“Fuck fuck fuck!” I tried to back out of the hole, but I was panicking and instead of staying down my body’s fight-or-flight mechanisms were telling me to stand and run and maybe murder. “Speedy! Minotaur! Minotaur!”

A set of claws dropped onto my bare calves. “Calm your tits, kitten,” Speedy rumbled in his deep voice. “Or you’re gonna experience some aggressive acupuncture.”

I took a deep breath, lowered myself flat, and squirmed backwards.

“What’s wrong? What happened?” Dina helped me to my feet and pressed a canteen into my hands.

I drank gratefully. Fifteen seconds of pure terror was dehydrating.

“It’s not a cave,” I said when I could breathe again. The panic wasn’t gone: I barely noticed that Keith had appeared, camera in hand.

Speedy rolled his eyes, snatched up the camp lantern, and walked into the hole before I could stop him. His head popped out again a moment later.

“Congratulations,” he said to me. “You found a second part of the city. Probably storage, and an escape route if they were attacked.”

“Okay,” I said. My heart was pounding hard enough that I could feel it in my knees. “Okay.”

“You knew that when you went in there,” he said, shaking his head at me.

I flipped him off and trudged away.

Okay.

Okay, apparently I had developed a mild phobia of minotaurs. Unfortunately, the ghost pirate was still coming, so I needed to put that first fear aside and focus on developing a second one.

Right.

Pirate, Hope. Focus on the pirate.

I dropped to the ground and slumped forward, hugging my knees.

I didn’t want to be here.

I wanted Mare to be awake, and safe.

I wanted the two of us to be back at the Bellagio—or better yet, back home in Washington.

I wanted things to make sense!

My fingers were running up and down my left arm, searching for a scar that was no longer there, but I could barely feel—

Oh. Shock. I was in mild shock. Everything was catching up with me, and—

I turned and drove my fist straight into one of the rocks.

“Gnaaaah!” I gasped, as the skin on my knuckles split open.

Fun doctor fact: you can’t snap out of shock. What you can do is add a new symptom for your body to manage, and it tends to prioritize physical injury above mental injury. Which makes sense, evolutionarily speaking, as it’s darned hard to process psychological trauma if the tiger has already eaten you. Pain is a hell of a motivator. So I wasn’t fixing my brain, just postponing the breakdown. Plus, gross weeping holes ruining my brand-new skin.

I lurched to my feet, pounding my bloody knuckles into my palm to keep the pain going

“Knife,” I said to Dina.

She slapped the combat knife into my hand. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Why were you screaming about a minotaur?”

“Bad dreams as a kid.” It was an autopilot answer. “Where’s the light?”

Dina pointed towards the black mouth of the tunnel. There was a tiny spark in its center, nearly swallowed by the dark.

I hopped up the rocks, shoved the combat knife through the belt loops on the back of my shorts, and dove headfirst into the tunnel.

Into the dark.

A little wiggling, and I was through.

The LED jogging light was lying in the center of the tunnel where I had left it. I took a deep breath, and picked it up. The light spilled from between my fingers, glinting off the blood on my hand.

“Ghosts are just people,” I whispered, as I shut my eyes. “There’s no such thing as monsters.”

Which was only half a lie, and only because that first sentence devoured the second and spat out its bones.

“Perp?”

There was movement to go along with the sound. The roadrunner zoomed up to me and inspected my ankles.

“I was wondering where you ran off to,” I said, and then I grabbed it by the neck.

Roadrunners are fast. Like, fast-fast. Much faster than any human. But no human is stupid enough to grab a roadrunner by the neck, because while the beak is a deadly weapon, those talons are little buzz saws. I, however, was using pain as a coping strategy, and I had decided the talons would be a big assist. The roadrunner never saw me coming.

It screeched and tried to wiggle loose, mostly by shoving those talons into my skin for leverage.

“Knock it off,” I told it.

The roadrunner’s feet slowed, then stopped. It left two talons stuck in my palm.

“I’m guessing you’re Team Coyote?”

The roadrunner blinked.

“Got a message for your boss. You ready?”

“…perp.”

I leaned in as close as I could, and whispered: “The kid and I are shit psychics. Neither of us have any training. If your boss wants entertainment, have him wake up the redhead with the long hair. Then the real game’ll start.”

I knelt and gently released the roadrunner. Its talons were still embedded in my hand; we spent a few awkward moments trying to detach them. Once we did, the roadrunner scampered to a safe distance and began to complain at me.

“Consider it payback for beaning me in the head,” I said.

The bird rolled its eyes, and disappeared.

Not ‘ran off,’ mind. Actually literally vanished.

That shook me. Most ghosts could teleport inanimate objects. Only the truly powerful ones could teleport a living creature, and there were always consequences. Ben did it with Speedy all the time, because Speedy wasn’t able to talk while he recovered, and omygod sometimes you just needed a break!^[44]

I squeezed my injured hand until blood splattered against the dry earth, and focused on how much it hurt.

“Huff?”

Goldie Hawn poked her head through the tunnel’s entrance.

“Hey,” I said. “You get everything sorted out?”

“Yeah,” came a deep muffled voice from behind her. Goldie Hawn’s lips curled over her fangs in surprise as Speedy shoved against her butt. “She’s not Hohokam.”

“Really?” I realized I had already written Goldie Hawn’s backstory in my mind. And that was…well, that was a pretty shitty thing to do.

Speedy finished pushing Goldie Hawn into the tunnel. “She predates the Hohokam by at least ten thousand years.”

If I had been drinking, I would have done the most marvelous spit take. “Really?!”

Goldie Hawn made a sound that could only be a chupacabra’s version of a chuckle.

“Yup,” Speedy said, as he put his paws on my legs for a lift. “She’s Clovis. One of the first cultures in North America to develop after the last Ice Age.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said to her.

“She’s going to teach me her language,” he said, shaking in delight, then added: “If we live through this.”

“Ah.” I turned towards the darkness in front of us, and began walking. It was easier to see when Goldie Hawn was there; she threw off more light than any other ghost I’d met.

“Goldie, why are you helping us?” I asked. “Not that I mind! I’m just curious.”

“That’s getting close to sacred ground,” Speedy said, as Goldie Hawn nodded. The blue glow she cast bobbed up and down in time with her head. “From what I can tell, she’s seen this scenario play out a lot over the millennia. She thinks it’s cruel.”

“I agree,” I said to her. “Thanks. And you’re fluent in English?”

Speedy laughed and swayed on my shoulders. He was almost woozy from joy. “She’s fluent in everything!”

Oh, joy. The super-genius linguist has found his prehistoric ghost of a dream girl. I could make a billion dollars on their odd-couple screenplay.

“Does she know how to fight Hawley and the rest of his crew?” I asked.

“She says that’s your job.”

I made a fist with my injured hand, and squeezed until I felt a fresh trickle of blood. “Why. Why me?”

“Psychics are nature’s way of maintaining the balance between the worlds of the living and the dead.”

I shook my head. “That sounds like what de Borromeo said. But I don’t know how to do that!”

“You kidding?” Speedy laughed and rubbed his head against mine, like a happy cat. “Kitten, the only thing you know how to do is beat some ass!”

Quick as I had grabbed the roadrunner, I reached up and seized Speedy by his scruff. I just wanted to shake him and shake him until—

I dropped him on the floor.

“Hey!” He took a swipe at my ankles with his claws. “What’s your problem?”

“Go back to Mare,” I said. “I’ll hold the tunnel.”

He shouted after me, but I couldn’t seem to hear him. There was a scrap of light ahead; the tunnel came out on the other side of the mountain, and the night sky was waiting. I kept walking towards that small scrap of open air.

Goldie Hawn came with me.

Through the tunnel, towards that little piece of sky.

Goldie Hawn poked her head out first, then gestured for me to follow. We came out of the mountain above a small valley. There was a ledge beneath our feet, but if there had ever been a path to this rear entrance, time and erosion had carried it away.

The air felt…wet?

I took a deep breath. Yes, the air was definitely wet. Everything seemed to be waiting, as if the entire world was about to explode.

I peeked over the side of the ledge.

Below?

Ghosts.

They had gathered by the foot of the mountain. There weren’t as many in this group as there had been in the one which had attacked de Borromeo. I counted twenty, maybe twenty-five, all of them waiting for that same unknown signal. They wore the illusion of their old clothing over their blue bones and what they had chosen to keep of their raw, broken flesh.

Hawley was there.

He was unmistakable. Taller than the others and dangerously thin. A sword with a slight curve to it, and a raggedy coat which floated around him. He was the center of the action; the other ghosts, pirates and cowboys and whatnot, kept looking to him for direction. He had that same quality of power which I had seen a hundred times in politicians, as if Heaven itself had blessed him with the ability to lead.^[45]

“How did his crew mutiny against him?” I wondered aloud.

Goldie Hawn growled something, which sounded very much like: “Starvation drove them to it.”

I wheeled around. “I understood you!” I said, delighted. “Human you!”

Her ears perked up, and she gave me a wide toothy grin.

The ghosts at the base of the mountain heard me, and roared.

I shut my eyes. “Oh, shit.”

Snarl-growl: “Whoops.”

I leaned over to see the ghosts bounding up the mountain in huge ground-eating strides. Up, up, each leap taking them straight up, up to where we were sitting—

I yanked out the combat knife. The belt loops shredded as it slid into my hand.

Up, up…

We could see their tattered flesh. The rust on their weapons. The bones poking out through the holes in their shoes. These ghosts had gone to great lengths to make themselves as terrifying as possible, and hot damn, it was working.

I stood and stretched out my toes in my boots. I couldn’t feel my own feet. They might as well be nothing but bones, too, for all that I could tell.

“I think I’m having a breakdown,” I said to Goldie Hawn. “Right now? Like, right now this second? I’m having a massive breakdown. These ghosts? They aren’t even really a thing. They’re just the latest thing. And the only reason I’ve got all of these bullshit things to manage is because I’m me.”

I stood and turned to face the ghosts.

“Well, I can’t fuckin’ stop being me.”

And then they were over the edge of the ledge, and the battle was on.

 

 

 

Chapter Thirty-One

 

Time stops.

The dead feel pain.

They can’t help it. It’s muscle memory; they remember they had muscles, so they remember that a knife sliding through those muscles hurts like hell. It’s temporary pain, gone as soon as they remember they’re dead. But it slows them down, and I move through the ghosts, putting that combat knife through a dozen different ribcages.

Gravity is my friend. Those ghosts might have all but flown up the side of the mountain, but when I throw them off of it, they plunge towards the ground. That’s what their memories think will happen, and they can’t break away from those memories long enough to remember they can walk on air.

I grab an arm; its owner is shocked into forgetting that its true body had rotted to pieces several centuries ago. I want to cause as much pain as possible; I break the elbow, and then rip the arm from its socket. The ghost screams, and I hurl both the ghost and its arm over the edge of the mountain.

They keep coming, pouring onto the narrow ledge as fast as they can. They stink of the grave; I notice that some of them are wearing actual clothing, not just illusions they’ve crafted as costumes.

I wonder how long they’ve been in this world as ghosts, and if any of them regret the decision to stay.

Goldie Hawn fights beside me. In the heart of the battle, I see her as she truly is; a young woman, her eyes shining with power. She keeps the swords and weapons from my body, moving in the wild steps of the same ancient martial art that de Borromeo had used on the pirates.

I begin to match her technique.

Low, sweeping thrusts to break their ankles. Upwards strikes which end with a knife to their unbeating hearts.

That twist of a hand which de Borromeo used to blow the pirates across the desert.

And (holy shit) it works!

Not at first. The first couple of times, I nearly lose my hand as I leave it hanging in midair. Goldie Hawn is there to pull me aside, to knock the swords and daggers and hatchets away. The ghosts keep coming.

But I work at it. It’s a peculiar twisting movement with a finger gesture which is rather like flipping the bird, so I start to shout: “Fuck off!” instead of the usual martial arts kiai, and the ghosts are blown from the mountain.

How am I doing it? I can’t tell. I’m definitely not doing it right. De Borromeo glowed like lightning and pushed, and her pirates disintegrated. Mine stay in one piece, unless I put in the effort to tear them apart with my bare hands. There’s just not enough of me and there’s too many of them, and then—

They’re gone.

As cautiously as I can, I peer over the edge. Spectral projectiles fly at my face.

Time starts again as I fall backwards.

“Shit!” I slammed against the rocky wall of the mountain, all but wrung dry. That quick glance had shown the ghosts regrouping, none the worse for wear.

I looked at Goldie Hawn. At least she was still a woman; my brain had finally been knocked out of monster mode.

“I can’t do what de Borromeo does,” I gasped. “That thing where she turns them to dust? Yeah, no. That’s not in my toolkit. All I can do is slow them down.

“Hi, by the way. You’re human.”

“Hello,” she said, smiling. Her true voice was as smooth as running water. “Can you keep going?”

“For a while, but eventually one of ’em will get lucky and I’ll get dead.” I was tired. My entire body was shaking. Nothing made sense except the fight…especially the part where I knew that no fight lasted forever, and I wouldn’t survive this one. I was outnumbered and outclassed on a truly supernatural scale.

