CHAPTER SEVEN

I’d never been to Greece before.

We landed at night, which muffled the edges of the city. I’ve done a lot of traveling, and when you’re tired and hungry and jet-lagged, every airport looks like the same. I dragged Mike and Speedy across Athens, got us checked into our hotel, and hit the sheets for something like ten hours until the boys decided they were ready to explore and the best way to wake me up was to sit on me.

I forgave them as soon as I made it to the window.

I had booked us a room in a hotel on the edge of the old city, a fact I had forgotten until I saw this amazing landscape of white and gold laid out beneath us. The sun was high enough to bounce light off of limestone and marble, and the entire place glowed like an ancient gem.

I might have squeaked.

We were close enough to the Parthenon to pick out the details. It looked as if a giant had smashed a club against its roof, leaving columns and craters. The rocks running across the hill were this glorious tumble of rubble. All I wanted to do was explore.

We were off and running.

I think I’ve mentioned how I’m new to the spy game, but one of the first things I learned is that bad guys get bored. If Speedy, Mike, and I were being followed, we could do worse than play tourists for a little while. The bad guys—if there were any—wouldn’t quit following us, but they’d take out their phones and start Candy Crushing or whatever the cool hitmen are playing these days.

Bored bad guys are sloppy bad guys. After six hours of us acting like jerky tourists, we’d be able to recognize them.

We usually just waved and blew kisses. Sometimes, if they’re really extra-terrible at their jobs, we pay someone to bring them coffee or beer.

(Speedy and I love to buy drinks for our bad guys. It scares the shit out of them.)

The walk up the hill to the acropolis was steeper than it appeared from the hotel room. Mike and I took it as an opportunity to run sprints. I won; he was wearing a heavy backpack and an additional thirty-five pounds of male Queensland koala. By the time we got to the Parthenon at the top, we were both winded. We figured it’d buy us some time to talk freely: any bad guys who had followed us on foot had probably died.

Mike deposited Speedy on a nearby chunk of fallen marble, and the three of us took in the view.

Spectacular.

“Did Archimedes ever visit Athens?” I asked as I passed a canteen of water to Mike.

“Nobody knows,” Speedy whispered. He was stalking a lizard across the rocks. “Probably, but there’s no record of it. We know he made it down to Egypt—ach!” He mistimed his pounce, and missed the lizard by a mile. It scurried behind a clump of tawny grass. This, he ate.

“Greece and Rome were at war when he was alive,” he continued around a mouthful of grass. “Archimedes lived in Syracuse. There was bad blood between Syracuse and Athens, and Greece was hell to move around in, but any scholar who made it all the way to Alexandria must have also hit up Athens.”

“So what can we expect to find here?” Mike asked, thumbing through Archimedes’ dossier on his phone.

“For Archimedes? Jack fuck-all shit. But Posidonius studied in Athens when he was a student.”

I leaned back on my rock. Athens morning sunlight, folks? Absolutely divine. “Have we just outright accepted that Archimedes was haunting Posidonius?”

“Yes,” Speedy said.

“Maybe.” Mike was always open to alternatives. “But if Posidonius did bump into Archimedes, where did it happen? Their geographies didn’t overlap.”

“We should find a Greek ghost and ask,” Speedy suggested.

“Working on it,” I muttered.

There was another reason—a darned good reason—we had started in Athens.

We were looking for ghosts.

The Afterlife is…

Okay. Imagine a bag of marbles.

Now, imagine a bag of marbles a billion times the size of that one. And dump all of those marbles on the metaphysical floor.

Now, imagine you have to move from this nice Cat’s Eye here to that lovely Aggie aaaaaaall the way over there, but only, like, one out of fifty of those marbles are connected, and you have no clue how to locate these connections.

That’s the Afterlife.

Please remember that ghosts don’t tell us shit about shit. Everything I know about the Afterlife is conditionally vague. Since I’m, you know, still alive, my impression of the Afterlife is that it’s not so much Heaven as it is your own personal version of Better Metaphysical Homes and Gardens. You and your buddies who have chosen to remain in the Afterlife, rather than dissipating into the aether or getting reincarnated as bunnies or whatever, get to play with your own section of space-time. It’s yours. It’s your own slice of paradise to manipulate as you see fit. You want to live in a cave? Bam! There’s your cave. You want to live in Kim Kardashian’s mansion? Bam! There’s your mansion.

(I’m not sure if a facsimile of Kim Kardashian comes with it, by the way. I’ve never asked, because ugh.)

But this little slice of paradise? It’s private. Unless you’re the type of person who’s okay with strangers barging into your home, your borders are impenetrable.

From what I’ve gathered, this creates something of a challenge in making new friends. Your old friends can find your home just fine, and maybe you all go hang out in spaces that certain ghosts have created for get-togethers or whatnot, but you can’t just wander into someone else’s backyard and ask to use their Kardashian cave-pool.

