Our Lady of the Various Sorrows (Voices of the Dead Book 2)

by Victoria Raschke

  “It looks like we have plenty of time for you to tell me what the hell all that was about.” Jo pointed up, though there was no way to know if direction meant anything between here and there.

  “I’m not sure where to start exactly.”

  “You could start by telling me what your plan was. Did you know I was a Voice and a Portal when we met? Were you trying to get knocked up by my son? Were you ever going to let me in on your plan with Matjaž? Or were you going to go on betraying my trust until I cottoned on and fired you as spirit guide?”

  “It would be easier to tackle these one at a time.”

  “Take your time. I’m definitely not going anywhere.”

  “I did not know you were anything but a teashop owner and a photographer, or that you used to be a photographer. I did maybe know you had been tangled up with Dušan Črnigad.”

  “So were you actually attracted to me, or was this some starfucking-by-proxy garbage?” She regretted the question as soon as she asked it. If it was the latter, it would make all of this bullshit even worse.

  “Starfucking was hardly my thing, love. I was attracted to you. And I was attracted to Faron. You were both a bit of fun.”

  “So there wasn’t any grand scheme to produce some Wiley/Belak heir to the white god throne or something?”

  “That came later and was entirely Avgusta’s doing. My mother figured out what you were at my funeral and hatched her plan from there.”

  “So it was her idea to get Matjaž and me–”

  “Again, no. I thought the two of you would be good together. He broods for weeks at a time, and you are about as interested in commitment as I am. Perfect match.” Helena laughed again. Of course she would be undaunted by the possibility of spending eternity in a barren wasteland hashing out their relationship.

  “So what was your role in all this?”

  Helena pulled her knees up to her chin. “Reluctant Radio Helena.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Avgusta would call me up into her studio and grill me for information.”

  Jo looked out to the horizon and the miles of bleak surrounding them.

  “You could’ve told me.”

  “To what purpose? I had no intention of helping her. I had my own plan.”

  “Which Avgusta thought she could subvert to produce a supernaturally inclined grandbaby?”

  “Avgusta was rather single-minded in her pursuit.”

  “I guess you come by it honestly, then.” Jo stood up. “What do you think would happen if we just started walking?”

  “I think we’d be moving, but the landscape wouldn’t change much.”

  Jo shrugged. “And how did Veronika get involved in all this?”

  “Mother needed someone to be her errand girl, and who better than a traumatized teenager who’d probably already had her lifetime’s worth of bad shit happen to her? Avgusta was never one not to meddle.”

  “I see you come by that honestly, too.”

  Helena laughed again, but it was more sarcastic. “Except I should’ve meddled more this time. After the heart business, I should’ve paid more attention to what she was up to.”

  “That was Veronika?” The flash she’d had of Matjaž at Faron’s door made even less sense.

  “Yes. She fucked that one up, too. I hijacked my brother’s body to defuse it. I’m sorry Ivanka caught part of it, but it would have been much worse.”

  “No wonder he was so angry about the flowers.”

  “He was angry about a lot more than that. Rightly so. If it’s any consolation, Avgusta’s days of scheming are done. Matjaž put paid to it.”

  “Matjaž and I put paid to your scheme, as well. Not that it matters.”

  “I know. I saw you with Leo.” Helena took Jo’s hand and pulled her back down to sit next to her. “I have to admit, I was a bit surprised you fell for the priest. But you don’t seem to know how to take the easy way out, either.”

  “It doesn’t matter now.” It might not matter to Leo, whether Jo loved him or not. It did matter to her. Death probably left everyone feeling unfinished.

  Helena put her arm around Jo’s shoulders. “It should have mattered. I failed you as a guide and a friend, too.”

  “You protected Faron and Ivanka, so I’ll give you a pass.” Jo laughed. “Besides, if you and I are stuck here together forever, there’s no point in being pissed off at each other.”

  “I’m glad to see you are taking a practical approach.”

  “If we are in Dušan’s version of the Land of the Lost, it means my father is here somewhere.”

  “That’s why you wondered what would happen if we started walking?”

  Jo nodded.

  Helena stood up and offered her hand. “Well, I might not be your spirit guide anymore, but the least I can do is help you look.”

  Dušan, decked out in his black god regalia, appeared in front of them, glaring down at Jo as the two women landed on their butts back in the dust.

  “You do not belong here.”

  “That’s comforting, but I seem to find myself here anyway. And, look, I brought a friend.”

  Gods didn’t sigh exasperatedly, or she guessed they didn’t, but that was the mood drifting off Dušan nonetheless.

  “You have, and now I must take you back.”

  “I don’t want to go, not to where Faron can revive me. Besides, I’m not going anywhere without my father.” She pushed herself off the ground and stood in front of Dušan as defiantly as she could. She barely came to his chest. Helena stood silently beside her.

  “There is no time to find him.” Dušan’s voice reverberated as much in her chest as in her head.

  “I’m not going. He sacrificed himself for me and–”

  “You do not understand. You are in no position to bargain.”

  ——

  The party had followed Goran and Faron out into the courtyard and now stood pressing in against Leo as he tried to keep them away from the grim tableau. Goran knelt beside Jo first, but quickly turned to Ana, moving his hands over her and chanting softly under his breath.

