Ghost Shadow (Moon Shadow Series Book 4) (2 page)

“What girl?” I struggled to stay focused on the problem rather than screech at Martin for dragging me into a mess, one that I didn’t understand and probably couldn’t fix. “Does she have a soul?” I was not about to bring anyone back here without a soul. Wouldn’t that be like rescuing a vampire? Or was that like creating one? No…

Thankfully Martin interrupted before my mind walked off any deeper into crazy. Roberto translated Martin’s blur of words. “Soul, yes, she has one, but she’s still alive on this side and her soul needs to come back here. She can see the—” Roberto shrugged again.

There were a million questions, but from the way the wisps were starting to separate, I didn’t need to be told we were out of time. “Martin, we can look for the girl on this side, and maybe we can help, but why did you call me here?”

“The bloodstone.” It was Roberto who answered since Martin was now nothing more than an arm attached to a fast-fading light that might have been his chest. “He thinks he can use the bloodstone’s energy to help her.”

I didn’t generally carry the green and red stone around, but the last time I had talked to Martin, he had felt me using the bloodstone here. In short, I wasn’t likely to ever come to Tent Rock without it.

Bloodstone, or heliotrope, carried natural powers for healing, especially of blood or circulation. It also aligned and healed a person’s energy. Its lesser known use included an ability to call storms and hold the power of the wind. Wind magic had the power to carry messages into the past or future because wind had been there before and could go anywhere without the check of time. Maybe heliotrope had some power in the realm of the dead.

The particular stone Martin asked for was one he had harvested from Mother Earth when he was still alive. It held Martin’s magic, my magic, White Feather’s magic and my best friend’s water witching magic.

Only a fool would give up an object of such power, but it was out of my backpack and on my palm without hesitation. Martin may have been an obnoxious drunk while alive and a pest after he died, but he had given me the stone without strings attached, and later he had given his life to save us.

“I give this without restraint, freely—”

Martin’s shriek split my oath. I nearly dropped the stone to cover my ears. White Feather shifted the breeze in an instinctive reaction to save us from danger even though the peril seemed to be limited to a caterwauling meant to serenade a banshee. My ears rang in protest.

Roberto said, “He says I can give him the stone because I can reach across. But it needs your earth magic to push through the connection.”

“Since I have no idea how to give it to him, I’m glad you do.” I turned over the stone. White Feather moved from behind to beside me, barely restraining himself from protectively elbowing me out of the way. I saw his mouth move, but couldn’t hear the words.

Maybe my sudden deafness was due to the ringing in my ears, but that made no sense because I had no trouble hearing Roberto when he yelled, “Hey, wait!”

Martin shouted back. They both had a hand on the stone. Martin’s energy might be weak, but it certainly wasn’t dead yet. Where he touched the stone, his hand was gray and nearly solid.

“Leggo!” Roberto screamed. His fingers turned an odd gray color, drained of blood.

Martin wailed in response, a horrific sound that not only echoed, it knocked rocks loose.

Roberto bellowed back, jerking his hand.

Lynx grabbed Roberto’s free arm and pulled, but the mist snaked up Roberto’s graying arm like a giant glow worm intent on devouring dinner. Inch by inch, it sucked Roberto into Martin’s world. He was turning into a corpse before our eyes.

“Uh, Martin…”

Eyes rolled across the fog. “Eneergy…feed earth.”

“Unless you want someone else to join you who doesn’t belong there, let him go,” I shouted.

White Feather sent a stiff breeze into the fog that was Martin, but the wind just crossed through him as though he wasn’t there.

I reached for the stone, anchoring myself to Mother Earth. White Feather knew the second I grounded, and he grabbed me around the waist. If he yelled instructions, I couldn’t hear them. In this strange place, warped with the magic that Roberto used, I could hear Martin more clearly than my living friends.

As soon as my magic touched the stone, I saw Martin clearly. He was gray. Everything was gray except the pulsing green and red of the bloodstone. His dead fingers were wrapped around it, but Roberto’s hand was still stuck to it.

“Let it go,” I commanded.

