“Go, go, go,” Dillon chanted. He’d herded the other ghosts — at least the ones he could touch — outside the door ahead of him, but Noah had stopped in the doorway. Why was he just standing there? They needed to leave!
Dillon started to form another text message to Grace, but before he could complete it, the pressure that he’d been fighting against began to ease off. He stumbled forward, almost falling on top of Joe. Nadira and Misam were beyond Joe, Mona with them.
Dillon glanced over his shoulder. Rose was holding a sobbing Sophia and she looked different. She’d never been a fader, but the pink of her sweater looked deeper, the gold of her hair brighter. She seemed denser, more solid, and almost glowing, as if she was lit from within.
Dillon stopped pushing away from them. No answering tug began drawing him back.
Nadira kept going, carrying Misam out into the street and down it. Dillon could see when she hit the edge of her range, because she leaned into the pull, bracing Misam’s head with one hand. It looked to him, though, to be about the usual distance that she could get away from Noah, not a response to the vortex.
“Are we okay? I can’t feel it anymore.” Joe had his arms extended, as if to shelter the others from the pull, but he let them drop to his sides.
“I think so,” Dillon replied. He looked back into the restaurant. The angry man was standing near Rose and Sophia, his mouth moving as if he were muttering his usual phrase. Some of the wisps and faders were also clustered around them. Chaupi was emerging from the kitchen, his expression mildly questioning, as if he had just noticed that something unusual was happening.
“You need to leave,” Grace repeated, clutching her phone.
Exhaling with relief, Dillon sent her another text.
Her phone chimed. Grace blinked at her screen. “Oh. Okay. Maybe not.”
“Okay?” Noah stared at her.
Still staring at her phone, she asked, “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Noah replied.
Grace’s gaze flickered to him, then returned to her phone.
She wasn’t asking about Noah, but about the ghosts, Dillon realized. She was waiting for him to answer. But he didn’t get a chance to send her a message before Joe grabbed his upper arm and hauled him out the door and into the street.
“We need to talk,” Joe said, towing him toward Nadira.
She’d turned to look back in their direction, but she wasn’t coming any closer. Her arms were wrapped around Misam, clutching him to her in a fierce hug. He wasn’t kicking to be let down, but his head was craned to look their way, too.
Mona turned to the glass window at the front of the restaurant. “Vinegar,” she said. “I can get rid of these smudges.” With frantic energy, she began polishing the window.
Dillon didn’t resist Joe’s pull, although he shot one last glance at Rose. She was patting Sophia’s back soothingly. Sophia’s sobs looked like they were slowing down, her body shuddering with gulping, shaky gasps.
“What was that?” Joe asked.
“How could Sophia open a gateway to Hell?” Nadira demanded as soon as they were close enough. “Is she a demon?”
“No, no.” Dillon shook his head. “I don’t think there’s any such thing as a demon. Or at least I’ve never met any.”
“Hell has demons,” Nadira said, her voice rising. “Pits of fire, scalding water, black smoke, burning wind. And demons!”
Dillon patted the air with his hands, fingers widespread, trying to soothe her. It would be just his luck if he upset her so much that she turned into a vortex ghost herself. “It’s not exactly hell then.”
“What exactly is it then?” Nadira asked, her dark eyes shooting daggers at him.
“It’s…” Dillon didn’t know where to start. He should have told the other ghosts about the vortex weeks ago. But it wasn’t something he liked thinking about. Every time he remembered Chesney’s ghost — the feeling of his energy, that grimy chemical burn enveloping him — he felt both guilty and revolted.
He’d hated Chesney, he really had. But he was pretty sure he’d destroyed Chesney’s soul and he didn’t much like having that on his conscience. Knowing that Chesney would have happily destroyed him and his parents didn’t make him feel any better about it.
“It’s what?” Nadira snapped.
“It’s another dimension, I think. An energy dimension. It’s not burning, but it’s…” Dillon bit his lip. He didn’t want to scare them. Or did he? They needed to be warned. “It’s very unpleasant,” he finally finished.
