WalkingHaunt (3 page)

“Niisa, do you mind if I take a nap?”

“Huh? Oh, no, go ahead. You look tired.”

The shuttle started to move, and Yoh held onto the arms of her chair. The rumbling stopped, and they were sailing with the tug of gravity low in their bellies. They were off the ground, and it wasn’t as bad as Yoh had anticipated.

Niisa looked like an excited five-year-old as she stared out the windows and then back at the data pad in her hands. This was a dream come true for her, and Yoh was happy to be the method by which she got to live it.

“You’re the bastard.” The little girl came up to Yohwen where she played alone on the swings.

“Yeah, so what?”

“What is your name? Mine is Niisa.”

“Yohwen Dahl.”

Niisa sat on the swing next to her. “My mom said that you weren’t a member of the Dahl family.”

“My grandma officially made me a family member.” She jerked her chin high. “I may be a bastard, but I am a Dahl, and there is nothing my dad can do about it.”

Niisa smiled and stuck out her hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

Yohwen blinked and frowned in concentration. “You want to be my friend?”

“Yup. I like your hair.” The smile was guileless and held none of the hidden emotion that Yohwen was used to around strangers.

Yohwen cautiously extended her hand, and Niisa took it.

The dark-haired girl beamed. “We are going to be friends forever. I just know it.”

Yohwen felt something in her life shift. “I think you might be right.”

The rest of the school year passed in a strange haze of Niisa always being at her side. The next year, when new classes and teachers had separated them, Niisa held a protest in the hallway until she was allowed to return to Yohwen’s side. She hadn’t left since.

Healer Debarren touched her shoulder. “Orkill would like to speak to you.”

She sighed and got to her feet. She had been lost in her thoughts for a while. She made her way through the snug halls to the cockpit where Orkill was waiting.

Debarren helped her into the navigator seat, and he left them alone. Yohwen looked out at the stars, and she sucked in a deep breath.

“Oh my.” Until this moment when she looked at the sky, she had seen the energy of the souls of Ysheer. The beauty of the stars and the visible nebulas had escaped her.

Orkill pivoted his seat to face her, and she got nervous. “Don’t you need your eyes on the road or whatever?”

“We are traveling two systems over. The ship has been given our destination and will get us there as quickly as possible. I don’t need to steer.” He smiled for the first time.

Yohwen suddenly recognized that he had been tense on an unfamiliar world, possibly nervous about getting her cooperation.

He lifted a data pad and extended it to her. “This is the contract your grandmother negotiated. Sign it with a thumb and iris scan, please.”

She lifted the pad, and when she got to the amount of funds that had been listed, she coughed in shock. “Wow. Way to go, Grandma.”

Orkill laughed. “You weren’t paying attention?”

Yohwen answered absently, “Naw, when she does her thing, I tune her out.”

He snorted. “How can you tune her out?”

“Years of practice.” When she got to the mention of her return to Wedderal, she sighed in relief and signed.

She handed the pad back to him.

He flicked the screen. “I am registering it at the Citadel mainframe.”

She nodded and stared out at the stars. “Excellent. Wow, do you see this all the time?”

He grinned. “When I am not on active duty. What do I need to know about how you work to make this easier?”

Yohwen looked at him, really looked at him and read the sincerity in his expression. “I umm…it has to be dark or you won’t be able to see those who have come to speak. I need my feet exposed to the ground, and if I am working within a building, I will need a few hands full of local dirt under my feet as a conduit.”

He cocked his head, “Why the dirt or the sand?”

She smiled at the opportunity to educate him. “We are all made of the same stuff as the world we walk on. To draw the soul back from its two-hundred-year orbit, I need a connection to what it once was. In a cemetery, the families are the ties, not the body that has disappeared into dust. With no family, I will use the world itself to call them back, and hopefully, I will call the right one. Any personal effects or identifiers that you can offer me would be most helpful.”

“Fair enough. Why are your eyes orange? Most eyes on Wedderal were dark.”

