Noah Czerny was a very human name to give something that did not look very human to Calla’s eyes. She had seen a lot of living humans in her time, and she’d seen a lot of spirits in her time, but she hadn’t ever seen something like this. A soul this decayed shouldn’t have been – well, it shouldn’t have been anything. It should have been a remnant of a ghost, a mindless, repetitive haunting. A hundred-year-old scent in a hallway. A shiver standing next to a certain window.
But somehow, she was looking at a shambles of a soul, and in it, there was still a dead kid.
“Oh, baby,” Jimi said, full of instant compassion. “You poor thing. Let me get you some …” Jimi, ever the herbalist, generally had an herbal suggestion for every possible mortal ill.
“Some what?” Calla prompted.
Jimi pursed her mouth and rocked a bit on her feet. She was clearly stumped, but could not lose face in front of the others. Also, she did have a tediously good heart, and there was no doubt that Noah’s existence distressed her.
“Mimosa,” Jimi finished, triumphant, and Calla sighed with grudging appreciation. Jimi wagged a finger at Noah. “Mimosa flowers help make spirits appear, and that’ll make you feel stronger!”
As she stomped back up the stairs, Maura asked Mr Gray to show Noah into the reading room, and then she and Calla conferred at the base of the stairs. Rather than telling her how they’d come to have Noah with them, she merely held out her arm and allowed Calla to press her palm against her skin. Calla’s psychometry – divination through touch – was often unspecific, but in this case, the event was recent and vivid enough for her to pick it up easily, along with a kiss Maura had shared with Mr Gray beforehand.
“Mr Gray is talented,” Calla observed.
Maura looked withering. She said, “Here’s the rub. I think I was being shown that mirror with Piper’s name on it on purpose, but I don’t think it was Noah’s purpose. He doesn’t remember how he got there or why he was doing it.”
Calla kept her voice low. “Could he have been a portent?”
Portents – supernatural warnings of ill tidings to come – were not of particular interest to Calla, mostly because they were usually imaginary. People tended to see portents where there were none: black cats bringing bad luck, a crow promising sadness. But a true portent – an ominous suggestion from a little-understood cosmic presence – was not something to be ignored.
Maura’s voice was also hushed. “Could be. I haven’t shaken this terrible feeling all day. The only thing is, I didn’t think something sentient could be a portent.”
“Is he sentient?”
“Part of him, anyway. We were talking in the car. I’ve never seen anything like it. He’s decayed enough to appear as a mindless portent, but at the same time, there’s a boy in there still. I mean, we had him in the car.”
Both women mused upon this.
Calla said, “He’s the one who died on the ley line? Maybe Cabeswater made him strong enough to stay conscious for all of this, beyond when he should have passed on. If he’s too cowardly to go on, that crazy forest could be giving him enough power to stick it out here.”
Maura gave Calla another withering look. “It’s called scared, Calla Lily Johnson, and he is just a kid. Ish. Remember he was murdered. Remember he’s one of Blue’s best friends.”
“So what’s the plan? You want me to get ahold of him and find things out? Or are we trying to send him on?”
Uneasily, Maura said, “Remember the frogs, though.”
A few years before, Blue had caught two tree frogs while out performing neighbourly errands. She’d triumphantly set up a makeshift terrarium for them in one of Jimi’s largest iced tea pitchers. As soon as she’d gone to school, Maura had immediately divined – through ordinary channels, not psychic ones – that these tree frogs were in for a slow death if tended by a young Blue Sargent. She had set them free in the backyard and thus began one of the largest arguments she and her daughter had yet or since had.
“Fine,” Calla hissed. “We won’t free any ghosts while she’s at a toga party.”
“I don’t want to go.”
Both Maura and Calla jumped.
Of course Noah was standing beside them. His shoulders were slumped and his eyebrows tipped upward. Under it all were threads and black, dust and absence. His words were soft and slurred. “Not yet.”
“You don’t have much time, boy,” Calla told him.
“Not yet,” Noah repeated. “Please.”
“No one’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to do,” Maura said.
Noah shook his head sadly. “They … already have. They … will again. But this … I want to do it for me.”
He held his hand out to Calla, palm up, as if he were a beggar. It was a gesture that reminded Calla of another dead person in her life, one who still hung sadness and guilt around her neck, even after two decades. In fact, now that she considered it, the gesture was too perfectly accurate, the wrist too limply similar, the fingers too delicately and intentionally sprawled, an echo of Calla’s memories —
“I’m a mirror,” Noah said bleakly, responding to her thoughts. He stared at his feet. “Sorry.”
He started to drop his hand, but Calla was finally moved to a reluctant and genuine compassion. She took his cool fingers.
Immediately a blow smashed into her face.
She should have expected it, but still, she barely had time to recover when the next came. Fear spewed up, then the pain, and then another blow – Calla nimbly blocked this one. She did not need to relive Noah’s entire murder.