Unlike most of her peers, Wendy didn’t get a cell phone until she was fifteen. It was a birthday gift from her mother and was strictly for the family business. Her father wasn’t supposed to know about it. Dutiful daughter that she was, Wendy still kept it a secret even though she doubted he’d care about it now.
Though she and her mother had been close once upon a time, the death of Mr. Barry had changed things between them. Her mother began trusting Wendy more, especially with the twins, and going out more often when Dad was on assignment. If her mother had been any other woman, Wendy would have thought she was having an affair. And in a way, she was. The love of her life wasn’t George, Wendy’s father. Her mother was in love with her duty as a Reaper.
The night of her mother’s accident started out typically. It was late February and the beginning of the rainy season. Wendy was studying at Eddie’s when she received the call from her mother. The cell, tucked away in her bag, trilled once before going to voicemail. Wendy, deep in the middle of a tricky word problem, was unwilling to stop her homework yet again just because her mother expected her to jump at her beck and call. She barely glanced at her backpack before going back to work. Shades generally stuck to the same area; whomever her mother wanted her to send into the Light would most likely be there tomorrow. The reaping, Wendy decided, could wait for once. It was a decision she’d soon regret.
An hour later she filed her books away and remembered to check her phone. She pressed 2, the speed dial for her voicemail. She expected her mother to have left a list of boring reaping assignments to knock out before Wendy could go to sleep. Maybe there were Shades hovering around the Tiny Tot playground or a ghost wandering down Castro.
The voicemail turned out to be something much more important than that. Eddie, munching on popcorn, watched the smile slip off Wendy’s face, replaced with a look of horror. He set the bowl aside.
“What’s up?”
Wendy snapped her phone closed and shoved it in her pocket. “I need to borrow your car.”
“Whoa there, hotshot, you’ve barely got your license.”
She wouldn’t meet his eyes as she gathered up her things and stuffed them haphazardly in her bag. “Ed, I need this. I gotta go.”
“Then let me drive you.” Eddie staggered to his feet, legs half-numb from the time spent on the floor, and grabbed Wendy by the upper arms. “Wendy, what’s wrong? Is someone hurt? That was your mom, right? Is she okay?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Wendy snapped, yanking away.
Quickly, Eddie set himself between Wendy and the door, crossing his arms and tucking his compact wrestler’s body firmly against the door. There was no way she was moving him without a fight. “I’m your BFF, Wendy. Why don’t you try me?” When she hesitated his expression softened. “Give me a chance,” he pleaded. “Please?”
Torn between her duty to her mother and the vow of secrecy her mother had made her swear, Wendy hesitated…and told him. She told him about the ghost she’d met the day his father had died, about the rotting Walker-to-be in the hospital, and about her mother’s calling—now her own—as a Reaper.
“So now that you think I’m crazy,” she finished, turning her face away so Eddie wouldn’t see her fear for their friendship, “may I please borrow your car? You can listen to my voicemail. My mom needs my help. I really gotta go!”
“I don’t think you’re crazy,” Eddie rebuked.
“What?” Wendy’s head snapped up. “Of course you do. Didn’t you hear a word I just said? Ghosts, Eddie. Dead people. You know, boo!”
“Wendy, look, you’ve always been a little weird.” He laughed, shaking his head in amazement. “To be honest, it’s a relief to, you know, have a reason for it. Why you’re so strange. This seems as good a reason as any.”
“You believe me?” Wendy could hardly believe her ears. “Serious?”
“I sincerely doubt that you of all people would lie to me,” Eddie said, scratching his ear. “Not after everything we’ve been through. So if you’re not lying, well, I guess that means you’re telling the truth. I guess there’s only one way to find out, huh?” He drew his car keys from his front pocket. “Let’s go.”
It took twenty minutes to reach Redwood City. When they spotted the gigantic pileup it took immense self-control for Wendy to keep her dinner down. Her mother’s ambulance was at the back, parked beside the overturned school bus half on the highway. Most of the police were at the front of the wreck where a U-Haul lay on its side, the side torn open and its contents strewn across the lanes of traffic. A twin mattress lay haphazardly across the divider, sodden and bent double from the rain.
Eddie pulled to the side of the 101, tucking his car as far into the breakdown lane as he could—and as near as he dared without attracting notice from the cops. The storm opened up, rain pouring buckets upon buckets across the windshield so hard and fast that Wendy had to squint to make out the front of the accident.
