by Susan Vaught
She toyed with my hair for a few moments, and then cupped my face with both hands and said, “Xavier always told me you would come back.”
I couldn’t find any words, so I kissed her soft cheek.
“It was foolish, what we did.” She shook her head, keeping my face firmly in her grip. “Stupid and short-sighted, and you paid for it, Trina. There aren’t words for how sorry I am.”
“You didn’t force me to go.”
“I didn’t stop you, either.”
Her eyes closed, then opened.
Finally, I was able to ask, “How did he pass?”
“Heart attack.” Her smile turned wry. “Right in the middle of having a temper fit at some fool who cut him off in traffic. I told your father a thousand times he was headed for an end like that, but did he listen?”
“No,” I said, resting my hands on her bad knees, trying not to buckle under the sudden weight of grief and regret. “Of course he didn’t.”
The colors in my hands were shifting and moving, moving and shifting, and when Addie saw them, her eyes got wider. “Looks like you got power inside you now. Have you tried to use it?”
“No,” I told her. “But you gave me some of it. It saved my life when I crossed over to the other side.”
She nodded. “Well, then. We have our work cut out for us, figuring out what you can do with power like that.”
On impulse, I pressed my palms against her knees. It was like my fingers were drawn to press on certain spots, and as I stared into the colors, I picked out the strand that reminded me of the sunlight that came out of Forest. I willed it into Addie’s knees, sensing the unnatural shape of the joints and asking my yellow light to make them smooth and round and right again. My arms vibrated and my fingers tingled, and the yellow light left me in a soft, hot rush.
“Oh,” Addie said.
My eyes flew to her face, but she didn’t seem to be in pain. Just startled.
After a few seconds, she shifted my hands away. I sagged for a second, surprised by the fatigue that hit me. By the time I got to my feet, Addie had popped her wheelchair leg rests to the side.
She stood, hesitant at first, but as she straightened, her expression moved from worry to amazement to relief. She nodded to me, bending her knees, then straightening again. “Yes, my girl, we have a lot of work to do.”
Addie was able to walk me to my father’s grave, where Darius and Forest and Levi were waiting.
I knelt in the soft grass in front of the marble etched with his name and the dates proclaiming his sixty-nine years of life and I stretched out my hand. Dozens of tiny purple flowers sprang open everywhere I touched.
“I’m here now, Daddy,” I said, tears blurring the flecks of purple and green. “I came back, just like you told Addie I would.”
It was over now, all the struggling and fighting between me and him, but all the trying was over, too. Darius’s hand settled on my shoulder, and I covered it with my own.
“He never killed anyone else,” Darius told me. “Even the ones who needed killing. He got it, baby. He really did.”
I pressed my cheek into his knuckles and let the tears flow.
Behind us, some two miles in the distance, Lincoln Psychiatric Hospital sat soaking up the seconds and minutes and days and years. I had a feeling that the stones and mortar in that old hospital knew all about time—and pain, and power, and other things too terrible to consider while kneeling in the sunlight in a patch of flowers, crying tears for my lost father, with my friends and the boy who had waited for me to come back to him even though the other people in his life had moved on and left him behind.
That old hospital and the horrors skulking in its dark corners weren’t through with us yet. I knew that. But for now, at least, the bells were quiet.
Part IV
Fear
Levi
She comes to me in my dreams, in the clearing where Pastor Martinez set me on fire. Birds shriek as she walks, and shadows run away before she touches them. She has a golden light, and it’s beautiful.
“There are lots of wonderful places in the world,” she says, and her voice is like music. “Why do you stay here?”
In my dreams I always tell Forest the truth, so I say, “I stay here because I’m scared.”
She laughs, and the sound makes me happy. Then she looks me over with those brown eyes, and a breeze tickles the curls around her face. “You died and came back to life. You help spirits cross over to the other side, and you kill things that would terrify most people. What scares you, Levi?”
In my mind’s eye, I see Imogene and all the power she had when I was younger, and how it’s draining away. She started fading the moment she brought me back from the dead, as if it’s a price she’s having to pay, and I almost can’t stand to think about how I’ve hurt her.
“I’m scared of trying to handle the spirits at Lincoln,” I tell her. “I don’t know if I can do what Imogene does.”
She thinks on this, and the light around her warms me like a campfire. “Reasonable. But that’s not why you’re hiding. What scares you, Levi?”
I lower my head because I don’t want her to see my face.
In my mind’s eye, I see Trina and Addie, the witches. They have a lot of power. They might be dangerous. If they take to fighting me, I won’t be able to beat them.
“I’m scared of what I don’t understand,” I tell Forest. “What if I make a mess of everything?”
Forest thinks on this, too. Her eyes are so pretty they make my heart beat funny. “I worry about the same thing,” she says. “But that’s not why you’re hiding.”
She stops, but I know she’s going to ask me the same question a third time. When she does, I’ll have to answer her.
My hounds circle in the clearing, Cain in the lead. I met him the night I died, and he’s been with me since then. He must have heard my nerves jumping. When people look at him and the rest of my dogs they just see beagles, but in my dreams, they’re made out of shadows, and they’re bigger than ponies. They’ve all got matted black fur like Cain and fire for eyes and bloody fangs. Imogene told me they’re barghests, and they usually live on the other side. Our great-greats called them soul-eaters.
