Ghost Shadow (Moon Shadow Series Book 4) (13 page)

Troy flinched when the dog touched him. He stopped, momentarily confused, but then refocused on his goal.

If I could somersault over her arm and grab the ring on the way...I’d land in the lake. The lake was dangerous, but it might be the only chance we had.

Because the fog muted most sounds, we were all equally unprepared when the strumming of the song,
Stairway To Heaven,
floated across the water.

I wasted a millisecond scanning the black surface, but there was nothing out there. When I finally whirled sideways, I saw Kyle, the musician I’d recently escorted, perched on the outcropping of rocks that bordered the lake. “Kyle!”

He strummed his guitar, the haunting tune floating across the gray. The blankness on Troy’s face was replaced by realization for half an instant.

Amy’s hand was still beckoning him, her fingers extended. It was now or never.

“Aaaaaaawk!” The scream jarred me almost as much as the music had, and Kyle hit a wrong note, but to a man, we looked up.

The hawk dove so fast, it took precious seconds for me to realize it had slammed into Amy’s hand and either pried the ring loose or ripped her finger right off.

We all pounced towards the prize and ghost or no, I bet Troy and I earned perfect Olympic scores that rivaled the hawk’s dive.

The ring was tuned to Troy, spiraling his way in the fog even as he reached for it. His hand wrapped around the ruby.

Amy may have been closest to it, but my foot snapped energy against her knees.

She tilted over, knocked flat. Stunned from the loss of the ring, she stayed that way.

As I rolled to my feet, her wide eyes stared up at me in horror. Her hair began to fade, losing the individual strands and waves, but despite only a blobbing mass atop her facial features, her beauty remained.

Her hand clenched and unclenched, missing a finger and more importantly, missing the ring. A strange darkness flickered around her edges like a black flame, reminding me of the blood in Espy’s IV. Was Amy part demon? Was that how she marked Troy, leaving a demon mark, but not one that Cinderspark had recognized immediately because Amy was part human too?

Kyle continued to play, while off in the distance, something joined in. Discordant violin shrieks sliced across Kyle’s music, nearly breaking his melody in half. He missed more than a note, but manfully he held the tune, and played even louder.

Amy screamed, writhing in agony.

I backed up more than one step. Kyle began sinking into the rocks.

Amy shouted, “Give it back! You wanted me to have it! It keeps me hidden from him! You saved me!”

She was suddenly crawling, stalking Troy. Flashes of dark flickered along the veins of her ghostly arms, neck, and even her face. Like the tarnished band on Troy’s finger, the elongated patches were a dark glow that surged through her bloodstream. She had been marked by something, and it had expanded much further than the small mark Troy had on his hand.

Without the ring, her real essence was no longer hidden behind stolen energy.

Troy ignored her and touched my arm briefly. “Time for me to take the next train out. I should have left right after I made my peace dirt-side. Take care of my friends for me, please? I owe them, big time.”

What was a ghost like me supposed to do with a ragged menagerie of animals? I barely understood only the most obvious chatter.

I nodded my agreement anyway. He had guided them here, and now they were repaying the favor. I was a poor substitute.

“And tell Cinderspark goodbye and thanks?”

I nodded again, but knew I wouldn’t see her again. My throat hurt, my heart hurt and there was no way for a ghost to relieve it all with tears.

Troy held up his fist, clenching his ring.

Color
! I stared at the deep ruby glow, barely hearing the fading sounds as Kyle finished
Stairway To Heaven
.

A tiny spark drifted down, and then Troy was gone.

Chapter 16

The howling threat of the hounds gave my feet wings. I dove for the rocks, hitting the spaces and oozing in like water down a drain. The tattered ghost animals must have disappeared with Troy because the only one that was close on my heels was Spook.

Amy knelt at the water, her hands spread in an awkward circle shape. She shouted, “There isn’t time! I need to cross now! It will be temporary, I promise!”

Kyle was already tucked inside the cavity with me, his guitar returned to the case resting comfortably across his back.

There was another odd screech of distorted violin chords and then a cackling laugh from hell.