  Gregor called Investigator Marta Klančnik. She would be able to disperse the crowd and keep things as quiet as possible.

  Leo tried to close Jo’s eyes, but they wouldn’t stay closed. He tried not to imagine the pain she had been in, given the condition of her body when they found her. He was focusing on mechanics and facts, but his thoughts were crowded by his own silent keening. She couldn’t be dead. In all the possible futures he had mulled over in his indecision, Jo lived, with or without him.

  Piercing sirens and flashing blue lights transfixed the crowd. Police officers, usually unwelcome in the semi-autonomous enclave of Metelkova, were greeted with silence. Uniforms herded the crowd back into the gallery, leaving a half-moon of the directly involved standing in the snow around a raggedly screaming Ana, a sobbing Veronika, and a dead Jo.

  Marta stood among them, questions forming then dying on her lips. She finally asked Gregor what happened, but he redirected her to Leo. Leo could see Jo’s oldest friend was using every ounce of his strength to remain calm and helpful, but the shock and sorrow on his face was as clear as the night air around them.

  “We found them like this. We haven’t had any luck getting Veronika to speak, but best I can tell she tried to curse Jo. Ana got in the way.”

  “Is that possible?” Marta looked to Gustaf, who had taken a few steps back from the others. His face was pained and grayer than usual.

  Gustaf stared at Investigator Klančnik like she had fallen there from space before coming back to his senses. “Yes. Of course.” He stepped closer and looked down at Veronika, still rocking back and forth unable to comfort her sister.

  The younger girl’s voice finally gave out, but she still thrashed in her sister’s arms.

&nbs
p; “I had no idea Veronika was a witch, or that she had taken up training with one.” Gustaf continued to stand, staring at the two girls as if he were looking through them to the center of the earth.

  “My mother wasn’t training her so much as using her to do her bidding.” Matjaž’s comment raised more than one eyebrow, but the focus quickly turned back to comforting Ana.

  Leo watched the discussion in a detached way. He alone was comforting Jo. Was he the only one who believed she couldn’t be gone? Or maybe the disposition of her body was too much for anyone else to bear. Faron stood over them, his face determined.

  “I can bring her back.” Faron knelt in the snow and started to lay his hand on his mother’s chest.

  Gustaf rushed to Faron and pulled him away. “Stop! Your mother would not want this.”

  Leo looked at the two men, confused. Jo had told him about Faron’s ability, but he’d assumed at most he would be able to revive a house cat. It never occurred to him Faron could raise the human dead. In his experience, Death never gave up his quarry without a price.

  Faron ripped his arm away from Gustaf. “It’s what I want.”

  The others stared at the two men.

  “Your father told me what he is, what you are. You cannot undo this once it is done. Would you give yourself to him to save her?”

  Leo looked from Faron to Gustaf and then around at the faces gathered. Almost any one of them would have given themselves to save Jo. These people were Faron’s family, the family his mother had chosen.

  “Yes.” Faron turned away from the Austrian and his warning and knelt again in the snow across from Leo. “You should put her back on the ground. I don’t know what will happen if she comes back.”

  Leo laid her back onto the packed snow as tenderly as possible. He’d seen her body seize, her hands curled into fists. He would be surprised if the tension in her muscles hadn’t broken bone.

  Vesna knelt with them, as if Jo were an altar they had all come to tend. “Faron, she’s not here. You won’t bring her back now.”

  Faron turned on her, tears freezing to his reddened face. “How can you know that?” He ran the back of his bare hand over his cheek. “She has to still be here.”

  “I can’t explain how I know. I only know she isn’t back yet.”

  ——

  “Goddamnit, woman. Will you not listen to me?” Dušan, god of the darkness, her son’s father, looked down at Jo as if she were a child he could scold into obedience.

  “I will not leave without him.” She would not do as she was told. That hadn’t worked out any better than doing things her way, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to choose getting ordered around.

  “Now is not the time.”

  “Then promise me you will find him so he can cross into the Next.”

  “Gods do not make promises to mortals, or if they do, it is never the bargain the mortal wishes. Have you not read enough mythology to know that?” The frustration in his voice was gone. It had been replaced by the arrogance she was more familiar with.

  “I will take your promise in whatever form you are willing to give it. At this point, I don’t have much to lose.”

  Helena laughed. “She has a point there.”

  Two shades struggled toward them from the dark horizon. As they got closer, Jo recognized them as Katarina and Tomaž, Ivanka’s parents. Both were wan with haunted eyes and reached out to her pleadingly without speaking.

  She was repulsed by them. Their appearance and demeanor were nothing like they had been in life. Katarina’s cascade of dark hair was matted and stringy, and her clothes were rags. Tomaž was a whimpering husk, belying his life as a swaggering womanizer. Her revulsion was quickly replaced with anger at herself and empathy for them.

  Whatever they had been in life, they, like her, had been at the mercy of supernatural forces far beyond their control or understanding. They had not deserved the deaths they had received. Jo still wrestled with her own guilt, for in the end, she had been the instrument of Katarina’s demise. Leo and Gustaf could argue into the following week about how it wasn’t true, the demon had already consumed her life, but Jo had heard Katarina’s neck snap as they fell.

