The mist whipped away from Billy and surged at me, a high-pitched whine suddenly loud enough to make my eardrums ache. The gaping eyes and howling mouths came clearer to me, much clearer as one of the ghosts came at me like it wanted a kiss. Dull cold slid along my cheekbones, fingering a scar on one. I shuddered and stepped back, finding the edge of the cauldron with my heel.
“Joanie, stay still.” Billy’s voice was cold as the dead’s.
I whispered, “They can’t get at me. They don’t like my magic. Just tell me how to banish them and get out of here.”
“Joanne.” Billy had four kids and a fifth on the way, but I’d never heard him employ a Daddy Voice before. Part of me seized up with resentment. My own father and I had an atheistic relationship, which is to say, he’d never quite believed he’d ended up with a child at all. I generally disliked anything that reminded me of that.
The rest of me just seized up because that’s what instinct tells people to do when they hear a Daddy Voice. I stared at Billy, who kept his attention on the mist and spoke through his teeth. “They don’t have to get in you. The longer you’re around them, the more they latch on. The more you move, the more they notice you. The louder you are, the faster they come to you. So shut up.”
I really, really wanted to do what I was told, but his volume had increased all the way through that, and by the time he was done, the party hall was visible again. My sphere contained a cauldron, me and a dense, almost-black cloud where Billy stood. There was no way I was letting him face that alone. I jumped down from the cauldron, took a quick look at the room beyond my sphere—it had cleared out, only Thor and Phoebe immediately visible—and forged into the dark fog that surrounded my friend.
His voice wrapped around me immediately, soft and cajoling, full of sympathy but very firm: he knew I was confused, that I was lost, that I didn’t understand what was happening. All of that was absolutely true, so for a second I thought he was talking to me. At least the mist hid my blush when I figured out that no, he was still talking to the gray goop, and continued to in a gentle murmur. He knew he was a cipher, strange to the living world but safe to the dead, and that his presence gave them comfort.
Comforted wasn’t the word I’d use for the agitation I felt in the fog. It—they—were becoming clearer to me now, easier to read, as though they were remembering more and more of what it was to be human. I could tell at least a few men from women, though the greater part of the mist was still formless, maybe having left their bodies behind so long ago they had no memory of a shape to fill.
I had met the newly dead before, but it was no preparation for meeting the oldly dead. The newly dead, at least the ones I’d met, were pretty cool and collected. It may have helped that they’d mostly been shamans themselves—in fact, the one newly dead girl I’d met who hadn’t been a shaman had been pretty confused, now that I thought about it—but they’d had a sense of purpose and of self, and knew they only had a limited amount of time to impart information to me before they moved on.
The cauldron ghosts had only hate and fear to hold on to. They desired; oh, how they desired. They wanted flesh forms. They wanted vengeance. They wanted freedom, and would do whatever they could to obtain it. Thieving a body from a living soul would do: that’s what the dancers would have provided, if I hadn’t been there. I got a—no pun intended—ghost of an idea of how schizophrenic the dancers would have become, fighting for their own bodies with a plethora of spirits all determined to become the sole resident of their lithe forms. Only the strongest of the invaders would survive, but a few of the jettisoned others would cling to the surface, hoping for a chance to wrest control away. Even from without, their angry will could affect what a host body might do.
And right now they were trying to get inside Billy.
Not all of them. Some were listening to his voice, hearing the guidance he offered them. Those few could be put to rest, maybe because they were too tired of fighting to survive, maybe because they’d forgotten what they were fighting for. A few bits of mist separated from the dark cloud and dissipated, and I imagined I heard a sigh of relief. I shivered and wished them a good journey, wherever they might be going. Maybe to start again; a while ago Coyote’d told me that souls reincarnate. There weren’t that many new ones, although apparently I’d been mixed up fresh: no history of mistakes to weigh me down, but as he’d said, no history of learning experiences to buoy me up, either. But these ones had held on to this world, to their most recent bodies, to something, so long that they’d lost cohesion. They were still energy, the way that spark that made life inside things was energy, but all that was left in them was a craving for a new body.
I couldn’t help wondering if there were enough souls waiting to be reborn to fill all the people in the world, or if tortured ghosts like these left a handful of babies born empty every day. I hoped not. God, I hoped not, but just the idea opened a white-hot door inside me, through which poured the intention to help.
To my complete horror, the mist gave a sonic cry able to scour flesh from bone, and twisted toward that brightness.
The thinnest of it came first, like I’d put up a magnet that pulled filaments toward me. The weakest ghosts didn’t have enough weight to remain firm, and flew through that burning door inside a blink. They hit a flash point as they went, turning from mist to flame and leaving marks on my soul, like the memory of paper curling and drifting to the ground. Stronger spirits, carrying more resistance, followed more reluctantly, but an unburdened sense of relief swept me as some of them passed through into the brilliance. Once or twice an afterimage caught behind my eyes, like the echo of the life that had kept them there. I clung to those, and lost them even as I did: they left nothing, when they burned.
Murk slammed against the door in my mind and filled it, bellowing rage and refusal. The light faded away, blocked by a determination to hold on. Relief left me, joy left me; hell, even my power left me, slamming itself between the blackness and the white door in my mind. Triumph and fury sluiced through me in equal parts before the darkness fell away, and I had the shuddering sensation of a narrow escape. I mumbled, “Idiot,” and staggered a couple of steps before cranking my head up to see how the party fared.
My sphere of protective magic was gone, eaten up by the retreat my power had staged. So was most of the mist, though a few dark clouds still clung to Billy, trailing him like residue from a smoke machine. Thor and Phoebe were still there, and the DJ’s station blared “The Monster Mash,” but the room, so crowded only a minute or two ago, now held only hangers-on, the moral equivalent of ambulance chasers, all staying a safe distance from the center of activity.
Phoebe said what everybody, including those who’d fled, was presumably thinking: “What in hell was that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” I dropped to my knees, then leaned forward on my palms, gasping against the impulse to upchuck again. I could feel ghostly willpower dissolving inside me, resistance to passing on drifting into ash in my bloodstream. More, I could feel the tremendous black weight of the one who’d blocked the door, and the protests of those who’d been left on the wrong side. I curled down even farther, hands made into fists that I rested my forehead against. I felt like crying, and I wasn’t sure why.
Billy put his hands on my shoulders and gently pushed me back until I was sitting on my heels. His gaze was worried but calm, far more reassuring than the wide-eyed hollow look I felt aging my own face. “I haven’t got your Sight,” he said quietly. I could tell he was making his voice a lifeline, something stable to hang on to. Grateful tears welled up in my eyes. “All I see are the ghosts, Joanie, so I don’t know what happened. Tell me what you did. It’s going to be fine.”
“She gave them the light,” Melinda said out of nowhere. A twitch of conflicted gladness ran through me. I didn’t want Melinda and her soon-to-be-born daughter anywhere near the dark magic flowing around me, but it was nice that my friends hadn’t abandoned me when the smart money was on getting the hell out of there. “She opened a door to the light and guided them home.”
“No.” My mouth tasted terrible. I wiped a hand across it, but kept my gaze on