Walking Dead

“Don’t be ridiculous.” The car had been my first crush, but I was hardly about to admit that out loud. I was never, ever going to live this down as it was. I dropped my hand to the Trans Am’s roof, rallied myself to magnificently ignore Billy and said, “You can speak now.”

“S-s-speeaaaak!” Rage and desperation filled the drawn-out plea, spoken as though the thing had long since forgotten words and was drawing their shape from, oh, say, a logic-module voice synthesizer. Or maybe it was just echoing me.

“Who are you? What do you want? Why’d you fight against crossing over? I—”

“Joanie.” Billy sounded tired but droll. “Maybe I should conduct the interview.” He crouched in front of the Trans Am’s hood and put his hands on it, evidently trusting that the magic I’d called up was going to prevent a second round of Billy Becomes Lunch. “There are at least three of you,” he murmured. His self-image softened again, which I thought was fascinating. Next thing I knew I’d be wearing that leather getup when I wanted to be a tough girl on the psychic level.

“Three? How do you know? I—”

He gave me a quelling look. “The color, for one thing. Individual spirits turn pale gray as they fade away. Age doesn’t blacken them. They have to be united somehow, to get that dark.”

“Evil spirits aren’t automatically black?”

He gave me another look. “This isn’t the best time for a crash course in ghost identification.”

I thought it was the perfect time, but I also saw his point. I bit my tongue against asking more questions, and he added, “Besides, I had them in me for a minute there. I might be out of my league, but at least I can tell when I’m dealing with more than one ghost.”

I unbit my tongue. “If you’re out of your league shouldn’t I—” He didn’t have to say anything this time. I bit my tongue again and Billy turned his attention back to the Trans Am. All the color had pressed up against the vehicle’s nose, under his hands, like it was trying to get out. In fact, I could feel it trying to get to him, but it was a minor nuisance, like a dull itch. I’d have to be rendered unconscious to loosen the hold I had on the ghosts, and I wasn’t sure even that would do it.

“Something’s holding you,” Billy murmured. “Something strong enough to tie you all together. Family?”

“N-n-n-noooo.” The cry sounded like a wailing child, angry and full of uncertainty. Unexpected sympathy lurched in my heart. Things trying to take over my friends were inherently bad, but lost things trying to find a way home were merely pathetic. I liked the idea of helping a lot more than banishing.

“The way you died, then.” There was sorrow and certainty in Billy’s gentle voice, like he was trying not to upset the already unhappy child. He whispered, “Shh, shh,” to the uprise of misery that vibrated through the car, and I winced on behalf of the Trans Am’s windows. It was magical, and the windows would hold because I wanted them to, but Ella Fitzgerald had nothing on the pitch the ghosts reached. “Violent death,” Billy guessed softly and, this time to me, said, “It’s what holds most spirits beyond their time.”

Nervously, because I wasn’t certain I was allowed to say anything, I asked, “How long would they usually stay? You see them all the time….”

“Not all the time. Just with murders. With an ordinary death, illness or age, they fade away as soon as the body dies unless they have some need for closure that’s not related to their deaths. If they’re victims of abuse, for example, or once in a while if they feel someone they love is in need of help or comfort they’ll stay. There are people who say they feel the dead with them, even years after they’ve crossed over.” He glanced at me. “Most of them are kooks, but some of them really do have spirits who stay with them, like Caroline did with me. There are mediums who can communicate with the long-dead, but my ability is shorter-term.”

Beneath his quiet speech, the ghosts in the car twisted and howled, clearly too agitated by his question to give a straight answer. He ran his hand over the car’s hood, soothing motion, but they still screamed and battered themselves against the cage my magic made. Billy ignored them, giving me more of that crash course in ghost investigations after all. I thought it gave the spirits something audibly soothing to latch on to as much as it educated me. “Even with a lot of violent death, like car wrecks, the spirit usually only takes a few hours, a couple of days at most, before it lets go. They usually have a sense of self still when that happens. Forms that you’d recognize as human, the ability to communicate.”

He turned his attention back to the car. “These ones are old, Joanne. There’s almost nothing left to them than the need to survive and earn vengeance. It’s all right,” he murmured, clearly no longer talking to me. Compassion deepened his voice, turning him into a gentle bear of a man, and tears stung my nose. I didn’t think I had that depth of kindness in me. “I’m here to listen and to help. When you’re ready you can tell me what you have to say.”

Maybe it was worse for them to fear they might lose Billy’s attention than to contemplate their stories, because despite his assurance he’d stay, their cries stopped and their halting, miserable voice searched for words. “S-s-s-sown, all s-sown.”

