Ghost Shadow (Moon Shadow Series Book 4)

by Maria E. Schneider

  “Can Roberto help us? But if we wait for Roberto to call us, we could be waiting for all of eternity!”

  Now Martin shook his head. “The witch is good. The cat, he’s on a mission. He will bust you out. An actual portal is a better doorway than Roberto trying to force the weave to stay open long enough. With just Roberto you could end up stretched to nothing when you tried to squeeze through.”

  By now we had reached the lake. Martin didn’t bother to peer around the rocks, he just blasted through them and headed for the shoreline. I floated along the bank until the area looked familiar, but when we broke the surface there were no black stones. Nothing but water and random gray rippled back at us.

  Luckily Kyle had better spatial memory than I did. He found the black stones after only two attempts.

  Martin took one look and resumed pacing. “Broken violin. Portal.” He spun suddenly, hovering directly over my face like a mad scientist. “You heard this broken music before. Did you ever see it?”

  “The music?” I asked stupidly.

  “No. The entity playing it!” Martin rarely shouted, but he was agitated now, bobbing up and down.

  When the violin screeched, I had been running for my, well, I was running, not taking notes. “There were flames. Sparks of light. The second time Kyle played, I was already inside the cairn, hiding.”

  “Flames.” Martin drifted away again, no humming. He finally put his own hand on the water next to Kyle’s and stared into the depths. “We don’t want to use this more than once. We’ll have to contact Roberto first and make sure everyone is in position.”

  “Once?” Kyle stared at me, sadness in his eyes. “If you can slide through, you can deliver the message for me. If you can’t manage to get through, it’s not likely that I can talk to her anyway. No point in trying that.”

  Martin huffed. “If the thing opens, the problem is that any of us can get through.”

  Kyle blinked. “What?”

  Martin bounced again, his head stretching like a giant genie squeezing out of a lamp. “The issue, of course, is that once there, the only way to survive is to inhabit another human body. Quite problematic if you don’t have one waiting, which is likely Amy’s problem. This portal doesn’t belong here. The weave has always been one direction, but permeable. There are leaks that provide the energy we squirrel away.” He pointed to the rocks now invisible beneath the water. “If this is a portal that leads dirt-side, unlike the weave, it is not one-way. The power required to create it is neither simple nor small. And whatever owned that power was not Amy with a ghost ring that belonged to a dead guy.”

  I listened to the gray carefully, but the only sound was waves lapping and the cottony silence of the fog. The smell of dampness held no hint of sulfur. “You think she stole power from someone other than Troy?”

  Martin nodded. “Something stronger than Troy owned the power that opened this portal. Since it has not taken that power back, the entity either can’t find it or it can’t use the portal because it has no body to inhabit. But once we activate it, whatever powers this thing will know we’re using it. It’s going to want to jump over and inhabit a body.”

  And if we were the ones opening the portal, the body on the other side waiting would be mine.

  Chapter 20

  My job was to stand guard over my body, which was more than a little boring and kind of spooky. Sure, I was linked to the hospital room, so it was easy enough to sit there at the weave, but a coma was very nearly like sitting on a death watch. Unlike a death, there wasn’t even the beauty or comfort of a life line.

  My body never stirred, not even when I nudged myself from this side. My skin was gray. You’d think I would be used to that color by now, but somehow the gray of this side was healthier than the one dirt-side.

  Martin assigned himself the more desirable job. He roamed the edge near the canyon waiting for Roberto and Lynx so he could tell them to set up a meeting back at the hospital. Even if Lynx were to show up on my watch, there was no guarantee he could understand me perfectly through the weave, not unless Roberto was around. After the zombie attack, maybe Lynx wasn’t ever planning on setting foot in the hospital again.

  It wasn’t on the agenda, but I wandered. I snuck around checking for the aunt and little Espy who could see ghosts. The girl could definitely understand me, but only if she had recovered from her coma. I peeked into every room that the edge allowed me to see, but she wasn’t to be found. That was probably a good thing for her. Maybe.

