by E. A. Copen
I swallowed a mouthful as he tipped up the cup and grimaced. It tasted worse than it smelled. It was like drinking watery sand mixed with mashed up insects and dirt. The mixture trailed down my esophagus. I was painfully aware of where it was, as it left the same magick numbness behind on the inside. As soon as it hit my stomach, I reacted violently. My whole body jerked forward with the urge to vomit, but Sal closed his hand over my mouth and nose, pinching both tight and cutting off my air. I had no choice but to swallow it a second time. It went down a little easier, but only because my tongue was coated in the stuff. I was more afraid I would choke on my own vomit than anything else. The second sip he gave me was even easier.
By the time that one hit my stomach, I was already seeing strange lights in the air. A drug-induced (or maybe just hypothermic) heightened sense of awareness mixed with the tired brain-fog that had already been there. It wasn’t a gradual thing. One minute I was just tired and nauseous. The next, everything was sharper, leaner, more finite. The words that pounded out of Sal’s mouth slowed, every strange syllable a spoken wave of power that I wanted to escape. It hurt when the sound waves struck me. The colors in the air were too vibrant, too alive, swirling and twirling. I couldn’t look at anyone’s face, no matter how hard I tried. Everything I tried to focus on was obscured by a blinding, bright light.
Sal moved to the end of the tub where my feet were. I thought maybe the spell didn’t work, that it was over and I should get out. I tried to grip the sides of the tub, but my arms weren’t working right. The warmth of his fingers wrapped around my ankles. Maybe he was going to help me out.
Instead, he pulled my feet up and held them. My head went down under the water with three inches or so to spare. I didn’t get a breath before I went down. The move surprised me enough that I let out the breath I had in a garbled scream. When he didn’t let me go so I could come up for air, my arms and legs thrashed wildly. I tried to kick him, to turn and jerk free, but Sal was too strong. I was out of time.
I tried to fight the urge to breathe for as long as I could. In the end, instinct won out. Black closed in on the edges of my vision, highlighting the shrinking light that was focused on Sal’s face. I opened my mouth and filled my lungs with water.
Chapter Thirty-Three
“You handled the medicine better than I expected,” said Chanter.
We were sitting cross-legged in the air, not three feet from the tub, watching Sal drown me. Somehow, that didn’t seem odd, and meeting Chanter as a ghost—or spirit, or whatever I was—wasn’t completely unexpected. If I had still been in my body, I might have been surprised, but the body is limited to the brain’s understanding of the world. Outside, free of the confines of the mortal body, everything seemed clearer and not in the same way the so-called medicine Sal had made me drink made things clear.
The room was quiet, the people still. My human brain would have perceived the moment as frozen in time. Ghost-me understood that time as I perceived it was a bullshit construct. Time wasn’t a line stretching from a fixed start to an inevitable end. It was dimensional, multi-faceted, and full of little blips and junctions that I could explore at will. I was no longer limited to this time-space. I was everywhere and nowhere.
Whoa. Talk about altered consciousness.
Chanter’s ghost chuckled. “It’s a lot at first, isn’t it? Being dead.”
I turned to look at him. He looked solid, but then so did everything else. “How do I—”
“Know things?” He shrugged. “I could tell you that medical science has documented increased brain activity just before death, that all of this is a sort of short-circuit in the neuro-pathways of your brain. That’s how someone like Han would explain it. Or maybe it’s a deep and meaningful spiritual connection with some supreme consciousness. Maybe we’re just too stupid for our own good.”
I swallowed. Then I realized I hadn’t been breathing. That was a weird feeling. Things like breathing, blinking, and swallowing the spit in your mouth are automatic. Not having to do that was…It was weird. Really, really weird.
“Are you really here?” I asked of Chanter. “Are we actually outside my body and in the hospital on some other plane? Or is this all some kind of vivid death hallucination?”
Chanter laughed and stood, extending a hand down to me. “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Why should the afterlife be anything different?”
