“I’m sure we all experience it differently,” he said.
Of that I was certain, but there was no point in saying so. I glanced around and noticed that Lily was watching our conversation from the corner of her eye as she looked after Julianne—who had stopped painting once again and lain back down. The ghosts had ceased circling the bed and seemed to be moving back, separating, and loosening their bonds to float out and fill the whole room in drifting clouds.
“There,” Stymak said. “The ghosts are moving. It’s like their attention is changing. Now might be a good time to try and talk to them, before they wander off.”
A dark form pushed forward to hover over Julianne, cutting off most of the other spirits. A few of the more self-aware ghosts did seem to be drifting away, as if they were tired of waiting and had decided to go elsewhere, but the repeaters and the barely-there lingered, stuck or unable to leave and moving neither toward the bed nor away from it. They wouldn’t be much help.
“Do you want to give it a go together?” Stymak asked.
I was eager to see how Stymak operated—and if he was for real or was just jerking my chain. Not to mention, we’d get more information from the stronger ghosts, who were now starting to pull away. “Sure,” I said. “How do you do this?”
“I usually just close my eyes and concentrate on drawing them to me and when they get close enough, I guess we ‘talk,’ though it’s not talking really. What do you do?”
“Kind of similar, except I go to them.”
“I’m not sure how that would work.”
“How ’bout you take my hand and we’ll see what we can do.”
Stymak frowned as if he wasn’t sure of my sincerity, but he moved closer and put out his right hand. I gave him my left and took a deep breath, waiting for him to close his eyes and do whatever he did.
I let the Grey sight flood over my normal vision as I slipped a bit closer to the land of ghosts, watching Stymak. The distant buzzing, muttering sound of the Grey swelled and, with a jolt of unpleasant surprise, I could hear voices. I hadn’t heard voices in the Grey in quite a while and I didn’t like the episode they reminded me of, but these weren’t quite the same and after a moment’s panic I settled myself down and let whatever was happening come to us.
Which was just what it did. The ghosts gathered around Julianne’s bed and some of the stronger ones that had started drifting away turned toward Stymak, fixing us in dead gazes. The voices grew louder.
I slid down lower into the Grey, looking for the brightness of the energy grid of magic and finding it suddenly in a swarm of color and silver ghostlight. A bright rope of twined blue and gold energy spun out from Richard Stymak’s bright white shape beside me. I’d never seen a living person with a pure white aura before and I wasn’t sure what it meant. I watched the rope weave and wave, luring the ghosts toward it, toward Stymak, while a crystalline voice nearest me—Stymak’s, I realized, though it sounded different here—called softly, “Hello, hello, I’m here. Come here. Hello . . .”
Three ghosts moved toward him, slowly at first, then rushing as if each wanted to be the first to arrive. Far away I heard a strained voice whispering, “Go away,” and the rattling, distant roar of the Guardian Beast. That particular monster that patrolled the borders of the Grey wasn’t coming closer, but I suspected it knew we were here. It’s an uncanny and unpredictable beast and, for lack of a better description, it’s my boss in the Grey, so I wasn’t sure if its attentive distance gave me comfort or scared the hell out of me.
The first of the ghosts, a coal gray form with a midnight face, its energy a tangle of fading blue light and dim red points, pushed against Stymak, brushing against me and leaving a scent of burned flesh in its wake. I shuddered at the smell and the strange sensation of jagged bones poking into my skin as if I’d embraced a fractured skeleton. It made a keening sound as the other two rushed up, pressing close to Stymak and jostling for his attention.
The three ghosts babbled in a squealing cacophony that set the rest of the ghosts to howling and jabbering like a mad chorus behind them. I tried to listen, but the words were a jumble, diced into useless sounds.
“One at a time, please,” Stymak said, panting. That at least was understandable, though I still wasn’t used to the violin-sharp clarity of his Grey voice.
