Chapter 9
9
“YOU SEE...both of them?” I ask Zander, not sure I’m processing this.
That I messed it up somehow, I get. I just don’t know how .
“Of course I do.” He looks around at our friends. “You guys don’t?”
Emerson shakes her head. “Not now . You see them...right now?”
Zander points to Zachariah with one hand and Elizabeth with the other. “Uh, yeah.”
The ghosts themselves don’t seem too concerned with this turn of events. Granted, they’re very purposefully not looking at each other...while also very clearly sneaking little glances at each other.
It feels like a mirror I have no interest in peering into.
“I don’t understand,” Emerson says and turns to Frost, but he shakes his head.
“I’ve never heard of such a thing, and I certainly don’t see any spirits.” He turns his gaze from Emerson to Zander, then me. “Are you certain that’s what you see?”
“Yes, I am certain . The spirits we summoned are right here in front of us.” I tell myself that this might be weird and irregular and confusing , but it is definitely better than feeling like death, the way I have after other misadventures in Summoning.
“They look exactly the same as they did in the Summoning.” Zander is staring at Zachariah, no doubt noting all those similarities I was picking up earlier. All that Rivers might, gray eyes, and power—clear even in spirit.
“Should we make the circle again? Try to send them back?” Emerson asks.
Elizabeth waves a languid, see-through hand. “We’re here. We might as well stay until the meeting. Then we’ll worry about going back.”
I look at Zachariah. He has an unreadable look on his face, but he nods. Curtly.
“They both think they should stick around until the meeting,” I inform everyone who can’t see and hear them.
“I guess that makes sense. We can conserve our energy.” Georgie nods as if this was the plan all along.
“You guys can really just...stay here for six days?” I’ve never even heard of such a thing, so I’m sure I sound as skeptical as I feel.
“You tell us, girl,” Zachariah says gruffly. “You are the one who brought us here. Together.”
Elizabeth turns her ghostly head in his direction. “You will respect my blood.” Then she turns to me. “We’ll find out either way,” she says, and she sounds perfectly reasonable. She even smiles. Demurely, which is a red flag, us both being scandalous Goods and all. “Nothing to worry over, I should think. We’ll handle whatever comes.”
“What are you going to do ?” I ask them both. I try to think of what I would do if I was a spirit hauled back to St. Cyprian long after my death. “Haunt your enemies? Or...their descendants, I guess?”
They both start to look at each other, but seem to catch themselves before it takes. Then they both say the same thing, at the same time. “I will stay with you.”
Meaning, their specific descendant.
“Great. How?” Zander looks over at me, widening his eyes.
“We’ll simply go where you go, of course,” Elizabeth says, giving the impression of looking down at Zander though she’s a pretty short ghost even while she’s hovering off the ground. “It is late. I’m sure we should all retire. If an ascension is in the offing, we must all be at our best.”
I cough, then repeat this for everyone else. Complete with the way Elizabeth looked at Zander while she spoke.
My friends peer around a little helplessly, as if trying to figure out where the ghosts must be standing based on where Zander and I are looking. Or not looking. Even Emerson doesn’t seem to know what to say.
For roughly thirty seconds.
Then our fearless leader recollects herself. “She’s right. Let’s clean up. Get some sleep. Regroup tomorrow.”
The ghosts float about the yard as if reacquainting themselves with the trees, the river, and even a Main Street with far more shops and buildings than would have been here in their day. The rest of us gather our things, cleanse what needs cleansing—some magical amulets like a moon bath, some implements like the power of the river, my athame that I used at the start to perform a ceremonial severing of now from then in the old way likes a chant and a few affirmations—and magic away other items to the places they belong.
Zander stays closer to me than he would normally. I pretend not to notice, but he has a kind of energy around him that I can feel in the dark. He always has. I always know where he is.
I grit my teeth and ignore it until we’re a few feet from the ghosts and he leans in closer. Much closer. I hold my breath.
“So this guy is just going to...haunt me?”
I shrug, and pretend my heart isn’t going a little wild in my chest. “It looks that way.”
“You’re the Summoner,” he growls at me, though his gaze is on Zachariah. “Why don’t you know ?”
I don’t think he’s trying to get a dig in that there’s something I should know but don’t. I feel the slight all the same and shove it down deep where I keep all the rest of them, polished and ready to wound.
While I’m trying to come up with a suitably scathing retort, I hear our ghosts talking to one another.
“Wilde House is as pretentious as ever, don’t you think?” Zachariah asks, laughing slightly, a rough sort of sound that I tell myself is in no way familiar. “I can’t imagine why anyone would build something like this.”
“Remind me,” Elizabeth returns in an arch voice that is also familiar, “what was it you built with your own hands when you were alive, Zachariah?”
Zachariah does that sigh-that’s-not-a-sigh thing. Elizabeth pretends not to notice, while making it clear he failed her in any number of ways I don’t have to know their story to understand.
Because I already understand. Too well. And I...don’t want to be like this.
With every last part of me, I don’t want to be doing this same thing with Zander into the afterlife the way these two are.
I don’t get good and scathing with Zander. I swallow it down. I catch Elizabeth’s eye and indicate she should follow me as I walk inside Wilde House. She floats along with me, close enough to the floor that it almost seems like she’s walking. We wind our way through the house’s main floor, but she pauses at the foot of the stairs and frowns at Azrael, the dragon newel post.
Hard.
“Everything okay?” I ask, frowning at the newel post myself.
Elizabeth tilts her head one way, then the other, studying the dragon on the post, whose onyx eyes seem to almost...gleam at us. Then she straightens and shakes it off. Visibly.
“Carry on,” she tells me, nodding toward the stairs.
