Spirit Ascendancy (34 page)

The energy shifted. Above us, the ghosts that had been swirling like clouds around the eye of a storm suddenly slowed to a stop, hovering motionless in a great canopy of the dead over our heads. And then, slowly at first, then faster and faster, they began to spin in the other direction, breaking the heavy silence as they did so with a deafening cacophony of screams. They reached, with desperate outstretched arms, down toward the Geatgrima which was now forcing them back in great pulsing waves. The glow around it intensified, seeping into cracks and crevices between the rocks, illuminating every tiny gap between the worlds.

“It begins!” Neil shouted, and his expression was sheer maniacal glee as the light from the Geatgrima illuminated his features. “Fail, shall we? You will see now what the Necromancers are capable of!”

I opened my mouth to retort, but was blasted off of my feet as a tidal wave of energy exploded out of the Geatgrima. I sailed through the air and slammed into the castle wall behind me. My vision went white, and then black, and then red, as I put a hand to the back of my head and held it up before my eyes, soaked in my own warm, scarlet blood. I rolled over and stared into another pair of wide, petrified eyes.

“Jess! What are you… I don’t understand!”

Hannah lay beside me, having been thrown to the ground by the force of her own power. She stared at me through features so altered by the energy coursing through her that she was barely recognizable. The only thing more striking than her beauty in that moment was the haunted, terrified look in her eyes.

“You’re here! You’re alive! But…”

“Yes, I’m here.” I crawled across the ground and grabbed for her hand. She clutched at me, and as she did so, a wild pulse of something shot through me, and I felt the pain in the back of my head recede. She had healed me.

“But you were dead! They told me you were dead!”

“They lied to you. It was all a lie.”

I watched the truth sink in, and the realization—the absolute unadulterated horror of the realization—come alive in her eyes.

“What have I done?” she whispered.

We turned as one to the chaos she had unleashed. Wraiths poured from the gaping mouth of the Geatgrima, awash in a flood of purple light that struck like lightening and swelled like fire. It roiled, the ultimate force of nature, across the courtyard and up the walls; a sea of empty eyes and distorted faces and clawing limbs.

The force of it had thrown Finvarra and Milo’s prone figures rolling across the ground like ragdolls. It had sent Finn’s captors crashing through a stained glass window, and now he was army crawling across the ground toward us as though through a hurricane, mouthing words I could not hear over the howling. Only Neil remained on his feet, clinging to the stones of the Geatgrima which shook beneath his scrabbling hands.

I had a moment, no more than a heartbeat to decide what to do.

I looked at Finn, and whatever he saw on my face froze him.

“No.” His mouth formed the word, and it couldn’t have struck me more deeply if he had screamed it in my ear.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

I turned to Hannah. “Call me back.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You can do it. I have faith in you. Call me back.”

And before she could respond, before Finn could do more than reach a hand out toward me, I jumped to my feet and pelted toward the source of our destruction.

They may have been shouting for me. They may have been running after me. I would never know for sure. The Geatgrima gaped wide before me, seeming to open wider as I approached, like it was waiting for me.

Like it had always been waiting for me.

As I ran, I reached down and snatched up the torch, alive with the essence of a thousand trapped souls. I clutched it in my hand, and its solidness in my hand gave me courage, something real to hold on to. I skidded to a halt at the base of the steps and with an almighty heave, I threw the torch deep into the heart of the blinding, violet light.

I sprinted up the steps of the dais, for if I slowed down, if I hesitated for even a moment, how would I have the courage to do what I knew I must?

I raised my arm, the soul catcher glinting in the glow. A single swipe, and I would fly free and through the portal. But then a hand closed violently around my wrist, and I was face to face with Neil Caddigan, his blazing eyes mere inches from my own, struggling violently to shove me back off of the dais.

But Hannah had not just healed me. Hannah had given me strength beyond my own physical abilities. She had given me a power nearly as fierce as her own. And I called upon it now, as I gripped Neil by the arm, as I wrenched his fingers from my wrist, as I shoved him with every particle of strength I possessed through the Geatgrima itself.

