The room passed inspection, however. At a loss for something productive to do in lieu of her normal routine, Wendy sat down to finish her homework early. An hour passed. Two. She completed the last line of her geography paper, stretched until her back crackled, and sighed in relief.
“I don’t remember going to school. It looks tedious.”
Stifling a shriek, Wendy started out of her chair like a frightened cat. Every hair felt as if it were on end, every nerve tingling with shock and surprise. “What the hell are you doing here?!”
Piotr rose from her bed, where he’d been sitting. He flushed, embarrassed, looking as if he was worried that he’d done something wrong.
Wendy held up a hand for silence, shushing him. They heard footsteps pad down the hall and a gentle tap on the door. “Wendy?” It was Jon. He opened the door a crack, letting in a waft of sugar-scented air. “I thought I heard you yell. Are you okay?”
“Leave her alone, Poindexter!” Chel yelled from across the hall. She was breathless and the speedy beat of her feet on their mother’s treadmill almost drowned her out.
“I’m fine, Jon,” Wendy said. “Just stubbed my toe.” She raised her voice. “And don’t call Jon ‘Poindexter,’ Chel! It’s not nice!”
The whirr of the treadmill paused and their parents’ bedroom door slammed.
Shaking her head in annoyance, Wendy glanced at Piotr and belatedly realized how ridiculous it was to shush one of the dead. It wasn’t as if Jon or Chel would be able to hear Piotr talking anyway, not even if he’d shouted at the top of his lungs.
Jon shrugged, set a fresh-baked sugar cookie on the vanity, and shut the door. Wendy waited until Jon’s footsteps had faded to smile apologetically at Piotr. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude.” Grabbing her stereo remote, she flipped it to her favorite station and turned the volume just high enough that it would drown out her low-pitched voice. “You just sort of snuck up on me. I was expecting you to come up the tree.”
Piotr glanced out the window. “I can, if that would make you feel better. But the door, it is very thin, and this home is very new. Easy to walk through.”
“Right,” Wendy agreed. “I should have thought of that before.”
Shrugging, Piotr sat on the edge of her bed again.
“No. We don’t.” Wendy hesitated beside her desk, uncertain whether he would find it weird if she sat beside him on the bed or if she should just sit back down on the chair. But it was
As if sensing the train of her thoughts, Piotr pushed further back so that he was almost resting against the headboard. “My apologies. I am stealing up your space.”
“No,” she said, flushing, “it’s cool.” Collecting the sugar cookie and nibbling on the edge nervously, Wendy drifted towards the edge of the bed, obliquely glad that she’d taken the time to neaten up. Piotr looked strange but somehow right in her room, with his dim shoulders outlined against the hot pink puffy pillows and the chipped black headboard. It was as if her life had been leading up to this moment—a ghost among her private things, as casual as if he belonged there, as if he were alive.
Wendy wondered if she were truly going crazy.
“So,” she asked too brightly, searching for some topic to break the odd awkward tension. “Any word on the hat? Or the holes in it?” No longer hungry, she set the cookie aside.
At first it seemed he wouldn’t answer, and Wendy began scouring her mind for some other topic, when Piotr said, “None of the others knows what it means. Lily is frantic.” He reached to pet Jabber but snatched his hand back when the cat aimed an ill-tempered swipe at his wrist.
“Aren’t there any, I don’t know, ghostly acids or something that could have done it?” Wendy asked.
“Things, objects, sometimes pass over into the Never but I have never heard of such a thing.” He grimaced. “It is possible, I suppose. But unlikely. It is a blessing, I suppose. Such an acid in the wrong hands would make…a deadly weapon.”
His choice of words struck Wendy as strange and scary. “You know, I never thought to ask this before, but… Piotr, what happens when ghosts fight one another? If a Walker doesn’t eat you, you can’t kill each other, can you? You can only, you know, hurt one another, right?”
“That is wrong. We can destroy one another. And some do.”
Gaping, Wendy pressed cold fingers to her lips. “But that’s crazy. You’re already dead!”
“That’s what being a ghost is like. Death, existence, and death again.” He smiled sadly. “Unless you find the Light. Then, salvation.”
Wendy shuddered. “I’d imagine there’s nothing worse than dying after you’re dead.”
Piotr disagreed. “
“Really?” Curious, Wendy sat up. “What’s a Lightbringer?”
Standing now by the window, Piotr leaned forward and gazed out into the early evening, eyes searching and expression grim. When he turned to face her, Wendy was stunned to see how drawn his features had become, how pale he’d grown. He was still, steady, but the haze of his very essence seemed to be shaking, as if he were trembling. Piotr, she realized, was terrified.
“It’s a—” Piotr struggled for the word, “a figure? A figure made of pure light, blinding light, and it sings a siren song that draws us. It’s new, a snare like nothing you’ve ever seen.” Piotr half-laughed, a broken, battered sound. “It has tentacles of light that it uses to spear us with.”
“Tentacles.” Wendy was starting to get a bad feeling about this.
“Thin, flexible. The light is bright. If we get too close…” He glanced under his lashes at her and hesitated, quieted.
The anticipation burned in her gut, a roiling mass of nerves, but Wendy didn’t dare show Piotr how his words unnerved and frightened her. “If you get too close?” Wendy prompted, with a fake, sunny smile. The grin wasn’t quite appropriate, but he was hardly looking at her, lost in his own dark thoughts.
“Since the light is like fire to us, if we get too close to it, the light burns us to cinders. It just starts eating away at what we are until we…until our very essence is stripped into nothing.”
Coldness coiled in her gut. Wendy straightened, clasping her hands together to keep from shaking. A being of light that broke apart essence until it was no more. Surely he couldn’t mean…her?
“Have you seen it?” she asked, studiously staring at a snarl of thread on her comforter. Her fingers, restless, stole out from her lap, picked at the snarl, working the knot until it had come undone. She smoothed it, pressing hard into the fabric. “This…this Lightbringer?”
As Piotr outlined his meeting with Lily and their encounter with the Walkers and the Lightbringer, Wendy remained calm and quiet. There was no doubt in her mind that Piotr had seen her on patrol that night, had spotted her when she’d been forced to reap the nosy Walkers that had scented her and tried to chase her down.
He’ll never understand, she realized, sucking the ball at the end of her barbell between her front teeth.
And wasn’t that, in part, the truth? Hadn’t she told herself just the other day that when all this was over, she’d reap him and release his soul into the Light? So who was in the wrong here? Piotr for being frightened of her or Wendy for doing her job in the first place? The job she hadn’t even asked for? The job she didn’t want anymore?
He thought she was a
Piotr hated her. He just didn’t know it yet.
Wendy felt ill.
Desperate to change the subject, she searched for something, anything to talk about. “I just realized that I forgot to tell you about this crazy dream I had earlier this week.” Wendy settled on the edge of her bed, drew her legs up under her, scooted in. She could feel the coolness banking off him in waves, like the errant breeze from a weak fan. He even smelled cool—evergreens and mint and the slightest hint of something earthy just underneath. The scent of death, his death, which separated them.