  Kyle’s job wasn’t any more exciting than mine and just as morose. He had to monitor Paula and learn to manage the edge the way Martin had taught me.

  He could only take so much of watching his wife before the sorrow engulfed him. Most days, he’d stop by once or twice to see if anything had changed with me.

  I was patrolling the edge to make sure no hellhounds were near when he drifted into my zone.

  “The music made it through,” he said without preamble.

  “To your wife? I wondered if it might. You’re pretty powerful when you play.”

  “I wasn’t even trying to cross or communicate with her. I just played.”

  I nodded. “That’s what Martin says. He says the edge responds best when it isn’t being forced. He allows it to flow around him, and then he grabs whatever comes through the thin spots. Your music, it’s more dirt-side than here. It’s not dead like us so why wouldn’t it drift through?”

  “She looked up. She...” he choked.

  “She heard it,” I finished for him.

  He nodded. “Have you experienced that sort of magic, too?” He waved at the lifeless figure in the hospital bed that was me.

  I snorted. “My body is oblivious, trust me. There are those who are more sensitive to ghosts. Maybe your wife is one. Maybe she’ll become more sensitive with you watching.”

  He frowned. “You said a link is stronger if there’s something that exists on both sides. If she has my guitar, that will be one thing. But I also wanted to give you this.” He handed me a ghostly guitar pick.

  “I don’t know if I can take it across.”

  He shrugged. “But if you can, then a piece of here is there. I have more picks anyway. I must have had five in my jeans when I died.”

  I accepted the disc. It possessed an odd energy, a kind of vibration as if it stored pieces of music inside. I wrapped a length of hair around it and stowed it behind my ear. It might not stay there, but most ghostly essences seemed to stay put until situations blew up in our face, literally floating bits all over In Between. “I’ll do my best.”

  “I should just move on, shouldn’t I? And let her move on?”

  “Nobody knows the answer to that sort of question,” I replied. “Let’s go check on Martin. Maybe he’s having better luck. You can ask him your questions. He’ll chant earth magic stuff and pretend he knows the answer, but it might be total nonsense.”

  “Heh. I’ll keep that in mind.”

  It was easier traveling the edge with someone to watch my back. Sticking to one area was more dangerous anyway. Anytime energy gathered in a particular spot, it attracted feeders.

  I heard the snort through the fog before either of us saw anything. The thing must have been facing away from us because we didn’t see the eyes until it heard us and turned our way. The orbs lit the gray with the same dangerous red glow as hellhound eyes, a warning to anyone with sense enough to run. The creature was huge; a dirty gray with a snout and tusks that belonged on a mammoth or a giant boar.

  “Holy...”

  I pushed Kyle closer to the weave before he could finish his sentence. “Shhh. Push the weave between us and tamp down!” The tusks on this pig were far enough apart that even if we split up, it might be able to spear both of us with a single charge. I edged close to the weave, herding a chunk to undulate between myself and Kyle.

  Kyle caught on quickly, but he was newer at manipulating the edges. I smelled ghost burn when he brushed too close, but he never uttered a
sound. I’d have screamed bloody murder.

  The glowing dots of red left laser trails as the boar shifted its head, sniffing.

  Were pigs nearsighted? We’d best hope so.

  The edge wasn’t particularly quick about accommodating us, but we pushed a fat lip between us. It was almost enough for me to tuck behind, but that left me boxed in. There weren’t many alternatives. I’d been carefully noting any good hiding places as we drifted, and we were in no man’s land at the moment.

  The pig snorted and stepped one cloven hoof closer.

  The strains of a broken violin shattered the misty shuttered silence that was In Between.

  The giant boar’s snout lifted and spun as though tugged by a rope. Its feet beat an odd, grating rhythm as it rumbled away.

  Pressure from the weave behind me had me scooting out into the open as soon as the pig disappeared.

  Kyle joined me.

  “Is it headed the same direction as us?”

  I shook my head. “It isn’t following the weave edge. It went towards the violin, I think.”

  “To the lake, then?”