I watched as the vortex opened to receive him, in spite of the outward flux of spirits. It seemed that, even as it disgorged its hordes into the living world, the Gateway could not resist taking another into its depths.

And another.

I clenched the soul catcher between my teeth, ripped it apart, and soared upward. Then I envisioned myself, with a thrill of terror, on the other side of the Gateway. I plunged headlong through it and, with every particle of strength I possessed, willed it shut behind me. Everything went still.

I opened my eyes and saw the stars. Thousands upon thousands of them.

They were just as I remembered them, stretched across the sky in a scattering at once random and perfectly ordered.

I looked at them for what felt like a long time, gleaning comfort from the familiarity of the constellations and awe from the sprawling vastness of it all. Then I turned my head and looked to my right.

The broad barren reaches of the Arizona landscape stretched out around me. A dusty, abandoned stretch of highway snaked off into the distance between geometric plateaus of rock, basking in the starlight. The hood and windshield of the Green Monster curved beneath me, cool and firm against my back.

I knew who I would see if I turned my head the other way. My heartbeat rose to a violent gallop as I did it.

My mother was gazing up at the same stars, her expression childlike in its wonder. Her eyes, always bright, seemed a hundred times brighter with the light of countless stars reflected within them. Her hair fanned out around her head, giving temporary order to her usually untamable mass of curls. A single freckle darkened the hollow of her cheek. I reached out to touch it with one tremulous finger.

“Don’t rub it too hard or it might come off,” she said, an old but never tired joke. It never stopped me from stroking her cheek, not even once. I did it now, and felt a long-tightened knot loosen in my chest.

“You’re here,” I said.

“Of course I’m here. Where else would I be?”

“I don’t know.”

A shooting star flitted across the great expanse, and we both watched its progress.

“Did you make a wish?” she asked me.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t think of anything to wish for, just now.”

“Yes. I know just what you mean.”

Her breath, the familiar smell of her, was like oxygen to me. I groped across the rusty old hood of the Green Monster until I found her slender fingers, and wove my own through them. They fit like puzzle pieces. There was something I needed to tell her. What was it? Then I felt an ache in my other hand, an emptiness, and I realized who should have been there with us, all that time.

“I found her,” I said.

“I know. I’m so glad.”

“She’s beautiful. And fragile. And so much more like you than I ever was.”

She squeezed my hand “I know that, too.”

As I spoke of Hannah, a distant echo pressed faintly against my ears. I turned away from my mother and looked off in the distance, down the road, as far as I could see.

A shape darkened the horizon there. It might have been a door.
“What is that?” I asked.

“That’s your way back,” my mother said.

I looked at it again. There was a sound coming from it, reverberating softly along the soft bends in the road. It might have been music. It might have been a voice. It was so hard to tell, and I didn’t want to think too much about it just now.

“I can hear something. There’s a voice.”

“Is there?”

“Yes. Can’t you hear it?”

“No. I can only hear the stars.”

And we listened to the quiet mystery of them, stretched out and singing above us.

 “This is the night I think of when I think of us,” I said.

She turned to me, and her eyes were full of a glistening hope that plucked at the very strings that tied me together. “Do you mean that?”

“Yes. I mean it.”

“Because there were a lot of other nights…”

“Forget about them. They don’t matter. Just this night, Mom. Let this be the night.”

“I love you.”

“I know that, now more than ever. I love you, too.”

“And her…”

“I’ll make sure she knows it. She will know it, in time. And she will love you, too.”

Her hand squeezed mine, and the car seemed to speed beneath us, jetting far beyond the vast spaces of the Arizona night, and I shielded my eyes against the sudden, blinding brightness of the stars, as though they were trying their hand at imitating the sun. We were flying, our hair fluttering out of the open windows. I watched the pavement flash past, imagining, as I did when I was a child, that we were not driving, but flying like birds.

A small smudged face was staring at me from the rearview mirror.

“Mary!”

“Yes.”