“Oh my God,” he whispered, thunderstruck. “What happened?”
“Who cares? There’re kids out there,” Wendy moaned, spotting the wandering hoard of Lost milling around the crushed remnants of the yellow school bus. Her eyes skipped over the garish splash of red splattered across the inside of the windshield. Apparently the driver hadn’t made it either. “Normally Mom doesn’t let me reap kids. All I’ve ever done are adults! Shades! Maybe a Walker. Once. But never kids!”
Eddie passed a hand over his mouth. “It looks like the U-Haul must’ve skidded. The semi couldn’t stop and the bus ran into the semi. Those cars got crushed in between. Oh my God, this is…” he swallowed rapidly and wiped his mouth again. “You’ve seen shit like this before? How do you keep from being sick?”
“You take a deep breath and remind yourself that the body is just a shell.” Wendy started scanning what she could see of the wreck. “Come on, Mom, where are you?”
“Can you do it without her? Reap them?”
“I guess, maybe, but kids are supposed to be way, way harder. I’m not supposed to; Mom’ll kill me if I do and she didn’t want me to.” Wendy buried her face in her hands, torn with indecision; she could go ahead and help with the reap and catch flack for it later, or sit like a good girl and wait for her mother to spot the parked car and fetch her. Despairing, Wendy cried, “What should I do?”
Eddie took a deep breath and stared straight ahead, frowning at the swirling red and blue lights. “What’s your standard operating procedure? For car wrecks, I mean?”
“Reap any souls that don’t go into the Light on their own. But…kids…” Wendy plucked at Eddie’s sleeve, trying to convey her terror at the potential job before her. Her mother was nowhere to be seen. Eddie, still staring at the chaos in front of them, didn’t move. “Okay, Wendy,” she muttered under her breath, “you can do this. Mom’s obviously got her hands full or she would’ve been done here by now. Just…just do this.”
“Wendy,” Eddie said, voice flat and dull as he examined the site of the accident, ignoring her loosening hold and low pep talk. “Did you reap my dad?”
“Now’s not the time, Eds.” Wendy reached for the handle but before she could pull it the locks snapped down.
“Tell me, and I’ll let you do your thing.” Eddie wasn’t looking at her, simply staring out past the windshield, hectic color in his cheeks. He reached out and grabbed her wrist, fingers digging in. “Did you? Did you reap my dad?”
Despite her worry for her mother, despite the steady pulse of the emergency lights and the throng of child-ghosts stumbling about right before her eyes, Wendy felt a tug of sympathy. Mr. Barry had been Eddie’s world, she remembered, he had been Eddie’s everything.
“No, Eddie,” she said, her voice almost drowned out by the rapid swish of windshield wipers, the punishing rat-tat-tat of rain on the roof of the car. She remembered the scarred boy holding her hand, the way the two of them had looked out at the wreckage before Eddie had passed out. There’d been no ghost there but the boy who’d held her hand and comforted her, no other souls around.
“Your dad went into the Light,” Wendy soothed. “He made me promise to watch over you and when he knew you were gonna be okay he just…let go. I never saw a ghost before that night; I couldn’t have reaped him even if I’d known I needed to. But he didn’t need it.”
Eddie nodded, released her, and the locks snapped open. Wendy fled the car and his tortured expression, welcoming the familiar burn in her gut as the heat of the Light washed through her.
It was as if her arrival opened some small riptide in the hole of the Never. Rays of Light began spilling from the storm-shot sky, brilliant shoots of blinding warmth that drew the dead and dying toward them with near mindless yearning. Wendy had to do nothing for those that could find their own way; she stepped aside and let them travel on. Soon only a handful remained, a dozen or so ghosts, huddled together and crying. A woman, pale white and flickering, hung at the far edge of the accident, wiping her hands over and over again on her white slacks. From the look of her, Wendy guessed that she had been the driver of the U-Haul. The side of her face had been ripped apart.
“A deer,” she moaned over and over again, the gaping maw that was her face flexing with her cries. “It was a deer! The streets were wet and I couldn’t stop!” She grabbed one of the little ghosts and shook him. “You saw the deer, didn’t you? Didn’t you? It wasn’t my fault!”
