by E. A. Copen
When I gave up my shadow to Oden, I also lost my reflection. Now, disembodied spirits apparently didn’t have shadows, but I guess they still had a reflection because I saw mine and Nate’s rearview mirror. By the terrified scream, he did too. Still screaming, Nate turned around and stared at me.
I screamed back.
Nate stopped to take a breath. “Holy shit. Lazarus?”
“Holy shit, Nate! You can see me?”
Nate frowned and scratched his frizzy head. “Sort of. You’re translucent. But if you’re here, how are you also the hospital? Lazarus, what is going on?”
I was so thrilled that somebody could see me that I barely remembered why I’d come in the first place. I waved my hands. “I’m not really me. At least, not all of me. To close the seal, I needed extra power to fuel the spell and use the stones. So, I used the only readily available source of power: my soul.”
“Well, that actually makes sense. And it sounds like you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Nate turned around and shrugged. “Just the sort of selfish, yet self-sacrificing thing you’d do.”
Selfish? I mean, I guess he was right in a certain sense. However, I had ripped out my own soul to save the entire world. What part of that was selfish? I guess the part where I could have considered how it would affect other people if I were dead. Though it had occurred to me, and at that moment, I had decided my death was still a small price to pay to save the world from Mask.
“Nate, I know you’re grieving, so I’m going to let that go,” I said. “Besides, we have bigger problems. Mask isn’t dead.”
Nate turned around in his seat again to look at me. “What you mean he’s not dead? There’s no sign of him, and both Finn and Remy said it was over.”
I shook my head. “This was just one battle of a very large war. If we don’t reclaim Faerie and hit Mask where he lives, then he’ll just keep coming back. You need to tell the others.”
“Me?” Nate squeaked. “What makes you think they’d listen to me? Even if I tell them I talked to your disembodied spirit, the first thing there and ask for is proof, which I don’t have.”
“You can’t tell them about me,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because if you tell them, they’ll be too focused on trying to save me to do what needs be done. I can take care of myself. I need the rest of you to be focused on taking back Faerie. Make sure Finn and Remy know, Nate. And make sure they understand how much magic it really takes to close those seals. They’ll need more than what they have.”
Nate frowned. “Where are they supposed to get more magic?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe since they know in advance, they can enlist help from other people, other fae. Just don’t let them do what I did.”
“What about you?” Nate asked. “Is this just you now? Are you… Dead?”
“I don’t think I’m technically dead. I’ve got six days to figure this out before Baron Samedi digs my grave and I’m a goner. That’s more than enough time for me to get this figured out. I’ve been in worse scrapes.”
Nate arched an eyebrow. “You’ve been in worse scrapes than this? When have you been brain-dead before?”
Guess he had me there. This wasn’t my first time being dead, but it was probably the closest I’d ever been to not coming back. At least the last couple of times had been on purpose. I guess this one was too, but it wasn’t like I’d planned it in advance. “That’s not the point,” I continued. “The point is, I’ve got it handled.”
“Right,” said Nate, gripping the steering wheel. “Just one more question.”
“Fire away.”
He blinked hard and adjusted his mirror again as if doing so would make me disappear. “Why can I see you?”
Chapter Five
I didn’t have an answer for Nate. As far as I knew, he didn’t have any magic, so that wasn’t it. Maybe he’d just hung around enough dead things it’d made him sensitive. Maybe we had some sort of special male bond.
While he drove to the hospital to keep watch over my body, I did my best to hover in the back seat so I could listen to him as he updated me. Hanging out in the back seat of a moving car as a spirit not bound by Earthly physics was no easy task, mind you. Rather than just sitting on my ass and letting the car carry me along, I had to keep pace with it. Good thing my skinny, ghostly legs didn’t get tired.
“The last twenty-four hours have been awful,” he said and shook his head. “Better than before, but still awful. The city is a mess. Bodies have been piling up at the morgue, but thankfully most of them are just there for processing and we’re not autopsying all of them. Actually, I’m not handling hardly any of that due to the mysterious viral breakout. The CDC is handling the bodies, and D.J. is coordinating all that. For once, I’m thankful he got that promotion instead of me.”
“What about Remy?” I asked as he turned a corner. I miscalculated the speed and wound up moving to the other side of the car.
Nate lifted a hand from the steering wheel and waved it around. “Well, she’s not exactly a broken mess like I’d expect a daughter to be after losing her father, but Finn keeps telling me it’s not that she doesn’t care. Apparently, fae handle death very differently from us humans. She’s spent a lot of time sharpening her various weapons.”
That was good. If Remy was focused on vengeance, all Nate would have to do is point her in the right direction.
“And sleeping with Finn,” Nate added.
I liked that part a lot less, but I had to remind myself that she was an adult and could do what she wanted. It could be worse, I told myself. It could be somebody like Josiah. At least the two of them were close in age. From a political standpoint, the two of them hooking up was a good thing, so long as they didn’t have any sort of violent fallout. What was left of Summer and Shadow could unite under one banner. All that bad blood could be water under the bridge as they joined the High Court to attack Mask’s hold on Winter and Summer. As a fellow court monarch, I should’ve been happy, which reminded me…“Who is running the Court of Miracles while I’m out of commission?”