“Retreat?” she asked.

I nodded. Goldie Hawn helped me to my feet. We fell back, out of the night and into the mountain.

If she hadn’t been dragging me along, I would have missed it. Instead, I nearly cracked my head on the pile of rocks which lined both sides of the opening. I dodged, and saw something we had missed on our way outside.

“Wait,” I said. “Look!”

We stopped. The rocks were much like the pile that Dina and I had moved inside the old city, with heavy boulders at the base. Except these? Some ancient engineer had put both stacks of stones on slopes, and had angled them towards the opening.

“Go,” I gestured towards the far pile. Goldie Hawn moved to press her back against the stones. I did the same to mine.

“On three!” I shouted. “One, two…”

A ghost in an old Stetson hat and a long rotting duster came through the entrance. It spotted me, and its mouth opened in a skeletal roar.

“Three!”

Goldie Hawn pushed. Her rocks moved easily and tumbled across the entrance. The cowboy cried out as the rocks pulverized the memory of his body.

Mine—

“C’mon,” I snarled, as I threw my weight against the rocks. “C’mon!”

There was a grinding noise as the rocks slid over each other, slowly…too slowly…

The dead cowboy had remembered it was already dead. It pulled itself from under Goldie Hawn’s rocks and turned towards me, its mouth open wide enough to swallow me in a single bite. Behind it were a knot of ghosts, howling for blood, fighting to get through what was left of the opening.

“C’mon!” I shouted, as the rocks finally tumbled over themselves. They crashed against the rocks from Goldie Hawn’s pile, stacking themselves high, blocking out the other ghosts. Even the cowboy got caught in them a second time. It gave me just enough time to shuffle over to our tiny landslide and shout, “Now, stay the hell out of my mountain!”

“Come.” Goldie Hawn slipped her arm beneath mine. “They’ll be able to move those rocks. We have to get your friends out of here.”

“Yeah.” I wanted to collapse on the ground and sleep for a year. Five years. A nice round decade. Instead, we retraced our steps through the mountain.

The glow that Goldie Hawn threw off as a chupacabra was muted when she was in human form. I had to strain to see through the gloom. The tunnel looked extremely labyrinthy…Nope. Breakdown Brain was having none of that. Instead of dwelling on past monsters, I heard myself say, “You can walk through walls, right?”

Goldie Hawn nodded. Her hair moved against my bare cheek. “Yes.”

“Or jump from one location to another?”

“Yes.”

I looked back over my shoulder. There were no ghosts behind us. Not yet. “So what’s going to keep them from walking through those rocks? Or jumping straight into the tunnel?”

“Tonight, barriers cannot be penetrated; they must be moved, and they cannot be moved by supernatural strength. They must be moved for the same reason they had to use the tunnel in the first place, as there are rules in effect,” she replied. “Your animal friend was right about that. Otherwise, this wouldn’t be a game.”

“Game.” I started to laugh. “Right. Best game ever. So much fun.”

Goldie Hawn began to laugh along with me. “Oh,” she sighed. “I hope you live through this.”

“Me, too,” I cackled. “You don’t want me hanging around your desert for the rest of eternity!”

She howled while laughing, chortling like a hyena. I joined in, even though it hurt to breathe.

“Hope?” Fish’s voice came from just ahead. “Do you need help?”

“Probably!”

Goldie Hawn began to howl again.

The harsh white glow of LEDs appeared, followed by the mouth of the tunnel. I went through first, pulling myself along the tunnel with my elbows. I squeezed through the little hole at the end, and came out in the main cavern.

“Jeeze!” Fish took in my battle damage with wide eyes. “What happened to you?”

“Ghosts don’t bleed. These ghosts are hella-dusty tho’. Great sense of theater, all things considered,” I groaned, as he helped me crawl down the stones to the floor of the cavern. “They’re coming. We’ve gotta seal this entrance.”

Fish shouted for help. Tellerman and the others came running, and, very slowly, the rock pile was rebuilt.

Not well, though. We didn’t have the raw power or the equipment to lift the biggest stones. I saw the small hundred-pounders go back up, and shivered. If Dana and I could move them, then two dozen dead men would have no problem.

Goldie Hawn had watched all of this in silence. When she was sure that we had done all that we could, she nodded to me. “You’ll be safe for a little while,” she said. “I must go and check on my friends.”

“Gotcha.” My heart sank a little. She had saved my life more times than I could count in that one battle. “I hope they’re okay.”

“I’ll return when I can,” she replied.

“Thanks for all you’ve done.”

She smiled at me, and slipped into her chupacabra form. She danced a few quick steps, as if happy to be back on four legs again, and turned to leave.

“Hey!” I whispered. When she turned back, I held up my right hand so I could wiggle my fingers at her. “One thing. If you see a ring anywhere out there, could you bring it back to me?”

Goldie Hawn nodded, and then ran towards the cavern’s entrance until she was nothing but a speck of blue against the night…and gone.

I was having suspicious thoughts about my missing ring. I had taken a couple of hard hits to the head today, but I was pretty sure I remembered seeing it while I was chasing the roadrunner. That ring couldn’t fall off.^[46] Someone had removed it. Which means that someone had known what it did, and that removing it would keep me from using it.

It wasn’t looking good for de Borromeo’s angry desert theory.

And then, the part I was dreading happened: Tellerman came over and sat beside me.

“I need to know what’s going on,” he said.

“No, you don’t.” I pressed my face into my knees. “And you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

“No.” I knew I had to get up and move around, or I’d stiffen up and be useless, but nothing seemed to work. Ah, shock.

“Hope—”

“I can’t tell you anything,” I said. “Need-to-know, only.”

“You look like death warmed over,” he began, and cut off only when I began to laugh. If I had sounded on edge when I was laughing along with Goldie Hawn, now I was a full-bore maniac.

“Hope,” he said. “We’re scared. You’ve got to help us.”

A bright flash of brilliant light swept over us, followed by a crash which shook the entire cavern. We all turned towards the rear tunnel; the stones we had piled against the opening were still standing. The front entrance? No, nothing. What—

The flash and the noise shook the cavern again. This time, water began to sprinkle through the ventilation holes in the roof.

“A thunderstorm,” Tellerman said, as he gave a relieved chuckle. He shook the tension from his body, and slumped over his knees. “Just a thunderstorm.”

A thunderstorm. That explained why I had caught the scent of water when Goldie Hawn and I were outside. We were far enough away from the vents that we’d stay dry, but it was yet another complication we didn’t need.

Well, it was a complication they didn’t need. I found myself utterly unimpressed by the rain. I wondered if the ghosts would mind if I stayed right here and sat out the storm.

Tellerman turned to me. “Hope?” he said. “C’mon. If this is really an Army exercise, you can tell me. I know how this kind of thing works.”

“Go away,” I whispered. It hurt to speak. My voice had broken on that last bout of insane laughter.

“What’d she say?” Keith came over, camera on his shoulder. He wasn’t looking at me, just the screen in front of him.

“Not now,” Tellerman told him.

“Yeah, not now,” I said. Or maybe I just thought I said it. In either case, Keith knelt beside us, and swung his camera around.

That great shiny glass eyeball stared right at me.

I balled up my fist and smashed it straight into the camera.

I knew it was wrong. I knew there was no coming back from it. You don’t hit, you don’t hurt, you don’t break!

I also knew I didn’t care.

The lens shattered, and the camera popped out of Keith’s hands to smash him in the face. I didn’t hear the sound of his nose breaking, but he howled with pain and dropped the ruined camera.

Dina and Oshea came running, and there was a lot of shouting. Oshea slid between me and Tellerman; Dina grabbed Keith by the shoulders and hauled him away from me.

Unnecessary. I didn’t want to hurt Tellerman. Or even Keith. All I cared about was that goddamned camera, and it was finally dead. I decided to kick it for good measure, and it spun across the cavern floor in circles, spewing a very satisfying amount of glass.

“Oh, hell.” Speedy was in my lap, checking my eyes with a flashlight. “Kitten? Don’t do this.”

It seemed like an excellent time to lay down on the cavern floor, and maybe rest for a while.

“Is she okay?” Dina asked Speedy.

“Obviously not!” he snapped. “She’s—”

Whatever he was about to say? It got stuck in his throat, as those phenomenal ears of his swiveled in the direction of the rock pile.

The rocks were beginning to move.

 

 

 

Chapter Thirty-Two

 

INT. CAVERN, NIGHT

 

The camera is stationary. There is picture, but the lens is damaged and the image is indistinct. Voices and shapes of Spooky Solutions team can be heard, along with those of KOALA and FISH. Two prone shapes that are not interacting with the others are HOPE and MARE.

 

KEITH (crosstalk): I think—I think that bitch broke my—

 

OSHEA (crosstalk): Can you blame her? You shoved—

 

DINA (crosstalk): —told you to stop, and you—

 

KEITH (crosstalk): —not gonna apologize for doing my job.

 

Sound of thunder in the background.

 

TELLERMAN: Keith, put it away. Just for a while, okay? Something happened to her when she was in that tunnel.

 

DINA: Is it the same thing that happened to Mare?

 

TELLERMAN: I don’t know.

 

HOPE kicks the camera away from her. The image spins. Some of the broken glass is removed and the picture improves.

 

KOALA: Gimme a flashlight.

 

KOALA shines a flashlight in HOPE’s eyes.

 

KOALA (to HOPE): Kitten? Don’t do this.

 

HOPE lies on the ground.

 

DINA (to KOALA): Is she okay?

 

KOALA (to DINA): Obviously not! She’s—

 

KOALA falls silent.

 

KOALA (quietly): Okay, everybody, get moving. Third building on the left is the most structurally sound. Let’s go.

 

TELLERMAN: What’s happening?

 

KOALA points towards the rock pile. The smallest rock slides off and falls to the ground.

 

KOALA (quietly): Pick up your stuff and move. Fast.

 

Movement as KEITH picks up the camera. The humans and KOALA move from the back of the cavern into a building. HOPE and MARE are carried. A large piece of old wood is propped against the opening to serve as a door.

 

KOALA (whispering): Turn off the lights.

 

The scene goes to extreme low light. The major source of illumination is lightning coming from overhead. A secondary source is a camping lantern left in the cavern.

 

There is a sound of large rocks falling, followed by a low strange-sounding howl.

 

FISH (whispering): Oh my god.

 

KOALA (whispering): Shut it.

 

FISH (whispering): But—

 

KOALA (whispering): I know. I hear him, too. Panicking won’t solve shit.

 

TELLERMAN (to KOALA): What’s happening?

 

KOALA: C’mon, fuckos, how many times do I have to say this is none of your business? You’re not helping. Just let it play out.

 

TELLERMAN (to KOALA): Hey, you—

 

HOPE (to TELLERMAN, quietly): Don’t touch him.

 

TELLERMAN (pausing): …

 

TELLERMAN (to KOALA): …sorry.

 

The howling noise is heard again.

 

KOALA (to FISH, whispering): …her.

 

FISH (loudly): What? No!

 

FISH (to KOALA, whispering): …last time…she was psychotic.

 

KOALA (to FISH, whispering): …better get your ass in…need her up and moving.

 

The howling noise is heard again. This time, it is much louder. Everyone falls silent.

 

A scratching sound comes from the makeshift door. Then, the door is torn away by an unseen force.

 

HOPE (leaping forward, knife drawn): Motherfucker!

 

 

 

Chapter Thirty-Three

 

Let’s back up about ninety seconds, right before it all went pear-shaped.

I had given up. I’d like to say that I was lying in a ball on the ground because I was weighing options, figuring out the best course of action, and all that snazz. Nope. As soon as those rocks began to move, Shock-Me decided it was over and we were done.

It was actually comforting. If I had known how de Borromeo had sacrificed herself to defeat Hawley, I might have dug up enough energy to try it. Since I didn’t, and since we were all going to die anyhow, it was nice to lie back and watch everyone else freak out for a change.

I wished Hawley would stop howling, though.

I knew it was him. How? I don’t know—I suppose the barriers I had slapped up around my brain had finally fallen down. I knew that he was alone, that he had left his minions outside, and that he was the only one who had enough strength to enter the mountain. Goldie Hawn and I had managed to do that much, at least.

The howl moved up and down four different octaves at once. Eerie? Yes. Annoying? Definitely.

Speedy prodded me onto my feet. Tellerman and Dina each took one of my arms and carried me between them. Fish cradled Mare against his chest as if she was a delicate flower. We shuffled from the back of the cavern into the ancient city. The building Speedy had picked had an old piece of wood stacked against the opening where a door should be. We moved this, slipped inside, and tugged it shut behind us.

I hadn’t given much thought to the interior of the buildings. All I could think was that there were eight of us, and the single room was extremely tight.

Speedy pushed me over to the corner of the room, next to Fish and Mare. I slumped down and used her lap as a pillow.

“Hope?” Fish was close to begging. “C’mon. You’ve got to do something.”

