by A. J. Locke
“My mom must have left me a hundred messages,” Ethan said with a sad smile. “She calls me every day. I don’t need an alarm clock when I have her calling at seven in the morning.”
“One of those kinds of moms, huh?” I said. “Well, I definitely think we should reach out to them before your mother loses her mind.” Ethan was quiet for a while as he stared at the ground.
“E-mail them,” he finally said. “My mom hasn’t warmed up to technology much but my dad has an e-mail address. You can tell them…”
“Don’t worry, I’m pretty good at coming up with believable lies,” I said. I pulled my laptop out from under the coffee table and booted it up. Ethan looked over my shoulder as I wrote an e-mail to his father telling him that Ethan had taken an impromptu trip with his friends and wouldn’t have much access to e-mail. Ethan approved, so I sent it off, then he sat back and sighed.
“I could use one of my mom’s overpowering hugs right about now,” he muttered. “I can’t wait until I get my body back.”
That made me pause. “Look, Ethan, I need to tell you something.” Okay, here went the big letdown. “I may be able to track down your physical body, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to put you back into it.”
His head snapped up, and his eyes grew wide. “W-what? What do you mean? You can’t be serious!”
“We’re dealing with reanimation here,” I said. “At least I think we are. The normal process of reanimation involves drawing a soul out of a living body and putting it into a corpse, thus bringing it back to ‘life’ for a short amount of time. But I’m a little out to sea with what happened to you. Your living soul was kicked out, but it wasn’t so someone could put your soul into a corpse; it was so another soul could enter your body. It’s like some sort of reverse reanimation, and I’ve never heard of anything like that before. I wouldn’t know how to undo it.”
“But someone must!” Ethan said, shooting to his feet. “Selene, you can’t leave me like this. I’m not a dead guy. I’m not a ghost! I’m only nineteen; how can you do this to me?” Nineteen? He really was a young’un. I had seven years on him.
“I’m not doing anything to you,” I said. It was strange being the calm one for a change. “I’m just saying it might not be as easy as you think to get all this straightened out. There very well may be someone out there who can help, but I’m not spreading your story around until we know what we’re dealing with. I wouldn’t want whoever is in your body to catch on to the fact that you’re working with a necromancer to get your body back.”
Ethan sighed, seeming utterly deflated.
“Once we track down your body, I’ll get more people involved, and we’ll see if we can figure out who is in it and how to get them out.”
“And me back in?” Ethan said.
I hesitated. “Well…I…it’s just that reanimation has never worked when it came to putting someone’s ghost back into their own body.”
His eyes widened, and I sensed another outburst approaching.
“The rules of reanimation aren’t rules that we all understand, Ethan.”
“We?” Ethan said. “You mean you…?”
I bit my tongue, then figured what did it really matter if Ethan knew? If he ratted me out, then there’d be no one to help him, and he’d likely find himself subjected to a necromancer circle.
“Yes, I’m a reanimator, which may make me the best person to help you, but it doesn’t mean I can. Reanimation needs something alive and something dead to work. You have to start with a living body because the life aura of the individual will still be clinging to the ghost. That’s how a corpse can become reanimated. That aura dissipates quickly though, so that’s why putting an existing ghost into a corpse doesn’t work. Especially if it’s his own body.”
“But my body isn’t a corpse!” Ethan said.
“But if we got whoever is in there out, it would be, technically,” I said. “And right now, you’re a ghost, which means you are of dead energy. So you see…”
“This can’t be happening,” Ethan said, dropping his head into his hands. He released a choking sob, and I felt really bad for him. With a little burst of energy, I was able to place my hand on his shoulder.
“I didn’t tell you all of this to discourage you, though I guess mission failed,” I said. “I just wanted you to know the truth of what we’re dealing with. It would have been worse if I let you keep your hopes up only to reveal all of this once we actually had your body in our grasp.”