Nate shrugged. “I don’t know if anyone’s taken charge. It’s only been a day, Lazarus.”
A lot could happen in a day. I’d have to check on that as well when I got the chance. But first things first. I had to find someone who could help me locate the pieces of my soul. “Nate, think you could relay a message to Josiah for me?”
He turned his head slightly. “Can he see you too?”
“I don’t know. Who knows what that guy can do? Just in case, I need you to tell him I need to talk to one of his demon buddies.”
Nate hit the brakes and sent me flying through him and into the dash before I stopped myself. Luckily, I’d avoided hitting the engine, which probably had enough iron in it to zap me. “I don’t often object to what you do, Laz, but talking to demons? There has to be a line somewhere.”
I pulled myself out of the plastic dash and floated over to the passenger seat. “I understand your concern. Trust me, it’s not ideal for me either, but I need someone who knows the underworld and can track things. Unless Josiah himself can do it, I’ll need someone from there.”
He sighed heavily and inched the car forward to the intersection. “Just promise me you won’t make any deals with them without clearing it with someone else first. No offense, Laz, but when you think you’re in a life or death situation, sometimes you just make the worst choices. I don’t want you to go dark side. I just want my friend back.”
He pulled through the intersection and turned the corner. University Medical Center lit up the skyline in the distance, the only building whose windows were all lit. It stood like a multi-story block candle, casting its light on the palm trees in the center of the road.
Nate was right again. On my own, I didn’t have the foresight to make the best decisions. Emma and Nate had always been the first people to tell me when I was making a bad choice, and ev
ery time I screwed up, it was because I’d gone off on my own without including one of them. I couldn’t keep doing that and expecting things to change.
“I promise I’ll run any deals by you or Emma,” I said.
He nodded with a grunt and pulled into the hospital parking lot.
The hospital itself was mostly empty of people, with a single attendant at the information desk. That didn’t mean no one was around. Dozens of emaciated ghostly figures wandered the grounds, their gazes locked straight forward, jaws hanging open. Occasionally, they’d let out a low moan. If another ghost wandered too close, the starving ghosts would snap their jaws at it, biting off pieces to make themselves glow slightly brighter.
I shuddered. Hungry ghosts. This wasn’t my first run-in with them. A small group had been hanging around the Quarter, trying to snack on me. The first time the Reapers showed up, they made short work of them and I got away, but that wouldn’t happen here. Thanks to Odin, the Reapers had been called off until sunrise. I was on my own.
Maybe if I hang close to Nate, they’ll leave me alone? I clung to his side while we went up the walk. The ghosts hanging around didn’t bother looking up, but a few floated close on their pre-set wandering routes. One looked at me with dead, empty eyes. His jaw twitched.
I yelped and rushed to Nate’s other side.
He stopped walking to frown at me. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Just keep going.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “Please, just keep going.”
He shrugged and kept walking.
All this time, I’d accused Jean of being a coward and acting strange, but now that I was a disembodied spirit too, I understood why he was so damn jumpy all the time. There were ghosts all over trying to eat him, Reapers trying to reap him, and the amount of effort it took just to pick something up was insane. No wonder he was a moody, cowardly bastard.
“Excuse me,” said Nate, reaching the information desk. “I’m here to see Lazarus Kerrigan. He’s a patient in the ICU.”
“One moment, please.” The lady behind the counter tapped some keys.
I chanced a look around. None of the ghosts had ventured close to the counter, so it seemed safe to glance at the screen from over her shoulder. The screen she pulled up only had limited information, listing the room I was in and the number of visitors allowed, along with a list of visitor’s names that must’ve been submitted at my admission.
Nate cleared his throat to get my attention.
“I can’t go in the elevator,” I said. “Giant steel box. It’ll zap me.” I floated toward the ceiling. “I’ll meet you up there.”
The ICU was up on the fifth floor in the second patient tower. I zipped through the magnetically locked glass doors and down the hall past a skeleton crew of nurses. Every room I passed had at least one person in it, though some held both a patient and an exhausted-looking visitor on the fold-out sofa.
I was in room five-oh-eight.
I stopped in front of the room, gazing through the door into the darkened space. The curtain had been drawn, and it waved slightly in a breeze coming from an air vent in the ceiling. A loud, mechanical hissing sound filled the air, the sound of the ventilator breathing for me. It sounded like someone was in there with an old-fashioned bellows, forcing my lungs to inflate and deflate in a perfectly unnatural rhythm.
Am I ready for this? I floated through the door, stopping on the other side of the curtains. Do I really want to see my dead body all hooked up to everything? I could just wait there for Nate and listen in as he did all the talking. This wasn’t something I had to do.
The curtain shifted slightly as I pushed through the thin fabric and came out the other side. I didn’t look anything like I thought I did. When I thought of a braindead person on a ventilator, I thought of a just that, the person as I’d seen them, lying in a bed as if asleep, a tube going into their mouth. There might be more wires hooked up, monitoring their blood pressure, heart rate, and so on, but they were basically still them.
