CROSSING THE LINE
The rain lets up long enough for us to bury him. A swathe of black umbrellas cluster around the grave in a sleepy corner of York Cemetery as the pallbearers lower the coffin into the ground. The vicar drones on, empty words about a lad he didn’t even know. My new suit itches. It fits perfectly, proper smart, but I hate it.
I’m wearing dark glasses, even though it’s gloomy out. I know I look like a prick but it’s that or pretend I’m really into coloured contacts. My eyes are now a permanent, unnatural silver. It doesn’t look human, and it unsettles most folk, dead and alive.
It unsettles me.
The two detectives who came to my house watch from the back of the crowd. The investigation into the mysterious deaths is ongoing. Me and Sam are still “subjects of interest” but the lawyer Sam hired says they can’t prove anything.
My stomach growls loud enough for Sam to take my hand and squeeze. I squeeze back. I’m all right. I ate a huge breakfast at home, then a second breakfast with him and snacked on the way over.
The next rumble sends an ache rolling through my rib cage. Claws needle the inside of my skull and coil under my skin, their ugliness festering. The wraiths aren’t individuals any more but a mass, like there’s a river inside me that’s blended them together and into me too, seeping into my soul. I bite my tongue until I taste blood.
Hold on.
Being around a lot of people is hard, especially when emotions are running high.
The wind blusters the big yews and oaks, sending leaves tumbling over the assembled crowd. My folks are here with my sisters, sorrowful and subdued. I came home, but I’ve changed again in new and dangerous ways. Mum avoids looking at me, like she’s afraid she’ll see something else in place of her son. Dad’s over-attentive, asking questions and always checking in. He wants to know everything, as if this is a condition we can beat together. My sisters are scared of me. They pretend that they’re not, but they don’t come in my room any more.
That hurts.
Despite all that, my family still came today. They liked Mitch. Everyone did, he was that kind of lad. Half our school have come to the funeral, so have his new mates from college, teachers, chefs from the restaurant where he was doing his placement, ghosts, ghosts and more ghosts, an ocean of the dead packing the church. I didn’t think many people would come down the cemetery to say a final goodbye, but almost everyone did.
Opposite me, a sour-faced woman stands next to a portly man with a mean jaw, his muscle run to fat in middle age. Mitch’s mum is a shell; demure, mouth downturned, stare vacant like she’s dreaming of a different life. His dad looks like he wishes he was down the pub, bored rather than sad. Dickhead.
I painted my nails Mitch’s favourite colour just to piss him off.
Mitch’s older brother, Luke, supports Leonie and her family, looking enough like Mitch to hurt. The brothers hadn’t seen much of each other this past year, not since Luke moved in with a mate from work. He showed up at Leonie’s a week after Mitch’s death to ask for help planning the funeral, slipping into her family like he’s always belonged there. He and Leonie talk most days now. It’s helping them both.
Mitch would’ve liked that.
I’m sorry he didn’t get a chance to reconnect himself, but I’m sorry for a lot of things these days.
We’ll never play videogames until four a.m. again, or bake together, cook up stinking ward paint, or walk Dante in the rain. He won’t see Europe after college with Leonie like they’d planned. He won’t go to Pride next summer.
He’s really gone.
The wraiths living in my bones hiss with grief. I feel everything: a suffocating rush of agony, confusion and denial. The air tastes sweet and cloying, like something is putrefying under the earth. Decay fills my mouth and instead of disgust, hunger surges again, my cravings bleeding forward as my nerves shudder to contain them.
You will consume the people you love most.
Souls surround me. The guttering light of fragile life glows beside the deep steady burn of the dead. Their vitality smells like peace. Hunger gnaws even deeper than my belly or even my bones.
I count down from ten, breathing slowly.
Stay in control.
I am Charlie. I am Charlie.
The reality that I’m some kind of living monster that hungers for souls is impossible to settle beside the faces of my family and friends. What scares me is that sooner or later, I’ll have to give in and I don’t know what to do about it. I need to say something to Sam, but I’m scared. This … thing I’ve become, a monster, a weapon, an abomination, is so like what Caleb Gates tried to make himself that I can’t ask Sam to accept me as I am.
Maybe I should just leave.
At the end of the grave Neelam stands with Heather, wearing Leonie’s cryptolenses. They’re all moved into their new place in Manchester. I’m not sure how it’s going to work for them – they can’t even touch – but they’re giving themselves the space to try.
Mitch’s coffin looks really far down. I wish I hadn’t wasted two years of our friendship ignoring him when he deserved better. I wish I’d been the friend he needed, that we’d had more time.
His brother releases a fistful of earth on the lid. Leonie starts to cry and the cracked pieces of me shatter. Darkness escapes my skin, twisting around my fingers.
No.