I thought about reminding him that I had done something—hell, I’d done everything!—but spending my last few minutes in a shouting match was meaningless. Besides, we’d all be dead soon, and then I’d probably have to fight Hawley anyhow. Might as well enjoy the peace while I could.

Speedy seized the hand I had bashed open on the rock, and held it out to Fish. “Fix her.”

“What?” Fish drew away from us. “No! You shoulda seen her last time—she was psychotic.”

“Can you fight these ghosts?” Speedy hissed. “Because if you can, you better get your ass in gear, since you’ve already forced her to do the heavy lifting. And if you can’t? Then we need her up and moving.”

“She’ll crash again,” Fish said, but he took my hand anyway. His skin was cold, as if he was already readying himself for the grave.

“A lot can happen in fifteen minutes,” Speedy said. “We both know what happens if she’s still lying here when Hawley finds us.”

Fish nodded, and shut his eyes.

This time, the pain was minimal. Honestly, it was more intrusive than painful; I could feel the tiny creeping sensations of cells showing, growing, stretching…

That eerie howling stopped.

Mike always said that psychics dealt with the living and the dead. Nothing inanimate. Nothing that didn’t contain that intangible flicker of stardust which made us…more. But as Fish forced my cells to hurry on their natural path, I thought I could feel…more. The desert was (blue mist began to move into the room) starting to change, starting to drink (a ghostly chuckle) in the rain, and the rain (long blue fingers, long blue bony fingers, long blue bony fingers scratching at the makeshift door) was calling the land awake.

Hawley tore the door away and swept into the room in a maelstrom of ruined blue.

Oshea screamed.

Hawley went straight for her, those long blue fingers reaching for her throat—

I was there to meet him.

I drove the combat knife straight into the hollows of his rib cage, right where his heart should be. I pulled the knife out, and then drove it in again and again.

I think I was howling.

A flash of surprise moved across Hawley’s empty eye sockets. In that moment, I saw him as he truly was, a man not much older than myself, wracked by a genetic disorder and the better part of a lifetime spent at sea.

Did I feel pity? I can’t remember. Probably not. At that moment, I was nothing but adrenaline-fueled rage.

Hawley fell backwards, out of the room and into the city. I kept after him, attacking with the knife, with my hands, with my feet, driving him back, back—

Hawley seized the knife.

He had waited until I had stuck it between his ribs again, and then clapped his bony hands across my own, trapping the knife—and me—against him.

He opened his mouth as wide as he could, all teeth, all stench, all death, and leaned in as if he wanted to swallow me whole.

Pro tip: never, ever trap the hands of someone who’s sunk several decades into practicing judo.

I spun sideways and went straight into a modified Tai otoshi…a body drop. I spun, stuck a leg out, and sent the ghost over my hip and straight into the ground, head-first. There was an incredibly satisfying crunch! as the back of his bare skull cracked against the ground.

Hawley groaned.

My hands were free: I reclaimed the knife, but instead of more stabbing, I decided to start stomping Hawley’s face into the dirt instead. Some distant part of my mind noted that since the face(ish) part of his head was pointing up, that would take a little additional effort.

Well, might as well get started. Not like he had much actual facematter to work with, anyhow.

“Kitten.”

*stomp*

*stomp*

*stomp*

“Kitten!”

*stomp*

*stomp*

*stomp*

“Kitten!”

I stopped, blinked a few times, and realized Speedy was standing beside the puddle of Hawley’s ghost.

“Kitten, you gotta move.”

The words swooped around my brain, bats looking for a place to roost.

“C’mon.” He put his head against my legs and shoved. “Move.”

Hawley groaned.

“Move!” Speedy shouted, swiping at me with his claws, and I finally understood. I grabbed him around his pudgy stomach, tucked him under my arm, and began to run.

I glanced over my shoulder. Behind us, Hawley began to drag himself across the ground. Slowly at first, one hand after the other, as if he were in agonizing pain. Then, he started to shake the pain off, his skull began to round itself out, his hands began to move faster and faster…

He stopped, and turned towards the open doorway of the building which sheltered our friends.

I screeched to a halt. “Hey!”

Hawley chuckled, his body flowing back into its original unstomped form. He moved towards the others, clawed fingers reaching out—

Oh, shit.

How do you get a pirate’s attention?

On my best day, my headspace is populated with rabid bees. On a day when I needed to find a way to keep a zombie pirate away from my friends? Those bees did advanced zombie pirate calculus. The answer was inevitable, really: there’s only one surefire way to get a dead pirate’s attention.

“Hey!” I shouted again. “I know where your ship is!”

That got his attention.

Hawley whipped towards me in a cloud of blue, his mouth hanging open in a skull’s silent scream.

“And I know where your treasure is, too!”

The pirate charged.

“Go go go!” Speedy shouted.

I was already gone.

Speedy and I raced through the city.

I made the mistake of looking over my shoulder again. Whatever rules were in effect, Hawley had decided they no longer applied to him. Not when his treasure was threatened. He was flying towards us at an inhuman speed, roaring, ready to tear us to pieces with those claw-like fingers.

I was still holding Speedy like a football, with his head pointed behind us and his butt leading the way. His little tail began to twitch in earnest. “C’mon, kitten!” he shouted, as Hawley reached for his eyes. “Pick it up!”

We crossed from the cavern into the night as the storm broke open. The light rain turned blinding; we were soaked to the skin within seconds. It slowed me down; the old road was in terrible shape, and we were on a cliff. One misplaced foot would result in a short, slippery scream.

Hawley didn’t have to deal with anything as mundane as feet. He kept coming, still howling, still stretching out those claws of his towards Speedy’s face…

A streak of blue darted across the rocks and plowed straight into Hawley.

Speedy began to laugh.

Another blue streak flashed across the rocks, followed by another, and then another. Too many to count. Too fast to make out any details.

“What’s happening?” I shouted through the rain.

“Reinforcements!” he cried.

I slowed down long enough to find a safe place to descend a washed-out section of road. Hawley was screaming beneath the pack of chupacabras.

“Damn,” I said, impressed, as the chupacabras started to pick him apart. Today was the first time I had seen ghosts fighting against ghosts,^[47] and they were definitely doing damage to each other.

“Keep running,” Speedy snapped. “They can’t hold him for long.”

He was right. Hawley had taken a page from de Borromeo’s playbook, and was lashing out left and right with his long hooked fingers. When these jabbed into a chupacabra, the poor ghost dissolved into blue motes of dust.

“We gotta help them,” I said.

“Don’t stop.” A familiar honeyed voice came from beside me. “They are buying you time.”

I turned to see Goldie Hawn in her human form, holding onto the cliff face beside me. “Is he…what’s he doing to them?”

“It takes a great deal of energy to manifest in this world,” she said, as she held out her hand to help me over a spot where the road was flooding. “He is dispelling this energy. They are unharmed, but it will take time for them to recover.”

Speedy wriggled out from beneath my arm and climbed up to my shoulders. He draped himself over my head and turned his arms into a furry hat brim to keep the rain off of my face. “Where do we go?” he asked her.

“To de Borromeo,” Goldie Hawn replied, and pointed in the direction of the pirate ship. “She will bind him within his prison again, but you must bring him to her. She has lost much of her own strength tonight.”

“Right,” I said. Above us, Hawley had his fingers deep in the chest of a large chupacabra. The poor soul screamed once before it was torn apart in a cloud of dust motes. “What about Hawley’s crew?”

Goldie Hawn looked me straight in the eyes. “Be smarter and faster than they are.”

There was nothing else to say, so I took a deep breath, and leapt into the storm.

Down the mountain, wet from rain, my feet sliding out beneath me so I slid halfway down on my ass.

Down to where the desert floor began, water starting to puddle and creep, the ground still too dry to soak it up.

Towards the ruins of the old caravel, lost beneath the earth.

Speedy hunkered down as best he could. I wasn’t wearing his jogging harness, and I was keenly aware of his claws digging into my shoulders. It didn’t hurt.

Nothing hurt.

Was I still in shock? Maybe. But we had reached the point where the adrenaline rush from Fish’s miniature healing job had burned itself out, and I didn’t feel any different. No crash, no burn. No feeling.

No, wait. I wasn’t numb. Not anymore.

For athletes, there’s a zone called a runner’s high, where emotions smooth themselves out and pain becomes an afterthought. I had never found it before—I’ve run marathons and the ol’ bee-brain keeps buzzing the entire time. In spite of the rain, despite the ghosts, I felt…

What did I feel?

I felt the desert around me. It had come fully awake as it welcomed the rain. The water moved into the cracks within its broken earth, into its nooks and crannies, beginning to fill the soil with enough moisture to sustain it for another year, for another decade, maybe, for the seeds lying dormant within the ground to come alive, for the plants to drink and drink and drink until each individual cell of their bodies was full to bursting.

I felt the sky above me, and somehow just knew this storm was a wild creature caught in a trap. It didn’t belong here; it was supposed to be five hundred miles to the west. It had been lured here. The desert hadn’t earned it!

The storm wept. It wanted to punish this greedy, thirsty land.

I felt like crying, too.

What else did I feel?

For once, I didn’t feel the eyes of the world on me. It was me and Speedy, and nobody else. Maybe a ghost or two knew where we were.

Maybe Coyote.

No one else.

It was exhilarating, to be here, to be alone. Finally. Finally! Privacy!

But…

But we had no backup; we had no safety net; we had no one and nothing to help us.

Maybe privacy was a tradeoff. Maybe the bigger the problems, the more you needed help to solve them. And all of my current problems were layered on top of each other, where a pirate and a desert and a trickster god were tangled up together, and it was up to me and a koala to find a way to pull it all apart.

Be careful what you wish for, I thought, and began to laugh. Just a little, at first, a small chuckle which soon built to a wide, warm laugh which stretched out through the cold rains. It was all just so funny!

What else did I feel?

There was an angry storm all around us, and a thirst-starved desert beneath us. The one was nourishing the other. It wasn’t fair, but what was fair for a storm, or for a desert? They might be full of life and death, but neither of them could reason. The storm raged its denial of the natural order, while the desert took advantage of the opportunity.

Me?

I was a human being. I wasn’t trapped. I wasn’t stuck in one place.

I lived. I learned. I could change.

I felt free.

The brief flashes of lightning came faster now, one right after the other. I thought about asking Speedy what would happen if the lightning touched down near enough to electrify the puddles, then decided against it. There was nothing I could do to change that, except get out of the water as fast as I could. The water was up to my ankles, but the ground was finally beginning to soften up. It’d become mud soon enough, and that’d bring with it a new set of problems. For now, it was firm enough.

“You okay?” Speedy’s voice was a slow undercurrent beneath the storm.

I mulled over what he had asked, long enough for him to repeat himself. “Yeah,” I replied.

“You sure?”

“No. It’s a process.”

That’s when the first of Hawley’s zombie-looking minions swung up from his hiding place behind a large boulder. I recognized him from the fight on the mountain; he had branded himself with the memories of an axe and a long knife, both razor-sharp. He never got close enough to use them: I did that little hand twist with the “Fuck off!” command, and he soared across the desert.

“You’re getting good at that,” Speedy muttered. “Keep an eye out. There’ll be more of them.”

He was right…and also wrong. I had expected to be attacked by the two dozen ghosts from the mountain, maybe accompanied by a bunch of those who had been in that first direct assault on de Borromeo. Instead, maybe a handful of ghosts popped up, their weapons at the ready, and never more than one at a time. These were easy to throw aside, and they didn’t come back once they were gone.

Speedy stood tall, and used my hair as his handholds to move around.

Rain began to fall in my eyes again. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Something’s wrong,” he said. “There should be more of those guys. And where’s Hawley? He coulda caught up to us by now, easy.”

I slowed but couldn’t stop; the mud was starting to suck at my feet. “Think we should go back to the city?”

“No,” he said, veeeery cautiously, as if he wasn’t sure.

“Speedy—”

“I know it’s a gamble!” he snapped. “But I’m almost positive that Hawley’s already waiting for us by his ship.”

“What?” I began to pick up speed again. By now, the water was cascading towards the low places, and I was fighting to keep my footing. “Why?”

“Because he’s a fucking pirate, kitten.”

“More details.”

Speedy sighed. “Because he’s a fucking pirate who’s just received a massive power-up from reality television. He’s going to try to do something with that power.”

That made sense. Even if Hawley hadn’t gotten his hands on a boatload of pearls, there might have been some treasure in his ship. You couldn’t take it with you, after all.

And then it was just one more hill between us and the ship. A single little hill, up and over. It’d be nothing if the ground was dry; between the rain and the mud, I had to fight my way up to the top on my hands and knees.

De Borromeo was waiting at the top. She was lying flat against the hill, as low as she could get and still peer over the top.

“Hey,” I said, as I flailed my way towards her. The rain was going cold; the mud was beginning to suck the warmth out of me. “Glad you’re all right.” When she didn’t reply, I added, “…you are all right, right?”

“I am well,” she replied, her attention fixed on something on the other side of the hill. “For the moment.”

