To my surprise, he bent down to say something to the Overalls Ghost. I wondered if he was a human initiate into supernatural matters, or a nephil half-breed like me, or something like my father. I was just about to activate my magical sight to find out when the Overalls Ghost shot to his feet and started stumbling down the sidewalk in my direction. He looked almost as solid as the living, but he passed through them without any of them noticing.
The cowboy had a faint smile on his face as he tapped the fingers of one hand against the palm of another. He was counting, I realized. And the Overalls Ghost was running.
Nod growled and crawled out from under the table and I stood up without quite knowing why. Ghosts could be frightened, but they couldn’t really be hurt unless they allowed it, and they couldn’t be destroyed at all. But still—why frighten a ghost? And how? If I were better with my magical sight, I could just flick it on and learn more about him—but if I did that, the chaos of the Geometry would make it hard for me to watch anything else, and I wanted to see what happened when the cowboy finished his count.
He counted to five four times, then started moving after the Overalls Ghost. He didn’t walk; he sauntered, weaving around the other people on the sidewalk. There was no way he should have been able to catch up with the ghost, but the Overalls Ghost seemed like he was stumbling through deep snow and after less time than it took to count to twenty, the cowboy reached him.
He smiled dreadfully and stretched out his hand to catch the ghost’s arm, like somebody playing tag in slow motion. It had just that air of a game being played. But when he touched the ghost, the ghost screamed.
It wasn’t like any mortal scream I’d heard before. It wasn’t a noise. It was a blow, straight down the spine. It raised Nod’s fur and the hair on the back of my neck, and every mortal in earshot paused and looked around. The expression on the ghost’s face was terror and agony. And then the ghost just... disintegrated into wind, and his scream was the last thing to go.
The cowboy looked at me, actually at me, through the space where the ghost had been and grinned widely. Horribly. Then he pointed a finger gun at me, winked, and vanished into thin air just as the song playing over the coffee shop speakers ended.
-two-
“Hey, kid, are you all right?”
I was huddled on a bench somewhere—where? The bus stop outside the high school—with my dogs around me. The ghost’s scream—the ghost’s expression—consumed my mind’s eye, and I couldn’t stop remembering my mother saying she wouldn’t be around for long.
But a boy a little older than me had stopped beside my bench to check on me. I couldn’t concentrate on him very well, just enough to pick up that he was Korean, wearing big sunglasses, and he smelled of tea and cedar and basil. I shook my head, muttered that I was fine, and tried to wish him away. Instead he patted Grim, who was curled up beside me on the bench, and looked at me for a long moment. Then, finally, he kept on walking, and I was glad that I didn’t have to come up with an excuse for my distraction.
I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t think that cowboy, whatever he was, could get past my father to do that to my mother. She was his, by her choice, and it was awful but it was a fact that my father didn’t let anybody take what was his. Especially now, especially after the shift in fallen angel politics that had come along with the lake monsters and the other changes. He’d had to make concessions and there was no way he’d make more willingly.
A car door slammed and a familiar figure stalked toward me. I hadn’t seen her in months, ever since I’d come home again. For a moment, I panicked that she’d found me, before I remembered the incoherent call I’d made right after the cowboy destroyed the Overalls Ghost. I was here to meet her. She wanted to talk.
Thinking that didn’t actually make the panic go away. I wasn’t ready to face her again. I didn’t know if I ever would be. But here she was, her cold shadow falling over my bench, because I didn’t have anybody else to ask.
Picking up my mood, or the woman’s scent, Grim leapt off the bench and hid underneath. The demon I only knew as “Tia” took his place beside me gracefully. She was gorgeous, with deeply tanned olive skin and dark hair pulled back into a chignon. She wore designer sunglasses and a sleek cream suit, and she smelled like fire and sunshine and peaches and wrath. My mother called her the Lady in Red, but I’d never seen her in that color. Just like my father, she was one of the Fallen, although the demons had scruples my father and his kin laughed at.