Forest doesn’t pay a bit of attention to them. She doesn’t care about my birds, either, when they come sailing down from the moonless sky. They look like geese, but in my dreams, they’re a blur of wings and claws. They’ve got heads like buzzards, but bodies like women. They’re all about revenge and nightmares, but they stay away from Forest. Her light would set them on fire.
I make myself look at Forest, but I have to blink, she’s so bright. She’s got Imogene’s power. I know she does. She’s gentle and sweet. She’s made out of love. The bracelet on her wrist hangs there like it’s mocking me, reminding me that I can’t touch her.
The third time she asks me her question, it comes out so soft I barely hear it.
“What scares you, Levi?” she whispers.
In my mind’s eye, I see her just like she is, beautiful in more ways than I know how to talk about.
“You,” I finally tell her. “I’m scared of how much I care about you.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Some girls dream about handsome princes who carry them off to live happily ever after.
I’m not one of those princes.
In fairy tales, castles are always bright and pretty and full of unicorns.
Lincoln Psychiatric Hospital isn’t one of those castles.
It’s a monster made out of stone and brick and metal. It’s also a doorway between two worlds—ours, and the place where dead things stay until they face their final judgment. Lincoln doesn’t much seem to care what happens outside its thick walls. Time passes, but Lincoln never changes. It’s got secrets, and it watches, and it waits.
“You talk about this place like it’s alive,” Forest said as we walked through an empty ward, checking for anything weird or wrong like we did every evening, when the thin spo
ts between worlds got thinnest. Since we fought Carl Newton Mahan and Trina went to the other side when she shouldn’t have, everything had gotten worse. Seemed like every other night something had been trying to claw its way back to the land of the living.
I shrugged. “Lincoln is alive, in its own way. More like ... aware.”
My hand dropped to the belt I was wearing, to the knife Imogene made for me. The handle was steel, but the blade was bone. I never asked her what kind of bone she used. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. It could cut anything, and that was enough for me. Until I met Forest, I didn’t carry it much. Usually my dogs and geese did enough to scare ghosts and people into doing what I wanted, but since I met Forest, things had been trying to kill us.
“Lincoln Psychiatric can’t be aware.” Forest waved her hand around the dark hallway, the light from her skin sending spiders skittering toward dark corners. “It’s just a building.”
“It’s a big pile of rocks built on poisoned ground.” I glanced at her, trying not to get goofy because she was so pretty. “Blood rituals back through time and all the patients that lived and died here—you can’t imagine. These walls have been soaking up pain and crazy for as long as they’ve been standing.”
Forest’s brown eyes laughed at me. “You’re saying it’s a building with issues.”
“Yep.”
She moved slow, but she kept smiling. “So, is the old asylum on our side, or not?”
That made my chest go cold. In the back of my mind, I heard the tower bells ringing, and I thought about the times I’d had to fight some bad ghost or strong Madoc spirit. Lincoln was built to help sick people, but it seemed like the hospital had gotten sick itself. I didn’t know if it was trying hard enough to keep the door closed on what was dead and gone.
I let myself look at Forest. “I don’t know.”
We were on the top floor, and the only light came from the bulbs along the baseboards. They glowed blue, barely enough for me to see the hardwood and tile. We had to be careful of all the furniture set around to make the place “homelike,” as if anything could. Each step we took echoed. I kept my hand on my knife.
“Did you see that?” Forest’s voice made me jump, and I looked where she was pointing.
Silvery smoke flowed across the painted cinder-block wall, marking the spot where a ghost had just been. I squinted in the darkness. Whatever the ghost was, it was so weak it didn’t leave much in its wake.
“A leftover,” I said.
“They aren’t leftovers, Levi. They’re people.” Her sharp tone stung, even though I knew it was coming. “Or they were.”
If I sighed, she’d give me a sermon about manners, just like Imogene. If I kept my mouth shut, she’d go right on frowning. If I said the wrong thing, she’d think I was mean. I wanted to knock my head against the nearest table.
“You’re ... right.” That was the best I could do. “Sorry. But whatever it was, it didn’t have much power.”
Forest let out a breath, then nodded. “Should we go after it? Try to cross it over?”
I studied the dark corner where the smoke was fading away. Only a little bit left. It was probably a kid. There had been lots of kids here across the years, and I still found them sometimes. Kids liked to hide, even when they were ghosts. Once upon a time, I would have called my hounds and birds, but now Forest would get pissed if I did that. She’d think it was awful to scare a kid, no matter that the kid wasn’t alive anymore.
The muscles in my gut got tight. Thanks to knowing Forest, I kinda thought that was awful now, too. She was making me soft.
“It can wait,” I muttered.
I think she smiled.
We started walking again, and I made sure to keep the shadows pulled around us. I hadn’t always been careful about being seen, but Forest thought that was mean, too—letting sick people get a look at me when other folks might not believe them when they told what they saw. She was probably right.