  “Things In Between aren’t all that stationary. We’d better find Martin. If he’s collecting energy while he waits, he could attract that pig or whatever summoned it.”

  “That noise from the violin is like dying all over again.”

  “Yeah.”

  We hurried, but it was for naught. By the time we reached Martin, there was no point in warning him away from the edge. He was deep in conversation with his friends, and we desperately needed the exchange of information.

  The best Kyle and I could do was play lookout and hope that if anything showed, it would follow us if we ran, leaving Martin time to save himself.

  Martin formed ghost words and puffed them across at Roberto like smoke signals. I’d never collected my words that way. I just shouted them and hoped. Martin was smarter. He literally formed them as bursts of air and energy and blew them to the other side.

  Adriel, the witch, squeezed in a word between puffs. “You don’t ask for much, do you?”

  Martin ignored her and kept talking. “This portal is likely linked to a demon or its power. Something is stuck here upsetting the balance. Whatever it is, it’s not nearly as powerful as the thing that came through when I closed the gap and ended up here, but it is an evil entity, not interested in the greater balance.”

  Adriel’s eyes widened.

  He nodded. “Whatever is powering that portal has a stake in making it through itself. You better have your vamp friend sit in with you at the hospital when we make our move.”

  “Patrick knows how to stop demons?”

  Martin snorted. “Nothing stops demons. But the vamp is already dead. The demon will be less interested in him and more interested in living souls. Might provide the vamp a fighting chance to do something to destroy the demon.”

  White Feather broke in. “You don’t have any idea how to stop this thing?”

  Martin had to step back from the weave as it whipsawed for no reason at all. I scanned the fog around us, but saw nothing especially threatening.

  Martin resumed speaking in his disembodied voice. “If I knew how to stop a demon, it would already be stopped.”

  Roberto fell forward just then. The cat grabbed his collar and yanked him back. The weave snapped shut, just missing Martin.

  The faint discordant notes we had heard earlier snaked through the fog.

  I stepped up. “Time to roll, Martin.”

  He was tired, but never stupid. The three of us scattered.

  Chapter 21

  Waiting for the cast to assemble in my hospital room involved a lot of pacing, worrying and wasting time. An anxious ghost is not a pretty sight, and yoga exercises don’t do a damn thing to calm a frantic ghost who might have the opportunity to live again. It was impossible to say how long we waited because time In Between wasn’t the same as dirt-side, not precisely. A single day In Between could be very very long. Or very short. The daylight cycles were interrupted by deep fog that was very nearly the same as the dusk and dawn light that often marked a cycle.

  In desperation, I practiced jumping over hellhounds that didn’t exist. I even considered singing to the weave, but discarded the notion as one that would scare off Lynx and his friends.

  Once Lynx and his friends showed, I was to gather Kyle and Martin to try the portal. Finding Kyle was easy. He had made the cairn near the lake his shelter. I’d not have chosen that spot if you paid me, but if he found comfort there, well, you embrace any kind of peace wherever you can find it In Between.

  Martin was another story. Nothing on earth or In Between could stop his wandering nature. Every day I’d check the hospital room and then flit to the canyon or the lake or even Troy’s tree searching for him.

  He wasn’t spending much time at his canyon. When I asked about it, he said, “Too dangerous. I sip the energy quickly and leave. There’s a demon on the hunt.”

  After that, I completed my rounds in fear, harvesting from the edge as far from the hospital room as possible. I caught a glimpse of the girl, Espy, and her Aunt Brenda once. One or the other was doing the medium trick again, but they were no longer at the hospital. By the time I was able to hop closer, the weave was thickening, and there was no time to ask if Espy was better.

  I saw the nurse Sonya frequently, sometimes working with Paul, the technician, or one of the vampires. The female vampire wore a tag identifying her as Tina. There were two male doctors, one of whom was an impossibly older guy who included me on his rounds. He wasn’t as decrepit as the near-corpse on the bed, but it was a close second. He must love his job to still be working at his age. His badge was so old, the letters were faded beyond recognition, except for a “C.”

