Walking Dead

head and sat down, leaning against one of the headstones “—I mean, I get why you dove in. You were trying to save me. Thank you, by the way. But, Billy…why the hell did you dive in?”

He gave me a familiarly exasperated look, which made me happy. If I could still annoy him, there was hope for bringing him back. “You’re a hell of a lot more important in the grander scheme of things than I am. I wasn’t going to—”

I cut him off with a wave of my hand. “Overlooking the fact that I fundamentally doubt that, it’s not what I’m asking. It’s a death cauldron, Bill, and you’ve got four kids and another one due in a couple of days. Why on God’s little green earth would you do something like this?”

Silence rolled over the cemetery, Caroline looking between me and Billy and back again. It took a long time for him to say, with a note of uncertainty, “I had this idea it would be all right. That I could just…rest for a while. That it’d be comfortable.” Another few seconds passed before he admitted, “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It’s the cauldron.” I tipped my head against the headstone and looked toward the sky again. Clear and blue and reassuring, an unmitigatedly beautiful day. “Every time I’ve gotten near it I’ve started wanting to climb in. I don’t know if it really offers peace, Billy, but it sure as hell talks a good game. The cauldron itself is seductive. It makes you want to get in it.”

“Well, how can that be? If living people just want to climb in—” His mouth worked and while I was pretty sure it wasn’t his original intention, his sentence ended with, “Shit.”

“Yeah. So I don’t know how we destroy it.”

Caroline’s foot thumped against her headstone. “You could ask the expert.” She sounded more like Billy than I’d expect a little girl to. They used the same inflections, though her voice was a couple octaves higher.

“Billy is my expert. What he don’t know, I don’t know. Only I don’t know a lot more than he don’t know.” I frowned and stopped talking, afraid I’d get myself stuck in a paradox or something.

“No,” Caroline said patiently. “I meant, you could ask the dead girl.”

She’d looked pretty normal, right up until then. She’d looked, you know. Alive. That trapping fell off, turning her into something unlike anything I’d ever seen. She was still generally little-girl shaped, still with braided pigtails and a solemn smile, but it was like the girl had been peeled away to reveal a pure bright soul beneath it. She wasn’t alive. She hadn’t been for a long time, but it hadn’t left the kind of mark on her that it had on Matilda Whitehead. Love had kept her from moving on, not vengeance, and over the years that had just kept building up.

Billy’s mortal form began to fall away, too. I didn’t like that: it suggested too strongly that he was dead, and that me diving after him into the cauldron hadn’t done any good, which was not an answer I was prepared to accept. But stripping away the human shell let me begin to understand just how tightly entwined his soul was with Caroline’s; how much she’d been informed who Billy had become. They’d been best friends in life, the big sister protective and proud of her little brother, the younger brother awed and admiring of the older sister. I could hardly imagine the intensity of their bond surviving into adulthood had she lived, and at the same time desperately hoped would have.

But she hadn’t lived. She’d drowned, and she’d been so worried for her baby brother that she hadn’t gone on to wherever human spirits usually went. She’d stuck around, protective and protecting, and the place that had always belonged to her inside his own soul had made a little more room, accepting her there. He saw ghosts because part of him was one.

Unhappy certainty crawled up from within me and made me ask, “How do we break the cauldron, Caroline? If it’s not a living body, what is it?” I knew the answer. I hadn’t until now, but I knew the answer, and I wanted her to give me another one.

Radiance spilled from her as though the question made her glad. “An innocent spirit,” she said lightly. “That’s all it takes. An innocent spirit.”

“Like you,” I whispered. Like an eleven-year-old girl who’d never had much chance to live.

Caroline smiled. “Like me.”

Billy’s human form closed up over his spirit-self again, a growl contorting his voice. “Like hell.”

Caroline turned to him, putting brilliant fingertips against his chest. “I’m so far overdue, Billy. I should’ve gone on years ago. You know that. Even Bradley knows it. It’s why he hates all of this so much. It’s long past time for me to let go, and if I do it now…” Her smile blossomed again. Smile didn’t come close to what happened when she expressed happiness. The whole world around us lit up, grave markers casting white shadows and a sense of joy and excitement wiping out other emotion. It utterly lacked in artifice, but was wise enough about the world to make it achingly poignant.

“If I go now,” Caroline said again, “I can help you. I can save that family. I can put all those restless dead back to sleep. It’s a good time, Billy. This is a good time to go.”

“Caro…” Billy’s voice cracked.

I got up and jerked my head toward the world beyond the little graveyard. “I’ll wait out there. Take your time.” I walked out and closed the gate behind me, as though doing so could give them the privacy they deserved.

A few minutes later a supernova expelled us onto Archie Redding’s lawn.

CHAPTER 29

Tuesday, November 1, 12:01 a.m.

From my perspective, quite a lot of time had passed since I’d jumped into the cauldron. From the world’s, it looked like very little time had passed at all, and yet what had passed was filled with bitter dredges.

There was no fight left in Ida Redding’s body, nor in her daughters’. They were still relaxing, in fact, falling out of tormented arches and twisted shapes to collapse into stillness on the earth. A terrible stillness: one that spoke of life already spent and gone. I didn’t need the Sight to tell me we’d broken the cauldron too late, but it washed over me anyway, lighting up the bodies of three people who should have been left in peace more than a century and a half ago.

Two things came blazingly clear, holding me in time and letting the rest of the world fall back in irrelevance for just an instant. The Reddings’ fresh-born souls still lingered, bewildered and injured but not ripped from their bodies; not swallowed by the banshees’ hunger. I blinked in astonishment and my ability to see them faded; mine wasn’t a talent for observing ghosts, and all I was left with was a layered look at the bodies they’d abandoned.

Between midnight and one minute after. That was the window Redding could revive his family in. What he hadn’t known, what the banshees and the Master had never told him, was that those sixty seconds would be the only time in which life ran in their veins again. The bodies lying on the grass were tens of decades dead, burned with years of primitive preservation. It hadn’t been only salt and ice that had kept them together, but magic, as well, and I could see that fading; could see the collapse of cellular structure. They would decompose by morning, finally gone to the ashes they should have been so many years ago. Exhaustion and sorrow closed my eyes for a moment, before I made myself look again at the chaos surrounding me.

Redding himself was on his knees with his forehead against the earth, hands folded over his head. I could hear his sobs, and thought, uncharitably, that he was doing nobody any good. Suzy was hidden behind Gary, who still had my blazing blue rapier in hand, though he’d flung his sword arm up as if in defense. Morrison looked as though he—

Actually, he looked like he was in the midst of cauldron-diving himself, only to rebound off an invisible barrier. He looked pissed, mostly, with a solid dash of confused added to the mix.

As for myself, I lay on a huge iron-bound oaken circle, shards of the cauldron blown to bits around me. In fact, iron bands were scattered all over the yard, and chunks of oak were floating in the pool. A half circle of slivers, some delicate and some massive, lay at Morrison’s feet, like they’d hit something and slid off again. I shot another look at Gary and my sword. He lowered it and shrugged.

Belatedly, I realized I was technically lying on Billy, not on the cauldron’s base at all, and that he wasn’t breathing.