Ghost Shadow (Moon Shadow Series Book 4) (8 page)

I slid away, ever so carefully. A wisp of my arm brushed against a greedy edge of weave and the pain rocked me dangerously close to a different part of the grasping bands. “I don’t know the answers to any of that. And time is not the same here.” My voice squeaked with pain.

“Go! Hurry,” Roberto yelled.

The cat tossed something at me. Instinctively, I reached for it, although, of course, it could not cross the barrier. Except it did.

“How we gonna find out who she is if she doesn’t know herself?” the cat wondered, all trace of happy purr gone.

“That’s not a problem.” The vamp’s voice was fading, but his words were still clear. “I don’t know who she is, but I do know where she is.”

The weave slammed shut, slapping me backwards like a piece of gray litter tumbling onto the landscape. My hand clutched the bundle of woven weeds and fur. I wasn’t going to lose it, no matter what.

Chapter 9

If I could have held near the edge, I would have stayed, pain and impending doom notwithstanding. The vamp knew where I was? Why did he know and I didn’t? A second or two longer, and he might have told me. Not that it would have mattered. I couldn’t go there. But if a vampire knew where my body was, did that mean I was a vampire somewhere on the side of the living?

No. I was here. The vamp existed on the side of the living. He must imbibe from the living to be able to remain there. He was dead. I was dead, but I was In Between. Sucking nutrients from pine needles and shafts of light that leaked into In Between didn’t make me a vampire.

There were ghouls that ate the living or the dead; anything for souls or bits of life. They were like the hellhounds, but faster. Shoot, most everything except the roadkill and a few human souls ate everything and anything In Between. The mermaids weren’t the types you invited over for coffee or tea. Not that I’d actually witnessed them eat anyone, but those teeth weren’t for gnawing down trees like a beaver.

I frowned, holding my arm where it had been slashed by the weave. My essence was leaking, and I was drained again, but the packet the cat had thrown me was full of energy. How had it made it across? Why had he thrown it, anyway?

The braid smelled of him, of earth, of magic. Before In Between, I hadn’t known about magic, but now having met Cinderspark and the others, there was no doubt it existed. This braid was plant energy, human energy and a unique spark. I breathed it in again. Clean. Earthy. Electric. There was a small pebble woven through its silky length. A hole in the center of the bead allowed the braid to run through it. One darker gray spot had dripped across the pebble, and I wondered if it was the same earth Martin had requested—a bloodstone.

I carefully disguised the braid from the cat by weaving it into my hair. It was a barely noticeable dark gray spot against the lighter gray.

Thinking of Martin made me all the more determined to find him. Unfortunately, thinking of him didn’t make him appear, but it provided a distraction that might keep me from brooding about my own death. The how and why didn’t matter anyway because there was nothing to be done about it. But the cat didn’t seem to agree with that sentiment.

It was stupid to hope. I didn’t even remember enough details to help. There had been an attack, and then a bright light that shattered me in every direction. I had refused to go towards a light because I knew what that meant, and when something tried to pull from me, I instinctively fought back.

Something or someone had demanded the light inside me, but I had refused to give it up. There wasn’t much else to the memory other than a fear that left me mindlessly screaming until I ran, stuffing the light into a place that was opposite the direction of the pull.

And then in that instant, it was too late. I was here and not ready to be dead.

I turned and smacked right into Martin.

“Eeeeep!” Quiet as a ghost, he had snuck up on me. The shock of bouncing off him nearly sent me straight back into the weave.

I glared at him to no avail. He merely drifted to the right and began crooning over a pile of gray. Nothing unusual there; the man was always singing at something.

Rather than wait for him to cease his yodeling, I told him I’d seen Roberto and Lynx again. I left out the part about Lynx throwing me the braid. Even though Martin had said the bloodstone was for me back when Roberto had handed it to him, Martin had never passed the gift to me. Not that I had any idea what to do with it. Such a powerful object from the land of the living would only make me a target of every hungry beast In Between.

Martin sang around my words, but he was listening. When I stopped talking, he puffed himself up with air for no apparent reason.