As Wendy approached, the woman in the white slacks backed away. “I’ve got to find the deer. I’ve got to! I’ll prove it was an accident. Just wait here. You wait right there!” She turned on her heel and pushed past the little boy, hurrying over the edge of the highway and into the ditch where she quickly vanished from view. Wendy could have gone after her, but she knew that her mother would be able to capture the ghost far faster than she ever could. Her mom could get the driver; Wendy just had to find her and let her know what happened.
In this form Wendy walked the space between life and death. Paramedics were offloading bodies from the bus and the semi and the two cars at the back of the wreck but here, at the edge of the accident, she was a whisper of a being, a flickering creature made of shadow to the living and light to the dead. In the downpour and chaos of the accident, no one noticed her…except the ghosts.
“We didn’t mean to,” sobbed one ponytailed girl as Wendy brushed her with the ribbons of Light, “it was an accident.”
Wendy, assuming the child meant the car wreck, kissed the girl’s cheek and sent her on. There was a deep tug inside when she did so, a tidal pull like menstrual cramps, but fiercer, darker. Wendy, thinking that this was what her mother meant when she said that child-spirits were dangerous, relished the tug of pain. Her mother must be busy elsewhere, she thought to herself, sending a second child on, or perhaps she missed this group?
Each spirit sent into the Light made her weaker, set the pain in her gut a little higher until her lungs were burning and her eyes were watering. Every breath was torture. It was the worst pain she’d ever felt, the worst stitch in her side multiplied tenfold. Wendy, struggling to finish the job, sent the last of the children on and sank to the ground. Her Light flickered and dimmed, leaving her wholly human again.
At first Wendy thought she was inadvertently touching one of the corpses; perhaps a driver thrown free of the wreckage only to break their neck at the edge of the accident. But then her eyes spied the dark blue jacket of her mother’s EMT uniform and the coppery wash of sodden hair. “Mom?” Wendy whispered, horrified. “MOM?”
Her mother did not answer and Wendy began to scream.
Now, seven months later, Wendy was still screaming…only now the scream was on the inside. She’d stopped reaping Shades in the days following her mother’s accident. It hadn’t been a conscious decision at first, merely a matter of convenience. Her father was a wreck and the twins needed someone to pick up the slack in the mothering department. Wendy had been doing most of the chores for years now so she had that part of the routine down, but she had to hide how adept she was at laundry and cooking from her father. Dad had no idea that Mom had been depending on Wendy for as long as she had.
She needn’t have bothered. Now her father took Wendy’s efficiency around the house for granted and only noticed when she slacked off. Sure, there was less reaping, since Wendy only took the souls that got in her way while she was on patrol, but covering the city section by section on foot was time consuming and tedious.
At first the lack of reaping had been a convenience thing, but it had stealthily grown into something more. The few times she’d tried to reap a Shade that summer, she’d failed. Her palms would grow sweaty and her vision would double; it felt like a vise had wrapped around her chest and was pushing the air out of her very pores until she backed away from the ghost and fled home. Her mother would have said she’d lost her nerve, if she’d ever had it in the first place.
Piotr’s words had shaken her up, though. She couldn’t stop turning the numbers over in her head. Before her mother’s accident Wendy had sent (on average) three or four souls a week on to the afterlife. It was something she hardly had to think about. Do the dishes, reap a Shade, go grocery shopping. It was rote. Over the course of the five years she’d been helping her mother send souls on, she must have reaped at least a thousand souls—or more!—all by herself.
How many souls had she left in the Never over the past seven months? And with her mother gone, how many of the day-to-day souls that she’d encountered at the hospital, at accident sites, even in people’s homes…how many of those were left there, weeping into the stillness of a world that didn’t even know they existed anymore?
Chel and Jon went their separate ways as soon as Eddie dropped them off. Wendy waved goodbye from the front porch and drifted upstairs, hardly noticing Jon puttering in the kitchen or the lights spilling out from the shared upstairs bathroom. Chel shut the door with her hip as Wendy passed, Wendy’s makeup bag clutched in her left hand and her cell phone pressed to her ear in the right.
Wendy didn’t bother turning on her lights. The rumpled bed looked too comfortable to resist. Pausing only long enough to toe off her boots, Wendy crawled under her covers and hugged her pillow against her chest. Her eyes drifted closed. She dreamed.
