Page 27

I t was hard to see ghosts in daylight, even for me. The sun made the almost transparent bodies so pale that they were barely an outline on the scene, even when looking straight at them. Like an image painted on glass and then erased so that only the memory of the lines remained.

That was why I waited until twilight sent long fingers of shadow flooding over the desert and darkness had almost fallen before venturing out to the edge of town. And then beyond it, into the wide-open spaces that were all that existed for miles, now blooming in dark reds and mauves, deep, burnt umber, and that peculiar sunset yellow that makes everything look slightly sepia-toned. Everyone thought I was resting before dinner, which wasn’t remotely possible. I couldn’t rest until I knew...

Whatever there was to know.

But for a while, there was nothing but wind and the faint memory of the day still staining the horizon. It was a ruddy sunset, with only a little yellow flickering at the edges, like the flames of a fire. I watched it as I finally rolled to a stop and sat there in the gathering gloom, and thought I’d gotten that wrong.

Not a fire, but a bonfire, only not like the one in Stratford. Just the regular sort, blowing in the wind of an English coastal night and scattering sparks like stars across the sky. While clouds scattered the moonlight, the tide lapped the beach.

It looked like the bonfire that lived in my dreams.

The two places couldn’t have been more dissimilar, coastal Wales and the parched Mojave, with the Vegas shrub leeching whatever water the sun had left in the air, shriveling the sinuses, and drying the eyes. But mine were wet anyway, from memory. Of the last time I’d seen him, my own special ghost, the very last time...

Or was it?

I waited, my heart in my throat because I didn’t know. The jalopy ticked and coughed as I sat there, the engine turned off but not yet silent. Offering a wheezing commentary on the day and on the foolishness of my quest because there was nothing here.

There couldn’t be; he was gone.

I knew that, as sure as I knew anything, and I didn’t need the mournful wind over the sand to tell me so. I was freaked out and imagining things, and who wouldn’t be after the last week? Or when faced with what lay ahead, who wouldn’t want the whispered voice of a friend in her ear or the reassuring press of a hand, even a ghostly one?

Maybe especially a ghostly one.

I thought I’d seen him in the crowd, just for a second, when I was talking to ?subrand. But try as I might and scour the surrounding streets as I had thereafter, for hours, there had been no further glimpse. Nor of the ghosts who’d been stalking me earlier, all of whom had suddenly disappeared.

Instead, I’d found only one mad old thing in a darkened alley, where the roofs of two adjacent houses almost met and left the area in the shade, enough so that I could just make him out, pawing through a garbage can and muttering to himself. And then swiping at me with a clawed hand when I got too close and threatened whatever prize he’d thought he’d found inside. The pale eyes had been as crazed as my own probably had last night, and he’d hissed at me, warning me off.

There had been no others, and there were none now, even when the sunset faded into a sullen line before winking out altogether, like the world shutting its eyes. And leaving the desert bathed in moonlight and looking strangely ghostly itself. The temperature started to drop as soon as the sun vanished, leaving me huddled in my Old West coat even though it was only September here, but it was unseasonably cold for Vegas, and I was getting uncomfortable.

For more than one reason.

What the hell was I doing?

I needed to get back. They’d be looking for me soon, and I had given everyone enough reasons to side-eye me lately; I didn’t need to add another. Not when I expected them to follow my lead, and wasn’t that a joke?

The lead of Cassie freaking Palmer, who had elevated fake-it-‘til-you-make-it to a high art form but was about to run face-first into the pointed stick of consequences as if I’d been doing anything else since I got here. Or even before. I was frankly amazed that I was still alive, not that that was likely to continue for much longer.

Yet people had kept looking at me all over town while I hunted for someone who wasn’t there. As if I were Gertie or Agnes and knew what to do. Vendors, trying to push free food on me, people in the crowd watching me with half-hopeful, half-fearful eyes, ?subrand staring at my poor, tattered card as if it held all the wisdom of the ages...

God, what was I doing? Sitting in a rapidly cooling Jeep or whatever it had been before a thousand repairs had made it into this , and hoping for what? A miracle? Because those didn’t happen anymore if they ever had!

I needed to start the freaking Jeep, needed to drive off into the smear of color left by the sunset before I got anyone else killed, needed to stop tearing up like a little bitch because I didn’t have time for this. I didn’t have time for anything! Including this latest breakdown or whatever the hell I was doing!

Only I couldn’t leave because I’d also managed to drop the fucking keys, and they weren’t in the seat or the Jeep’s rusted floorboard, meaning they’d fallen outside into the sand. And wasn’t that perfect? Wasn’t that exactly what I needed?

I floundered out the door and got down on my hands and knees, scouring the darkened landscape, but I couldn’t see them. I couldn’t feel them, either, just more dirt under my fingernails, under my tattered, lousy manicure, under my skin like everything anymore. And suddenly, it was all too much.

