by C. E. Murphy
And despite all the grief I’d given him, he’d never once responded with the kind of comeback I deserved, not even an I told you so when I found myself faced with irrefutable proof that the world contained a lot more than met the eye. I couldn’t remember him ever telling anybody to shut up, much less me in the midst of a paranormal crisis.
I’d been functioning on “act now, think later,” which had, as a rule, worked for me so far.
Now I was scared.
CHAPTER FOUR
My obvious impulse was to hiss, “What can I do?” but I’d just been told both to shut up and to not draw a blade on the mist. That left me with a big fat nothing in the easy-choices department, and every inch of my body was cold with indecision and worry. Moreover, I didn’t take it as a good sign that the ooze slicked away from me and swirled around Billy, nibbling at the orange-and-fuchsia colors that made up his aura. They were as steady as I’d ever seen them, nothing in his psychic presence suggesting distress, but it bothered the hell out of me. I was supposed to take on all mystical comers, not let my friends step up and do the job.
Unless, of course, my friends had a better idea of what to do, in which case I should get over myself and help somehow, albeit without asking aloud what might be useful. Billy was almost obscured by the mist, nearly all of it having drifted from the perimeter of my sphere to surround him. My heart took up residence in my stomach and churned the remaining pink drink. I closed my lips on a vile-tasting burp and gave Billy five more seconds to tell me what to do before I went Grecian on the gray stuff’s ass.
Billy said, “You don’t belong here,” so gently I flinched, first out of surprise at hearing his voice and then from childish insult. I wasn’t the world’s greatest shaman or anything, but I was doing my best. His vote of confidence meant a lot. Having it dismissed cut my legs out from under me.
“You should be resting.” His colors strengthened, coming through the mist more strongly, like he was putting energy into what he was saying. Exactly like that, actually: from three feet away I felt soothed. Even the sweat beading under my wig and trickling against my scalp stopped itching so much. “I know it’s easy to travel at this time of year, and that you miss your bodies, but they’re gone. Long gone.” Strain showed in his voice, and I finally clued in.
“It’s dead people!”
The mist whipped away from Billy and surged at me, a high-pitched whine suddenly loud enough to make my eardrums ache. The gaping eyes and howling mouths came clearer to me, much clearer as one of the ghosts came at me like it wanted a kiss. Dull cold slid along my cheekbones, fingering a scar on one. I shuddered and stepped back, finding the edge of the cauldron with my heel.
“Joanie, stay still.” Billy’s voice was cold as the dead’s.
I whispered, “They can’t get at me. They don’t like my magic. Just tell me how to banish them and get out of here.”
“Joanne.” Billy had four kids and a fifth on the way, but I’d never heard him employ a Daddy Voice before. Part of me seized up with resentment. My own father and I had an atheistic relationship, which is to say, he’d never quite believed he’d ended up with a child at all. I generally disliked anything that reminded me of that.
The rest of me just seized up because that’s what instinct tells people to do when they hear a Daddy Voice. I stared at Billy, who kept his attention on the mist and spoke through his teeth. “They don’t have to get in you. The longer you’re around them, the more they latch on. The more you move, the more they notice you. The louder you are, the faster they come to you. So shut up.”
I really, really wanted to do what I was told, but his volume had increased all the way through that, and by the time he was done, the party hall was visible again. My sphere contained a cauldron, me and a dense, almost-black cloud where Billy stood. There was no way I was letting him face that alone. I jumped down from the cauldron, took a quick look at the room beyond my sphere—it had cleared out, only Thor and Phoebe immediately visible—and forged into the dark fog that surrounded my friend.
His voice wrapped around me immediately, soft and cajoling, full of sympathy but very firm: he knew I was confused, that I was lost, that I didn’t understand what was happening. All of that was absolutely true, so for a second I thought he was talking to me. At least the mist hid my blush when I figured out that no, he was still talking to the gray goop, and continued to in a gentle murmur. He knew he was a cipher, strange to the living world but safe to the dead, and that his presence gave them comfort.
