Holiday Magick (27 page)

I looked at the hand for a long second, then up at his gaunt face, and then—realizing that making the possibly-dangerous intruder angry wasn't a good game plan—reached out my own hand.

It passed
through
his.

Burning cold shot up my arm. I gasped and snatched my hand back, rubbing it as my world tilted around me.
Ghost! Real ghost. Ghosts are real? Or I'm crazy—crazy like Aunt Rosie. Oh, man, I was definitely not cool before—I really can't rock the straightjacket look. Ella Eaton won't ever want to go out with me now
.

Having the world end in the next week or so suddenly didn't seem like such a bad thing.

Aunt Rosie tapped at my leg through the covers. I slid it over, and she sat. “Jared, honey, some people in our family have always had the Sight. It's a gift, and if you use it right, you can do great things with it. When Captain Simmons here came by tonight and told me that a boy your age, with dark brown hair and blue eyes, had seen him from the school bus today, well, I just…” She wiped a tear from her smiling face and gave a loud sniff. “And the timing couldn't be better—if you can help me, we're going to try to save the world. I'm gonna need some help if this is gonna work, and your mother has all the Sight of a myopic mole.”

“…declared states of emergency in all fifty-eight counties of California.” The TV morning show's newswoman jumped as a drunk-looking guy in a B.U. t-shirt photo-bombed her report, staggering in with a moan of “Braaaaaaains…” while his friends fell over laughing. The newscaster took several steps to the side before continuing. “Outbreaks have been reported in most major cities across the country, with the latest in Chicago, Dallas, Boston, and Atlanta. Worldwide, the number of people infected may be as high as seventeen mill—”

Aunt Rosie clicked off the TV, tossing the remote onto the kitchen counter. “We can't concentrate on the ritual with all that noise.”

The fact that I'd agreed to learn the ritual at all made me pretty sure I'd been hit with the dirty end of the mental hygiene stick. In the end, though, it came down to simple logic: either I was insane—and so doing something as bizarre as raising ghosts with my crazy aunt was just a normal afterschool activity—or I really was able to see ghosts, in which case performing a ritual that would…I wasn't quite sure what it would do, but it sounded like it might supercharge them, make them strong enough to…

This was my problem. I had no idea what help ghosts could be in fighting zombies. And that was what my aunt was all excited about.

“It's all about concentration. Seeing the spirits isn't enough, but it's a necessary part of channeling the energy to the right astral plane. If we are going to pull this off, we need to be able to focus the energy
through
us. We need to be the conduits.”

I looked at the handwritten, leather-bound book on the table and rubbed my hands over my face. “How?”

“Ancient magic.”

I gave her a you-gotta-do-better-than-that look.

“We're all tied into the energy of the universe, honey. Our thoughts, our emotions, are part of that energy. Our souls are part of it. We use the words of the ritual to focus our thoughts in a way that taps into the greater parts of that energy. Words have power—people have known that for a very long time. Prayer, incantation, chants, mantras—they all tie the speaker into this energy. Learn these words. Say them with feeling. If we do this right, we can then channel that energy between us, feed it into the spirits, make them strong enough to stop the necromancer's minions.”

I'd never heard someone refer to “minions” in a non-sarcastic way before. I held up one of the quartz crystals—the thing was pale-pink and about the size of a small flashlight.

“When do we make the tinfoil hats?”

Aunt Rosie flicked my ear with her fingernail. “We don't have time for you to make jokes!”

I covered my ear with my hand. “That hurt, you know!”

Captain Simmons walked through the wall next to the refrigerator. The temperature in the kitchen fell with his arrival, and I gasped.

He stopped in front of Aunt Rosie. “The men will be assembled and ready at sunset, ma'am.”

“Thank you, Captain. That will give us enough time to get the supplies ready.”

The crystals scraped against the tabletop as I nonchalantly tried to build a crystal log cabin; I was trying to be subtle as I watched the dead guy.
There's a Civil War ghost in my kitchen, and he calls my crazy aunt “ma'am.”

Actually, if we were going to have shared hallucinations, I guess it was a good thing they were polite ones. With my luck, I could've hallucinated Brad Williams from fifth grade chucking dodgeballs at my head for the next sixty years.

My mother came up from her office—she'd converted the basement a few years ago so she could run her graphic design business from home—and started making a fresh pot of coffee while my aunt and Captain Simmons studied a town map.

The Captain's finger traced the line of South Road to where it crossed Rt. 9. “This would make a defensible perimeter.”

Aunt Rosie frowned. “So you want to leave the road to the highway open.”

My mother startled, gave Aunt Rosie a worried look, and then turned back to watch her coffee drip into the pot.

Captain Devil-Beard watched my mother for a moment before returning to the map. “It is the most defensible position. If we seal off the town entirely, we will not have any control over where they will try to breach the barrier. Leaving the single path will channel them right onto Main Street—where we shall be waiting for them.”

