Lightbringer (25 page)

I'm getting emotional. I'm sorry. Anyway, the point of all this is…hell, if you want to be with this Peter dude, I'm not going to stop you. I'm going to caution against it, I'm not going to like it, I might even tease you for it, but I'm not going to bother you about being with me anymore. You are my best friend. You are the most important person in my life. You were the only person who really got how tore up I was when my dad died, and you were the only person who knew exactly how much I loved Dad when he was around.

He was my hero, Wendy. And even though I'm still a little pissed at you…what I'm trying to say is that you're my hero too. What you do, going out and helping the dead, it's dangerous and it's crazy and it's not safe and part of me really, really wishes you wouldn't do it anymore because you're right, you could get hurt…but I'm also proud of you.

The world would be a sadder place without you in it, that's all I'm trying to say. You're amazing and wonderful and I'm always going to be deeply in love with you, but other than this note I'll never mention it again.

I hope you can find happiness with this Peter dude. And if you ever doubt what you're doing, if you ever think, “Huh, maybe I should stop,” I want you to hold that buckle. Because I know that if Dad were around he'd be proud of you. And I know that it was Dad's death that started you down this path.

I love you, Wendy. Be happy. Merry Christmas.

Eddie

Dropping the note, Wendy wiped away the tears coursing down her cheeks.

It had been so long since Wendy had thought of Mr. Barry as anything more than the man who she'd seen die, the one whose death had unlocked something deep inside her and allowed her to see the dead. But before that he'd been a special man, her best friend's father, and one of the few fun neighborhood dads. He'd had gentle eyes, she remembered, and a slow, kind smile. Eddie didn't resemble him much, he took after his mother, but the eyes were the same, especially when something tickled him. Mr. Barry, like Eddie, had loved a good laugh.

She wondered what Mr. Barry would have done if she'd had to send him into the Light. Would he have fought it the way that girl's grandmother had?

Wendy had a sneaking suspicion that, if Eddie were in trouble, he might have.

Learning that Piotr and his kind thought of her as a monster, well, that had been a rude awakening. Once upon a time her mother had claimed that all ghosts were glad to see her coming, that they welcomed the embrace of the Light. But her own experiences these past few months with the Walkers and the White Lady had taught Wendy differently. At the end, when they were bathed in the fiery Light, the Walkers struggled and cursed and it was only the sweep of siren song that kept them at her side as she went about the deadly business of tearing their essence apart.

The Shades though, and Specs, the ones who saw it coming…the few who knew their death in the Never was at hand, they saw the Light as a blessing. So which was it?

Now that she'd taken the time to think about it, to get to know Piotr, reaping without consent felt wrong. It was as if she were forcing herself on the ghosts, sneaking up on them unawares and sending them on without their blessing, but until now Wendy had never really considered stopping. Staying out late, roaming around town in a ceaseless hunt for the dead—until now Wendy had done as her mother had always instructed her to do, ambushing most of the Shades in the dark, never really considering that maybe her
mother
had been the one who was mistaken, that perhaps her mother had been the one taught improperly. Maybe there could be another way.

If not, Wendy could certainly try to make another way herself.

The thought itself was sobering. After Piotr had left she'd swung from one extreme to the other, gone from reaping only in the most dire of circumstances to reaping because she felt like it. She'd done everything but the thing that felt most natural, most right.

Did Wendy have to reap every single ghost she came across? Just because her mother had done so, as well as the countless other Lightbringers before her, didn't mean that Wendy had to follow in their footsteps. This wasn't a job she'd taken, after all; it wasn't as if she'd
applied
for it. It had been thrust upon her without her consent, a duty and a burden dropped in her lap by Mr. Barry's death.

Wendy held the buckle to the light.

“I have a choice,” she said aloud. “I don't have to be her kind of Lightbringer anymore. Not unless I want to.” It was freeing, admitting that fact out loud, and the stress began to drain from her shoulders, her neck, leaving Wendy feeling lightened for the first time in ages, possibly since her mother's accident. Wendy was giddy with the realization that all the horror of her daily drudgery could end as she saw fit. Once the White Lady had been taken care of, once the Lost had been freed, then she could finally relax. She could be the right kind of reaper, the volunteer kind.

