Eight Rivers of Shadow

by Leo Hunt

  “Sorry, Ash! I’m sorry! Please!”

  She’s biting her lip, clearly trying not to cry. She turns away, strides into the kitchen. I hear her banging around. I’m certain she’s going to come back with a knife or something and go to work, and I’m frantically trying to pry my spirit fingers into the seam around the mirror’s glass, force my way out, but it’s just not happening, and then she comes back and all she’s holding is a glass of water. She puts some pills in her mouth and takes a gulp.

  “Sorry,” Ash says absurdly. “I’m sorry. I’m trying to work on my mood and stuff. Be more balanced.”

  “That’s . . . OK, Ash. Let it all out.”

  I really don’t know what to say. She’s like the clouds crossing the moon in the night sky outside: cold, distant, constantly changing. She’s pacing the pale wood just behind my body’s chair. She gestures with the half-empty glass. She’s about to say something and doesn’t. Ash wants something from me, I think. She wants something from me, but she can’t quite come out and ask for it yet.

  “It’s been ten years for me, too,” she says, “since I last saw my father. We were six.”

  There’s something Dad told me nudging at my mind, bumping up against the shore of my memory like a boat at high tide. Something Dad told me . . . last year, that night, Halloween, when I spoke to him and the Devil . . .

  He left me and Mum ten years ago. There was a war between necromancers. That was why he needed to summon the Fury, his demon, and why he used . . . why he used my unborn brother for the ritual.

  Where does Ash fit in with this?

  “The war,” I say. “I know about that.”

  “They were supposed to be on the same side,” she says.

  The memory isn’t a boat bumping against the shore anymore, it’s more like a dam bursting. A name flashes into my head.

  “Magnus,” I say.

  “Good,” Ash says. “Magnus Ahlgren. And I still remember the last time I saw him.”

  “You’re his —”

  “Daughter,” she snaps. Ash swallows the last of her water. “I was his daughter. Your father betrayed mine. He sent his Host to our secret house one night and killed my family. My father died. Our family’s Host was broken and consumed by Horatio’s demon. So you’re right, I’m not Ashley Smith. My name is Ashana Ahlgren.”

  “But you’re . . . American? I thought Magnus was Scandinavian.”

  “We’re Swedish. I lived there until I was six, then I lived in a lot of other places. It wasn’t safe. But I ended up choosing California when I was twelve, and that’s where we’ve stayed for the last four years. It’s beautiful. When we’re done here —”

  “Done with what?”

  She ignores me. She turns the glass around in her hands. She’s thinking.

  “I’m sorry about your father,” I say.

  “Don’t be. I barely knew him. If we made a noise when he was reading, he’d make us hold a block of ice until it melted. Child-rearing up beyond the Arctic Circle. And Mum had crossed over just after I was born, so.”

  “Right.”

  “I loved our Host, though. They’re the ones who brought us up. They were kind to me. I barely even spoke to any living people when I was really little. And then, you know, your big dog-headed demon ate them all.”

  “You always saw ghosts?” I ask. The idea of being brought up by a Host, of loving them, strikes me as totally insane. It’s like being brought up by a writhing nest of vipers. The idea of the Shepherd or the Prisoner being my childhood guardian is beyond absurd.

  “I’ve been a member of the Ahlgren Host more or less since I was born. Dad put a sigil minor inside my hand when I was eight days old.” Ash holds up her left arm to the mirror. I peer at her hand. There’s a tiny white scar, the size of a five-pence piece, on the inside of her wrist.

  “There’s a sigil inside you? How does that work?”

  “Yeah,” Ash says carelessly, “it’s part of the bone. It’s like this little stone charm, and then you do some magic and it fuses into you. Sigil minors are like sigils with training wheels, I suppose. I was going to get a proper sigil when I was eighteen.”

  “Dad had a black ring. I didn’t know sigils could be inside you.”

