by May Peterson
Unless this was my own ghost doing the thinking. Fuck.
There was a terrible thought, just then, that this was it. That I was already a ghost, and this was what my final hell looked like. That I wouldn’t even get the courtesy of oblivion. Just a long, blind second of panic without end.
Sounded a lot like how my life had been, with the extra details decomposed away.
All I could think was that I did not want to die this way. It was stupid and embarrassing. The darkness—that perfect lack of everything—left all my polluted, infant needs exposed. I just wished someone were here.
But then, it changed, like I was slipping back into a hallucination. Because the walls of my attic grew up around me. My haggard breathing did nothing to relieve my lungs. I was so empty. Like I could consume everything on earth and still be screaming with hunger.
I had been here before. Right after I’d quickened, terrified by the new violence of my body.
She was all that had felt real. Eirlys had come and gone like a heat mirage, sometimes the awe-striking ghost she’d become. Other times looking alive again, ranting strangely in her old voice. She’d loomed over me after I’d torn my own lips and wrists, desperate to savor the taste of something bleeding.
“Get up.” She hated me. Everything in her voice and posture seethed with it. But looking at her helped. It reminded me of what had happened. Somehow, I’d come back as this.
“Are you hungry?” She trailed a ghostly hand across her abdomen, where her death wound shone black. I nodded mechanically. Such a shameful answer. All my carnal impurity reduced to this lust for flesh. Death had made each of us what we really were.
She dangled damp fingers over my mouth. I snapped at them instinctively, but my jaws passed through her hand. “You should have simply died. We all had to. None of us received a second chance, when it was your lust that killed us. In a just world you’d have stayed dead.”
This version of Eirlys was worse than all the others. I wanted to hide from the raw blade of her scorn. Yet it felt wrong to hide. I had earned this.
Then she’d come with a softer expression of pity, or regret. “Do you want to go? To abandon us here? We have to haunt this place forever. You can leave. But... I’d miss you if you did.” When she put her arms around me, I could almost feel their weight. “I love you, Rhodry.”
No. No, that’d definitely been the worst.
This was the Eirlys that stood before me now. Eyes clear, smile bright and open. Her blood like a sash of honor. Even when she was pitying me, her presence made the room cold. “Maybe we can finally be together now. No more fighting death. What is this fascination we have with losing battles?”
We could never be together. Not like either of us had wanted, however different that might have been. But whose voice was this now? Eirlys, the incubus, or Rosemary? They seemed now to rise up as one, clad equally in the ice and fire of my memories.
Eirlys frowned. “Come with me.” Choose me. Choose death.
It seemed all I ever did was choose death. I would rather have stayed dead than abandon the souls. My redemption would be theirs, or be nothing. The only answer to the shame that had taken over my life. That was my real enemy. The shame. And all the powers at my disposal, the mercy of the spirits, immortality itself, were impotent before the might of this one demon. I would accept no forgiveness until it was slain at last.
And now, with that battle lost forever, I would have given anything to be forgiven.
A knock came at the door of the attic. It was definitely not part of the memory.
“Rhodry?”
I froze. Not that voice. I’d endure all the others. An amber glow pooled under the door. But I dared not look.
Because Mio wasn’t supposed to be here.
Eirlys’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t listen. Keep looking at me.”
“C-can you hear me?” He sounded so close. Like he was right next to me, shouting into my ear. And I couldn’t call back. To tell him that I heard him, or to leave me.
“Do not look at him.” Eirlys came closer, tried to grab my hand. She, more than any other, should be the reaper who took my soul now.
But Mio...he shouldn’t have been part of my story. He’d suffered exactly what I had done everything to prevent. Because I loved him.
Because I loved him, I looked at the door.
Eirlys’s shout faded. It ripped me from the attic and back into the Deep. My body transformed into a battlefield of sensations—finally, I could move and gasp and see.