I turned to look at her over my shoulder, but the battered back seat was empty. I could only see her in the mirror.

I was suddenly full of hot, bubbling guilt.

“Mary, I’m sorry. I brought you here,” I said.

“I should be here,” she said.

“But it should have been your choice to cross. You, and all those other spirits. But I was afraid, if I didn’t do something, that torch would go out and you’d never be at rest.”

“I know that. We all know it. You saved us, truly.”

“Did I?”

“See for yourself,” she said, and the backseat vanished from the mirror. I was staring instead into some kind of darkened room. I leaned forward for a better look, and the mirror gaped and swallowed me, pitching me, tumbling into blackness until…

I was crouched in a dark, dusty corner. To my right, a brick wall. To my left, a jagged row of laminated book spines. That familiar smell of old, neglected literature was sharp and mildewed in my nostrils.

“Don’t spook them. Whatever you do, don’t spook them out of here, or I’ll never invite you on one of these investigations again.”

I stared around for the source of the voice, but I could see nothing.

“Who said that?” I whispered.

“I did. I said that. Who the hell else would it be? Now be quiet before you screw this up, Ballard.”

I couldn’t pin his voice down to any one place. First it was hissing from behind me. Then it was echoing like it was coming through stereo speakers. Then it was right beside me.

“Where are you, Dr. Pierce?”

“Where am I? I’m right here! Get your head out of your ass, Ballard!”

I stared around and spotted him, smirking at me from the cover of a battered old volume on the Russian history shelf.

“What the hell? What are you doing here?” I asked him.

“Me? I’m dead! I’m supposed to be here! Shouldn’t I be asking you that question?”

I glared at him, not least because I hated the idea of him being dead, and even more he already had the audacity to joke about it.

I sat in silence for several minutes, waiting for something to happen. The library was utterly still, but for the ticking of a clock somewhere, and the dull clunking of a nearby radiator.
“What exactly are we waiting for?” I hissed finally.

The Pierce on the cover of the book rolled his eyes at me. “The door. Look at it.”

I followed his gaze and saw the door for the first time, way at the end of the longest row of books I had ever seen. Surely no library was that big.

“I see it,” I said. “What about it?”

“It’s the focus of the investigation!” Pierce whispered, and suddenly he was no longer plastered on the book cover, but kneeling beside me, eyes trained on the screen of a thermal camera.

“What are we looking for?” I asked him. I stared down at the little glowing screen in his hands, but all I saw was the same scene before my eyes: a long passage ending in a closed door.

“You tell me, Ballard. You’re supposed to be the ghost girl.”

I stared down at the door. It looked completely ordinary. And yet…

“I think I hear something.”

“What do you hear?” Pierce whispered excitedly, and he pulled one of his recorders from his pocket, flicking it on and holding it up to my face.

“It’s difficult to tell. It’s really faint. A voice, I think.”

“Concentrate really hard, Ballard. Can you tell what it’s saying?”

I listened for a moment, and while I did, Pierce held absolutely still. Little red glimmers danced in the dark hair of his beard, reflected up from the recorder’s light. He was smiling like a kid in the glint of his own birthday candles, making a wish he knew would come true.

The voice was repeating something, over and over again. There was a lulling rhythm to it, and it tugged at something inside me.

“I think it’s a song… or a chant…”

“Is it a male voice or a female voice?” Pierce asked.

It was soft. Gentle. Tearful. It was a forlorn, heartsick sound.

“It’s a girl. She’s really sad.”

“But you can’t make out the words?”

“No.”

Pierce clicked the button on the recorder again, and the tiny red light went out. So did all of the light in the library. I yelled as we were plunged into darkness, but stopped almost at once as a desk lamp popped on beside my elbow, illuminating Pierce’s cluttered office.

“Let’s examine the evidence,” he said. He elbowed a stack of books onto the floor to make room for the recorder on his desk. He slid into his rickety desk chair and pulled it in until he was crouched, his nose barely an inch from the little device. He looked up and rolled his eyes at me. “How do you expect to hear anything all the way over there? Get over here and listen!”