“What do you…” I trailed off as I finally reached her, and could see what was on the other side of the hill. “Oh.”

Down in the hollow where Hawley’s ship had been entombed? Ghosts. Lots of them. All of them, at least all of the ones who had made it through the night intact. Hawley was at their center. Their attention was on the water gathering within the center of the hollow.

“We’re too late,” de Borromeo said. “He seeks to escape the desert and return to the sea.”

“Ooooo-kay,” I said, as I squinted through the curtain of pouring rain. “Can we do anything?”

De Borromeo shook her head. “This is now beyond our ability to stop. We can only bear witness.”

“Ominous,” I muttered, as Speedy and I settled ourselves in the mud beside her.

There was a ghostly shimmer beneath the water. It was larger than any other ghost I’d seen, and had an unnatural shape. It stayed just out of sight, its form blending at the point where the desert floor met the water.

Hawley appeared to be furious. He would seize any ghost foolish enough to get within arm’s reach, and plunge them into the water. Those unfortunate ghosts would scream as they dissolved into blue motes, which were in turn swallowed by the blue shape beneath the water. The rest of the ghosts joined hands and focused every bit of their spare power at that shape.

It wasn’t enough, so Hawley began to call down lightning.

He walked into the center of the hollow, where the water was deepest and glowed the brightest. He shouted and raged at the storm, and as he did this, he stretched his too-long arms up, up, up towards the churning sky.

Lightning struck him, casting him in an aura of blue so bright that I had to turn away. When my vision cleared, I saw Hawley with his arms deep in the water, cramming one-point-twenty-one gigawatts of energy into the ghost which lay trapped beneath the water.

Slowly…so slowly!...a woman made from a hundred different hues of blue began to emerge. It was a ghost; that was clear enough. But it was also lifeless, as if it had been carved from stone…or wood. More of the woman broke free, and—

Hang on, she had a tail?

Then, before I could figure out where Hawley got his hands on a mermaid, there was a great rush of blue as the rest of the ghost pulled itself from its tomb within the desert.

Hawley’s ship—the spirit of Hawley’s ship—floated upon the rising water.

Speedy shook his head and sighed. “Bingo.”

 

 

 

Chapter Thirty-Four

 

“That’s a thing you don’t see every day,” my mouth said on its own.

“I haven’t seen that in four hundred years.” De Borromeo’s mouth was operating independently of her good sense, too.

“I guess…” I had no idea how to process the concept of a literal ghost ship, let alone the concept of how to fight one, so I let my mouth have total control. “I guess those old sailors were right about ships having souls.”

That was either the absolute right or absolute wrong thing to say, as de Borromeo snapped out of her stupor. “Only human beings have souls, Hope Blackwell!” she whispered angrily. “God did not waste His precious gifts upon animals, vegetables, or such things as ships.”

I snuck a quick side-eye at Speedy. As he didn’t appear ready to rise up and stab the nun, I guessed he was still unable to see or hear her. “Let’s table theology for the moment,” I said, and pointed at the ship. “What do we do about that?!”

“I don’t know,” de Borromeo admitted.

“Speedy?”

“Thinking,” he said. His attention was fixed on Hawley. The pirate captain had climbed aboard the ghostly ship, and was encouraging his crew to board. None of them appeared especially interested in being the first one to join Hawley.

“They mutinied against him once,” I said.

Speedy nodded. “Yeah, but I’m not watching them,” he replied. “Watch the ship.”

The ship kept trying to rise into the air. It didn’t get very far. After a couple of inches, it shuddered and dropped back into the water.

“How do you fight a ghost?” Speedy asked. When de Borromeo opened her mouth to answer, he snapped, “Not you. Hope.”

“Wait, you can see her?”

“Of course not,” he snarled. “She’s not a juiced-up monster. Kitten, tell me how you fight ghosts.”

“You hit them as hard as you can,” I replied.

“Why?”

“Because they remember pain.”

“Exactly. Ghosts can be anything, go anywhere, but it takes an act of will. It’s easier to put on a chupacabra costume than forget you can’t feel pain.” He nodded towards the ship. “That thing’s got no mind of its own. It’s a boat. It goes where the water goes.”

“That’s good,” I said. Hawley was whipping the boat with a lash made from a thickly braided string of blue. The boat shuddered, and lifted itself from the water again. It made it a little further before it splashed down with a slow groan. “Gonna make it hard to sail that thing all the way to the Pacific Ocean," I said, grinning.

“Child, do you think this is over?” De Borromeo turned the full force of her nun glare on me. “Hawley is too strong for me to put back in his tomb. He will feed the strength of those who are lost in the desert to his ship until it bends to his will.”

Ah. That was a problem. Hawley’s boat might never be able to fly, but he probably thought it was a matter of inadequate fuel. Wholesale murdertimes would soon commence in the Sonoran Desert.

I shook my head. Water sloughed off and went flying, but it didn’t make a difference. Everything was cold and wet and nasty, and I was slowly sinking in mud. If we hadn’t been lying on top of a small hill, Speedy and I might have been in danger of being swept off of our feet, or worse. I glanced up at the storm, which showed no signs of breaking; around us, there were signs that this was about to turn into a spectacular hundred-year flood. The situation wasn’t going to improve.

“All right,” I said. “What do we do?”

De Borromeo turned her eyes towards the sky. “We pray.”

“Hold that thought,” I said, as I pulled Speedy from the mud with a schloorp-ing sound, and hauled the two of us through the mud on all fours. Once we were out of smiting range from the nun, I plopped him on a flat rock. “Any ideas?”

“That boat,” he said, jabbing a claw towards the ghostly ship. “It’s a hell of a liability. If Hawley was thinking clearly, he’d see that. It’s gonna drain all of his power until he gives up on it.”

I nodded. Habitual thought: ghosts feel pain because they think they must. Hawley has his ship again, because he thinks he should. If we took the ship from him… Well. Hawley looked the same as always (horrible, drooping skin hanging in ruins from his face with bits of bone sticking through, yuck and double yuck), but there were waves of exhaustion coming from him. He had poured most of the energy he had gotten from Spooky Solutions into his ship. Take out the ship, seriously cripple the Big Bad. Then, de Borromeo could plant him back in the dirt.

I grinned. “I’ve always wanted a good swashbuckling on a pirate ship.”

“Talk to your husband about that,” Speedy said, as his gaze darted over the boat. “How do we get up there?”

“No idea.”

“Can you jump it?”

I didn’t need to eyeball the distance from the top of the small hill to the ship in the bottom of the hollow. “Hell no! Not even if I hadn’t burned myself out on this day-long marathon.”

It was true: over the past twenty-four hours, all I had done was run. I was really feeling it, too. There wasn’t much left in the tank. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I had just been running, but I’d been running in extreme heat, followed by slogging through monsoon season. In the middle, there had been not one, but two, shocks to my system which had literally changed my physical makeup. I was going to crash—probably very soon—and nothing other than rest and calories would be able to get me up again.

In fact, this mud? This extremely cold mud I was lying in right now? It was astonishingly comfortable.

Ah, yes, the desert’s version of hypothermia. At least I wasn’t far enough gone to not recognize the symptoms.

“C’mon,” I said, as I shook myself. Speedy dragged himself up to my shoulders, and I squelched our way back to de Borromeo. She appeared to be deep in prayer; I wasn’t sure how to proceed.

Even if he could see her, Speedy has zero hangups. “How do we get aboard that pirate ship?” he snapped.

De Borromeo didn’t open her eyes. “Pray, small animal.”

I wasn’t going to translate that. “She doesn’t know, either.”

“Yeah, well—” Speedy paused, and then snapped: “Get down!”

I fell face-first into the mud, with Speedy burrowing beside me like a chubby big-eared otter. De Borromeo vanished. For a moment, I thought Speedy was punking me. Then, wind. Strong enough to cut through the rain, strong enough for me to feel it through the thick layer of mud caked across my body. But not moving fast. Just strong, as if it had been displaced by an enormous moving—

I turned my head to see Hawley’s ship rising out of the hollow. Hawley was standing on the prow,^[48] his arms held aloft as if he was moving the ship by his will alone. Which, y’know, was most likely the case.

“How’d he convince the ship it wasn’t a ship?” I asked.

Speedy ignored the question, and pointed towards the underside of the ship where a series of ropes were slowly waving in the wind. Some of them resembled ladders. These were dangling juuuust overhead…

“Right,” I said, and tucked Speedy under my arm in a football carry.

“Um, kitten—”

“You got us into this,” I reminded him. “There’s no way in hell you’re sitting this one out.”

“Fine.” He squirmed out of my grip and climbed up to my shoulders, and then locked his paws around my neck. “Go.”

I went.

There was a rope not too far from us. Thick, twisty rope, made from the memory of plants. As the ship passed over our heads, I grabbed that rope and gave it a little tug. When it stayed firm in my hands, I started to haul us up, hand over hand.

“Keep us under the boat,” Speedy whispered.

I would have told him that yes, I was trying to do that exact thing, thank you so much! but it was too much effort. Instead, I kept climbing.

If you’ve ever had to climb a rope, chances are it was tied to a gymnasium ceiling. That’s never been a problem for me. Used to do it all the time at martial arts camps. Hell, once I did it on a dare, and spent an entire night clinging to the rafters after the rope broke.^[49]

Never climbed one that whipped around in a blackout rainstorm while I climbed, tho’.

Hands on the rope, hold, step-lock with the feet, stand, move hands up, hold, lift knees, step-lock… Over and over again, as quickly as I could, I hauled us up the rope. My arms and legs were sore, and my hands with their brand-new callous-free skin? Screaming. And every couple of minutes, the boat crashed down in the desert, and we were all stuck in the mud again until Hawley whipped his ship back up into the storm.

“On your nine,” Speedy whispered.

I glanced to my left. There were a second set of ropes, of the ladder-like variety. I tucked my legs tight, and used my weight to build us a little extra momentum. After a few decent swings, we were close enough to make the switch.

Up.

We reached the side of the boat, and then there was the added stability of the (not really) wood against my feet as I climbed. I searched for a porthole or a window or something, a way to get inside without charging the pirates head-on… Nope. No luck.

“We’re gonna have to climb all the way up to the deck,” I whispered.

Speedy grunted. “That’s a great way to walk straight into an ambush.”

I started giggling. “Hey,” I snickered. “Hey, you remember your history?”

“Volumes more of it than you do,” he replied. “You thinking Blackbeard?”

“Yeah, but we don’t have any fire.”

He reached out and swiped a pawful of mud from where it had stuck to the side of the boat. “We’ll work with what we’ve got.”

Picture it.

The Sonoran Desert.

Night.

The kind of hundred-year storm you saw maybe once in your lifetime, and only a few times since you died.

You’re a ghost. You were a pirate—in your mind, maybe you still are a pirate, which makes you a pirate even during what should be your eternal retirement. And your boss is something of a shouty dick who’s threatening to feed you to his boat. You’re already having a crappy night, so when the swamp monster climbs over the side of your ship, roaring profanities in multiple languages?

You decide you are done.

As we leapt over the railing, Speedy held onto my head with his back claws and let fly with his strongest squeaky-toy bellow, waving his forearms and wiggling his ears. Out of the twenty pirates left? Four of them straight-up jumped over the side, right then and there.

Hawley didn’t budge. He stood there, standing tall on the prow,^[50] arms extended and unmoving, a statue as unmoving as the mermaid on the…prow.^[51]

Fine, whatever. I charged the nearest pirate. No, I’m wrong: I charged the nearest cowboy—my old buddy in the beat-up Stetson. When I got within throwing distance, I took out his legs and hurled him at the deck as hard as I could.

Then, something extremely strange happened: Stetson expected to hit the deck, but the deck wasn’t expecting to be hit! Stetson’s face met the deck…and got stuck there, his skin smashed into the wood, blurring into the same featureless blue energy. Small tendrils of blue reached up from the deck and began to peel Stetson's body apart, very carefully, as if ripping off snack-sized pieces made him all the more delicious.

Stetson began to scream. It was muffled, and I couldn’t make out any words, but his hands clawed at the wood decking around him. His frantic scrabbling slowed, and then stopped, and he started to sink into the deck as the ship began to digest him.

“Well, that’s utterly horrible,” I muttered to myself, even as I grabbed another ghost and slammed him into the tall wooden mast. The mast shuddered, but this time the ship seemed to welcome the meal; the ghost couldn’t even muster the energy to scream before the ship absorbed the ghost into itself.

Speedy paused in his multilinguistic bellow-barrage long enough to growl, “You’re feeding it.”

“Gimme another option!” I snapped. The odds were still against us, even though another couple of ghosts had seen what had befallen their pals, and had jumped ship. The remaining ghosts were decidedly terrified; the freakish mud-monster had weaponized their transportation.

Except we weren’t much of a mud-monster. Not anymore. The rain kept pounding down, and Speedy and I were losing our camouflage. We were quickly transforming from a creature out of legend to a filthy woman with a talking koala standing on her head. I was worried until I realized that the pirates couldn’t seem to process this, either: we might have lost the element of surprise, but we had definitely gained the element of weird.

