Lightbringer

most of the Shades in the dark, never really considering that maybe her mother had been the one who was mistaken, that perhaps her mother had been the one taught improperly. Maybe there could be another way.

If not, Wendy could certainly try to make another way herself.

The thought itself was sobering. After Piotr had left she’d swung from one extreme to the other, gone from reaping only in the most dire of circumstances to reaping because she felt like it. She’d done everything but the thing that felt most natural, most right.

Did Wendy have to reap every single ghost she came across? Just because her mother had done so, as well as the countless other Lightbringers before her, didn’t mean that Wendy had to follow in their footsteps. This wasn’t a job she’d taken, after all; it wasn’t as if she’d applied for it. It had been thrust upon her without her consent, a duty and a burden dropped in her lap by Mr. Barry’s death.

Wendy held the buckle to the light.

“I have a choice,” she said aloud. “I don’t have to be her kind of Lightbringer anymore. Not unless I want to.” It was freeing, admitting that fact out loud, and the stress began to drain from her shoulders, her neck, leaving Wendy feeling lightened for the first time in ages, possibly since her mother’s accident. Wendy was giddy with the realization that all the horror of her daily drudgery could end as she saw fit. Once the White Lady had been taken care of, once the Lost had been freed, then she could finally relax. She could be the right kind of reaper, the volunteer kind.

She almost sobbed with relief.

“Wendy!” Jon called from downstairs. “Are you coming down to eat?”

“Go ahead without me,” she called back. “I’m kinda worn out.”

“Ok! I’ll set some aside for you!”

Hugging the buckle close, Wendy flopped on the floor, her hair spread in a halo and her eyes drifting closed. Sleep had been a rare commodity and the subtle sounds of the house around her—the twins downstairs eating, the distant hum of the TV—soothed her to sleep. Grateful for the respite, Wendy drifted into slumber. As she slept, she dreamed.

In her dreams Wendy walked and walked. The familiar stretch of beach wavered before her, bathed in glaring sunlight and hazy from the heat. The sea murmured to her left, the craggy hillside loomed to her right. Seashell doors marched in a ragged line on the sand.

Over the past months, when Wendy visited the beach, she had learned to glimpse the names of the dream doors out of the corner of her eyes, to read them with a swift glance but never look at them straight on. Sometimes the doors opened easily at her hand, leading out of terrible nightmares and into kinder climates. Other times the shells scattered with a touch, trapping her in terrible hellscapes that she had to endure until morning came and brought the buzz of her alarm clock.

Then the mist came, quenching the heat and blotting out the fierce and glaring sun. When the first tendrils lapped at her toes, Wendy’s arm itched and burned; confused, she glanced down at the four open slashes, surprised that she had brought her real-world injury into the dream with her. When tiny white maggots began squirming from the gaping holes she knew the White Lady was near.

“That doesn’t scare me anymore,” she called, pitching her voice as loud as she could. “It’s gross but it’s not like it’s real or anything. And besides, I thought you were done with stupid shit like this. It was too juvenile for you or something?”

“Isn’t it?” The White Lady’s boat drifted out of the mist, mooring itself in the usual place. It took several minutes for the White Lady to struggle out of her small skiff, her movements stiff and slow. The past months had not been kind; her robes were ragged now, worn through with large, moth-eaten holes that allowed nauseating glimpses of the extent of the rot. Where she stepped on the sand black puddles like oil slicks formed, sticky dribbling ichor that sank slowly into the earth and emitted puffs of scent that smelled like rotten eggs. “You’d be surprised the things that cross over from dreams into the real world.”

“You’re falling apart,” Wendy noted, stepping away from the White Lady and shifting so she was upwind. “What the hell is happening to you?”

“One of the mysteries of life… or death,” the White Lady replied, coughing so that Wendy could see the bellows of her lungs fight to squeeze in and out. “Death for the dead, Lightbringer. It comes to us all.”

“Not like that, it doesn’t,” Wendy protested. “I should know. Not that I’m complaining. I wouldn’t care if you rotted down to dust after all the crap you’ve been putting me through.”

“You’ll care,” the White Lady said. “One day you’ll die and you’ll see.”

“You know,” remarked Wendy, keeping her distance, “for a crazy lady, this talk’s been awfully sane so far. Find a good dead psychiatrist? Freud himself, perhaps?”

The White Lady shrugged. “Eh, it comes and goes with the strength of the decay. As I said before, just wait. One day you’ll see.” She clapped her hands. “But enough chit-chat, I don’t have time to fuss with your nonsense today. I’m here to talk about our truce.”

“You mean the truce I told you to ram up your ass? The truce we agreed wasn’t going to happen? Open war and all that?” Flicking her wrist until her wounds were free of squirming bugs, Wendy crossed her arms across her chest and leaned against the bow of the boat. It was like leaning against a clammy wall, and black slime from the hull worked its way down her back. Wendy grimaced and straightened, annoyed that everything even remotely surrounding the White Lady had to be so unbelievably foul. “Real or not, ugh, this is so disgusting.”

“Yes, that truce. Though perhaps calling it a trade now might be more to the point.” She coughed again, a horrid rattling sound that hurt Wendy’s ears.

“A trade?” Wendy rolled her eyes. “Right, sure. I’m listening.”

“I’ve got something you want, Lightbringer. You’ve got something I want. So we trade.”

“I sincerely doubt that you have anything I want.” Wendy ran her hand along her shoulder, cleaning off the clinging remains of the muck. “Unless it’s a clean towel or maybe a shower.”

“A shower can certainly be arranged as a gesture of goodwill,” the White Lady said and snapped her fingers. “I always like to clean up before beginning negotiations.”

Above the beach, forked lightning flashed and thunder boomed, nearly atop them. A two second beat passed and then rain pounded from the sky, soaking Wendy to the skin almost instantly and obliterating the chilly mist within seconds. Though the foul White Lady had called the rain, the water was clear and cold and wonderfully cleansing, raising huge gooseflesh across every inch of skin. The slime washed away within seconds and the itching eased shortly after.

“Yeah, I guess that works!” Wendy shouted over the downpour, the drumming rain filling the world with noise. She hunched over and rapidly rubbed her hands over her slick arms, seeking friction-warmth.

“I haven’t many tricks left,” the White Lady said, her voice pitched low but still reaching Wendy’s ears, “but the ones I have are powerful.”

“I can see that.” Wendy straightened, determined to not show the White Lady that the chill was getting to her. “Want to turn off the waterworks now?”

“If you like,” came the negligent reply, and just as suddenly as the rain arrived, it was gone. Clouds dashed across the sky, revealing the hot afternoon sun once more, and rainbows glinted all around the beach, reflecting every direction she looked.

“I’ve got to learn how to do that,” Wendy mused. “Is that trick super handy or what?”

“Dreams are not the absolute realms of the Lightbringers,” the White Lady said, reclining on the damp sand and drawing her moth-eaten shift carefully across her legs, “but they can learn a trick or two. Prophecy, a nice neutral zone for a talk, a little spying, or even a bit of glamour; your kind can become quite adept here if they need to be.”

“You say that like you’ve met people like me before.” Now that she was clean and no longer revolted by the way the dreamscape bent in horrifying ways when the White Lady was near, Wendy was back on her guard.

“I told you that I’ve been watching for a long time,” the White Lady said, irritated. Where the hood slipped back Wendy could see long strips of essence that had been sewn together with wide, thick-stitched loops of thread. Where the strips tapered off, darker patches of skin had been carefully set with a crosshatch stitch. Examining these marks, Wendy realized that they had to have once been tattoos, but were now too badly marred to make out.