Ghost Shadow (Moon Shadow Series Book 4) (3 page)

Despite the danger, I puffed myself backward, stealthy as a ghost.

The edges of this demon were dark, especially around the knobs on the head. The slobbering beast was obviously very hungry. Hopefully it was inexperienced enough to ignore its surroundings in favor of digging and tearing at the fabric of the living world.

By my third breath, I had traveled about six feet. And by my third breath, the thin seam the demon was tearing at shone with colors other than gray. There were only a few more layers between it and the living. If the demon was strong enough, he might pop through without peeling further.

I breathed harder and faster, even though it might get me noticed.

The demon discarded strips of fog behind him like a gravedigger depositing soil.

My eyes remained glued to the seam, not only because I wondered how much time was left for my getaway, but because I too was drawn to the world of the living. My hunger wasn’t the same as that of the demon, but there was still curiosity, envy and loneliness.

Half my brain was hoping for a glimpse of life, the other half was gibbering senselessly about escaping. Amid the expanding light behind the edge, I finally glimpsed a washing machine. Piles of sheets in a large commercial laundry hamper waited next to it.

That figures. You spend all your days hungering for the joy and excitement of life, and you get the laundry day from hell, complete with a demon drooling over a few sheets because they happened to be spattered with blood. I absently wondered if the demon would lick up the dots and bloody blobs. Maybe the sheets wouldn’t even need washing after the demon was done with them.

Thankfully, there were no people visible through the faint layers. If a demon was involved and a human was waiting, it was almost always an idiot attempting a demon binding. The power from that sort of thing could suck half of In Between into oblivion, or so Martin claimed.

Since I was already dead, I didn’t know what would happen if I were sucked into a locked pentagon with a demon, but I wasn’t anxious to find out what kind of pain would result.

Just as the blue behind the layer lightened to daylight, a short woman with gray hair trundled into the laundry room with another bin full of dirty sheets.

The demon bounced up and down as if he’d hit the jackpot.

His focus gave me the opportunity to swoosh another three feet away.

Completely unsuspecting, the lady tossed a bundle of laundry inside one of the washers. The edge of one sheet snagged under the black smock apron she wore, but she ignored it and started the water flowing.

The demon howled. Maybe he had intended to lick all the soiled sheets, bloody or not.

The woman twitched and turned to look behind her, but her eyes roved straight past the demon.

The humpbacked monster gave a gleeful chortle and slowly dug a single talon into the last layer of weave as though he were anticipating the feel of her flesh.

It might have been the water rushing into the washer, or it could have been the demon’s foul presence, but the washer in front of the lady began to vibrate. With one work-worn hand she shoved the dangling edge of the sheet into the washer.

The demon sliced into the weave.

I blew out every ounce of air in my ghostly lungs and hit the fog at a dead run.

The sound of the blast hit me first. The white heat took too little time to catch up.

Chapter 2

The backlash from the explosion rolled me like a ball and threatened to scatter me like soot. The torn edges of In Between ballooned away from the blast, roaring with the sound of a thousand winds. Those pieces were my friends, blocking some of the dangerous debris as the demon was rejected and summarily slapped backwards.

Of course, the same thing that saved me might kill me. Anytime I was forced too close to the living world, I relived my death, that moment of shocking, mind-numbing pain when I looked down and I wasn’t anymore. Throbbing pangs radiated from every body part as if sharp sand flowed through my fingers. The ice was a cold that cut. As the hurt melted, nothing remained but sloshing gray.

I started swimming through it, much as I had that first time. The fog this close to the border was in strips, interlaced like woven cloth, entrapping me as the pieces strove to weave themselves back together.

I sucked in air as though breathing, but this time it was in search of the damp smell of In Between. The taint of anything burning would be my only warning if I swam too close to a certain fool demon who had just attempted a trick without enough power to pull it off.

My essence fought to stay in one piece as the torn steely bands wove themselves tighter, heedless of the fact that my misty body parts might be tangled among them. Flowing around the weave required changing shape, concentration and something else, something that was the nature of being a ghost. My soul kept me linked together, but when your eyeballs are squished into a thin rope and sideways, you lose a lot of perspective. If I wasn’t careful, I could accidentally leave pieces behind.