Comforted wasn’t the word I’d use for the agitation I felt in the fog. It—they—were becoming clearer to me now, easier to read, as though they were remembering more and more of what it was to be human. I could tell at least a few men from women, though the greater part of the mist was still formless, maybe having left their bodies behind so long ago they had no memory of a shape to fill.
I had met the newly dead before, but it was no preparation for meeting the oldly dead. The newly dead, at least the ones I’d met, were pretty cool and collected. It may have helped that they’d mostly been shamans themselves—in fact, the one newly dead girl I’d met who hadn’t been a shaman had been pretty confused, now that I thought about it—but they’d had a sense of purpose and of self, and knew they only had a limited amount of time to impart information to me before they moved on.
The cauldron ghosts had only hate and fear to hold on to. They desired; oh, how they desired. They wanted flesh forms. They wanted vengeance. They wanted freedom, and would do whatever they could to obtain it. Thieving a body from a living soul would do: that’s what the dancers would have provided, if I hadn’t been there. I got a—no pun intended—ghost of an idea of how schizophrenic the dancers would have become, fighting for their own bodies with a plethora of spirits all determined to become the sole resident of their lithe forms. Only the strongest of the invaders would survive, but a few of the jettisoned others would cling to the surface, hoping for a chance to wrest control away. Even from without, their angry will could affect what a host body might do.
And right now they were trying to get inside Billy.
Not all of them. Some were listening to his voice, hearing the guidance he offered them. Those few could be put to rest, maybe because they were too tired of fighting to survive, maybe because they’d forgotten what they were fighting for. A few bits of mist separated from the dark cloud and dissipated, and I imagined I heard a sigh of relief. I shivered and wished them a good journey, wherever they might be going. Maybe to start again; a while ago Coyote’d told me that souls reincarnate. There weren’t that many new ones, although apparently I’d been mixed up fresh: no history of mistakes to weigh me down, but as he’d said, no history of learning experiences to buoy me up, either. But these ones had held on to this world, to their most recent bodies, to something, so long that they’d lost cohesion. They were still energy, the way that spark that made life inside things was energy, but all that was left in them was a craving for a new body.
I couldn’t help wondering if there were enough souls waiting to be reborn to fill all the people in the world, or if tortured ghosts like these left a handful of babies born empty every day. I hoped not. God, I hoped not, but just the idea opened a white-hot door inside me, through which poured the intention to help.
To my complete horror, the mist gave a sonic cry able to scour flesh from bone, and twisted toward that brightness.
The thinnest of it came first, like I’d put up a magnet that pulled filaments toward me. The weakest ghosts didn’t have enough weight to remain firm, and flew through that burning door inside a blink. They hit a flash point as they went, turning from mist to flame and leaving marks on my soul, like the memory of paper curling and drifting to the ground. Stronger spirits, carrying more resistance, followed more reluctantly, but an unburdened sense of relief swept me as some of them passed through into the brilliance. Once or twice an afterimage caught behind my eyes, like the echo of the life that had kept them there. I clung
to those, and lost them even as I did: they left nothing, when they burned.
Murk slammed against the door in my mind and filled it, bellowing rage and refusal. The light faded away, blocked by a determination to hold on. Relief left me, joy left me; hell, even my power left me, slamming itself between the blackness and the white door in my mind. Triumph and fury sluiced through me in equal parts before the darkness fell away, and I had the shuddering sensation of a narrow escape. I mumbled, “Idiot,” and staggered a couple of steps before cranking my head up to see how the party fared.
My sphere of protective magic was gone, eaten up by the retreat my power had staged. So was most of the mist, though a few dark clouds still clung to Billy, trailing him like residue from a smoke machine. Thor and Phoebe were still there, and the DJ’s station blared “The Monster Mash,” but the room, so crowded only a minute or two ago, now held only hangers-on, the moral equivalent of ambulance chasers, all staying a safe distance from the center of activity.