Aunt Rosie nodded. “I'll need a few men to come with me. I won't be able to get to the trucks without some help.”

My mother poured her coffee, gave Aunt Rosie a tight-lipped assessment, and then looked at me. I shrugged. She sighed and headed back downstairs.

When the captain turned to look at me, I shifted in my seat and bumped the table, and my crystal cabin clattered into ruins.

Golden light angled in over the western mountains and cast giant shadows on the sidewalk as Aunt Rosie and I walked to the cemetery. One of the crystals angled a sharp point through the backpack and into my spine. I shifted the straps, wiggling them a bit, and groaned when a second point joined the first.

Climbing the hill, I stumbled a step when the cemetery fence came into view. More than two dozen reenact—no, they weren't reenactors; they'd been the original, uh,
enactors
—lined up against the wrought iron.

“So many…” I murmured.

Aunt Rosie frowned. “Not enough. Not nearly enough.”

The silent soldiers watched us walk around to the front gate, following the path back past the flagpole, where the American flag hung limp in the breezeless evening. The three dusty, solar-powered spotlights brightened a bit as the sun faded from the sky. The ghosts drifted closer, following us in a loose circle, their silent steps leaving the grass unbent beneath their feet. When we reached the last row of crosses, Aunt Rosie reached for my backpack, unzipping it while it was still on my back, and took out half of the crystals. She set them, points out, in a circle at her feet, making a tiny sun. She then peeled off her white gloves—revealing the palest skin I'd ever seen in my life—before picking up the largest two crystals.

She pointed one toward the far side of the cemetery, near the ruined foundation of the hospital. “You see how I set the crystals up? You do the same over there with the rest, and then watch me. When I wave like this,” she threw her arm from side to side above her head, “we'll start the ritual together. If we both keep working, we should be able to expand the energy field to cover most of this area. You ready for this?”

Uh—no!
I had no idea how I wanted to spend this time, but I knew that performing an ancient ritual in a cemetery after dark, while surrounded by ghosts who watched our every move, was
so
not it.

My feelings must have shown in the fading light, because Aunt Rosie's features softened. “Life is full of challenges, full of things that we don't want to do, things we don't want to deal with—bad things, scary things, terrible things. And we can run away. We can say, ‘Let somebody else do it,' or ‘Why is it just us? This is everyone else's problem, too.' Or we can decide that we want to be the kind of people who see what needs to be done, and then do it. We can be the people who take care of others, protect others. This is one of those times when someone needs to step up, Jared. The right thing—the thing that needs doing—is right here, and we're the only people who can do it. You with me?”

I nodded as her words sank into me, leaving me feeling somehow…older, more important, than I ever had. “Yeah.”

I hitched my backpack up on my shoulders—it was lighter now that she had taken out half the crystals—and hustled over to the place my aunt had indicated. The grey-faced ghosts faded back out of my way as I passed.

Setting up my own circle of crystals, I stood and looked to where Aunt Rosie's shadowed form gestured as though in conversation, although I couldn't hear voices. After a few seconds, I gave a shrill whistle.

Every ghost turned to stare at me, and I felt my face heat.
Whistling past the graveyard
…Aw, crap, had I just done something rude? Aunt Rosie straightened, and then waved her arm over her head. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and pulled up the words I'd memorized at the kitchen table.

I repeated them over and over, focusing in on the meaning, the desire to draw power through me, but I felt nothing except the anxiety that someone from school might see me out in the cemetery at night with my weird aunt and a bunch of crystals. The words trailed off as I opened my eyes.

Across the way, a glow began to form around Aunt Rosie. Wind came from nowhere, snapping the flag and clanging its metal clips against the pole. My jaw dropped, and for a few endless seconds, I watched the doughy, middle-aged woman from the group home fall away, replaced by a figure made of light.

The ghosts drew nearer to her, their silhouettes outlined against the strange, pale radiance, and I suddenly remembered that I was supposed to be doing something. I blanked for a moment, but then the words came, strangely resonating with meaning.

The crystals in my hands grew warm, and I felt the wind begin within me. A glow spread across my skin as everything from my toes up started to go all pins-and-needles. My eyes wouldn't blink; they stayed open and felt…bright, as though I was lit from within like a jack-o-lantern. The hairs of my arms stood on end as I
felt
the words connect, felt the power come through me and reach for the power coming from the other side of the cemetery. The two waves met and washed outward, bathing the headstones in light as pale as dawn.

The ghosts seemed to grow stronger and healthier as the light touched them. As the rippling power spread, more figures stirred up from the graves. Dozens, then hundreds, pulled themselves tall, and as the light began to fade, I saw one no-longer-fallen soldier face the flag and salute.