  “I know all about those rings. Well, sigils can be anything that’s properly worked and prepared. Some of the old necromancers had oaken staves or, like, crowns made of gold, stuff like that. Octavius, your dad’s old Shepherd — he had his sigil mark tattooed onto himself. Ahlgrens have always had bone sigils, made part of us, because you can’t steal them.”

  “So you’ve got a Host?” I ask.

  “Sort of. It’s complicated. And I’m supposed to be asking you questions. . . . So, I know you’ve read the Book of Eight. Where do you keep it?”

  “I got rid of it,” I say.

  Ash looks me in the eye. “You’re a bad liar,” she says. “And you’re awful at investigating people. Your goth girlfriend? Worst eavesdropper I’ve ever seen. And coming into Holiday’s house like that . . . as if I’d keep anything important there. Honestly.”

  “Why are you staying there? How did you make the whole exchange story work? Holiday’s family?”

  “I’m actually discovering that I’m quite fond of the Simmons. Don’t worry about them.”

  “What about Mark Ellsmith?”

  “He’s in a hotel.”

  “Would this hotel bear any resemblance to the farm that dogs get sent to when they’re really ill?”

  Ash snorts. “He’s alive, if that’s what you mean. I don’t just murder people, Luke. He’s being paid to live there for a month. I can give you the address if you like.”

  “I’m hardly in much of a position to check it out if you did. How are you . . . how did you manage all of this?”

  “I have my ways. I sort of had some outdated ideas of who you were. I thought you were popular, so I decided I’d just come in at the top and find out what kind of person you were before I asked you for anything. And then I get here and find out you’re not invited to anything anymore, and you spend all your time with that one girl . . . so clearly something had happened with your father’s Host. But it was frustrating, and you seemed to be onto me immediately.”

  “You were hardly subtle. Gliding into school dressed all in white.”

  “I know.” Ash sighs. “I never realized how much I’d stand out in this depressing little place. Ah well.”

  “And I followed you back here. You didn’t expect that.”

  “No, I didn’t. Although you got yourself stuck in a spirit trap. I wouldn’t give yourself a pat on the back just yet.”

  “It’s hard to feel smug when you’re trapped in a mirror,” I admit.

  “I don’t feel that smug out here,” she replies.

  “So what do you want from me? Why did you come to find me?”

  Ash looks at the floor.

  “Actually,” she says, “I sort of came here to ask for your help.”

  I don’t know how to respond to this. Usually when people ask for your help, it’s assumed you can either agree or turn them down. I don’t really feel like I can say no to Ash. She watches me intently, running her right foot back and forth across the floor. Her sock makes a soft sound against the wood.

  “Normally people who ask you for help don’t have you captured.”

  “You trapped yourself there. This isn’t your house. Nobody invited you.”

  I don’t say anything. Given everything Ash has done in the past few days, I feel totally justified in following her to this house. I’m not about to apologize.

  “You seem like someone I can talk to,” she says after a pause. “If I let you back into your body, will you promise not to do anything stupid?”

  “Of course,” I say. Ash barely weighs a hundred pounds. The second she lets me out of here, I’m heading for the door.

  She frowns. “Well, you would tell me that. You want me to let you go. You’re thinking, Oh, she’s so small and delicate, no
way can she keep me here. . . .”

  “I don’t hit girls.”

  “What makes you think you’d get the chance?”

  Ash makes a beckoning motion with her left hand. A spirit blinks into existence beside her. The ghost is a tall, dark-skinned woman with long black hair and eyes like pools of oil. She wears a white robe, and a broken spear juts from her chest. The ghost I saw last night. Some of the pieces are coming together.

  “This is my retainer,” Ash says, “the last of the Ahlgren Host. The Widow.”

  “We already met,” I say.

  The black-eyed woman looks from my body to my spirit, trapped in the mirror, and back again.

  “What would you have me do?” she asks Ash softly, in a voice like frost forming.

  “This is Luke Manchett, Horatio’s heir. He will be our guest,” Ash says. “He is not to leave without my permission.”

  “As you wish,” the Widow replies.

