When Katie opened her eyes she went into an immediate panic. There was no arm slung lazily over her waist and no solid wall of muscle pressed against her back. Nor was there the cool shadow of a rocky ceiling, or even the unrelenting and arid desert. There was, however, a dizzying dance behind her eyelids when she closed her eyes and tried to wish herself back into his arms.
“Jack,” she whispered, but her voice sounded too loud and it hurt to speak. Even the air seemed too heavy. It was pressing down on the soft tissues, the delicate muscles in her throat. “Jack.”
“He’s not here, babe.”
Katie shot up and darted her eyes around a rectangular room with cream walls and a jumble of papers and photos stuck higgledy piggledy over them before coming to rest on the person speaking to her from the swivel chair in front of the desk. A tiny girl sat there with her feet barely reaching the floor. Short black hair was scraped back tightly under a red hairband and miniscule strawberry blonde roots complimented her pale face.
“Why do you dye your hair?”
Jaye flicked her fingers under the elasticated band and shrugged. “Don’t speak yet.”
“I’m fine. I mean, I feel like I’ve got a monster sore throat but otherwise… fine.”
“Honestly?” Katie drew a cross over her heart. “It usually takes a while to get used to your new body.”
“It’s not really a body though. Is it? I don’t feel anything- I just think I do.”
“Where’ve you been? I know you went away for a while because you went into the… other room with the doctor, and you didn’t come back out.”
Katie scooted up the bed to give her friend some room to sit down. She didn’t know how much she should say about her night with Jack, about her version of the Dead World, about thinking she had to do something before she could move on.
“Like what?”
It wasn’t until then that she remembered Jaye could now pluck the words right out of her head.
You’ll learn to control it soon enough. Right now you’re too raw and open. You can’t build a wall against me because you’re still in transition. You’re a ghost.
“So are you,” Katie replied indignantly. It was one thing to be a ghost, it was another to have people reminding you of that fact at every turn. And she had a feeling this was only the beginning.
“Not exactly. See, a Shade is somewhere between you and what you used to be.”
“Oh. A different shade of human.”
“Poetic.”
Katie concentrated on the dainty, smiling face in front of her. The baby blue eyes and pixie nose. The jagged creamy teeth and determined set of her jaw. If she fixed on one face for long enough, maybe she would stop missing all the others. For however long she was stuck like this, nobody else would see her. Nobody would hear her or speak to her. Katie could wander through their lives, watching and wishing, changing everything, and they wouldn’t even know she was there. “You’re crying,” she told Jaye.
If you’d just heard what I did, you would cry too. She made no move to dry her eyes. “You said you had to do something again. Before you could move on.”
“Uh-huh. I saw Jack. He’s trapped in the Dead World.”
“You think you have to get him back?”
“I don’t know. You told me I made you let me go for a reason. Maybe it was that.”
“But you didn’t even know where he was. It can’t have been that.”
Katie swung her legs down and walked over to her wardrobe to look for some proper clothes, suddenly feeling ashamed of her near-nakedness. Her hand passed straight through the handle. She tried a few more times and then glared at Jaye who couldn’t stop herself giggling. “Well, you do it, genius.”
Without so much as a hesitation, Jaye yanked the door open and started pawing through the clothes on hangers, looking at them with something like disappointment. There really wasn’t much choice – practical clothes that were built to last; jeans, jackets and a load of lightweight gym outfits.
“But I was solid in the Dead World. I could touch things.”
“Normal rules don’t apply,” she said and Katie immediately thought about Jack- had he woken up and found himself alone? Was he dashing around trying to find her? Or, more importantly, trying to get her back? “Here.” Jaye picked out a yellow tennis dress with a sparkly rainbow design over the straps and laid it out on the bed. “It might be easier for you to dress yourself if you can actually see what you’re trying to put on.”
“A dress? It’s single figures out there.”
“You’ll just have to learn to beat the cold then.”
