Spirit Prophecy Page 17

  We waited. Standing guard before the door, Carrick looked almost alive, but for an odd shimmer around his outline that I had come to recognize as one of the hallmarks of a ghost’s appearance. It was like looking at a photograph of something astonishing, only to realize that it had been photoshopped, that something about the light and the shadow didn’t quite match up, leaving it with a slightly surreal appearance.

  “We were all…pleased to see your clan represented here again,” Carrick said. Something about his features was familiar; I thought it must be the way he kept his eyes trained away from us when he spoke, which seemed to be another Caomhnóir trademark. “You have a long and illustrious history at Fairhaven, as I’m sure you will learn.”

  “Pleased is not the general vibe we’re getting, actually,” I said. “People around here seem much more interested in recent history than anything else.”

  Carrick nodded grimly. “Yes, quite so. Still, I was glad to hear that everything was resolved. I’m sure it will get better.”

  “Right. Thanks,” I said.

  Carrick looked relieved, as though this awkward attempt at conversation with an unknown Durupinen had gone better than he’d expected, and lapsed into stodgy silence. Finally, after an agonizingly long few minutes, the door behind him shuddered and creaked open into a candlelit office.

  Finvarra stood silhouetted in the moonlight streaming through her open window, her hair a silver cascade down her back. I was struck, as I had been the first time I’d seen her, with the power she seemed to exude, an undefinable aura that demanded respect, even awe. She gestured us in as we hesitated in the doorway.

  “Please, come in,” she said.

  Carrick stepped back to let us through. Still feeling like an unruly eight year old in the principal’s office, I shuffled in, Hannah and Milo just behind me. Hannah and I sat down in the chairs to which Finvarra was pointing, Milo hovering off of Hannah’s shoulder like a bizarre ghostly parrot.

  “I’ve been meaning to talk with you both,” Finvarra said, her face still obscured in the long shadows the moon was throwing across her. “Hannah, we have spoken briefly, of course, regarding your gift. But everything has been so busy, preparing for the start of the fall term, that I was quite overwhelmed with other matters. I apologize we haven’t met sooner, Jessica.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, when Hannah proved incapable of speaking. She was watching Finvarra as though the woman were pointing a weapon at her.

  “First, I wanted to say that I am very sorry about the circumstances under which you discovered your legacy. You have both suffered needlessly, especially you, Hannah. I hope you will believe me when I tell you that we did everything in our power to find you both, and to rectify the situation,” Finvarra said. As she walked toward us, the shadows rose across her like long, caressing fingers.

  I didn’t trust myself to say anything polite to her about our “situation”; I was still too angry about everything we’d been through. Luckily, she didn’t seem to require, or even expect, a response, and went on.

  “I had to make many difficult decisions where the two of you were concerned, and I know that the consequences have been trying to deal with. But we knew that the most important thing was to find you both, and to restore the order to the Gateways and to the Durupinen at large. Only when you’ve been trained and educated can you learn to deal with the gifts you’ve inherited. I hope that you are settling in alright?”

  An honest answer to that question would have taken too long and sounded much too disrespectful, so instead I trusted myself to reply with a stiff, “Yes, thank you.”

  “It is a big adjustment, I know, but you will grow accustomed to our ways and to your new responsibilities. It simply takes time,” she said. She smiled for the first time, a subtle but pleasant expression. “We are here though, to discuss another matter, and that, as I’m sure you gathered, is Milo.”

  Hannah squirmed in her chair. “What about him?”

  “We need to talk about why he’s here, and why he can get through the wards into your room. He shouldn’t have been able to follow you here to begin with, not without great difficulty, and he most certainly should not be able to enter the warded areas of the castle,” Finvarra said.

  “But there are lots of ghosts here. Hundreds of them — some of them have been here for centuries, and you’ve let them stay here. Please don’t make him leave,” Hannah said, her voice rising to a panicked squeak.