Martin had recovered the missing pieces that first time.

My head snaked into one flat piece. That shape didn’t bother me at all so long as my eyes were in place, returning my ability to see straight. I searched out corners that might hold any color other than gray.

“Crap!” I was still too close to the edge. In the shifting weave, a room became remarkably visible. The view was every bit as sharp as when the weave thinned because someone was about to die. There was no pain, so I hadn’t breached the border, but the pressure was building.

I stared hungrily; I couldn’t resist. Maybe I wasn’t even as close as I had initially thought because the walls were grayish and the light was dim. But, no. The room actually was drab. It appeared to be some sort of medical facility with white sheets, stark walls and a bed with a pink bedspread instead of boring white. A shelf along the wall was full of flowers, a teddy bear, a stoneware pitcher and two rocks.

A dark-skinned girl with braids sat on the bed, her legs crossed and a fierce collection of wrinkles slanting across her lips and forehead. She was maybe eight or ten years old.

She stuck her tongue out at me.

I was surprised, but from the way she stared right at me, it was obvious she could see me.

“Go away, stupid ghost.”

A woman came from around the cloth partition. She held a notepad and pen, but looked up and gave me a half smile of acknowledgment.
Both
of them could see me!

“Everyone thinks it would be so neat to be like a cartoon, seeing ghosts or zapping people with lasers, talking to animals, being cool. It’s stupid. Useless.” The little girl wrapped her arms around her knees and rocked back and forth on the edge of the pink bedspread. “Aunt Brenda, make it go away.”

Her aunt smoothed a hand across the girl’s head. “You need to learn to separate your feelings from theirs. Or are you supposing you can smoke that nonsense your older brother does and that will help you ignore it?”

The girl pulled back from her knees in surprise. “I didn’t say I was going to smoke drugs!”

Aunt Brenda rewarded her with a small smile. “I know. But people do. Sometimes even after they get to be my age when they should know better. They never learned to deal with it. It doesn’t matter if you’re like your ma and can feel what is happening miles away to someone you love or if you’re like me and you can see the ghosts.”

Rock, back and forth.

I felt like a spy. But the girl and her aunt could see me. They had looked right at me and done everything except say hello and invite me for tea.

“Why do they come here?”

Aunt Brenda turned to me. “Do you know why you’re here?”

I shook my head. I raised both hands and shrugged what would have been my shoulders.

“You will figure it out. You ghosts show up a few times. Then you ask.”

“Ask what?” When I spoke, the curtains moved as though there was a breeze, but the window was closed.

The aunt looked back at the girl. “Then you and me, Espy, we decide whether we can help or not.”

“Why do we have to help?” The girl asked the question floating in my own brain.

The aunt reached out a hand in my direction, fingers splayed. She didn’t touch me; she couldn’t and even so, she wasn’t close enough. “Sometimes we are the ones who need help from the other side. So when they ask a favor of us, we try to help.”

Roberto, Martin’s friend, was like Espy, the little girl. Roberto could not only see us, but talk to us and hear our answers. The girl was able to understand me perfectly. The aunt I wasn’t so sure about, but when Roberto had wielded his magic, everyone near Roberto seemed better able to understand Martin and me.

Still, for me to see them this clearly...I panicked. The edge was thin here, probably because the demon had just tried to force himself through nearby.

I swam backwards as fast as my gray could paddle. Predictably, I hit the wall. The woven fog had already started to close with me almost embedded on neither side. I wasn’t some dumb newbie. I knew that when you hit the wall, you bounce. When you bounce you go backwards, right into the firm line that you are not allowed to cross.

The scream peeled back my face. Oddly, I heard the aunt’s pen drop to the concrete floor.

Espy grimaced as though hit by an echo of my pain as I was bounced backwards and away. Something about her sparked a memory of another little girl holding my hand and laughing up at me as I showed her how to twirl a pretty baton, but the thought disintegrated with the rest of me as the weave sliced me to pieces.