The ghosts didn’t listen but continued to push and shove to get his attention, chattering incomprehensibly. I heard Stymak grunt as the darkest one of them shoved unusually hard, rocking him. Stymak’s energy dimmed and took on a greenish tone. “Stop! One at a time!” he said, sounding distressed.
I snatched at the pushing spirit and crooked my fingers in its tangled energy, pulling it away from Stymak. “Back off, jerk,” I hissed at it, giving it a shake. Flame flashed up my arm and I felt a jolt as the ghost fought back, then faded to a dim shape.
“Someel otsu vagueish . . .” it muttered, crumbling into black ash and blowing away in the swirling of the Grey, not destroyed but exhausted for the time being.
“What?”
But that ghost was gone and another one had pushed itself up to Stymak, talking so low and fast I could barely hear it as more than a chatter of teeth and a clatter of consonants. The last of the three ghosts had something more like a recognizable human face and form over the knot of pale blue energy at its core. It whispered and hissed with the other, the sounds of their voices harmonizing with each other and mixing with the background chorus of ghosts in a quavering dissonance that almost brought sense to the noise, but not quite. I could feel it, like pressure waves, trying to fall into a recognizable pattern but never quite matching up.
I let go of Stymak’s hand and reached for the two ghosts. The Grey wavered and shimmered, then realigned itself with a jolt. Stymak shivered, shedding his brightness for a moment before it flared back, not so bright as before but without the green tinge. “Who else is like Julianne?” His voice sang on the Grey.
The ghost chorus replied. “Jorvin. Stermar. Kadon. Derling.” Stymak shuddered, but I resisted touching him again. I brushed my tentative fingers against the ghosts and they flushed with a fleeting spectrum of color, whining like an ancient crystal radio. With a sudden pop, the ghosts sang back: “Kevin Sterling. Jordan Delamar. Sterling. Delamar. Delamar. Sterling. Kevin. Jordan . . .”
The ghost voices faded as the two primary singers slid away from Stymak, back toward Julianne again.
In the Grey I saw the dim form in the bed flare into color. The ghosts rushed toward her, swirling again into their desperate, dancing gyre.
I pushed away from the Grey, coming back into the normal as much as I could. The silver light of the world between still lay over everything in my left eye, but I could see the rest of the room normally. I glanced quickly at Stymak, who looked all right, if a bit pale and shaken, and then toward the bed.
Julianne sat up like a marionette being raised by a careless puppeteer, her limbs oddly flopping as her head lolled. She picked up the brush she had recently put aside and brought it to the wet canvas with strokes so harsh and slashing that they pushed the built-up paint aside and left a smear across the painting: “DelamarSterling.”
Then she fell back onto the bed, the heart and blood pressure monitors blipping faster for a few seconds before they reverted to their usual low, dull murmur. Eva Wrothen rushed into the room—I hadn’t realized she was even in the house and her appearance startled me for a moment. Then I turned to Stymak again.
He was blinking at Julianne. “That’s what the ghosts said.”
FOUR
“Kevin Sterling and Jordan Delamar. Do you recognize the names? Could they be the other patients?”
“I’d guess,” Stymak replied, shrugging. “That is the information you were after, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but ghosts don’t always give the answers you ask for.” I looked away from him and back to Lily Goss by the bed. “Do those names mean anything to you? Either of you?” I added, turning to fix the nurse in my gaze.
/> She blanched, but Goss just looked confused and shook her head. “Nothing,” Goss replied. “I don’t recognize those names. They aren’t anyone I know. Or that Julianne knew, so far as I can remember.”
I looked harder at Wrothen, and said, “But you know.”
Wrothen shook her head, conflicted, but what she said was, “I can’t—I can’t tell you.”
“You don’t have to. But do you recognize either of those names?”
Trembling, she nodded, her aura glowing a sickened shade of yellow-green as she said nothing.
“Patients, like Julianne,” I guessed.