“I can’t,” Martin replied. His eyes were no longer sparks. They were just transparent gray that held a human panic and a sadness that hadn’t been there when I last saw him.

My magic pulsed against the bloodstone. No way would I physically touch it. I could feel White Feather, his strong arms holding onto me.

Could I call the bloodstone back? Martin had called it across. His earth magic was stronger than mine…well, it might have been in life. Mine would be the stronger now.

There were no tools to use here. Though I could still feel my earth magic, Martin was right. This place pulled at the stone, at me, at Roberto. It pulled at Life.

It could have the stone and what it held, freely given, but it couldn’t have Roberto. He didn’t belong there and neither did I.

I had learned to manipulate pieces of Mother Earth, but I wasn’t proficient and had only practiced with silver. “Bloodstone.” I called the stone anyway. Blood was the tie to human life. There was no need for blood in this colorless place, especially Roberto’s.

The crimson specks answered, responding to my pull, shifting forward, like to like. The drops of bright red swelled under Roberto’s fingers. I reached out and gingerly touched his shoulder, a part of him that hadn’t yet turned ashen.

With a sucking, popping crack, the red separated from the green. I pulled harder, trying to draw them to us, to Roberto, to earth.

A gray blob rose up behind Martin, a mass I had thought was a rock or just another shadow. As I pulled, Martin came forward, suspended halfway between his world and mine. With the draw of magic, his arm glowed and radiated ever closer to Roberto’s shoulder and my hand.

The gray apparition darted forward. My grunt of warning came too late.

The shape collided with Martin. As it touched his shoulder, it turned into a hand. The blob resolved itself into a woman. She was as colorless as he, but there was an odd iridescent shimmer about her. Snippets of energy occasionally pulsed across her, relieving the unrelenting gray.

“It’s the girl!” Lynx shouted.

As she knocked into Martin, he flew backwards, still grasping the stone.

The force of his pull would have drawn me and my magic forward if not for White Feather’s strong hold. With a muffled plea, I reached my free hand to White Feather’s arm around my waist. Our rings touched and sparked. I clung to him and kept my grounding to earth, tugging at Roberto and the bloodstone with everything I had in me.

The woman’s eyes burned straight through me, a flash of blue, just before a maelstrom of colors burst across the dead landscape, blinding me. I lost my grip on Roberto and fell back so fast, there was no time to brace myself for the impact.

I couldn’t be certain whether I’d been sucked in or pushed out until White Feather groaned underneath me.

“What the hell was that?” he muttered, spitting sand.

I blinked, wondering just how hard I’d hit my head. Everything around me was a mix of dark shapes looming, waiting to attack.

No, wait. Like fools we were running around Tent Rock at midnight. I tried rubbing my eyes, but other than grinding sand into my skin, it accomplished nothing.

“Dead witches are the worst,” Lynx said right before dropping a whimpering Roberto next to us.

“Do you have a light?” I demanded.

“What for?”

“Lynx, not everyone can see as well as you do in the dark. Or in the light for that matter.”

“Light will just draw attention to this mess.”

White Feather turned on his flashlight. Roberto was shaking like a leaf. He stared at me in horrified silence as though the situation were all my fault.

“You okay?” I sat up and felt for my own head. Sand coated me from head to toe. Being washed in desert must be a prerequisite of the magic here.

Roberto stared down at his hand. I turned it to face the light. He said something, but the magic had shut down, whatever kind it was he wielded. I could no longer interpret his words.

Lynx tilted his head, and asked, “What happened to the rest of the stone?”

I picked up the nugget from Roberto’s palm. “Martin has it. Only the red part crossed back with us. There isn’t a hint of green left in the piece.”

Roberto nodded. He found the strength to stand and began signing frantically at Lynx.

White Feather said to me, “Can you hear me at all?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Martin’s gone. I couldn’t hear you while Roberto was holding open the link. He included me somehow.”

“That must be why you ignored my suggestion that you not go after the bloodstone.”

“Probably,” I hedged.

“And the reason you ignored me when I told you to stop pulling on the stone.”

“How did you know I was pulling on it?” We both stood and brushed uselessly at the sand.