I could explain Azrael to her, and what little I know about how and why there is a newel post with a name, but she only gazes back at me. I’m too tired to get into it with a ghost, so I start up the steps, letting her follow.
I lead Elizabeth into my room. I’ve been around ghosts, spirits, and signs from the other side my whole life. They don’t...hang out. The energy required is too much, and I’m not sure what happened to make it so she’s just here , almost like she’s whole and human again. If I don’t focus on what I must have done or not done to make this happen, it’s fascinating. I’ve never heard of anyone getting to watch a ghost just exist in the world the way we do.
Ghosts: they’re just like us.
Elizabeth drifts in, then all around, studying the wallpaper and the view out the window. She takes in every little detail of the guest room before she turns to me, puts her hands on her hips, and says, “Well. Conjure me up a bed, then.”
“You’re going to sleep? In a bed?”
“I may not be corporeal, but I still need a bed to sleep in, child,” she says as if I should know this when who could know this? I’ve never given a single stray thought to the sleep preferences of ghosts. “I may have slept on the floor after I was fool enough to marry that man, but I refuse to do that again.”
“You two were married.” I’m surprised she’s acknowledging the marriage at all, but I conjure her up a bed all the same. I make it nice and fancy, because it seems like something she’ll get a kick out of.
“Briefly. Before he got himself killed.” Elizabeth studies the bed in such a way I can’t read her reaction.
“Rumor is you killed him.”
She gets into the newly conjured bed, in full ghostly dress, and pulls the soft, heavy covers up over her spirit. She doesn’t respond to my version of gentle prodding, so I decide to be direct. “Did you kill him, Elizabeth?”
She makes a soft noise beneath the covers that I can’t quite identify, then pulls them down to reveal her face and skewers me with a look. “Be careful, child. My sponsorship can always be rescinded.” She nods at my stomach then, a pleasant smile on her face but something glinting in her violet eyes. “You wear no wedding band. I assume you’ve followed in our scandalous ancestress Mercy’s inauspicious footsteps.”
“That’s not quite the burn these days as it might have been in yours.” It’s still surprisingly effective, no matter how okay I am with being an unwed mother .
I kick off my shoes, magic on my pajamas, and crawl into my own bed. I have sat with ghosts, spoken to them, danced with them, and occasionally suggested they leave the mortal coil alone, but I have never had a sleepover quite like this. It would probably bother me more than it does, but the idea that Zander is also dealing with this profound weirdness when he is a Guardian better used to river things puts a smile on my face.
It also has me considering all those similarities I don’t want to notice between them and us. I shouldn’t let myself wonder. I shouldn’t consider anything but how fantastic it’s going to be to get some sleep. I can feel exhaustion tugging at me.
I definitely shouldn’t ask.
But it’s only Elizabeth and me here.
I can’t come up with a good enough reason not to ask.
“You must have liked him at some point to have married him, right?” I don’t know what I’m looking for. I pluck at the quilt on my bed, and when she doesn’t answer right away, I dare to look across the room to where she lies so stiffly in hers.
“I loved him,” she says at last, with a kind of devastating finality that echoes in me. In ways I do not like. “Through many a ridiculous fool’s errand—his specialty. I told him not to go on that trip. I had a premonition it would not go well, but he and his precious legacy wouldn’t listen.”
I want to ask her questions so I can outline all the ways Zander and I aren’t like Elizabeth and Zachariah, but premonitions are not the purview of Summoners.
“You weren’t a Summoner?” I ask Elizabeth.
“What’s this?” My ancestress sniffs, clearly offended. “I summoned, of course. My tie with the spirit world was very strong when I was living. That’s why we came so readily to you tonight. Don’t let Zachariah tell you it was because of his Guardian navigating abilities, because that is ridiculous. ”
“If you had premonitions, you can’t have been a Summoner. You must have been some kind of Diviner instead?”
Elizabeth sits up in her dramatic bed and frowns at me. “I do not understand you.”
That makes two of us. I sit up too. “What was your witch designation?” I ask her, aware as I do that my pulse is getting a little crazy. I can feel it in my wrists, my ankles. My baby.
She frowns at me as if I’m quite dim. “Revelare.”
“What?” I’m not sure I’ve ever heard that word in my life.
“A Revelare. Just like you.”
I laugh, but mostly in confusion. “I am barely a Summoner and I’m definitely not...whatever that word is. Whatever it means.”
She shakes her head at me, her frown deepening. “Goods are always Revelares.”
“Not this one. Not my mother either. Or Granny Good, I’m sorry to tell you.”
She floats up through the covers—yes, through them, making me wonder how she was beneath them to begin with—then crosses the room to me. She’s kind of hovering above my bed, and I thought ghosts couldn’t really creep me out, but turns out a sleepover ghost body looming above my bed does the trick.
She’s studying me closely, and I can feel her magic. When I shouldn’t. It shouldn’t work here, outside the circle and away from the ritual. Nothing is as it should be tonight.
“You have something special,” she says after a moment.
Being half human has often led to me being called special , but usually with a nasty sniff or an eye roll. Elizabeth sounds proud.
I find I have no place to put that.
“Very special,” she says, nodding her head. “I knew there was a reason we stayed.”
“What’s the reason?” I need to talk to Emerson about this. And Rebekah. Has Georgie heard of a Revelare ? Surely Frost has.
Elizabeth shakes her head, and she smiles at me. And it’s genuinely warm. “Ah, my child. There are so many.”
Then she puts her spirit hand on my forehead, and I shouldn’t feel it. Not so fully formed, almost like a real hand, but I do.
“Sleep, my children,” she whispers. To me and to the baby inside. Like a spell she shouldn’t be able to cast in ghostly form.
But that’s the last thing I remember before I wake up the next morning.