Lightbringer

exception.

“I am Piotr,” he began, unsure what else to say. He tingled from head to toe now, heart hammering against his ribs, waves of jumbled emotion rocking him with unbelievable force. He cleared his throat. “And you?”

“Wendy,” she replied shortly, meeting his gaze and giving him a long searching look. Piotr, unsure as to why she was staring at him so hard, broke the contact after a few moments. Wendy’s expression was painfully intense; he felt as if he’d failed some vital test. “It’s short for Winifred?”

When he looked back he realized that her lips had thinned into a straight, taut line. She wet them several times, as if tasting her next words. Long moments passed before she sighed, shook her head, and laughed brusquely.

“You don’t recognize me.” Wendy rubbed the side of her hand against her forehead, leaving a pink mark behind. “I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised. I’m just me, right? Just Wendy.”

Startled, Piotr stepped back, taking her in again, carefully this time. Wendy stared at him in turn, eyes tracing his face with something like wonder. He realized that she truly did know him in some way, though she was a mystery in return.

“Net, I’m sorry.” Nervous now, taken aback, he clasped his hands and rocked back and forth on his heels, a child taken to task for an unremembered crime. Elle’s taunts came back to him: that old memory of yours just ain’t what it used to be. Annoyed, Piotr shoved the mocking voice away. “Should I?”

“Curly,” she replied and laughed again. The bitterness was gone now and the warmth had returned to her smile. Wendy rolled her eyes. “You called me Curly.”

The nickname was familiar but it took Piotr several seconds of actively casting back, thinking hard, before the image of the girl came. Blood-spattered and smoke-dusted, she’d been a tiny thing, eyes dilated in shock from a terrible crash and skin greenish-pale as curdled cream. It had been a car wreck, one dead, and the song of the Light fading away in the distance when he’d rode on the scene.

“Da, now I remember you,” he said, marveling. “The highway…there was bad weather on your side…the living side, yes?” Without thought his hand stretched forward as if to touch her but he truncated the movement, embarrassed to show wonder at the reunion.

“Got it in one.” The girl, Curly—no, Wendy—kicked her chunky boots and tilted her head back, staring up at the late afternoon clouds as if willing them to drift down and envelop her, stealing her away. “I thought I was seeing things, but you said I wasn’t.” She straightened and drew one knee up to her chest, resting her chin upon it. “In case you didn’t remember.”

“Net, I remember,” he said again, at a loss for what to say, and uncomfortable.

Her smile was swift, bittersweet. “Yeah, you seem to, now.” There was a clicking noise, faint but precise, and Piotr realized that Wendy had a metal rod through her tongue that she tapped thoughtfully against her teeth. He stared at it, fascinated. Why would someone do that to themselves? It boggled the mind.

“So, Piotr,” she said at last, “what were you doing in there? Don’t the dead usually avoid the living? Or am I just an exception for you?” Her chuckle was light and sweet.

Piotr’s heart lurched and he felt like a fool, imagining what it would be like to get real, honest laughter out of this girl. Seers were by their very nature dour people. If time and contact with ghosts hadn’t soured her against the dead yet, it would. It always did.

Still, Piotr decided, there would be no harm in telling her. Wendy was, after all, able to see his kind and might, if fate was kind, have been a witness to whatever happened to Dunn.

“Looking for clues,” Piotr began, choosing his words carefully. He liked this girl and he didn’t want to upset her unduly, but the situation merited a need for a certain amount of detail.

In the end Piotr outlined the bare bones of the situation, leaving out the horror that was the Lightbringer and the nightmare that was his recent encounter with the White Lady, stating only the rumors that the White Lady was ultimately behind the unrest among the dead and the recent rash of kidnappings. He told her about Dunn. Wendy listened in attentive silence, nodding her head at the right moments and clicking the bar against her teeth at others.