“That cat is a good cat, curious and smart. Now that they found you, maybe he and the witch can call you back.”

“You really think I’m still alive?”

Martin let all the air out of his essence, but released it carefully so he didn’t swish away. “There are many stages to death, and you’ve always been different from the rest of us here. Your voice isn’t hollow, and you trail phantom juice behind you that reaches for the other side when you aren’t paying attention to it.”

“I do?”

“You’re more contained now that you have practice, but you have a ghost.”

“I
am
a ghost!” I left off the ‘you idiot,’ but it was a near thing.

He nodded and hummed. “But you have this double impression. It took me a while to figure it out, but whenever you are near the edge, your mirror image hops right over like it belongs there.”

This was news to me, although, admittedly, I was constantly having to collect myself. Bits and pieces were frequently sliced and diced off me or melting away on what seemed like an hourly basis.

“If I’m still alive, how do I find myself? And how the hell do I go where I want to be? If my body exists, I’d rather peer through at it instead of random hospital rooms!” One other question burned inside me, but the answer might be too frightening to face.
And who am I?

“Stop fighting the weave. It is just a form of energy, doing what it is meant to do. Use your own energy to coax the weave along. Of course, if you aren’t careful you’ll break apart, but you can nudge the edge along in front of you if you are careful. It doesn’t like us so it will skitter out of the way for us, but yet it must contain us. You can’t fight it. Sing to it.”

“Martin.” I started to tell him that not everyone wanted to float around crooning like an insane madman, but he chuckled, turning it into an all-out cackle before he regained control of himself.

“Not lucky enough to have a beautiful voice like me? Heh-heh.” He wafted away, beckoning. “It’s not the voice that has to sing. It’s the energy.”

He was headed back to the edge. I hesitated, but Martin would merely wander away if I didn’t follow. Nervously I puffed myself after him. “The last time I visited the edge with you...Is it required to be naked to coerce the weave into doing what you want?”

Martin nearly blew himself halfway across In Between. His laugh started as a ghostly shout and dissolved into chuckles that pushed him around in a circle of fits and starts. “Heh-heh. Oh, heheheehee. No, but my nakedness irks the witch. Adriel is an amazing power, but she could stand to unbend some.” Martin cackled some more.

“Good thing because I don’t even know how to get naked,” I muttered.

That set him off again.

When he could finally speak, he said, “I dress myself with bits of this and that, same as when I was topside. This place isn’t earth, but it has a voice. If you listen, you can gentle it and bend it where you might want. Same as earth.”

I wasn’t certain of that. But at least any follow-up ordeal wouldn’t require me to stand naked in front of the cat and his friends. And most of the time Martin didn’t bother to fully form himself, which was fine. His granite face was more than enough.

As we sidled back to the edge, he asked me to list all the rooms and people I’d seen. Predictably, those memories brought us near the hospital. Reminiscent of walking through a graveyard, only the opposite, I could see blurred images of the living walking the corridors. There were at least two nurses, a doctor in a lab coat, and a gaggle of visitors whispering. The group nearly ran over the cleaning lady when she stepped around the linen cart to hand an orderly a set of clean sheets.

“Oh, hey Julia,” the guy acknowledged her, glancing up from his phone. His name tag read “Paul” in big black letters. “Since you haven’t filled the linen closet just yet, can you also drop a set of those in room 202 on your way by?” Without waiting for an answer, Paul smashed the clean sheets in the crook of his elbow and ducked into the doorway next to the one with the visitors.

The patient in that room was facing the wall, but turned with a groan when Paul walked in. Something about the man’s bald head sparked a memory, but Martin distracted me when he sang, “Well, lookee there.”

I drifted his way to find him in front of a chilled storage area containing rows of bagged blood. If blood spatters on a sheet could attract a demon, I certainly didn’t intend to frequent a blood bank on a regular basis. There were bags of the stuff just waiting for a demon—or a vamp. My mouth dropped open.

A female vampire, dead as could be, picked up two of the bags, scanning one of them with a handheld device. She was dressed in a purple nurse’s smock, but it fit her curves well, making her somehow very elegant, even in death. Her hair was smoothed into a French twist, and like Patrick, a bat-like visage hovered behind her.