“What,” I said, “you reap what you sow? Does that mean you were murdered because you’d been murderers yourselves?”

Billy, over outraged spiritual screams, said, “You’re really not helping,” and I had the grace to feel a little abashed, especially since I’d just been admiring his compassion. “She won’t say anything else,” he told the Trans Am, and the steely note in his voice suggested to me that I’d really better not. I had vulnerable points Billy didn’t know about, but he had enough of a grip on some that I probably didn’t want to get in a fight with him, not even when I theoretically had the home-team advantage. He said, “Sown,” when the ghosts had quieted and it seemed likely I wasn’t going to open my mouth again. I could almost hear the gears grinding in his head as he worked through the possibilities of that word: “Buried in fields, or dismembered and scattered across fields? I wonder what was beneath that party hall fifty or a hundred years ago.”

Frustrated rage gave the ghostly shrieks a new edge: “S-s-sown! All sown!” They swirled away from Billy’s hands, filling the Trans Am with agitated gray, and beat at its windows and roof with blows that felt, to me, like human hands. I shuddered and told myself I was anthropomorphizing. These things hadn’t been human in a long time.

They came back to Billy, and this time I could see I wasn’t forcing human aspects onto nebulous bits of ether. Bony hands spread against the inside of the hood, matching Billy’s, pressing like they’d reach through and slide their fingers through his. Their screams faded, turning into desperate intensity as they tried for words that had faded from their consciousness a long time ago. “Sown d-d-dead. Dead.”

Way in the back of my brain, a penny dropped, and my mouth said, “Sown dead. Sowen, the day of the dead. Samhain,” without filtering it through the active thought process in my mind. It was just as well: if I’d thought about it, I’d have never figured it out. Samhain was the Irish new year, falling on the same date as the western Halloween, and the next day was, in plenty of cultures, the day of the dead. I’d learned all about it from a precognitive anthropologist who’d predicted my death wrongly, and her own with depressing accuracy. To the English-reading eye, the word looked like it should be pronounced Sam-hayn, but in Irish, it was Sowen. “They all died at Halloween.”

The ghosts erupted in a shriek of triumph, and Billy twisted to give me a good hard look before he said, “Nice job,” without a hint of begrudgement. I didn’t quite know what the look was for. It sort of made me feel as if I’d been holding out on having an encyclopedia of arcane knowledge to draw from, but I really didn’t. I knew more than I had a year ago, but that wasn’t saying much.

“It’s a pattern.” Billy was still looking at me, though the way his voice went calm suggested he was speaking to the ghosts. “It gives us a place to start. I want to make you an offer.” He turned his attention back to the Trans Am. Faces were beginning to appear beneath the translucent hood. Not fully fleshed human faces, but something more than skulls. They reminded me unpleasantly of The Scream painting.

“We’ll find your bodies, if we can. We’ll find your killer, if we can. But I don’t have the skill, even here, to draw your memories out clearly enough to learn everything we can from you.” Billy sounded utterly at home with his talent’s boundaries. I envied that, not because I wanted more power, but because I didn’t know where the edges of mine lay. I’d read often enough that if you argue for your limitations, then sure enough, they’re yours, but that wasn’t what I heard in Billy’s voice, or saw in the image of himself. He’d had most of a lifetime to learn what he could and couldn’t do. The window in which he could see the dead had extended bit by bit over the years. In another thirty, he might be able to talk to ghosts a week dead instead of just a couple of days, but maybe not, too. Either way, I didn’t get the sense he rested on his laurels, only that he accepted what his gifts were.

It wasn’t a bad lesson for me to learn. Man, I was getting all mature and stuff. That couldn’t be good for a person. Fortunately, the only person on hand to notice my leaps and bounds of maturity was Billy, and he was still talking to the ghosts. I rewound what he’d been saying—surprisingly easy, within the confines of my garden—and said, “Oh, no way, no how, hell no,” to what memory informed me he’d suggested.

“I don’t see much other choice.” Billy stood up and faced me, broad arms folded over his chest. “They’ve got enough presence and opinion that they refused to cross through that door when you opened it, and I don’t have the ability to usher them through. We need a much stronger medium for that, or to resolve their murders so they’ve got nothing left to hang on to.”

“Yeah, but—”

He shook his head. “You can’t risk having them here. One healing trance and they’ll make a run for the short route out of imprisonment here and into someone else’s body.”

“I’ve got them pretty well wrapped up here!” I gestured toward the Trans Am.

Billy quirked an eyebrow. “Can you maintain that 24/7? Can you hold them apart from any healing you need to do? I watched how you pushed them out of me, Joanie. Eviction, then capture. You weren’t splitting your concentration.”