Besides, the boat had finally learned that ghosts were easy pickings. Any ghost unfortunate enough to be touching the ship was slowly, sneakily, drawn down into the spectral mass of the ship itself. By the time the ghost had realized that the ship had started to suck at their energy, their feet had already been dissolved to their ankles. The ghosts were panicking—a couple of them remembered they could sacrifice their own feet without any true harm coming to them, and they would fly away from the ship in a flash of blue. Most were caught in the trap of their own minds, and they went down, down, into the hungry gullet of the ship, screaming.

I lunged at one of the remaining ghosts; he tripped and fell against the deck, and even that small contact was enough to awaken the ship’s appetite. The boat sucked at his hands and feet, drawing him down, down, dissolving him into nothing but an echoing scream.

“We’re coming for yoooou!” Speedy howled, reaching out for those last few ghosts, his claws fully extended and his mouth open to show his fierce eucalyptus chompers.

Those ghosts fell into bedlam. Absolute panicked bedlam. They soared up and away to escape the ship, as fast as they could, crashing into each other, casting each other down towards the ship as they went. It wasn’t like that old joke about being faster than your buddy to escape the bear, tho’: when a carnivorous ship was coming for you, it could eat the slowest ghost and the fastest ghost at the same damned time.

It was terrifying to watch. So terrifying that I almost didn’t notice the slow tugging at my boots—

I leapt straight up in the air, fast enough to get a shout from Speedy. The ship, unable to digest leather, wagged a dozen long tendrils at me as if to tell me to settle down and become edible.

“Knock it off!” I snapped, hopping back and forth on my feet so those tendrils couldn’t latch on and feed. After a moment, the tendrils sulked back into the body of the ship, as if they were disobedient puppies I had smacked with a rolled-up newspaper.

Speedy tapped me on my shoulder. “Kitten,” he said. “Problem.”

Hawley was still standing on the prow,^[52] still deep in his statue impression. He was watching us, a grin plastered across his face that had nothing to do with how his lower jaw broke straight through his skin.

I took a fast inventory of the ship. All of the remaining ghosts were gone; they had either fled or been eaten. “Whatcha thinkin’, Smiles?” I shouted at Hawley. “You and your monster boat here are the only ones left!”

“Don’t taunt the pirate,” Speedy muttered.

“Let me have a little fun,” I retorted.

“Fun?” The koala eased himself down from my head to his perch on my shoulders. “Look at him.”

I didn’t know what Speedy meant. Not until I put aside the idea that Hawley was a pirate.

No. He had been a pirate. Now he was a ghost, and we had managed to cheat our way through a successful whupping of his minions.

So why was he just…

…standing…

…there…

“Oh, shit,” I whispered, as I finally saw past his illusion. It was minor. Extremely minor. Probably because Hawley didn’t want to spend the energy to make it last past a couple of strong blinks. But he had no feet. His legs ended just above his ankles, the rest of him blending into the deck of the ship. Unlike the others, tho…

“Oh, shit,” I said again.

Hawley wasn’t being slowly digested.

He was already part of the ship.

 

 

 

Chapter Thirty-Five

 

“Can you see that?” I asked Speedy. “The real Hawley?”

“Don’t have to,” he said, as he pointed at Hawley. “Dumb-ass boat couldn’t so much as float six inches above the water, and all of a sudden it’s soaring and gobbling up the undead on its own? This boat found itself a human brain.”

“Okay, this keeps getting more and more horrifying.” I spun to look for an escape route. Hawley was getting better at controlling the ship; behind him, ropes were zipping back and forth within the rain, touching items all across the deck. Hands. Hawley had gotten himself a hundred new hands, and was familiarizing himself with how they worked.

One of those ropes cracked itself like a whip in midair.

“Time to go,” I said, and sprinted for the side of the boat.

Ropes darted towards us, casting off the rain with a sibilant hiss! They went for my legs, my arms; I jumped and dodged, and Speedy snapped at the ropes as they came. If Hawley had possessed the ship—oh God, this meant ghosts could possess other ghosts, or maybe they could just possess the memory of objects, or—focus, Hope! If Hawley had possessed the ship for five minutes longer, we’d have been toast. Instead, he was still figuring out how his new body worked, and it slowed him down.^[53]

We moved, we dodged. We survived. We reached the rail, and I jumped into the dark, and—oh God we were so high up! Wait, no, that’s just a reflection—hit the water. There was a moment of panic as the water closed over my head, and I felt Speedy’s paws slip away.

“Speedy!” I found I could stand; the water was waist-high. But it was moving quickly, and he was so small—“Speedy!”

“Hope!” His faint cry came from the west. I tried to run, and my legs shot out from under me from the force of the water. There was a low point in the terrain somewhere nearby, and the water was rushing to fill it.

“Hope! Here!” Speedy again, his voice much louder.

The water carried me into something solid and extremely sharp. I gasped as a whole lot of pain seared its way straight through my baby-soft skin, and flailed around until I found my footing. A flash of lightning, and there was Speedy standing above me; he had found a pile of rocks and had pulled himself to safety. He scrambled down the rocks and sank his teeth in the collar of my shirt, and between the two of us, I managed to reach a spot just above the water line.

“You okay?” I gasped.

“Yeah, you?”

I shook my head. That sharp whatever-it-was had bruised a couple of ribs. “No more running,” I said. “I’m done.”

“Then you better start swimming,” he snapped, and pointed over my shoulder. “Now!”

I tried to turn; pain flared low in my ribs and roared up my side, but I managed to catch a glimpse of a huge blue blob flying straight at us.

I grabbed Speedy by the scruff of his neck, and dove.

I couldn’t shut my eyes. If I did, I was a little bit scared I wouldn’t be able to open them again. Instead, I pressed my back against the sharp, solid whatever-it-was and held Speedy tight against my chest, as the blue belly of Ship-Hawley touched down just above us. It cut through both the water and the top of the whatever-it-was as cleanly as cutting butter with a hot knife, and then lifted up and away again.

We bobbed to the surface, gasping, and pulled ourselves from the water as the boat began to turn.

“He’s searching for us,” I panted. There was nowhere to hide. We were lying on the edge of a football-field-sized patch of land which was mostly rock, and there were more rocks all around us, square rocks, carefully positioned rocks, and that pointy whatever-it-was had been the broken corner of an old building— “Wait.” I sat up, and looked around. Nearly everything lower than the stones we were lying on was covered by water, but there was something familiar about the place. “Where are we?”

“De Borromeo’s mission.” Speedy nodded at the highest point on the pile. There was a flash of lightning, illuminating a familiar drawing of a cartoon dick with eyeballs.

“C’mon,” I said. We dragged ourselves as far from the water as we could, trying to tuck ourselves within the space between the rocks. Speedy found a little bolthole and darted inside, but immediately darted out again, his wet fur sticking straight up on his hackles.

“Snakes!” he said, and began licking his front paws.

“Did it getcha?”

“Came close.” He shot another glance at the boat. Ship-Hawley was slowly moving in a zig-zag pattern as it tried to locate us in the water. “We can’t stay here. This place is crawling with creatures trying to ride out the storm.”

“There’s nowhere else to go!” I gestured at the lake around us. By now, it was probably deeper than my waist, and there were places where it was moving fast enough to throw up waves. If I wasn’t beaten to hell and back, I might be able to wade us over to the mountains. In the shape I was in, there wasn’t a chance. And the water was still rising. In about fifteen minutes, we’d be out of shelter.

“I know,” he said. “But we’re not beaten until we’re dead.”

“This isn’t a game!”

“Sure it is,” he said, as he began to poke around the rocks again. He found one that was twice the size of his body, and started sniffing around its edges. “It’s just a game in which we can die. C’mere, kitten, this rock is loose. Help me slide it out—I think there’s something behind it.”

I grumbled, because koalas have never “helped” move anything, ever, but the rock shot straight out of its nook as if it had been greased. There was a large white object behind it. I shoved one foot in the hole and kicked around my boot. When nothing crunched down or stabbed me full of venom, I reached in with my bare hands. Hard bumpy plastic met my fingertips.

“It’s a cooler,” I said, dragging it out into the rain. I popped the lid, and found a bunch of junk. An old phone, a pair of white Keds— “Hey, this is de Borromeo’s stuff.”

Speedy snatched up the phone and tapped on its screen before he tossed it back in the cooler. “It’s got power. No service. Where did she go, anyhow?”

“I think she’s still praying. Or maybe she went to rally the chupacabras.” There wasn’t much in the cooler. The Keds had taken up most of the real estate. The rest was various bits of tourist junk, including a familiar baseball-sized dome with a metal clip on the reverse. “Look! My jogging light.”

“Gimme.” Speedy snatched it out of my hands before I could turn it on. He flipped the cooler over and used it as a cover to hide the light, then flicked the switch. The bright yellow light snapped on, as strong as ever. He turned it off, and tossed it between his paws, considering. “What else was in there?”

“Some headphones, and, like, six titanium sporks.” I picked up the Keds. “If we’re getting MacGyver, the shoelaces are in good shape.”

“Yeah, gimme those laces,” he said, and began turning over smaller rocks. “And get me the biggest rock you can throw.”

“Whatcha thinkin’?”

“This is waterproof, right?” He held up the jogging light. When I nodded, he twitched his ears in the direction of Ship-Hawley, which was at the far arc of a sweep. “We need to buy ourselves some time. If he sees this under the water, he’ll think something’s down there.”

“And then he’ll dive down and check it out, and know we’re close enough to turn on a lightbulb and tie it to a rock!”

“No, he won’t,” Speedy said. I found a shoebox-sized stone and pushed it towards him. As soon as I did, I regretted not choosing a smaller stone; throwing it might be the last thing I did before I fell down. Too late; he had already lashed the jogging light around it. “He’s a ghost out of time who doesn’t know what a lightbulb is. He’ll think he’s found magic. Besides, he won’t go in the water. Not unless he severs his connection with the boat and dives in himself. He’s a sailor; he won’t be able to imagine a scenario in which a boat can go under the water. He’ll just cruise around in place for a while, and we can use that time to think of a way out of here.”

In the distance, Ship-Hawley was beginning its pass. Lightning broke the sky behind the boat, a streak of white which burned its way through the storm. I could just barely make out Hawley on the prow, mouth open in that silent laugh.

“Turn it on, and throw it to the south,” Speedy said. “That’s where the courtyard is. It’ll be shallow enough to cast the most light.”

“No,” I said, very quietly, but thunder ate up the word.

“What?”

I grabbed the stone with its dome light, and shuffled towards the east side of the clearing. Behind me, Speedy fluffed in irritation. “I said south, dumbass!”

“That’s not where the riverbed is,” I replied.

“What? The riverbed? Why?!”

“Face facts, Speedy. Unless you’re keeping a spare helicopter in your ass, we’re not getting out of this alive.” I reached the edge of the water, and waded out as far as I could. It wasn’t very far; my legs were shaking so badly, I was barely able to walk. “But if we don’t do something, Hawley’s gonna sail out to the Pacific Ocean. People will die, and then he’ll eat them!”

Ship-Hawley was cruising towards us, slowly, scanning the waters. When he saw something in the water that was human-sized, ropes shot down and tore it into pieces.

It took me a couple of tries, but I finally got the words out. “De Borromeo gave her life to bind him, right?”

I turned to look at Speedy. It took a moment, but he nodded.

“I don’t know how to do that,” I said. “But I can at least try that hand-twist move she showed me, and put everything I’ve got into it.”

“Kitten—”

“I’m good at one thing,” I said, as I turned on the jogging light. “Might as well go out doing it, right?

“Besides,” I added. “If this doesn’t work, we can always come back as ghosts and kick his ass.”

I turned and spun, hurling the bright, beaming rock like a shotput. It arced though the air, and then dropped into the water.

“Stay here,” I said to Speedy. I had already begun to swim out towards the light when I heard frantic paddling behind me, followed by sharp claws digging into my shoulders.

“Buddy—”

“Shut up,” he said.

I hung in the water. There wasn’t much of a current here, and I could keep afloat without too much effort. But it was very cold, and nothing hurt anymore, not my legs or even my bruised ribs. My doctor brain said those two facts were scary-related; my regular brain was finding it hard to care.

At least it’d be over soon: Ship-Hawley had spotted the light, and was speeding towards us.

I dipped under the water as low as I could, so only my eyes and nose were clear. Speedy shifted his grip, and his big nose popped up beside me, nostrils flaring.

I chuckled. His mouth was closed. Small blessings and all that.

My legs bumped against something solid. When it didn’t bite me or roll away, I decided it was the far wall of the mission’s garden courtyard. I slid my feet around until I found a solid place to stand, and knelt so the water would carry my weight. Another small blessing.

Then, the pirate and his ship were there, and everything else ceased to matter.

 

 

 

Chapter Thirty-Six

 

The ship had raced to reach the light, but it stopped well short, drifting in the air a goodly distance away. Ship-Hawley circled the spot warily several times, passing over Speedy and me in the process. Each time it did, I wondered if those ropes would shoot down and snatch us up, and that’d be the end of it.

