The gate creaked as she closed it. Toby looked up at his dad. “I didn’t even hear the gate when you came. I thought I was listening, but I didn’t hear it.”
“Lily and I came over the fence.”
“Yeah?” Toby looked at Lily, then at the fence, obviously measuring their respective heights. Impressed, he said, “It’s a pretty high fence.”
She smiled. “Your dad gave me a boost once he was two-legged again.”
“But you still did it real quietly,” he said, determined to give her credit. “Uh . . . I’m sorry about calling you Dad’s mate. I’m not supposed to say that, but I forgot. It’s just that I don’t have a word for you.”
So she wasn’t the only one. “I’ve been bothered by that, too. I can say what you are to Rule, but I don’t have a word for what you are to me. Though maybe I’ve found one.”
“What’s that?”
“Family.”
Toby’s face lit up like she’d plugged him in. Quickly he looked at his feet, as if he might need to keep an eye on what they were up to. “Cool,” he said, in the way of a boy embarrassed by his emotions.
She wanted very much to hug him. “Of course, my family is kind of messed up.”
He looked up, grinning. “Your grandmother’s cool.”
“That she is.”
“Toby.”
That’s all Rule said, and in a mild voice, but the boy deflated. He sighed and scuffed his shoe in the dirt. “How much trouble am I in?” He looked up at his dad. “You figured out what I meant, right? When I made you a trail.”
“I did.” Rule stopped and put his hands on Toby’s shoulders. “You handled a difficult situation with honor. Not perfectly, mind, but with honor. I’m proud of you.”
The light came back in Toby’s face. He all but glowed as he asked casually, “So what’s my punishment?”
Lily’s mouth opened. She closed it before she got her foot in, but a couple more questions joined the rest on her mental list.
“Well.” Rule started walking again. “You did leave the house at night without permission. And this isn’t Clanhome.”
“I know.” Toby paused, then said hopefully, “Laps?”
Dad chuckled. “Oh, that would be such a punishment. You love to run. No, I’m afraid it will be math. Three days, one page of fractions each day.”
“Shit,” Toby said. Then, more quietly, “Whoops.”
Rule didn’t quite smile, but Lily could see the effort it took. “An extra page the first day for disrespecting your grammy’s rules about your language. Toby, I can tell Lily is puzzled by your punishment, since I said I was proud of you. Would you explain it to her, please?”
“Oh. Sure. See, I couldn’t tell . . .” But he stopped as they reached the street, quickly checking for cars.
He always did that, she’d noticed. It seemed to be a lupus thing. He never lost track of his surroundings, even when he might have assumed adults were watching out for him.
His pause was brief. They stepped into the empty street together. “I couldn’t tell Dad about the ghosts because I’d promised. It was an actual promise, so I couldn’t just decide things had changed and I needed to tell, see? Like if I say, ‘See you at school tomorrow,’ that’s not a promise. I could get sick or something. But if I promise to be at school tomorrow, I have to be there, even if my leg’s broken or a tornado comes. There’s no mitigating circumstances with a promise.”
The “mitigating circumstances” almost made Lily smile. It was so Rule. But this was deadly serious for Toby. “Admirable, but a hard standard to live by. Is this a lupi thing? Or just Nokolai?”
“Lupi. Like Grandpa says, we’re supposed to hoard our promises, or put limits on them, so maybe I shouldn’t have promised Justin and Talia to keep her secret without, like, establishing some parameters. I was pretty little when I did it,” he said from the lofty vantage point of his nine years. “I didn’t know about parameters. Anyway, when Justin called and said Talia was in trouble from the ghosts, I couldn’t tell anyone, but I needed Dad to know because Talia needed help. And you needed to know what the ghosts said. So I, uh, left a trail for Dad. I didn’t break my word, but I found a way to do the right thing. But I did break the rules.”
“By sneaking out.”
“Yeah. Kids don’t get to pick which rules we obey, just like clan don’t get to choose when they’ll obey the Rho. And sometimes there’s a price for doing the right thing. I have to be willing to pay the price.”
“I see,” she said gravely. “Is math a high price to pay?”
“Well . . .” He darted a glance at his father. “Not real high. I don’t like it much, but I can do fractions pretty fast, so it’s not going to take me lots of time. Did it help, hearing what the ghosts said?”
“Yes, though I haven’t sorted out what it means yet. Apparently the perp is male. That should help.” She glanced at Rule. “I’m thinking it’s lucky my boss is a precog.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Ruben foresaw this?”
“No, but remember the investigative panel I told you about? The one he put together after that ghost disrupted Cynna’s wedding?”
Toby immediately had to know about the ghost. Lily was happy to let Rule take over telling the tale while her own thoughts turned to ghosts . . . and memory.
After the incident at the wedding, Ruben’s precognitive Gift had prodded him to find out more about ghosts. The Unit lacked a medium, so the experts he’d brought in had all been civilians—a varied crew, as it turned out, but they’d agreed on one crucial point: no one knew what caused ghosts.
Murder was certainly a factor, but not all violent deaths threw ghosts. The suddenness of death was a factor, too, but sometimes a lingering death resulted in a ghost. The old canard about the ghost needing to resolve something held true, yet any number of people died with serious issues left unresolved—and went on to the Big Whatever without leaving any ghostly residue behind.
Most ghosts didn’t linger long. Some did. Most couldn’t affect the physical world. Some could, using what might be telekinesis—doors slamming, knickknacks falling off shelves, that sort of thing. Many ghosts were sad or confused. A few were actively hostile.
None of the mediums had reported ghosts who screamed in their heads.
The experts didn’t agree on what a ghost was. Some—those who didn’t believe in an afterlife—insisted that ghosts were a sort of congealed energy that failed to dissipate when the person who’d generated it died. They were simply patterns, not people, lacking real cognition or sense of self. But to a woman—and for reasons no one understood, mediums were always female—the mediums disagreed.
Lily had to cast her vote with the woo-woo crowd on this one. Something survived beyond the body. Might as well call it a soul.
What bugged Lily was that not all mediums were Gifted. At Ruben’s request, she’d checked them out. Turned out that a few people were able to see ghosts without possessing a hint of magic. That had been confirmed in double-blind tests comparing their sightings with those of Gifted mediums. They couldn’t interact consistently with the ghosts, though. Only those with a medium’s Gift could.
This struck the dead-is-dead experts as proof that ghosts weren’t people. They claimed that the medium fed the ghosts energy, giving them a semblance of life. The mediums had done some eye-rolling over that. Sure, the ghosts were using the medium’s power to communicate, but even without that magical boost they were discrete entities. Maybe not the entire soul, but some part of it.
The part with the memories. Lily’s heart bumped up a beat. That was the other thing everyone agreed on. When asked about this world or their current existence, ghosts’ answers ranged from vague to nonsensical. But they remembered themselves and their lives. Clearly. Vividly.