“Hell is more than unpleasant.” Nadira’s grip on Misam started to relax as if Dillon’s words were reassuring her.
“Yes.” Dillon sighed. “Akira used to think vortex ghosts destroyed other ghosts. But it’s not the ghosts so much as it is the energy. Too much spirit energy creates a hole that opens into…” Dillon spread his hands, searching for the right words. “It’s like an ocean. Of energy. It feels like chaos, but it’s a place of… of unbecoming.”
“Of unbecoming?” Joe repeated, inching closer to Nadira and Misam.
Dillon lifted his shoulder in a shrug, trying for a nonchalance that wouldn’t reveal his fear. “Maybe it’s the universe’s way of cleaning up leftover spirit energy. But we get sucked in and then, well, souls dissolve into nothingness there. Or get…” He swallowed. “Shredded.”
Should he tell them that he’d been the one doing the shredding? But if they got more upset, they’d create more energy, and the more energy they created, the more danger they’d be in.
Misam whimpered. “I don’t want to be shredded.”
“Nobody’s getting shredded,” Joe said. He and Nadira exchanged glances.
Dillon couldn’t tell from their expressions what they were thinking. Did they just not believe him? They’d felt the pull, the same as he had, but Noah had been dragging them around for years. Maybe the vortex hadn’t felt different enough for them to appreciate the danger. He didn’t want to frighten Misam, but he had to make them understand the risks.
“Ripped apart,” he said. “Broken down into component bits.”
He paused.
They didn’t say anything.
“Dead,” he added. “Really dead. Gone for good, no longer existing in any form. That kind of dead.”
Joe put a hand on Nadira’s shoulder. “Okay, that doesn’t sound good.”
Nadira snorted. Her grip on Misam had tightened again. “No. That sounds very bad.”
Dillon nodded. “You guys must never have gotten really angry at one another.”
“They argue all the time.” Misam wiggled to get free. Nadira set him down, but kept a careful grip on his hand. “All the time!”
Nadira glanced at Joe. He seemed to realize he was still touching her shoulder and removed his hand, stuffing it into his pocket self-consciously. Nadira’s lips twitched as if she didn’t know whether she wanted to smile or scowl.
“It’s not the same,” Dillon said. “My gran turned into a vortex ghost. When she died, she was... upset. Grieving and angry and lost. She couldn’t find me and she got stuck between the dimensions. And then later, I met this other ghost and he was threatening my mom. He made me mad.”
Dillon dropped his gaze, staring at the sidewalk. He’d known better. He’d been aware of the danger. But his feelings had overwhelmed him and he hadn’t been able to control them.
Softly, he said, “Despair is very powerful. And very dangerous.”
“Okay,” Joe said briskly. “No despair. Got it.”
“No despair,” Nadira agreed. She sniffed. “It is a great sin and I am not inclined to it, anyway. But if you have been to this other dimension, Dillon, why are you not—” She opened her fingers wide.
“Disintegrated,” Misam finished for her.
“I didn’t get trapped there,” Dillon said. “I started texting my mom and I sort of gradually faded back into this dimension.”
Nadira’s eyebrows shot up, her expression dubious. “So to save ourselves from this place that is not-quite-hell, we must learn to text?”
It was partly relief — that they believed him, that they weren’t asking harder questions, that Nadira was looking for solutions instead of getting upset — but Dillon gave a snort of laughter.
“I suppose. But it would be better not to wind up there. We need to find a doorway. The other kind of doorway.”
And they needed to find it soon. Dillon had wanted to help the other ghosts since the day he’d met them, but he hadn’t felt any urgency about it. They’d been trapped with Noah for years. What difference did another few weeks or months make?
But if a vortex was a build-up of spirit energy being discharged into another dimension, maybe Noah wasn’t responsible for the accumulation of ghosts around him. Maybe the ghosts were forming their own whirlpool of spirit energy — enough to attract other spirits, but not enough to break through into the energy dimension.
At least not until now.
And if that was the case, even if Rose had managed to save them for the moment, one more ghost — or one more burst of intense emotion — could become the tipping point, the last straw that plunged them all into the void.