Just how many vampires were walking around dirt-side, anyway?

I backed off until the fog rolled in and obscured every single bit of the other side.

“Odd, those vampires,” Martin said. “Did you notice the aura of death?”

“Their lifelines are gone. Patrick was like that too. Dead, but the glow of life radiates through them from borrowed energy.”

He tapped one finger on his nose. “It’s not easy to meditate here with all these distractions. You can’t learn if you are busy watching people and wishing you were there. Come along, and I’ll teach you elsewhere.”

We drifted peacefully for a while before Martin coaxed the weave to reveal an empty canyon. The location didn’t surprise me. “Did you die here?”

He hummed. “I came here from there.”

“That sounds like a yes.” He might choose to Mickey Mouse around with the idea of death, but I wasn’t inclined to float around fooling myself. Maybe there was a part of me left alive over there, but for now, I was as good as dead and just as hampered.

“It’s easier for me in this spot,” he agreed. “Feel the wind.”

Martin drifted into meditation. His near constant singing became a buzzing.

I watched in silence. The edge didn’t attack him, nor did it expand to allow him more freedom. Martin’s life force didn’t exactly drift over to the other side either, but he didn’t appear to be trying very hard to go anywhere at all.

It’s easy to be patient as a ghost. You really don’t have a lot of appointments to keep. I didn’t feel the wind at first, mainly because I wasn’t paying attention and didn’t have much use for air. But as I watched Martin and the canyon, the tiniest bit of a living breeze slipped through to our side. Martin sucked in the air and puffed it out carefully, in rings.

Now he was singing in smoke signals?

Since there was no sense in wasting the energy, I hungrily enveloped the bits of warmth and air that drifted my way.

“You blend with it,” Martin intoned. “You sing to the earth, and she brings you treasure. You sing to the weave, and it accepts you.”

“I’m not the weave.”

“But it knows you.”

“And it hates me,” I muttered.

Martin was not deterred by my lack of enthusiasm. With nothing better to do, I tried shaping my form to match that of the weave. Maybe it liked thread. I could look like a bunch of strings. Of course, it wasn’t all that easy, and with my eyeballs stretched into a thin line my vision was warped, but anything to tame the lion.

Then again, Martin still held his shape except he was thinner. He rarely bothered with legs or arms, even now. He was a very utilitarian ghost. He didn’t waste energy, unless you counted his singing.

I was pretty sure the weave would not appreciate my singing. But what did it want from me? Nothing. I had nothing to offer.

Stretched out as I was, for the first time ever, straying fabric wasn’t slashing at me. I still couldn’t penetrate it, though.

I pulled my head together, but like Martin, I kept the rest of me bottled into a small space. Less of me to be available for the cutting block.

Martin breezed back and forth, dancing to his chant. After a bit, I noticed that he ebbed and flowed with the fabric of the weave. He drifted closer and then floated away. The weave often gave way before him, creating a space. Anytime it did so, the fabric was temporarily thinner as it stretched.

I stopped watching him and watched the steel bands. In the past, I had worried only about it coming after me or how close it was or wasn’t. The weave was very elastic, but because it flowed, it also resembled running water. It billowed past at a steady rate, bobbing in and out, over and across, and up and down.

Whenever Martin drifted close, it flowed
around
him rather than attacking him, but like real water, since he floated slowly, the weave didn’t splash against him. It just thinned, making room until the flow became more uniform.

The breeze from the canyon, with all its wonderful desert smells, came through every time the weave was sheer enough. The sounds of birds could be heard, a caw here, a twitter there.

No wonder Martin never had to spend his time hunting energy. He was perfectly capable of meditating his way around the edge, collecting whatever he needed. In this remote area, there was no one on the other side to see or disturb him.

The thought was a magnet for trouble, or perhaps my intuition worked better with my essence all tucked into my head. A sound, a different pressure, something was behind me.

I spun sideways, accidentally ricocheting off Martin. He nearly smashed into the weave. My bounce sent me flying over the hellhound, but barely.