They didn’t.

Ship-Hawley moved with all of the caution in the world, as if he knew the light was a trap but he couldn’t quite figure out how. He was a cat with dangerous prey, and he knew it was playing dead.

But nothing happened.

It felt like forever, watching Ship-Hawley work up the courage to investigate the light at the bottom of the water. Eventually, a single bright blue rope uncurled, broke the surface of the water, and shot back up.

“This is embarrassing,” I muttered.

Speedy’s whiskers brushed against my cheek. “Can you hurry up? The water’s freezing, and I hear great things about Hell.”

“No.” Overhead, more ropes were descending as Ship-Hawley began to prod the depths. I was hoping the water was deep enough. I was hoping he wouldn’t realize he could change the lengths of those ropes. I was hoping Speedy was right, and Ship-Hawley had no idea what a lightbulb was, and that a time-lost pirate wouldn’t be able to resist an unexplained golden glow.

I was hoping.

The jogging light was pretty far down, and it was so small. I had been worried that it’d be swallowed up by distance and debris, but it was still shining, still a bright yellow beacon that Hawley couldn’t ignore.

I held my breath as Ship-Hawley reeled in its ropes.

Finally, the ship landed on the water.

Speedy’s whiskers buzzed again, as he asked, “Now?”

“Shhh.”

The ropes went down, moving through the water as Hawley tried to locate the source of the light. I held my breath until they returned to the surface, empty.

There was a long, long pause.

“Now?”

“Still waiting,” I replied as quietly as I could. “It’s not just Hawley that’s stuck in that ship.”

After a moment, he nodded. “You think you can get the other ghosts out of it?”

“I know I’m at least gonna try.”

And then? At the line where the railing met the sky, Hawley appeared. Hawley the pirate—no, Hawley the person, a scrawny stretched-thin man with a raggedy beard. He had done away with illusion when he had separated himself from his ship.

And he was tired.

Oh, God, I could feel his exhaustion! He was barely holding on. All of the power he had gathered to himself had gone straight into the ship, and when he had broken from it, he had left all of that power behind. There was almost nothing left to him, just this…

Just…

This.

He stepped from the boat and fell into the water.

Speedy waited until Hawley had disappeared beneath the water before he asked, “Now?”

I didn’t bother to answer. Instead, I shut my eyes and took in the whole of the world—at least, the world within my grasp. That giant puddle of water all around us. Beneath it was the desert. Soon, probably within the week, it’d be covered in autumn flowers. And then winter, when it would be dry as a bone. The snakes and lizards and other living things that had been driven out by the storm would return, if they could, and they’d eat the bodies of those that couldn’t.

It had happened before.

It would happen again.

The desert was life, built on death, built on life, forever and ever. Amen.

“I saw a dinosaur,” I said, smiling, and I opened my eyes to see Hawley rising from the water, the golden jogging light cradled in his hands and a blissful expression on his face. The pirate had found his treasure.

“Hey, Hawley!” I shouted as I stood.

He looked up, blinking in surprise. He recognized me, and his face began to fall apart as he gathered his illusions around him. Skin and muscle tissue receded from his bones—

I was having none of that. I took a breath, extended my right hand, and shouted:

 

“GO TO HELL!”

 

Hawley had just enough time to scream in rage before De Borromeo’s tricky little hand gesture blew him into motes of bright blue dust.

I felt a little twinge around my ring finger before my legs stopped working, and everything went black.

I’m not sure how long I was unconscious. It was pretty great. Nothing hurt, there was nothing to do, no ghosts to banish, no government conspiracies to solve, no classes to attend, nothing.

And then a set of koala teeth crunched straight through the juicy meats of my upper arm.

“C’mon, kitten, wake up. It’s five feet. You can crawl five fucking feet!”

I cracked an eyelid. I was lying on my back. Speedy was standing in shallow water, shouting at me, slapping me across the face with a paw and not even trying to pull his claws.

“C’mon!” he shouted again, when he saw I was awake. “I got you this far! Put in the work and get out of the water!”

I tried to look around, but my body wasn’t listening to me anymore. All that I could see was a bunch of stones, plus a little doodle of a dick. Somehow, Speedy had dragged me back to the ruins of the mission.

There wasn’t much left of it. We were as high up as we could go, and the water was still rising. And there was nothing I could do about it. My body was done. I had gone as far as I could go. It took all of the energy I had left to lick my lips, and say, “Get out of here.”

Speedy met my eyes. “Fuck you.”

“Go,” I said. “At least try. Sparky needs you. If we both…y’know…”

“You think he’d ever forgive me if I left you?” Speedy forced himself between my arms, as if it were bedtime and we were both preparing for sleep.

“Love ya, kitten,” he said in a soft voice. I could barely hear him above the sound of the rain.

“Back at ya, asshole,” I whispered.

Thunder rolled. There was a strange sound within it, like a small pop!

I knew that sound. I couldn’t place it, but—

Speedy began to laugh.

“Shut up,” I told him. I barely had enough energy to die properly. The delay, plus his laughing, was somewhat irritating.

“Kitten, look!” he shouted, as he squirmed out of my arms. “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here!”

Wait, what?

I shifted my head, veeeeery slightly. I was…dry? Yes. Dry. For the first time since the storm had broken, I was warm and dry!

We appeared to be behind an invisible shield of some kind. The water rose around it: we could see the small detritus of the desert pummeling the shield, before it bounced off and vanished into the distance. I shifted my head the other direction, veeeeery slightly, and then a little more, so I could take it all in. The shield appeared to be a perfect half-sphere; the water flowed around us, over us, and away, with nothing seeping beneath the line where it joined against the ground.

Someone had put us in a bubble!

We were saved? No. Impossible. This was a temporary reprieve to get our hopes up. Once we thought we were safe, Coyote or the sentient desert or whatever was planning to yank this shield away. A final decorative piece of shit frosting on the doomcake.

But the shield stayed put. Even while the water rose around it, high enough to drown what little was left of the mission, it stayed put.

We were…alive?

I didn’t understand. Not until I heard a familiar voice say, “Dearest?”

Ah. Now I understood.

I rolled my eyes around until I could see an older man, all in blues, looking dapper in a pair of spectacles, and an embroidered waistcoat and matching pants. His hair was unbound, and floated around his head in a wispy crown.

I smiled up at my best friend. “Hey, Ben.”

Benjamin Franklin, the water parting around his shield as if it were a ship’s prow,^[54] returned my smile. “Hello, Dearest,” he said. “Do you need a hand?”

“Yeah,” I replied.

He lifted me up, as easily as if I were a child. Speedy climbed Ben’s pants leg, and nestled himself on my stomach. This close, I could sense Ben’s raw power. Few other ghosts in America had the kind of name recognition that Ben enjoyed. Could he change the course of this flood? I didn’t know. It wasn’t important. Not when he could pull a Moses and part the waters around us.

He stepped into the air, and we left the water below.

“What happened to you?” Ben asked, as he walked across the sky. The rain avoided us; we were still surrounded by that bubble. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“Tried,” I muttered. “Coyote.”

“Oh? Coyote the trickster?” There was something slightly dangerous lurking within Ben’s voice.

Speedy caught it, too. “Friend of yours?”

“We’ve met.”

“Did he tell you to come save us?” I murmured.

Ben chuckled. I didn’t understand why, but it didn’t matter. Not when I felt warm and dry, and safe.

He flew us back to the hidden city. I wouldn’t have been able to find it again, never in a million years. There was water everywhere, swallowing up all possible landmarks. Here, there, were spikes of rocks, or the crowns of the tallest cactus. Nothing else. Only rain, only water.

Once we reached the city, I realized why Ben had been able to find us.

Mare was awake.

What’s more, Mare was organizing.

She stood on the ledge, drenched by the rain, and surrounded by a dozen ghosts, all of whom pulsed with deep, powerful energy. Founding Fathers. And each and every one of those persnickety bastards was jumping when Mare said frog.

“You!” She pointed to a ghost I recognized—John Adams. “There’s a cluster of pirates about a half-klick to the west. We need them back here!” Once she was done with Adams, she moved to another Founding Father, and sent him off on another task.

“They’re rounding up the evil ghosts?” I asked.

“A friend of yours said it would be easier to manage them if they’re all in one place,” Ben said. “I believe she said her name is de Borromeo?

“A formidable woman,” he added, beneath his breath.

“Please do not hit on the nun,” I sighed.

“She was an earthly woman first, dearest. In her time, the clergy was a retreat for women who wished to—”

Somehow, I found the strength to slide to the ground and stumble away from the lecture. Ben laughed, and resumed talking about the limited opportunities available to women in the Whatever Centuries as he followed after Speedy. They fell into their usual habit of verbal sword fighting, with Speedy snapping off swears and Ben parrying them right back at him.

I didn’t mind.

Safe.

We were safe.

I picked a dry spot just past the edge of the rain, and was planning to sleep right there for the next fifteen zillion years when Mare spotted me. She rushed into the cavern. “Hope!” she shouted, waving. I managed to stay upright as she slammed her arms around me. “I’m so glad you’re okay!”

“Me, too,” I gasped. I returned her hug, mostly for stability. “Where’re Fish and the others?”

“He’s kept them in the cave,” she said. “When I woke up, I called Pat. These guys showed up almost as soon as I told him what was happening.”

“How did Fish wake you up?”

“He didn’t.” She shook her head. “I just woke up.”

As she moved, her hair slid to the side. And there, on my right hand…

“Whoa,” I whispered. My special unobtanium ring was back where it belonged.

“What?”

“I’ll explain later,” I said. “So…how are you? With the…you knows?”

Mare released me, and tossed a couple of handfuls of wet hair over her shoulder. She glanced over at the remaining Founding Fathers. They had greeted Ben as the beloved brother who had begun an argument last Thanksgiving, and they were determined to finish it tonight. “You were right,” she whispered. “They’re just people.”

She turned to leave, raising her voice ever-so-slightly to insist that gentlemen there was work to be done and we should all perhaps concentrate on that!

“Good hands,” I assured myself. “They’re in good hands.”

I shuffled a few more steps into the cavern. I was aware (almost) that the Spooky Solutions crew was still hiding in the back of the cave, and they were calling to me. But the ground was dry, and that was all I needed.

I collapsed face-first in the dirt.

Then? At long last?

Everything stopped.

 

 

 

Chapter Thirty-Seven

 

There were no dreams.

I had expected de Borromeo to make an appearance. Maybe Goldie Hawn, or even Hawley. None of them showed up.

The first time I woke up, Oshea crammed food and fresh water into me. Nothing made sense, so I let her, and then went back to sleep.

The second time I woke up, I had to pee like never before in my entire life. My nose led me to a little latrine area not far from the cavern door. When I was finished, I peeked outside; the ghosts were gone, and so was the storm. The water reflected the light of the half-moon, and everything was silver and blue and black, and beautiful. I ate another helping of camp food, and went back to my pile of blankets to get more sleep.

The third time I woke up, my husband was staring down at me.

“Hi, Sparky,” I said.

He picked me up and engulfed me in a bear hug.

“Don’t crush me,” I gasped. “It was a really crappy night.”

“We heard.” A crotchety voice, like death warmed over, and (sadly) quite familiar. I turned to see Fish standing with two men. The first was tall and stocky, with thinning red hair and freckles. The second man looked like Patrick Stewart dipped in pickling brine; he was the one who had spoken.

Mike Reilly and Richard Smithback.

I knew why Mike was here: I had spent the last few days leaving him weird-ass voice messages about finding another psychic. And Smithback…well, Smithback was our healer, and I had a lump in my stomach when I realized why he was here.

My husband released me. I reached out and brushed his dark blond hair back from his face.

“Speedy told us everything,” he said.

“Including how this might have been his fault?”

He shut his eyes for a moment, then amended: “Speedy told us almost everything.”

“Don’t be too pissed at him,” I warned. “I’m still not sure what started it all.”

“Figure it out later,” Smithback said. “Give me your hand.”

“Nooo,” I whined.

“Yes,” Mike said, grinning.

“I don’t want another adrenaline crash,” I pouted, as I dropped my hand into Smithback’s waiting palm.

“Stop bitching. You’re further from death than I am,” he said, and pushed me back onto the pile of blankets. I let him: Smithback had no problem playing the terminal cancer card, and there’s no good defense against that. “Fleishman, come here. Put your hands on her bare legs. Now, pay attention to how I do—”

I stopped listening, and rested my head against my husband’s chest as they put me back together. I almost drifted off to sleep; compared to Fish’s clumsy hammer-slam healing, Smithback’s healing technique was surgically precise. He even put my calluses back, and tweaked a formerly bad knee so it stopped feeling so exactingly perfect. After they were done, I walked around the cavern for about five minutes, with Sparky’s arm around my waist to keep me from zooming straight off the cliff face. Right before I was about to crash, the Army rescue helicopter returned.