In her dreams, Wendy walked and walked, an endless beach stretching out before her, with foamy waves licking her toes and shells crunching beneath her bare heels. A person walked beside her—sometimes her father, sometimes Eddie, but most often Piotr—and when she grew tired of walking Wendy held out her hand for her companion to grasp. The hand in hers was warm and firm, the grip strong and reassuring. Holding this hand, Wendy felt safe, secure. His hand in hers, she was afraid of nothing. Fingers intertwined, they continued walking down the beach until they reached a door in the sand.
The door was made of millions of shells sunk into the firm, hard-packed sand at their feet. No two shells were the same, though each shimmered with a radiant and subtle rainbow. When Wendy looked on the door long enough, she realized that there were words written in the reflected light. Squinting, she concentrated, but could only make out a word here, a word there. Wendy turned to ask if he could make out the words, but the hand holding hers was gone.
“Dad?” Wendy called, shading her eyes against the grey glare of the sky and twisting to squint up and down the beach, hoping to catch sight of him. “Eddie?” There was nothing, not even his footprints in the sand; the dream had erased him.
Confused, but more curious about the door than her companion’s disappearance, Wendy knelt down and ran her hands over the shells, finger tracing the mystery words like a child first learning to read. For a time the door grew brighter, almost bright enough to make out the words, but then a horrible thing occurred: every place her fingers touched, the shells grew black and cold. They crumbled as she watched, horrorstruck.
The words faded, became ghosts of themselves, and a wave washed across the beach, taking the blackened shells with it. The sand underneath these holes in the shell door was black as pitch, sticky to the touch, and foul smelling—a ripe, turgid scent like old mushrooms grown in rotted hollows that have never seen the sun.
Wendy drew back, stared avidly at her hands. Her fingers were trembling, sure, but her hands were as they should be—ten roughened fingers tipped with ten blunt and ragged nails. Silver bangles at each wrist jangled together, and two silver rings—one at each thumb—glinted in the pale, grey morning light.
Tipping her head back, Wendy looked up at the sky. The expanse was uniformly grey as far as the eye could see. A crowd of ramshackle huts crowded the shoreline, set far enough back from the beach for safety, but only a few dozen yards from the cool expanse of sea. Gulls cried and circled overhead, but no feathers clung to their outstretched wings; they were floating, darting skeletons dancing on the breeze.
As Wendy watched, one bony gull swept wings back and dove straight down, breaking the waves with a writhing creature grasped tightly in its beak. Squinting, Wendy could make out the shape of a fish being gulped down almost whole, but it was a fish nearly out of a cartoon, all spiky bones and eyes, extended from a scaly but fleshless head.
“I’m dreaming,” Wendy said aloud, realizing it for the first time. “This is a dream.”
She pinched herself. “Wake up. Wake up, Wendy, wake up.”
Though she pinched until her wrists and arms were tender, Wendy found herself no closer to waking than before. At a loss for what to do, Wendy examined the stretch of beach on all sides. The houses were gone now, swallowed by thick white mist rolling in from the ocean. Some miles distant, probably far out at sea, Wendy heard a foghorn boom across the water and the answering call north of her position, a mournful reply that split the silence in twenty-second bursts.
As Wendy examined her surroundings the mist finally reached her and enveloped her. A faint breeze pushed the mist against her face, tickling her neck and cheek like warm, wet kisses, dragging her curls down so they hung lank against her shoulders, sodden and dripping.
“I know this place,” she said, and she did. With the mist had come the memory of a mother-daughter trip to Santa Cruz for breakfast on the beach years before, in the early months of her reaping. The sun had burned off the mist after only a few hours, but the memory of her mother sitting beside her, the cool morning air, and the world dressed in clouds, had always stayed with her. For a moment Wendy imagined that she could smell her mother’s perfume. Her eyes filled with tears.
Swathed in the white and blinded by her memories, Wendy turned and turned, at first seeking some escape from these memories-within-a-dream, and then seeking even the faintest hint of a direction. The sound of the sea surrounded her, the foghorn boomed all around. The warm feelings disappeared in a rising wave of panic.
This isn’t that beach. Mom is gone and I’m lost, I’m lost, she thought desperately. Wendy knew she was still at the edge of the sea—cool waves rushed around her ankles, the sand sucking greedily at her toes—but she could make out no outcropping of stern rock or figure out from which direction she’d come. I can’t do this anymore.