  There were other patients and technicians, but none ever glanced my way. I grabbed bits of energy and stayed on the move.

  It must have been the third or fourth day after Martin had talked to his friends when he found me on the way to my hospital room.

  “Now. Hurry.” Rather than waiting for me to follow, he just spurted ahead. For an old guy, he was fast.

  I kept up, but barely. “How do you know it’s time?” I demanded.

  “I stopped by your hospital room this morning.”

  “You can thin the weave there?”

  “It was easier once Lynx showed up there with bloodstone. Been monitoring the room a bit, and since he had the bloodstone, as soon as he showed, I knew they were ready.”

  By the time we reached the lake, the broken violin was an ugly foghorn, echoing intermittently.

  Martin bobbed up and down anxiously. “That demon is on his way. He’s been popping in here like a man addicted to a whorehouse. With Amy no longer hiding the portal and herself behind Troy’s essence, he knows right where the window is located. He must not be able to open the portal himself, and unless he has a body waiting, it wouldn’t do him any good. Success depends on whether we can push you through fast enough.”

  Kyle perched on top of the cairn. He had his guitar out, but wasn’t playing. “Now?”

  Martin knelt at the water, muttering incoherently, the bloodstone out. “This will work. You ready?”

  Was I ready? No. How did one get ready? I wasn’t sure I wanted to accept that nearly dead body in the hospital room, but the key point was that it was nearly dead. I was currently dead-dead. “Yeah.” I glanced at Kyle. He watched the water hungrily. “I’ll tell your wife. I have the address. Given the condition of my body, it might take me a while, but I’ll do my best.”

  His eyes flicked to me, and he ran a shaking ghost hand through his dark hair before he remembered there were no longer any individual strands to soothe him. “Will you remember? Or will everything suddenly be forgotten when you pop through?”

  He knew that I retained little of who I’d been while alive. He answered with me. “I don’t know.”

  “Right. Got it,” he said then, resigned.

  Because I was facin
g away from the water, I saw the enemy first. It was the red-eyed boar, waiting in the fog. This time, it was not alone. Its rider nodded at me with a smile that should have frozen the water behind me—or burned it up, given the flames that licked along his dark body.

  “Uh, Martin,” I squeaked.

  Martin’s hands formed a circle. He dropped the bloodstone into the center.

  “Martin!”

  The demon cackled. In Between rattled from one end to the other. “Go ahead.” He slashed his violin with a flame instead of a bow. “When you go, I go. Or you can stay here. Either way you are my new host, and those on the other side will be totally unaware. They’ll call you, and one way or another I will own your body.” He laughed, spitting fire. “There will be room for both of us,” he crooned. “You’ll learn to love me. I’ve been waiting for a host ever since I was freed.”

  His evil chuckle was in perfect discord with the chords he ruined on the violin.

  My ghost form shook with fear, but I was riveted in place, held by his promise.

  I would not play host to a demon. I’d rather be dead. My eyes flicked to the circle.

  When my eyes shifted back again, the demon was next to me. His glowing eyes haunted me, but they were beautiful in their own way. Red orbs, full of promises. I shrank inside myself, but could not break free.

  If I took a single breath, I would live. The demon would flow through me, repairing all that was ruined. Wait. That didn’t make sense.

  The demon soothed my worries, explaining it all. “I was so lonely until I gained enough power to let my friends through. Once you are with me, they are yours to command. You’ll never be lonely again. You will wield power you never dreamed of.”

  I realized now that he was the first demon I had seen. There had been no boar, no violin. He hadn’t played music; he was simply a lost demon trying to survive, just like me. If I hadn’t run then, we could have been friends so much earlier.

  Barking and an intense cold made me shiver. Wait a minute. The demon hadn’t been friends with Spook. Spook had lost a leg to the demon we fought. I frowned. Something wasn’t right. Where was Spook? I could hear him. Why couldn’t I turn my head or move my eyes to find him? It had been this way right before I died. I had been trapped then and now.