The Felix-the-Cat clock above Wendy’s desk counted the passing seconds: tick-tock-tick. Piotr stared hard at Wendy, chest rising and falling, beads of sweat standing out against his skin. Wendy was tempted to run her thumb into the hollow of his temples, to see if those glistening droplets felt wet or if they would be made of the same stuff he was—chill, electric nothing.
“That’s impossible,” Piotr said with flat finality, taking a step back into her bed. From the thighs up he stood, fists resting on his hips and face set in angry lines, but from the thighs down he was gone, buried in the springs and coils and stuffing of her mattress.
Hating herself for doing this, Wendy shook her head. “No, it’s not.”
“Stop joking, Wendy! This is not funny! It is no joke!” Piotr was mad now and the cold came off him in powerful waves. The rapid exhalation of Wendy’s breath misted in the air, turned to puffs of white. She shivered, wrapping her arms around her waist, and wished that she had pulled out her coat. There was a stained hoodie on the top of the mending pile. Wendy crossed the room and donned it, smelling the pungent aroma of tar and grass, the faintest whiff of her own blood. How long ago had she ripped this hoodie? She’d faced so many fights these past few weeks, jumped so many fences, Wendy couldn’t even recall how she’d torn it.
“I’m not joking.” Wendy held out her arms. “I can show you.”
“This is sick!” Piotr turned his back on her. “I am leaving.”
Knowing now that Piotr would refuse to believe her until she gave him proof, Wendy wavered between showing him and letting him leave. She could do it, Wendy realized, she could let him walk out the door and wait this drama she’d instigated out. He would come back; they were too close for Piotr to stay away long. They needed one another—she was helping him by destroying the Walkers, even if he didn’t know it, and he had promised to find her mother. But if she did this, if she pushed the issue and showed him what she really was inside, the likelihood of him ever coming back…
“No,” Wendy said. “I have something to show you.”
“Net,” Piotr hissed. “I do not want to see it!”
“I’m so sorry, Piotr,” Wendy whispered. “But you’ve got no choice.” Decision done, she reached inside and began unraveling the firm web of will her mother had taught her to keep tightly woven over her abilities. The heat inside grew, incrementally at first, but then with more insistence as she fed the fire of Light within. The humming, crystal clear in its clarity, heartbreakingly intense, began to fill first her mind, then mouth, then seep out of her very pores.
The air between them, previously still, began to swirl and move. Papers lifted off her desk in the wayward eddies of air, moisture pattered from the ceiling to dampen her bed and carpet; the curtains flapped wildly. Wendy knew they were creating something wrong in her room, something like a mini storm front, but couldn’t help herself. The power was growing, the song rising out of her, and only when she had a reaction, only then could she feel safe enough to stop.
The shadows on her wall in the Never began to lengthen while, in the real world, the shadow cast by the light of her desk lamp began to fade. Going…going…gone.
It was the siren song that did it.
Piotr spun and, seeing the glow pulsing at the edge of her soul, hearing the sweet slinking song, stumbled back. The outline of the girl he knew, red curls brushing against her cheeks and arms outstretched, was rapidly fading under the rising wash of Light. The Light wasn’t as blinding this close, though Piotr’s eyes still gushed water when he gazed upon her, and he felt the song worm its way into his head. High and sharp and lovely, the song vibrated in his back teeth, turning his knees to jelly. The bones he’d long since discarded felt like shattered glass and ground gravel in their sockets and yet, despite the insistent pain, a feeling like exaltation overwhelmed him, lifted him up and made him feel obliquely, absurdly grateful. The Light was horrible and humbling and it was all Piotr could do not to start screaming until his vocal cords were a blasted ruin, his lungs a tattered mess in his chest.
