Page 73 of All Her Ghosts

Lunging out of my body, I sear across the distance. I let the current of her ghost-trapping vest reel me, harvesting its momentum, letting it drive me faster and faster until I slam into her, my full weight in one bone-jarring blow. There’s more of me than the vest knows how to deal with. It can’t swallow me, can’t consume me. The nurse staggersbackward with the force of my impact, alarmed, slapping at the air in front of her. Immediately, her bully boys whip up their guns, pointing them at her.

“The girl!” she demands. “The girl!”

The guns wheel on my lifeless form slumped in Bas’s arms.

He spins, crouching, blocking me with his body. No time to do anything else. There’s nowhere he can go. No cover he can get to. But Bas in danger—or else me, battering the ghost vest and its owner—brings Cain sharply into focus. His face clears, teeth bared. He remembers himself in sudden, excruciating detail and surges forward, descending on the bullies like a whirlwind.

In their momentary distraction, Bas stands. The clouds split. A hot shaft of sunlight spills down, cracking into his hand. I leave him to it; I have my own work to do. Though small, not as refined as the thing in my mother’s basement, this mini-void gnaws at me, tearing me off balance. It shreds the outline of my fingers, wicking away my energy, my life—but I am not alive.

I am more than alive.

I am a weapon. I am myownweapon. And I will aim accordingly.

Splaying out my fingers, I reach into her vest. I flood it with everything I have left. All my anger, my pain, my grief and love andresponsibility. And trapped inside those silvered facets, ghosts awaken. They turn their bleary eyes on me. They remember. When they reach out with fingers and paws and talons, I reach back. I grab them, gathering them up tight to my chest, and wrench—

The crystals crack. The vest explodes. Ghosts boil free. They claw at the nurse, their furious haze an indecipherable maelstrom. She staggersback, crashes down to one knee, an elbow, borne down by their furious weight. Life drains from her body. Her lips purple. Her skin bruises. Ghostly pale, she snaps her teeth shut on a sharp inhale and drives herself forward, onto her feet. She staggers through my astral projection, shatters the bulwark of ghosts. Then she lifts her gun to aim at my lifeless body.

A scope flashes in an upstairs window. With a loudcrack, her head rockets back. Another shot fires, then another. Bully boys crumple. Bas scythes down the rest. But it’s not over: in the mouth of the cul-de-sac, a half-dozen black vans join the fray.

Cain grins, remembering his face as a young man, blood in his teeth and knuckles busted.

“I’ve got this,” he says and, cupping his mouth to his hands, he whistles.

For a moment, nothing happens. And then I hear it—the slow rumble, the crashing awareness, bleary eyes blinking awake. Ghosts flow from the dirt, from the city, from the scrap of woods and down the scree. They plunge over the side of the bridge, kiting through the air like wraiths. They wake from the yards, pour out from their lost homes. A hundred beautiful memories of fangs and claws, teeth and hands. In a crashing wave, an ocean, they surge to meet the coming vans.

And their ghost lights paint my storm a gleaming, perfect blue.

Tears sticky on my cheeks, I snap back into my body. Bas hauls me upright.

“We can’t stay to watch,” he urges, tugging me behind him. “We’ll lose them in the river. Come on!”

Inside a rickety house, footsteps pound down the stairs. We make itto the backyard before the door slams open. Bas spins me behind him, sword bared. My mother glowers back at him, slapping a fresh cartridge into her rifle with a steady hand.

“Mom?” I ask, incredulous.

I recognized her car, but I can’t wrap my head around this alternate reality version of her. I’ve never seen her look anything but poured-steel perfect. And yet today, deep in some dead-end West Virginia town, Mom strides across the yard in black fatigues and boots like mine, wild-eyed, her hair a fraying mess beneath a woolen cap.

“What in God’s name are you doing here?” she demands. “Why would you come here when the DNR explicitly stated they’d be looking for you down south!”

“Yeah, but they weren’t just looking down south, were they?” Bas barks, his grief too fresh to survive the sandpaper of my mother’s scrutiny. “Or they wouldn’t have hunted my dad down like an animal in Indiana!”

Mom stops short.

“Cain’s dead?”

“Yeah, he’s dead. Are you happy?” He bares his teeth. “I know you hated him.”

In the face of his raw emotion, Mom falters.

“I didn’t. I—” She breaks off, a shimmer in her eyes, swallowing hard. “I would have warned you if I knew how.”

“Warned us?” Bas laughs. “Seventeen years ago wasn’t warning enough? No, please, don’t bother taking responsibility now. Not when you’ve finally gotten what you wanted. Everything’s on fire and my—” His body breaks on the word. His sword falls, cutting a burning trenchin the yard. Bent around this gaping new hole in the world, Bas chokes, “Mydadisdead.”

Mom’s face softens. She looks away, murmurs, “I’m sorry,” and doesn’t meet his eyes. “It wasn’t my intent. I came here to fix this.”

She means it. God, why does it hurt worse that she means it? I dig my knuckles into my chest, trying to force the tears back. My eyes sting. My body threatens to crumple at any second, screaming a hundred complaints—why now? Why in front ofher? I killed a dozen men this morning, erased their lives so completely from the fabric of reality they might as well never have existed at all. I watched a man I didn’t know die, but somehow, he mattered more to me than all of them combined. Myschool nursetracked me down to murder me, so I shattered the ghost trap on her chest and summoned an army.

And yet, looking at my own mother’s face, broken in concern, unmakes me.