The Vague quakes—or maybe the tremor isn’t from the Vague but from the living world. Possibly thunder. While my spirit is hunting in the Vague, my physical body is still kneeling in the graveyard, being drenched by a freezing October rain, while I try to bring my dead girlfriend back.
No, not girlfriend. She’s more than that. She’s my actual life, my fucking soul. I can’t live without my soul.
Faster, I follow the line, hand over hand. It’s getting hot now, starting to glow red.
I risk one more bellow into the shimmering, shifting kaleidoscope of the Vague. “Cathy!”
“Cathycathycathycathycathy,” pants the sluagh.
But from somewhere ahead, and down, and to the right, I hear a reply. A real reply, in a familiar voice, half-amazed, half-doubtful. “Heathcliff?”
I step forward and nearly tumble off the edge of what I thought was glass but is really a downward slope studded with tiny, iridescent crystals. Cautiously, I slide down it. Some of the crystals shatter as I go, releasing a tinkling, chiming sound into the stagnant air.
My spiritual self is wearing the same clothes as my real body, and normally sharp pieces of crystal would tear up a pair of jeans…but they’re perfectly fine because this place has no logic. No physics. I’ve long since quit trying to figure it out, and now I just go along with the weirdness. I keep sliding, one hand on the line and the other on the slope, until my feet hit a cold, smooth surface. A wall of glass, thicker this time, and darker.
The line is red-hot now. It leads right through the smoky wall.
I peer through. “Cathy?”
A small, white hand slams against the glass, and I jump. Cathy’s face is a milky blur, her hair a murky cloud. “Heathcliff?” Her voice is muffled, like it’s coming from underwater. “Let me in!”
“Hang on!” I shout. I can feel my heartbeat racing higher—the heart I’ve left behind in my real body. The fast pulse—that’s okay. It’s when my heart slows down that we have a problem.
I scan the wall, moving a little farther to the right until the dark tint of the glass fades and I can see through it better.
Cathy isn’t in the mirror maze, where the souls usually stay for the first twenty-four hours or so after death. She’s floating in a vast chasm, her hair streaming and her pale body wreathed in smoke.
It looks like the wall separating us ends farther on, so I climb over giant wedges of glass, heading for the place where it melts into air. Cathy does the same, and the glowing line that connects us follows, seeming to phase through the glass. But when we get to that empty space and reach for each other’s hands, the transparent wall materializes between us again, solid and impenetrable.
Whoever set this up did something to keep me from getting to her. A spell or a curse most likely. I’ve never met a supernatural who can actually cast spells or curses—Meemaw says that gift died out decades ago. People who swear they can do it are just fooling themselves or others. But this sure looks like a curse. I’ve heard about something like it before, with one of Hindley’s clients. Real classy woman, lived in this big house full of artifacts. Someone broke in and killed her before she made it to her safe room. Stole a rare talisman, she told us after she woke up. She was fucking hard to resurrect. Hindley said he found her deep in the Vague, in a glass box covered with runes, with something called an “impossible riddle” etched on it. He read it aloud to her, and she solved it within minutes. Apparently the intruders had wedged a curse totem into her throat to make sure she’d stay dead. But even in death, she was too smart for them.
I don’t know why Cathy is behind this wall, but it’s gonna make it that much tougher for me to bring her back.
“I’ll get you, I promise,” I call to her. “Just give me a second to think.”
In the case of the woman in the box, a necromancer had to come for her, but she also had to do part of the work. She had to save herself through something she possessed—her cleverness.
Cathy is smart, but she’s got another gift, too. Her nature as a banshee: a scream that can shatter glass.
She’s floating a little farther away now, her eyes mournful, her voice soft and faint. “Heathcliff? Why won’t you let me in?”
“You’re drifting, Cathy. Come on, baby, focus on me. Here, see my hand?” I press it to the wall between us.
She blinks and reaches out, laying her palm against the thick glass, opposite mine.
I plead with her, my voice a hoarse echo. “Cathy, I want to save you, but you have to save yourself first. You have to scream.”
“Scream?” She shakes her head slowly. “That’s not me anymore. I don’t wail for death. I swim in death. Death is a part of me, as it always was—as it is. As it ever shall be.”
She’s going vague on me way faster than souls usually do. I’ve got to connect her back to her humanity, to the emotions that link her to life.
“Cathy, I need you to think, to focus. Look at me. You remember the first time we fucked?”
A spark ignites in her eyes—the ghost of a smile plays across her mouth. “Yes.”
“Good. Think about that. Think about how I stalked you afterward. That made you mad, right? Pissed you off. Remember how that felt?”
“Yes.” Her eyes are a shade brighter now, clearer.