And the Deep was lighting up. A light that should not have been possible from any source that was close enough to the Verge to matter.
What I saw in it was equally impossible.
Mio. In the beating heart of that light, speeding toward me like a star in descent.
He sang as he plummeted. In spite of the airless vacuum, I heard it. The song expanded around him like wings, parting the darkness.
Rhodry.
And it would kill him. Immortality would afford me minutes of consciousness, which I had mostly spent. For a mortal human being, that span would be measured in breaths. And he’d run out of breaths eventually.
I am with you.
The incubus had possessed him. But these were his words. And his voice infused me as it had at Rosemary’s feet, revitalizing me. Oh, this poor, brilliant, beautiful boy.
“Rhodry!” It wasn’t in my mind. He was close, crossing the span with the speed of fire. So close I could make out his open hands.
When no one else could have been, he was here. Holding out his hand for me.
I didn’t care what it meant. I chose him. It must have taken everything that was left in my suffocating body to lift my arm.
And take his hand.
It was so small in mine. I did my best to crook him against my chest and hold on. If this was the end, no power would force me to let him go now.
It wasn’t just light that enveloped me, but air. My vision cleared as I gasped sweet, sweet gobs of it. It gave me what I needed to grasp him, press my face to his hair and let his smell fill me.
He bound his song around us like armor, keeping us both alive in the bowels of the Deep—and if only for now, his power did not weaken.
But as I cradled his shivering frame in my arms, his exhaustion became plain. He breathed steady life into the song, but his chest heaved with the struggle. Sorrow shone from his brow. It wasn’t just my pessimism talking—this was the end for him, and he knew it. His power could deny the Deep. He had summoned me back from the brink once. With training and practice in witchcraft, he perhaps could have managed both at once.
“I guess I’m not much of a savior. But you deserved for someone to try.” His voice trembled, spangling the dark with blue and silver.
What a gesture to lose your life over. I could have cried. “But you’ll die.”
His smile was bright with pain. “Everything dies. I want to die when you die.” He stroked my cheek. “It’s just death.”
This had to be Mio, through and through. Any part of the incubus that was still in him no longer controlled him.
It shouldn’t end this way, with our deaths tangled over each other. As if two people dying together had the same power as them living together.
But this way, at least, neither of us would be alone.
His eyes closed, breath punctuated with gasps. He was failing. I pressed him to me, stroking his hair as fatigue carried him away. The truth ripped through me like a shotgun blast—he’d prolonged my life just long enough to keep me conscious as he died in my arms.
I kissed the top of his head. “I love you, lemon drop.”
The song ended. Mio was still breathing, but only while the air remained. The light was dimming. I closed my eyes and let the silence win.
Only silence was not what I heard.
It was sin
ging.
Hazy, distant, like an echo in a cave. As it climbed in volume, I recognized the same tune Mio had sung as he descended. But raised in chorus, expanding in clarity and strength. We were too far in to see the Verge, but I kept my eyes turned upward—because warmth was spreading across the Deep.
If Mio had been a falling star, these were dozens of stars, winking into sight. Over a hundred. They recast the Deep into a night sky.
These weren’t stars I was looking at. They were ghosts. The faces carved into my memory, swimming out of the haze. And they were singing the song Mio had left behind. They shot across the void, moving faster than my breath could escape me.
All at once, the last dam inside me broke. I couldn’t bear to look at them—just sob into Mio’s inert shoulder. Their fetters were not gone; the chains shone with a pearly fire, clasped in their hands as though they were using them as lifelines. The curse wasn’t gone. But Rosemary must no longer control them. The same change that had freed Mio of the incubus must somehow have given them this. The power to choose. The power to make of their damnation what they would.
And they’d chosen to remember me.