Nod licked his chops, then yawned hugely, showing off his teeth in a totally-not-growling way. I put my hand on his head, studying his ears as I tried to manage my own desire to get up and run away.
Finally, Tia said, “Well, AT?” Her lovely voice was calm but cool.
“I wanted to ask you about something I saw today,” I mumbled. “But first—”
“First?”
“I’m sorry,” I blurted out and stole a glance up. She was looking at me over her sunglasses with yellow-green eyes. “I know you worked hard on helping me get away from him and I really do appreciate it. It just didn’t work out. I’m not—”
“I don’t want to hear about what you’re not.” Tia’s tone was as crisp as an autumn leaf. “Ask what you want to ask. I have a client waiting on me.”
“Client” was how Tia referred to the person she was currently assisting. I’d been her client once upon a time. I thought we’d been friends, too. But now, with the scent of her suppressed anger filling my nose, I had to face the fact that I’d probably ruined that. She’d worked so hard to coerce a promise from my father that he wouldn’t chase me down when I left, and then I’d ruined it by pretty much coming back on my own.
“I saw a man destroy a ghost today,” I began, then added anxiously, “But that’s not possible, is it? Ghosts are souls and souls go on forever. I mean, I’ve always heard human souls can’t be destroyed by anything they don’t consent to.”
Tia wasn’t surprised by my story at all, so I kept talking in case she didn’t understand. “I mean, I know they can be tricked, but this... man... didn’t do any trickery. He scared the ghost into running, and then he chased him down, and then the ghost was just gone. He screamed...” I trailed off as Tia held up a hand.
“That was probably Ion, First Huntsman of the Wild Hunt. It isn’t even Halloween yet, but he’s been slipping out in advance of the big day,” she said flatly. “Usually when that Gravity’s Angels song plays. He isn’t a faerie, but he’s bound by some of the same restrictions.”
Huntsman. My father went by Hunter. He really embraced the name, all the way down to how he decorated his lodge. And I remembered how the cowboy had looked directly at me, as if he knew me. There were other things Tia had said that I knew I should pay attention to, but I couldn’t yet. “Huntsman. Is he connected to...?”
“Your parent?” Tia’s gaze went far away. “No. Nor are any of the others who ride with him. They are both more and less than he.”
“Hah,” I muttered and stared down at my hands, trying to calm my racing heart. My father tried to trick me sometimes. For a moment I’d thought—but Tia was honest. And my father was the one who’d first taught me about the immortality of souls. I didn’t know why the cowboy had winked at me, but it didn’t matter if he wasn’t part of my father’s game.
Tia ignored me and went on. “Your father wasn’t born a Hunter; once, he was something other than he is now. But the Wild Hunt was created precisely to hunt down and destroy souls.”
My hands went cold. “Why? How? Who would do such a thing?”
Tia blew a tendril of hair away from her face. “They were created in response to certain other things going wrong, back in the early days. We’d learned that the very inviolability of souls could become a threat, if they became badly corrupted and destructive. We needed a way to stop the damage from spreading when that happened. Six of my extended kindred gave up something of themselves to a celestial artifact, and the Wild Hunt was born.”
�
��But the ghost this Ion destroyed wasn’t corrupted or destructive. All he ever did was sit there and look at people!” I was almost wailing, but I didn’t know how to cope with this. Heart whined and put her head in my lap.
“I’m sure you’re right,” Tia said, with a flat calm. “What we created was just as flawed as what we tried to fix. The Wild Hunt became too enthusiastic, too concerned with its own pleasures. It was unable to discriminate between appropriate targets and inappropriate ones. So when the faeries were locked away outside the world, so was the Wild Hunt.”
“But—” I began, and then said, “Oh.” Something had happened recently. I didn’t know the details, because it made my father angry to talk about it, but the door between the faerie prison and the rest of the world wasn’t stuck as tight as it used to be.
“Yes.” Tia clasped her hands over a knee. “Once, they could only be summoned through a very involved ritual one day a year. Now they can escape occasionally, momentarily freed as the faeries are. But because we needed them sometimes, they were not bound entirely as the faeries were. And so, when their summoning day comes, they will completely slip their leash.”