Eyes straining against the white, Wendy believed at first that the figure floating towards her was her imagination. It bobbed in slow synchronicity with the swells around her ankles, drifting closer and closer through the mist, but it wasn’t until Wendy heard the rhythmic thump of waves against a hull that she put two and two together. The figure, whoever it was, was approaching in a boat.
Glad for the company in this spooky expanse of dreamland, even if it was unexpected, Wendy stepped backward, away from the shifting shadow in the mist. The bow scraped sand and the figure, lean and lithe, leapt nimbly over the side with a little splash and guided the tiny sailboat higher onto the shore.
“Mom?” Wendy asked. The figure was slim like her mother, and about the right height. But then she spoke and the raspy voice told Wendy that this woman was not, could not, be her mother.
“A little help?” Up close, most of the figure’s face was obscured by a deep, heavy hood, but the shape of her body was feminine, and she was only slightly taller than Wendy herself. The waves tugged at her cape and the shift beneath, pulling the sodden fabric toward the sea.
Wendy’s heart sank. Dream or not, some small part of her had been hoping that it was her mother. Even dreaming her face was better than the pain of the real, waking world.
“Um, yeah, sure,” Wendy surprised herself by saying, and helped tug the boat free of the sucking waves, leaving them both all foam and damp from foot to knee. The act of hauling the boat in had cleared her head, however; Wendy felt calm, in control once more, and grateful to the newcomer for the distraction.
“My thanks,” the woman said. She had a knapsack slung across her chest, hanging loosely from shoulder to opposite hip, and she reached into it almost to her elbow, searching until she found a largish silver flask with a deeply tarnished edge. The woman spun off the top and drank deeply, wiping her mouth with the side of her hand when she was done. Then she offered the flask to Wendy. “Portable heat,” she said. “The wind is cold; it eats my bones.”
She was right, the seashore was icy, but accepting felt strange. “No, thank you.”
The woman shrugged. “Suit yourself,” she said and began slogging through the mist and away from the ocean. Wendy followed.
Keeping the line of the boat in sight, they moved until they’d reached the tide line before the woman sank to sand and tucked her feet beneath her. Patting the space beside her, the woman did not relax until Wendy settled by her side. They were, Wendy realized, seated not far from the remains of the door in the sand. The surf rumbled, the mist eddied, and they sat in silence, listening to the fading boom of the foghorn and occasional cry of a distant gull.
“I think,” the woman said when the flask was done, “that it’s time we had a talk.”
“So talk,” Wendy said, wishing that it were her mother sitting beside her. The quiet contemplation had cleared her mind until Wendy felt pleasantly light, open and airy, but lonely and very, very young. The sun was either rising or setting on the horizon, burning away some of the mist and setting the rest to glowing; infinitesimal rainbows refracted and shivered at the edge of Wendy’s concentration, distracting her. “We can chat about anything you want.”
“It’s best if you begin with a question. That’s how these things are done, I’m told.” The woman scooped a handful of sand high in the air, tilted her hand, and let it fall in a steady stream. The sand hitting sand made a subtle swooshing noise. She brushed the crumbling beach off her hand and waited.
“Me? But this is a dream. Hello, why would I have questions? Especially from some chick I dreamed up?”
“Is it, now?” The woman wrapped one arm around her knees. “Or is this space something more?” She chuckled. “Even if this is a dream, ask anyway. Call me the genie in the lamp. The mysteries of the universe are yours for the asking.”
“Right. Okay, fine, a question, a question…” Wendy couldn’t imagine anything that she’d want to ask this stranger. It was a dream, nothing more. Then she realized that there was one thing she was curious about. “Why’re you wearing a hood?” Wendy demanded. “Let me see your face.”
“I don’t think so,” the woman replied, tugging the hood further forward. “I had an accident when I crossed over and my face isn’t—” here she laughed unexpectedly, “pretty to look on.”
“Crossed over?” Wendy snorted. “This isn’t the Never. I’m only dreaming… aren’t I?” The light, dizzy feeling left in a rush, leaving Wendy chill and tense and wishing her male dream companion from before could have maybe stuck around a little longer. “Aren’t I?”