Darius and Trina were working the ward below us, and Imogene and Addie had the basement. We each had little willow charms in our pockets. The witches had made them, and said they’d get warm if something bad happened.
My gaze slid over to Forest again.
When I first found her, I thought she was just another pretty girl with a touch of Madoc, but she’d proved me wrong right quick. She could see thin spots to the other side better than me, could cross over and come back easier than me, and even make her own thin spots. She was getting good enough that she didn’t lose much time when she did it, either. I kept saying she might get as strong as Imogene, but Imogene said no. She said Forest would be stronger.
“Levi? You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Getting lost in your head and looking pissed off. We’re patrolling, not skulking.”
“I don’t skulk.”
She laughed at me. I wasn’t sure why.
We walked around a corner to face a unit door, and my skin went prickly. The lights in the old asylum went dim, and right about that time, Forest pointed to a spot way down the hall.
“Look,” she said. “There’s that ghost again.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
About fifteen feet ahead of us, pale silver light danced in the hall. In the middle of the glow, I saw what looked like a little boy. He was skinny, maybe three feet tall, and wore a buckskin suit like Davy Crocket. The curls on his head made him cute as a bug, but behind him, the door to the next ward blinked like an old movie.
I didn’t like it. I backed up a step and grabbed Forest, taking her with me.
The kid watched us, his eyes a little too glowy and white for my comfort.
“What?” Forest pulled away from me as my fingers burned from touching her. Smoke came out of my fingernails, and my gut clenched against the pain of the blisters rising on my palm. That bracelet of hers, it only got stronger with time.
“Why did you hurt yourself? It’s a kid,” she said. “Not a dragon. Just a cute little boy.”
“That’s what it looks like, yeah.” I still didn’t like it. The kid was brighter than he should have been, given the smoke we saw on the wall a while ago. I suspected he was trying to fool us. Now he was standing between us and the door.
Forest hunkered down beside me to get a better look at the kid. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”
“Don’t talk to him.” I clutched my knife even tighter and reached out for my hounds and birds.
“Are you seeing something I’m not?” Forest asked. “Has he got some kind of glamour?”
“No, but—”
“Then don’t be paranoid.”
I barely heard her. My thoughts whipped through every type of ghost I had run across or read about in Imogene’s records. Something that liked to look like a kid. Something strong enough to trick us. Nothing came to me.
“This might be a shade, back from the other side,” I said to her, as quiet as I could. “Don’t get close to him.”
The boy’s blank eyes glittered at Forest. My hounds started baying, and I caught the distant thunder of wings and honking.
“What are you doing?” Forest sounded mad. “Are you trying to scare him to death?”
“He’s already dead.” I didn’t take my eyes off the boy, not even for a heartbeat, as I pulled my knife and squared my feet in case it came to a fight.
The boy smiled at Forest.
I bared my teeth.
Shadows flickered on the walls around the kid—and they weren’t my shadows. Something ... I felt—
My thoughts clouded, and my elbows got heavy.
Why did I pull my knife on a little boy? He didn’t have empty eyes. He had blue eyes, and pink cheeks, and curly dark hair.
“He looks cold,” Forest murmured. “I wonder if we could find a blanket no one’s using.”
A blanket. Yeah. I should go and get one. The kid was probably freezing. He might need shoes, too. Probably a small size, but I wasn’t sure. Those feet looked pretty big.
And they were growing ...
I blinked.
Those feet belonged to a grown man. A man wearing moccasins. And the Davy Crockett buckskin, it wasn’t cute anymore. The pants and shirt had fringe like old Kentucky mountain men wore—the really badass guys who lived off the land and would kill you just as soon as look at you. The boy, now he had long hair and a beard that went all the way to his waist. When he grinned, I saw rotten nubs where his teeth should have been.
He turned solid, not like a ghost at all.
Oh hell.
He was a shade, and a strong one.
Cain and the rest of my hounds exploded through a thin spot and charged across the ceiling, howling and pulling the geese along behind them. The birds arrowed down, forming a ring around the scrawny man.
“Levi?” Forest sounded scared. “Who is that? What is that?”
“Get behind me,” I told her through clenched teeth, gripping the knife as Cain dropped his beagle glamour and put his huge black body between me and the shade.
Forest got up and scrambled back where I told her to go.
“Hey,” I called, and the shade jumped toward me, knocking Cain into the wall. The dog cried out in pain.
The shade swung a tomahawk at my head, laughing like a fool.
“Stay back,” I yelled at him, filling my voice with all the power I had. He didn’t want me, I could tell. He was aiming for Forest—but he wasn’t going to get her.
Cain snarled as he hefted himself off the ground. At his second growl, my hounds and geese jumped all over the shade. The dogs snapped and barked, and the geese flogged his head with their wings so hard he had to raise his bony arms to save his face. Then he started laughing again and grabbing my birds and wringing their necks. Cain darted in and out, snapping at the shade’s legs and ankles, but he landed a kick square in the dog’s face.
“Go!” I shouted to Forest as Cain yelped. My other hounds fell back, keeping a wary distance. “Get through a thin spot and find Imogene!”