I looked like an alien being. A pressurized mask covered the entirety of the lower half of my face, a thick, flexible tube running over the side of the bed like some plastic trachea extension. They had my head tilted up so that I wasn’t lying flat on my back, but the position made the ugly hospital gown they’d put on me droop around the neck, exposing all the round stickers on my pale chest. I looked more dead than alive with my off-color complexion, my limp limbs, and the slack muscles in my face.
Nate had said Josiah was with my body, but that wasn’t who I found curled up on the sofa, staring at the waves on the monitor. It was his partner, Khaleda.
She blinked when I came through the curtains and sat up. “Lazarus?”
I halted, hovering over my body. “You can see me?”
Khaleda tilted her head and raised an eyebrow. “I’m the Queen of Hell. Or trying to be. Of course, I can see you. But you’re very thin. What happened?”
Samedi had said I’d need to find someone familiar with the tortures of the underworld to get a beat on how many pieces I’d lost and where to look for them, and I couldn’t ask for anyone better than Khaleda Morningstar. Not only had her father been the Devil himself, but he’d trained her to be his personal assassin. She’d also undergone some of the tortures Hell had to offer personally while she was a prisoner there. No one on Earth knew the underworld better than her. But getting her to help me wouldn’t be easy. She had a war to fight, and I didn’t think she liked me very much.
I floated down on the other side of my bed, standing between Khaleda and my body. It was surreal, seeing myself breathing only with the help of a machine. I just couldn’t look away from it. “Did anyone tell you how I wound up this way?”
She sighed and rested her elbows on her knees. “Josiah was vague. Something about you being your typical, self-sacrificing fuckwit self. No external injuries other than some scrapes and bruises, though, so I just assume you lost your soul somehow. I expected it was already in the underworld awaiting processing. Color me surprised to find you’re still around. Emma will be thrilled.”
I cringed and turned away from my body. “Yeah, I’d rather you didn’t tell her.”
“What are you talking about? Why wouldn’t you want her to know?”
“In case I fail,” I explained. “There’s nothing worse than false hope. I’ve already let her down by doing this to myself. Telling her there’s a slim chance that I could come back from it is just cruel.”
She made a small, snort-like sound of disapproval and flipped her hair. “Whatever. Your business.”
I pressed my fingers together awkwardly. “Actually, I might need your help.”
Khaleda burst out laughing. “My help? Oh, wait. You’re serious?” She cleared her throat. “Lazarus, I hate to break it to you, but I’m in the middle of strategizing a war I still don’t have an army to fight. In fact, that’s why I came here. Josiah said I should talk to your daughter and the shadow fae she’s been sleeping with. Apparently, he’s my nephew.”
“You want to enlist the fae to help you fight for your throne in Hell?” I crossed my arms. That was a stretch. There weren’t many fae still free of Mask’s influence, and of the fae who were, I doubted they’d sign on to help her. The fae weren’t keen on fighting other people’s wars. “Has anyone told you that Faerie is kind of a mess right now?”
She shrugged one shoulder. “Josiah might have mentioned it in passing. I’m sure it’s something I can work around or deal with in some way. I wouldn’t have come otherwise.”
I slapped myself in the face, or tried to. Since I had no physical body, my hand just passed through me, which was a weird as hell feeling. “Listen, Khaleda. Far be it from me to get between a queen and her potential throne, but if you don’t help me, I can’t get back in my body, and if that doesn’t happen…”
“What?” She crossed her arms. “It’s not as if the world would suddenly cease to function without you. Heaven wouldn’t descend and wipe every living thing out i
n a battle of epic proportions, there would be no genocide in Hell. A few people would be mildly inconvenienced is all.” She stood, her fists balled. “If I don’t get my army and take Hell, that is exactly what could happen. I’m talking about the end of the world, Lazarus.”
“So am I,” I cut in. “If Mask doesn’t get ganked, he’s going to invade Earth again, and not just here. Everywhere.”
“Good,” she said. “Maybe he can keep Michael busy for a few weeks while I deal with Beelzebub and Leviathan.”
“I’m not kidding around, Khaleda!”
“Neither am I.”
Nate cleared his throat from the doorway, drawing a fierce look from Khaleda.
“What is it?” she demanded.
Nate stuck his hands in his jacket pockets. “I couldn’t help but overhear your argument from the hallway. Actually, you might want to keep it down. The nurses are going to think you need to be admitted to the behavioral health unit if they think you’re talking to yourself, Khaleda.”
“I’m not.” She gestured to me.
“I see him.” Nate came in and pulled the curtain so it was blocking the view from the door again. “I think you can help each other and still both get what you want, don’t you, Khaleda?”
She turned away and crossed her arms again, pressing her lips together. “Well, having the Pale Horseman on our side would be beneficial when the time comes.”
“I hate to break it to you,” I said, “but I’m actually looking for a replacement.”
“You’re what?”
Nate came around to the end of the bed, gripping it with both hands. “Stop it, you two.”
“She started it!” I gestured to Khaleda.
Nate rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It doesn’t matter who started it. All this arguing is wasting time. Lazarus has only six days to find the missing pieces of his soul and put them back together again. Help him, Khaleda. Then he can help convince the fae to fight alongside you.”