Bridge of Souls

by Victoria Schwab

Lucas puts his phone away, but my attention keeps going back toward the strange pull. I lift the camera to my eye, sliding the focus back and forth, as if it will show me the source of the pull, but all I see are blurry headstones. I’m still peering through the viewfinder when Mom calls, “That’s a wrap!” and it’s time to go.

  * * *

  We grab lunch in the Garden District, a place where all the houses are draped in Spanish moss and look like smaller versions of the White House, columned and proud. And then it’s on to Lafayette, which is apparently only Lafayette No. 1 (they really aren’t that good at coming up with names for graveyards here, but I guess when you have forty-two of them, it’s easy to run out of options).

  The rain has trailed off, but the clouds still hang low, as if it might start again at any second. The world is gray, and full of shadows.

  “For such a vibrant city,” says Mom, “people love to spend time with the dead.”

  And I can tell that she’s about to start a story.

  The cameras trail her down a row of tombs, and we follow.

  “A few years ago, a couple was staying at a hotel here in the Garden District when they decided to take an afternoon walk to explore this cemetery.”

  “As you do,” says Jacob.

  As if she can hear him, Mom smiles. “It might sound like an odd way to spend the day, but people come from far and wide just to tour the graveyards. They treat them like art galleries, museums, history exhibits. Some come to study, or pay respect to the dead, but others simply like to wander among the quiet crypts.”

  Her steps slow as she talks.

  “On their way, the couple met a young woman, traveling alone, and she asked them if they knew how to get to Lafayette.

  “ ‘You can come with us,’ they said. ‘We are going there ourselves.’

  “And so the three set out together, the couple and the young woman, who said her name was Annabelle. They walked, and chatted, and made their way to the gates of Lafayette, and strolled together, admiring the graves.”

  It’s easy to get lost in Mom’s stories. I grew up with them, and sure, the tales she told me before bedtime were usually less morbid than these. But I love to hear her talk.

  Now she comes to a stop in front of one of the crypts.

  “And at some point, the couple realized that the young woman had stopped walking and was looking mournfully at one of the graves. And so they went to her, and asked, ‘Do you know someone? Is that where they’re buried?’

  “And the woman smiled, and pointed at the grave …”

  Mom reaches almost absently for the door of the crypt.

  “And she said, ‘This one’s mine.’ ”

  Chills race over my skin, and Jacob folds his arms and tries to look like he’s not totally freaked out as Mom says, “The couple followed her gaze, and saw the name on the stone was Annabelle. And by the time they looked back at the young woman, she was gone.”

  Mom’s hand still lingers in the air, as if reaching for the grave. I snap a photo before her fingers fall away, and I know, even before I’ve finished the roll, that shot will be my favorite one.

  Dad steps up beside Mom.

  “Some ghost stories are like gossip,” he says, taking up his role as the skeptical scholar. “Passed from person to person. Who knows if they’re true? But the next graveyard is home to something far more … tangible.”

  “Oh joy,” says Jacob as the cameras cut off and Mom says it’s time to head to St. Roch.

  She’s practically bouncing by the time we get there, as if this is the ride she’s been waiting for.

  From the outside, St. Roch seems like a pretty normal graveyard, which is a thing I never used to say. I hadn’t exactly seen many graveyards before my parents decided to become the Inspecters. But in our brief time as a family of traveling paranormal investigators, I’ve walked through miles of bones and cemeteries large enough to need street signs, been pushed off crypts, fallen through crumbling bodies, and even climbed into an open grave.

  “And that’s not even counting the five places we’ve been today,” says Jacob.

  Mom grabs my hand and pulls me through the gate, and I feel the usual hush of unhaunted places. Or at least, less haunted ones.

  I look around at the rows of stone monuments and crypts, wondering what the big deal is.

  And then we enter the chapel.

  “Oh sweet holy no,” says Jacob at my side.

  “What am I looking at?” I ask, even though I’m not sure I want to know.

  It looks like a room full of body parts. Hands and feet. Eyes and teeth.