That was vague enough that I could believe this Chanter was the real deal. I took his hand and he hauled me up. On my feet, I caught sight of my body below the surface of the water. The waves in the tub obscured my face, but I stopped to study Sal. He was wincing. “I’m sorry you had to do this,” I said to him.
“He can’t hear you,” Chanter said, tucking his hands into the pockets of his worn, dusty jeans. “No one can. That’s the trouble with being dead.”
Chanter didn’t seem like he was in a hurry to get anywhere, and nothing in the room was moving. Still, I felt like I was forgetting something important. There was somewhere I had to be, something I had to do. Time was more flexible now. I’d get around to it. I had an eternity now, after all.
I decided to look around the room. Hunter was just a few feet behind my body’s head, perched on the edge of a chair, leaning forward and chewing his bottom lip. His fingers gripped the edge of the plastic seat so tight that they were white. Reed stood next to him, his forehead wrinkled and sword raised off the ground. His back was turned to the door and he was frowning at the scene of my death.
Behind them, pressed in the narrow space between the doorframe where the plastic sheeting hung and the ceiling, was Cynthia. She held in her right hand a glowing stick of silver. The glow had to be magick, but I couldn’t tell what kind of spell she might have worked into the silver. Her face was blank, gaze focused on the back of Reed’s head. Her eyes were full of murder.
I turned to look for Chanter, but he wasn’t there anymore. When I turned back around, he was in front of me. “Jesus Christ!” I gasped and stepped back. Well, floated back. Gravity doesn’t work quite the same way when you’re a disembodied spirit.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Chanter said with a grin.
“Knock it off, wise guy. Look.” I pointed to where Cynthia was perched and ready to strike. As soon as time started moving again, she would use the magick she was pouring into that silver stick and whack Reed on the back of the head. Another good jump, and she’d be over the tub and on top of Marcus, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop her. Marcus was as good as dead.
“Interesting,” he mused and nodded. “But inconsequential to why you’re here.” Chanter bid me follow him and floated through the plastic. It didn’t so much as rustle at his passing. I turned around and surveyed the scene one more time and then followed him through.
I stumbled and tripped over a brick sticking up in the middle of the brick street. When I went down, I scraped my right elbow. Ow. Pain. Wait, I shouldn’t have felt pain as a disembodied spirit.
“My goodness, are you all right?”
I lifted my chin from the road and looked up into the worried features of my mother. She was a slight woman, still young enough to attract attention if she’d dressed the part, but old enough to have a patch of gray. She wore one of the three blue dresses she’d sewn by hand, with a white turtleneck underneath it. The short sleeves came just above her elbow and the neckline was high enough she didn’t need the turtleneck, but Mom never went out without long sleeves. She wore an unflattering white hat over her hair, which she’d wound into a tight, braided bun. It was dark out. A gentle, off-key rendition of The Old Rugged Cross drifted out of the wooden church behind her without musical accompaniment.
It was a Sunday night service, one I remembered well. I was twelve years old.
I pushed myself up on wobbly arms and brushed the dirt from my dress. It was identical to my mother’s. I wanted to tell her that I was fine, but she didn’t give me the chance. In the w
ay only my mother could, she reached out, gripped my arm, and turned it over to see the bloody bit of road rash. “What made you fall like that?” she asked, shoving her thick eyebrows together.
“I don’t know, Mamma.” I bowed my head. I knew it was the brick, but I was afraid she’d yell at me for being clumsy. I was already in the worst trouble of my life. That’s why she’d brought me to the special church service two towns over to meet one of those traveling healers. I had the devil in me and we aimed to get him out.
“Whatever became of that little girl?” Chanter mused.
Just as suddenly as before, we were standing outside of my twelve-year-old body in the street. My mother’s worry was frozen on her face. My shame and fear were etched all over me.
“She didn’t have the devil in her.” I closed my eyes, turning away from the scene. “People fear what they don’t understand. Mamma was terrified of the devil, and she thought the magick was some kind of demon after my soul.”
“But this was an important moment. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have chosen it.”