  The memory of it sent slivers of ice down her spine, or where her spine had been. Maybe someone in the Next could explain the physics of shades to her.

  “You can take them back with you. They have suffered, as have their daughters. It would do well for them to be at peace.”

  It wasn’t what she asked for, but it was its own solace, to be Tomaž and Katarina’s “get out of jail free” card. She nodded.

  Relief flooded their drawn faces. Dušan gathered the four of them into his cloak, and the bottom dropped out of Jo’s stomach. Even her shade wasn’t cut out for inter-dimensional travel, assuming this was another dimension. Her understanding of what constituted reality, her own especially, had taken a beating.

  Chapter 25

  This was not the person Faron was supposed to save. He sat back on his heels, his face burning with tears and anger. He couldn’t say Dušan lied to him, but he hadn’t told him the truth, either. There was no way his father hadn’t known it would be Jo when the decision came.

  Vesna took his hand. “She is coming back.”

  “How can you tell?” He wanted to scream but he spit the words out at her instead.

  “There are things that haven’t happened yet. Things Jo has to be here for.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “It means you have to trust me. And we have to wait.”

  There was so much pain in his mother’s face. Could he bring her back into that? Goran was still murmuring behind him trying to undo whatever Veronika had done to her sister.

  Across from him, Leo clutched Jo’s hand. “Faron, there is always a cost. You can’t bring her back if it means your life. She would rather be dead.” The words pained him to say; Leo wanted her to be alive as much as Faron did.

  “I won’t die.” And that was the problem wasn’t it? He would be like his father, like Rok. He would eventually watch them all die. He sat back on his heels. “Vesna, can you really tell me when she’s back?”

  “I think so.”

  He nodded. More words weren’t going to change the situation or make him feel any better.

  Gregor and Matjaž joined them in their vigil. Faron could feel the others standing behind them, watching. Ivanka’s hands rested softly on his shoulders. He shrugged them off. “Not now.”

  After this, he would have to end it. He couldn’t ask her to stay with him. He felt her move away again, and he went back to waiting, watching his mother for a sign.

  ——

  Jo settled back on the snow-covered ground as Dušan let go of her arm. The scene in the courtyard had changed only in the number of people standing around her corpse and the miserable child.

  Helena stood next to her and grabbed her hand again. “What are they waiting for?”

  Jo shook her head. Ana needed medical attention.

  Jo was waiting for her door. She imagined it arched like the entrance to the courtyard, and maybe purple like her grandmother’s front door had been. Dušan the God disappeared from her side and reappeared as Dušan the Man walking toward the group huddled in the snow.

  The realization landed on her like an avalanche, and there was nothing she could do. There was no door to run through this time. Dušan had orchestrated his plan perfectly, maneuvering them all into place so very carefully. She had trusted him again at her peril, and Faron’s.

  Dušan knelt in the snow next to Faron. She couldn’t see if he spoke to him, but Faron looked to Vesna, who nodded. Faron put both of his hands on her corpse’s sternum as if he were going to start CPR, and Jo snapped back into her body, and into a pain she would never be able to accurately describe. It was nothing, though, compared to looking up into
her son’s completely white and glowing eyes.

  “River.” She could barely get the word past her lips. There was a flurry of activity around her, but she couldn’t focus on anything except the screaming in her nerves and the hole punched through her heart. Leo’s face came close to hers. “River. Take me. Take us.”

  ——

  Leo could barely make out the words. She was still on the edge of death; he wasn’t sure how hypothermia would help.

  “She said to take her to the river.” He looked at Gustaf, as if he could translate.

  Goran stood up from his ministrations over Ana. “Of course.”

  “Can’t we put them under a hot shower or something? The river is nearly frozen.” Matjaž pushed in tighter to the group.

  “No, the river is sacred. She’s right.” Goran nodded his head.

  Getting Jo and Ana to the river and into the water in the city wasn’t an easy task. Plečnik’s architecture was designed to keep the river out of the city, but his canal design also made it very difficult for anyone in the city to walk into the river.

  Gregor looked at them, incredulous. “Have you lost your minds? Throw them into the river? You might as well leave them out here to die in the cold. Gustaf, can’t your witch-doctor friend help them?”

  “Dr. Struna is not a witchdoctor, and this is beyond her capabilities. If Goran cannot reverse the curse, the river is the safest option.” Lichtenberg’s words were much calmer than his expression.

  “Then we go.” Leo picked Jo up as gently as possible.

  She wasn’t twisting and screaming like Ana, but every muscle tensed, including those in her face. Tears tracked down her temples into her hair, but it was her silence that unnerved him.

  He started toward the river, out of Metelkova. Faron picked up Ana, and the others followed. What had been a celebration was now a gruesome parade through the empty, frozen streets. A mantle of white covered every surface and reflected the light of the street lamps. They encountered no one on their grim errand.

  “There’s nowhere close you can get into the river easily.” Vesna walked beside him, taking two steps to his one.