Their singing dissolved all other sensations like formations in sand. They were collectively stronger than the grip of the abyss on me. Hands fell on me, cool and ethereal and unyielding, taking my arms, lifting me up. This close, their chorus was raw, slightly out of unison. The ghosts of the children, of the emaciated and ravaged, still wept. The girl who could not find her mother. The boy I’d found on my lawn. A pair of nurses with blighted eyes. A man holding his severed arm to a battered stump, eternally trying to reattach it.
They were the first to take hold of me, securing me in their bruised hands. Through their tears, they sang. Weakly, desperately, but relentlessly.
A ghost slid through their number to the front. Cecilio. One eyebrow quirked wryly as he grabbed me.
I clasped him at the wrist and held on. “What the fuck are you doing, coming back for me?”
“How could we forget our lord, who fought to redeem us?” His smile flashed with the years, moments of him chastising my shoe choice and whispering rumors to me in the dressing room.
The lost girl spoke. “It’s because of the singer that we could leave her behind at all.” Her. Rosemary. “I’m not letting him die!”
Wrapping my arms tighter around him, I kissed the crown of his head. I knew he’d had at least one miracle left in him, even if it may have cost him everything.
Together, the lost souls drew me back to my life.
Their grace humbled me. Grace I could never have deserved. I had fought, but not redeemed them. The curse was not my making—but I had been unequal to its defeat.
That grace they poured out on me nonetheless. They bore us up through the Deep—this place was theirs, its pull powerless against them now. The song they’d been given lit the way. I held my breath in the sudden wind of motion, the last of Mio’s gift of air. He’d suffocate soon—if he still lived. Yet the souls carried us with incomprehensible speed. And they did not fail.
In the next second, a tide of heat hit me. They had carried me all the way back to the Verge, its stones thrumming. The curse chains wound along the edges, holding open the gates. The ghosts that had not descended were keeping the doors from closing. Tears scalded my eyes, turned the cavern into a sweep of watercolor and starlight. I gasped in the atmosphere, hungry for every breath. With Mio pressed to me, the ghosts set me lightly on the dirt.
The air seemed full of glittering flowers, painting the hillock white. But when they fell on my face, the tingle was that of snowflakes. Even the blood gleamed with them. Eirlys’s snow. She had found herself, just as the others had.
She and Rosemary grappled, like wrestling angels, over the mound. Silver and ice crossed each other, Rosemary all but obscured by the blizzard. The incubus, a tatterdemalion of images, knelt on the hill. It held itself up, shivering in the ghost-light, and sang. Brokenly, unevenly. It sang without reserve, as if guiding the lost souls back to it.
Had the incubus set them free? What power had Mio kindled inside it?
Eirlys and Rosemary looked up from their battle, and for a moment, they only stared.
Eirlys’s expression was a clash of awe and rage. Her fingers jabbed erratic shapes. In a moment, I realized she was signing.
“Go. Take him. Go.”
What—I searched her eyes. A weary smile marked them; this was the one gift that she could give me, at last.
“We keep her here.” Her fingers flew, so fast I was surprised to be able to read them. “Take Mio. We stay.”
The immensity of it struck me speechless. Eirlys was offering to take the burden from me. Rosemary had no hope of escape without a host to inherit her fetter as a cambion for the incubus. The ghosts would ward anyone from stepping on this cursed land again.
Just as I had tried to do. A forever of guarding the doors of death. And I could escape. Mio may live. We could leave and never look back.
And Eirlys never would. She’d stay silent forever, without even Mio to hear her. Cecilio would never, his service ended. Rosemary couldn’t control them anymore—but their private curses raged on, the damage of their deaths unhealed.
I had not been equal to their need. Of course I had not. Rosemary had proved a ghastly foe. Making this my burden alone had only trapped us all. None of us could have faced this alone.
And I hadn’t been alone. Every hour, Eirlys had barred the way to hell. Cecilio had watched over me. Souls who didn’t know my name had come back for me. Mio had beckoned me back from death—twice.
It had never been that I didn’t want to be forgiven—that was the only thing I wanted. But my vow had been to earn it.