Katie impetuously stuck her tongue out at her friend, which she promptly returned with interest, and frowned at the summery garment. She knew Jaye wasn’t really being mean when she chose a thin piece of clothing. Knew that she was trying to help her learn to stop feeling things. Sooner or later, things would get easier. Dying was bound to shake anyone up, and she was well and truly shaken. The world might be in flames outside her small room, might have stopped turning or imploded because she had not been around to stop it. Katie flicked one eye up and looked out of her window at a cloud-streaked blue sky and the silhouette of Levenson Academy for Sport and Action – exactly the same as she had left it… how long ago? The day to day calendar on the desk was open at Tuesday the 19th of October but that didn’t mean anything, did it. Changing a dead girl’s date pad probably seemed a bit pointless. The computer! That would give her the date and time! If she could only touch it to turn it on.
“It’s Tuesday.”
Katie raised her eyebrows.
“Same year. Same week, day, whatever. Same everything. You’ve been dead for precisely…” Jaye glanced at her watch and stuck her tongue out the corner of her mouth in an unbelievably cute way as she tried to count back the hours. “Precisely four hours and twenty two minutes.”
So the storm and falling asleep in his arms..? Even though it had felt like an entire day and night, and she felt as refreshed as she did after a solid nine hours sleep, it had all passed in the blink of an eye? Time worked differently in the mortal world and the ones belonging to the dead – presumably, when you had forever to fill, nobody wanted it to actually feel like forever. Katie could not decide how she felt about the world not noticing she was no longer part of it so she concentrated on getting the dress onto her strange new body. “So…” A tense silence crept through the room. “It’s not long.”
Jaye looked away. She was inches away from a breakdown herself and only knowing that Katie was in need of her help was holding it together. She was upset that her friend had died, even more upset that she had come back and had to learn all these new things, upset that dammit the kid hadn’t even finished going through puberty yet. “You know we tried. None of us… we didn’t want to lose you.”
“Jaye, look at me. You’re not getting rid of me that easily. While there are still things I need to put right – whatever they may be – you’re stuck with me.”
“I love you, babe. I love you and Dina like sisters. If I could have died instead of you…” She left the sentiment unfinished but they both knew where it would have ended. The impossibility of it just weakened very barely controlled emotions.
“Right,” coughed Katie, turning away from the cuddle she so badly wanted and knew she couldn’t have. “Let’s see if I can get some clothes on.”
The door creaked open just as Katie had thought herself into the yellow dress and a pair of cream pumps. She’d worn them most of the summer and to college a few times when she’d been in too much of a rush to bother with lace up trainers, so they were easy to conjure from under her bed. It was easier to think of it as a magic trick. The things she thought of weren’t mystical, they didn’t appear out of thin air – no, they were in a particular place and she just moved them to a different place. Okay you had to substitute sleight of hand for the power of her mind but hey.
Both girls glanced at the door as a tear-streaked faced poked through the gap. “Hey,” it sniffled. The door swung a few inches wider and a pale arm with a square of white bandage taped to its’ upper portion slid it further open, dragging past the outfits Jaye had discarded on her hunt. “What are you doing up here?”
It took Katie a long minute to recognise this grieving mess as Dina. At the hospital, she had been an exhausted, unkempt thing but now, now she seemed hardly human. “D!” she screamed and threw herself at her, remembering too late that Dina couldn’t catch her and crashing to the landing floor.
It did not hurt.
From her place sitting on the floor, she sat to listen in to what they wee saying.
“Taking a look at her things. It’s still Katie’s room and these things are everything she was. They’re all so new…”
“Untouched. Just like she was.”
Katie frowned and wondered what Dina meant. With everything she had seen and done, how could she possibly be clean again? Maybe Jaye picked up that haze of confusion. Maybe she was confused all by herself. But she asked the question anyway.
“You know, the way things would all go wrong for her or one of us and she’d just be like ‘it happened. I mean, it’s oh shit it happened but it’s still gone tits up so how do we make it right.’ She just kept moving. You know what I mean?”
Jaye nodded. Tears were glittering in her eyes and Jaye didn’t want to wish them away. She wanted to weep and scream and put her fist through something.
“I miss Katie already. She saved my life.”
“She saved us all, D.” She walked over to the desk and casually mussed her hand over the papers she had there. “What are you doing to her wall?”