“So what you’re telling me is that the Walkers,” she said the word far easier than Piotr had anticipated. It slipped easily between her lips, as if she had practice, “are kidnapping the souls of little kids all over town?”

“We call the children ‘the Lost,’ but da, this is correct. Before… before, the Walkers always devoured the Lost,” Piotr confirmed. “As soon as they got claws on them. But now…” he left the sentence unfinished.

“They’re acting weird, traveling in packs. Grabbing instead of chowing down.” Wendy switched the phone to her other ear. A car pulled into the space beside them and Wendy nodded to herself, muttering, “Uh huh, okay, I get it,” until the passengers had turned the corner to the diner’s entryway.

“Da! You understand, but… you’ve… had experiences with them?” Piotr knew he shouldn’t be surprised at this, but the dichotomy of the thin, shocked girl huddled by the highway and this young, powerful woman was still fresh and startling to him. He supposed he would have to adjust.

“I’ve met the Lost before. Not often, but every now and then. Once I even spotted a Walker, uh… feeding.” Wendy paled and she wrapped her free arm around her stomach, hunching over. “It was… it was horrible,” she said. Piotr ached for her but didn’t know how to comfort the living over the obliteration of the dead. “Nasty.”

“So you know. You have seen.”

“Well, yeah. I’ve been spotting Walkers wander all over for weeks, but I didn’t realize it was this big a deal. And you think they’re taking their marching orders from this White Lady chick? But why? Aren’t they the ultimate evil on your side of the line? They’ve clearly got you and yours on the run.”

“The White Lady can give them something no one else can,” Piotr admitted. “Flesh. Before now, the Walkers would look out only for themselves. Then the White Lady came. Somehow, with her touch, she can reverse their deathrot. It was a mark of their darkness, the rot. It showed us that they fed on the young. To so casually reverse the marks of such blasphemy… she’s zloj… evil.”

“Gee, ya think?” Wendy sighed, rubbed a knuckle against the bridge of her nose, and tilted her head back, scowling up at the endless expanse of sky. “Great. Just what I need right now. An army of undead cannibals on the warpath.”

Piotr searched for a tactful way to express his surprise at her reaction. “Why would this concern you? You are alive. The worries of the dead, surely they are nothing to you?”

“You’d be surprised,” she replied shortly. “The concerns of the dead are sort of a big thing to me right now.” Her expression softened. “In more ways than one, apparently. Count me in.”

“You wish to help me?” Piotr was flabbergasted. “But why?”

Rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand, Wendy shrugged, flushing. “Couple of reasons, I guess. One, I don’t care if they’re alive or dead, no one should be messing with kids. Secondly, you were the first ghost I ever laid eyes on, so I sort of feel like I owe you. You know, for keeping me company when I had no clue what was going on. And finally, well, I’ve got my own selfish reasons, okay? I scratch your back, and vice the versa. I help you out, maybe you’ll think about helping me with a problem I’ve got going on.”

“It is a deal,” Piotr said, marveling at his luck. A Seer could go places a regular spirit like himself could not; she was living, after all. “What aid may I offer, Wendy? How can I help?”

“You want to know now?”

“It is as good a time as any, da? Is it a question? Perhaps I have the answer already.”

“I…” Wendy swallowed thickly. “I was wondering if you’d heard about a ghost wandering around town.”

Piotr raised an eyebrow and dared a smile. “I see many ghosts. It is my luck.”

“No, I mean…a specific ghost.” Wendy chewed her lower lip and suddenly brightened. “Wait! I have a picture, here.” She pulled the phone away from her face and pressed a few buttons in rapid succession. Piotr peered over her shoulder as she pulled up a picture of a slim red-haired woman with dark, kind eyes and a tired smile. Like Wendy, she sported a ring of intricate tattoos around her collarbone.

“This woman, she looks something like you,” Piotr said. “A sister?”

“My mother.”

“Ah,” Piotr sighed. “She has recently died and you wish to know if she’s still in the Never, da?