“Just for that day, right?” I asked, anxious for a bright side.
Tia kicked her foot a little before saying gently, “No. There will be no ritual to draw them back again. On the first of November, when Halloween ends, they will be free to ride over the world, hunting down any wandering soul. We don’t know if they’ll respect the marks of celestials on claimed souls, either. I think not, myself.”
I demanded, “Is somebody doing something about this? You can’t just let it happen!”
With a cool, almost unfriendly look, Tia said, “Somebody is trying to do something about it. It’s not going to work, though.” She pulled out her phone and began to play with it.
“Why not?” I threaded my fingers through my curls and stood up, dumping Heart’s head off my lap. “Why are you so casual about this?”
“Because having a tantrum about it helps nobody.” Tia shot me a glance over her sunglasses. “If you’re going to help out, you’re going to have to stop behaving like a baby.”
I took a step back. “Me, help? How can I help?” Various faces passed across my mind’s eye and I shook my head. “I can’t help anybody.”
Tia’s delicate eyebrows arched. “Really? And here I thought that was where this was going.” She stomped one foot lightly and said mockingly, “You can’t just let it happen.”
I flushed, my ears burning. “That’s different.”
“Of course,” said Tia sweetly, standing up. “I have to go. When you called me, I thought we had a chance, but...” She shook her head. “Oh well. Go make your excuses to your ghostly friends. And your mother—” She smiled, as if it was twisted out of her. “Maybe your father can protect her. Probably not, though.”
“This isn’t fair,” I said. I knew it was stupid but I couldn’t help it. I felt like the shadow of my father was just behind me. He wouldn’t like me talking to Tia again, let alone helping her. But my mother—
Tia tucked her phone back into her handbag. “Of course not.” Her gaze went to somebody across the street and she said briskly, “See you around, AT.”
She started to cross the street, then turned in the middle to call back, “Back in LA, you could have called almost anybody for help, you know.” The gentleness in her voice was worse than the scent of her anger.
My throat hurt. “Yeah. I’ve thought about that. But I didn’t. I called for him.”
It seemed like her eyes were burning through the sunglasses for a moment. Then she turned and walked away, leaving me alone except for my dogs.
*
The Black Clearing wasn’t actually black, not in the physical mundane world. It was a tiny clearing in the forest on my father’s land, draped in the greenery of the pines. There was a little firepit in the middle and the ground around it was scuffed up. There were old needles everywhere, with odd patterns drawn in them. There was the smell of old beer, too, but not a single abandoned can to be found. You could just see a bit of the sky if you looked up from the center. It always felt like a cage to me. I was pretty sure my first best friend had been eaten there.
I didn’t know if she’d died there, or somewhere else. I wasn’t even sure if her ghost lingered in the Black Clearing. Sometimes I saw the chains of a haunt, a ghost’s dream forming, but the dream never pulled me in. But even if Emily hadn’t lingered, other victims of my father did. They didn’t belong to my father the way my mother did, but they’d been caught by him all the same, unable to move past the memory of my father’s torment.
The Black Clearing wasn’t actually black, but it wasn’t entire mundane either. Viewed through the magical Geometry vision, the land itself glowed with the pain of its many-layered ghosts. The trees cringed away from the firepit in the center and a stain sank into the stones.
“Hi,” I said, kneeling down and shoving my hands into the dirt for a moment. They ached just being here. After Emily had vanished, I’d reported the Black Clearing to the police as an anonymous tip. My father hadn’t liked that at all.
“I brought you some things.” I dug some scented candles out of my jacket pocket, along with a few pieces of candy and some ribbon I’d scavenged. Carefully, I laid out the candles along Geometry lines that made sense, then lit them with my firelighting charm. The candy I scattered in the dirt and the ribbons I tied to the trees. All the while, I could feel ghostly attention on me.
