Harper had the feeling she’d forgotten something and it pissed her off. “Gift from a friend. Minor bit of spell disruption imbued into the silver inlay. She figured I might need an extra hand in my current state.”
“Well, it’s awesome. I think it just saved our lives. I wonder if I could get something like that put on the swor—no, he’d kill me.” Walker brushed her thought away.
Harper frowned, trying to scrape together an elusive memory. Wasn’t I just angry at Walker? Why? Or was I . . . ? The electricity isn’t the only thing that’s off in this house. She scowled and glared at a spot to Walker’s left with a snort of self-disgust as she put the past five minutes back together. “Damn it. Those things came with the house.” She peered at Walker. “You can’t possibly have wanted to hurt me—you haven’t known me long enough. And I have no reason to try and knock your head in.”
“Knees.”
“What?”
“Looked like you were aiming farther south than my head.”
Harper gave it a moment’s thought and shrugged. “I never was any good at baseball.”
I stared at Harper a few seconds, then giggled. A sharp overwrought giggle, to be sure, but a giggle. “I guess not. And to answer your question, yes, I usually do pick up bits of solidified evil without checking from a distance first. I don’t generally get—there’s a word for that kind of thing, where you touch something and it gives you information.”
Harper said, “Psychometry,” a bit dryly, and I snapped my fingers at her in thanks without looking her way. “Right. I don’t get psychometric feedback. It’s not how I work.” I stared at the once-more scattered bits and pieces and leapt to a conclusion. “It’s how they work, though. Alma and Mae. Oh! Shit. It’s not a ghorcerer, it’s ghorcerers. There’s two of them. Sisters. Twins, maybe. I saw your face and knew it as well as my own.”
Saying it aloud made me flinch upright and look hard at Harper. We weren’t twins, but between our height, relative slenderness, and psychic gifts it wasn’t too far a stretch. Pennies were dropping like crazy inside my head and I was afraid to blink or even breathe for fear of knocking them out of line, so I kept staring at Harper and talking, this time in hope of getting the words out before the idea fell apart. “I’m wrong again, it’s not ghorcerers. You were right. But so was I. There’s a ghost and a sorcerer, and a—a blood vendetta? They hate each other,” I said, sticking with the obvious. “And this house is their . . .”
I ran out of speculation, but Harper didn’t. “Their war zone,” she concluded. “They’re the haunts. Maybe this space is what they started fighting over, or maybe it’s just been poisoned by them. It’s—”
“Even if they’re not the haunts, the house is used to their shapes,” I blurted. “To their magic. And we almost fit those shapes. So we pick up the artifacts and the house pours them into us.” My fingers twitched. “If I had ten minutes and an internet connection I could look it up and find out the house’s whole history. I could know everything we’re up against.”
“I have my phone.” Harper took her phone out, started to toss it my way, then looked disgusted. “No signal. Of course there’s no signal in a haunted house.”
“That would be too easy.” I made a face that caused Harper to crack a smile. I got the impression she wasn’t the world’s best at making friends, which was something I could sympathize with, although I’d improved a lot lately.
“I have an idea.” I paused. “It’s probably a bad idea. Most of my ideas are.”
Harper assumed the expression of one waiting for the other shoe to drop. I smiled as brightly as I could. “We let them inside us and work this thing out the old-fashioned way.”
“With torture and bloodshed?”
I cleared my throat. “I was more thinking of ‘with rational minds familiar with similar power sets in control.’”
“Ah,” said Harper. “You’re right. That sounds like a really bad idea.”
“Da-hah!” I waggled a finger in the air. “I have a plan. We switch it up. You take the sorcerer, I’ll take the ghost. That way they don’t know how to utilize the power set they’ve got. It might give us time to talk it out.”
“Are you always this hopelessly optimistic, or is it a special performance just for me?”
“A little bit of both. Got a better idea?”
Harper sighed. “Not really. But how are we going to keep them from just straight-up trying to kill each other? I have this,” she said, gesturing with the cane, “and you have those.” She nodded at me, leaving me to peer down at myself in confusion. “The shoulders,” she said. “I got a good look at their width when you tried plowing me down a minute ago. I’m guessing you’ve got the arms to match.”