“‘Iam vero videtis nihil esse morti tam simile quam somnum,’” the woman replied, drawing her knees up and resting her chin upon them. “Cicero’s De Senectute.” Her head inclined towards Wendy. “Roughly translated, it means, ‘Now indeed you see that there is nothing so like death than sleep.’ An apt description, wouldn’t you say?”
Cold chills danced down Wendy’s spine. “Do I know you?”
“No,” the woman replied. “But I most certainly know you. You are the scourge of the Never, the one who walks at night.” She sighed. “I hear quite a lot from where I sit. Quite a lot. And not all of it, I’m sad to say, is good news.”
The woman straightened and turned so that she faced Wendy head on. All Wendy could see of her face was the bottom of her chin and long, lean line of her neck. When the woman spoke, the cloak shifted aside for a brief moment, revealing a crosshatched scar lining the edge of her collarbone, the remains of the puckered flesh dipping under the neck of her shift.
“You’ve been meddling in my affairs. Poking your nose where it shouldn’t be.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Wendy protested. “I don’t even know who you are. I’m dreaming this. I’ve got school—”
“Time is short here,” the woman interrupted. “Though the hours seem long. A pair of very special Walkers went missing recently, a matched set, and I can’t say that I like that one bit. I’ve got eyes and ears everywhere—seems some folks would like to join in on my pretty party—and the whispers say that you’re the one to blame for my recent troubles. Riders I can handle, they’re just a gang of arrogant kiddies, but someone like you? You need to be dealt with.”
“Who the hell are you?”
The woman sighed. “They call me the White Lady.” Her fingers plucked the crosshatched scars like a harpist strumming strings and her voice dropped low, insinuating. “Heard of me?”
Cursing, Wendy shoved away from the woman and leapt to her feet. She tried to unravel the Light but the fire was dead inside, black coals and dust. She could not even find the smallest flame to fan into a blaze. Wendy pounded her fists on her thighs. “Why won’t it come?”
Amused at Wendy’s display, the White Lady shook her head, hood swaying from side to side, and tsked. “Dreams may be like death, my dear, but they are still ages apart. Do you really think I’m so stupid as to approach you in the Never?” She sighed again, as if disappointed. “You’ve just proven that you can’t be trusted; you’d reap me then and there, if I were to call for a palaver.”
“What do you want?” Wendy asked flatly, ashamed of her outburst. She crossed her arms over her chest, keeping well away from the woman.
“A truce.” The wind blew in a harder gust; Wendy was downwind of the White Lady and nearly gagged at the rich, thick scent of rot that filled her nose and watered her eyes, filling her mouth with the strong, sour taste of bile and coppery salt.
“You want a truce?” Wendy spat, trying to clean her mouth of the foul taste. She could hardly believe her ears. “What kind of truce?”
The White Lady threw up her arms in disgust. “The kind where you and I call a cease-fire. You don’t attack my Walkers and I don’t have them attack you and yours for interfering in my business. Truuuuuce. It’s a simple enough word, haven’t you ever heard it before?”
“I’m not stupid,” Wendy snapped.
“Hmm, I wasn’t so certain.” High above them seagulls cried, their noisome calls bouncing off the jetty and echoing around the cove. “Excuse me a moment,” the White Lady said, and stood, hem whipping about her feet. She gathered up a handful of sand and shells and rolled the damp mess in her hands until it was firmly compacted into a lopsided sandball roughly the size of her palm. “I do hate gulls.”
“They’re too far,” Wendy pointed out. “It’ll never make it.”
“That, my dear, is the beauty of dreams,” the White Lady said serenely and flung the ball hard in the direction of the seagulls’ calls. It soared up and out, traveling impossibly far, retaining its firm shape as far as Wendy could see. The call of the gull broke as if severed, ending in a strangled cry followed by a sickening wet thump far distant down the shore.
The White Lady wiped her hands free of the last clinging grains.
Wendy turned her face away, sickened. “You’re foul.”
“No, just practical. They do make such a noise. A lady can hardly dicker for peace with a ruckus like that going on in the background,” she said, rucking up the arms of her cloak to the elbows and holding out hands with palms turned up. “So how about it? Let’s make a deal.”
“I don’t deal with the likes of you.”
“The likes of me?” The White Lady pressed mottled and rotting fingers to her chest in a gesture of dismay. “And just what is that supposed to mean?” When she moved her hands the skin began flaking away from her bones in a shower. Wendy could spy yellowed sinew and slim cords of tendon holding her bones together.