  There are legs tacked up on the walls, a pile of crutches on the floor. An arm hangs over the table, and looks like it’s waving at me. It takes me a second to realize that the body parts aren’t real, that they’re made of plastic, and plaster, and chipping paint.

  My stomach churns.

  “St. Roch,” announces Mom. “Patron saint of good health. Unofficial recipient of used prosthetics.”

  A breeze blows through the chapel, and an artificial knee creaks.

  “Some are symbolic,” explains Mom. “A hand, for someone with carpal tunnel. A knee, for someone whose joints ache. But others are given in thanks. People bring them here when they don’t need them anymore.”

  I stare at the shrine. A glass eye stares back, one wide blue iris fogging with age.

  This place isn’t haunted.

  It’s just really freaking creepy.

  I back out of the chapel to give the film crew room, because the space is small, and because I really don’t want to be surrounded by body parts, even if they’re not real.

  Jacob and I wander up the path, surveying graves with names like Bartholomew Jones, and Richard Churnell III, and Eliza Harrington Clark. Names that sound like something out of history, a play.

  My parents’ voices rise and fall from the chapel, following us like a breeze. Jacob scales a crypt and steps from roof to roof, as if he’s playing hopscotch.

  Thunder rolls through, the low clouds dark with the promise of more rain, and I can barely feel the Veil beyond the humid air.

  And for a moment, I feel myself loosen, unwind.

  And then I look around, and realize that unlike St. Louis No. 1 or Lafayette, there are no swells of tourists here right now, no groups clustered around the tombs.

  The graveyard is empty around us.

  And I remember Lara’s warning.

  Stay with your parents … Don’t wander off.

  “Jacob,” I say softly.

  But when I look up and scan the crypt rooftops, he’s not there. My pulse picks up, my hand going to the pendant at my throat.

  “Jacob!” I call, louder now.

  Something moves at the edge of my vision, and I spin, already lifting the mirror when I see his superhero shirt, his messy blond hair.

  “What?” he asks, cringing back from my pendant. “Can you put that away?”

  I sag in relief. “Yeah,” I say, a little shaky. “Sure.”

  We start back toward the morbid chapel and its offerings of hands, and eyes, and teeth. And halfway there, the air changes.

  At first I think it’s just the storm. Maybe the sudden cold, the way all the wind drops out of the world, the eerie quiet, is just normal.

  But I know it’s not.

  I’ve felt this way before.

  On the platform in Paris.

  In the séance room in the hotel.

  And the only word I have for it is wrong.

  Something is very, very wrong.

  I look around, but I don’t see anything strange.

  I lift the camera to my eye and scan the cemetery again, peering through the viewfinder.

  All I see are graves.

  And then something steps between them.

  In the viewfinder, it’s … nothing. A void. A solid dark. A patch as black as unexposed film, just like I saw at the Place d’Armes.

  When I lower the camera, the darkness has a shape.
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  Arms and legs in a black suit, a broad-brimmed hat low on its face, which isn’t a face at all but a bone-white mask, black pools where there should be eyes. That mouth, set into a rictus grin.

  The Emissary of Death holds out its hand, gloved fingers uncurling toward me.

  “Cassidy Blake,” it says in a voice like a rattle, a whisper, a wheeze.

  “We have found you.”

  Cassidy, run!” shouts Jacob.

  But I can’t.

  When I try, it’s like dragging my arms and legs through icy water. And when I try to breathe, I taste the river in my throat.

  My feet are stuck to the ground, my eyes locked on the Emissary, and I don’t know if it’s fear or some kind of spell, but I can’t speak, can’t move. It’s all I can do to grip the camera in my hands. The camera. My fingers scramble numbly, and I finally bring the camera up, turning it toward the advancing figure.

  I hit the flash.

  If the Emissary were a ghost, it would stop, stunned by the sudden burst of light. But the Emissary doesn’t stop. It doesn’t even flinch. It just keeps moving toward me, those long thin legs covering too much ground with every stride.

