Page 75 of All Her Ghosts

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “You don’t have to carry it alone anymore. We’re here now. We’re ready. You can put it down.”

Finally, finally, my mother breaks. She lowers the gun, curling inward, wipes a brusque arm across her face. Bas’s sword melts from his fingers.

“Take us to where it started,” he asks.

My mother swallows. She turns away.

“This way.”

CHAPTER 22

Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting

“Phoenix” by The Jane Austen Argument

Followed by gunfire, steel on steel, and wailing ghosts, we plunge through bracken, skidding down a short hill to the river. More spirits meet us on its banks, thousands of little lights trudging through the water, emerging onto shore. I can’t help touching them. Reaching out with frozen fingers, the inferno of my massive soul flickering against their little lights, I remember them so they can remember themselves.

“Help me,” I tell them, squeezing hands, touching faces, looking them in their hazy eyes until they sharpen. “I’ll take you home soon, I promise, but you have to keep the men with guns from reaching me.”

“What are you doing?” my mother hisses, groping for her ghost salt.

Gently, Bas bats her hand away from her pocket. “Just watch.”

He glows. I don’t know if he can help it now—if it’s his nature or his grief—but light seeps from him, a warm and gentle burn, a lantern on the shore.

Not yet, ghosts mouth to him as they pass.Soon, Ferryman. She promised.

They break around us, a glittering tide amid his steady light, surgingup the embankment. Safe between us, my mother watches their grim procession with eyes wide and wary, hand frozen in the air, torn between her rifle and the ghost salts in her pocket.

Bas catches my eyes. Reluctantly, I tear myself away from my dead souls. Black mud sucks at my sloppily laced boots, threatening to steal them off my feet. Head down, determined, I slog toward the river. Kicking slime and clumps of water weeds, I inch along an old iron fence that disappears beneath the water’s surface. An inflatable raft bobs at its far end, tossing in the restless water.

I wade in. The river floods my boots, soaks my jeans to the knee. Without meaning to, I close my eyes. This close to the ghost fence, even the water throbs with an aching kind of heartbeat. I can feel the tormented ley line trapped within its boundaries. The sensation scatters me backward in time. For just a second, I stand ankle deep in a fathomless and ancient river, beneath an endless sky of stars.

Bas’s fingers press into the small of my back. Steadying the raft with one hand, he helps me up with the other and takes a seat at the tiller. Because of course he does. He was made for this, after all. Mom watches us take our places and I wonder what we look like to her—him glowing, frost gloving me to the shoulder, both of us patterned like lacy bones—because she hesitates. Her gun dips in her hands like she no longer knows what to do with it.

I stare back at her from the boat and suddenly the distance between us seems too monumental to cross. How can I reach her now, standing on the bank of the living without an obol beneath her tongue?

But on the horizon, men swarm the hill and get dragged back, struggling against a dozen hands and gnashing teeth. Bas strokes afinger down the engine, waking it with a shivery sunbeam. He unties the battered rope lashing us to shore.

Leaning forward, I throw out my hand.

My mother takes it.

“I’ll drive,” Bas tells her when she spills on board, and his black eyes burning gold brook no argument. “Just point the way.”

She leads us downstream. We hug close to the bank, keeping the hill between us and anyone looking for us. I dig a long stick out of the hillside, stand at the front of the boat clearing a path through the tangled river weeds. Every muscle in my body aches from the onslaught of the day, but there’s a familiarity to it. Almost comforting.

I was built for this too, once upon a time. I can almost remember the graceful neck of a longship plunging above the waves, a ship of starlight chasing the sun—

Or did I read about that? Something about Ragnarok—a last longship out of Helheim heralding the end of the world? I can’t remember anymore. Maybe I’ve spent too long outside my body because my soul doesn’t want to fit. It sticks out from my edges; another, bigger hand overlapping my human fingers. And I don’t glow—not like Bas—but I reflect him. His light shivers around me, cast like a net into the water, illuminating a city.

Bluegills scatter from the open mouth of a sunken movie theater, algae coating posters still framed to the front facade. Old, rusted cars hang open outside a hardware store. We pass like ghosts over street after street of houses, windows intact more often than not, still awaiting their occupants. Sinking fingers under the water, Bas casts a light around us, steering us wide around sunken streetlights to keep from scraping a hole in our bottom. In his scattered glow, I spot a sign:

macdougall memorial research center

authorized traffic only

keep left