He grunted. “I could push wind into it, but not pull it back. I could feel you there as if I were pushing wind at you. You weren’t listening to me.”

I leaned over and picked up my backpack. “Thanks for holding on to me.”

He reeled me in close. Lips against mine, he said, “Always.”

Lynx said, “Roberto wants to know if you can find the girl.”

White Feather sighed.

“Good question,” I replied. “I don’t think we can find her tonight.” Since I hadn’t recognized her washed-out features and had no idea how to bring her back across if we found her, I had a bad premonition that locating her was only going to be the beginning of our problems. “Maybe now that Martin has the stone, she’ll be fine.”

Roberto signed something, but Lynx was too busy staring where the ghosts had been to bother translating. “We’ll need to find her to be certain.” His ears swiveled once, hearing things only a cat could hear. “I wonder who she is and how she got stuck there.”

No way to know right now. She hadn’t left a calling card. Martin wouldn’t have the energy to reappear and I didn’t want to be here if he did.

I had no way to know that Lynx and Roberto would keep looking without us. Only a fool would delve into something so dangerous.

Chapter 1

When I first died, thoughts of revenge consumed me. I knew how it happened, but had to guess at the why. The guy who killed me hadn’t paid for the crime. Not that I knew whether or not he had been arrested for my death, because I was too busy trying to survive In Between. No matter. He had not paid the correct price including change—because death was the ultimate price.

Yeah, it’s like you’ve heard. Some people cross over completely. I see them sometimes. They slide through in a daze, not seeing, not knowing where they are. Others stare right at me and nod, as though we’re passing on a street. Some of them look right through me like the ghost that I am.

But there are other people here too, as well as other creatures: spirits, monsters, ghouls, imps and even demons. The demons don’t belong here. They spend all their time plotting how to cross through In Between to reach the world of the living. Most of them get spit back so fast it causes a weird bending in the bubble, one that burns them and everything around them. The blue-white flame either ends the horned beasts or sends them back where they came from.

It’s safer to avoid the edges of In Between, even the one leading to my old haunting ground, pun intended. For some reason, at that edge, I can usually peer through the opaque flesh of the barrier right into the slightly distorted view of my former world. I can see where I used to exist and where I’d much rather be.

Spirits and demons can sometimes force open those edges, and I didn’t want to be where I was right now because a demon was busily cutting through the weave.

I held myself as still as only a ghost can be, but even in In Between there are drafts.

This demon wasn’t close to humanoid; it was of the young, not very powerful variety, but old enough that fire licked the edges of its form. When demons lacked power, they were harder to see in the gray of In Between because instead of bright demon-red or lots of flames, they were more of a curdled dried blood color with a black shadow radiating outward.

This one was pushing at the weave, scratching along the surface with sharp claws, trying to puncture the barrier separating us from the world of the living. I couldn’t decide whether to remain frozen or float backwards. If it detected me I’d be toast, but if it broke through the edge with me this close, the backlash would sear right through me.

I gathered myself downward into a crouch, determined to be nothing more than my name suggests. I have no memory of my living name, but Shadow fits the ghost that I have become.

Ghosts don’t sweat, but we get the shakes. The tremors ate at my concentration.
How long did I have to escape?

The demon peeled back another layer of foggy fabric separating In Between from the living world. He gurgled with delight and then let loose a screeched pitch that sounded like raw metal scraping on asphalt. He dug his claws in again, drooling liberally. His fetid breath was a rotting odor so foul, it was a good thing ghosts didn’t need to breathe.

I floated to the right, hoping to slide outside his peripheral vision. How the beast was able to tear away layers as thick as pig fat and at least as stubborn as alligator skin was beyond me, but I’d seen the results and been too close to the backlash once before. The damage nearly killed me. I had drifted aimlessly, barely able to move, trying not to hurt for at least a week. If Martin hadn’t found me and dragged me to a safe place...I didn’t want to think about what monster might have claimed me for a snack.

Breathing did nothing for my survival, and it wasn’t the fastest way to move either, but it was my best choice now. Sucking in air and pushing it back out might gain the attention of the demon because breathing belonged to the world of the living, and demons fed on anything with life—or even those that had once been alive.