Lightbringer

“A dream?” Piotr leaned forward, curious and smiling. “Please tell. There are some that say dreams are gateways for the dead.”

“So I found out.” Wendy explained how she’d met the White Lady in her dream, but carefully kept their conversation streamlined, never mentioning why exactly the White Lady had chosen to single her out. “She’s threatening my mother’s soul,” Wendy finished. “I think…I think that maybe she’s upset that I’m meddling.” It was close enough to the truth, Wendy reasoned. She was meddling, after all, just more than Piotr could ever know.

“This is no good,” he declared when she’d finished, pounding a fist into his palm. “She cannot be allowed to do this!”

“I don’t know how I’m gonna stop her from it,” Wendy replied dryly. “But at least I can wriggle away if I need to.”

“Spies,” Piotr said softly. “This makes sense. If she had eyes and ears other than the Walkers, it would be much easier to time the kidnappings.” He frowned. “I shall have to take this news to the others.”

“That won’t be easy. Aren’t you guys spread all over?”

“Net, no longer. Once it was this way, but now all the Lost in the city have gathered together,” he explained. “Close to the humans, safe. But this arrangement cannot last for long. Squished as we are into one little building…tempers are already simmering.” He shook his head. “In truth, I should be there now. I’ve been shirking my patrol shifts and letting the others pick up the slack, trying to pick up traces of Dunn instead.”

“Then why’d you come tonight?” She hesitated, tapped one finger on her temple as if searching for a memory. “I thought you wanted to bring, um, what’s her name? Lily?” Wendy was proud of the way the name rolled flawlessly off her lips.

“Lily, in all her wisdom, believes I can learn more about Seers on my own.” Chuckling, Piotr ran aimless fingers across her bedspread. “Besides, James arrived earlier today. Lily wanted time with him.”

“Time?”

Piotr raised his fingers in air quotes. “‘Time.’”

“Ooooh. Wow.” Wendy relaxed, relieved. “I didn’t know you still did that sort of thing.”

Finding a loose thread in her comforter, Piotr ran his fingers through it over and over again. The thread wavered after several seconds of intense effort. “Why not?” He shrugged. “We’re dead, not… uh… dead. Da?”

Wendy couldn’t help but laugh. “Yeah, I think I get it. So, wow. This Lily chick sounds sort of like Eddie. She really likes this James guy, huh?”

“Indeed. Their territories are close but they can only meet infrequently. With other Riders there to watch the Lost, they can spend a while alone.” He smiled. “I am very happy for her. She works much too hard and the loss of Dunn has been a blow for her. James will offer the comfort she needs.”

Pausing a moment to make sure she wanted to pose the question after all, Wendy casually asked, “What about you? Do you have anyone special over there? Anyone you need to be comforting right now?”

“Special?” Piotr looked at her blankly, confused, before he understood what she was getting at. Then he laughed, flushed, and clasped his hands together in his lap. “I have in the past, da, but not for years. Since the early thirties at least.”

“Thirties?” Wendy was stunned. “The nineteen-thirties?” How old was Piotr anyway?

“That sounds right.” Piotr began tapping one finger against the outspread digits of the other hand, counting off the years. “The thirties, possibly the forties. One of the world wars had just ended. And I was with Elle for a while. Not long. She’s…a wild child. I dated Lily as well, though only for a short time.” His half-smile drooped. “James still hasn’t forgiven me for that.”

Amused that the dead had relationship drama just like anyone else, Wendy laughed merrily and a touch unkindly. This was something her mother’s training had never even hinted at. “They’d broken up?”

“I thought seeing Lily in such a manner would be acceptable,” Piotr complained, sounding eerily like Eddie for one brief moment. He waved a negligent hand. “But apparently net, it was not. I gave it my best, but it lasted a year. James,” he grinned, “is a very persistent rival.”

Hearing this guy, this boy who was her own age in physical years—if not actual years spent on the earth— sound just like her best friend, annoyed with some small fact of life, lifted an invisible weight that had been pushing Wendy down.

For the first time, she began really seeing Piotr—not just the peculiarities of him as a dead man, but as a person with quirks and foibles like herself. He was no longer simply a ghost she found attractive and would one day have to reap, but a guy near her own age, with his own problems and history, brimming with stories to tell.

Tension broken, they sank deep into conversation about the merits and perils of dating within one’s social circle, what the dead did for fun, and talked the rest of the night away.

More than three weeks passed like this, each night spent deep in conversation, getting to know one another as only friends can do. After that first night, Wendy told Piotr to meet her at midnight and no sooner. Exhausted after her long nights and longer conversations, she sank easily into sleep with Piotr holding her hand. Despite his presence, her dreams grew worse.

The dreams weren’t the only stressful change in her life. Determined to piss off the White Lady at every opportunity, Wendy now made a point of going out of her way to reap every Walker she saw instead of resorting to only self-defense.

At first, relaxing the personal ban on reaping ghosts had been utterly nerve-wracking—seeking them out was absolutely nothing like coming across them and defending herself. Trembling each time she dug inside herself and released the Light, Wendy forced herself to focus on taking every soul she spotted, returning to the habit of reaping with fierce concentration. She had to make up for all those souls she’d abandoned, Wendy reasoned. She couldn’t let them continue to suffer.

Though she had to work back up to the regimen she’d been familiar with before, Wendy still felt a pang of fear every time she slid into the Light. Reaping ghosts was still excruciating, but dealing with the pain grew easier with every reap—as if spending time with Piotr was painting a spiritual target on her back, or as if she gave off a ghostly pheromone even when in her regular state.

Within a week, ghosts—Shade and Walker alike—sought her out at every opportunity: school, the diner, even on the bus. Since she couldn’t become the Lightbringer around the living, being accosted in public was difficult to ignore. Wendy learned the art of ducking into alleys and running for the closest bathroom whenever a ghost was near. The ghosts generally followed.

Worried about what might be happening to her mother in the chaotic world of the Never, between the White Lady’s threats and her Walkers, Wendy kept her searching patrols as close to home as she could easily manage. Eddie often drove her on patrol and did his homework in the car.

More than once on these whirlwind patrols, a ghost would approach, dim in the light, and Wendy would think it was her mother. She’d check her impulse to send the spirit on until it was close enough. Then, always, she’d feel the crushing disappointment.

Those reaps were always painfully quick.

Keeping to such a steady schedule soon made a major difference. In a matter of weeks, Wendy had Santa Clara swept clean of Walkers and Shades alike. There seemed to be more of the dead than ever before, and the Walkers grew crueler as the nights passed. Soon it became a struggle to reap them. The Walkers, originally loners, began traveling in pairs and then in packs. Perhaps they had other Walkers observing from the shadows, or maybe after so many encounters they were beginning to learn, but they began concentrating their attacks in the brief moment that Wendy took to become the Lightbringer. She could be wounded here, in that brief instant between physical form and ethereal. Despite their jabs, however, Wendy was still strong, even when outnumbered, and yet, as fast as Wendy was, she wasn’t infallible. The smartest and quickest Walkers would attack and run, escaping her grasp before the siren song could lure them back, returning to report to the White Lady on a semi-regular basis.

Through it all, though she looked high and low, ducking into every building she could, Wendy never saw her mother’s soul.

Ironically, during their discussions Piotr worried that the Lightbringer would stumble upon the Rider camp at Pier 31, never realizing that he’d ensured its safety by letting Wendy know exactly where it was located.