Lightbringer

enough.”

She was on a roll and couldn’t hear him, or simply chose not to. “Whether you remember it or not, you’ve traveled some, Pete, and you took us along for the ride. Hell, you and Lily’ve been dead together longer than most of the Walkers ’round this town’ve been walking. Ain’t that right, Lily?”

The insistence Elle sank into each word chilled Piotr to the bone. Lily wasn’t denying the wild claims and Piotr knew that James, infuriating as he was, had never been much of a liar. But what Elle was claiming was sheer, unadulterated insanity, and impossible to boot. Piotr couldn’t remember his own death—few ghosts could—but surely he’d remember having died more than two centuries before. Wouldn’t he?

“Net,” Piotr murmured louder, shaking his head. “I don’t believe you.”

“She’s telling the truth,” James said. “You’re older than Moses, Peter. You’re older than anyone any ghost I know’s ever met. You’re damn near ancient.”

“Believe me or not, Petey-boy, I think I’m tired of givin’ two tin shits about it,” Elle sneered, thrusting her fists on her hips and wagging her head from side to side for emphasis. “Worrying about you all the time just ain’t cuttin’ it for me anymore. I’m just pointin’ out that you ain’t exactly playin’ with a full deck lately, and unless you’ve been lyin’ this whole time then you never remember us, Pete. You never do.”

“A couple decades pass and it is like meeting a new you,” Lily agreed, voice pitched low and quiet, but calm and firm. She looked apologetically at Piotr, spread her hands wide, and dropped them to her sides. “Your accent and some Russian phrases remain, but the rest, your memories and recollections…they are new like snow, like the clear mountain stream. When I first met you, you were like the great and wise Yanauluha; you guided me in my struggles and taught me much of the ways of the Never. You were serious then, but kind, and knew how to calm the troubled waters of my mind. But years passed and with them passed the man I’d known. Who you are now is not who you were then. You are not a bad man now, but different.”

Piotr groaned, rested his fingers at his temples, and massaged, hoping to drive away the tension headache that was building there. “You sound like you miss this ‘old me’ a lot.”

Lily did not reply, but her cheeks grew dark.

“Great,” Piotr muttered. “Fabulous, what a great bunch of friends you all are.”

Roughly, Elle coughed, then bent over. Piotr was startled to realize that Elle, strong and nettlesome Elle, was crying. Her hands opened and closed convulsively, her shoulders shook. Lily moved as if to comfort her and was waved away.

“All that time,” Elle croaked, furiously swiping the tears off her cheeks, “all that time we’ve spent with you, fretting over you, looking out for you and yours, all that time not knowing if or when you were going to start sliding into being someone else, and now you’ve thrown us over. And for what? Because you’re stuck on some dizzy sheba who don’t even have the decency to be dead? One you can apparently touch but, you know, just not for that long?” She sneered and spat on the floor, mere centimeters from Piotr’s shoe. “Well ain’t you the biggest sap I’ve ever seen.”

“You’ve got a right to be upset,” Piotr began tensely, forcibly keeping himself from wrapping his arms around Elle and simply hugging her. Elle rarely cried and he hadn’t meant to hurt her feelings; Piotr felt lower than low for doing so. “Before the kids were taken I hadn’t been around, pulling my shifts as I ought to have, you’ve got a point there. You and I…I wasn’t happy hanging around. I felt I was an imposition.”

“So you dumped the kids?” James asked derisively.

“Net,” Piotr retorted, annoyed and wishing James would quit needling him. “I assumed that with all those Riders staying here I could be away more often, but I know now that no matter how uncomfortable being here made me, I could have helped. I should have helped.”

“Damn right, you should’ve,” James grumbled, lapsing into a sharp and pointed silence.

“Pros’tite, I’m sorry for that,” Piotr continued, ignoring James. “I truly am. But the rest of it…this Yannihula—”

“Yanauluha,” Lily corrected. “The first shaman.”