Rosemary had given me the answer. This was why I had never been able to purify the curse. Everything in me had approved of its punishment of me. It was a death-curse, eroding my spirit away even as immortality sustained me. I hadn’t been able to defeat it because I’d agreed to it.
And I did not agree to it anymore.
I stepped toward Eirlys. Balancing Mio in my arms, I lightly took her hand.
Let this chain, too, be broken.
Briefly, her hand was warm in mine. Like on our wedding day, when we’d been young and alive. I should have known then how molly I was, because it wasn’t the kiss that I’d treasured. It was holding hands with my best friend, my family, and knowing she’d be there for the rest of my life.
And she had been.
Moon glow spread from the touch. It lit her frozen death wound, the stain sparking with pale fire. Amazement bloomed on her face. She snatched her hand away, pressed at the wound. Her frostbitten fingers came back damp with the blood of returned life. It was thawing—and receding.
After fifteen long years, the wound that had killed her was beginning to heal.
I knelt down, sheltering Mio with my chest. She looked to me with awe, tears sparkling in her eyes, but the virtue was already lifting her off the ground. She spiraled gently upward like one of her snowflakes, a blue-tinged light shivering off the walls of the cave. The ghosts, still singing, drew near. They raised their hands to her, touching her shining robe, the purity that dissolved the ice like a dream. She lifted her own thunder, let it rock across the hill. It shook the cave, resounding in a storm unleashed. Blood evaporated off her as the wound shrank, leaving nothing but new skin behind.
And then, just as the peal hit its peak, it broke, releasing a human voice. Her voice. Singing in time with the chorus of souls, dominating the air. The years under the curse had not weakened her. It had made her into a tidal wave, an unstoppable note that echoed across the impure water.
The blessing did not stop with her. Something like spring rose from me, pulling the fetor off the roots. Gingerly, I lowered my fingers to the bloodied water. Dark red became clear.
The curse was breaking.<
br />
Eirlys seemed to gather the blessing and refract it. Snow fell on the damned, and wherever a snowflake touched a chain, the link burst, only glints of frost left behind. She opened her arms, beckoning the blizzard down.
Everywhere I looked, iron was fading into shimmers. My blessing and Eirlys’s snow covered them all. All I seemed able to do was hold Mio and tremble, letting the tension rush from my body as I lifted my face to the crystals. I reached for the ghost nearest me, the little girl that had taken my hand. I brushed a finger on the link, and it dissolved into air.
She watched me, watched the iron uncoil from around her neck. She was so small and emaciated, dirty with the dredge of her life. But when she moved now, nothing weighed her down. She flexed her hands a few times. The misery and courage on her face fell away, replaced by a new emotion. Relief.
She nodded at me once, smile far too old for her face. Then she vanished into the snowfall, a faint glimmer where she had stood.
One after another, the souls laid their chains under the snow. Some stood on the mound and wept, finally remembering who they’d been. Still more cried out for each other, parents and children, lovers and friends, able to see and touch each other freely for the first time in years. Only now did their singing abate. Laughter and tears took the place of song, the new chorus of their freedom. They joined hands in pairs and made their way up the mound, into the Verge. Others simply dissipated like the orphan girl, no longer bound by any distance. The cavern was filled with a procession of souls, luminous and weightless as they left their curse behind.
They were free, at long last. Of them all, only one remained on the hillock. Cecilio, standing with hands behind his back and beholding his lady.
A circle of moonlight rippled across the water from where I’d touched. The blessing swept over every stain until they ran clean, cleansed the stink of the grave off the air. My ghost tree shuddered in recovery, the seeping wounds coursing clear with sap. Already the trunk and boughs gleamed with fresh, palpable strength.
I carried Mio up the mound. There, crouched at the base of the tree, was the incubus. It looked like a new creature under heaven, tiny and gossamer and guileless. It stared out over the ghosts, eyes wide with either amazement or horror.