  Jacob is still shouting, but I can barely hear him. The world has gone cotton quiet. The only sounds that get through are my pulse and the too-heavy steps of the Emissary walking toward me.

  “Once, you stole from us,” it says, and the words wrap around me like water.

  I feel like I’m in the river again, the cold leaching all the strength from my limbs.

  “Once, you fled.”

  It reaches up for its mask, and I feel myself tipping forward, into the dark. The Emissary hooks one gloved finger under the bone mask, begins to lift its face away, when Jacob appears, all flailing limbs.

  “Get away from my friend!” Jacob shouts, flinging himself at the Emissary. But Jacob goes straight through, and hits the ground on the other side. He collapses, shivering as if doused in cold water. His hair hangs wet around his face, and he spits a mouthful of river water onto the grass.

  Jacob, I mouth his name.

  The Emissary doesn’t even seem to notice.

  Its bottomless black eyes stay on me.

  I manage a single backward stumble, clawing at my necklace. I hold up the mirror pendant like a too-small shield between me and the skeletal thing striding toward me. I force air into my lungs, and speak.

  “Look and listen,” I say, voice shaking. “See and know. This is what you are!”

  But we’re not in the Veil.

  And the Emissary, whatever it is, is not a ghost.

  It looks straight past the mirror at me, then closes its gloved hand around the pendant and tugs it free. The cord snaps, and the Emissary flings the mirror away. It hits a gravestone, and I hear the splinter of glass before the world is blotted out again by the Emissary’s voice.

  “We have found you,” it says, “and we will return you to the dark.”

  It reaches forward, and I know that if it gets its hands on me, I will never get away. I know, but my legs are still like blocks of ice.

  I shuffle backward again, make it a few clumsy steps before the ground changes beneath my feet, from gravel to stone, and a wall comes up against my back. A crypt, old and crumbling.

  There’s nowhere to run.

  Jacob struggles to his feet, still looking damp, and dazed, and gray, and even if he were solid enough to fight, he wouldn’t reach me in time.

  The Emissary steps closer, and I resist the urge to close my eyes.

  There’s nowhere to run, but I won’t hide.

  I look up, into that skull face, those empty eyes, as it reaches out, gloved fingers skimming the air in front of my chest, carrying the touch of ice, and cold air, and deep shadow, as its other hand goes to its mask.

  “Cassidy Blake,” says the Emissary, in its whispering way, “come with—”

  Something shatters against the Emissary’s hat.

  A roof tile.

  I look at Jacob, but he’s still struggling to his feet.

  And then a voice from the crypt over my head. A prim, English voice.

  “Back off, reaper. She’s not going anywhere with you.”

  The Emissary looks up, and so do I, and there’s Lara Chowdhury standing on the crypt roof, dressed in a pair of shorts, a gray blouse, and a bright red backpack.

  I’m still trying to figure out how she’s there—if she’s there—when she disappears, jumping down from the crypt and out of sight.

  Maybe she thought the Emissary would follow her, but it doesn’t.

  “Lara?” I shout as the Emissary turns its focus back on me.

  “Cassidy,” she says from the other side of the crypt. “You might want to get out of the way.”

  The rotting tomb gives a violent groan against my back, and I realize what she’s doing. I lunge out of the way, just before the old crypt sways, and splits, and topples forward.

  It doesn’t crush the Emissary, exactly. I don’t think it’s the kind of thing that can be crushed.

  But the fall kicks up a lot of dust and debris, a thin gray cover. I hold my breath, trying not to inhale. A hand closes around my wrist, and I jump, stifling a shout, but it’s just Lara. Impossible, amazing Lara. Who’s really here.

  “How are you here?” I ask, almost choking on crypt dust. “Where did you—”

  “Questions later,” she says briskly. “Right now, run.”

  I stumble, bending to scoop up my pendant from the weedy base of a grave, grimacing when I see the mirror is broken—not just splintered, but shattered. I pocket it as Lara pulls me up again and pushes me toward the gates.

  Jacob staggers after us, still looking shaken and damp. “Are you okay?” I ask him.

