rare silence. He slid to the floor so he could kneel in front of Matilda/Sonata. “There’s light waiting for you, Matilda. Are you called Matilda?”
“My brothers call me Tilly, but it isn’t a proper grown-up lady’s name. I like Matilda.”
Billy cast a brief smile at the floor, then straightened his expression before meeting Sonata’s gaze again. “Matilda, then. When were you born, Matilda?”
“In the year 1887.” A shadow passed over Sonata’s face. “That was a very long time ago, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Billy said quietly. “Yes, it was. The others who are with you, do you know when they were born?”
Sonata turned her head to look toward the cloud of ghosts. “The twins are too little to say. Anne-Marie was born in the year 1846.” Consternation creased her forehead. “Ricky says he was born in 1943, but I remember nothing but the darkness after the year 1900. There are others.” Her gaze sharpened and she brought it back to Billy. “There are others with us here, but I care for the twins and Ricky and Anne-Marie. The others are not like us.”
“They’re older.” I got the sense she meant they’d died older, rather than having died earlier in terms of calendar dates. “They died in the wrong way. In the wrong times. They are not like us.” Everything the girl said was delivered in a cool, precise tone, as though she disdained or mocked us. I hoped it was just a century of being dead, and that she hadn’t been quite so horrible when she’d lived.
“Died the wrong way?” Billy asked diffidently. I’d seen him use the approach with his own children when they didn’t want to confess to something they’d done wrong. Affected disinterest on Billy’s part made admission on theirs less scary.
“They were not sacrificed.” She said it with such disinterest I suddenly felt the rage behind her words. The little girl had been dead for decades. What Billy was really talking to was a fury so potent it had refused to cross over.
“Can you tell me what the sacrifice was?”
Sonata put her arms out, and a long thin line of red split each of her forearms. Then she stood, and another bloody line scoured her from throat to groin, and then again, splitting the muscles of her thighs. Magic roared to life inside me, sending me forward a few jerky inches before I realized the blood was tinged with ethereal green, and that beneath Matilda’s ectoplasmic presence, Sonata’s body was unharmed. She said, “Five cuts, such a pretty star,” and bent forward at the waist, arms spread out to the sides. Blood dripped from her arms and torso, pooling beneath her. Then she lifted one leg, then the other, so she hung in mid-air as though she’d been lifted there on a glass plate, and blood poured from all five wounds, splashing to the floor.
To my eternal gratitude, Billy, and Patrick, who’d stood when Sonata did, looked as astounded as I felt. We all three just stared at the woman hanging in the air, none of us able to get beyond the blatantly abused laws of physics.
The blood had actually started to slow before Billy finally cranked his jaw up and said, “Thank you for showing me, Matilda. You could sit down again, if that would be more comfortable.”
To everyone’s relief, she did. The injuries and the blood faded away, leaving the cool-faced child to meet Billy’s eyes again. He, cautiously, said, “A star has five points,” and I understood what he meant: the cuts she’d shown us made four starlike points, but the fifth obvious one would be the throat, not the torso.
Matilda shrugged. “The throat is too quick. The star bleeds slow to make the potion potent.” She sing- songed the words, as if they were a nursery rhyme long since committed to memory.
Billy nodded as though she hadn’t said something horrifying. “And the others died in the wrong times, too,” he reminded her. I couldn’t have maintained the casual calm tone he used, and was two parts impressed and one part shocked that he could.
“Fifty, one hundred, fifty, one hundred.” Matilda flicked her fingers dismissively, sounding suddenly bored. “There is something the woman who offered me her body should know.”
Magic thumped inside me like a heartbeat, warning. I hadn’t spoken in a while, and my throat was dry as I asked, “What?”
Matilda’s eyes came to me, and her mouth turned to a predator’s smile. “I said I would give it back. I lied.”
CHAPTER 12
I bolted forward, hands outstretched to—to I didn’t know what, exactly, but I was by God going to try. Billy let out a yell and I dodged his grab, crashing to my knees at Sonata’s side. Outraged healing power lit me up like a Christmas tree, making my flesh translucent to my own eyes. I caught Sonata’s face in my hands, and beneath the quiet repose of her expression, Matilda flung her ghostly head back and shrieked with glee.
As a child, I’d gotten the idea that when I was in pain, if I could only stick a needle into the hurting part— whether it was a headache or a gassy tummy or a scraped knee—that I could draw the pain out with it and cast it away. I’d probably picked up the concept by reading about trepanation, but the point was that even as an adult, part of my brain thought it made sense.
Matilda, for all intents and purposes, became a needle pulling my pain out, except
Patrick slapped his hand against my forehead, and against Sonata’s, and began to shout in a language I didn’t understand. Matilda laughed, a cold hard sound all wrong from a child’s throat. Under the shouting, under the flood of magic rushing out of me, I heard Billy’s voice, compassionate and stern: “Matilda, there’s a way out for you, but this isn’t it. Let us release you. We’ll take what you’ve told us and do our best to find your murderers, but you deserve to rest now.”
Her voice vaulted me out of my body, if I’d even been there anymore. I looked down at myself, feeling like I was a million miles away. A silver cord thrumming with power attached me to myself, though even as I watched, it contracted, losing cohesion as Matilda sucked magic out of me to strengthen her speech. “I don’t want to rest. I want to live.” For the first time she sounded like a child, full of desperation and fear. “I never had a chance to live.”
“And you still won’t,” Billy said calmly. “This body isn’t yours to take.”
“She gave it to me!”
“And you agreed to leave it.”
Her smile turned nasty again. “Only when she says the words, and I won’t let her. This one’s power will let me keep her voice locked inside.”
Gosh. Apparently there was a reason Billy’d told me not to let a vengeful spirit latch on to me. Patrick was still speaking, his voice gaining strength. I concentrated on that, trying to use it to get back to my body, but after a few seconds it occurred to me that I didn’t even know the guy, and there was no reason he should be my guiding light. I wrapped my hands around the cord, which felt weak and watery even in my non-corporeal grip, and started pulling myself down.
Patrick stepped back to English and murmured, “This is your final chance, Matilda. Let us guide you through your pain and anger and into what waits beyond. It will be a better place, that much I promise you.”
Sonata shuddered, as though Matilda was entrenching herself more deeply, and my body-attaching cord turned to mist. I gave a panicked yell and dived downward, slamming into my body with a sick thud. I tried shouting, “Tally ho!” because I thought it was funny, but instead I said, “Trk!” and was astonished how much effort even that much sound took.