“They dropped the three of us off, and took everyone else back on the first trip,” Sparky explained, as he helped me wrestle with the safety harness. “They’re all at Yuma Proving Grounds.”

“I was gonna call you, but we didn’t want to start the usual media feeding frenzy.”

“Don’t worry about that,” he chuckled. “The storm and the sudden signal loss gave us a perfect excuse to make sure you were safe. We came down with a team from the Smithsonian.”

“Tellerman’s gonna get a nice documentary out of this,” I said.

He didn’t answer me. Instead, he swung his legs around me to use me as his chair, and gestured for the team on the helicopter to start the winch. There was some fussing—apparently hauling up two bodies when one wasn’t secure was a no-no—so Sparky did some cyborg magic and started the winch himself.

As we rose above the mountains, he tipped the harness towards him, and we kissed. He tasted of worry and sweat, with a hint of peppermint.

I broke away and rested my forehead against his. “Next time, we’re going on vacation together. Somewhere with taxi service. You have no idea how many miles I’ve put on me in the last few days.”

He chuckled. “And Speedy isn’t coming.”

By then, we were close enough to the helicopter to hear a deep voice shout down, “Like fuck I’m not!”

We didn’t go straight home. No, I still had three days left in my vacation, and by this point I thought I had earned some aggressive self-indulgence. So, back to the Bellagio we went. By the time we reached the hotel, I was feeling somewhat like myself. Sparky hustled me up to the penthouse, and stuck me in the tub to rest. When I got drowsy, Speedy hopped in the tub and swam laps to keep me awake. Ben hung out on the couch in the main room with Mike and Smithback, and I smiled as the sound of crappy daytime television took over the suite.

Then the others began to show up.

First? Fish arrived. Mare had gotten him on loan from the Army for a few more days. Something about discovering a major archaeological site, and the need to debrief him, although her version of “debriefing” was probably more literal than the Army expected. The two of them vanished into her room and only came out for ice.

Since the Spooky Solutions team was stuck sitting on their hands until the Smithsonian cleared the site, they were back in Las Vegas, too. They came by at least a couple of times a day. They wanted…

I don’t know what they wanted.

I think Dina wanted answers that she could understand. She kept asking questions which scratched at the edges of what we had gone through. However, Oshea always came with her, and Oshea wanted nothing explained. Of the two of them, I think Oshea understood the most, and it scared the hell out of her. She knew how to manage her sister, so every time the conversation swung towards the supernatural, she dialed it down to normal. We did a lot of shopping, hit a few excellent restaurants, and even caught an evening performance of Cirque du Soleil.

Keith came by once. Just once. He tried to talk about the ATV and the chase through the ancient city. Speedy and I sat across from him at the kitchen island, and did nothing but drink straight whiskey and tell the raunchiest jokes we knew until he got frustrated and left.

Then there was Tellerman.

He came alone. When my husband, Mike, or Smithback were in the room, they joked about the intricacies and hypocrisies of government work. But when they weren’t there, he would sit down and stare at me, waiting.

He broke me down one time. “I wish I could tell you,” I said.

“Do you?”

“No.”

He smiled a little. “Was it really the Army?”

I sighed. We were sitting on the rooftop balcony, taking in the evening air before the rest of the crew showed up for dinner. Speedy was asleep in Tellerman’s lap, and I was finally able to get through a whole hour without sucking down a whole pizza. If Tellerman knew how to take no for an answer, it would have been pleasant. “I’m not allowed to talk about it.”

There was a small tink! of ice chips as he sipped his drink. After a moment, he said, “I’ve got a lot of it on tape.”

“Yeah, well.”

“I’m not threatening to blackmail you.”

I laughed aloud at that. “Okay.”

“I’m warning you that I’ll probably put out one final Spooky Solutions about this trip.”

I kept laughing. Speedy and Mare had already gone through the footage. Anything that even hinted at proof of the supernatural had been accidentally taped over during a server backup. Oops! The conspiracy theory nutjobs would cry foul on OACET, but the conspiracy theory nutjobs always cried foul on OACET, so we weren’t worried.

As I said—small blessings.

Tellerman paused. It was a weighty pause: it had the small whistling sound of a distant bomb closing in on its target, so I stopped laughing and let him drop it. “Keith found a tape from that night of the storm in one of his cameras,” he said. “It never got uploaded to the servers.”

Yup, there it was. “I thought you wanted to go legit.”

“I also want to make money,” he replied. “I’m not blackmailing you, honest. I’m just warning you that we’ve already got bids from the Discovery Channel. I’m holding out for HBO, Showtime, one of the premium channels. But it’ll be out there.”

“Unless?”

He tipped his glass roughly in the direction of the Sonoran Desert.

“You want to know that badly?” I asked him. “You’d sacrifice a truckload of money and publicity for that?”

“I think…” he paused to find the right words. “I think there’s more to life than what we’ve come to expect.

“I didn’t go into ghost hunting by accident,” he added. “I want to know.”

I got up to refresh our drinks. “No,” I said, and ruffled his hair as I passed him. “No, you don’t.”

“Hey, now—” He moved Speedy from his lap to my empty chair, and then stood to follow me. Wait, no; make that he tried to stand, but toppled over with a sharp scream, his hands pressed against his crotch, and his legs curled up as high as he could bring them.

Speedy hopped down from my chair and walked off to our bedroom, his head and tail held high.

The next day, Sparky and I left Las Vegas in a rental Land Rover,^[55] with Mare and our friends following us in an extremely comfy Cadillac SUV. We were heading for Yuma, where we’d drop off Fish. From there, we’d catch a military flight back to D.C., where we’d have to convince the Army to take control of a thousand square acres of the Sonoran Desert. Then, we’d have to convince them to put up fences and No Trespassing signs posted at key locations, and the paper trail—if you knew where to look for it—would suggest that OACET was involved in every step of the process. After that, I would have to take a trip out there every six weeks for the first six months, and make sure I was in the public record when I did. Photographs, interviews, the works.

Since that protected land was a good fifty miles from de Borromeo’s mission, we felt pretty confident that the inevitable crackpot conspiracy theories (and their corresponding nutjobs) that would spring up after Tellerman’s documentary would be completely wrong. Hawley would stay lost, at least until the next psychic stumbled down from the Smithsonian’s new tourist destination into de Borromeo’s territory.

So, like, next Thursday, probably.

Which is why Sparky and I turned off the main road before we got to Yuma, and drove west down an old maintenance road which dead-ended in the middle of nowhere…and at the edge of an enormous lake which stretched as far out as we could see. It wasn’t anywhere near de Borromeo’s mission, but since that part of the desert was still under eight feet of water, this was about as close as we could get.

I took a shopping bag out of the back of the Land Rover, and went to the edge of the lake. I wasn’t sure how to make contact with de Borromeo or Goldie Hawn, but I couldn’t leave without making the effort to say goodbye. Sparky stood nearby, not saying much.

“Perp.”

I took a deep breath. I didn’t want to look down. I wouldn’t look down!

I looked down.

The roadrunner was standing beside me, leaving its small X-shaped tracks all over the rain-beaten earth. “Perp.”

“Go perp yourself,” I told it. “I’m here to say goodbye to the ghosts who didn’t try to murder me.”

The roadrunner made a rude noise and stepped away.

I ignored it.

I half-expected that de Borromeo wouldn’t show up, and I’d have to come back out to the mission again after the floodwaters had receded. But after a few minutes of studiously ignoring the roadrunner, I saw the nun gliding towards us over the surface of the lake.

“You see her?” I asked Sparky.

“No,” he said. “Would you like me to go out-of-body?”

“Nah,” I said, as I patted him on his butt. “We’ll keep it short. Besides, I think she’s a fan of ours.”

“Ah,” he said, and walked away, following the edge of the lake to give us some privacy.

De Borromeo arrived, stepping from the surface of the lake to the shore with grace. She didn’t hesitate; she walked straight over to me and embraced me.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you so much.”

“Least I could do. Sort of,” I replied. “Since it was my fault for coming here.”

She let me go, but kept hold of my hands in hers. “How were you to know?” she said. “You did more than I could have asked of you. Hawley is bound in his tomb, and desert is sleeping once more.”

“Yeah, about that,” I replied. “Are you entirely sure the desert was to blame for this? Because there’s this roadrunner—” I paused to look for the bird. It was, of course, nowhere to be found.

De Borromeo’s smile fell. “I was sure of a great many things before you arrived,” she said. “Now, I am not so certain. If I am right, the desert was given a great flood, and that occupied its attentions more than our fumbling mistakes.

“But,” she said, as she turned to greet the lake with her arms outstretched, “no matter the cause, we are dealing with forces greater than ourselves, and those never offer any easy answers.”

I chuckled. “Seems like a bit of an easy out for you.”

“That, too.”

I laughed in earnest as I held out the shopping bag. “Here.”

“Oh?” The nun took it, and peered inside. She let out an exclamation of delight as she took out a new phone and a pair of Keds.

“There’s some tequila in there, too,” I said. “No ice, though.”

“Yes, well, perhaps I can find my own ice.” De Borromeo paused, and then said in a great rush, “I feel I am due for a vacation!”

“Yes!” I clapped her on the back. “Yes, you are. Where are you going?”

“I haven’t decided,” she replied. “I need to find some jorguín from this time and ask their advice. There is still the problem of the boat.”

I winced. “Oh, no. What’s happened?”

The nun waved in the direction of the Sonoran Desert. “It’s still sailing. I hoped it would break apart, but—”

“All those poor ghosts,” I said. “They’re stuck in there forever?”

“Not forever. But today, the ship is still too strong to manage,” she said, as she did that fist-clench-sweep gesture.

I nodded. Yeah, we were dealing with this now.

“Go on your vacation,” I told her. “I’ll come back in a couple of weeks. By then, the boat might be weak enough to pull apart. Have you seen anyone from the chupacabra pack?”

“No.” De Borromeo’s mouth was set in resignation. “I hope they have gone to take time for themselves to heal.”

We exchanged goodbyes and good wishes, and the nun told me that my husband’s legs were much nicer than the other young man’s. Before she left, she kissed me on both cheeks and said, “I meant it when I said you would have made an excellent jorguín.”

“Maybe,” I replied. “But for now, I figure I’ll just be me.”

De Borromeo smiled, picked up the shopping bag, and slowly faded away into the afternoon sunlight.

“Is she gone?” Sparky asked, as I walked over to him.

“Yeah. She says that Goldie Hawn and the others are missing. I promised I’d come back soon to help her wrangle the ship. If they haven’t come back by then, we’ll search for them.”

He groaned. “If she drags you into another pirate battle—”

“Don’t be too hard on her,” I said. “She also says you have great legs.”

“Nuns never lie,” he said, and sidestepped as I tried to goose him. We spent a few minutes stomping around in the lake and splashing each other before we headed back to the Land Rover.

“Did you get what you needed?” he asked, as he stripped out of his shoes and socks to dry.

“I guess,” I replied, as I slid behind the wheel. “I’ll probably never get answers to the really big questions, but, y’know, who does? We have to deal with things as they come, and adapt as best we can.”

He grinned at me, a sweet sunshine smile which made me especially glad that I hadn’t drowned in the desert a few days before.

“One thing I still don’t understand,” I said, as I threw the vehicle into reverse and started to put it through a three-point turn. “There were some guys at the Bellagio our first night there. Real bruiser-types. They followed us all over the casino, but after that they disappeared.”

“Ah,” my husband said. “You see—”

“I knew it!” I jabbed a finger into his chest. “Do you know how many problems you caused? What did you do, call the manager of the Bellagio and ask for him to put some undercover security on me?”

“You'd just been assaulted!” he said. “Twice!”

I was ready to snipe at him, but then I saw the roadrunner. I had all but forgotten about the bird until I caught a glimpse of it in the rearview mirror as I was turning. It disappeared over a small rise in the land. I watched the edge of the hill on the other side, waiting for it to reappear.

It never did.

Instead, a coyote—the first one I had seen all week—darted across the ground. It turned its head towards me and a giant toothy smile engulfed the entire mirror for all of a heartbeat, and then it took off running.

“Well,” I said. “Well.”

 

 

 

Notes

 

As always, this book wouldn’t have been possible without the love and support of my husband, Brown.

My thanks goes to the beta readers who were so very generous with their time. Gary, Tiff, Andrea, Kevin, Carlota, and Joie, you're always there to poke problems into a managable shape. Thank you so much. And my thanks also goes to Danny and Jes for the copy edits.

Digger the talking wombat is property of Ursula Vernon, who also puts on the name of T. Kingfisher to write amazing books and create stunning cover art. Thank you for the pirates!

Finally, I've taken some liberties with the Hohokam story presented in Chapter Twelve, and combined two different origin stories into the same one for the sake of brevity. If you are interested in reading more about the Hohokam, I recommend beginning with The Short, Swift Time of Gods on Earth by Donald Bahr et al (University of California Press, 1994).