  “Zero out of ten,” he says with a shiver. “Do not recommend letting that thing touch you.”

  “Less talk, more flee,” snaps Lara.

  My ears are still ringing from the strange quiet that surrounds the Emissary, but as we near the graveyard gates, I swear I hear music. Not the eerie melody of the Veil but the high whine of a trumpet, followed by horns and a saxophone.

  And then we hit the exit of St. Roch and I look up, and see a parade.

  A very slow-moving parade. Cars crawl forward, and people walk on foot, some all in black and others in white, some holding flowers and others umbrellas. A marching band is staggered through the group like beads on a chain, gold instruments gleaming, as jazz rises through the street. And something moves at the center of it all, carried on either side by a pair of men.

  It’s a casket.

  And this, I realize, isn’t a parade.

  It’s a funeral.

  Lara pulls me straight toward it.

  We duck and weave through the slow-moving sea, slip through a gap between a drum and a horn, a pair of women in feathered Sunday hats and a carriage horse, tumbling out on the other side of the street.

  The procession stretches as far as I can see.

  “That’s a lot of life and death,” says Lara, pulling me down behind a car, “which is good cover. It should confuse the Emissary, at least for a while.”

  We crouch low, the three of us, and then Lara looks at me and the first thing she says, really says to me, is “I told you not to wander.” And then she scowls at Jacob. “Honestly, how hard is it to keep her safe?”

  “I’d like to see you try!”

  Jacob finally looks like himself again, his blond hair dry and his color back (well, as much as it ever is).

  Lara clucks her tongue and lifts her own mirror pendant, angling it over her shoulder, so she can see past the parade to the cemetery gates.

  I reach for my mirror before remembering it’s broken. My hand hovers as if it doesn’t know what to do, before dropping onto my camera.

  “Do you see it?” I ask, shifting so I can look, too.

  The air lurches in my chest as the Emissary appears at the mouth of the cemetery. It pauses under the wrought-iron arch of St. Roch, head swiv
eling from side to side as it searches for us. For me.

  And then it disappears, sliding apart like smoke.

  “It’s gone,” I whisper.

  “For now,” says Lara, voicing the part I didn’t want to think about. The Emissary came out of nowhere. It vanished into nowhere. Which means it could be anywhere.

  We sag back against the car, waiting for the procession to pass.

  “Lara,” I say. “How did you get here?”

  “I took a plane,” she says, as if that’s the part that needed explaining. “I was at the airport, and my parents’ flight had already taken off. As you know, I was meant to go home, but I got to thinking, you are rather out of your element, and I have always wanted to see New Orleans—the Society of the Black Cat and all—so I changed the ticket.”

  “You just … changed the ticket?”

  “Booked a layover, actually. It’s not that hard. Did it all on my phone. I know my parents’ credit card details. And it’s a short flight from Chicago to New Orleans.”

  Even Jacob looks impressed.

  “It will be a while before my parents check in with me,” she says, “and I couldn’t expect you to handle an Emissary on your own, so—”

  I pull her into a hug.

  Lara stiffens a little, clearly unused to the affection. But she doesn’t pull away.

  “Thank you,” I say, squeezing her tight.

  She pats my arm and looks over her shoulder. “We should go.”

  She’s right. The music is fading, the funeral moving on and taking our cover with it.

  “How did you even find me?” I ask as we get to our feet.

  “In-betweeners stick together,” Lara says, poking me in the chest. And I get what she’s saying. There’s a thread—not a physical one, but just as real—that runs between us. Like a compass pointing north. Which reminds me, for a second, of the weird feeling I had in Metairie Cemetery, that push-pull I felt, and I’m about to ask Lara if she knows what it is when a voice cuts across the road.

  “Cassidy Blake!” snaps Mom.

  The funeral procession is gone. The street is empty again, and my mother storms across it.

  “How many times have we talked about wandering off during a— Oh my, Lara? Is that you?”

  “Hello, Mrs. Blake.”

  “Sorry!” I say. “I wanted to see the parade. Or funeral, or whatever that was. And I ran into Lara!”