She nodded again, breathing a little easier, as if I was taking some weight off her.
I put my hand on her shoulder and offered a grateful smile. “Thank you.”
I don’t think I have a movie-star smile, but I guess it was good enough. Wrothen seemed to sag, sighing out the last of her confusion as she slid from under my hand, her head bowed. “I’m supposed to help people. . . . I hope I haven’t done the wrong thing.”
“You haven’t done anything wrong. You’re helping us find out what’s happening to Julianne. You haven’t said or done anything to harm anyone.”
Lily jumped up and ran over to hug Wrothen. “Thank you! Oh, God, thank you, Eva!”
Wrothen looked almost comically startled and stiffened in Lily’s embrace before she put her arms around the other woman and returned a weak hug. I turned away from them, wanting to give them a moment’s privacy, and focused on Stymak again.
“You OK?” I asked as he plopped into a chair.
He blew out a breath and pushed his hair back from his face. “Yeah. That wasn’t quite what I’m used to.”
“I think that was my fault. I was afraid the first ghost was hurting you and I pushed it away.”
“It was. That’s—I mean the whole thing was just wrong from the beginning. That was just really, really weird. Usually I just get impressions, ideas, a few words, but this was . . . painful. Scary. I’ve never been afraid of a ghost in my life and that was . . . really scary. What happened at your end?”
“It was . . . very loud. There are a lot of ghosts in here and they’re clustered around Julianne, waiting for an opportunity to . . . use her, I guess. But they were very interested in you once you started calling to them. And then they were babbling and it sounded like a bunch of pieces trying to make one whole or . . . well, more like a jumbled signal that needed to be adjusted. So I tried to ‘tune’ the ghosts a bit, I guess you’d say, trying to get the bits of the noise to line up into an intelligible sound. It was just a guess, though.”
“Seems to have been the right one. But, man, that was really unpleasant.”
“Ghosts generally are.”
He frowned at me. “I don’t find them to be. They’re just . . . needy. Scared. Lonely. Like the living.”
“That’s a nice commentary on your fellow man.”
“I mean the things that make them seek help are the same things that make living people do it. And like us, they sometimes do the wrong thing or don’t know how to express themselves. People don’t get wiser when they get deader.”
“That’s the truth.”
“So, now what do you plan to do?”
“I need to find those other patients and see if they truly are manifesting anything like Julianne’s behavior. With three cases, I might find something they have in common that could tell me what’s happening.”
“I’d like to come along.”
I hesitated. I wasn’t keen on having an impromptu partner, but I had to admit Stymak had been able to make contact with the ghosts in a way I couldn’t. I wasn’t certain I’d have been able to get any information out of them on my own. “I’m not sure it’s a great idea . . .” I started.
“It’s a better idea than keeping our information to ourselves. We both want to find out what’s going on with Julie and I’m not sure what would have happened if you hadn’t been here to push that ghost off me. I’m scared, to be honest. But you’re not scared.”
I made a face. “Oh, I’m scared. I just know it doesn’t help, so I’m going ahead anyhow.”
Stymak brightened up. “Good! Then I’m sticking with you.”
Whether I liked it or not, it appeared I had a sidekick. Or something like that. “It may take a while to track these guys down,” I said. “I can start on that. Could you get started deciphering yesterday’s recording?”
“Oh, crap! I forgot to send it to you. I knew I’d forgotten something.” He looked abashed. “I’ll get it done today. I still haven’t figured out what language it is—if it is a language.”
“Don’t worry about it. Once you get it to me, I’ll have a friend of mine work on it too. It’ll go faster that way.”
Stymak nodded. “All right. I’ll stay with Julianne for a while and then head back to my place to work on the file. She usually gets pretty quiet in the middle of the day.”
“Maybe she’s exhausted by then.”
“Could be. . . .”