  “When I let you out of the mirror,” Ash says, turning to me, “you’re to go directly back into your body. If you try and go anywhere else, you’ll wish you hadn’t. Are we clear?”

  “Perfectly,” I say, eyeing the Widow. I’ve got no illusions about my ability to outrun Ash’s terrifying servant, and besides, I’d be leaving my body here.

  Ash seems satisfied with my answer. She walks up to the mirror and presses her left hand against the glass. A thin, high chime sounds, and the glass of the mirror splits neatly down the middle. The two halves of the mirror swing outward like a set of double doors, and I find myself pushed back into the living room, like a piece of paper caught in a gale. The Widow has one hand resting on the shaft of the spear that sticks from her chest; she’s watching me for any sudden movements. I give her what I hope is a reassuring grin and float toward my body. My head has fallen to one side, and my breathing is light and regular. There’s a zit coming through on my left cheek, a deep red hill. I need to shave.

  I fall into myself.

  I come awake in the white plastic chair, shivering, with a knot of tension halfway down my back. I flex my fingers and toes. The room is absolutely freezing, although I think this has a lot to do with the presence of Ash’s servant. The house has that new-paint smell, harsh and artificial.

  Ash is facing me, with her back to the mirror. There’s no sign of the crack or opening in its surface anymore.

  “So you’ll behave yourself, Luke?”

  “Yeah,” I say. My eyes feel gritty. I blink. “I promise, seriously.”

  “You look cold,” Ash says. “Hang on. I have some oversize stuff that might fit.” She vanishes into the hall, and I hear her padding up the stairs. I look at myself in the mirror. I don’t look good. The Widow is standing behind me, hands resting on the back of my chair. The cold coming from her skin burns. I almost ask if she’d consider backing off a bit, but one look into her tar-pit eyes squashes that idea. Why do her eyes look like that? I’d assumed the Shepherd’s eyes were a one-off, just some strange side effect of him being evil, but it seems like there’s something more to it than that.

  Ash comes back with a white fisherman’s sweater. She hands it to me, and I pull it over my head. It’s a surprisingly good fit, maybe a bit too tight at the chest. It’s clearly made from expensive wool.

  Ash fiddles with her nose ring. Neither of us seems quite sure where to go from here.

  “Are you hungry?” she asks after an uncomfortably long pause.

  “I am, actually.”

  “Spirit walking, leaving your body vacant, is supposed to speed up your metabolism,” she says. “Shamans used to feast for eight days and eight nights before they attempted a journey to the other place.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I do have Magnus’s library,” Ash says. “All his books and papers. Your dad stole most of them, but he didn’t know about the encrypted backup of the archives. I’ve been studying them for years.”

  “Lucky. Dad only left me some random papers.”

  “I’m not lucky,” Ash says.

  “Sorry,” I say quickly. “I just mean, Horatio only gave me some pages of numbers and stuff.”

  “And the Book of Eight,” Ash says. “Don’t forget that. Your demon destroyed my family’s copy. Burned it.”

  “You don’t have one?”

  “They’re not easy to come by. I’ve read everything ever written about it, but I’ve never seen an actual copy. You’re luckier than you realize. Anyway, aren’t you hungry?”

  She walks past me. I stand up and follow her into the gleaming white kitchen. I lean against the doorframe. I can feel the Widow standing behind me, her deathly cold aura making me shiver even through Ash’s sweater. I glance around, accidentally make eye contact with the ghost, and quickly look away. Ash is breezily rummaging through some cupboards, her back turned, but there’s nothing I can do. I’m stuck here. She’s got me right where she wants me.

  Ash makes me a little plate of dried fruit, olives, a cup of yogurt. I sit up on the counter and start to eat. I don’t have much of a taste for olives, but the dried apricots are exactly what I needed. The gnawing hunger in my gut quiets down.

  “I have Coke in the fridge,” Ash says, “if you want some sugar. Or there’s tap water. I didn’t remember to buy a kettle yet.”

  “How did you get the electricity connected up here? Whose house are we in?”

  “It’s mine,” Ash says. “I paid for it.”

