Comforted wasn’t the word I’d use for the agitation I felt in the fog. It—they—were becoming clearer to me now, easier to read, as though they were remembering more and more of what it was to be human. I could tell at least a few men from women, though the greater part of the mist was still formless, maybe having left their bodies behind so long ago they had no memory of a shape to fill.
I had met the newly dead before, but it was no preparation for meeting the oldly dead. The newly dead, at least the ones I’d met, were pretty cool and collected. It may have helped that they’d mostly been shamans themselves—in fact, the one newly dead girl I’d met who hadn’t been a shaman had been pretty confused, now that I thought about it—but they’d had a sense of purpose and of self, and knew they only had a limited amount of time to impart information to me before they moved on.
The cauldron ghosts had only hate and fear to hold on to. They desired; oh, how they desired. They wanted flesh forms. They wanted vengeance. They wanted freedom, and would do whatever they could to obtain it. Thieving a body from a living soul would do: that’s what the dancers would have provided, if I hadn’t been there. I got a—no pun intended—ghost of an idea of how schizophrenic the dancers would have become, fighting for their own bodies with a plethora of spirits all determined to become the sole resident of their lithe forms. Only the strongest of the invaders would survive, but a few of the jettisoned others would cling to the surface, hoping for a chance to wrest control away. Even from without, their angry will could affect what a host body might do.
And right now they were trying to get inside Billy.
Not all of them. Some were listening to his voice, hearing the guidance he offered them. Those few could be put to rest, maybe because they were too tired of fighting to survive, maybe because they’d forgotten what they were fighting for. A few bits of mist separated from the dark cloud and dissipated, and I imagined I heard a sigh of relief. I shivered and wished them a good journey, wherever they might be going. Maybe to start again; a while ago Coyote’d told me that souls reincarnate. There weren’t that many new ones, although apparently I’d been mixed up fresh: no history of mistakes to weigh me down, but as he’d said, no history of learning experiences to buoy me up, either. But these ones had held on to this world, to their most recent bodies, to something, so long that they’d lost cohesion. They were still energy, the way that spark that made life inside things was energy, but all that was left in them was a craving for a new body.
I couldn’t help wondering if there were enough souls waiting to be reborn to fill all the people in the world, or if tortured ghosts like these left a handful of babies born empty every day. I hoped not. God, I hoped not, but just the idea opened a white-hot door inside me, through which poured the intention to help.
To my complete horror, the mist gave a sonic cry able to scour flesh from bone, and twisted toward that brightness.
The thinnest of it came first, like I’d put up a magnet that pulled filaments toward me. The weakest ghosts didn’t have enough weight to remain firm, and flew through that burning door inside a blink. They hit a flash point as they went, turning from mist to flame and leaving marks on my soul, like the memory of paper curling and drifting to the ground. Stronger spirits, carrying more resistance, followed more reluctantly, but an unburdened sense of relief swept me as some of them passed through into the brilliance. Once or twice an afterimage caught behind my eyes, like the echo of the life that had kept them there. I clung to those, and lost them even as I did: they left nothing, when they burned.
Murk slammed against the door in my mind and filled it, bellowing rage and refusal. The light faded away, blocked by a determination to hold on. Relief left me, joy left me; hell, even my power left me, slamming itself between the blackness and the white door in my mind. Triumph and fury sluiced through me in equal parts before the darkness fell away, and I had the shuddering sensation of a narrow escape. I mumbled, “Idiot,” and staggered a couple of steps before cranking my head up to see how the party fared.
My sphere of protective magic was gone, eaten up by the retreat my power had staged. So was most of the mist, though a few dark clouds still clung to Billy, trailing him like residue from a smoke machine. Thor and Phoebe were still there, and the DJ’s station blared “The Monster Mash,” but the room, so crowded only a minute or two ago, now held only hangers-on, the moral equivalent of ambulance chasers, all staying a safe distance from the center of activity.
Phoebe said what everybody, including those who’d fled, was presumably thinking: “What in hell was that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” I dropped to my knees, then leaned forward on my palms, gasping against the impulse to upchuck again. I could feel ghostly willpower dissolving inside me, resistance to passing on drifting into ash in my bloodstream. More, I could feel the tremendous black weight of the one who’d blocked the door, and the protests of those who’d been left on the wrong side. I curled down even farther, hands made into fists that I rested my forehead against. I felt like crying, and I wasn’t sure why.
Billy put his hands on my shoulders and gently pushed me back until I was sitting on my heels. His gaze was worried but calm, far more reassuring than the wide-eyed hollow look I felt aging my own face. “I haven’t got your Sight,” he said quietly. I could tell he was making his voice a lifeline, something stable to hang on to. Grateful tears welled up in my eyes. “All I see are the ghosts, Joanie, so I don’t know what happened. Tell me what you did. It’s going to be fine.”
“She gave them the light,” Melinda said out of nowhere. A twitch of conflicted gladness ran through me. I didn’t want Melinda and her soon-to-be-born daughter anywhere near the dark magic flowing around me, but it was nice that my friends hadn’t abandoned me when the smart money was on getting the hell out of there. “She opened a door to the light and guided them home.”
“No.” My mouth tasted terrible. I wiped a hand across it, but kept my gaze on Billy, who seemed solid and reassuring and safe. “I mean, maybe, but I didn’t mean to. I just wanted to tell them I would help. Going into the light, that’s just a load of crap—” confidence failed me “—isn’t it?”
“A door.” Billy’s voice was terribly controlled, the kind of control that said unadulterated panic was one very fine line away from where he stood. “Joanne, listen to me. This is important. I know you use a garden as a metaphor for your soul. How do you enter the garden?”
I stared at him without comprehension for a couple seconds. I’d thrust my imagery of a garden on him when I was trying to heal him from a magically induced coma, but I’d had no idea it’d left him with an idea of my psychic set-up. I was beginning to think Billy Holliday could be very, very dangerous to me, if he chose to be.
“A rabbit hole,” I finally croaked. “I almost always go in by a rabbit hole. Or a mole hole. I was a badger once.”
Billy’s shoulders relaxed fractionally. “All right. You’re going to need to do a spirit journey and make sure that you didn’t let the ghosts into your garden, but usually the mind sets up fail-safes. If you enter through the earth then probably the door didn’t lead inside you.”
“There’s a door inside my garden,” I said inanely. “But it leads to where people go when they’re dying.” It led to where I went when I was dying, anyway. “I don’t use it. Much.”
Melinda and Billy exchanged a glance that told me I didn’t want to know what they were thinking. Instead of asking, I looked back at the cauldron, and noticed a leg sticking out from behind it. I crawled over and found both the dancers sprawled on the floor, breathing shallowly. I dropped my head, watching long hair brush my elbows. “Crap. I thought somebody would’ve gotten them out of here. I’m gonna need to…” I put a hand out, calling up silver-blue power, and Melinda came around the cauldron to crouch and catch my wrist. “You can’t.”