I sat in the sand with my back to the rusted jalopy, pulled my knees up to my chin, and cried. And cried and cried and cried, and wasn’t sure who I was even crying for. Myself? All the people I was about to let down? Billy Joe?

Because he wasn’t here, he was dead and passed on, and I was glad he was! Glad he couldn’t see the woman he’d given his life to protect and who had managed to fuck it all up anyway. And who was about to get killed by a bunch of fucking assholes who had wrecked the world he’d died to save!

Only no, she wasn’t because she couldn’t even manage to find the fucking—

Keys.

I blinked because they were somehow right in front of my face, but not on the ground. They were literally right there, dangling in mid-air, gleaming a little in the moonlight and blurred by my tears. And while levitation was a skill that witches were taught, I wasn’t doing that.

I wasn’t doing anything except backing up fast until I hit the fender of the Jeep, and yet there they still—

“Billy?” I heard my voice croak, but nothing answered except the wind.

I scrambled to my feet, tears drying on my cheeks, and stared wildly around, but still... nothing. He wasn’t there, nobody was there, just the same boring desert I’d been looking at for half a bloody hour now. But then I turned back around and—

“Fuck!” I yelled because the keys bumped me in the nose; they were so close.

“Ah, that’s better,” the wind sighed. “I thought I was going to have to deal with you in a state.”

I grabbed the keys, and they were just keys. Colder than they should have been, but that could have been the night air. Only it wasn’t the goddamned night air!

“Billy!” My voice broke again, but this time, I didn’t care. “ Where are you? ”

“Wondering if it’s safe to come out.” A ghostly cowboy hat just peeked over the opposite side of the hood when I whirled around at his voice, which had come from a new direction. “Is it the wrong time of month? Cause you’re a little scary right now.”

“Billy!” I screeched, but the hat was gone by the time I ran around the Jeep. But I spied it on the other side of the vehicle now, back where I’d just been. And visible through the pitted surface of the one window this thing still had, although why it did, I didn’t know, as it had no roof. Or much of anything else, which was why, this time, I went through the Jeep; only no, that wasn’t right.

I tore through it, leaving the doors open behind me and panting and staring around when I reached the other side because the damned hat was gone again! And ghosts didn’t leave footprints, so I was left with nothing. Except the slowly warming keys in my hand and another round of am-I-crazy-or-not playing through my head.

“Billy,” I said, only it came out as a sob that time. I fumbled for the necklace he’d once haunted, the one I still wore despite the fact that he wasn’t in it anymore, and even though I’d had to battle a crazed countess for it because I couldn’t let it go. And slumped back against the Jeep, utterly defeated and completely alone.

“You’re not alone,” the wind said, only it wasn’t the wind’s voice this time. And it wasn’t the brush of the wind against my hand, either, as fingers closed over mine. And it wasn’t the wind’s arms I threw myself into and almost went through the body I’d grabbed until it solidified abruptly to keep that from happening.

“Hey! Give a guy a little notice next time, okay?” Billy said because it was Billy. It was him!

Only I had no idea how.

“It’s a long story,” he said through duck lips because I guessed I’d said that last out loud. And because I’d grabbed his cheeks in my palms to keep him in place, so I could look at him.

He was so perfectly how I remembered that for a second, I was suspicious. But ghosts didn’t change appearance unless they wanted to, and I guessed he hadn’t wanted to. Everything was identical to how he lived in my memory: the ruffles on his cowboy shirt, the faded denim on his jeans, the hat that said he’d seen a frontier that he never had because Billy hadn’t gotten further West than the Mississippi, where he’d swindled some gamblers in a card game and met an early demise in a sack at the bottom of the river.

But he was here now, with the same hazel eyes I remembered so vividly, looking into mine with understanding but a bit of apprehension at whatever was on my face.

Because this wasn’t possible.

“It isn’t Samhain,” I whispered, which was the only time of year I was supposed to be able to see him. I saw dead people all the time, ghosts, zombies, god knew what else, especially here. But he was gone , finally transitioning to whatever lay beyond this world and every other.

“Yeah, about that,” he said as I gripped his arms tightly enough to make him wince. “Cut that out!”

“How?” I demanded, my voice thick with all the things I couldn’t seem to say.

“It’s complicated—”

“ How? ” I shook him.

“When the gods tore Earth a new butthole, it weakened the fabric between here and... there,” he said as if searching for the right words. “Those of us who’d crossed over had a brief window before things shored up again to make a decision—come back or stay where we were. I came back.”