She almost sobbed with relief.

“Wendy!” Jon called from downstairs. “Are you coming down to eat?”

“Go ahead without me,” she called back. “I'm kinda worn out.”

“Ok! I'll set some aside for you!”

Hugging the buckle close, Wendy flopped on the floor, her hair spread in a halo and her eyes drifting closed. Sleep had been a rare commodity and the subtle sounds of the house around her—the twins downstairs eating, the distant hum of the TV—soothed her to sleep. Grateful for the respite, Wendy drifted into slumber. As she slept, she dreamed.

In her dreams Wendy walked and walked. The familiar stretch of beach wavered before her, bathed in glaring sunlight and hazy from the heat. The sea murmured to her left, the craggy hillside loomed to her right. Seashell doors marched in a ragged line on the sand.

Over the past months, when Wendy visited the beach, she had learned to glimpse the names of the dream doors out of the corner of her eyes, to read them with a swift glance but never look at them straight on. Sometimes the doors opened easily at her hand, leading out of terrible nightmares and into kinder climates. Other times the shells scattered with a touch, trapping her in terrible hellscapes that she had to endure until morning came and brought the buzz of her alarm clock.

Then the mist came, quenching the heat and blotting out the fierce and glaring sun. When the first tendrils lapped at her toes, Wendy's arm itched and burned; confused, she glanced down at the four open slashes, surprised that she had brought her real-world injury into the dream with her. When tiny white maggots began squirming from the gaping holes she knew the White Lady was near.

“That doesn't scare me anymore,” she called, pitching her voice as loud as she could. “It's gross but it's not like it's real or anything. And besides, I thought you were done with stupid shit like this. It was too juvenile for you or something?”

“Isn't it?” The White Lady's boat drifted out of the mist, mooring itself in the usual place. It took several minutes for the White Lady to struggle out of her small skiff, her movements stiff and slow. The past months had not been kind; her robes were ragged now, worn through with large, moth-eaten holes that allowed nauseating glimpses of the extent of the rot. Where she stepped on the sand black puddles like oil slicks formed, sticky dribbling ichor that sank slowly into the earth and emitted puffs of scent that smelled like rotten eggs. “You'd be surprised the things that cross over from dreams into the real world.”

“You're falling apart,” Wendy noted, stepping away from the White Lady and shifting so she was upwind. “What the hell is happening to you?”

“One of the mysteries of life…or death,” the White Lady replied, coughing so that Wendy could see the bellows of her lungs fight to squeeze in and out. “Death for the dead, Lightbringer. It comes to us all.”

“Not like that, it doesn't,” Wendy protested. “I should know. Not that I'm complaining. I wouldn't care if you rotted down to dust after all the crap you've been putting me through.”

“You'll care,” the White Lady said. “One day you'll die and you'll see.”

“You know,” remarked Wendy, keeping her distance, “for a crazy lady, this talk's been awfully sane so far. Find a good dead psychiatrist? Freud himself, perhaps?”

The White Lady shrugged. “Eh, it comes and goes with the strength of the decay. As I said before, just wait. One day you'll see.” She clapped her hands. “But enough chit-chat, I don't have time to fuss with your nonsense today. I'm here to talk about our truce.”

“You mean the truce I told you to ram up your ass? The truce we agreed wasn't going to happen? Open war and all that?” Flicking her wrist until her wounds were free of squirming bugs, Wendy crossed her arms across her chest and leaned against the bow of the boat. It was like leaning against a clammy wall, and black slime from the hull worked its way down her back. Wendy grimaced and straightened, annoyed that everything even remotely surrounding the White Lady had to be so unbelievably foul. “Real or not, ugh, this is so disgusting.”

“Yes, that truce. Though perhaps calling it a trade now might be more to the point.” She coughed again, a horrid rattling sound that hurt Wendy's ears.

“A trade?” Wendy rolled her eyes. “Right, sure. I'm listening.”

“I've got something you want, Lightbringer. You've got something I want. So we trade.”

“I sincerely doubt that
you
have anything
I
want.” Wendy ran her hand along her shoulder, cleaning off the clinging remains of the muck. “Unless it's a clean towel or maybe a shower.”

