“I’m the connection,” I said. “I am here to close the circuit between life and death and all the ways a soul can be caught between them. I’ll hold this space so you can come back to it. So you’re not lost to Lu’s memories. So you don’t burn to ash when you’re exposed to the raging fire of life.”
Stella licked her lips, a little startled at my description, but she nodded.
Tough, this one. Made of unbreakable determination.
I liked that about her.
I took two seconds, maybe three, finding my center. There was a cost for all of us in this. Lu carried the highest risk. Not only would she have to endure the physical pain, ghosts were not very stable entities.
It was easy for a ghost to lose focus in the chaos of being part of the living world again. If the host wasn’t strong enough, if the will of the ghost wasn’t strong enough, if the connection wavered, even a fraction, the entire thing could go to hell in seconds.
A spirit could be torn to shreds, a bloody, ragged mess of a thing that either blew apart into dust specks—deader than dead—or shattered andstuckinside the host.
Most living people wouldn’t survive having fractured bits of the dead inside them, and the ones who did, eventually went mad.
I started humming the Little Bird song, urging the bird to fly through the window because there was molasses candy on the other side.
Stella raised her eyebrows as I went on to the chickadee verse. I ignored her. The song helped me focus. I’d used others in the past, but once I’d heard this one, it had stuck and was now my go-to ghost-hosting focus.
“All right. This is gonna be easy,” I said. “Nothing but duck soup. One, two…” I reached down and finally pressed my hand into Lu’s palm, my long, strong fingers wrapping around hers, “…three.”
The hot jolt of energy flashed through me so hard, I shook like a tin house in a desert wind. It was—
—black powder, lightning, fire—
—it was—
—storm through a forest, raging rivers carving earth, stone, mountains—
—it was—
—screech of joy, wail of loss, and voices, voices, voices, wanting, needing, loving, living, howling, begging, singing—
—it was—
—lu, Lu,LU—
“There,” I whispered, as the connection between worlds latched and held,snicking together in the center of me, like a zipper from my head to my feet. “We’re clear. You’re clear, Stella.” I wasn’t looking at her, couldn’t look at Dot. All I could see was Lu.
Lu, right there in her world, one set of zipper teeth sticking out into my world, Stella’s world.
And where those two worlds met in me? Oh, the collision of color, heat, scents,life, that pummeled and shook me. I wanted to open my mouth and yell. I wanted to open my mouth and drink it down until it tore me apart. Blissful agony.
Instead I inhaled slowly, breath catching and smoothing. Then I widened my stance and set my shoulders, as if I were holding up the ceiling, the house, the world.
And exhaled.
“What do I do?” Stella sounded lost and small. Wanting what was right there: an open doorway, a (mostly) living breathing body, a wonderful woman inviting her to step into her space, offering her a voice she hadn’t had in years.
“Just walk through me and then to Lu. Don’t stop. You’ll fall into her. And when I tell you it’s time to leave, you walk back through me. Got it?”
“Yes. I think so. Yes.”
I was still watching Lu, and only Lu, but I felt Stella moments before she strode through me—
—anger, jealousy, hope, the horrifying collision, metal groaning, glass shattering, then, pain and blood, so much blood and the blackness before the light—
Stella passed through me, her stride steady, homed in on Lu like a heat-seeking missile.