There was a moment, just a moment, when Piotr thought he could grasp just what Wendy was. Then tentacles of Light punched through her chest in a bloodless spray of glass-green fire, leaving a wound like a lipless mouth where her beating heart should have been. The physical body he had known as Wendy was obliterated now, not a tangled hair or shred of skin left. She was Light and life and a terrible, all-encompassing love that filled him and stretched him and left him feeling shredded into tiny pieces. Where her mouth should have been was a smooth, flat expanse of what he could only assume was skin, her nose was gone, her ears lost to sight. Only her eyes, large and brown and warm, were the same. They gazed at him and for the first time in all his years of endless, plodding existence, Piotr felt weak.
Weighed down by her regard, he dropped to his knees and bowed his head. When he vanished beneath the top of the bedspread Wendy drew her power back inside with difficulty, forcing the banked heat inside to cool, to dim, and wrapped the unspooling ribbons of Light around herself again.
Long moments passed before she was done and when Wendy felt fully in control, felt that Piotr was completely safe from the Light side of her nature, she opened her eyes to find him mere inches from her. His expression was shuttered and she searched his face, desperately trying to puzzle out his state of mind.
“Piotr?”
“You are the Lightbringer.” Flat, cold.
She swallowed thickly. “Yes.”
“You lied to me,” he said and his accent was so thick she had to struggle to make out his words. “For weeks and weeks, you have been lying to me!”
“I didn’t lie exactly,” she hedged, feeling miserable, “I just didn’t—”
“You just didn’t tell me that you incinerate my friends day and night!” He threw up his hands and strode across the room. “Are you the one taking them—our Lost? Did you take Dunn? Or Tommy? As revenge for your mother? The Lost took your mother, so you take the Lost?”
“No!” Horrified that Piotr would think such a thing, Wendy struggled for the right words to calm him, to soothe this troubled situation. “I would never—”
“Never what? Never kill one of the dead? Because you have, I’ve seen it!” Piotr crossed his arms over his chest and glared at her. “Or do you deny shredding those Walkers? Stabbing them with those…tentacles? What are they? Weapons? Knives for the likes of you?”
“They’re ribbons!” Wendy snapped. “I wrap a ghost—”
“So you admit it. You strangle my kind with—”
“Strangle? Strangle!” Wendy sputtered. “I save you—”
“Is that what you were trying to tell me earlier, when you stumbled over your words time and time again? Telling me about your mother, you had such a hard time describing her as Seer. Because you are not Seer! You are more. And if you are more, then your mother must be more, da? Is that why you seek her so hard, Wendy? Are you lonely? Is the burden of killing the dead over and over again too much for you?”
“It’s not like that! My mother—”
“TELL ME THE TRUTH! Does your mother kill my kind? Do you?”
“It’s not killed if you’re already dead!” Wendy yelled before she could stop herself. Wendy’s hands flew to her mouth, eyes huge and horrified, but silence followed the proclamation. She’d lucked out; no one seemed to have awoken at her shout. Whispering harshly, she added, “And it’s not like I knew any of you before! I was just doing what I was told to do! It’s my job!”
“Your mother,” Piotr snorted. “Grandmothers, aunts. An entire family of Lightbringers. Destroying souls as you see fit! Filling us with…that…making us feel small and weak and then ripping us apart! Does it make you feel big to make us feel small before you tear us into nothing with your ribbons?” He spat on the ground.
“You dumbass, we don’t destroy anything! I reap ghosts!” Now pushed past all endurance, Wendy strode up to Piotr and poked him in the shoulder. Surprisingly, she made contact and the touch of him was like dragging her hand through dry ice. Yelping, she yanked her hand back and waved it rapidly in the air to warm it. “I don’t kill you, I don’t destroy you, I send you to the afterlife!”
“I am in the afterlife,” he snapped.
Wendy, fuming over the possible damage to her hand, gaped at his sheer stubborn stupidity. Then, surprisingly, he added, “Did you hurt your finger?”
Subdued somewhat by the question, Wendy held it up. “I’ll live.” He snorted and she realized that this fight was getting them nowhere.
“I didn’t mean the Never,” she said dully, sitting on the edge of her bed and tucking her wounded fingers into her armpit. They stung and tingled crazily but she thought they’d be okay. “When I say afterlife I really mean the afterlife. I don’t kill you, I send you into the Light.”
