“Like I haven’t heard that one before,” I muttered. “Why does it always have to be someone else’s fault with you, Simondson? It was your dead wife’s fault you robbed her daughter’s inheritance. Now it’s my fault you’re dead. Me, I’m betting on greed, vanity, and plain old-fashioned stupidity—your usual motives.”
He started to object and I rattled his vague substance in an offhand way while rolling my eyes. “Oh, please. Try something new. The truth would be good. Let’s start with the woman who convinced you to beat the living hell out of me two years ago.”
“Claire?”
Interesting: I knew her as Alice—I was pretty sure we were talking about the same female. “Petite thing, ruby-red hair, sharp teeth, smokes like a silent film star . . . ?”
The ghost nodded. He looked tired, as if whatever had befallen him at the end of his life had been exhausting and death wasn’t any more restful. But, of course, I had come along and made him wake up from whatever brand of eternal sleep he might have been enjoying. Or not. I felt no shame: This man had beaten me to death and I felt he didn’t deserve much respect from me now that he’d joined the post-life crowd himself. “You didn’t know me from a hole in the ground, so how did your Claire talk you into knocking my head in?”
The ghost wavered and blinked, seeming to cringe and fold into a smaller shape. “Can’t think,” he moaned.
“Try harder. How did she compel you to attack me? Who killed you? How? Tell me. Tell me any of it and I’ll let you off the hook.” I needed everything I could get to fight Wygan. . . .
I yanked Simondson a little closer, studying the thickening mist of his form as he tried to remember. When he seemed nearly corporeal, he began shaking, a choked squeal of pain singing out of his mouth in a red cloud. I sank deeper into the Grey, looking at the tangled skein of energy that was Simondson’s ghost. Red, a hot red that deepened to a bloody claret color at the core. I touched one of the swirling strands of his energy, hooked it with my finger, and pulled with a firm pressure.
The hot color leapt off him, running up my own arm like flame and nerve gas. The wretched arc of agony made me buckle and cry out. I nearly let go completely. Voices from everywhere and nowhere shrieked and gibbered in my head. I backed away from the deep level of the Grey, shaking. Simondson panted, a remembered response to surcease, and trembled.
I kept one hand on him, but I relaxed my grip, pushing him just a bit away from me in the depth of the Grey, letting him drift into a less corporeal state. He shuddered and breathed a blue gust, almost sexual in the quality of its release. Repelled, I had to force myself to keep him present.
He caught a breath he didn’t need and sagged a bit in his respite. “Let me go,” he murmured. “I can’t help you and it’s torture when I try to remember....”
“I can see that.” I didn’t want to investigate the how of it—I knew I’d have to eventually, but not this second. For now it was enough that I thought I had the principle of it. I guessed that this was something akin to whatever torment Wygan had my father tied up in: The Grey was in large part memory in various forms; when the memory was strong, the spirits were more corporeal, but as they became stronger and more “there,” they were also more subject to pain. Wygan had done something . . . horrible. A spell or binding of some kind that looped back through memory as agony.
Ghosts didn’t experience sensations like a live person, but they remembered them as if they were real and that was what Wygan had tied him to, somehow. As Simondson—or my father—tried to remember anything or act, he became more solid . . . and so it went in spirals of suffering: remember and be tormented, move toward presence and become engulfed in pain. It was better to fade down to the merest whisper of what you had been, to a shade and a shadow, and remain mute, stupid, and inactive. Unable to help anyone or even yourself until Wygan was ready to use you for his own purpose. Best, by far, to go away forever, if you only could.
Simondson groaned again, almost crying. “Let me out of this. Please.”
I could let Simondson go. I was sure of that, though the process of tearing his shape apart and out of the weave of the Grey would be miserable for us both. But I needed him. I needed his knowledge and I thought I might need him just because he was connected to me and what might happen next. But keeping him in this state—as I had no doubt my dad was also kept by Wygan—was cruel. Letting it go on sickened me, left me feeling like I was collaborating in the horror.
But still, I said, “No.”
SEVEN
I wavered when Simondson howled in rage at me. I wasn’t intending to torture him, but I couldn’t let him go yet. There were still too many answers missing. I had an idea and I hoped I could make it work. He clutched at me with incorporeal hands that still had the power to do me hurt. His fury and pain were a whirlwind around me, tearing and pulling at my own substance as if he could rend me to pieces and scatter me to the etheric winds of the Grey.
Faint and distant noises intruded and became recognizable : Grendel growling and barking, Quinton calling to me, Chaos chuckling like something demented. The thread of their familiarity kept me anchored against the storm of noise and emotion. I backed further out of the Grey, not quite gone—still present enough to keep a hand on Simondson but much harder for him to harm. I needed a container, silvered if possible. . . .
“Stop, Simondson!” I yelled, crouching. “I’ll let you go, but you need to do a few things for me, first.”
“No! Why should I?”
“Because I can let you go and no one else who can will. I’ll set you free when I’m done.”
“How can I trust you? Why would you do it later if you won’t do it now?”
I put out my hand, slipping it into the tangle of his angry energy. I ached like the bones of my arm were burning, but I did it, working into the weft of his shape and pushing a bit of it aside, loosening his form for a moment. Then I just held still as long as I could stand it, letting him sigh and dim in relief. Something of his mind brushed against mine and I shivered, gagging a little at the sensation, but it should have been enough for him to know what I was thinking. Ghosts aren’t psychic, but if they can crawl inside your skin for a while, they can seem that way. I concentrated on my intentions and hoped he was picking it up.
“I will let you go,” I said between clenched teeth. The red storm of his emotions was tearing across my nerves. “I swear. But you’ll have to come with me. I swear it,” I repeated, feeling my legs tremble with the effort of remaining upright.
He eased back, the ire of his presence draining away. I crouched down, putting my hands to the ground as I slipped back toward the normal. I clenched the bloody sand beneath my palms into my fists, feeling Simondson’s presence as a dull heat in the compressed grains.
As soon as I was back in a more visible state, Quinton and the animals converged on me. “Stop!” I yelled. “Don’t touch me yet. I need a metallic container, a shiny one. Any size.”
Quinton scrabbled through his pockets, displacing the ferret, and dumping a handful of mints out of an Altoids tin. He buffed the interior quickly with a handkerchief and held the tin out to me, open.
I dumped the handful of stained sand into the tin. Then I reached back into Simondson’s tangled, dim form, and twisted off a thread of his energy, which I shut into the tin with the sand. As long as it stayed closed, I should have a way to call on Simondson’s spirit for a little while at least. Simondson and I both breathed easier then. I slipped the tin into my pocket, careful to keep it closed.
Quinton helped me to my feet. I shook my head before he could start asking questions. I still had a few things to do while we were here. The rest could wait, but not this.
“Simondson,” I started, “show me where you died.” He grew hotter and the humming pain around him increased. “No. No, don’t think of it. Just go there. Go slow enough for me to follow. Don’t think, don’t remember, just move.”