“Why?” I stared at him. “You were happy—”

“But you weren’t. I could watch things here after I left, kinda off and on, like a TV with bad reception. But enough to know that you didn’t return from Faerie. Everybody said you were dead, but I knew damned well you weren’t. Human souls don’t reincarnate like the fey, and if you’d suddenly popped up in the hereafter, I think I’d have known. So you were on some jaunt through time like usual and—”

He stopped because I was shaking him some more. “You were happy! ” I screamed. “You were safe! You should have stayed there —”

“I was happy and will be again as soon as you fix this,” he said as if that was in any way likely! “But you need help, and I couldn’t just leave you, could I? It was always the Cassie and Billy show, remember?”

I stared at him, caught halfway between utter relief and creeping horror. Because if he was back, he could be killed, and I didn’t mean the usual way. Things were stalking this Earth that ate souls, consuming their essence in a finality that far transcended death and left me in a state of abject panic for Billy, the one person who I’d thought was okay.

Was I going to lose him, too? Was that my ultimate fate, to lose them all? Was this how my story ended, all alone with everyone I’d ever cared about dead and my world in ruins around me?

I felt dizzy suddenly.

“—and I knew you’d be back, that one day you’d pop back outta time and you’d need some help from someone who—” he stopped. “Is something wrong?”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. When I tried, I just started laughing and then found that I couldn’t stop until I was gasping for breath and only staying on my feet because Billy, a man who’d crossed the great divide and been safe, had come back...

To this .

“Cass. Cass . Listen to me,” but I wasn’t listening. I couldn’t seem to do that, either. I couldn’t seem to do anything but screw up —

Billy finally lost patience and shook me back—hard. And kept on doing it until I was in jeopardy of whiplash and had somehow managed to gulp my way back to sobriety. Or whatever it was called when you’re no longer dealing with insipient hysteria.

I honestly wouldn’t know anymore.

“Tell me,” he said flatly.

So I did. I stood there in the desert, probably looking like a madwoman talking to myself and gesturing like crazy, like that poor bastard in the alley, and sometimes crying and sometimes laughing, and through it all, just drinking him in because I still didn’t believe it. This was a trick; someone was... was doing this to me, one of those fey back in town working with the other side to drive me over the edge they had to know I was teetering on.

And if anything could do it, this would be it. To bring Billy back and then have him just vanish. I kept reaching for him, touching him lightly on his sleeve or hand, even though it was visibly creeping him out, but I couldn’t seem to stop.

But he stayed there. Pausing to roll a cigarette after a while, because my story was not short. And weirdly, it was that simple gesture, from striking the match on his boot heel to the lumpy, I-rolled-this-when-half-drunk shape of the thing, and the way the smoke wove in and out of his semi-transparent form that finally convinced my disbelieving brain.

I’d seen him do that a thousand times. I even remembered the scent of the tobacco, which he’d purchased from some Native Americans because he liked the herbs and bark they mixed in with it. It had a completely different scent from modern tobacco and had memories hitting me so hard they were almost painful.

I told myself that was why I kept tearing up, or that it was the smoke in my eyes that wasn’t smoke because that tobacco mix was still at the bottom of the Mississippi along with Billy’s bones.

Get a grip! I thought as my voice wavered for the fiftieth time, and Billy pretended he didn’t notice. And the only other eyes out here were a coyote’s, gleaming for a second in the moonlight, wondering who this crazy woman was for an instant before he found somewhere else to be.

And then I was finished somehow, with the whole sorry tale. And Billy and I were sitting on the ground, or in his case, hovering slightly over the top of it, staring up at the stars that had started to peek out of the blue-black haze overhead.

For a moment after I finished, there was only silence and the soft sounds of the desert at night. The wind whispered over the sands, an owl called to its mate, some distant insect chirped its availability to the ladies, and the sparse desert vegetation rustled with the things evading the owls. And I found myself relaxing for the first time in days.

The mad rush, rush, rush , the relentless pace of life lately, the feeling that I even had to slurp my soup in a hurry because the next crisis was headed this way any second now, gave way to something else. Not peace exactly, because there was no true peace in this world. But this far out, there were no reminders of all we’d lost, either.

No ruined cities burning themselves onto my eyeballs, no desperate people trying to eke out an existence in the wastelands, no gigantic predators prowling the land searching for all the little scurrying things in the desert, just waiting for us to make a move. No anything but chill night air that didn’t feel so uncomfortable anymore; maybe I was getting used to it. Or maybe with Billy back, I felt complete again for the first time in ages, instead of like I was missing my right arm.

Whatever it was, I could finally breathe .

Of course, I knew it couldn’t last. Knew that, in my time, he wasn’t there and wasn’t going to be. But he was here now, and I was so, so glad to have him!

I found and squeezed the insubstantial hand lying on the sand alongside mine, and it felt so good! And it squeezed back before Billy turned to look at me through a haze of smoke. And finally found his words, only they weren’t the right ones.

“What the ever-loving fuck? ”