 

 

 

About the Author

 

K.B. Spangler lives in North Carolina with her husband and as many dogs she can sneak into the house without him noticing. She is the author and artist of A Girl and Her Fed, where Speedy, Hope Blackwell, Patrick Mulcahy, and the Agents of OACET are alive and well. The ghosts are well, too, thanks for asking. Additional information about these and other projects can be found at kbspangler.com.

 

 

 

Footnotes

[1] Ghosts are blue. Usually a vivid dayglow blue which is bright enough to read by on a dark night, but as they can change their appearances at will, they can show up in whatever shade of blue their little undead hearts desire.

 

[2] I hate that word, by the way. Suggests I have occult knowledge and innate abilities beyond the ken of normal human beings. Well, I don’t know shit about the occult, and any abilities I have are those I’ve worked my ass off to acquire, so go fuck a bunch of glorified innateness.

 

[3] I’m hoping that ghosts don’t talk about what waits in the Afterlife because there’s really a Heaven, a benevolent higher power, all the chocolate swimming pools one can backstroke through and so on, and that telling us would lead to mass suicide as we try to beat the rush to the Fluffy Kitten Ball Pit. I’m guessing that ghosts don’t talk about what waits in the Afterlife because they don’t have the ability to convey such information in a manner that our tiny mortal brains can comprehend. And I’m dreading that they’ve escaped from a dimension of giant soul-sucking demon millipedes. All I know for sure is that when I die, I’m gonna punch everything I see until they either throw me back into reality or drop me into the Kitten Pit.

 

[4] Not, you know, lock him in a cage or anything like that. Speedy doesn’t travel well—koalas are territorial, and his primary territory is the arboretum attached to the back of my house. But he’ll cozy up to any female koala he finds, and that improves his mood immeasurably. When we’re on the road, I make sure to drop him at any convenient koala enclosure and damn the consequences. Which are considerable. But none of those consequences are as scary as a mad genius marsupial who isn’t getting his strange on the regular.

 

[5] Lemme give you the extra-short version. My husband, and Mare, and four hun—uh, I mean, the others—got roped into a top-secret government project. They were kids at the time. Babies, really, just out of college or whatever. There was some brain surgery, and some neurological implants, and then they were cyborgs.

 

[6] This also says something sharp about those societies. Think about it: their dead women are consigned to an afterlife of weeping and handwringing and occasionally tricking people to their deaths, instead of becoming old-fashioned slaughterghosts.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, I’d like to think that here in America, gender equality has progressed to the point where women have achieved slaughterghost status after we die. But on the other hand, this will probably just cause problems for me since I’m the one who’ll have to hide the bodies.

 

[7] What I’m saying is, if Speedy decides he wants to get his claws in you? You’re fucked.

 

[8] See aforementioned reference to: “You’re fucked.”

 

[9] My husband uses her to keep OACET running. When I called to tell him that I was stealing Mare for the week, he said, very quietly, “…shit.”

 

[10] Mare was just gleestruck about this, by the way. She had never organized an entire Army base before, let alone one with storage facilities the size of those at Yuma. In her spare time, she’d grill Fish about the specifics of Who was responsible for inventory, What protocol were followed for the organization process, When the last inventories were conducted, Where specific classes of items were kept, Why certain protocols were followed instead of others, and How the entire base at Yuma was structured in respect to management and access.

I learned three things from overhearing these discussions. Item One: Fish paid attention to a metric fuckton of trivial details, which (at first) I thought was a huge red flag for Team Keep-Ghosts-A-Secret. Item Two: journalism as an industry suffered a profound loss when Mare decided to pursue a career in public service. Item Three: Yuma was about to be struck by the organizational equivalent of a nuclear warhead, and I hoped they had a lot of clipboards handy.

 

[11] There’s a very good chance that when I die, I’m going to be one scary-ass powerful ghost. There’s the fame thing, plus the psychic thing, meaning whatever imprint I leave in the Afterlife will probably be a Hope-shaped hole through time and space itself.

I should note that this is just guesswork on my part, by the way. None of the dead folks I hang out with will say one way or the other, even when I ask them all direct-like. But they do go out of their way to make sure I stay alive, so there’s that.

 

[12] Note: Martial artists get crap all the damned time about “losers” (or, more recently, “cucks”) who tap out instead of fighting until their opponents lay prostrate before them as ruined puddles of tenderized meat. The high-minded among us say something like: “Sparring is used to develop skills with our partners, and is not conflict with an enemy,” but I usually just ask if they want to go a few rounds.

 

[13] Which, believe it or not, is extremely high praise. Lemme tell you about Josh Glassman. You know that one friend you have who’s really into running? Seriously, almost alarm-bells-ringing into running? The guy who thinks ultra-marathons are a warm-up event? If he’s polite, he’ll never talk to you about running because he knows you don’t appreciate it like he does. For him, it’s not so much a sport as an art form, and if you don’t understand that distinction he’s not going to waste his time educating you. But! If you ever tell him you want to learn about running? You’ve initiated hours and hours of conversation. Will he discuss the physical mechanics? Probably. The health benefits? Definitely. This will be followed by an offer to go running with him to see if you enjoy it. And don’t worry, he’ll start out slow until you’re up to speed.

Replace running with sex, and Josh Glassman is exactly like that.

I’d never met a competitive sexlete before I met Josh. Sex is fun, yeah, that’s a no-brainer, but it’s not just sex for Josh; it’s an esoteric mashup of a cardiovascular workout and the Kama Sutra and tantric meditation and the occasional break for chilled towels and energy bars. Keep in mind he doesn’t do pity fucks, either—he might be willing to introduce you to a different kind of sex, but if he thinks he’s wasting his time with a partner who can’t learn to play at his level? He will very politely sideline you, permanently.

Now, Mare? Quiet, docile, bureaucratic Mare? She sleeps with Josh on the regular.

 

[14] It’s totally cool if you don’t know what petroglyphs are. I do because I hang out with Speedy, and Speedy is a professional linguist, including ancient languages. If you don’t hang out with your own superintelligent koala, all you need to know is that petroglyphs are prehistoric rock carvings. Not paintings. Petroglyphs are cut into the stone and are more durable. Same general goofy damn-it-all-Todd-look-what-your-son-has-done-to-the-walls shapes, though.

 

[15] Which pissed off Speedy so ferociously that he shimmied up the inside of the chimney and refused to come out until I agreed to take him to the zoo. Which I hate doing, by the way, because taking a perpetually randy koala to the zoo has an entirely different—perhaps legally punishable—outcome than taking a fellow human being. But I owed him. The only way I’ve been able to make it through med school as quickly as I have is thanks to Speedy, the world’s best/worst study buddy. I won’t say you should find a superintelligent trickster monster to help boost your grades; I will say there’s a lot of incentive in not knowing when or how he’s planning to set you on fire for failing your Immunology exam.

 

[16] This trip was teaching me a lot about the production side of television programming. I had assumed it was point-and-shoot with snarky eyerolls at the talent, but that was only about a third of it. The rest was work.

 

[17] Sometimes I think this world doesn’t like us very much.

 

[18] There’s a gorgeous saying from…someplace I can’t remember. If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together; if you want to do both, carry the koala. I added that third part.

 

[19] I’ve been told by veterinarians, zoologists, biologists, and one heavily flummoxed Australian wildlife rehabilitator that koalas don’t snore. They usually don’t talk, either.

 

[20] As if I didn’t have enough on my plate, my friend Rachel Peng has been on a freakin’ rampage about mental health problems in veterans. She asked me to get involved, and she’s not someone you can say no to. Besides, fame might be a shit cracker topped with shit cucumbers and a side of fresh-made shit, but people pay attention to causes if someone famous supports them. Might as well use what’s bad to build some good into this world, right?

 

[21] And no, I wasn’t going to ask how she charged her phone; she was literally made of energy. I was somewhat curious about her service plan, though.

 

[22] Okay, fine! Never let it be said that I can’t learn from experience. So, no, the ghost of Thomas Paine should not go fuck himself, because wishing such a thing on another person would be rude. Instead, let’s say I would not be too angry if circumstances align themselves so the ghost of Thomas Paine is forced to undergo a severe audit by the IRS, dating aaaaall the way back to before he fled to France, and held responsible for compounded interest.

(…and then he should go fuck himself.)

 

[23] It’s more of a honk mixed with a donkey’s bray, actually, but it sounds as though it’s made by an animal ten times his size, so I call it a roar for dignity’s sake.

 

[24] If you’ve ever wondered if the pen is truly mightier than the sword, I can lend you a superintelligent koala.

 

[25] At the time, I had no evidence she thought of herself as female, as none of them ever broke character and I made special effort to not go looking for chupacabra beans and franks. Or, alternatively, fish tacos. Or even if those things mattered. Still, “she” was plastered against the walls of my mind.

 

[26] The normal reason, anyhow. That minotaur was nothing close to normal.

 

[27] I stack my amphetamines with caffeine in coffee form only, and never with other prepackaged stimulants. My Adderall dose is as high as my physician will allow, and nobody needs me amped up beyond all natural limits.

 

[28] Add whatever caveat you want.

 

[29] Not that roadrunners have much of an emotional range, but this one was definitely waiting for something. It might as well have been checking a tiny watch on its tiny wrist.

 

[30] Yes, I know what I just said.

 

[31] This was something I had learned right then and there. To be fair, I didn’t have much experience with caves, but the last time I had been in one, Mike and I had dragged a headless corpse through an entire mountain. Plus, minotaur. Look, it was a traumatic experience, okay?!

 

[32] Ever share an awkward silence with a roadrunner? It’s not great. Definitely not great.

 

[33] His name was Mike Atchell. Lived in Monterey, California, for most of his childhood. Shitty childhood, by the way. I can always sympathize with folks who have abusive stepdads. Moved out east to try and start a new life. Broke a couple of hearts, had a couple of kids. Fell in with some assholes. Tried to kill me. Died.

And this entire story would have been exactly the same without this particular footnote, so what does that tell you about the value of a human life?

 

[34] And I am an expert.

 

[35] I can’t even remember what they were. It’s as if the space in my head which was able to perceive them ceased to exist once I returned to my body. Oh, right. Spoiler alert: I returned to my body.

 

[36] Two things. Yes, dead nuns really do talk like this, or at least this particular nun does. And no, I wasn’t about to have a theological throwdown with the woman who had just given me the gift of the temporal footprint of a dinosaur! Besides, whatever source of creation you wanted to stamp on that moment? It had done glorious work.

 

[37] Did I know for a fact if that particular dinosaur was a Tyrannosaurus rex? Come on, of course I didn’t. I still don’t. I’ve intentionally not checked to see if Tyrannosaurs once roamed the Sonoran Desert, because that moment was fucking magical and I don’t need scientific names to make it more so. If you absolutely must be specific, I saw a big carnivorous dinosaur which was similar to what I’ve been told a Tyrannosaur looked like. And if that still isn’t enough for you, I hope you’re either an armchair paleontologist or you’ve accepted that your singular purpose is to suck the life out of parties.

 

[38] She had shown me a dinosaur! Of course I was going to cut her a little slack.

 

[39] See? I can learn.

 

[40] Learning is a process. Shut up.

 

[41] Fish: “Um—” Me: “I know, I know.”

 

[42] I shall not tell a lie. And you shall not know what transpired in the vicinity of my goodie box.

 

[43] At the time, I figured if I could give Fish the credit, at least some good would have come of this.

 

[44] I’m aware this is a jerk thing to do, thanks.

 

[45] Total lie, definitely, but they made it work for them.

 

[46] Because Science Reasons.

 

[47] At least, the first time I had ever seen ghosts fighting for keeps. The Founding Fathers settle a lot of disagreements with an old-fashioned punching match, and then they go out for a drink.

 

[48] I’m pretty sure this is the word used to describe the pointy part at the front of a boat.

 

[49] The pantysnitches who dared me to climb up there? They fled. And they didn’t call for help. So when my arms got tired, I had the brilliant idea to tie myself to the rafters using my clothes. The next morning, they had to get me down with an inflatable bounce castle. By the way, this happened at a parochial school. What I’m saying is, I have a long history of climbing ropes and scandalizing nuns, sometimes simultaneously.

 

[50] Same question.

 

[51] Okay, maybe I should look up the definition of that word.

 

[52] Prow: (noun) the forepart of a ship or boat; bow.

 

[53] I sympathized, sort of. My own body still felt like I was sliding around in a mitten made from newborn skin. At least it was my own newborn skin, and I didn’t eat other people to keep it. Honestly, I was really worried about those other ghosts. I was sure that some of Goldie Hawn’s people had been caught up in the hungry chaos. And was I going to judge whether or not an evil cowboy should spend the rest of forever as boat fuel? No. No, I was not.

 

[54] Tah-dah!

 

[55] The kids we had left at the Spooky Solutions camp had the good sense to get out of the rain. They had abandoned one Jeep in the desert with the keys in the ignition in case we came back, and had driven the other one back to where we had left the vehicles. The three of them took the Mustang, the Jeep, and the van straight to the high ground for shelter, and had weathered out the storm in an IHOP. I gave them very generous tips in thanks for keeping my car insurance premium from breaking the stratosphere.