I turned back to Lily Goss and Eva Wrothen, who had settled down near the bed. Julianne was apparently asleep—or whatever one called the state she was in. Wrothen kept shooting me furtive glances. I wondered what she thought I was going to do. Maybe she’d noticed my tendency to become a bit see-through when I dropped toward the Grey. Most people ignore it, but those who do notice are often a little freaked out at the sight. I hadn’t been too hard on her . . . had I?
I frowned and turned my attention back to Stymak.
“All right, if we’re going to work on this together, you stay here and observe Julianne or work with the ghosts—you know better what’s yielding information in this situation than I do. And be very careful—I don’t want you to have another problem with a ghost trying to harm you. I’ll get started finding those other patients. Send me the audio files as soon as you can and I’ll send you the information I dig up. When we’re both up to speed, we can get together and decide how to proceed.”
Stymak nodded. I started to leave, pausing for a moment by the bed. The dark shape that had descended over Julianne wavered and heaved like a sail in a gusty wind and as I listened, it sighed and groaned, “Leave, leave, leave . . .” No one else seemed to have heard. I wanted to touch the dark form and see if I could communicate with it, but I was afraid the motion might seem sinister to Goss and Wrothen.
“Ms. Goss,” I began, then turned my gaze to include the nurse. “Ms. Wrothen, would you mind if I touched Julianne?”
Wrothen scowled. “In what way?”
“Just my hand on her hand.”
Wrothen looked at Goss, who bit her lip but nodded assent.
I drew as close to the bed as machines and rails would allow and reached out to take Julianne’s left hand. The first thing I felt was wet paint and I realized she’d been using that hand to paint with. Then I felt a cold jolt that traveled up my arm and zinged across the back of my eyes, warping my vision into a static-filled haze of darkness shattered by jagged curtains of shifting colors. The shock stole my breath and I gasped, taking in air gone ice-sharp. There was no summer here. The darkness hovering over Julianne lashed at me with thin whips of silver mist that left a howling despair and anger behind as they passed through my flesh. “This is mine! Go away!” They weren’t so much words as they were the strongest mental impression of a shout.
I held out for a moment against the pressure, pain, and cold, trying to see the shape of whatever held sway over the body of Julianne Goss, but all I could make out with either eye was a dull, unbroken blackness that cloaked her form like a drenched blanket. No more enlightened than I had been before, I broke the connection and pulled my hand away from hers, easing back from the edge of the Grey.
The two women beside me stared at me with expectant expressions—Lily’s more hopeful than Wrothen’s.
“What did you see?” Lily asked, hesitating as if she wasn’t sure she wanted the answer.
“Just darkness.”
“Is that . . . bad?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does something have possession of my sister?”
“In a way, but what it is and why it’s acting like this is still a mystery to me. It doesn’t seem to be harming her . . . any more than she’s already been harmed, but it’s not helping her heal, either. It’s a lot of angry and confused something—it might even be Julianne herself.”
Goss grabbed the hand I’d laid on her sister’s, her head enveloped in hopeful shades of blue with white sparks. “Can you help her? Can you figure out what it is?”
“I will, one way or another, with Mr. Stymak’s help. You and Ms. Wrothen need to keep her safe and well until we do.”
Wrothen made a soft snorting sound in the back of her throat, but didn’t say anything while giving me the evil eye, her aura spiking out in an annoyed shade of pumpkin orange. At least she seemed to be back to her normal grumpy self—which was better than conflicted and confused—and I had the impression she didn’t like me much. Not that that’s new: A lot of people and things don’t like me.
FIVE
I didn’t see Quinton that night, but I did talk to him on the phone while the ferret played the clown and tried to hide one of my boots under the living room bookshelves. I had been poking, searching, and sneaking around databases trying to get information on Kevin Sterling and Jordan Delamar, so while I was pleased to hear from he-who-dislikes-the-phone, my mind was not quite on his track at first.
“Hey,” he said. “Just a heads-up: Your friends with long teeth might have attracted unwanted attention.”