Katie craned her head around the door frame just in time to see Dina use a red drawing pin to tack a tarot card to the wall between a couple of running certificates. Katie remembered an old makeup bag she had left in her coat at the club where she had died. The bag had contained a compact with a silver badge in – she absently flexed her scarred left hand, vaguely aware it should be stinging like crazy and wasn’t – two tarot cards and a crystal. One tarot card had been burnt in an impossible fire underwater and the other was here being pinned to a wall. The card bore the legend HIGH PRIESTESS and showed a pen and ink drawing of a woman looking like she had the weight of the world on her shoulders.
Ask about the crystal, Katie mentally shouted. Why on earth was she bothered about a purple chip of rock?
“There was a crystal. Did you find it?”
Dina nodded her head and bit her lip. “She’s not coming back, is she? It was too soon. I know she knew but… she won’t, will she?”
“I don’t know, babe.”
They dissolved into tears and each others arms but Katie couldn’t watch any more. She took herself off to sit on the stairs and think.
What could she possibly have to do here before she could pass on? Katie thought about the End Place and that terrifying cliff lined with the spirits of all those who died too soon. To save a friend from being pushed off that cliff, she had travelled there and found a million or more dark shapes just waiting for their turn to fall from the edge and go to the Other Place – heaven, hell, gravel and soil, a large expanse of nothing, whatever you believed in. Katie didn’t know if she believed in anything like that. Those couple of days had shaken her up completely. Things had happened there... A girl – well, something that claimed to be female – was waiting for her… No, Katie had to figure out what she was supposed to do and avoid it altogether.
“This is so messed up,” she muttered into her knees. Until that moment, Katie hadn’t even realised she had backed into the wall and curled into the tightest, most inoffensive ball possible. “I don’t even know who else can see me. How am I meant to do anything with no body?”
Suck it up soldier.
The army sergeant voice she always brought to life when she felt like crawling down a deep hole and never coming out until the world stopped spinning chirped a wake up call in her head. Katie hadn’t created this matter of fact, no nonsense, doesn’t know the meaning of can’t voice until about seven months ago when she had been raped. It had been this voice that had got her through hours of questioning and counselling without crying, this which had distracted her from the brutal examination the police doctor had put her through, which had made her get up, put on her uniform and go to school the following day. And she had taken its’ advice when it told her to get out of Worth – take the first opportunity that arose to leave behind the town that had birthed her, raised her, and killed the first little piece of her.
You know what you have to do. Now, step to it, girl.
But Katie had no idea what she needed to do. Still, Sergeant Voice was right, as usual. Hanging around here and moping was only going to make her sadder. If she got up and started doing something then maybe an epiphany would strike. It seemed unlikely to say the least but stranger things had happened.
The two older girls had left her room by the time Katie went back in. She sat down before her laptop and blinked hard. Telling herself to get her shit together didn’t make it any easier. She thought of Jack. She didn’t even know how to get back to him and that gave her an empty feeling somewhere deep inside – a place her living body had never had. Not being able to see him or speak to him hurt worse than- wait. Maybe seeing him, touching him and feeling his hand in hers as they ran for the borders together. Borders? Borders of frikkin’ what girl? Maybe that was impossible. It had been sheer luck last time. Speaking to Jack though… that was entirely doable. All she needed to do was figure out what she wanted to say to him and then send the words through that invisible mind link that tied them together.
What was happening to him? Was he missing her? Was he in his own version of the Dead World and safe, if lonely and alone? Was he happy and blissfully ignorant that her life was in turmoil?
Oh Katie, you have no idea how wrong you are.
Excuse me? She coughed at the unexpected mental intrusion, first pissed off at him for touching her mind from where-ever he was and then guilty that she had let a moment of anger in at all. Where-ever Jack was, he was stuck there, right? Trapped.
There’s something terrible in this world. It’s everywhere I turn.
Jack, I want to come back with you. I don’t belong in this place any more. It made Katie ache to admit but the truth always hurt when a lie would be so easy. There was too much life in town. Too much life she remembered. Too much she would never get to live.
Stay where you are.
You don’t want me to be with you?
There was the slightest hesitation. No.
