Paladin was off having happy home-time with his famous father and perfect family, so I couldn’t rely on the Stalwart to beat me into unconsciousness again. Nor could that have been the key anyway, seeing as how a dozen-plus beatings since had failed to trigger a similar reaction. So if it wasn’t the physical pain that had sparked my power… what was it?
I tried to remember my mindset during that first battle in the pit; the realization that I couldn’t win, my hatred of Matthew’s casual superiority, even my burning resentment that Nikolai had knowingly sent me down to get battered for his own amusement.
Beneath all of those thoughts and emotions had been anger, black and thick like Bakersfield mud after the driving fall rains, the anger that had been with me from those first years after Mom’s murder, giving me the strength I needed, helping me weather the blows that came again and again.
Anger? That I could do.
I closed my eyes and took a long breath. I reached deep for the anger I carried everywhere and let it bubble to the surface, I let it rise within me until it had flooded every part of me, until my fingers twitched with the need to scratch and claw. Then I opened my eyes, looking at a dorm room tinged red with a haze like blood, and I unleashed that anger at the ghosts around me, chasing it with every scrap of will I could bring to bear, all tied up into a single word.
Leave.
The red haze thickened and darkened until my vision was totally obscured. I collapsed back onto the bed, my pulse a loud drumbeat in my skull. Minutes passed before I was able to catch my breath, before I was able to do more than simply lie there and twitch. Eventually, I pushed myself back up to a seated position with one shaking hand, feeling as old as Amos. I swallowed once, then twice, and finally opened my eyes to see what I had wrought.
Absolutely nothing had changed.
God fucking damn it.
•—•—•
After that, things got a little incoherent. I remember conversations that couldn’t have happened and encounters that were almost definitely dreams. At various times, the asshole who murdered my mom showed up, and I drove him away by hurling pieces of furniture at him, but each time, that same furniture was whole and in its usual place moments later.
Somewhere in there, I must have gotten food at the cafeteria, but I can’t recall doing so, and none of the staff copped to ever seeing me come in. I don’t remember leaving the dorm room at all, even once, but at some point, I found myself back in that clearing on the west edge of campus. It was night, but I could still see, the world around me lit with the harsh light of the dead.
I tore my eyes from the ghosts rushing in from the tree line. The sky was full of stars that were not stars but spirits, drifting down out of the darkness like spiders on invisible threads of silk. I turned my eyes to the ocean, and found it disgorging waves of glowing forms onto the shoreline, miles away, forms that slithered their way towards me as if distance was just an abstract concept. As they neared, I realized they too were ghosts, many of them bloated and misshapen, swaying forward on staggering spectral limbs.
Where once there had been a single ghost, then two, then a few dozen, now there were hundreds. Maybe thousands. The silent, skin-crawling buzz filled me, drowning out every last shred of the world around me. I felt the rings of ghosts around me tighten. I felt the last remnants of space between me and that very first and smallest circle—the one that held Mom and Shane and two of the bandits Her Majesty had killed on the road—shrink until there was nothing left, until the air was not air, but the forms of the dead, and my lungs began to seize from the lack of oxygen.
And then I felt something new.
The endless, soundless hum stuttered, then stopped. The ranks of ghosts furthest from me shivered and broke apart, that pattern repeated again and again as a path slowly opened to where I huddled. Down that path came a woman, taking small, mincing steps forward as a thousand ghosts made way before her with reverent haste.
She was wearing a simple black dress straight out of old-time vids; little black buttons from the ankle-length hem all the way up the long column of her neck, every one of them securely fastened. Hair as dark as the dress was pulled back into a bun that added a decade to her appearance, but her pale face was young and unlined. A doll’s mouth curved insouciantly below a button nose, and high cheekbones made her look fancy rather than just underfed.
It wasn’t until she was within arm’s reach, when the last ring of ghosts had scattered rather than stand in her way, that I saw her eyes. Mud brown and empty, like freshly dug graves, they were eyes that every person in the country would have recognized and feared.
“Hello there,” she finally said, with a quiet smile that died somewhere in the abyss of those eyes, “My name is Sally.”
CHAPTER 45
Everyone knows about Sally Cemetery.
Everyone knows the things she did.
I should have been terrified when she walked out of the forest, spirits bowing before her like she was some sort of queen of the underworld. Instead, I remember only relief. I remember the way thousands of ghosts went silent, and the sweetness of the breath I took in that stillness; nothing but cool air filling my lungs. I remember feeling free for the first time since Shane’s death.
Even now, with everything that’s happened since, with the terrible things I’ve learned and the equally terrible things I’ve done, there’s a part of me that loves Sally for that singular moment of