The Afterlife is a very exclusive invitation-only after-party. I had already asked Ben to find a dead dude, who knew another dead dude, who knew a Greek dead dude, who knew either Archimedes or Posidonius. I didn’t expect anything to come of it.

So, you know. Go to the source.

I let my mind wander. I felt a bit like Speedy’s lizard: mostly enjoying myself in the sun, but keeping an eye out to make sure something bigger wasn’t about to eat me.

Ghosts feel like…

I don’t know what they feel like.

I know when they’re around. They push on my brain. They don’t do it intentionally—I think the energy they throw off hits my psychic buttons.

Today, my buttons remained unpushed. The Parthenon was unhaunted.

(At least, for me. I have my theories about why psychics can perceive some ghosts and not others. I’ll get into those theories later.)

I sat up and stretched.

“Anything?” Mike asked.

“Nope,” I said. “If there’s anybody lurking about, they’re staying off of my radar.”

“It was a long shot anyway,” he said.

What Mike didn’t say was that it was probably for the best. I don’t speak Greek, let alone ancient Greek. If we had bumped into an old ghost, Speedy would have had to serve as the translator.

How do you say ‘righteously pissed-off poltergeist lynch mob’ in ancient Greek?

“We should go to a battlefield,” Speedy said. “You always get lucky at battlefields.”

“Um…” I had the mental image of getting skewered on a dead Spartan’s spectral spear. “Put a pin in that idea. I want to keep trying here.”

We played tourists for the rest of the afternoon. It was incredibly pleasant. The Parthenon has a snack stand. [2]

The Acropolis at Athens is a wickedly arid place. Most of it is dusty and dry, but we ended up at the southern end of the ruins, in a space that was more green than brown. We were the only people in sight. The walk was rough for the average tourist, but there were plenty of signs to show we hadn’t magically discovered this place. Candy wrappers, used condoms, the occasional shoe, that sort of thing. Made sense: there was a cluster of apartment buildings down the hill, just barely visible through the tree line.

“Where are we?” I asked. There was a set of columns sticking up from the ground. After spending the better part of a day in the old city, the magic of turning the corner and tripping over (literally) those surviving scraps of buildings was beginning to wear off.

“The Asklepion spring house,” Speedy replied. He was back up on Mike’s shoulders, inspecting the ruins from a height. He had run afoul of a scorpion on one of his lizard chases and was done with the ground for a while.

“I thought that was on Kos,” Mike said.

“Asklepieia were healing temples,” Speedy sighed. “Like hospitals. The Greeks built more than one of those fuckers.”

He inspected the rocks around us. Most of them were giant slabs of cut stone left over from when the archaeologists had tried to stick the temple back together. Behind those was the mountain, with chunks of crude caves here and there. “Try again,” he told me, as he stared into one of those caves.

“Speedy?”

“Healing was another form of science. The library’s gone, and so’s most of the art, but there’s still water here. Try again.”

“I don’t see a spring,” I started to say, but caught myself when I saw all the trees. Underground water is still water. “Right.”

I found a big flat stone, checked it for scorpions, and sat. The sun was behind the mountain, and it was getting chilly. “This entire week is going to be about me freezing my butt off on cold rocks,” I muttered quietly to myself.

Speedy has the unbelievable hearing you’d expect from an animal whose ears take up a majority of its headspace. “Don’t care. Find ghosts.”

“Hush,” Mike told him. He was keeping watch back the way we came. “We finally picked up a tail.”

Speedy glanced over Mike’s shoulder, and grinned at the two men far down the trail.

I shut my mind off as best as I could, and waited for something to push my buttons. Bird song. Bugs. What sound does a scorpion make? Do scorpions make noise, anyway? They’re not like wolves…maybe they are. There was that thing on the Discovery Channel about wolf packs and how they don’t howl when hunting. They just pick their moment and strike. Sometimes they howl. Howling’s like…I guess it’s a cheerleader thing…

I had made the mental jump to wolves in cheerleader skirts (Rrrrah! Rrrrah! Go team go!) when I felt that unmistakable twitchy-itchy sensation I get when a ghost is nearby.

“Guys? We’re on.”

Mike shooed Speedy off of his shoulders, and slipped off his backpack. He had carefully wrapped the liquor bottles in sweatshirts, and they didn’t even clink as he pulled two of them from the bag.

Let me tell you about ghosts and liquor.

Wait, no. I don’t really need to bother with this one. It’s self-explanatory. Loooong story short? Only the most powerful ghosts can travel through time. They’re the ones with ready access to future booze. The rest of us, both living and dead, have to take our alcohol as we find it.

I’ve yet to meet a ghost who’ll turn down a free drink.

Mike and I had picked up an assortment of Greek alcohol at the duty free shop. We’d gotten a sharp look from the clerks when they realized we were buying all of this stuff while traveling into the country, not out of it, but fuck ’em. Ghosts are territorial buggers. A bribe is more likely to work if it’s familiar, so wine and ouzo it was.