  “I’m not leaving her, so if that’s what you want, you can just forget it,” Milo said, wrapping an arm around Hannah’s quivering shoulders. “Where she goes, I go. That’s just the way it is.”

  “Exactly,” Finvarra said, still smiling. “Put yourselves at ease, both of you. We are not asking you to separate. In fact, it seems that that would be impossible at this point.”

  “Damn straight,” Milo muttered.

  Finvarra went on as though she hadn’t heard the profanity. “I’d like to discover the nature of the connection between you. You do agree, Hannah, that you feel more connected to Milo than you do to the other ghosts with whom you come into contact?”

  Hannah seemed to relax for the first time since entering the room. “Yes. But it’s different. I didn’t just know him when he was a ghost. We were friends when he was alive, too.”

  “Best friends,” Milo added.

  “Yes, you certainly have more of an emotional connection, that’s natural,” Finvarra said. “But I want you to think for a moment about the way your connection feels. Try to separate, if you can, the history you and Milo had together in life, and concentrate instead on the physical and mental sensations of interacting with him now.”

  Hannah’s brow furrowed. “I … oh. Yes, I think I understand what you mean.”

  “What? What is it?” I asked.

  “Well, with the other ghosts, I only feel their presence when they’re near me. I mean, physically near me. But with Milo —it’s like I can always feel him.” She looked up at Finvarra. “Is that what you’re talking about?”

  “Precisely. And has it always been that way between the two of you, since Milo has taken this form?” Finvarra asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I see,” Finvarra said, a finger tracing her lips thoughtfully. “And you, Milo. This may seem intrusive, as what I am about to ask you is of a very personal nature. I apologize about prying into what may be quite painful living memories, but I must do so in order to illuminate this situation further.”

  “That’s okay,” Milo said with a shrug.

  “Would you please tell me the nature of your death? How it came about, and also any role that Hannah may have played in it?”

  I sat stiffened upright in my seat. “What do you mean, any role she played in it? Hannah didn’t have anything to do with Milo’s death! Did you?” I added, in a much more accusatory tone than I had intended.

  “No! Of course not,” Hannah said, as disturbed as I was about the turn the conversation had taken.

  Finvarra held up a hand. “I do not mean to suggest that Hannah killed Milo, or assisted him in any way. But the moments leading up to Milo’s death were very significant in shaping the relationship the two of you now share. It is important to understand how Hannah factored into his thoughts in those moments of his death. Milo, would you please share with us what you can remember?”

  Milo shifted from foot to foot. The sudden absence of his usually confident air seemed to dull his very existence, like a light inside him had gone out. When he spoke, it was in a voice very unlike the one that usually danced from his lips. He looked very young, and very small.

  “Growing up in my house was hell. My parents are from China, and my dad has a very traditional view of the world. He had my path all laid out for me before I could walk; private schools, Ivy League college, medical school, and a respectable marriage to a nice Chinese girl. We never discussed it; it wasn’t up for discussion. I would bring honor to the family and be grateful for every decision that had been m
ade for me.”

  The room had gone completely silent as we all listened to Milo. I’d barely ever heard him say two unsarcastic words in all the time I’d known him.

  “So, naturally my childhood was a real barrel of laughs, especially when I started realizing I wasn’t the manly son my father had expected. Dressing up in my mother’s high heel shoes and asking for princess tiaras and Barbie dolls were not exactly part of my approved list of activities. Every time he turned around I was doing shit like painting my toenails pink or making dresses out of my bedroom curtains like a friggin’ Von Trapp. My father blamed my mother, said that she wasn’t being strict enough with me. He threw every pink and frilly thing out of the house, even my little sister’s stuff. When that didn’t work, he thought he could beat the gay out of me. Clearly,” he said with a bitter little laugh and a flick of his wrist, “that didn’t work either, though not for lack of trying.