“I didn’t choose it,” I said, and then turned back to the scene with a sigh. “I didn’t want to be like her,” I said, putting my hands in my pockets. “Mamma meant well. I think I knew that even then. She was afraid of everything. She didn’t have friends. She didn’t really have faith. I don’t even think she believed in God so much as she was scared shitless of the devil. And I think this is when I knew, I knew that she was afraid of me. Maybe she was right to fear me.”
There was a lightning flash of pain in my head, a white-hot burning strike that brought me to my knees. Above my head, thunder rumbled. The wind picked up. It was a light breeze, but it was still enough to nearly knock both Chanter and me over.
“We have to move on,” he said.
When I raised my head, we weren’t on the street anymore. We were in a cramped indoor space standing under the blue light of a computer screensaver. The words GO MOUNTAINEERS bounced back and forth on the screen in a three-dimensional yellow font with three exclamation marks behind it. Clothes littered the floor, some of which I recognized. In fact, I recognized the whole scene from the muffled moans coming from the bottom bunk and the stink of adolescent sweat, pot, and sex in the room.
I jumped in front of Chanter and spread my arms. “Hey, this is private.”
“I don’t pick the scenes,” he said with a shrug. “Your brain must think this is important for a reason.”
One of us in the memory elbowed the wall and knocked one of the thumbtacks out. A framed, signed poster of Kurt Cobain tumbled to the floor. We didn’t even notice.
I turned my head and felt an ache in my chest. “It is. But Alex is my memory, and this is a private moment. I’m not comfortable giving you a play-by-play.”
“Why?” Chanter snorted. “Because you think I don’t know where werewolf babies come from?”
He leaned to the side. I leaned to block him, but I was a ghost. Ghosts aren’t so good at blocking things. “Seriously, Chanter. This is awkward. Like doing it in front of your parents.”
“I see where Hunter gets some of that annoying over-confidence. All young men think they’re God’s gift to women.”
If I’d had skin, I would have flushed crimson.
Chanter turned away and decided to walk the room. “Have you figured out what you’re supposed to be doing yet?” When I didn’t answer, he said, “That’s just fine. Took me a while to figure out my business, too. You did give him my recipe?”
“Yeah. I gave it to…” Who? Why was it so hard to think?
Thunder rattled the windows. I winced as the storm in my brain struck my skull and took us to another point in time and space.
This time, we stood in the desert with ruined buildings all around us. It was hot. That much I could decipher from the mirages of heat rippling through the air, even though I couldn’t feel the sun on my skin. The sun was brutal and bright, swollen, and strangely close in the naked sky. I didn’t know this place. This wasn’t my memory.
“So, you are Judah Black.”
I whirled around at the sound of an unfamiliar woman’s voice, throwing my hands up in a defensive gesture. Chanter was gone, and in his place stood a woman I thought I knew.
Emiko was even more stunning in person. Or, I guess in spirit. She was five and a half feet tall, her posture a drawing out of a Victorian-age girl’s book on manners. She didn’t wear a dress, but a traditional kimono, blood-red in color, with white birds all over it. Herons, or cranes, maybe. Her black hair was piled atop her head in mounds, each decorated with little white flowers. She dipped slightly, a curtsy of sorts.
I swallowed as the faint memory of my purpose fluttered by. I had come to kill her before she could kill me.
She pushed her painted lips into a full smile. “But I am already dead.”
“Er, you can read my thoughts?”
I flinched as she flicked her wrist and extended a fan that matched her kimono. “You and I are joined now, just as I’m joined to the blood of the werewolf girl.”
“Are you…eating me?”
She giggled, covering her mouth with the fan. “No, not I. Allow me to introduce myself formally. I am Emiko. Or part of her, anyway.”
“Part of her?” I tipped my head to the side.
She paced past me, touching her fingers to the side of the building. “We were called back by her need. By her…hunger.” Emiko shivered. “The dark voice called, and we came. In death, we were fractured, mind, body, soul. Without me, Emiko is just a mindless beast, feeding on easy prey. There is nothing to hold us here. Not like you have.” She turned and pointed limply at my chest.