It wasn’t friendly. It never was, not here. That was okay. I was the daughter of their tormentor and all the candy in the world wasn’t going to make up for that. But it was important to me that they knew they weren’t forgotten.
I pulled my knees to my chest and hugged them, staring at the whorls in the bark in the tree across from me without really seeing them. My dogs were back in my shadow again; we were too close to home and I was afraid of my father remembering they existed.
My own memories opened up and I let them: memories I normally tried not to remember, but were here impossible to forget.
Emily’s smile the last time I’d seen her was innocent and cheerful. She and her mother dropped me off at home after a sleepover, and we were going to talk later that day about a school project. It was one of those moments of normality I cherished so much. We hugged each other, and I hugged her mom, too. It was real and wonderful.
My father smirked when he asked me why Emily hadn’t called me. Panic infused Emily’s mother’s voice when she did call me, begging me to tell her Emily was with me. When I looked at my father, he smiled and winked, like we’d enjoyed a secret. I ran through the forest until I reached the Black Clearing, where the smells told me everything I didn’t want to know.
I scrubbed my face and clawed that memory away. I wanted to remember her alive as well as dead. I wanted Emily to be more than just a victim. But instead, a different memory swallowed me down, something much more recent and just as awful.
A woman, a mortal woman, came to my father’s house to do business with him. He made her stay the night, then used me as bait to lure her into breaking his rules. She’d wanted to be my friend. She’d wanted to help me out. She screamed as he broke her arm, and he laughed as he talked with his pack about what he was going to do to her next. And then—no.
No.
I buried my face against my knees and dragged in deep breaths until the terror and shame receded. Remembering was the sacrifice I offered the dead, but it wasn’t the only reason I’d come. I couldn’t go so deep into the memories that I started screaming, too.
“I saw a thing today,” I told the hidden ghosts. “A man who could destroy ghosts with a touch. Apparently he’ll be doing that a lot soon. Unless somebody stops him.”
Wisps of ghost-stuff appeared around the ribbons I’d tied to branches. Something was listening.
“I don’t know what I can do to help,” I added irritably. “She wouldn’t even tell me. I did ask, too.”
The ghost-stuff around the ribbons and the smoke from the candles wavered and formed into a young woman, similar in age to my mother’s locket picture. It wasn’t Emily. It wasn’t anybody I’d ever seen before. But she looked at me like she knew me well, and she didn’t say anything at all.
After waiting a long moment for her to berate me, scold me, attack me, I tried to fill the silence. “Why do you stay here? Why don’t you just go on to where the unbound ghosts go? Why waste eternity here? You’re dead. You could get away from him if you really wanted to.”
The ghost spread her hands and her words emerged from the top of the silence like coffins bobbing to the surface of a lake. “There’s no justice. There’s just us.” And for a moment, I had a dizzying sense of something growing underneath the turf and clay of the Black Clearing, something dark and glittering and charged with hatred.
Then the ghost spoke again. “All you have to do is find them.”
I glared at her. “I know where he is. He’s easy to find. He’s always there.”
She stared at me for another long moment, her eyes like the shadowed moon. Something was wrong. I’d misunderstood something.
“You mean the Wild Hunt,” I said reluctantly.
“They live in a hidden fold of the other world. She who would fight them for us cannot find them. We heard her looking.”
I shifted uncomfortably, pushing my fingers into the dirt again. I was good at finding things. I was even good at finding things that crossed the boundaries between worlds. Or, rather, my dogs were. They had all sorts of interesting talents.
“Who is she?”
A ghostly shoulder shrugged; she gave no other answer. A cloud seemed to drift over her eyes.
“I want to help,” I admitted. “I want to help you. You’re my friends.”
“No,” said the ghost. “We’re not.”
I curled around the turmoil in my stomach. “I know,” I whispered. Then I forced myself to my feet, dousing the candles and snatching at the ribbons. “I have to go. I’ll... I’ll think about it. I’ll do what I can.”
Wolf Interval (Senyaza Series Book 3) Page 2