Chapter 3

By the time I wafted away from the weave, I was in bad shape. Several parts of me were bruised. Ghosts don’t bleed, but we leak. Don’t ask me; I don’t know much besides the fact that it’s painful, and if a ghost leaks too much, she isn’t anymore.

The structures In Between are mostly what we make of them. A ghost shelter looks a lot like a cairn, little more than a collection of stones where we can hide. Mine was more of a hillside cave, because Martin had been the one to rescue me after my first accident, and he knew all the best spots In Between.

I pulled myself inside my shelter, feeling fortunate the weave hadn’t spit me out into an unfamiliar area. No one knew how big the bubble was because it was elastic, ever-changing and had a wicked boomerang. I’d been lost plenty of times before, and it was the last thing I needed when hurt.

Like lumpy dough, I oozed onto a flat rock that served as a chair, pressing the gray leaks to staunch the flow as I tried to hold myself together. The fog drizzled a misty rain, but once I was inside my protective shelter, it no longer threatened to wash me away.

Rain was good in that things wouldn’t be able to smell and follow me, but bad in that I was chilled. Worse than that, emotional stress caused the fog to echo back my feelings, magnifying them. That left me increasingly miserable by the second.

I wallowed inside the gray blob that was the jacket I had died in, but as I spread thin, I repeatedly had to reel in parts of myself. I rarely ever had feet, but usually had legs.

Tired, I curled into my favorite spot and dozed, wishing I were alive, yearning for the small comfort of a cup of hot cocoa or a friend.

* * *

Martin and Troy were my best friends In Between. Troy was younger than me by six years when he crossed; a car accident that he remembered all too well. He still resembled the healthy seventeen-year-old football player he had been, albeit his best color was now gray. His jeans, jock jacket and t-shirt were as casual as my own denim jacket and jeans. It didn’t matter what we wore anyway. More than half the time we were faces with unformed limbs.

Troy most likely befriended me out of pity. Like another bit of the roadkill he collected, comforted and protected, he mentored me. As I described my latest ordeal to him, I certainly felt like roadkill.

“Man, Shadow, what is it with you and demons?” He hovered near the rock that served as a table inside my cave. I stayed in the corner so he didn’t see the full extent of my latest injuries. We had no need to eat, but we did need energy. Much of it came from slashes of quick light that passed through In Between, but Troy had a habit of bringing bits from the living world; a leaf, grass, roadkill that wasn’t quite dead or other animals that were more than happy to breathe their last bits of life on us before becoming another of Troy’s numerous ghost pets.

He set a smear of mud on the table.

“Did you harvest that from a roadkill?” A bright green blade of grass was embedded in the mud. I needed energy more now than usual, but was loathe to use this particular piece because of its likely origin.

“That’s the easiest way.”

“Gross.” I stared hungrily at the clump of mud, wondering if a ghost could catch a disease from smeared raccoon parts. The latest roadkill ghost, said raccoon, stared up at me and made a chattering noise.

It took a few days of the animals being In Between before I could understand them. Without Troy’s tutelage, I’d never have grasped the concept at all.

“I figured you wouldn’t care for it.” Troy grinned, and from his gray palm produced two juniper needles. “These came from the tree where I brought Coon through. Untouched by any critters unless a bird pooped on them before they fell through.”

Feeling starved, I pushed the best arm I could form towards the pine needles.

He obliged me by dropping them into what would have been my hand had I pulled off forming one.

The pine was still warm, in a living sense, not a heat sense. “Wow! Thank you.” Anything that came from the real world, even if it had been plucked, harvested or died, held some amount of energy. The needles were sharp, tangy and if not alive, they had life energy. It soaked into me, helping heal the throbbing leaks.

“How is Coon doing?” I asked when I finally felt able. Raccoons were all addressed as “Coon,” but the intended one seemed to answer when Troy spoke to him. Out of respect, I directed my question at both Troy and Coon; Troy because his answer would make sense, and at Coon to avoid insulting him.