Dropping Sam’s hand, I push backwards through the crowd. Villiers and Reid reach for me, worried. But many among the dead scurry out of my way, as if they can sense the predators inside me. Sam says they’ll get over it, just give them time, but they should keep their distance. Everyone should.
Low branches catch on my puffer and slick brown leaves make underfoot treacherous. Careful not to slip, I move as quickly as I can in my prostheses, cutting beneath the trees. Drizzle dusts my face. I smell heavy rain in the distance and think of Mitch again. He loved a storm.
I stagger on to the tarmac in front of the ruined chapel where a few cars are parked up, but there’s no one here. Gulping lungs of cold air, I fight to quiet the rhythm in my head but all I can see is the hollow earth swallowing Mitch’s remains.
It’s not fair. He should have stayed. He should have lived.
But then we would have lost Leonie.
It’s too much and it hurts.
Licks of phantasmic essence curl from my back and arms, ruffling my hair as they grow – desperate to consume and wrench and devour. Undefined, they’re not anything personal like Tempest’s torch, or Villier’s rapier, they’re just raw power.
The seal on my chest burns. A scream of rage roars from the pit of my belly – half-sob, half-bellow. Metal crunches and glass shatters. Smoky tendrils tear at the blue hoarding around the chapel, punching through the chipboard, ripping holes. The cars parked opposite the chapel are a crumpled wreck.
Someone’s here.
I whip round.
Sam, his soul a soft, pale glow threaded with green. It’s bad that I can see it, that means the wraiths are more in control than me. Maybe I should’ve let Meryem lock me up. He steps forward and I flinch away, putting a hand up in warning.
“You won’t hurt me.” There’s so much trust in his voice I can’t stand it. He’s wrong, and he’ll regret it. The cool control I found when facing down Meryem has evaporated.
I think about Viola, who’d do anything for the lass she loved, including becoming someone unlovable. I’m something Sam can’t love – no, shouldn’t love.
He needs to leave me. If he won’t, I’m gonna have to go away to live in a bothy in the Highlands and get food air-dropped in. No family or friends, just me and the lonely landscape.
Fuck, that sounds boring.
I could travel then, get a van and just live on the road doing odd jobs. I’ll go town to town hunting down the shades that escaped The Old Place. Mr Agyemang and his occultist friends bottled a fair few, but most are still out there. We need to deal with them and they hurt people, so maybe feeding them to the wraiths to keep me stable won’t feel like murder. My chest cramps, nausea rising.
God.
Sam will live a long life with Tempest and Leonie and our friends. He’ll move on, find a lad more like him.
But I want him so much. He makes all of this bearable.
Fingers under my chin, on my neck, holding my face. My shadow manifestations lick over Sam’s skin, coiling in his hair and down his arms, but they don’t hurt him.
Last week Sam manifested his own phantasmic object. Not a torch like Tempest, but a paintbrush. It doesn’t look like much, but the boy can paint pure magic.
What defines me?
Wish I knew.
“There will be a lot of bad days,” he says simply. “But there will be good times too. You taught me that.”
I shake my head. “It’s too dangerous. Meryem was right—”
“Oh, shut up, Charlie Frith,” Sam snaps. “If you’re going to get started on all the ‘I’m not worthy of you’ bullshit, then firstly, I know I’m amazing and that you’re obsessed with me. Who wouldn’t be, look at these dimples. Adorable. Secondly, you can’t tell me what to do. I get to choose who to love. And I choose you, wraiths and all.”
“But I’m just like Gates,” I snap. “I wanted this—”
“So? He wanted power for himself. You wanted to mirror to protect everyone else, and you risked your autonomy and freedom to trap the wraiths and keep everyone safe. The power it comes with is a side effect you’ll have to manage, and you will. You’re nothing like him.”
I start crying, proper gut-wrenching sobs that make me think of how Mitch cried for Leonie when she was in the hospital. Remembering him again is like a fresh knife wound to my ribs and makes me cry even harder.
Sam wraps his arms around me. At some point, I realize the smoky manifestations have stopped and I can’t see his soul any more.
“Here.” Sam fishes a chunky bar of fruit and nut chocolate from his pocket. “This might help take the edge off.”
“Did … you bring this just in case?” Swiping my cheeks with the back of my hand, I look at the chocolate, then at him. “I really love you.”
“Good.” Even dressed all in black, he’s radiant. He’s the fucking sun. “Because I’d hate for this relationship to be one-sided unrequited pining and I rather like kissing you.”
He proves it. His lips are soft, hands firm on the lapels of my suit jacket, and I am unravelling.
“Charlie?” Leonie hurries up the path, Ollie, Heather, Neelam, Villiers and Reid behind her. She spots the cars and swears. All three vehicles are smashed, windscreens cracked, bonnets and fenders bent and warped out of shape.