He was quiet a moment. Wendy glanced up and found him standing at the window, looking out. “How many?” he asked, voice low. “How many have you sent on?”
She swallowed thickly. The tone of his voice, the low pitch, didn’t bode well. Piotr had never been a shouter, but he was generally more animated than that. This sudden stillness unnerved her; his unexpected quiet set her on edge. “I’ve never counted. A lot. Hundreds, possibly thousands. Mostly Shades.” She hung her head, for the first time ashamed of what she’d always before considered her duty, part of the natural order of things, even when she’d been avoiding her duty out of fear and guilt over what happened to her mother.
“I told you before, with my mother gone I didn’t want to do it anymore, but because of the Walkers…I’ve had to get up to speed pretty quickly. So…hundreds. Probably more.” She cleared her throat. “I’ve been taking out Walkers while I’ve been on patrol. Ever since we talked. You got me started again. I’ve been helping you.”
“Helping me.” Piotr nodded but didn’t turn. “I must leave.” Leading with his left shoulder, he began to phase through the wall.
“Piotr, wait!” Wendy jumped to her feet, hands outstretched, but before she could take the half dozen steps to the window, he was gone.
In her dreams, Wendy ran.
She was on the track at school, circling the field over and over again, the stitch in her side ablaze with pain, her legs trembling, the soles of her bare feet pounding the pavement in a rhythmic staccato. Stinging sweat ran in her eyes, blurring her vision, and every inhalation burned. Even her teeth ached, though whether from the cold or the exertion, Wendy was unsure. All she knew was that if she stopped running, even for one moment, she’d see that dim silver flicker at the edge of the field and she would have to follow it. She’d force her way through the woods again, nettles stinging her calves, burrs catching in her socks, branches whipping across her face, until she found the man again, still under the fall of eucalyptus deadwood.
She didn’t want to see him again. She’d had enough of death and ghosts.
It was too much. She couldn’t go on but she forced herself to take the next step and then the next. Wendy pushed on, pushed on, and when her leg gave out, knee buckling and calf tightening in an excruciating charley horse, Wendy shrieked, hitting the ground with shoulder and hip. She cried, writhing on the ground, hair pooling beneath her head. The pain sunk deep, angry fingers into her muscles and twisted. Wendy screamed and screamed and screamed.
It took a long, long time for Wendy to realize blessed, numbing cold was working its way through her leg. Her cries tapered off; sniffling, she wiped her wrist across her face and struggled to sit up.
“I’d be careful if I were you,” the White Lady said, sitting back on her haunches and rising in a creaking, graceful arc. Where her hands had pressed into Wendy’s leg, blue flesh rimmed in ice slowly warmed. “Push yourself too hard and you’ll never catch up with me.”
“Go away.” Wendy flopped back to the ground and glared up at the stars above. She tried to find the Big Dipper but couldn’t. The stars were different here, bigger and brighter, closer to the earth. The air was startlingly cold, especially for a California night. Wendy wished that she’d dreamed herself a jacket.
“The Rider is an idiot,” the White Lady said, moving her fingers to the back of Wendy’s ankle, rotating the cuff gently. “Even I can see that you provide us a good service. I don’t appreciate you meddling in my affairs, don’t get me wrong, but certain Shades have been clinging to the last vestiges of life for far too long. They need to be put out of their misery.”
Irritated that the news of her fight with Piotr had flown so fast to the enemy’s ears, Wendy gritted her teeth and feebly swiped at the White Lady’s icy hands. Chuckling at Wendy’s irritation, the White Lady released her ankle. “You didn’t hurt anything. You’ll be sore in the morning, but nothing tore.”
“Didn’t I just tell you to go away?”
“Would that I could. You called me here.”
Wendy snorted. “I did not.”
The White Lady shrugged. “Suit yourself. Feel free to leave, then. You won’t see me shedding a tear. If I can still cry.” She chuckled. “I haven’t tried.”