“I don’t deal with ghosts,” Wendy said. “I don’t deal with cannibals like Walkers. And I definitely won’t deal with a ghost who’s got Walkers taking orders from her.”
“A little high and mighty, aren’t we?”
“They’re foul. They eat children. And I don’t know how you’re healing them, but if you were any kind of decent human being when you were alive, you’ll stop helping them out.”
“Ah, teenagers,” the White Lady sneered. “You all think you know everything. Look, dear, let me tell you a little something about the real, adult world. You work with whoever you have to, in order to get shit done. You get it? I worked with worse than Walkers when I was walking the living lands, that’s for sure. And, by the way, enough with the attitude. A simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ will suffice. I don’t need lectures from a kid barely out of diapers, thanks.”
“Fine. You want an answer? Here’s your answer: N-O. No. I’ve got my own business to attend to, lady, and if your Walkers happen to be in the area while I’m doing my thing, then that’s just too bad for you.”
“Oh, really?” The White Lady clasped her hands demurely together. “So that’s the way you want things to be, then?”
“Pretty much.”
“Fine. That’s the way it’s going to be. Oh-me-oh-my I do believe I’ve been TOLD, now haven’t I?” The White Lady laughed then, a burst of racketing hyena mirth that echoed loudly.
Whoever she was before, dying made her go crazy, Wendy realized. Deep cold overwhelmed her with the thought, as if she’d dipped her hands and feet in snow; licked at icicles until her lips and tongue were numb. Wendy shivered and turned her face away from the woman, digging her toes in the sand, seeking the comforting stability of the earth beneath her feet. She took one step back and then another, when her ankle slammed into something sharp and pointed that dug deep into her skin, pricking her. Startled by the unexpected pain, Wendy yelled and fell backwards on the sand, catching herself with her elbows. Sparks of fierce tingling heat flared up her arms, stealing her breath.
The terrible laughter cut off.
“Well then, I think I’ll just have to keep you, won’t I?” The White Lady hiked up the hem of her robe, lifting the cloth high over knees seeping clear, whitish fluid. “If you’re not going to talk business now, then we’ll just have to negotiate after you’ve been my…guest for a while.”
Sucking in a deep breath and holding one scraped and stinging elbow in the other hand, Wendy glanced around, confused and bordering on hysteria.
The open beach was gone as suddenly as it had appeared. Birds chirped in the trees and the mist vanished; the sky was a blue bowl dotted with shell-shaped clouds. The White Lady’s boat was still only a half dozen feet away, moored up against a large and drooping willow tree, but they were enclosed in a large copse of trees, their branches so tightly packed together that Wendy knew she’d never be able to wriggle through.
What remained of the shell doorway was gone, but in its place was a large concrete circle marked with a hopscotch grid. At the end of the grid was a box writ with the number 13 over and over again in a chalked rainbow of colors, some faded, some fresh. A lush carpet of green grass stretched out in all directions; nearby the wind tossed the tops of trees to and fro, setting the empty swing set into a jangling metallic cacophony.
There was no path, no opening, no easy way up or down. She was trapped.
A foot or so away, where Wendy had tripped, was a cheerful red picnic blanket laid out with square white plates and napkins shaped like swans, matching chopsticks stabbed artfully into each swan’s back. A bottle of soda chilled in a bucket of ice and beside it was an old-fashioned picnic basket, one corner spotted with blood. A large Chinese takeout container lay on its side beside the basket, huge clumps of white rice spilled across the corner of the blanket.
Crawling on hands and knees, Wendy approached the blanket. At first she thought it was her eyes, but the rice was indeed moving. Maggots and silverfish.
Overwhelmed, Wendy turned her face aside and dry-heaved.
“A feast for my honored guest!” The White Lady cried, approaching from behind. She stepped around Wendy’s side and crouched down, the gull she’d beaned flopping from her fist by one rotting leg, and dipped the remains of its head in the puddle. “Even in dreams, a girl’s got to eat, yes? Not seasoned, but we’ll make due, won’t we? Nothing like an impromptu BBQ, that’s what I always say.”
“You sick bitch,” Wendy gasped, pushing away from the White Lady and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “You can’t keep me here!”