  “I was a really good student, you know. I totally could have pulled off the Ivy League acceptance, the med school workload, all of it. But none of that mattered anymore. My father didn’t care if I brought home straight A’s if I was also bringing home a boyfriend. My mother would have been okay with it, but she didn’t dare show any sort of approval around my father. It got so bad that I stopped eating, started popping pills, even flirted with suicide. A failed attempt or two later and I was locked up.

  “The weird thing was that when I was in treatment, I was okay. It was actually the happiest I could ever remember being. The doctors understood and accepted me. They tried to help me, but they weren’t trying to change me the way my father was. They wanted me to be happy and healthy—they wanted to treat the depression and the behaviors, not change who I was on the inside. But no matter what they did, no matter how much they helped, I always had to go home to him. And as long as I was still gay, I was still sick, still wrong.

  “New Beginnings was the last place they sent me to be fixed. That was where I met Hannah, and where we became best friends. I was the only person there that she told about the ghosts, except for the doctors. And just as she accepted me, I accepted her. I knew she wasn’t lying, even though I couldn’t see the people she could see. I trusted that she was telling me the truth, because it was so obvious that we were in the same boat. Each of us had an innate part of us that we couldn’t change, that we couldn’t do anything about, but it made functional life outside of institution walls impossible. As long as we were who we were, we could never be happy out there. We used to joke that if we formed a band, we would be called ‘The Unlovables’. We would have a string of great albums no one would buy.”

  Here Milo paused, and sunk into the same space that Hannah was occupying in her chair. She pulled her body close to him, as though she drew comfort from his coldness the same way that others would draw comfort from the warmth of a living body. I shivered unintentionally and struggled against an unbidden jolt of jealousy. It should have been Hannah and me that were that close.

  “Then, after about eight months, they told me the good news —I was going home. But I just couldn’t do it again. I couldn’t walk back into that house, and face his expectations that I would be an entirely new person, the son he thought he deserved. I couldn’t face his disappointment and his wrath when he realized that I was still me, the same disappointing fuck-up she-male he’d locked away. And so I made the decision that I wasn’t going to go. I was going to kill myself instead.”

  He said it with a shocking nonchalance. Maybe that was a benefit of being a ghost; you could look at your life, and even the decision to end it, with analytical detachment. I didn’t think I’d ever want that particular ability.

  Milo went on with the same disconcerting insouciance, “It wasn’t that hard of a decision to make, really. When I considered the alternative, dying seemed like an excellent option. I’d be free of him, free of his expectations of me. The only hang-up I had, the only thing that really gave me pause, was Hannah. She needed me; I was the only one who believed her about the ghosts, the only one she could talk to about it. But at the same time, it was knowing her that made me realize I might have another option —an option between living and dying. Maybe, if I died, I could escape my father, but stay with her. Maybe I could be a ghost. It felt like the perfect solution. I would never have to go home, and the two of us could stay together, no matter where else they sent her. It didn’t have to be death or life, black or white; I could have a life of grey.

  “I wrote her a letter, just in case it didn’t work. I mean, let’s face it, I had no idea what it took to become a ghost; what if I’d screwed it up and crossed over by mistake? I’d been tonguing my meds for weeks, hoarding them in my mattress. I also stopped eating; the less of me there was, the fewer pills it would take to kill me. I think she suspected something, but I never asked her.” He stroked Hannah’s cheek. “Did you know?”

  “I knew you didn’t want to go home. I thought that was why you were backsliding, but I didn’t think you were getting ready to kill yourself. I would have been so mad at you,” Hannah said.

  “I know, sweetness” Milo said with a sad little smile. “And I couldn’t have that, could I? So finally, the night before my release was scheduled, I locked myself in the bathroom and took all the pills. I wasn’t totally sure if I had enough, but I figured that even if I didn’t, the attempt would keep me in the hospital long enough to figure something else out. Then I lay down on my bed and waited for it to happen. I’d written Hannah a letter, explaining that I would stay with her if I could, but that, if I couldn’t, I was really, really sorry for leaving her alone.”