Sniffing, Wendy shivered. When the White Lady handed her a jacket formed of the strange dream-stuff, she took it without comment and slid gratefully into its warmth. “I have nothing to say to you.”
“Don’t you? Not even one question?”
“You’re right. I do have one question for you.” Wendy sat up, chin jutted out and glared at the White Lady. “Destroy Dunn yet?”
Patting her thighs and sitting down beside Wendy, the White Lady sighed. “Come now, Lightbringer, don’t be stupid. You and I both know that if I had, you’d have heard about it by now. Your fortnight isn’t up for two more days.” Her phalanges scraped the edge of the track, digging furrows in the dirt. “But then again, maybe I should. I tire of our constant head-butting. It certainly would prove a point, wouldn’t it?”
“I’ll back off,” Wendy said. “On one condition. And only that condition.”
“Indeed? Well, please, elucidate. What in heaven or earth could move the mighty Lightbringer to lower herself to actually deal with me?”
“You tell me why you’re kidnapping the Lost.” Wendy scowled. “And quit calling me the ‘mighty Lightbringer.’ That shit is getting old.”
“Absolutely not.” The White Lady shook her head. “No deal.”
“You’re obviously not feeding them to the Walkers,” Wendy pressed, “and you don’t exactly seem the motherly type. Surely there’s some reason other than just shits and giggles. Tell me why and I’ll lay off the Walkers unless they attack me first.”
“Why are you seeing a dead boy in your room every night? We all have our own reasons for the things we do.” The White Lady tsked softly. “Kissing the dead instead of reaping them? For shame, girl. What would your mother say?”
“You could ask her.” Wendy tapped her tongue ring against her teeth. “Oh, no, you can’t, can you? You still haven’t found her. All that bluster and you’re just as lost as I am—can’t find one single ghost.”
“She knows the Never well,” the White Lady admitted. “I’m starting to admire her.”
“Just starting to?”
“Hush, girl. You’ll never hear one of my kind praising one of yours.” She sniffed. “It simply isn’t done.”
“This isn’t me agreeing to a truce,” Wendy warned. “Just so you know.”
“The time for truce is long over.” The White Lady leaned forward so that the remains of her chin rested on her knees, the rest of her face still cast in the hood’s deep shadow. “You’re right. I can’t destroy Dunn…yet. I know you’ll never stop hunting my Walkers. So we must agree to disagree, I suppose. No more talks of truce. No deal. Here on out, it’s open war between the two of us. Agreed?”
Wendy sighed. “Agreed.”
“When I find your mother—and I will find her—I’m going to obliterate her. Just so you know.” The White Lady laughed and there was a dark edge to her mirth, an underlying anger that Wendy would’ve been deaf to miss. “I tire of this.”
“You talk, but all I hear is blah, blah, blah.”
The White Lady stood. “Do you even know why you called me here?”
“I didn’t.” Wendy closed her eyes. “Get out.”
“As you wish, Lightbringer.” The White Lady began to move away. “But, just a reminder, we’re at war, girl. No more nice-nice. If I can, I’ll have you torn to shreds.”
“Bring it. You send ’em my way, I’ll keep knocking them down.”
“You can’t keep up this pace. You’ve realized that, haven’t you?” The White Lady chuckled. “One day you’re going to reap too many souls in a row and leave yourself weak. All I have to do is wait.” The wind sighed in the trees and the White Lady sighed with it. “I think I’ll have you kneel before me, before I rip your soul apart. Fitting, isn’t it? A simple ghostie like me destroying the mighty Lightbringer? Just the idea of it leaves me all a-tingle.”
“Blah, blah, blah. We’re done here.”
“Yes, Wendy, I think we are. Goodnight.”
When Wendy opened her eyes, the White Lady was gone. She was still dreaming, she knew, and if she wanted to, she could wake up. But waking up would mean facing the fight she and Piotr had just had; facing reality.
Wrapping her arms around her chest, Wendy conjured up a warm, sunlit beach and sank deeper into her dream. Plenty of time to be miserable in the waking, living world. Right now she just wanted peace.