Chapter 13 A Gift of Starlight #2
“I loved a boy,” said the shade. “He was tall and handsome and strong, and he came from a world all unfamiliar to me, but beautiful when he whispered of it in the middle of the night. He was sure he belonged here. He was so sure. But in the end, when he settled into stillness, it was too much for him. His heart stopped in the middle of the long afternoon—truly stopped, not just paused—and he fell. He didn’t get back up. ”
“Love isn’t forbidden among My statues,” said the Lord.
“No,” agreed the shade. “We were never told not to love. But stillness as we have to practice it is very hard on the body. The heart wants to beat, not hold itself in stasis. The lungs want to fill. He stilled himself, as he had been taught to, and it killed him. I was … I was so very angry that he should be snuffed out so easily. He was the fire by which I warmed myself. A world without him was very cold and very cruel and I wanted no part of it.”
“What did you do?” asked Lundy again, voice harder this time.
The shade—Iason—raised his eyes and met hers.
“I left my pedestal in the middle of the night, when the other statues slept and the halls were silent. I found the door of silver and the door of gold, and I listened at them both until I heard Aleksy’s voice, like a whisper carried by a dream.
I opened the door, and heard the unquiet dead on the other side.
They whispered and hissed and slid over one another like snakes in the darkness, and when I slipped into their company and asked them to return him to me, they told me what to do.
They asked for blood. They said that if I bled for them, we could be together again.
I was foolish and in love and thought they meant my blood would somehow start his heart beating again, put the breath back into his body and bring him back to me. Instead…”
“Instead, you bled, and they came to feast,” said the Lord of the Dead. His tone was very nearly gentle. “They took their fill, and when they were done, they took what was left of you.”
“Yes,” said Iason. “They drank me dry and then devoured my body, bones and all, and expelled me from their company. I died, and still we aren’t together. Still, we wait in separate rooms for the rest of eternity to unfold. How is this fair? All that I wanted was to be with my love.”
“And now we know,” said the Lord of the Dead.
“There’s always enough life lost for one or two of the hungry dead to find enough substance to do harm.
They feed on small things, like the moths, and they strengthen themselves, and they attack the statues.
But for them to have such numbers, they needed to be strong from the beginning.
They took the blood of a grieving boy and they spun it into teeth and claws with which to devour all they came across, and every statue they fell grants them more strength, more substance with which to take what they desire.
It explains why this happened now, and not the moment your Jill found herself here. ”
“She’s not our Jill,” said Christopher. “Don’t call her that. We don’t want her any more than you do.”
“Ownership doesn’t matter,” said Lundy. “What do you expect us to do? We’re dead. Let us rest.”
“After you help us stop the unquiet, I will let you rest as long as you like,” said the Lord of the Dead.
“But how?”
“Their weakness is their strength. They have too much substance to pass through things as the dead would normally do,” said the Lord of the Dead. “If you will all come with us to the door of gold and hold them back from doing further harm, I believe we can lock them inside.”
“And Nancy?” asked Kade.
“We can fight the other ghosts long enough to let you snatch her back,” said Lundy. “She was an odd one, that Nancy, but she deserved better than to die at Jill’s hands. We all did.”
“Then you’ll come?”
The look Lundy shot the Lord of the Dead was sharp and unforgiving.
“Not for you, we won’t,” she said. “You’ve been a poor regent since I got here.
You leave us alone and keep to yourself, and things like this happen.
But for Nancy, and for my students? Yes, I’ll come.
I’ll bring the dead. We’ll have a haunting. ”
“Thank you,” said Sumi. “I’m sorry you’re still dead. Dead was awful boring.”
“Thank you, Sumi,” said Lundy. She smiled, then disappeared. The other motes of light winked out at the same time, and the form of Iason dissolved into sparkling mist, fading away.
“We should go,” said Talia, feeling the shift in the air. This place had never been intended for the living, but it had tolerated them for a time. That time was coming to an end.
The Lord of the Dead nodded and turned back toward the door, the others hurrying along with him. Even Talia’s moths seemed to understand the urgency. They surrounded the girl in a dense cloud, wings flapping frantically as they rushed for the exit.
The darkness whispered around the group, but nothing reached out to grab them or stop them from escaping. They stepped back out into the Halls of the Dead, and Talia gasped softly as she saw her companions in the light.
They were all of them rimed in glimmering motes of silver, like starlight dusted across their skin. Christopher wiped his fingers across his wrist, and frowned a little as the glow remained unchanged.
“Are we radioactive now?” he asked. “Do I need to be worried about this?”
“No,” said the Lord of the Dead, glancing back at the closed silver door behind them. “The ghosts have gilded you with starlight. They’ll know who not to fight when the moment comes. It’s a valuable gift, but it will fade with time.”
“Cool. As long as I’m not going to glow in the dark forever, I’m cool with it,” said Christopher. “So what do we do now? Do we just wait here until something happens?”
“Lundy said she and the peaceful dead would come,” said Kade. “I trust Lundy to keep her word.”
“She didn’t say when, though,” said Sumi.
“I don’t think she needed to. She wants to save Nancy, if only because it’s Jill who’s doing the threatening. That means she’ll follow after us. We don’t know how much time Nancy has.”
It was sound logic, or as sound as anything could possibly be when dealing with the dangers of the dead. Sumi nodded, then asked, “So where are we going?” and turned an expectant eye on the Lord of the Dead.
He sighed. “This way,” he said, and started walking.
The others followed, draped in starlight, leaving the silver door behind.