  Milo fell silent, his hands picking absently at the specter of his jeans. Finvarra gave him a moment before prompting, “And at the moment you died? What happened then?”

  He seemed to find each word on his jeans, picking them carefully up and examining them before saying them aloud. “At first it was like falling asleep. I could feel myself slipping into sleep, but then…I was slipping further than sleep, away from myself. It was like someone cut my strings and I was floating off. And I remember feeling really relieved when that started to happen. It would have been very easy to let go, and most of me did, but there was this little part that was thinking about Hannah. I just kept clinging on with that tiny part of me, telling myself to let go of me, but to hold on to her. And I did,” he finished.

  I realized my mouth was hanging open, so I closed it. From the recesses of my mind, another description of death bobbed to the surface, at once so similar and so different from the one I had just heard Milo tell.

  “I just remember I could feel a pulling, and part of me wanted to go, but part of me didn’t. Everything was telling me to just let go and follow whatever it was that was taking me away, but that little part of me just kept clinging on, and, just as I decided I was going to let go…it had passed. I had missed it.”

  How strange to think of someone knowing they were about to die, and actually longing for it. How strange to think that someone would choose this imitation of life, this half-life, over a real one. Evan had become a ghost out of a desperate desire to live, but Milo…he shed his life like a snake sheds its skin. I could barely process it, but Finvarra was nodding as though she were hearing a familiar tale.

  “We’ve been together ever since,” Milo said. “Not that she was happy about it at first.” Hannah gave him a petulant look. “He could have had a really good life, it wasn’t like with me. I was never going to get better, I knew that.”

  “Honey, please. Even dying couldn’t make me less gay. Do you really think another year of therapy would have helped?” Milo said.

  “Stop it, you know what I mean!” Hannah cried. “You could have had a normal life if you just could have gotten away from your dad. You were almost eighteen, and then you would have been an adult. You would have been free to be yourself. You could have moved out on your own and found a boyfriend, someone who loved you for who you were.”

  “Yeah, well, some people can wait for things t
o get better, and some people can’t,” Milo said. “Besides, like you said, I may have been able to get out eventually, but you certainly weren’t, sweetness, not with your special flavor of crazy.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but Hannah was giggling.

  “So,” Finvarra said, “You undertook your own death with two intentions. You meant to become a ghost, and you also meant to stay with Hannah. Is that right?”

  “Pretty much,” Milo said.

  Finvarra stood up and walked a complete circle around her desk before continuing. “What you did was very significant, Milo. It would have been significant with any living person, but because Hannah is one of the Durupinen, your choice to stay with her was far more complicated than either of you ever could have realized. The two of you,” she said, coming to stand before them, “are now Bound.”

  “What does that mean, Bound?” I asked before either Hannah or Milo had the chance.

  “I’ll explain. Carrick, would you come here, please?” Finvarra called.

  Carrick materialized instantly at her side, standing as though a military officer had just ordered him at ease. Any time I’d ever seen someone stand like that, I was struck with the enormity of the misnomer; he couldn’t have looked less “at ease.”

  “Carrick was a Caomhnóir in life,” Finvarra said, and Carrick nodded respectfully. “He was assigned to my sister and me for our protection on the day we were initiated, and remained with us until his death fifteen years ago. But upon his death, he made a choice to stay with me, out of a desire to continue in his role as my protector. In doing so, he Bound himself to me.”

  Carrick drew himself up nearly to attention. “And would do so again, High Priestess, in a heartbeat.”

  “Thank you, Carrick. I know it,” Finvarra said, inclining her head to him. “When a spirit and a Durupinen are Bound, there is no breaking their connection. As long as the Durupinen lives, the spirit in question is tied to her. You will find, Hannah, that you will be able to call Milo to you, and that he will be unable to stray very far from your presence without your permission. He has, quite unwittingly, it seems, entered into an ancient and sacred pact, that he will stay with you and protect you until your own time comes to cross over, at which point Milo, too, may finally do so.”