“A shower can certainly be arranged as a gesture of goodwill,” the White Lady said and snapped her fingers. “I always like to clean up before beginning negotiations.”

Above the beach, forked lightning flashed and thunder boomed, nearly atop them. A two second beat passed and then rain pounded from the sky, soaking Wendy to the skin almost instantly and obliterating the chilly mist within seconds. Though the foul White Lady had called the rain, the water was clear and cold and wonderfully cleansing, raising huge gooseflesh across every inch of skin. The slime washed away within seconds and the itching eased shortly after.

“Yeah, I guess that works!” Wendy shouted over the downpour, the drumming rain filling the world with noise. She hunched over and rapidly rubbed her hands over her slick arms, seeking friction-warmth.

“I haven't many tricks left,” the White Lady said, her voice pitched low but still reaching Wendy's ears, “but the ones I have are powerful.”

“I can see that.” Wendy straightened, determined to not show the White Lady that the chill was getting to her. “Want to turn off the waterworks now?”

“If you like,” came the negligent reply, and just as suddenly as the rain arrived, it was gone. Clouds dashed across the sky, revealing the hot afternoon sun once more, and rainbows glinted all around the beach, reflecting every direction she looked.

“I've got to learn how to do that,” Wendy mused. “Is that trick super handy or what?”

“Dreams are not the absolute realms of the Lightbringers,” the White Lady said, reclining on the damp sand and drawing her moth-eaten shift carefully across her legs, “but they can learn a trick or two. Prophecy, a nice neutral zone for a talk, a little spying, or even a bit of glamour; your kind can become quite adept here if they need to be.”

“You say that like you've met people like me before.” Now that she was clean and no longer revolted by the way the dreamscape bent in horrifying ways when the White Lady was near, Wendy was back on her guard.

“I told you that I've been watching for a long time,” the White Lady said, irritated. Where the hood slipped back Wendy could see long strips of essence that had been sewn together with wide, thick-stitched loops of thread. Where the strips tapered off, darker patches of skin had been carefully set with a crosshatch stitch. Examining these marks, Wendy realized that they had to have once been tattoos, but were now too badly marred to make out.

Her fingers brushed her own collarbone tats. Would the same happen to her designs when she passed over? The White Lady noticed the gesture. “Protective ink only takes you so far in the Never.”

“It's worked pretty well so far.”

“That's because a Walker is the worst thing you've come across. There are much, much worse things out there. Things that don't even blink at your ink.”

“Yawn. Bored. Is there a point to all this?”

“My point is that your mother didn't train you well enough. In fact, she hardly trained you at all. Letting you reap only Shades for years? Until her little accident, your mother had you only reap one ghost. One. So why do you think you are coming to this talk from any sort of position of power?”

“I'm strong enough to tell you to go to hell. And I go through your Walkers easily enough. Or did you forget all that begging you were doing on their behalf earlier?”

“So you can reap a few Walkers. Yippee. I'm much worse than a Walker and I know that, for all your bluster, you've figured that out by now. And there are beings far, far scarier than I am wandering the Never.” She held up her rotting horror of a hand so that the light filtered through it, casting a holey shadow on the sand. “Did I ever tell you that I knew your mother? In the living world? I knew what she was.”

“Shut up,” Wendy whispered through lips gone numb from shock. “That's impossible and I don't have to listen to this bullshit.”

“It's not bullshit if it's true.” The White Lady clenched her fist, skin flaking down. “And you? You are really starting to irritate me, Wendy.”

“Good!” Wendy snapped. “Anything that gets your panties in a twist is fabulous!”

“Stupid, idiot child,” the White Lady snapped. “Normally the ones like you, the Lightbringers, are sent on their first dream-walk at seventeen. But your mother was gone by then, wasn't she? She never even bothered to tell you that you woke too early. Just thirteen,” she sneered. “It's a miracle you didn't go insane from the shock.”

Shoving against the sand for support, Wendy started to rise. The White Lady waved a hand. Hard pressure pressed against the tops of Wendy's shoulders and she toppled back down, her tongue ring popping smartly against the back of her teeth when she hit the ground.