Ethan nodded, though he didn’t raise his head. Great, now I felt really, really bad for him. I patted his shoulder a couple of times, then went back to my meal. Ethan would have to work through this on his own, but I had already sensed that he was persistent enough not to let it be too much of a setback. Sure enough, once I finished eating and was clearing things up, he had regained himself and looked at me with a determined expression.
“I still want to find my body,” he said. “And if there’s some way I can be put back, I hope you’ll help me with it.”
“I’ll try,” I said, careful not to use the word “promise” in any context. I was dealing with too many unknown things to make promises. In truth, I was more concerned with the fact that someone out there had the power to shove out a living soul and put a dead soul into his body. It made me afraid about what the reanimator’s motives were, what kind of power he or she had, and what the motives of whoever was in Ethan’s body were.
The only way to figure any of this out was to find Ethan’s body, so I went into my bedroom and got a pouch of rune stones. They weren’t the ones I kept under the floorboard though. These stones were legal, but I’d swiped most of them from work because they were rather expensive. Was I a criminal or what?
I grabbed Ethan’s shirt and brought it out into the living room, kneeling in front of my coffee table and clearing it off so I had space to work. Ethan knelt on the other side, and Luna pawed at me until she realized I wasn’t going to play with her right this moment. She then stood near where Ethan was and seemed to be staring at him, which made me raise an eyebrow.
“It’s like she can see you,” I said.
Ethan looked down at the little dog and shrugged. “Only necromancers and dead witches can see ghosts, right?”
“Yeah, unless we make you visible using our energy or the runes I placed on you before. Maybe she just senses you. I’ve heard animals can be sensitive like that.”
Ethan moved his finger toward Luna, and she barked once, then turned and pranced off to where her toys were lying on the floor. I shrugged and turned back to what I was doing. I placed Ethan’s shirt on the table and took out a rune stone that was irregularly shaped and had a light pinkish color.
“This is the rune stone we use to track down ghost beasties,” I said. “It’s similar to the stone I was wearing when I tracked you down. That rune was attuned to let me know when any ghosts were nearby, and it helped me know which direction to go. This rune will be more specific because it will be attuned only to finding your physical body.” Ethan nodded along as I spoke.
“I took a class on runes, and I learned a lot of what you just said,” he said. “I always had an interest in this sort of thing even though I’m not a necromancer.” Classes like that were mandatory for necromancers and dead witches and electives for everyone else.
“Okay,” I said. I placed the stone in the middle of Ethan’s shirt. “I’m going to activate the stone by channeling some of my energy into it, and that will make it absorb your essence from the shirt. After that, we should be in tracking business.”
Ethan was looking more and more excited, so I figured I should begin before he started bouncing off the walls. Or, well, through the walls.
“Stay still and be quiet while I do this,” I told him. “No questions or commentary until I’m done.”
“Okay.”
I held my palms over the shirt, calling up my necromancer power and releasing a stream of it. It wasn’t something that could be physically se
en, but I could feel it pouring from my palms like water. The energy sought out the rune stone and filled it up. Once the stone was active, it latched onto the essence left behind in the shirt and absorbed it. The entire process took about ten minutes. I picked up the rune stone, which was now glowing.
“Once the power settles, the stone should resonate with me, and I’ll be able to feel the direction of your body’s location,” I said. “Then off we go.” I only now wondered why I hadn’t put this off until the light of day, because now I’d be traipsing all over the place late at night. Thinking ahead really wasn’t my strong suit.
I held the stone in my hand for several minutes and waited to feel that tug that let me know it had located Ethan’s body. I frowned when minutes ticked by and nothing happened. The rune continued to glow, but I felt no pull from it, no urge to get up and start moving north, south, east, or west. That should have happened by now. I looked at Ethan, who was staring intently at the stone.
“Well, this was unforeseen,” I said.
“What? What’s wrong? Is it not working?”
“It appears…not,” I said. Ethan’s face crumpled. “I don’t know what the problem is. I know everything worked. I can tell it’s active, but it isn’t leading me anywhere.”