  “This development isn’t finished until next year.”

  “I paid five times the market price for this house to be finished by this March, to my exact specifications, and work has been suspended on the other sites for a month.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “It’s possible,” Ash says, “if you have enough money. I needed my own place in Dunbarrow, away from the town. This seemed ideal.”

  “Are you, like, rich?”

  Ash smiles. “We’re so rich we’re not even on the rich list. The Ahlgrens have been raising the dead for centuries. There’s plenty of opportunity to earn in our line of work. Since I’m not eighteen yet, my access is restricted. I can only use some of our fronts and stuff. But I get by.”

  “The Goodman Foundation?”

  “That’s one of the ways I move money around.”

  I remember my own inheritance, the money Berkley tried to tempt me with, the fortune that vanished into thin air when I didn’t choose the way he wanted me to. Somehow I suspect Dad’s fortune was small compared to the fruits of many centuries of necromancy. When your servants are invisible, intangible, and can kill most people by looking at them the wrong way, it’s not hard to see how a necromancer could earn a living.

  I swallow the last of my food.

  “So what do you want my help with?” I ask Ash.

  “I need your copy of the Book of Eight,” she says.

  “I gave it back.”

  “To who?”

  “The Devil,” I say.

  “Ah,” Ash says, not seeming as impressed as I was hoping, “so that’s how you got rid of the Host. Halloween. The Rite of Tears.”

  “I don’t have it anymore.”

  “Do you think he’s lying?” Ash asks the Widow.

  “Yes,” the ghost replies.

  “Now, why would he do something like that?” Ash asks softly.

  My stomach lurches. “I don’t know what you want with it.”

  “Fair enough,” Ash says. She pinches the bridge of her nose. Breathes in and out. “I didn’t want to do this tonight. But you’re right. I wouldn’t agree to help someone before I knew what they needed help with either.”

  “Mistress Ahlgren?” the Widow says.

  “I want him to want to help us,” Ash tells her. “It’s the easiest way.”

  Without another word, Ash turns and walks back through the living room to the hallway and the staircase. I’m clearly expected to follow her, and I do, noticing the lightness in the sky outside the window. We must’ve been talking all ni
ght, although I don’t feel tired. My body did sleep, I suppose. Ash must be exhausted. The Widow glides along beside me, her face as blank as the walls.

  The stairs are made from the same blond wood, leading at a right angle up onto a large landing. There’s a window, affording another view of the dawn’s glow rising behind the half-finished estate. There’s a bathroom, three doors that are shut, one hanging open. As we pass this door, I can see a bed inside, a desk, a freestanding clothes rack laden with white apparel. Ash’s room, I suppose. So she’s keeping some things at Holiday’s place for show? How much stuff do you need for a month’s visit? We stop in front of the farthest door.

  “She’s in here,” Ash tells me softly, and opens it.

  This must be the master bedroom — it’s big, larger even than the living room downstairs. It’s dark, and there’s a strong antiseptic smell. I can sense that the room is full of something: large suitcases, or maybe amplifiers? I’m thinking immediately of an audio mixer, because I can see glowing lights and readouts, but that doesn’t make sense. Why would Ash be showing me an audio mixer? There’s a low metallic rasping noise, like a robot breathing. Ash turns on the light.

  There’s a bed with a girl lying in it.

  The girl is connected to the room’s machines. The room is filled with them; they own the room. It’s a room for machines, and it seems like there should be no space for her or anything else that’s living. She’s got an IV in her arm, tubes in her nose and mouth. Tubes snaking under the white bedsheets. The smell of disinfectant is overpowering, but underneath it I can smell her, the girl, her body’s own smell, skin and hair that’s gone unwashed. There are machines stacked all around her, banks of lights and dials, a monitor that shows her vital signs: numbers, graphs, an oscillating readout. I see that the master bedroom boasts an impressive array of electric plugs and a sink installed in the far corner.

  “She’s been on life support for a decade. The machines do everything for her,” Ash says to me. “Everything except what makes a life worth living.”