Amelia frowned. “I’ve never liked that terminology because it implies one lives inside the other. A more accurate description would be that you havetwobodies—physical and magical—that overlap, inhabiting the same space in different dimensions. But sure, you can call it a soul if it makes you feel better.”
“OfcourseI’m going to call it that,” Marci said, eyes gleaming. “You’re talking about proving the existence of life beyond our physical bodies! Do you know how big that’s going to be?”
“Huge,” Amelia agreed, giving her a skeptical look. “But I don’t understand why you’re so excited. You’re bonded to a spirit of the dead who summons armies of ghosts. How much more proof of the soul did you need?”
“Those could still have been echoes,” Marci said. “Every paper I’ve read claims that ‘ghosts’ are nothing but the aftershocks people leave in the ambient magic when they die. Even with the Empty Wind, I had nothing to actually disprove that since the dead he brought back weren’t exactly chatty. They had goals but no personalities or proof of independent thought, so it was still plausible that he was reacting to the echoes of the emotions those people left in the magic when they died rather than the actual individual souls. But this is different.”
She put her hand on her stomach where Emily’s shot had gone through. “IknowI died, but I’m still me. I’m here and thinking and talking to you. If I can just figure out how to get proof of this back to the physical side, this could change everything we know about death and our own mortality!” Which would get her a Nobel Prize forsure.
“No doubt,” Amelia said. “If you can get back, this will blow the lid off everything, but you’re still thinking too small.”
Marci gaped at her. “How is changing the concept of human mortalitysmall?”
“Because you’ve always known it,” the dragon said with a shrug. “There’s a reason the soul is a concept in every culture. The idea of physical-life-only is a modern fallacy caused by the magical drought. Now that the magic’s back, it was only a matter of time before someone rediscovered what was common knowledge for the vast majority of humanity’s existence. Personally, I’mwaymore interested in your death specifically.” She looked back up at the cavern of on-ramps. “I mean, this place ishuge.”
“Is it?” Marci asked, because next to the stories of endless fields and the other mythical landscapes that were supposed to exist in the afterlife, she’d thought her little house was pretty modest.
“Totally,” the dragon said. “Not that I’ve ever been to this side before, of course, but I was under the impression that unless you were the sort of person whose life left a huge impact—heroes, great rulers, beloved artists, feared dictators, that kind of thing—mortal deaths were pretty cramped. No offense, but I was expecting something much smaller. I mean, you’re not famous, and you died relatively young, so where did all this space come from?”
Marci had no idea. Her father, however, was smiling. “It’s because she is well remembered.”
“Obviously,” Amelia said. “But remembered bywhom?”
Again, Marci had no clue. She’d cut off contact with all her old friends when she’d fled Nevada to protect them from Bixby. Even after he’d died, she’d been too busy to reach out. Most of them didn’t even know that she was in the DFZ, much less dead. The UN team knew, but they were only two people and a raven spirit. That left the dragons, but other than Amelia, the only dragon who knew her as anything other than “that mortal” was…
“Julius.”
Amelia grinned. “And now you know why your death is so interesting to me. It goes without saying that Julius took your loss very badly, but what’s remarkable here isn’t that he loved you enough to carve you out a good death—’cause let’s be honest: if any Heartstriker was going to fall hard for his too-competent mortal, it’d be him—it’s the fact that he’s adragon. And as we all know, dragons aren’t part of this world. We’re refugees. Non-natives, as Algonquin would say. We can inhabit the physical half of this plane because physicality is common across almost all worlds, but magically, we’re incompatible. That’s why we kept functioning during the drought that shut down the spirits and every other magical creature. We worked on an entirely different system, one where we created our own magic. That’s also why I had to hitch a ride here inside of you. As a non-native species, I didn’t share this part of your plane, so I needed an inside mage.”
“You mean to be inside a mage,” Marci said. “But if all that’s true, then how would Julius’s remembering me shape my death? If dragons can’t touch this side, how did this happen?”
“I have no idea!” Amelia said excitedly, flapping her little wings. “Everything I know says that Julius’s memories shouldn’t do squat for you here, and yet they clearly matter. There’s just no other explanation for why your death is so huge since no one else remembers you. This place has to be his doing, and that raises powerful possibilities.”
Amelia said this as though it were the best possible thing that could ever be, and from a magical-theory standpoint, Marci supposed that was true. If Julius was the one behind this,then they were standing inside the smoking gun that proved dragons were capable of manipulating the native magic of this world in at least one way. But while finding evidence of the impossible was one of the most thrilling events in any discipline, Marci was having a hard time matching Amelia’s excitement about the metaphysical manifestation of Julius’s sadness over her death. It was one thing to hope the guy you loved liked you back, but to find out the truth likethis, when everything they could have had was already lost, was too tragic to contemplate.
“I have to get back.”
“Oh, absolutely,” Amelia agreed, scrambling back down Marci’s arm. “As delighted as I am to finally find proof for the theory I’ve been working on for centuries, we didn’t come here to sit around enjoying the view. You’re going to be Merlin, and I’m coming with you, so tap your cat’s envoy, and let’s go!”
“Amelia!” Marci hissed. “Don’t talk about my dad that way!”
“Why not?” she said, glancing at Aldo, who’d sat through all the theory talk in uncharacteristic silence. “That’s what you’re here for, right? Ghost is the Spirit of the Forgotten Dead, and since we’ve just established Marci is most definitelynotforgotten, that puts her outside his normal reach. But all the spirit/Merlin pairs I’ve heard of started with some kind of sacrifice, and—forgive me if I’m jumping to conclusions here—a dead father fits the Empty Wind’s bill pretty solidly. My guess is the memory of dear old Dad was the price of admission for your initial bond. Now that death’s forced you apart, the Empty Wind’s coughed him up again to act as a guide. That means guiding us is his job, and there’s no insult in asking a man to do his job.”
“The insult is that you’re treating my dad like he’s a single-use item!” Marci snapped, glaring at the little dragon before turning back to her father. “Sorry, Daddy.”
“It’s all right,” Aldo said. “She’s not wrong. I was sent here by the Empty Wind specifically so I could guide you back to him. I should be doing exactly what the little dragon says. But for all his power, the Forgotten Dead can’t see us here, and before I go back into his service, I wanted to do my job as your father and make sure you knew you had a choice.”
“Choice?” Marci stared at him. “What choice? Stay dead?”
“Yes,” he said quietly, reaching out to brush her bangs away from her eyes. “You’ve had a hard run of things since I left you,carina, and I’m sorry for that. A father is supposed to protect his child, not make her life more difficult.”
“You didn’t do anything,” Marci said, shaking her head. “Bixby wouldn’t have come after me if I’d just left the Kosmolabe in Nevada, and all the stuff after with the seers and Ghost and helping Julius was entirely my decision.”
“I know,” he said. “You’ve always been ambitious. This is hardly the first time you’ve bitten off more than you can chew, but killing yourself over doctoral coursework is a far cry fromactuallygetting killed.”
She rolled her eyes. “Dad—”
“No,” he said sternly, grabbing her hands. “They killed you,carina. All these spirits and dragons and monsters, they ask too much. Of both of us.”