Hot tears flamed behind her eyes, damply cursing Katie for not being able to let them fall. Jaye, Lainy, all the other Shades could cry real tears. But then they had bodies. Just like Jack had a body. A young, muscled, perfect body. Peppered with scars and calluses, it was beyond beautiful – it was the simple result of hard work and not much play. And for the past six weeks or so, it had been hers. She tried to imagine Jack saying that one word. No. All the things that one word might mean – he didn’t want her, didn’t love her.
No! He sent the word at her again. The fear and negativity in Lady Katie’s pretty head was, even at this distance, battering at his defences. How can you even think I don’t want you? If it was safe, I’d find a way to get you back here before your next breath… but that’d be selfish. And really, really dumb.
What do you mean?
It’s not… you’re better off where you are. You have to trust me on this.
I do. She just wasn’t sure that she should. What do you mean, if it was safe? A thousand thoughts flashed through her mind, too rapid to bring even one into sharp focus; the feeling of vague but thickening dread only grew. Then his voice came floating back to her, so low it was hardly a whisper.
It’d be dangerous
for you. Hell, it’s not great for me but you…no. I can’t let you through. If she could only have known that he was trying to protect her… she probably would have smacked him again. You’d only stay here and you need to do something before you can belong to this world. I love you, Lady Katie. In case I never-
And then he was gone. Cut off mid-sentence like a lovers phone call rudely disrupted when his credit runs out. What was there to do? A few outstanding pieces of homework, a stack of crumpled clothes that needed ironing again. Thanks Jaye!
Welcome! Jaye psychically yelled back from her own room.
How could Jaye be so damn cheerful? Her life was over too. Okay she‘d had a bit more time to get used to it, but only nine months if her calculations were correct, and had had a couple of years more to do what she wanted with life but still. Over the last couple of months, Katie had started to accept the idea of death and dying young and it had stopped being so frightening because she would come back to her old life and everything would go right back to normal. But now she had died and had come back, if slightly less solid than imagined, and it wasn’t normal. Not normal at all.
The world seemed suddenly huge yet absolutely minute.
This is where I fit in. Where I belong. Why couldn’t she make herself believe it? The clock on her bedside cabinet read out 6.10 in glowing green digits. It felt as though time was slowing down, was practically crawling. Or maybe the whole time works differently here applied to people whose souls apparently didn’t realise they were dead, no matter what world they were in. Maybe she was moving too fast for time to catch up. Katie glanced up and then rose to examine the photos pinned to her walls; her with a dirt-streaked girl who had her eyes, a sweat shiny Katie on the finish line of a racetrack and dangling a gold medal around her neck, a snap of the two girls and two older people all huddled under a dripping umbrella. She remembered that day. It had been a holiday in Wales and Dad had insisted it would be fantastic fun to go camping for a few days. Even the memory of cold nights and finding worms in her wellies made her shudder. Never again. She shivered and imagined herself easily into her brown fleece jacket. The autumn was fast turning to winter and the chill was sharp. Zipped up snugly, Katie brushed her fingers over the family photos. Her mother, father, younger sister. Related in name and nature. Why didn’t she feel more than a far away stirring of nostalgia in her gut? Surely there should be the pressure of blood calling to blood, a soul crying to go home and say goodbye. There was none of that. It wasn’t until she moved to the recent pictures of her new family here in Northwood that the trembling in her fingers stopped being from the cold and started being about a longing for home.
Closing her open hands into fists, Katie held herself back from punching the wall in frustration.
She felt helpless.
It was a horrible feeling. Helpless meant weak and vulnerable; it meant somebody could overpower her with a word or a whip, it meant- a whip? Her hands flew to the deep lash across her left shoulder, covered by the strap of her dress, but she couldn’t forget it was there, couldn’t forget the whip that had made it. Her arms, legs, God even her face, were marked with the scars of a whip powered with irrational hate and brute strength. You were strong to stand up to him. You were strong twice against the man with eyes of fury. You can do it again. And she cussed out Sergeant Voice for being right again. But this was too gentle to be the sergeant. This was…this was… Impossible as she knew it was, Katie could have sworn the voice belonged to Dina.
Chapter three