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Calisto

Hospital visits were my least favorite part of the job, and I’d never really worked out why. Yes, it was colder and more clinical, the smell of disinfectant always present, but I didn’t think that was it. Maybe it was because the people here had suffered trauma, and they’d just found oblivion, only for me or one of my colleagues to yank them back for one last swan song.

What was it Margarita had said at dinner last night? Something about raising the dead even if they didn’t want to be raised? It wasn’t a new ethical dilemma. I’d always been keenly aware that it was the living who got to decide.

Perhaps it was the age thing, as well. Most home visits were people who’d passed away in their own beds, which invariably made them older. Here, you were just as likely to get people in their twenties and thirties. Younger sometimes. Not children. Even the PPB drew the line at bringing back children. At least they weren’t murder victims, unlike Griffin’s recent clients. I hated to think about how I’d have reacted in his position. It would not have gone well.

Today’s ‘job’ looked to be about my age, so mid-twenties. They’d transferred him to a private room as per policy, a closed curtain in a ward not enough privacy to do what I needed to do. A woman sat at the side of the bed, holding the man’s hand. From her age, I guessed her to be his mother. She wasn’t crying, and I was grateful for that, but she was almost as pale as the man she focused on. “George has been in a coma for two years,” she said once I’d introduced myself and she’d told me her name was Louise, her voice barely more than a hoarse whisper. “I told him not to get a motorbike, that they were dangerous, but he didn’t listen. He thought he knew better.”

“Did he have an accident?” My boss Cade always told us to get in, do what we needed to do, and then get out, that we were necromancers, not grief counselors. But I couldn’t be like that; it just wasn’t in my nature.

She nodded. “It was December. The roads were icy, and it was dark. No one knows what happened for sure. If there was another vehicle involved, they didn’t stick around to call for an ambulance. He came off his bike. Maybe he just skidded on ice, and there was no one to blame except for him for taking his bike out in unsuitable weather. It helps me sometimes to think that. The doctors said his body temperature indicated he’d been there for some time before the car came down the road and discovered the bike on its side on the grass verge. It was a young couple, and they called for an ambulance. I got the call at five in the morning.” She gave a wan smile. “You know that nothing good is waiting for you on the other end of the line when you get a call at that time.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He was wearing a helmet,” she continued, “but it didn’t matter. I guess they only reduce damage, not stop it from happening altogether. There was hope at first of them being able to reduce the swelling, so he’d wake up. Every operation he had, I had faith. But he never did. And now…” She lifted the hand that wasn’t holding her son’s, gesturing in his direction. “Well… you know, or you wouldn’t be here.”

“What are you hoping for?” I asked.

She took a deep breath in before letting it out slowly. “I’ve spent two years talking to him, and he’s never been capable of saying a single word back.” Her stony facade cracked for a second before she composed herself. “One conversation. I don’t even know what I want to talk about. I’ll probably end up telling him off for taking his motorbike out that night. But I just need…”

“Yeah,” I agreed without forcing her to finish her sentence. “I understand.”

She tried for a smile. “I expect you do, given what you do. It must be a tough job. Do you have a wife, Mr. Dominguez? Children?”

“Call me Calisto, please. And no, neither of those things.” There was a time and place for announcing you were gay and this wasn’t it. My colleague John probably would have done, but then John didn’t have a filter when it came to speaking his mind.

I started taking things out of my bag, Louise watching without commenting. She didn’t say a word until I had all the candles set up. “Do you think it will work?”

“I hope so,” I said with a reassuring smile. “I’ll do everything I can to give you that one last conversation.”

“Thank you.”

It was a matter of minutes to realize the process wasn’t working, my calls to the spirits on the other side to release George’s soul not so much going unanswered, as them being unable to grant my request. Like picking up a parcel in Argos, only to be told that no matter how many people looked for it, they simply couldn’t find what I’d asked for in the storeroom. It happened sometimes, particularly with coma patients. Like they’d wandered so far while hovering between life and death that they couldn’t be tracked down. At least, that was my understanding of it.

Louise’s swallow was audible. “They said it might not work.”

I straightened from where I’d had my hand pressed to George’s chest, his skin the sort of cold that only happened with death. “There’s one more thing I can try, but I need to be alone with him.”

“Cade didn’t—”

“Please,” I said, “if you could step outside.” I didn’t want to get into a conversation about what Cade had said the process entailed, because I knew he wouldn’t have mentioned what I was about to do. He wouldn’t have mentioned it because he didn’t know. Nobody knew, and that was the way I intended to keep it.

