Page 80 of All Her Ghosts

Nearby, just feet away, three skeletons stare with empty eyes, their ghost lights long since burned away.

I watched them stand.

I watched them die.

I watched each body get up over and over again until it couldn’t anymore.

I lost myself here. I lost my other half here. I losteverythinghere.

Mom climbs back to her feet. Rifle at the ready, she hesitates, pauses to grip my arm, stares me in the face. I stare dumbly back, frozen and cold, and I can tell she thinks that I’m afraid.

She says, “I’ll never stop fighting for you,” and looks me dead in the eyes but it doesn’t feel like a lie.

It feels like a terrible truth.

“Then you’ll die for me,” I whisper. “And who will ferry you across the river?”

Rifle slotting against her shoulder, Mom turns away.

“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”

Doesn’t she know? It’s already burning.

Woken by my proximity, markings on the floor begin to glow beneath the brown and flaking blood. Cold silver flows through every pictogram and cuneiform, every rune, every symbol. And I can’t read it, can’t remember, but I know it spells my name in as many languages as my mother could learn. The circle calls to me. It’s my cradle. My grave. It’s a stained mouth and a sky full of stars. A calloused hand splitting open a pomegranate, blue-raspberry kisses in the pouring rain.

My mind churns uselessly, unmoored in time.

Every soul follows the same path in the same direction: life, then death; then the winding river into our underworld kingdom. Every soul traverses it, and it’s only ever meant to flow one way. That way is blocked now, has been for seventeen years, my river dammed and banks broken.

But even still: the only way out of life is through it. The only way to fix death is to kill it.

I need to sail my river. I need to gohome.

I feel the ward-wall standing in my way, its siren scream discordant, drowning out my distant heartbeat. A siphon in the stream—if I die here, it will divert the flow of me. I need enough power to overwhelm it. I need to make myself huge enough—godenough—to not just plug the pipe but destroy it.

Caught in two conflicting flows, my soul bleeds from the seams inmy body. I crash to my knees, skinned palms stinging on the stone. At the very tips of my outstretched fingers, I can just tickle the distant ley lines, trapped and feeding into this corrupt generator.

“You said that thing works like a bomb?” I slur, mouth hazing between alive and dead. “As in, it releases a massive electromagnetic pulse all at once?”

Mom lurches toward me, hand outstretched to help. But bootsteps thunder down the iron grating outside. She swings around, levels her rifle at the door.

“It’s a spiritual EMP,” she says, shoulders steady, sighting down the barrel. “It will reroute a portion of the power from the ley lines, essentially deploying like a dam over the break in the world, stopping the hell seep.”

The door rocks on its hinges.

“That’s my cue.” Cain laughs and surges through the stone wall. Outside, someone screams. I have to bellow to be heard.

“But it’s like the ward-wall? The energy flows in one direction?”

My mom grinds her teeth, finger hovering over the trigger.

“Input and output, yes!”

“Good. Then I know how to fix this.”

Elbow over elbow, army crawling to bed down with monsters, a corpse returning to the undercroft below her bed, I drag my flesh-and-ghost carcass into the silver-lit circle.

“Jenny?” Bas’s eyes follow me anxiously, darting to the door and back, a question written in his whole body—