I looked down, noticing for the first time that there was a string tied around me. Three strings, actually, each as thin as embroidery floss. It was braided in colors of white, gold, and red and flowed out behind me for as far as I could see. I couldn’t see what it was attached to, but I knew it must be my body. That was the magick Sal had worked, the small modification that would allow them to pull me back when the time came. Finally, I remembered.
But as I studied the braided strings, I noticed that the white one was frayed and thinning in places. One hard pull would snap it completely.
“So the thing that’s been attacking Mia—that’s the one you call the beast?”
Emiko conceded with a nod. “She is hunger embodied, called forth to feed and nothing more. She will eat everyone in the bloodline before she is satiated. That was how the spell was written.”
“By Seamus?”
“By the one called Finvarra. He summoned her.”
“If Seamus summoned the beast, then why are you here?”
She gave a longing sigh. “I am not. I am a memory, an echo called upon to assist you. I do not belong to you. I am his.” She touched the wall one more time, and two tiny droplets of blood materialized, dripping down the dry wood.
Marcus, I thought. “You’re here with me because Marcus brought you. Seamus summoned hunger, and Marcus summoned you.”
“I am his memory,” she corrected.
We were talking in circles and getting nowhere. Who she was and how she’d gotten into my head didn’t matter. She was on my team, and I could use all the help I could get.
“Emiko, what can you tell me about the beast? Do you know how to stop her?”
“I cannot,” she said, lowering her head. “I know only she hungers. She wants.”
Thunder echoed through the town, and dark storm clouds rolled in. Emiko lifted her eyes to the sky, her expression worried. “You are dying.”
“She’s only mostly dead,” said Chanter next to me.
I jumped. “Would you quit doing that?”
“It’s not my fault you’re still lagging behind. While you’ve been here talking to her, I was doing a little recon. The thing you’re calling the beast? You’ve drawn its attention.”
As soon as Chanter finished speaking, the familiar lightning flash of pain tore through my head again. We
were transported to a new time and place. This time, we materialized in tree branches several feet off the ground. I grabbed for the nearest branch, afraid I would fall and drew impatient looks from both Chanter and Emiko. That’s right. Ghosts and gravity don’t necessarily get along well.
“I’m new to this ghost thing,” I protested.
“That’s just as well,” Chanter said with a shrug. “Don’t get used to it.”
I looked out over the forest. It was dark, and the familiar sound of crickets hung in the air. Somewhere close by, a bullfrog called. The pale yellow light of houses lit up a valley below. Beyond that rose a great fortress of wood, stone, and Japanese-style architecture atop a mountain. Rivers of light marched through the night sky headed steadily for the door of the fortress. Here, the beast had built its stronghold and was preparing to strike against me.
“Wait.” I looked down at the valley a second time. “This place seems familiar.”
Then it hit me. I knew where and when we were in my memories. The night I had hoped never to think of again, the one where everything changed. As the realization dawned on me, we floated closer to a tiny two-bedroom trailer situated on the side of the hill. The porch was littered with dead plants from back when I thought I could develop a green thumb. Tomorrow was trash day. I could tell because both cans were almost full.
The back door opened and I waddled out, seven months pregnant, with a skillet full of burnt meat. Tears streamed down my face as I tried to toss the charred bits of ground beef over the rail and into the trash while smoke billowed out of the house behind me. The phone was ringing back in the house. Alex was calling. It was the last phone call he’d ever make.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Ghosts and spirits can have panic attacks. I didn’t know that until I was a ghost having one. They aren’t quite like living panic attacks with an unbearable tightness in your chest, the waterworks, the shaking. But the crippling fear is the same. Dread overwhelmed what was left of me. The whole world quaked, and I found myself gripping the air for purchase. Any strong wind that came along would have blown me away for as small and utterly helpless as I felt watching myself go back into the trailer to answer the phone.