Louise stood, her movements jerky as she made her way to the door. I waited for it to click shut with her on the other side of it before turning my attention to the man lounging against the windowsill, his focus on the world outside rather than on me or the hospital bed.

“I need your help,” I stated. No reaction. “Baxter?”

He leaned closer to the window, careful his forehead didn’t touch the glass. “There’s a woman in the car park giving a blow job to her boyfriend in the back of a Ford Escort. At least I assume it’s her boyfriend. I suppose it could be anyone, really. Maybe it’s the traffic warden.” He craned his neck to get a better look. “Parking tickets are incredibly expensive these days, so who could blame her, if that’s the case? You’d think there’d be a bit more decorum in a hospital, wouldn’t you? I’d hate to think that while I was breathing my last, someone was getting deepthroated in the car park. Of course, it would be different if I were the one on the receiving end. In that case, I’d be all for it.”

“Baxter?”

His head-swivel my way was deliberately slow, an age passing before I became the recipient of narrowed blue eyes. “Oh, you were talking to me, were you? I assumed with you ignoring me for the entire evening last night that you couldn’t see me anymore, that I’d ceased to exist.”

“I was having dinner with my family. You could have found yourself something better to do.”

Baxter smirked. “And miss out on all the fun. Your family is a riot. They always have been. Do you know what my favorite part of the evening was?”

I had an inkling. “What?”

“The bit where they were talking about me and you had to try really hard not to look my way.”

I shook my head to clear it. “Listen… I’m not talking about last night. You know I can’t talk to you when other people are around. Not unless you want to find out what the inside of a psychiatric ward looks like. That’s what happens to adults who reach their twenties and still talk to their imaginary friend.”

Baxter shrugged as he turned back to the window. “I’m not imaginary, though. I never have been.”

I sighed, this conversation nothing new. “You know that, and I know that, but no one else does.” To me, he was as real as anyone. Sometimes I forgot he didn’t properly exist on this plane until he walked through a wall. That’s why he had to be careful not to lean too close to the window or his head would go straight through it. He’d told me that passing through glass wasn’t a pleasant feeling, that it was akin to having his insides scraped out with something sharp and cold.

“Oh, he came,” Baxter announced with something close to glee. “They’re looking for tissues.”

“Are you going to help me or not?”

Baxter pushed himself away from the window with the body language equivalent of an eye roll, long strides bringing him to the opposite side of the bed. He wore what he always wore: black jeans and a plain white T-shirt, his arms bare because, as he’d told me on more than one occasion, he didn’t feel cold anymore. Even after so many years, it was still jarring when I saw him walk through rain or a blizzard. He studied George for a long time, his facial expression giving nothing away.

“Do you recognize him?” I asked when the silence stretched on for too long. “Have you seen him?” When Baxter wasn’t here, he was beyond the veil, walking amongst those who were dead, but hadn’t yet passed on to whatever lay beyond. Heaven? Hell? I didn’t know. I wasn’t much of a theologian, and Baxter didn’t like to talk about it. He either didn’t know and wasn’t willing to admit it, or he knew, and it wasn’t a subject that sat comfortably with him.

When Baxter’s shrug was noncommittal, I asked a more direct question. “Can you look for him for me?”

He ran a finger along the white sheet, not quite touching George, but close to doing so. “You could go yourself.”

My fingers curled into my palms until my nails dug into the sensitive skin. This was an argument that raged on with no sign of a resolution. I had skills other necromancers didn’t, or at least if they did, they never talked about it. I doubted someone like John could keep it to himself for longer than two minutes, though, and as he’d never mentioned it, I had to assume he couldn’t.

Therefore, my assumption was that for John and Griffin, there was no smart-ass spirit who’d turned up when they were a child too young to understand what was going on and refused to leave their side since, that they didn’t have access to another world, and that for them failure to retrieve a soul was just that, a failure.

I had other options, though. I had Baxter. Only he was pissed at me for ignoring him the previous night. He’d been there the entire time at my parents’ house, pulling faces at Margarita and making eyes at Felipe because he knew it annoyed me. He’d nodded in agreement with my mother, laughed at my grandparents oversharing, and waggled his eyebrows at Henry and Lola when it had become obvious what they’d been up to.

“I can’t,” I said. “Please.”

Baxter sighed. “There’s no guarantee I’ll be able to find him. He’s been in a coma for a long time.”

“I know, but you could try.”

“He might not want to come back.”

“He will. He’ll want one last conversation with his mother.”

“Fine.”

