Beth raised her hand, like a student in a class she hated. “What if we can’t?”
“Then she’ll stay here. With me. Forever.”
Silence. Even Alice hesitated.
I cleared my throat, my neck burning with old anger and new fear. “Then you’ll show us the body. And everything you remember.”
The ghost stilled, then spread its arms. “Follow.”
It slid away through the fog, and Daniel fell in behind it, his hand never leaving Alice’s shoulder. Beth caught my sleeve and whispered, “Do you believe this?”
I nodded. “I do.”
Beth squeezed my hand, a little too hard. “Okay,” she said, “let’s go remember a murder.”
The path underfoot was soft, almost spongey, and the fog seemed to swallow all the light. Only the ghost’s dim outline pulled us forward. I didn’t look back, not even when I heard something shuffle in the shadows.
TWENTY
Emma
The woods were the same, and also wrong. I saw it in the slouch of Daniel’s shoulders as he walked ahead of us. The trees hung close together, arms knitted like pale old women at a funeral, branches bowed against the weight of fog that never quite lifted. My brother stuck close to Alice, his steps careful on the mushy ground, and Beth hummed behind me, half singing, half talking to herself, or possibly to the plants.
We followed the ghost, who seemed less like a dead man than I expected. He had grown more real as the day dragged on, hair thickening, teeth less pronounced, his shirt no longer tattered but just old. I wondered if that happened to all ghosts. Did they slowly become the people they used to be, or was he an exception?
Cody, the ghost, kept looking over his shoulder, checking that we were still there. He would pause now and then, as if to make sure he hadn’t lost us, though I doubted he needed to worry. If the path we were taking existed on any map, I’d eat my own driver’s license. Only the wet sound of leaves and our ragged breathing filled the gaps.
Daniel stopped at a heap of lichen and old twigs. I saw then that it was not a pile, but a person, or what remained of one. The bones had sunk into the soft ground, ribs poking up like the skeleton of a sunken boat. Shreds of denim still clung to a femur, and the skull had a puckered hole in the side, a wound so old it almost seemed to smile. Daniel crouched, sniffed around with a seriousness that would have been funny if the smell wasn’t so sharp.
“Heavy on the mildew,” he said, turning to us. “Little bit of wet dog, too. But nothing I can use.” His nostrils flared, but he shook his head. “Too far gone.”
Beth stepped forward, arms crossed, and stood for a long minute with her eyes shut tight. She muttered under her breath, something about sight and memory, and snapped her fingers. The air quivered, then nothing happened. She tried again, this time dusting a powder onto the bones. The dust was yellow, maybe turmeric or just pollen, and for a moment it seemed like the bones shimmered. Then it was gone, vanished into the rot.
“Well, that’s a letdown,” Beth said. She gave the skull a sorry glance. “No offense, but you’re a stubborn one.”
Alice sidled up, not caring about the mud on her jeans, and knelt beside the body. She touched the ankle bone, as gentle as if it might still bruise. “It’s sad,” she whispered. “He just wants to go home.”
Henry wrapped his arm around her shoulders, clumsy but comforting. “We’ll help him, right? That’s what we do.”
I said nothing, mostly because my mind was a tight, clamped fist, searching for any stray clue. I tried to remember what I’d read about old bones. Sometimes, they just wanted someone tobear witness. Sometimes, they were traps, little time bombs of grief. I closed my eyes and reached out with my Karma. The push and pull of what needed to happen. Nothing answered.
“Maybe it’s just sad,” I said. “Maybe it’s supposed to be.”
The ghost, who had been standing off to the side, looked down at his remains with a complicated expression. He bent, reached for the skull, and passed right through. “That’s weird,” he said. “You’d think I’d remember dying. But I don’t.”
“I can try something else,” Beth offered, and started rummaging through her bag. She produced a handful of dried herbs and a lighter. I watched as she muttered another spell. She lit the herbs and waved them in a circle, breathing in the sweet, sharp smoke. The fog pulled back for a second, then rolled in thicker than ever.
“I am not on my game,” Beth sighed. “Sorry, Cody. My magic’s off today.” She looked at me, hopeful. “Got any of that karma stuff in your back pocket?”
I shrugged. “I can try. But I think it works better on the living.” I crouched near the bones and closed my eyes. I pictured every moment that had led to this one: my parents’ accident, the years of Henry needing me, all the times I’d watched other people’s lives go sideways. Maybe, if I could make sense of those, I could do something for Cody.
I pushed out with my mind, the way I did when waiting for justice to fall, or for the world to even itself out. Reaching for my karmic powers, and feeling them there, strong as ever. I tapped into them, connecting with the dead man, and I felt something. A tingle. An awareness of my magic.
But when I opened my eyes, there was nothing. No crackle of energy, no invisible hand rearranging the pieces. Just… nothing.
The silence stretched, and Alice started to cry in a way that was soft and helpless, not the dramatic kind. Henry just held her, rocking her in a rhythm I remembered from when we were kids. I’d rocked him that way.
I stood, wiped my hands on my jeans, and saw a tree that caught my eye. Moving as if pulled by an invisible force, I walked toward the tree. The bark was old and furrowed, like an elephant hide, but there was nothing special about the tree. I glanced down, then up, then down again. That’s when I saw it: a black camera, half buried in the roots, lens pointing up at the sky. I knelt, pried it loose, and wiped off the worst of the mud.
