Okay, it wasn’t really much of a conundrum at all. I reached deep and seized hold of my magic as solidly as I knew how. It flared through me, and even here in my garden—maybe especially here in my garden—I felt myself go all see-through and powered up, magic flowing in my veins like blood. The light mist that covered this end of the garden burned away in blue heat, and sunlight flooded down on me and the thing that wasn’t Billy.
It was trying to re-form his idea of himself. His skin bulged and split and came together again, mutating grotesquely. Brief glimpses of cadaverous faces melted into view, then snapped back again. His body weight changed, always turning emaciated before he pulled it toward his own more solid shape. Either the dead didn’t have great body images or I was dealing with a supermodel’s ghost. The second idea was more entertaining, but I’d put money on the former.
My fingertips were actually digging into his skull, like I was grabbing Play-Doh that’d been left out in the air too long. Flesh rupturing and reshaping under my palm felt like giant boils being lanced and rebuilding with living intent. It was utterly disgusting.
It was also, in those terms, a sickness, and sickness, I could deal with. Boils were poison, poison was something that didn’t belong in the system…in vehicle terms, that meant water in the gas tank.
I’d used the idea before to drive venom from a thunderbird’s veins. Water was heavier than gas, but in my analogy the healthy material was the weightier, mostly because it was easier to visualize pushing scuzz off the top than off the bottom. I wasn’t, after all, actually draining a gas tank.
I dug my fingers deeper into Billy’s squishy skull and poured silver-blue magic into him through those indentations. To my surprise, he acquiesced, ceasing his fight and permitting me to take it up. For an eternal instant he folded himself away, leaving nothing but my magic and the ghost rider in an echo of Billy’s thought of himself.
The ghost scrabbled, fingertips scraping off my magic like it was made of glass, impenetrable to its touch. With Billy, it had been able to sink through, permeating all the parts of him. But magic became the water in the tank, too heavy for it to invade. Fear and fury whipped it around, but it didn’t dare leave the sanctuary of Billy’s thought-form; without it, the ghost had nothing, no shape, no hope of surviving, and it wanted to live more than anything.
Me, I wanted Billy to live.
My imagery seemed juvenile, and I was glad nobody else could see it. Blue magic filled Billy’s lower half, just like he really
I clawed my free hand into the mist that poured free, holding it with magic that I retracted, carefully, from Billy. It felt slow, because I was reluctant to abandon his thought-self until I knew he still had enough handle on himself to re-form properly. If he lost his sense of self I had a much bigger problem on my hands than what to do with a temperamental ghost. But he unfolded from whatever pocket he’d retreated to when I took over, and the idea of him stabilized with relieving rapidity. None of it took as long as an indrawn breath, but it seemed like much longer. Things that were important usually did.
As the magic spilled out of him, it wrapped around my captive ghost in a kind of safety net. It couldn’t get into me, but I figured it couldn’t dissipate, either, if I held it within a bubble of magic, and if it wanted to live, then within my power was better than nothing. And if I was going to find out what else it wanted, then it needed a voice, and neither nets nor bubbles could give it one.
I entirely blamed my subconscious for what happened next.
Magic took shape low to the ground, coalescing what I recognized far too early as a 1982 Pontiac Trans Am. The color was wrong, of course, because while my subconscious was a smart-ass, my magic was apparently content with remaining silver-blue. The ghost’s dark gray roiled beneath the car’s surface, making the “paint” seem changeable, even more so than Petite’s carefully crafted purple. I put a hand over my face and dared a glance at Billy through my fingers. He was still pale, which was understandable: I doubted being possessed was a nice experience. But he’d fit back into his image of himself solidly enough, and looked, perhaps, a little more burly now, as though he’d beefed up the mental image to fight all comers. I didn’t blame him.
He was also staring at the translucent car in my garden with a fair degree of disbelief while the corner of his mouth quirked. “So,” he said in a voice so very neutral it didn’t hide a bit of his amusement. “Was Michael Knight your first crush?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” The
“S-s-speeaaaak!” Rage and desperation filled the drawn-out plea, spoken as though the thing had long since forgotten words and was drawing their shape from, oh, say, a logic-module voice synthesizer. Or maybe it was just echoing me.
“Who are you? What do you want? Why’d you fight against crossing over? I—”
“Joanie.” Billy sounded tired but droll. “Maybe I should conduct the interview.” He crouched in front of the Trans Am’s hood and put his hands on it, evidently trusting that the magic I’d called up was going to prevent a second round of Billy Becomes Lunch. “There are at least three of you,” he murmured. His self-image softened again, which I thought was fascinating. Next thing I knew I’d be wearing that leather getup when I wanted to be a tough girl on the psychic level.
“Three? How do you know? I—”
He gave me a quelling look. “The color, for one thing. Individual spirits turn pale gray as they fade away. Age doesn’t blacken them. They have to be united somehow, to get that dark.”
“Evil spirits aren’t automatically black?”
He gave me another look. “This isn’t the best time for a crash course in ghost identification.”
I thought it was the perfect time, but I also saw his point. I bit my tongue against asking more questions, and he added, “Besides, I had them in me for a minute there. I might be out of my league, but at least I can tell when I’m dealing with more than one ghost.”
I unbit my tongue. “If you’re out of your league shouldn’t I—” He didn’t have to say anything this time. I bit my tongue again and Billy turned his attention back to the Trans Am. All the color had pressed up against the vehicle’s nose, under his hands, like it was trying to get out. In fact, I could feel it trying to get to him, but it was a minor nuisance, like a dull itch. I’d have to be rendered unconscious to loosen the hold I had on the ghosts, and I wasn’t sure even that would do it.
“Something’s holding you,” Billy murmured. “Something strong enough to tie you all together. Family?”
“N-n-n-noooo.” The cry sounded like a wailing child, angry and full of uncertainty. Unexpected sympathy lurched in my heart. Things trying to take over my friends were inherently bad, but lost things trying to find a way home were merely pathetic. I liked the idea of helping a lot more than banishing.
“The way you died, then.” There was sorrow and certainty in Billy’s gentle voice, like he was trying not to upset the already unhappy child. He whispered, “Shh, shh,” to the uprise of misery that vibrated through the car, and I winced on behalf of the Trans Am’s windows. It was magical, and the windows would hold because I wanted them to, but Ella Fitzgerald had nothing on the pitch the ghosts reached. “Violent death,” Billy guessed softly and, this time to me, said, “It’s what holds most spirits beyond their time.”
Nervously, because I wasn’t certain I was allowed to say anything, I asked, “How long would they usually stay? You see them all the time….”
“Not all the time. Just with murders. With an ordinary death, illness or age, they fade away as soon as the body dies unless they have some need for closure that’s not related to their deaths. If they’re victims of abuse, for example, or once in a while if they feel someone they love is in need of help or comfort they’ll stay. There are people who say they feel the dead with them, even years after they’ve crossed over.” He glanced at me. “Most of them are kooks, but some of them really do have spirits who stay with them, like Caroline did with me. There are mediums who can communicate with the long-dead, but my ability is shorter-term.”
Beneath his quiet speech, the ghosts in the car twisted and howled, clearly too agitated by his question to give a straight answer. He ran his hand over the car’s hood, soothing motion, but they still screamed and battered themselves against the cage my magic made. Billy ignored them, giving me more of that crash course in ghost investigations after all. I thought it gave the spirits something audibly soothing to latch on to as much as it educated me. “Even with a lot of violent death, like car wrecks, the spirit usually only takes a few hours, a couple
