Spirit (3 page)

But they had
both seen the lamp flicker. It would be hard, but I could reach out to them. It
was my only hope. I had to try.

***

Night had fallen
by the time I stepped out of my house. My episode with the Light took energy
from me, making me pause to gather myself. My parents had gone to bed early. My
mother was tired from crying and my father looked ten years older. If I could
have consoled them, I would have, but every time I reached out for them, it
seemed to make their grief that much worse.

My car sat in
the driveway, where my father usually parked, and his car was on the street
where mine usually was. Oh, my beautiful, black Camaro. I walked over to it
slowly, as if afraid of something unseen. She sat, the waxed black paint
gleaming in the moonlight, waiting for me to jump in and start her up, make the
engine roar to life. My fingers itched with the need to hold my keys once more.

I lifted my hand
and tried to run it over the fender like I had so many times before, but like
everything else, my hand slipped right through. My shoulders slumped and I
pulled my hand away, gazing at my beautiful girl longingly. “I’ll drive you
again, I promise. You’re not going to sit here like some creepy memorial to a
dead girl.” I turned on my heel and headed for the sidewalk, not wanting to
waste time dwelling on my car.

With the world
awash in shadows, I felt a little more confident walking out in the open. It was
weird, walking as a ghost. I kind of expected I would fly or at least float,
but no, I had to walk. I moved into the leafy shadow of the tree in my front
yard. The light of the moon cut through the branches, casting a dappled shadow
on the grass. Pulling the dark around me, I closed my eyes and pictured the
hurricane mess of Jodi’s bedroom: clothing everywhere, books scattered about,
and so much stuff on the floor you were in danger of breaking things just by
walking.

When I opened my
eyes, I nearly fell on my ass. Jodi’s room was clean. Her bed was made,
complete with hospital corners, not one stich of clothing was on the floor, and
even her makeup was uniformly lined up on her vanity.

“Whoa,” I whispered,
staring at the brown carpet under my feet. I don’t think I knew what color her
carpet was before. Jodi sat in the middle of her floor, between her bed and the
vanity, with a blue pillar candle on the floor in front of her. The wick was
lit, the flame dancing slowly, casting hypnotic shadows on the walls. The only
other light in the room was her bedside lamp with a red silk scarf thrown over
it. The strange mood lighting would’ve given me a headache in life. I was just
grateful it hid the shadow of death looming over her so I didn’t have to look
at it.

Jodi made a
small noise of frustration, drawing my attention back to her. Her forehead was
pinched in concentration, and I could see the muscle in her jaw working as she
glared at the candle, as if the flame had offended her somehow. But the longer
she stared, the angrier her face became even though nothing else happened.

“Oh,” I said
quietly, realizing she was trying to put out the flame, but the air in the room
remained unmoved. I squatted down in front of her, wanting to reach out and
give her some comfort, but I knew if I tried to touch her, it would only bring
her further into the despair she’d thrown herself into.

“You have to
remember to breathe, Fae,” I whispered, wishing she could hear me. In the muted,
red light, I saw Jodi’s cheeks becoming flushed as she pressed her lips tighter
and tighter into a thin, angry line. In another moment, she released the breath
she was holding with a cry of frustration, throwing her hands up into the air.
A brutal wind gusted around the room, blowing her hair back from her face and
extinguishing the candle flame.

“Screw you,” she
hissed. She picked up the candle and just stopped herself from hurling it
across the room. Blue wax trickled over the side of the candle, dripping onto
her fingers, but she didn’t seem to feel the burn. Jodi scrubbed her eyes with
the back of her other hand before falling to the side and curling up on the
floor, squeezing her eyes closed as she cried.

I pushed back up
to my feet. Jodi was in no fit shape to try to contact right now. I took one
last, lingering look at my soul’s sister before I gathered the shadows of the
room around me and disappeared into the void.

***

When I appeared
in front of Steven’s house, his car was missing. The next logical place for him
to be was at Anthony’s apartment, a good two miles away.

Anthony lived in
an apartment building at the corner of Main and Aliso at the top of the hill
just before Main Street became “Downtown.” I had only been there a couple of
times to drop Steven off, and even then I hadn’t actually been inside his
apartment. I was just damn lucky I remembered the apartment number. I appeared
on the sidewalk cattycorner from Anthony’s building. Not exactly where I’d
meant to end up, but it was close enough.

Traffic was
still zipping up and down Main Street, life moving on without me. I kept close
to the building, in the darker shadows, as I glanced up, down, and across the
street. The last thing I needed was for my guardian angel to take me by
surprise again. The sidewalk was clear, and from this distance, I couldn’t see
anything by the park across the street, next to Anthony’s building. I had never
really registered that he lived across the street from Cemetery Park, so named
because it was an active cemetery up until the early 1940s.

Sometime in the sixties,
the city decided to convert it into a park, but they never moved the bodies.
The place always creeped me out, especially when I saw people playing fetch
with their dogs or taking a picnic with their kids, knowing they were on top of
hundreds of unmarked graves. But I wasn’t prepared for what I saw that night.

Dozens and
dozens of spectral entities were all around the park, obscuring the finely
manicured lawn. In the last few days, I had seen other ghosts’ fleeting forms,
but none as tangible as me and none returned my gaze. Here though, when I
crossed the street and stood in front of the park next to Anthony’s apartment
building, no less than four spirits turned their deathly gaze upon me. For a
moment, I felt as though I couldn’t move, like a mouse caught in a corner as
the big angry cat hunkered down in front of it, just waiting.