I flexed my biceps beneath their white leather sleeves without really meaning to. Truth was, she was spot-on. I had the size and strength to choke most people out, and I’d been a scrappy kid, so I knew something about fighting. “Fortunately,” I said cheerfully, “I have a plan for that, too. Do you know anything about power circles?”
“I’ve seen wards and workings, but only from an observer’s position—I’m not a mage of any stripe. I can’t cast a spell.”
“Oh, no,” Walker said hastily. “Mages—hey. Mages do cast spells. My mages do that too, I mean. Me, I don’t do that. Well, hardly ever. Power circles are more just building connections. With magic. As you do. Except you don’t. Oh God, I’ll stop talking now.”
Harper laughed. “Mostly I hunt things down and tear them apart—more of a demolitions expert than a construction engineer. Or at least that’s how I’ve always thought of it,” Harper replied. “Though I guess they are two sides of the same coin.”
Walker’s eyes lit up a little. “That sounds cool. I kinda like breaking things apart.” She shook herself, and carried on with explaining the power circles. “Anyway, these are pretty simple. Keep things in, keep things out. I’m gonna keep things in this time. Can you use your magic silver stick to drag that bracelet so it’s near to you or will you fall over? Oh good! No falling over. Stand there.”
Harper, the bracelet safely at her toes, took up position in her assigned space. Then, at Walker’s request, she extended one arm fully. Walker stood just beyond her fingertips, glanced upward like she was checking for something, nudged Harper around a few inches, and murmured something that initiated a wave of sparks in her own aura. “You’re aligned to the north right now. Don’t move until I’m done. Well, you can put your arm down.” Harper lowered her arm, leaning heavily on her cane as she watched sparks tumble like an eager puppy after Walker, who paused every quarter-circle to murmur again. When she’d returned to where she started, a glimmer shot to the ceiling, then fell again, though the air took on a fine-grained texture that spoke of, but wasn’t exactly, the Grey’s silver and smoke. Harper gave it a curious prod with a fingertip, feeling resistance that shimmered and rippled in hues of determined green.
The contact sang a reassuring note in her mind. Oh, that’s Walker. An extension of her powers, like a tethered thread from the Grid. “Sorry.”
Walker straightened an extra half inch at the poke and shivered. “How intimate. But it kept you in, which is good. I’ve never tried to encircle a . . . whatever you are.”
“Greywalker.”
“Well, that clears things right up. No, it kinda does, if I think of your Grey as the Dead Zone. Where ghosts go before moving on,” Walker clarified before she, too, moved on, building a secondary circle that encompassed Harper’s and left room for another small one.
“I think so . . .” Harper replied. “It’s like an interference fringe between one place and the next, fairly raw, pretty cold.” The larger circle closed and Harper winced a little as a bright ringing pierced her inner ears, as if subsonics had been turned on all around her. A deep oceanic green shot through the circle before fading and taking the thrumming with it.
“That’s actually an almost weirdly accurate description of the Dead Zone.” Walker made the third circle with hers
elf and the locket inside it, and as it sealed, the Grey itself seemed held at bay—even more so than in the steel-and-glass cage of the Land Rover. In spite of the setting, the world almost felt . . . safe. Harper snorted at herself—any sense of safety in the world had been lost long before she’d entered the Grey. And then the momentary, warm respite and sudden silence of the Grid’s constant singing came like a shock of sensory deprivation and the echo of a half-forgotten life. As it settled on her, Harper gasped. Her blood was too loud in her ears and the world was ordinary, as it hadn’t been in years. “What was that?”
Walker, already crouched to pick up the locket, glanced at her and then the circles. “They’re walls, basically. Walls like to keep the things inside them safe. That’s their job. What, did they get a little overzealous? Are you ready for this?” she added before Harper could answer the first question.
Harper muttered, “No, but that’s never stopped me.” Walker gave her a rueful smile, and they picked up their artifacts at the same time.