Phoebe said what everybody, including those who’d fled, was presumably thinking: “What in hell was that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” I dropped to my knees, then leaned forward on my palms, gasping against the impulse to upchuck again. I could feel ghostly willpower dissolving inside me, resistance to passing on drifting into ash in my bloodstream. More, I could feel the tremendous black weight of the one who’d blocked the door, and the protests of those who’d been left on the wrong side. I curled down even farther, hands made into fists that I rested my forehead against. I felt like crying, and I wasn’t sure why.
Billy put his hands on my shoulders and gently pushed me back until I was sitting on my heels. His gaze was worried but calm, far more reassuring than the wide-eyed hollow look I felt aging my own face. “I haven’t got your Sight,” he said quietly. I could tell he was making his voice a lifeline, something stable to hang on to. Grateful tears welled up in my eyes. “All I see are the ghosts, Joanie, so I don’t know what happened. Tell me what you did. It’s going to be fine.”
“She gave them the light,” Melinda said out of nowhere. A twitch of conflicted gladness ran through me. I didn’t want Melinda and her soon-to-be-born daughter anywhere near the dark magic flowing around me, but it was nice that my friends hadn’t abandoned me when the smart money was on getting the hell out of there. “She opened a door to the light and guided them home.”
“No.” My mouth tasted terrible. I wiped a hand across it, but kept my gaze on Billy, who seemed solid and reassuring and safe. “I mean, maybe, but I didn’t mean to. I just wanted to tell them I would help. Going into the light, that’s just a load of crap—” confidence failed me “—isn’t it?”
“A door.” Billy’s voice was terribly controlled, the kind of control that said unadulterated panic was one very fine line away from where he stood. “Joanne, listen to me. This is important. I know you use a garden as a metaphor for your soul. How do you enter the garden?”
I stared at him without comprehension for a couple seconds. I’d thrust my imagery of a garden on him when I was trying to heal him from a magically induced coma, but I’d had no idea it’d left him with an idea of my psychic set-up. I was beginning to think Billy Holliday could be very, very dangerous to me, if he chose to be.
“A rabbit hole,” I finally croaked. “I almost always go in by a rabbit hole. Or a mole hole. I was a badger once.”
Billy’s shoulders relaxed fractionally. “All right. You’re going to need to do a spirit journey and make sure that you didn’t let the ghosts into your garden, but usually the mind sets up fail-safes. If you enter through the earth then probably the door didn’t lead inside you.”
“There’s a door inside my garden,” I said inanely. “But it leads to where people go when they’re dying.” It led to where I went when I was dying, anyway. “I don’t use it. Much.”
Melinda and Billy exchanged a glance that told me I didn’t want to know what they were thinking. Instead of asking, I looked back at the cauldron, and noticed a leg sticking out from behind it. I crawled over and found both the dancers sprawled on the floor, breathing shallowly. I dropped my head, watching long hair brush my elbows. “Crap. I thought somebody would’ve gotten them out of here. I’m gonna need to…” I put a hand out, calling up silver-blue power, and Melinda came around the cauldron to crouch and catch my wrist. “You can’t.”
“I can’t? Why not? I think I can.” I was a little engine that could. I tried to shake her off, though not very hard, for fear she’d weeble and wobble and then fall down.
“You need to check for ghost riders first. If any of them slipped into your garden, or are waiting on the other side of that door, they’ll follow your power right back into these kids. Call 911 instead.”
I lowered my hand, but kept looking at her. There were about eleven things I needed to do—make sure the bad things were gone, make sure the dancers were okay, come up with some kind of excuse for the partygoers, just for starters—but for a few long seconds all of that faded away while I stared at my friend.