Of the four
staring at me, two were small girls who looked to be about nine and ten years
old. They both wore plain white dresses that hung past their knees and cinched
up to their necks. Their high-top black dress shoes were practically lost in
the shadows. Another of the four was a war veteran. Of what war I couldn’t be
sure, but he didn’t look much older than me as he glared my way. The last was
an old, hunched over Chumash woman. Her bedraggled, dark hair swung down,
obscuring her face from time to time as she swayed where she stood. Her face
was a relief map of wrinkles, a testament to the long life she had before she
died.

I wasn’t sure
who to keep my eyes on; they were all glaring at me but spread out enough that
I had to make an effort to look at each of them. The larger of the two girls
tilted her head to the side, drawing my attention to her. Her large eyes looked
black in the night. She blinked slowly, her mouth opening slightly, as she
lifted one hand and crooked her pale finger, beckoning me to come. Absurdly, I
felt the desire to step forward, to answer her call, just like the pull of the
White Light.

I managed to
keep my feet planted on the sidewalk, though my toes were dangerously close to
the edge of the grass. I had the feeling that if I crossed the line of cement
and desecrated ground, that tiny waif of a girl would be on me like a rabid dog
on the last bone in the world. I shifted my weight and took one small step backward.
I heard the howling of the lost souls milling about the grounds. The girl’s
head snapped back, and her mouth opened into a terrible black maw. She screamed
long and loud before she rushed for me.

Her fingers were
crooked into claws and her hands stretched out as she flew across the ground in
her mad rage. I flinched against the sounds she made, feeling something for the
first time in days, and covered my ears. I panicked and scrambled backward,
tripping over my own feet, and fell to the ground. She was nearly on top of me.
I started to gather the shadows about me, ready to flee, but as she reached the
edge of the grass, she slammed into an invisible wall, then bounced off and
tumbled backward.

The milling mass
of spirits began to shift toward us. The noise and reverberating energy drew their
attention like moths to a flame. I pushed back, putting a little more distance
between me and the edge of the cemetery, before I got to my feet. I dusted my
hands off on my jeans out of habit and straightened my sweater. When I finally
found the courage to look up again, the entire population of the cemetery was
pressed close to the edge of the grass, practically looming over me. I clenched
my hands into fists to keep them from shaking and lifted my chin. They couldn’t
cross the line to get to me, and there was no way they would get me to do it
for them. I was fine; I just had to stay on the sidewalk.

The soldier
caught my attention, pulling it away from the still glaring, screaming girl in
white. He stepped forward out of the crowd. A few tendrils of pale white
slipped from his shoulders. He wasn’t quite at the grass line. His face was
calm and sad. I watched as he inclined his head toward me in a nod, which I
returned. One corner of his mouth lifted in a small half smile. I stepped forward.

He lifted his
hand, his fingers splayed as if he would intertwine them with mine. I lifted my
hand, opening my fingers and began to reach for him. I took another half-step
forward, a few blades of grass bending over the toe of my boot.

“Shayna, no!” a
voice called out like a ringing bell in the still, silent night. I blinked
rapidly, breaking the soldier’s trance over me, and snatched my hand away just
as my fingertips touched the invisible barrier between us. I could feel the air
ripple around my fingers when I pulled them back.

The horde began
to wail and scream, clambering over each other trying to get to me, but the divide
between the once hallowed ground and the sidewalk kept them at bay. I turned to
see who had saved me and felt the world fall away again. My angel stood not
five feet from me. Instinctively, I felt for the shadows. They answered my call
and readied to wrap around me at a moment’s notice, but when he didn’t make a
move for me, I hesitated.

“Why did you
stop me?” I asked, unable to help myself.

“Do not go into
the void, Shayna,” he said, his deep voice a melodic balm against the
screeching and wailing.

“The void?” I
asked lamely.

“You still have
time to come back to the Light.” Still he did not reach out for me, still his
wings remained folded quietly behind him. It gave me confidence to keep talking
to him.

“What is the
void?” I pressed.

“That,” he said simply,
inclining his head toward the dispersing crowd of nameless, shapeless wraiths.
The four cognizant ones stayed and stared at me, their anger a visible mar on
their faces.

“That’s what
happens when you turn from the Light?” I asked.

“In time,” he
said with a nod, his voice distant and sad. I looked at those lost souls,
wandering and angry. I was already angry: angry at myself, angry at my angel,
angry at whoever or whatever had ripped my wings from my back. How much time
did I have before I became like them?

On the night I
died, when Liam had walked me away from my friends and the wreckage of the
house, the tips of my wings had dragged along the ground. I thought maybe that,
though dead, I was still an earthbound angel. I thought I would get to stay,
and I just had to wait for someone, like my guardian angel, to show up and tell
me what I was supposed to do.

But that’s not
exactly what happened. My guardian angel did show, in a burst of blinding
light, glorious in his power with his wings spread behind him as he floated. I felt
warmth radiating from him and the tunnel of light, trust and some form of
relief rushing through me, making me believe I hadn’t been abandoned while
falling through the crumbling house. He held out a hand for me as he came close
to the ground, his feet landing silently. I started to lift my hand to take
his, I always took his hand when he reached for me, but the closer he came, the
closer the Light came. I felt the pull of the Light somewhere in my center. I
suddenly knew if I touched him, took his hand, let that Light envelope me, I would
leave this world and my friends behind.

“Wait,” I said,
snatching my hand back and taking a number of steps backward, nearly tripping
over my wings.

“Shayna, what
are you doing?” he asked.

“What happens
now?” I curled my hands into fists and kept them close to my chest.

“What happens
now?” he repeated. By the look on his face, it was obvious no one had thought
to question him before. “We go into the Light, you join our ranks, and you
become the guardian angel you were meant to be.”

“And Jodi and
Steven?” I asked. “What happens to them?”