If the Grey had faltered before, it failed entirely now: a world of hard colors rose in its place, red sky and yellow earth, the sun a blue-white ball that threw sharp shadows from thick blades of purple grass. Pain rose, strangely recognizable. Under the harsh glare of mismatched colors Harper thought, I’m dying.
“Dead! No, dead again,” burst from her throat, a stranger’s words in a familiar voice. Her hands clawed of their own volition, turning palms-up so she could stare at them, and a second shriek erupted: “Mae! Mae, what have you done?!”
The words filled the air, not muffled or softened by the Grey’s constant babble, but thrown into relief, almost visible as sharp stabs of rage across the crimson sky. Shadows hung from them, darkening them into slashes that rent open, gaining depth and power. Shapes appeared within, black light bending itself into well-known forms: a bear, a badger, an owl, all of them twisting into bone-breaking distortions of themselves. Alma’s words ripped from Harper’s throat again, a terrible melding of triumph and rage. “I told you! I told you! This is the world after death, bright and broken colors! Not your grey,” she spat. “Not your ‘singing silence’ of ghosts and ‘living light.’ There’s true life here. Life! Mae, where are you? See that I’m right! After all this time, after drowning in your arms, after your lies and hysterics, see that I was right!”
The voice rang and tore and Harper’s hands flew to her head, clutching her temples; for an instant she didn’t know who had commanded the action, herself or the rider inside. But it was herself. Harper wasn’t surprised, half a breath later, that she could stand here in this mis-colored place without her cane, without pain pulsing through her leg. The taut, furious energy within was and wasn’t like carrying the remnant of the unlamented Reggie Lassiter—it burned and ached, but with cold and hate instead of hot agony. “Drowned.” Harper’s own voice, speaking to Alma with a stab of understanding. “Did you and Mae drown together?”
Dying had drawn Harper into the Grey, and Walker had, earlier, wondered if dying was something Harper did a lot, as if it was familiar territory for her, too. Must be—those little black slivers of death don’t lie.
“Cold.” Alma stole Harper’s voice back in a whisper. “Winter ice, so thin, so cold, so black. We fell so far. We held on, we tried to breathe, but the black, the cold, the ice, it stole our souls.” The whisper cracked back to a scream. “And when they drew us out she told lies! Lies about where we had been, what we had seen, about what death itself was! She lied about the magic . . .”
Power stuttered in Harper’s hands, a flare that reminded her of the wash that had healed Walker’s burned hand in the hallway. It felt alien and beautiful all at once, an extraordinary sense of connection to the strangely colored world around her that spread wide, unlike the narrow, vibrant streams of the Grey’s energy grid as it rushed through the blackness between. This she could fall into and it would catch her, cushion her, accepting her as if she belonged, and make her whole again—
—until Alma ripped it free, confident in its use instead of gently exploratory. The flow of healing magic grew ragged, sharp edges tearing into her until its only purpose was pain and the survival of self. Of Alma’s self: Harper was to be subsumed, just as Mae ought to have been. Mae, the lying, betraying sister; Mae, who—
—who was not there. That thought crystallized in Alma’s mind, more powerful than any ideas that Harper could hold in place. Were this the Grey, it would be all right; there she could clutch and tear at singing skeins of energy, twist them into shapes or pluck them apart, but this was Walker’s type of magic and the strange beauty of it was drowned by Alma’s corruption. Walker had said shamanic magic gone wrong was sorcery, hadn’t she? In the Grey, Harper could have torn into the shape of it—of Alma herself—but sucked down by this choking filth of unfamiliar sorcery, she didn’t know how to fight back. She couldn’t see the Grid, hear its muttering or the ring and hum of Seattle’s constructed soul. There were no bright coils of living energy to touch, no shapes of magic like neon tracery in fog . . .
The cane, the silver deeply steeped in incantations—those were her weapons here. If I can reach them, if I can hold this bitch off long enough to find a way . . . Harper wrenched control back, looking for the cane, hoping it had come with her into the color-rich shamanic world. It was hard enough to hold any corporeal thing in the Grey, but she’d thought the cane would have enough affinity, even in such a foreign place . . .
