Chapter 9 Class Re
SILENCE FOLLOWED KADE’S WELCOME, lingering for several terrible seconds before the ghost of Jillian Wolcott laughed with exaggerated, overblown delight, clapping her insubstantial hands.
“Teacher’s pet!” she said. “I was wondering if I’d ever see you again!”
“Hello, Jill,” said Sumi, stepping forward as she snapped out of her shock. “Guess the shroud’s on the other foot now, huh?”
Jill stopped laughing. “I killed you,” she said angrily. “I took your hands and your nonsense story, and I left you for dead. I saw you die. I saw your skeleton wrapped in rainbows, walking around like it didn’t matter at all. You can’t be here.”
“Don’t you remember seeing me again in the Moors, after you stole your sister’s body like it was a coat you thought was really nice and wanted her to share?
Because I remember seeing you. I put a baling hook in the throat of that man you called ‘father,’ and I didn’t let him save you from the fall.
I helped your sister take her body back, and I spoiled all your plans. ”
“Not all of them,” said Jill with a shark’s smile. “I have new plans now, and you can’t spoil a single one. Come out of that room and I’ll swallow you whole. We won’t leave anything this time to resurrect.”
“No thank you,” said Sumi, shaking her head so hard that her pigtails whipped across her face like lashes.
“Coward,” said Jill. She shifted her smile over to Nancy.
“You were such good cover for what I was already intending to do. Before you came, I’d been planning to pin everything on Jack, to make her think she was sleepwalking and succumbing to the scalpel in the same breath.
But you were better. Not connected to us, not part of us, not anyone’s friend.
No one was going to miss you. How did you get to win while I had to lose? ”
“You’re killing all my friends,” said Nancy. “Is that really what winning looks like?”
“On the Moors, yes,” said Jill. “What kind of life did they have anyway, spending all their time pretending to be objects of art? That’s not a life. That’s a display.”
“No one gets to decide for you what living looks like,” snapped Nancy. “Life is supposed to be made up of the choices you make for yourself. Some of us choose perpetual motion. Some of us choose stillness. Neither one is better than the other.”
“Bah,” said Jill. “I am going to have a life again. I am going to put myself back together, one molecule at a time, and then I am going home to show my sister how badly she messed up.” She returned her attention to the Lady of the Dead.
“You want to save your statues? You want your pretty toys? Find something else to feed me and my army. Because we are legion, and we are not going back into the dark.”
She shot a withering look at the still-playing Christopher. “Stop,” she commanded.
Startled, he did exactly that. The flecks of silver vanished, the free-floating ones first, and then Jill herself. She faded the same way she had appeared, a little bit at a time, until there was nothing remaining to show that she had ever been there.
Christopher lowered his flute, staring at the empty hall. Everyone else was doing the same, looking at the space where Jill had been like she might lunge for them at any moment. Only Sumi’s eyes were fully focused; she could see the absence of the dead as easily as she had seen their presence.
“My Lady?” asked Nancy in a meek voice.
“Yes, Nancy?”
“Is there really nothing you can do?”
The Lady of the Dead reluctantly shook her head. “I wish there were, but my husband and I don’t command the dead, only give them a waystation on their way to whatever comes next. We’re not the only waystation of its kind, just the one where you are.”
Nancy bit her lip. That small gesture was so thoughtlessly human that it made Kade ache to see it. It was like she was remembering that she was a living creature against this backdrop of tragedy, like running to save the people she cared about was reminding her that she could run.
“Where is he?” she asked.
“Who, my dear?” replied the Lady.
“Your husband,” said Nancy. “Where is my Lord?”
THE DEAD WERE FAST, but the Lady knew all the spaces that were sealed against them, and both she and Sumi could see them coming, while Christopher could stop them as long as he was properly prepared to play.
They moved through the halls as a tight cluster, Sumi and the Lady on constant watch for trouble, Nancy and Talia pressed into the middle, like they needed protecting.
Talia, who had finally noticed how many of her moths were missing as they prepared to leave the Lady’s quarters, didn’t comment on where she’d been positioned.
She hadn’t commented on much of anything since that moment.