Ethan looked like he was about to cry. I kept holding the stone, hoping maybe it was just delayed, but I was beginning to think something else was going on that was keeping it from working.
“Do you think it’s because my body is out of range or something?” Ethan asked.
“The stone would lead me to Africa if your body was there,” I said. “The only way it wouldn’t work was if your body was dead, since there’d be no living energy to resonate with the stone.”
“But it’s not dead!” Ethan said.
“I said if,” I said, though it did occur to me that I still only had Ethan’s word to go on about this body-jacking thing.
Even though I had my own questions about what kind of ghost he was, his body could very well be dead and something else going on here. But from the look on Ethan’s face, I could tell he was on the verge of a breakdown. Voicing doubts right now wouldn’t help.
“Look, I’m not sure why it isn’t working,” I said. “But I’m going to keep it active and keep it with me; maybe it will kick in soon.”
“Okay,” Ethan said, but he didn’t sound reassured. The stone had a hole, so I threaded it onto a chain and hung it around my neck.
“See, I’ll even sleep with it on, so if it starts working at five a.m., we’ll head right out.” I didn’t relish doing that, but I wanted to wipe that utterly dejected look from his face by giving him as much hope as I could.
Ethan just nodded, then got up and huddled on the sofa, turning away from me. I sighed and headed to my bedroom with the rune stone. Luna followed me, so I picked her up as I plopped into bed. She immediately started having her way with my hands, worrying at them like they were the enemy.
“Wanna switch lives, Luna?” I said, rubbing her little belly, which brought her endless amounts of glee. “You can track down a ghost beastie and help a depressed ghost find his stolen body, and I can lie back and have my belly rubbed?”
She barked at me.
“I guess that’s a no.”
Chapter Ten
Thursday morning when I came into the living room, Ethan was still moping on the couch and only spoke to me to ask if the tracking rune had started working. When I said no, he resumed his sulking and didn’t say anything else. I was true to my word and kept the tracking stone on me, tucked into my shirt to avoid questions, but it didn’t resonate. I found that increasingly strange.
At work, Micah and I didn’t make any progress on tracking who or what had killed Leslie, and forensics still didn’t have the results for us, so I spent most of the day catching up on overdue reports. And having sex with Andrew during lunch.
It started to rain while I drove home, but Luna still had to be walked, and damn her if she didn’t enjoy splashing around in the rain and getting muddier than she needed to be. I’d have to give her a bath. Maybe that was how she punished me for all the times I kept her waiting for food and to be walked.
When I came back inside, miserably soaked despite my umbrella, Ethan, who hadn’t spoken to me when I’d first come home, deigned to get off the couch and give me big, hopeful eyes as I tried to close my umbrella. If an umbrella was this difficult to close, it was long past the time to buy a new one, but umbrella shopping was never high on my to-do list. As I struggled with the rusty thing and tried to deal with Ethan’s impatience over the tracking rune’s not working, I dropped Luna’s leash. She immediately took that as her cue to dash through the door back into the rain, running through the gate, which had been left open.
“Damn it, Luna, come back here, you little fur ball!” I ran after her. Luna pranced around, barking happily, and my insides clenched when the senseless dog ran into the street. “Luna!”
The world seemed to condense into slow motion. Luna ran across the street like there was something she had to get to on the other side, and at the same time, someone on a Vespa zipped down the street, oblivious to the tiny dog in its path. Until he ran her over.
I stopped and screamed, then I was running again, feeling like my heart was in my throat. The Vespa and its rider had been upturned, but both seemed to be okay. The rider started babbling apologies at me, but all I could focus on was the broken body of my dog. My hands shook as I scooped her off the ground and cradled her in my arms.
She was dead; it didn’t take much to tell that. I stood there in rigid shock for a moment, with the Vespa guy in my face and the cold rain sliding down my neck, and couldn’t believe I was holding my dog’s dead body in my hands.