After that, there was blessed silence if you ignored the howling of the hounds.

“What was that?” Kyle demanded.

I started to explain about the ring and Troy, but midway through he interrupted, “No. I meant that violin. Can music die? Because it sounded like it was dying.”

“Oh.” I shuddered. The sound of bent strings had been like a giant spider in my ear, a gross mobbing of something I wanted to claw out. “I don’t know. That noise was here at the lake before, remember? When you first came through.”

“Not like that.”

He was right. The instrument hadn’t been that horrifying before. It had been a threat, but not a lethal promise. “How did you find us? How did you know what to do?”

He stared at me, a blank expression on his face as though he were elsewhere. After Spook nudged his hand and gave it a ghostly lick, he said, “I come here to play and watch the mermaids that look like my wife. I know they aren’t really Paula, but I’m afraid I’ll forget her.”

“Why don’t you watch your wife instead?”

He sighed. “It hurts too much. She needs to...she’s still alive. She needs to find someone else.”

I understood all too well. “Don’t we all.”

“How? How do we do it? Do I just wait like that Troy guy and disappear one day when the time is right?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Some of us seem to have a purpose, like Troy. But he did what he needed to, and apparently he would have gone sooner except that Amy had his ring. He was stuck here feeding her.” I shivered again, my form threatening to break apart from fear and disgust.

“Why is that Amy chick here? Why are you here?”

“I don’t know.” Spook put his head where my lap would have been had I bothered to form legs. I gave him a pat.

Kyle swung his guitar onto his lap, but left it in the case.

“Is there something you need to do? Here? There?” I asked.

“There were a lot of things I needed to do there,” he said bitterly. “Like raise my little girl. Play my music.”

“Martin would tell you to play, then.”

“What good does it do here?”

“I don’t know that, either. But he’d tell you that if you were supposed to play, to keep playing. That’s what he does.” Even as I said it, I realized the truth of it. “He was of the earth there, so now he’s of the earth here. He just keeps right on being Martin.”

“What about you?”

“Well, there’s a real mystery.” Since we had nothing but time to kill until the hellhounds found a more interesting scent to track, I told him what Martin had said about me not being dead. “But I don’t know if it matters. I’ve been practicing nudging the edge, but so far as I can tell, there is no way back over even though my body is in a coma in the hospital.” I frowned. “I don’t know how I ended up here either. I was running from something, something like Amy, that was trying to harvest my life force. But now almost everything I meet makes a grab for whatever is left of me. I’m not sure it’s an improvement.”

“You might go back?” He stared at me hungrily.

“No one knows. Least of all me.”

“But if you do, then you can deliver a message for me. Right?”

I’d been worried he somehow wanted to piggyback or take my place. Compared to those things his request was an easy one. “Well, sure. But, Kyle.” I held up a hand. “No one knows how to return dirt-side.”

He nodded, but instead of losing hope, he strummed his suddenly available guitar and sang, “You can’t go back home.”

Unfortunately, I couldn’t even remember home, so he was more right than he knew.

Chapter 17

As soon as we were able to leave the cairn, I headed for Troy’s tree. Long before it was visible, I knew it was too late.

My throat caught, and I halted as the fog rolled forward and back. The juniper hadn’t exactly vanished, but it wasn’t there anymore either. Oh, there was a ghost of a tree, but the smooth side had completely disappeared. The remaining lump was more driftwood, a pile of jagged branches and a large trunk split down the middle. There was no hint of color, no shimmer of a connection to fairies or dirt-side. When I breathed deep, there was only the dampness of In Between, no earthy scents at all.

I drifted closer and held my hand over the ghosted wood. For the barest moment it whispered against my skin. It was a peaceful passing, one that energized and left a blossom of contentment, but sadness still struck me. The tree was dead and gone. So was Troy.

Spook woofed from behind me. Without turning I asked, “Where did the other roadkill go?”

He woofed again, a sound lacking concern.

“Well, I hope they are happy. And I hope they know how to find me or take care of themselves. I have a feeling I’m not much help otherwise.”