I knew Melinda referred to her god in the feminine, and that she knew what a coven needed to be whole. I knew she and Billy had met fifteen or so years ago at a conference about the paranormal, and that her oldest son was casually confident about his own sensitivity to things that were Other. “You and Billy, Mel, where did you come from? You know all this stuff, you’re so sure of yourselves, and I’m…” I gestured at myself. I was a twenty-seven-year-old cop in a leather bondage outfit, beleaguered by a destiny I could barely wrap my mind around, that gesture said. “I mean, did you want this to be real and just went and figured out that it was?”
Melinda’s smile held real sympathy. “I’ll tell you about my grandma someday, okay? They chased her over the border to keep her from hexing a bad man’s cattle.”
Phoebe, over our heads, said in a very small tight voice, “What exactly is ‘this’ that we may or may not want to be real?”
I looked up to find her still clutching her quarterstaff. Edward was just behind her, looking as if he wanted to hug me and wasn’t yet sure that it was safe. I sighed and thumped down on my butt, drew my shins up and looped my arms around them. Too late, it occurred to me that my skirt was indecently short and I was probably flashing my panties to anyone who wanted to take a look. I groaned and dropped my forehead against my knees, wishing I still had my mask so I could pretend I was someone else showing off their undies, but I’d lost it sometime earlier. Maybe at the same time I’d drained the drink without noticing. I kind of wanted another one just then. “You remember that lung surgery I told you about when I started taking fencing lessons from you, Pheeb?”
“Yeah. You kept rubbing your breastbone. You said it was a genetic thing, not lung cancer.”
The reminder made me want to rub that spot again. “I may have been a little misleading.”
“She got stabbed through the chest with a rapier,” Billy said, which was nice of him, because I wasn’t very good at this confession. Of course, if my friends kept letting me off the hook, I wouldn’t get any better at it.
Phoebe’s silence rang out a few long seconds. “Don’t any of the rest of you take this wrong, but I’ve seen you naked, Jo. You don’t have a scar.”
“I healed it.” That came out surprisingly easily. “That genetic condition, it’s…I’m a shaman. I can do magic.” I looked up, because suddenly it was worse to imagine her expression than to actually see it.
She had that tremendously neutral look people get when they’re trying to be polite about hearing something so outrageous they can’t believe it’s been said. She also had a stranglehold on her staff, knuckles practically glowing white.
I winced. “Healing’s easiest, but I can send my spirit to the astral plain, and between what a lot of Native American mythology calls the Upper and Lower Worlds. Earth is the Middle World.” I brightened a little, distracted by the details of my studies. “Actually, that’s really pretty Norse, too. That kin
d of world structure is more common than you’d…” Phoebe’s expression was getting more strained. I was not helping my case by lecturing. “You remember the dead girl in the locker room? Cassandra Tucker? You couldn’t get me to respond after we found her, even though I looked like I was awake. I’d gone to the astral plain to see if I could find her ghost and talk to her, but instead I got caught and was bargaining…with a giant…snake…”
I put my hands over my face. I was doing my best, but it sounded ridiculous. I honestly had no idea how to present my life in terms that didn’t sound insane, and I was once more incredibly grateful for the handful of friends who either believed to begin with, or who, in the face of irrefutable evidence, ground their teeth and accepted that my wonky reality was in fact real. Demonstration was the only possible way I could convince anyone I was on the level, because telling them made me sound like a lunatic. I mean, really. Bargaining with giant snakes? I looked up again.
Phoebe’s eyebrow was beetled. “Morrison got you to wake up.”
I nearly groaned. None of the rest of them had known that, and Melinda’s face brightened with interest. “I’ve known him for years. I’d only known you a few months. He had a more…”
“Intimate connection with you?” Melinda chirruped.
I muttered, “I’m sure the same thing would’ve happened if Billy’d been there to wake me up.”
Melinda widened her eyes and nodded sagely. I refused to look at Edward, afraid doing so would somehow seem guilty. Instead, I locked my arms around my shins and scowled at Phoebe’s knees. “You remember when the lights went out in January? Whole city blacked out for a few hours?”