“Tsk tsk, manners! Keeping you here, what nerve! You’re my guest! My guest until we sort out some sort of truce, my most honored opponent. Yet here you are, insulting me! What, were you raised in a barn?” The White Lady threw the gull to the ground and stood. “Surely your mother taught you better than that!” She paused, tilted her head. “Or did she? Didn’t teach you much of anything at all if you honestly think a mere ghost like me can truly trap someone who ‘won’t deal’ with her in a little ol’ dreamspace. Shame on her.”
“Don’t you talk about my mother,” Wendy growled, staggering to her feet and balling her hands into fists. “Don’t you fucking dare.”
“Oh yes, Mommy Dearest is wandering our streets, isn’t she?” The White Lady threw her head back and laughed and laughed and laughed. “My ears might be falling off, but they hear rumors just as well as they did before I ended up here. What you do is some kind of family business, yeah? Mother to daughter, that sort of thing?”
“Shut up.”
“And not only that, but rumors say that Momma Dearest has been out of the picture for a while now. Since this summer, am I right? What happened, Lightbringer? She up and quit?”
“I said, shut up.”
“Oh, I’m just fooling you! Everyone knows how you’ve been blowing off sending those pitiful Shades on to search high and low for her. Not having much luck, are we? How do you think dear ol’ Mom feels about that?”
Wendy felt her throat go dry. “How…”
“I suppose it’d be a real honest-to-goodness shame if one of my Walkers found her lost little spirit before you did, hmm? If I’d, say, sent them out looking for her?” The White Lady held out one rotting hand before her as if checking her nails. A finger fell off and she tsked, scooping down to pick it up and set it back on. “‘Be subtle! Be subtle and use your spies for every kind of warfare.’ Sun Tzu.” She chuckled. “Every leader needs a few flies on the wall here and there. Know your enemy, and all that. Even if your enemy is a snot-nosed kid.”
“You… you…” Wendy sputtered.
The White Lady sighed. “Yes, me, me. Be a dear and let’s make this truce work, hmm? I’ll leave you alone to search for your mom’s ghostie; you leave my Walkers alone when you come across them on your hunt.”
“I can’t do that.”
“And why not? If they chase you, you run, what’s so hard about that? They’re weak compared to the likes of you, and it’s not like they could hurt such a mighty ghost-killer, right?”
Slowly Wendy straightened, squared her shoulders, and took a long, measuring look at the White Lady. Despite the obvious instability of the White Lady’s personality, something she’d just said was pinging around inside Wendy’s skull. “You’re trying awfully hard to keep me away from your Walkers,” Wendy mused. “You start hassling me in my dreams, out of the blue, and you’re making all these threats that you then claim that you can’t back up if I’m really so very mighty.”
“Sarcasm. They teach you all about it in school, I’m sure.”
“Thing is,” Wendy said, ignoring her, “it really is my dream, isn’t it? My…what did you call it? My dreamspace.” Wendy grabbed a handful of maggots off the ground and concentrated at them. One by one the maggots transformed into butterflies, yellow-winged and delicate. Only the centers were still maggots, wriggling and white. “You’ve got some control here, but ultimately… it’s still my space, isn’t it?”
Wendy flung the maggot-butterflies into the air and they massed in a brilliant golden-yellow cloud, momentarily obliterating the great blue bowl of sky. One, however, had a partially crushed wing and waved feebly at her from her palm. The wings fluttered and drew inside the body until it was just a maggot again, big and bulky and hot in her hand.
“I’m leaving,” Wendy said. “And if I find out that you’re stalking my mother or you know where my mother is, this conversation…I…you won’t like it, okay? I’ll come for you and I don’t care how long it takes.” She turned away.
“You can’t walk away from me!” The White Lady snapped, grabbing for Wendy’s arm. “We’re not done here!”
“Oh yeah? Watch me.” Dodging the skeletal fingers, Wendy strode to the hopscotch grid and threw the hot maggot to the concrete, grinding it beneath her heel. It bled thin, sticky ichor that seeped into the ground, obliterating the chalk outline and revealing the door of seashells. The jangle of metal chains became the hooting of the foghorn, the twittering of birds faded into the wash of constant grinding waves.
The mist was gone and with it the boat, Wendy noted, leaving only a swatch of scraped sand as testament to its appearance in her dream. A feathered gull flew overhead with a shining, scaled fish caught in its beak. The beach was beautiful once again.
The White Lady was gone.