“Haunts are marked this way by genes of our ancestors. The eyes turn in childhood, and the training begins after they pull their first haunt. It is usually a family member that they bring out, and some do it in a moment of trauma.”

“What was it for you?”

She quirked her lips. “My grandma’s funeral and my half-brother beating me up.”

“Why?”

“For daring to attend. No one was expecting me to summon my grandma, and she tore a strip off him for attacking me. My birth was not of my doing. I had done nothing wrong, and she made sure that the family, and my father, knew it. When her will was read, she put the point home.”

He tilted his head, “How?”

“I am her sole heir. She gave me everything and my father was not very happy with that, so my mother and I bought a nice house in Teeger province, where we lived until she passed way five years ago. I sold it and bought my office.” She smiled. “Thanks to Grandma, I don’t need to work, but it keeps me busy.”

“How did your father take it?”

“Not well. There is a reason we had to move. He’s a real bastard.” She smiled at the memory of his shocked face. Even though she was a child at the time, she had felt the thrill of triumph.

“Sounds messy.”

“It was, but we managed.”

“I know it is none of my business, but how did your mother meet your father?”

She snorted. “They were introduced by one of her friends who did not know that he was engaged. Apparently, he didn’t bother telling anyone that he was marrying to increase the family money.”

“Ouch. So, I am guessing he didn’t greet your arrival with paternal joy.”

“He did not. I was the eldest grandchild by four weeks. Grandma was delighted, and my father was humiliated. I don’t think his wife ever let him forget it.” Her grim amusement made its way over to him.

“What did he do when you were identified as a Haunt?”

“I am pretty sure he threw up. Knowing that I had a built-in means of support in addition to inheriting my grandmother’s money was more than he could deal with. The funeral was the last time I saw him. Why the questions?”

“I am just trying to understand the social structure of your race. It is very complicated. There is a matriarchy but sons can inherit, a direct heir can be skipped in favour of another and Haunts are both desired and pariahs. It is most confusing.” His interest was genuine.

“Ah, perhaps I can explain. In my grandmother’s case, she was made matriarch of her family, head of her family, because of her service to our world. She was made the prime member when it came to financial matters, and she helped all members of the family when they asked. She was queen of the Dahls.” She chuckled.

Yoh explained, “Most families have either a patriarch or matriarch depending on who is the strongest at the time. They can help or hinder any member of their family at will. My father could have been the inheritor and the patriarch when his mother died, but he was a spineless twit who thought only of himself.”

He winced at her harsh assessment of her biological contributor. “That seems a little extreme.”

She smirked, “The first six years of my life my mother had to work three jobs to keep body and soul together. If my father had asked Grandma for support, she would have given it gladly. It wasn’t until she was dying that she and my mother conspired to link me to the Dahl family for my own safety.”

“Why then?”

“School is expensive, and my mother sensed that I would be a Haunt. Educating a Haunt is extremely costly, and she couldn’t do more than she already was.”

“You didn’t get to spend much time with her?”

Yoh chuckled. “I spent every evening with her as she did the books for one company after another. I brought her water, tea and cookies, and we had tea parties on scheduled breaks. It wasn’t the standard upbringing, but we got by, and once the money arrived, she still worked but it was because she wanted to, not because she had to. It was a good lesson.”

“What was?”

“If everything was taken from us, we could start over together and still make a go of it. We could build from nothing, because we never forgot how to work.”

He went silent as he digested what she had said, and he turned back to the stars that elongated as they passed.

Shrugging, Yohwen did the same and admitted that it was a view worth looking at.

Chapter Four

“They named it Raven Touch.” Orkill showed her the world as they glided toward the glowing clouds that surrounded it.

Yoh felt the waves of energy being put out by the exterior shell of the world. “Definitely Ysheer here. There are a lot of them.”

Tears started to trickle down her face, and she turned away from Orkill’s curious gaze.

“What is it?”

“So many children. I am not used to feeling so many children.” She got up and moved to the back of the shuttle.

“Where are you going?”

