Kat Richardson - Underground

Quinton peered at what must have been empty mist between my hands to him.

“What…?”

“Its Lass—the incorporeal part, at least,” I growled from the flashing heat/cold its touch wrought on my bones. “I wish I had a bottle to put him in…”

Nearby, Fish was struggling with Ben, making pads of fabric and strapping them over the bleeding wounds on his side. “One of you call 911, damn it! I don’t want this guy back on my table tomorrow!”

“Already done,” Quinton said. Time had passed without my notice. “We lost Lass.”

I glared at him before I realized he was talking to Fish.

In the murky distance, sirens wailed toward us. I stumbled a few steps to where Fish was working, shirtless in the cold. “How bad?” I asked.

“Bad,” he snapped, tying off another strip of fabric from what had been his shirt. “We might get lucky—his body temp was already down and heading for hypothermia from the dunking so he’s not bleeding as fast as he should be, but he’s shocky and he could collapse. I hope I remember how to save a life instead of studying the remains of one…”

I backed away, giving a speculative look at the struggling ghost in my hands. If Albert could do it…

“Don’t,” Quinton said, putting his hand on my shoulder.

“What?”

“I can see you thinking it. Don’t try to save Ben by putting Lass in his body. Even if it worked, it would be wrong.”

Carlos’s words to the same effect echoed in my head and I found the irony painful.

“I can’t keep holding on,” I said. “He’s… slippery.”

“You could let go…”

“No! There’s something undone here, and Lass is the one who has to do it—to put it right.” I shuddered, hating the idea that had come into my mind. “I’ll have to hold him myself.”

The sirens were closer and distant strobes of red and blue bounced off the fog.

Time was running out.

“Quinton,” I said, catching his eye as he tried to watch everything. “I’ll have to be a little… thinner. I don’t want the medics to see me do this.”

Quinton was a little confused. “Do what?”

“Take this… inside,” I said, shaking the protesting ghost of Lass.

“No! Harper—”

“Only choice left. Keep an eye out,” I added, taking the wet pheasant feather from my bag and sliding into the Grey with the fingers of one hand twined in the knotted energy remains of Lass.

The shape of the dead man grew more solid as I sank deeper into the Grey until the silvered mist gave way to the burning black and colored light of the grid.

Lass was a blazing gold wire frame of a man in my grip, twisting and writhing and more immediate than the merely bright knots that were Quinton and Fish… and the dimming skein of Ben. Wygan had stuck a bit of Grey into me once. Now I’d have to see if I could do it myself and hope it wasn’t so permanent this time.

I pulled the living fire of Lass’s ghost into a tight ball as it fought and twisted to escape. Then I stroked the feather over my own face and chest, feeling my shape loosen as the grid thrummed with fury and the screams of something in the grip of terror.

Time tilted and spread in a pool of mercury and rust. Heavy in the slowing of time, I pressed the harsh light that was Lass against my chest, pushing it deeper with the feather and my hands until I felt something crack and yield. We floated half incorporated, half apart, and mad with excess of life and death until the pain drew a whimper from my throat and then flared up in a blaze of agony as my own shape closed around the bindle of the dead man’s energy.

I reeled back to the normal, panting and crying with the pangs of Lass’s dying ripping through me. Quinton caught me but only barely in my still-thin state. I sucked breath in between my teeth, gritting them against the slashing agony of the dead man’s presence.

“Harper…? Are you all right?” Quinton asked, his face creased with fear, the Grey swirling around him in swathes of anxious green and orange.

I shook my head, not trusting my voice to remain steady, not to rise to a scream. The flashing lights of the Medic One unit were static near the smoking spire that rose from the Rover and the sirens had stopped. I could barely hear the splashing of feet through the mud above the screeching feedback whine of the Grey in my head as the paramedics headed toward us. I staggered toward Ben and Fish who knelt beside him, shaking his head.

He looked up. “What have we done? What happened? I don’t know what to tell them. ‘A monster came out of the marsh and killed them’?”

“Ben’s… dead?” I ground out, feeling my head spin and my guts drop in horror. The worlds shook me between them and I felt like a banner torn by the wind.

Fish shook his head. “Not yet. But Sisiutl—and that man. My God… What did we do?” Then he glared at me. “What did you do? This is because of you.”

I shook my head. “No. Sisiutl—”

“It’s a legend! It’s a story, like Qamaits and Tsonoqua bringing nightmares and eating children! It doesn’t exist!” He clasped his head in his hands as if it was going to explode while he groped for sanity in the face of what he’d seen.

“It can’t! Oh, God, it can’t! This can’t be happening!”

Lass tore at me and screamed in my head and I tottered, trying to keep my feet but falling to my knees beside Fish. I grabbed the babbling man by the shoulders, partially just to steady myself, and shook him, stuffing down the shrieks of Lass’s fury and my pain. “Then,” I gulped, choking out each word, “blame… me.”

Fish’s eyes went wide in horror as he stared at me, as if I, too, were a nightmare. His lips trembled to form words, but they didn’t come out.

“It’s… all me,” I ordered, and Fish nodded stiffly, shaking.

I tried to turn, but weakness dragged at me as the raging torment of Lass imprisoned in my head and body tore through me, blinding me with red veils of agony, so that I didn’t know where Quinton was—where anyone or anything was.

“You have to go,” I gasped, hoping Quinton was still nearby. “Don’t let them get you.”

I didn’t see him beside me or feel his touch through Lass’s stabbing and slashing inside, but I could hear Quinton say, “You’re out of your mind.”

“Yes,” I started. Then the pain broke me and I screamed, falling into the bleeding blackness between the grid and down, shrieking, to oblivion.

Swimming in the dark and the residual pain with Lass halfheartedly cursing me made the bed very uncomfortable. I didn’t like the bed: it had too many pillows and it smelled of too much bleach and something metallic. A discomfiting languor had fallen on both of us—Lass and me—and I felt I would never surface from the wreck of sleep. It was the way my fingers tingled and burned that got me to open my eyes.

The room was a soft mint green and my heart jumped with fear. I remembered the room. The last time I’d been in such a room I’d just finished being dead. I jerked up—or, rather, I didn’t, as my left arm twisted and yanked me to a stop with a yelp. Someone’s hands pressed against my right shoulder.

“Shhh… Don’t jump around like that. You’ll hurt yourself.”

That was Quinton’s voice. I blinked grit and gummy tears from my eyes and turned my head toward him. With no hat or coat and his long hair brushed down around his shoulders, he didn’t look himself. A battered and jury-rigged palmtop computer sat on the side table between us, and he put a stylus down on top of it as he leaned toward me.

He gave me a thin smile. “Hi.”

I tried to bring my hands together to rub my tingling fingers, but the left one didn’t move more than an inch and that with a sudden stop and a steely clank.