Magick Rising (15 page)

loving relatives, most ghosts are prisoners, and usually of themselves.

Murder victims who can’t release their fury at their unfair end. Victims of

loss who won’t let go until they find something long gone. Greedy spirits

who would rather guard treasures even in death than admit they were

mistaken to hoard it in life, or confused spirits who can’t recognize that their

time here ended long ago.

Ghosts embrace their helplessness,
become
their helplessness, until it

tethers them into place like invisible manacles. Fury. Loss. Greed.

Confusion.

And guilt.

Guilt must be the chain that imprisoned Richard Pemberley.

Some spirits cling to their own remorse so desperately, they think it’s

their route to absolution instead of their prison cell. It’s as if they can’t

change the past, so they do penance by punishing themselves. I wondered

what Richard had done that he could never, never forgive himself?

Worse, I had to figure him out in order to somehow ease his guilt, send

him away. Away to where he really belonged.

Away from me.

That shouldn’t be
so
hard, right? I barely knew the . . . ghost.

“You realize I’m going after her anyway.” I tried for my usual casual

competence and, for some reason, only managed hopeful uncertainty. “I

can’t not try. And it sure would help if before we—I mean, if you’d tell me

what I’m up against.”

For the first time since the verandah, he dropped his hold on me. He

also turned his back, his shoulders stiff. I could see that the torn back of his

vest had a strap that should have tied but hung loose. It struck me as sad,

that little extra touch of disarray on so formal a man. Worse, for a moment I

feared that he would vanish, and I felt a rush of preemptive loss at the idea

of it. Because whether I barely knew him or not, he
did
matter.

He mattered a lot more than any ghost should to someone whose job it

was to eventually send him on.

I stepped after him, placed a hand between his shoulder blades, and

tried not to take it personally when he flinched. “Please help me do this?”

“You do not know,” he announced tightly, away from me, “what you

are asking.”

Which was probably true. “So explain it to me,” I pleaded.

He turned back, and now
I
almost flinched from the misery on his

handsome, haggard face. “You will hate me,” he whispered.

“I doubt that.” I offered my hand, but he just stared at it. I said, “I don’t

even hate Lance.”

His eyes closed with his rueful laugh at my admittedly weak joke. But

when they opened, I saw his resignation. “I shall hold you to that.”

And he took my hand.

Even braced, I felt his guilt. But I also felt—frighteningly,

happily—that he cared about me, too.

That moment, when his fingers curled around mine, is when I really

sensed how deep I was getting here, how dangerous my evening had

become.

But it wasn’t the danger of ghostly violence that made my heart ache.

“Not here,” Richard warned, glancing over his shoulder at the house

and whatever she-demon lurked within. “Let us walk to the beach.”

We weren’t far from the Gulf of Mexico—the whole island of

Galveston is only 3 miles across at its widest point. I nodded and let him put

my hand on his arm so we could stroll like people used to do back in the day,

but it only lasted until we met our first passerby.

Then my hand fell, right through where Richard had been—still was,

actually, but suddenly incorporeal.

“I think,” he explained, “that their inability to see me counters your

ability to do just that. Your spirit sight gives me substance. But the

converse . . .”

Damn. We had to walk side by side, instead—sometimes catching each

other’s hands when, literally, nobody was looking.

Walking with Richard felt . . . formal, yes. But that formality, his

unwillingness to open up to me, soothed me with an honesty I hadn’t

expected. Before, I’d always looked for a guy with a great sense of humor

and a quick wit, which is why I’d been so easily drawn in by Lance

Charming. Lance had been everything I’d asked for and nothing that I

needed. At Richard’s side, letting him just stay silent for a few blocks, I

began to wholly appreciate what people mean when they say that still waters

run deep.

Here was an old-fashioned gentleman who placed himself between me

and passing traffic as if guarding me were his job by default—just as he was

doing with Manon and the house. As frustrating as it was for him to

question my right to endanger myself for the greater good, I also felt

surprisingly . . . cherished.

Near as I could tell, his reasons for talking to me had less to do with his

own selfish needs than with helping me, protecting my well-being . . . even if

his confessions might ease his own guilt and, in doing so, loosen whatever

chained him here.

So whose well-being hadn’t he managed to protect?

“You died in the 1900 Hurricane, didn’t you?” I asked. A few more

blocks of this easy, formal silence, and I wasn’t sure I’d have the

self-discipline to focus on my job.

He surprised me by saying, “Not exactly.”

I stopped. But—his dress, while timeless enough to pass for other eras,

did especially fit the turn of the century. What with the sand on his pants, the

water-stained clothing, and his unshaven chin, he’d obviously been through

something
rough. “Then how?”

“I should tell this from the beginning.”

Was it wrong to hope that this would be a long story, to extend our

evening together before I would have to . . . ? But I didn’t want to think

about that. It wasn’t even evening, yet. We had plenty of time.

“That’s probably best,” I half-teased. “From the beginning.”

So tell me, he did.

Richard’s abashed description of his “wild” youth had nothing on the

Spring Break crowd, but in his time, values had differed. What little he told

me of the vivacious Manon Boulanger made him blush, which made me like

the sociopathic ghost even less. He described ending their relationship, her

shit fit, and the day of missives. He had, he admitted, abashed, seen but not

truly marked the storm flag.

“I woke the next morning,” he continued, “to encroaching water. It did

not trouble me. Locals called such floods ‘overflows,’ part of island living.