“Yannihula, Yanauluha, it doesn’t matter! This talk like I’ve been some other person, it is insane, Elle. Nothing but crazy, creepy talk. Why do you keep going on like I’ve been around forever? I didn’t start the Riders; I haven’t been dead that long!”

For a brief moment Piotr hesitated—no matter how impossible it seemed, there was a chance, slim as it was, that they weren’t teasing him but in fact were telling the truth—but, try as he might, Piotr couldn’t bring himself to believe it. This was his afterlife, right? Piotr was certain, he could feel it in his very bones, that if what they’d been saying was true, if he truly had been forgetting things and slowly shifting personalities over centuries of existence, that somewhere deep inside he would have sensed such dichotomy before now. He would have!

Which meant that they were ganging up on him for some crazy reason; getting together to make Piotr feel bad for not being around when the Lost were taken, and for meeting with Wendy behind their backs. This was simple, petty revenge and nothing more, and he was ashamed of them and for them that they would stoop to such lows. Lily especially. Such meanness was normally beneath her.

So long as he’d begun, he might as well finish the fight and say goodbye to these petty people who were supposed to be his friends. Piotr straightened and firmly said, “I’m worried about you, Elle. About all of you.”

“He is worried about me,” Elle sighed, and then laughed. “Petey the boy wonder here is worried ’bout little ol’ Belladona Tinker. Well, ain’t that the cat’s meow, folks?”

“I am,” Piotr said. “I’m disappointed. This joke has gone on long enough.”

She nodded, the picture of thoughtfulness. “I have one thing to say about that.”

Straightening to her full height, Elle slapped him.

“You worry about me and I’ll worry about everything else,” she snarled. “Maybe, just maybe, if you’d been really worried before, maybe you would’ve been here when we needed you. Isn’t it funny, Pete, how the one time you run off for more than a few days they just magically appear and take us out? Like they knew one of our best fighters was gone!”

“Yeah,” James chimed in.

“Or,” Elle said, gaining steam, “maybe if you hadn’t had your head down in your pants and your hands down hers, Specs and Dora would be a little more here and a little less gone!”

Flabbergasted, Piotr could only open and close his mouth, jaw gaping like a fish. His hand drifted to his cheek, examined the heat there, the sting and momentary swelling where her palm had cracked against his cheekbone. Then Piotr grew angry.

“Ej! Smotret’ nyzhno! Listen to me, you—you arrogant bigmouth,” he growled, hands clenching into fists. “Wendy isn’t like that. She’s great! She’s fantastic! And unlike some of the people I know, she likes me for who I actually am, not who I’m apparently supposed to be. Or was. Or whatever! And as for Dora—”

“Elle, Piotr, stop,” Lily said reproachfully. She stood, shifting herself once again between Elle and Piotr, and shot James a hard glance for not stepping forward with her or stopping the fight earlier. “This talk is going nowhere. You are thunder booming in the distance. Neither of you is thinking straight and you’re only hurting yourselves.”

“Da, that’s obvious,” Piotr said, stepping back. “Wendy’s waiting outside. I think I’ve heard all I need to in here.”

“If this girl’s on the level, then she oughta prove it,” Elle called as Piotr stormed away. “She oughta step up and pull her weight a little more; maybe do some real business instead of just bumping off a Walker here and there. If she’s all fired up about duty and doin’ her job then she ought to go take care of the White Lady herself instead of pickin’ on ghosts like us. If you weren’t so goofy over this dame, you’d see that.”

“And if you had any faith in me, you’d trust me to know when someone’s a good person or not,” Piotr yelled over his shoulder. He paused at the door, hand pressed against the thick wood, and glanced back. They stood in a line in the far archway, Lily and Elle on either side of James like slim bookends leaning against one wide and battered book. The gloom loomed behind them.

“I’ll be back,” Piotr added, relenting at the sight of Lily’s mouth tucked in at the corners and Elle’s wide and watering eyes. “With Dora and the others. I promise.”

“You’re going to get yourself bumped off,” Elle said, clear and low, as he began leaning toward the door. “Soon’s you let your guard down. I’d lay a million clams on it. Two mil.”