Yeah…
Excessive property damage is definitely more of a supervillain thing. Actually, no, scrap that. I’ve seen all the Marvel movies, they trash everything.
Leonie crashes into us, hugging me hard and catching Sam up in it too. My cheeks heat with shame. She needs us, and here I was thinking of breaking my promise to Mitch so soon, like I could ever outrun what I am.
I’ll do better to stand my ground and know I won’t be standing alone. We’re an odd trio, the seers of York, carved by grief and violence, but we’re here, as we are, because of an act of selfless love.
Our ghosts are all around us. Leonie pulls Neelam into our huddle like she’s one of us. I guess, now that she knows our secrets, she is.
Tempest slips from the trees, never far away and nods at me. I nod back, an understanding there. He’ll do anything to protect Sam, including putting me and my wraiths down if he needs to. One day, if I can’t keep control, he’ll be there. I open up the circle for him, clapping him on the shoulder to let him know that I don’t hate him half as much as he thinks I do.
“What now?” asks Leonie. “I don’t want to go home yet.”
“I um…” Sam glances at me. “I was going to tell Charlie first at the restaurant but then we didn’t go and, well, I think it’s about time you all know.” He takes a shaky breath. “I bought us a house.”
“You and your mum found a place?” I ask, enjoying the warm, happy pulse in my chest. That’s what he wanted to tell me all along.
Sam blushes, as if suddenly doubting himself. “No, us. Team Spectre. If we’re going to take care of York, we need somewhere ghosts looking for help can come and where souls we’ve freed from deathloops can acclimatize before they decide what to do with their afterlives. It needs a bit of renovation, but there’s plenty of space for a mathemagics lab, a library, and a kitchen that Mitch would love. It’s a home, for us all.”
“I’ve got his favourite brownie recipe,” says Leonie. “Can we…”
“When the kitchen’s finished, that’s the first thing we’ll bake,” promises Sam.
“With the calories this one needs now you’d better make at least five batches,” says Ollie, jerking his thumb at me.
I lean into Sam, lowering my voice. “I think sometime, maybe soon, I’ll have to … um, eat, to survive.”
He nods, understanding that brownies won’t cut it for long. “I’ve a theory about that, but … we’ll sort it. You and me.”
I feel a hook in my heart and know, no matter what the future throws at us, it will always lead me back to him.
“Masters,” Villiers hisses a warning.
We all look to where he’s pointing. Sister Agnes floats nearby, watching. I realize with a jolt that we’re over the ghost line, way too close for comfort, but after months of threats she’s not attacking. There’s something in her face I’ve not seen before – fear.
Maybe she senses what I am now, or saw what I can do, but one thing’s for sure she can’t hurt us any more and she knows it. Hungry Ones like her won’t ever bother us again.
“Ah, bollocks. I forgot to bring those magazines,” I say. Not that she cares, but I said I would so I’ll come back with Leonie’s copies of Fault magazine and New Scientist, maybe comics if Ollie will part with some of his for an afternoon.
We start walking towards the cemetery gates, Villiers and Reid chatting to Heather and Neelam. Tempest follows with Leonie as Ollie whistles for Dante who’s racing through the gravestones. He runs a little lopsided after the battle for York. Like the other ghosts his wounds are slow to heal, but they saved so many lives that night.
A message flashes on my phone. It’s Cassie. Two weeks ago I received a postcard from Ohio with a mobile number on it. When I messaged it, I got a photo of a cornfield, an ugly oversized stone mantelpiece with Meryem’s makeshift ruh tasi propped up on it, and a grinning picture of Cassie with her family. She’s told them I’m a friend she made at the international boarding school she was supposedly attending.
Today, she just sends three words, a response to a question I asked her yesterday.
I know how.
When she’s ready, Cassie will help Leonie mirror with a ghost, repairing her soul and letting her use magic again. I’m not ready to share that news now. Leonie’s been a seer all of three weeks, we all need time to settle.
Everything’s still so uncertain. I don’t know how I’m going to handle the wraiths long term, or how to deal with the strange new abilities they’ve given me. I glance back at the wrecked cars and splintered wood. At the moment, all I do is destroy stuff.
But maybe it won’t always be like that.
I was so worried about not being enough for everyone – Sam, the ghosts, my mates, my family – and yeah, I still have no idea how to earn a living one day or if I’m even going to pass a single exam.
What defines me?
Hell if I know.
And for the first time that feels good. I don’t need to have it all figured out right now. I know what I don’t want to be and that’s enough.
I’m enough and I always have been.
Possibilities swirl in the rain damp air and for a moment I let myself sink into the future Sam has planned. A proper home for us and our ghosts, a chance to make a real difference and keep the promise I made to the souls of York all those months ago. We can build something here.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” I say.
“Yeah.” Sam holds out his hand. I take it. “We do.”
We’re only at the start.