“Okay, yeah, but—”

“If I make them my riders voluntarily, it reduces their potential control, and right now they’re willing to try it.”

“The words right now in that sentence concern me, Billy. What if they change their minds? And you already have riders from the party. Not all of them detached from you.” I looked around a little wildly, now that I’d remembered that. “Why don’t I see them here?”

“They’re not part of my self-image.”

Indignant, I pointed at the gray mist inside the Trans Am. “They’re not part of mine, either!”

“No,” Billy said with exasperated patience, “but you opened up a door in your mind and invited dozens of spirits to pass through. The ones that refused to pass on didn’t get rejected, just trapped. You said you’d had uninvited visitors before. Well, you more or less invited these ones. They’re here whether you imagine them to be or not.”

That made an irritating amount of sense. I glowered. “I still think it’s a really bad idea for you to play host to a bunch of ectoplasmic parasites.”

“I agree.” Billy breathed a quiet laugh as bewilderment smeared across my face. “It’s dangerous. But I think it’s less dangerous than leaving them here. If you dissolve the car—” His mouth suddenly contorted as he tried not to laugh.

“The car just happened! I needed something the ghosts could communicate through, and he can talk! It’s not my fault!”

“He,” Billy said, and gave up trying not to laugh. My ears burned red and he whooped until tears came to his eyes, finally promising, “It’s completely you,” as he wiped moisture away. “Release them from the car and they’ll come to me. It’ll be fine.”

I folded my arms, half sulking at being teased and half genuinely reluctant. I only had one argument to dissuade him, and I didn’t like it much. On the other hand, but besides being persuasive, it struck me as a genuine concern. “Okay. Look. We know I can keep them locked in, if necessary. Can you? Because…what happens if one of these things changes its mind about hanging around on you, and latches on to the baby when it’s born?”

I’d never seen Billy get so grim, which told me I was right: it was a legitimate danger. “We just won’t let that happen.”

“If Mel goes into labor before we get this thing resolved,” I said very steadily, “I’m taking the ghosts back. I don’t care what the other risks are.”

“Yeah.” Billy nodded, small tense motion that wasn’t like him. “Yeah, okay. It’s a deal.”

We shook on it, and I released the Trans Am thought-form to infect Billy with the vengeful dead.

CHAPTER EIGHT

It jolted us out of my garden, me blinking the Sight on as soon as I realized we were back in the real world. Morrison stopped drumming, but his hand remained raised, ready to strike the drum again if necessary. His aura hadn’t changed much since the last time he’d done this: it was still filled with rough edges of discomfort, purple and blue rubbing against each other wrong, but not badly enough to connote anger or fear. All too aware of the statement’s inaccuracy, I said, “We’re good,” and Morrison lowered the drumstick to wait on those of us with more esoteric skills to tell him what had happened.

Billy’s colors were grayed out, filmed over by his ghost riders. I could see varying shades, half a dozen or more soiling his presence. They amalgamated, darkening, and I imagined the ones he’d picked up in my garden were communicating Billy’s offer of help to those he’d carried from the party himself.

Either that or they were staging a hostile takeover, the thought of which didn’t reassure me at all. Mel sat up straight, her aura going bright with concern, though her daughter’s was rosy pink and serene with sleep. “What did you do to Bill?”

“Walker?” That was Morrison, a warning note in his voice before I had a chance to say anything. Then Billy spoke, and I was grateful, because anything I could say would sound like I was trying to fob off responsibility. It was his idea just didn’t cut it, even if it was true.

“It was my idea.” Billy lifted his head wearily. His eyes were dull. “The hauntings that held on to Joanne were old murder cases, and I promised we’d get them to a stronger medium to see if we could help.”

“A medium?” Morrison managed to keep the derision out of his voice, but he couldn’t bury the disbelief.

Billy swung his head toward the captain, the motion too heavy, like he didn’t have proper control of his actions. “It’s what I am, Captain. I communicate with the dead.” He didn’t exactly sound challenging, but there was a note of undeterrable conviction in his words. I knew Morrison was aware Billy had an affiliation for the weird that allowed his homicide cases to be solved in record time. That was why he’d partnered us. Still, from their expressions, it was safe to say they’d never discussed it over a beer.

After a few seconds Morrison bared his teeth, though the look came and went so fast I couldn’t have sworn I’d seen it. “Medium,” he said, and if I wasn’t sure his teeth had been bared, I was positive they were now clenched. “Shaman.” He scowled at Melinda. “Anything weird you want to put a label on?”

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