“I’ve no idea how I happened to see Georges Boulanger’s buggy

heading for the wagon bridge to the mainland. Perhaps I looked out my

window at the exact right time. But see it I did, its roof down to avoid being

upset by the wind, weaving against the gales even so, and I intercepted it.

“You see, Manon was not with him . . .”

He’d run down the flooding road, its uneven paving of huge wooden

beams seemingly made to trip the unwary pedestrian. He’d shouted after the

carriage, his words stolen by the squall. Only when Boulanger’s team of

matched bays balked at flying debris had Richard managed to catch up.

“Where is your daughter, sir?” he’d demanded, squinting upward

through the driving rain. Run-off soaked his shoes and wicked up his pants

legs.

“Her, she does not leave her room. She pines. She cannot face the

world,” admitted Boulanger with a Gallic shrug. “She is headstrong that girl,

n’est ce pas
?”

And her father was
leaving
? “With all due respect, sir, you cannot desert

her. Not with a storm coming!”

“She shall be fine. Two of our servants have stayed.”

They drove on, left Richard with rain pelting him like hail. Behind him,

an upstairs window—blown from its sill—smashed to the street below.

He wondered if Boulanger had taken this route on purpose, but that

was absurd. Boulanger could easily have knocked on his door rather than

leaving this meeting to chance. He displayed no concern despite the fact he

left a young woman, his own daughter, to fend for herself in an increasing

violent storm.

A lady, even one Richard found increasingly distasteful, ought not be

left alone in such weather.

Still, this was no more business of his. He couldn’t dismiss the idea that

Manon was manipulating him in some way. Her letters were so obsessive in

her demands, so confident that he could not resist her. They’d almost

felt . . . threatening.

No. He could not let Manon or her father’s careless execution of his

responsibilities trap him into going to her now that he was finally clear. He

wouldn’t
.

Instead, when two friends found him and suggested a streetcar ride to

see the waves, he joined the crowd. The surf forced the car to stop blocks

from what had been the beach, but even so far from the water’s edge, what

looked like snow flew in white handfuls across the ground, resolving itself

into sea foam. Brown, angry waves leapt in blasts higher than tall buildings.

As if the sea would not stop at the beach . . .

“I WONDER,” MUSED Richard now, slowing his step. We had crossed

the busy Boulevard to stroll along the Seawall. It ran eight miles along the

currently tranquil Gulf with concrete steps occasionally leading down to the

rocks or narrow strips of beach fifteen feet below. I took the first set of

steps we reached, which so late in the season provided shelter against most

unseeing eyes, and finally took my escort’s arm again.

There, that was better. The passing cyclists and skateboards up top had

seemed surreal, against my escort’s tale, anyway.

Richard didn’t draw away from my touch. “I’ve often wondered how

things might have changed, had I gone to Manon earlier. Or had I never

rejected her in the first place. Or had I not led her on.”

“You can’t blame yourself.” I meant that literally. Blaming oneself was

one of the heaviest chains with which a ghost could fetter himself to our

world. “You weren’t her fiancé or even her beau, anymore.”

Not that I had personal reasons for wanting to believe that the end of a

relationship equaled the end of one’s responsibility toward the other person.

And yet . . . ?

Holding on to this man’s solid, steady arm, I wasn’t thinking a lot about

Lance. Richard’s stiff, proper posture made something as simple as the way

he tucked my arm closer to his side feel like a full-on hug. That reminded me

of kissing him, only hours ago.

When he turned his head toward me, I saw the pain in his gaze and felt

frivolous to have even been thinking of kisses.

“You weren’t responsible,” I insisted, and in his case, I believed it

completely. No one who could feel that much pain and guilt could ever have

been truly responsible for something horrible.

He eyed me now, still in profile but his eyes cutting down to me. “Of

course I can. You have no idea what happened.”

“She died in the hurricane, right? She stayed behind just to spite you,

and she died with the thousands of others, and you both think you’re to

blame.”

Even a spoiled beauty like Manon deserved my sympathy. A girl should

be able to throw a fit without dying for it. But that made her a victim of the

storm not of the man—the ghost—beside me.

I would find a way to help her move on, to help them both move on.

But I was increasingly reluctant about that second part! In fact, as we

watched the Gulf in the orange sunset, soothed by the cry of gulls, the

rhythm of the surf, I leaned my cheek against Richard’s shoulder. He let me.

But he said, “We think we are to blame because we are to blame.”

Oh really? “Then tell me.”

“I still remember that afternoon as nighttime,” he admitted softly. “Full

dark took the island as the storm swallowed us. The Gulf to the south and

the Bay to the north met, deadly even in the middle of the island, destroying

buildings at the edges.

“I first took shelter at a friend’s home. We dragged in strangers who

were being pummeled by the wind whenever we could until perhaps ten of

us were trapped upstairs by a rising tide that filled the parlor, the kitchen.

And yet, in such perilous conditions, I could not forget Manon. At the time,

I blamed my own guilt, my own . . . honor.”

Watching him from his shoulder, I saw him curl his lip in self-disgust.

“Each hour we expected the storm to pass. Each hour, we saw it

become unimaginably more fierce until, unable to bear my imagined guilt, I

knew I must go to my damsel in distress.

“I had to climb out an upstairs window—the press of water locked the

downstairs doors as surely as that of a prison. So I jumped. Even as I landed,

stumbled, and went under, I recognized my recklessness. But the maelstrom

washed me immediately away from my shouting friends, away from the

groaning building even as it floated dangerously off its foundation—then

collapsed inward, no longer structurally sound. I tried to get back to them,