It was like she had suddenly realized why the school had a rule against quests, why they were considered verboten: she had been given exactly what she asked for, and, in receiving it, had discovered that there was a reason no one wanted what she had.
They moved quickly, the oasis of the Lady’s quarters left far behind them as they made for the last place where the Lady had seen her Lord.
The two of them had been spending most of their time apart since the unquiet dead broke loose, the Lady seeing to her statues and protecting what she could—although as they passed still-standing statues in the halls, Kade reflected grimly that “what she could” didn’t seem to include inviting the statues into her private chambers where the dead would be unable to reach them—while the Lord tried to determine what had changed.
Well, they knew what had changed now, at least in part.
Jill Wolcott had died twice, both times at her sister’s hand, and if there was anyone primed to become a restless ghost, it was her.
Maybe more importantly, between her first death and her second, she had used the lightning inherent to the Moors to knock her spirit loose from her flesh, transferring it first into her sister’s body, and then back into her own.
That had to change something in even a dead person’s structure. There was just no way it wouldn’t.
And like the rest of them, Jill Wolcott was a child of the Doors.
Like Sumi, she’d been pulled to the Halls after her final death, and joined the cloud of ghosts waiting to be released and reborn.
But Jill had so much anger in her, it was no real surprise that she’d grown tired of waiting and decided that it was time to act.
All this was information the Lord of the Dead didn’t have, and needed to have. And it would be reassuring to have him with them. To hear Nancy speak of him, he was barely shy of a god, a man with total dominion over his own realm, even if that dominion was partially shared with his wife.
It was the Lord of the Dead, not the Lady, who had turned Nancy’s hair white with a touch.
And it was the Lord of the Dead who had bargained with them for the release of Sumi’s spirit.
Kade hated to act as if the solution to a dangerous situation was to get a man, but in this specific case, that felt like the right thing to do.
So they hurried through the halls, five teens and one woman a sliver shy of being a goddess, and they waited for an attack that didn’t come.
Sumi paused a few times, apparently secure in her ability to see the dead coming, and peered up at the statues that lined the halls, studying their motionless faces.
“Why?” she asked, looking toward the Lady.
“Why what?” asked the Lady.
“Why, when you saw that the ghosts would kill and eat anyone they could catch, did you not bar the doors against travelers, or set up safe rooms where they could catch their breath before you sent them home? Why turn them into architecture?”
“You’re a Nonsense creature. You couldn’t possibly understand.” The Lady opened a door, waving them all anxiously through.
“Try me,” suggested Sumi.
“The doors called them here because this was their natural home. We just found a way for them to stay and be happy despite the danger.”
“By stripping away everything that makes them human,” objected Sumi.
The Lady of the Dead raised an eyebrow. “You think only motion makes a human?”
“No,” said Sumi sullenly. They were passing through a hall with domed, frosted glass windows covering the ceiling, turning the light into a gilded brightness that illuminated them all as if they had joined the ranks of the dead.
The statues here were still intact, standing calm and elegant atop their plinths.
“Our statues work very hard to be able to do the things they do, and they take pride in their accomplishments,” said the Lady.
“Those who don’t take that pride lose their certainty and return to the worlds of their birth in short order.
They have friendships here, rivalries. They fall in love, and some take lovers in the slow hours of the night, when the halls are sleeping and the dead sleep with them.
They move slowly, but they do move, and their passions can burn as hot as they do in any other world.
We steal nothing of their humanity. We merely give them other avenues for expressing it. ”
Sumi frowned deeply, looking toward Nancy. Nancy met her eyes and nodded, agreeing with the Lady.
“But … I can understand people going away from their friends when they’re doing it to do something,” protested Sumi. “If they’re being a mermaid or operating a shop or taking off their skin so they can marry their one true love. I don’t understand doing it just to do nothing forever.”
“Standing still isn’t doing nothing,” said the Lady.
“I think that’s where you’re confusing who you are as a person with who my statues are.
They’re all different, and they all have their reasons for being here, but none of them are less of a person or less human than you are, except for the ones who were never human in the first place.
Your world isn’t the only one whose doors can lead a person here. ”