“I am getting ready to find someone who can tell us what happened here.” She exited the cockpit and headed for Healer Debarren.

He looked up from his deep conversation with Niisa. “Can I help you?”

“Show me those boots.”

He jerked and got to his feet.

Niisa frowned. “What is it, Yoh?”

“Kids, Niis. Thousands of kids.”

Niisa paled and got up to follow her.

Debarren opened the storage box, and he pulled out a parcel marked
in case of emergency apply feet.
He snorted and opened the package, careful not to touch the objects inside.

“Here. Sit, remove your boots and put these on.”

The boots in question were lovely but not practical for running around in the kind of job described to her. “These are…”

Debarren chuckled. “Just slide them on. They will do the rest.”

Yohwen settled on a nearby box of supplies. She tugged off her boots and reluctantly reached for the Masuo. The right boot went on, and she felt a peculiar clasping and release as the surface conformed to her leg. “Weird.”

Debarren smiled, “Now, the other one.”

The second boot went on, and to her surprise, they shifted into replicas of the boots she had just been wearing.

She wriggled her toes, and the Masuo moved with her.

Niisa watched and smiled slightly. “I want some.”

Debarren inclined his head. “I will see what I can do.”

Yoh looked at her friend in surprise. It seemed a courtship of sorts had begun. It was about time. Niisa couldn’t put her life on hold because of Yohwen. She needed a little love in her life. Yoh had her gran and the souls she pulled in. Niisa needed more.

Yoh loved having her best friend with her, but all things had to come to an end sometime. Mind you, a relationship with a man who spent his time in the stars would probably not go over well with Niisa’s mother.

Yohwen got to her feet and imagined contact with the deck plates. The cool metal was touching her an instant later. “Excellent. These will work fine.”

Debarren peeled off his Healer robes and grabbed a suit with its own air supply. “This suit will protect you from anything airborne. The greatest danger is that the pathogen was designed for your race. That will mean that a simple puncture might have you sharing their fate. You need to be careful, and you ladies need to stay safe. The suits can only do half the work, you have to not be stupid.”

Yohwen laughed. “That is very succinct. Don’t be stupid. Excellent. Do the suits go on over our clothes?”

“They do, but not over that jacket.” He held the suit patiently while she took her jacket off, exposing the lacy top underneath.

She folded the jacket and put it on the box next to her then looked at the boots in consternation. “What do I do with the boots?”

As she asked the question, they moved and formed fitted half-socks over her feet. Smiling in delight, she stepped into the thick suit and started to tug it up her body while Niisa got into her own with Debarren’s help.

“We are entering the atmosphere. Grab hold of something.” Orkill’s voice came through the sides of Debarren’s collar.

Yohwen grabbed a strap in the cargo area.

Niisa grabbed Debarren, much to his surprise and delight.

Debarren gripped a strap, and the ship shuddered as it dropped into the atmosphere of Raven Touch.

Niisa seemed content to use him as a balance point as the ship shuddered through the different layers of the sky.

Yoh rocked and twisted with each shift of the metal beneath her. The helmet on the back of her suit smacked her during a few violent shifts, but then, the motion evened out and they were making progress through silent skies.

She finished sealing the suit and waited while Debarren went over the specifics of working the atmospheric filters on the costume she had been given.

“Touching down. The Guardsmen are waiting.”

Orkill spoke through Debarren’s suit again.

Yoh asked, “Doesn’t that get annoying?”

Debarren chuckled. “No worse than him being here in person.”

“I can hear you, Debarren.” Orkill’s voice was wry.

“I know, Orkill. Are we down?”

“Yes. Seal up, I will be there in a moment.”

Healer Debarren sealed Yohwen’s helmet first, and she took a few deep breaths before nodding to Niisa.

Her friend let the Healer seal her up, and he quickly grabbed another helmet that sealed itself to his bodysuit without an additional layer. Yohwen looked at him accusingly and he grinned. “The bonus of being with the Citadel.”

She wanted to snort, but she was in a bubble and wasn’t in the mood to stare at anything that would fly out of her head if she did.