After a few moments, I snapped to my senses and saw that there was a small crowd looking at what was going on. I turned and ran back into my house, slamming the door behind me. I hardly knew what I was doing. I moved almost as though I was outside of myself. I grabbed a towel and wrapped it around Luna’s body, then shoved my coffee table and rug out of the way and lay her body on the floor. I then ran into my bedroom to retrieve my hidden bag of rune stones.
“Selene?”
I looked at Ethan, and whatever he saw on my face made him take a step back.
“I’ll just…stay out of your way,” he said.
I turned away from him and found my bag of rune stones, then marched back into the living room and over to my aquarium. I didn’t maintain the fish tank because I had some great love of fish. I maintained it because I had a rambunctious little dog who lost her mind every time it rained and didn’t know that running into the street might not end well for her. I grabbed the net and bowl I kept under the tank and took all six fish out, covering the bowl with a cloth because the fish almost flopped out of it. I placed the bowl next to Luna’s towel-wrapped body, then knelt in front of them.
Now I had to focus, because I couldn’t do this with my emotions all over the place. I wiped at my tears and took several deep, calming breaths before opening the pouch and getting out my powders and stones. I drew a powder circle, then used other powders to draw runes inside it.
After the runes were drawn, I placed Luna’s body in the middle of the circle and put one goldfish on each rune. The fish weren’t dead yet, but they were weak enough that they didn’t flop out of the circle. For the reanimation to work, the fish’s souls had to be drawn out while they were still alive, so I had to do this quickly. I could feel Ethan hovering behind me, but he kept his distance and stayed quiet.
I placed my hands over the circle and closed my eyes, tapping not into my necromancer magic, but into that streak of reanimation power that would allow me to draw the life force of the goldfish from their bodies. It was a different feeling than when I used my necromancer magic. My body quickly grew hot, and I felt electrified. My reanimation power poured from my hands over the fish, sinking inside their bodies and grabbing hold of their souls. When I had all six snared in my power, I
pulled it back, and out came the souls.
I opened my eyes, and was able to see the fish souls as glowing, ghostly outlines of their physical bodies. In order for them to work in Luna, I had to manipulate them, so I moved my hands together and the fish souls started to waver and disperse until they no longer looked like fish. My reanimation power sparked like electricity around the souls until they melded into a glowing white cloud. Now they could be used as the life force for whatever I wanted. I directed the soul cloud into Luna, pressing it into her muddy, blood-soaked body. My throat tightened and tears threatened, but I kept myself together until it was done.
I continued to stream reanimation magic into Luna to give the souls enough power to mold into a new soul for her. It was draining, but I didn’t lose focus. Eventually, I could feel Luna’s body begin to knit together. I almost collapsed to the floor in relief.
It took almost an hour of channeling power into Luna’s body, but just when I felt like I was going to pass out from the energy depletion, I sensed that it was done. I dropped my hands and stared at Luna, who was unmoving, and held my breath, waiting to see if it had worked. I hadn’t practiced reanimation in years, and I prayed that I remembered how to do it right.
“Come back,” I whispered, staring at Luna’s body as though sheer will alone would make her leap into my lap again. “Don’t leave me, Luna.”
Before I had a dog, I used to make fun of people who doted and obsessed over their dogs like they were their children. However, having Luna for the past six years had made me understand that when you were having the shittiest day and it seemed like every two-legged creature in your life was trying to tear you down, it meant something that you could come home to a little animal that never judged you and that loved you as long as you loved her. I wasn’t about to lose Luna, which was why I hadn’t thought twice about doing what I’d just done. I’d make sure no one found out. Well, no one except Ethan, since he’d seen the entire thing.
After what felt like an eternity, I finally saw the faintest of movements from Luna. This time, I did slump over in relief before I carefully picked her up, still wrapped in the towel. She opened her eyes and blinked up at me, and I used my fingers to move her wet fur away from her eyes. She licked my finger and I almost cried, but I settled for cradling her to my chest.