“Thank—” Baxter disappeared before I could finish. I pressed my hand back on George’s chest and waited. Time passed differently beyond the veil, Baxter having told me previously that sometimes he had to search for hours before he found what I was looking for. Fortunately, his hour was only minutes to me. Sure enough, the glow started up after only a few minutes had passed, temporary life returning to George bit by slow bit. I waited until he was breathing and his eyelids flickering before heading to the door and finding Louise pacing in the corridor.

She whirled round at the sound of the door opening. “Is he…?”

I nodded and stood aside as she rushed past me, and then I followed her back in, the two of them too busy embracing to pay me any mind as I blew out candles and shoved them in my bag. I left without waiting to be thanked. I knew Louise was grateful; I didn’t need to hear it. And they deserved whatever time they got together, whether that be mere minutes or an hour.

As I exited the lift at the ground floor and headed for the large double doors leading to the car park—hopefully bereft of anyone experiencing oral pleasures—Baxter fell into step beside me, appearing as quickly as he’d disappeared. I didn’t look his way until I slid into the driver’s seat of my car, Baxter passing straight through the door with a wince, because glass, to take up a position in the passenger seat. His presence was the reason I drove in London, even though nine times out of ten public transport would be quicker and easier. I couldn’t talk to him on the tube or on the bus. Not without attracting the wrong sort of attention, anyway.

Baxter had been twenty-four when he died, so was stuck looking forever youthful. It didn’t stop him from looking tired, the search for George obviously a long one. “He heard every word,” he said as I started the engine.

“Huh?”

“Of his mother talking to him. Everywhere he went, she was there chatting to him. He said it was nice. He said he’ll miss it now he’s dead.” I nodded because I wasn’t sure what else I was supposed to say. Baxter’s gaze bored into the side of my face as I concentrated on the road. “I thought you were going to stop using me to track down lost souls. You said you were worried they’d get suspicious of how many people you bring back.”

I winced because I had said that, just a few days ago. “How was I supposed to tell a mother who’d spent two years at her son’s bedside that she couldn’t have one last conversation with him?”

Baxter snorted. “And before that, a daughter would be destitute without knowing where the latest version of the will, changed in her favor, was kept. And before that it was—”

“Okay!” I cut in. “I get the gist. You don’t have to give me a long list. I know I’m too soft.”

“I never said that,” Baxter said.

“You didn’t have to.”

“You’re nice, Calisto. You’ve always been nice. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Nice!” I gave the word the scorn it deserved. “Nice people are boring. Nice people get walked all over. Nice people always finish last.”

Baxter laughed. “Let’s take those one at a time, shall we? You’re a necromancer with a dead sidekick no one else can see or hear. Hardly boring. Do you get walked all over?”

“John and Griffin both think I’m wet.”

“John worries about you.”

“Does he?” I frowned when Baxter nodded, struggling to wrap my head around the unexpected piece of information. “Griffin used to hate me.”

“Griffin hated everyone for the past few years, including himself. Especially cheerful people who smile a lot. Which is you, in case you can’t make that connection.”

“He’s like a different man now he has Ben back in his life.”

“There you go.” Baxter propped his feet on the dashboard, completely ignoring my frown. “And as for finishing last, I can give you a few pointers about staying power.”

“Not everything is about sex.”

“I know. More’s the pity.”

“Did you talk about sex this much when you were alive?”

Baxter turned his head away so I couldn’t see his expression. “No. Because I could do it then. Now, all I have is talk.” My immediate stab of empathy drained away when he felt the need to add a bit. “And watching.”

“As long as you don’t watch me.”

“Darling, you don’t do it enough to make watching you worthwhile. When was the last time you got freaky with someone?”

“I’m not discussing this with you.”

“Meaning, you can’t remember.”

“No. It means I’m not discussing it with you. I might not control when you appear and disappear, but I have control over that.”

“I don’t appear and disappear. I have a life beyond you.” Baxter frowned at his own words. “Or should that be a death?”

I shrugged, because what else could I do? Baxter and I bickered like siblings. So much so that I often forgot the reality of his existence, that here on this plane, I was the only person who could see him, the only person he could talk to. We lapsed into silence while I chewed that thought over and vowed to be more tolerant, to let him talk about whatever he wanted to without judgment. If talking about sex made him happy, who was I to take that away from him?

“I saw her again today while I was looking for George. The girl.”

My fingers tightened around the steering wheel. “Yeah?”

“She still wants to talk to you.”

“I don’t want to talk to her.”

“You could at least find out what she wants. For me, if not for her. It would get her off my back.”

“No.” When Baxter didn’t respond to my point blank refusal, one of many I’d voiced since this conversation had first reared its head months ago, I turned his way. He’d gone. He’d be back, but whether it would be minutes, hours, or a day was no more certain than it ever was.