“Should we do this now?” Mike asked, looking down the trail.

“Yeah,” I said. Mike and I can tell fellow psychics at a glance: we’ve got this weird blue aura. It goes away after you make physical contact, shaking hands or whatever, but it’s great if you want to find strange psychics in a crowd.

Not that we ever did find other psychics, but I’ll get into that later.

(Listen, I’m sorry my life is complicated, okay? I’d explain everything to you at once if I could, but for the moment we should focus on how Mike and I wanted to get ancient Greek ghosts liquored up.)

Mike broke out the ouzo. I took the first drink.

I’d never had ouzo before. It was…uh…

It’s an acquired taste.

Mike waited patiently until I stopped choking: Speedy laughed his ass off.

“Well, that got their attention,” I said once I could talk.

“Two psychics and me?” Speedy said. “They knew we were here from the moment we hit the hill.”

He had a point. Ghosts are attracted to psychics, and there’s nobody, alive or dead, who doesn’t want to know the deal with the talking koala.

“Salud,” Mike said, toasting the invisible air around us.

“Wrong. Stin iyia mas,” Speedy corrected him.

“Stin iyia mas,” Mike and I parroted.

The ouzo was better the second time.

Then we put the bottle on the table, and waited.

Let me tell you about ghosts and memories.

A very few ghosts, like Ben, are super-powerful. They’re remembered. Everybody knows their name. Those memories are a source of energy, and these superghosts can use it to travel through time and whatnot.

But not everybody who dies was a legend. Most human beings are average schmucks just trying to survive. Four generations—at most!—and we’re just a blurry name on the back of a yellow photograph. The vast majority of ghosts don’t have enough energy to manifest.

There are motherfuckin’ ghosts everywhere, guys.

(Don’t freak out. Ghosts are like bacteria. Your body might be covered in invisible crawling things, but they don’t affect you unless you get a papercut or something. Same with ghosts. They aren’t invisible stalkers—they’ve got their own shit to do. [3])

We were trying to attract a powerful ghost. We figured if we got lucky, we’d get a philosopher or a scientist, somebody whose name was written down in an ancient text and remembered by resentful college students cramming for midterms.

If such a ghost showed up, it didn’t mean we’d be able to see them. Even for the best psychics, talking to the dead is a crapshoot. It’s simple physics. Strong ghost plus strong psychic? Conversation. Weak ghost plus shitty psychics? Zilch. Zero. Zip.

I’m really good with the dead, so if we got a strong ghost’s attention, I’d probably be able to talk to him.

If I could see him.

Which I couldn’t.

Not unless he picked up the bottle of ouzo to tell me exactly where he was, so I could focus on him.

Bribes are a time-honored method of communication between psychics and weaker ghosts. Some cultures refer to them as offerings, as in, “Hey, I offer you this bribe in exchange for favors.” It works mainly as a gesture of goodwill. As I said, ghosts have their own shit to do. A bottle of good ouzo proves we respect his time and want the conversation to be worthwhile for him.

(People, really! The absolute worst worst worst thing you can do when dealing with ghosts is think of them as the living’s little blue minions! They’re human beings, and they deserve respect. Also, they’re invisible human beings who can walk through walls—do not piss them off. If you’re lucky, the least they’ll do to you is hide the toilet paper.)

The bottle didn’t move.

We waited until the sun went down. Mike had brought a deck of cards, and we played poker. It was next to impossible to win, as we always dealt out four hands instead of three, and that fourth hand stayed flat on the stone.

No, I don’t know if long-dead Greek ghosts know how to play poker, but it never hurts to be polite.

Every fifteen minutes, I’d do that thing where I let my mind wander. Yup. There were still ghosts nearby. They just weren’t making themselves known.

“Fuck it,” I finally said. It was getting late, we were hungry, and the ruins looked savage after dark. Plus, the local kids would start turning up for their nightly hump-n-bump sessions. “We’re not getting anywhere.”

“Maybe we’re not wanted,” Mike said, gazing around at the broken marble stones.

“Or maybe they tried, and they’re not strong enough to lift the cards or the bottle. Or maybe it’s the culture problem and they can’t manifest to Americans. Or maybe…” I waved my hands uselessly and gave up. There were too many unknowns when dealing with ghosts.

We dumped everything into the backpack, checked to make sure our goon buddies were still lurking around (they were hiding behind some bushes, but the glow of their phones gave them away), and left the half-empty bottle of ouzo on top of the rock. Either the ghosts would spirit it away (hah), or the local kids would have a spectacular night.

We started down the nearest path. It wasn’t a hard walk, but it was dark, and Mike and I had to watch our footing. So we didn’t bother to look back the way we came until Speedy tapped Mike on the head and said, “Guys? The bottle.”

Mike and I turned around.

The bottle was gone.