A nasty laugh erupted from her own throat as Alma, sharing the confines of Harper’s own thoughts, latched onto the idea of the cane. It wasn’t there; a ghost of Alma’s knowledge hinted to Harper that it wasn’t part of Harper’s own self-image, not enough for it to travel into this other world with her. The knowledge was like a knife—her strength had always lain in her ability to take her own body into the incorporate world, to be safe within the citadel of it and reach for the strands of magic like burning threads. But now, that too had failed. Here, Alma knew how to move, Alma knew how to draw things to her.
Or to vault upward again, out of the red-sky world and back into the haunted house. Harper staggered, disoriented and stunned by the harsh transition, while Alma forced their shared body into motion, seizing the cane that lay at Harper’s feet, within her shamanic circle.
Two vicious slashes with the magic-disrupting cane, and the circle fell. But this was the house—multi-planed, corporeal and magical at the same time—and Alma had just made a big mistake.
The circle closed around me with a chime and a bright pulse of silvery light. Then the whole world went sideways, like I was trying to walk with one foot on the ground and the other on an escalator. The world filled up with chilly fog—but not fog really, more like the cold steam that comes off a frozen lake in a sudden beam of sunlight. It boiled and churned into shapes that were nearly recognizable—human faces, bodies, creatures that swam through the endlessly bright mist like sea serpents. And it all muttered and whispered in wind-chime voices, punctuated with the clack of bones and silver bells. I could see the house as lines of charcoal and red drawn in the restless fog of the Grey.
A shape like a tangled wad of colored light writhed around just in front of me—angry red and bitter green all twisted through with stiff bits of black like burnt twigs caught in a messed-up ball of yarn. The shape bloomed into something kind of human, wrapped in the cold fog that billowed into a face that peered at me, then dropped toward me like an anvil. I flung up a shield, gunmetal blue, and flinched as the thing slipped right through it and into me.
A twist of real anger and fear coiled through me. My shields were damn near impenetrable, at this point. I’d lost a lot, learning to keep them that way. That this thing could slip inside me so easily was bad with a capital B. I would have spent some quality time getting truly upset about that, if the misty world hadn’t lurched like I’d fallen through the floor as the cold dove into me.
My stomach felt like it stayed at floor-level while I fell down, and the silvery fog-world
lit up like the neon graveyard outside Las Vegas. Every color I could ever have imagined raced up and down, north and south, east and west . . . but not quite at random. There was a system to it, almost like the animistic colors I normally Saw, and equally entirely unlike them. Some colors ran toward the poles, others side-to-side, and a few just rose up and curled like springwater bubbling into the air. They were myriad and gorgeous, like the northern lights gone wild, and I thought I could make sense of them, given a little time.
I wasn’t given time. Instead I was given voices. The Grey talked. It whispered, it chattered, it babbled like a brook and sang like an endless choir in the fog-bound distance. Brilliant streams of light outlined the whole world like one of those crazy wire-frame simulations in some computer game. There was the house, as heavy and dense as the worst depression, seeming to float on the steam and speeding lines of colored fire.
“Alma . . .” I could hear the voice from my own mouth, but it was a floating stream of cold fog, not air. “You see? I told you! Can’t you feel it now? Racing through you like a torrent? It’s so beautiful! So much more beautiful than that nasty yellow earth and bloodred sky of yours.”
“Mae?” I asked, and it was me asking: it didn’t ride the air the way Mae’s voice did. “What happened to you?”
But she didn’t care about me; she was focused on Alma and on proving to her, somehow, that her own way of seeing the world was the real way to see it. Conviction and anger dripped icicles from the breathy fog as her voice grew more strident. “How could you lie about this? How could you, when we sank into the cold together? We used to be together! Together, together . . . like sisters ought to be, but you couldn’t let the world be right! No, no! You had to lie! To say that I was the liar! To keep it for yourself! This is where the power is—shaped in the living mist—”
The living mist, I thought under Mae’s rant. How could Harper stand it? It was fucking cold, to be honest, and while it was pretty, it was also disorienting and empty and terribly full at the same time. Which might have been bearable if the muttering would shut up!
Urban Allies: Ten Brand-New Collaborative Stories Page 24