He yipped, and we turned for home. I should have been exhausted, but between Troy’s peaceful passing to the next part of his journey, wherever that was, and the gift from the tree, I was more rested than before the whole ordeal began. It hadn’t hurt that instead of wallowing in self-pity, I’d been kept busy answering Kyle’s questions.

Thinking about Amy sent my essence crawling. Who had she been talking to? Where had she gone?

I hoped Troy hadn’t suffered too much. Much longer and the tree would have shut him out. And Amy would have bled him dry. She lacked the shapeless hulking black shape of most ghouls I’d seen, but maybe she was how ghouls got their start. Suck one person dry at a time. One soul here, another essence there. Then one day you’re nothing but a monster with no face of your own, nothing but an eating machine destroying and poisoning everything in your path.

The calls to the edge were frequent enough now that I almost expected them, but with everything that had just happened, I was tempted to ignore the tug that jerked at me as I passed closer to the weave.

My scalp tingled. It wasn’t a death rattle. It took me a long moment to realize the vibration was coming from the bundle the cat had given me. The waves resonated through me like a very low bass or maybe a drum beat you feel but don’t really hear.

Not sure whether to hunt down the source or not, I floated on the vibrations, letting it draw me closer. The edge responded to the beat too, because the next thing I heard was the feral snarl that only a cat could make—or a certain human with a ghost of a cat face hovering. Maybe because I had practice with Troy’s animals, or maybe because he was human and cat, I distinctly understood the snarl to say, “Your entrails are nothing but smear.”

To my intense dismay, the edge cleared on a room at the hospital again. Next time I died, I was going to breathe my last in a beautiful canyon like Martin.

My complaints fled in a near panic as I realized the cat was under attack. A large, bald man with tattoos smeared across one side of his neck lumbered towards Lynx with one club-like arm swinging blindly. The attacker was still dressed in a hospital gown, but it was torn and bloody. The bed had been slammed into the wall. Half of the leg supports, including the wheels, were smashed. One had been ripped completely off.

The cat dodged a blow, but the man never blinked. His mouth hung open as if it was too much trouble to close it. The hospital gown swung sideways with his missed blow. Where his stomach would have been, the flesh was peeled aside and hanging. Inside, there was nothing but a dried black cavity. The guy was little more than a mummy brought back into action. He certainly wasn’t alive, not with that hole.

When the club arm descended again, the cat darted faster than a streak of light, his claws tearing at the man’s neck. Blood welled, but it was dark black and already coagulated as if the blood in his veins had long ago stopped circulating.

Why didn’t the cat run away? The door was closed. Was it locked? There was no window. But how had the cat gotten locked in the room with a zombie?

My questions would have to wait. Lynx might be mangling this piece of rotting flesh, but even minus parts, the thing wasn’t slowing down. It stalked Lynx with a single-minded purpose.

From the intensity of the fight, it was clear that unless the cat could slice the zombie into tiny pieces, he’d eventually run out of energy and then his life force would be headed here.

That would be very bad. And unfair. This cat had been trying to help me. But I was stuck here where I couldn’t help him. Swinging my jacket sleeve with its bits of remaining life force wasn’t going to slow this zombie down. It might even feed him. What was needed was to toss this creature where he deserved to be—the land of the dead.

Could the answer be so simple?

“Lynx!” My shout was probably nothing more than a hollow moan on his side, but the cat heard.

His eyes flicked to me, full of fear. Blood and mess covered one side of his face. He’d been hit with some zombie part that had splattered or exploded.

He hissed. I understood it as,
“Run, Shadow!”
Yellow eyes were wide, evaluating every possible option.

“Bring him to me.” My wailing desperation pushed against the weave. I was trying too hard. Martin had taught me to sneak through the weave, not batter it into forming a hard resistant shell. “Bring him here, near me,” I whispered.

Lynx evaded the club arm again, stumbling and panting. The zombie launched his entire body at Lynx’s new location, but the cat twisted, an impossible feat for a normal human, climbed part of the wall and flipped back and out of the way.

Eventually, just by accident, the zombie might come in contact with the edge. The question was, which would have more power over the zombie, the In Between edge or the living world edge?