Page 107 of Starrily
“I’ve been taking good care of it,” Shanna said.
“I’m sure you did, child,” Iris said. “But care or not, it’s something we gotta fix immediately.”
“But you said there was a problem,” Callie spoke up.
“Yes,” Penny responded. “It’s the ritual. Shanna attempted to resurrect Simon into his own body. But it’s been too long for Raleigh. We’d need a new body for him.”
“We have to become grave diggers?” Raleigh asked.
“No, no. There is a ritual that creates a body—turns a ghost material. We’d extract your soul from the current body, then give it back its physical form.”
He had no clue how that worked, but it sounded painful.
“This is insane,” Callie said.
“What it is and what it ain’t don’t matter,” Iris said. “Because we can’t do it.”
“Why not?” Raleigh asked.
Penny sighed. “The ritual is highly specific. Right place, right time, a bunch of ingredients. Duplicating all circumstances of your death. From what Iris learned about it, we’d have to wait for months to attempt it.”
That wasn’t ideal, but at least it was something. Right?
“In the meantime, we’d lose Simon,” Penny continued.
Shanna whimpered and covered her mouth.
“Couldn’t you do the same for Simon?” Callie asked.
“The problem isn’t his body, it’s his soul,” Iris said. “That thing is holding on by a thread. And once it’s gone, ain’t no resurrection that’s gonna bring him back.”
Callie put her hand to her forehead and leaned on the back of the sofa. “Then what?”
“I’m going to lose Simon?” Shanna said.
“Hold on, now,” Phoebe said. “We cooked up something else.”
Raleigh released a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding.Good. They could still fix it.
“We’ll combine two rituals,” Penny said. “We’d never done anything like this before, but as they say, necessity is the mother of experimentation.”
“Invention,” Callie corrected.
Unaffected by that, Penny went on, “We’ll perform the ritual we meant to perform for Simon—bonding his soul back to his body once the body’s been freed. For you, Raleigh, we’ll do a modification of the ritual. But it being experimental, we can’t guarantee its success.”
Raleigh swallowed a lump in his throat. “And what happens if it goes wrong?”
“You’ll die.”
“Then we’re not doing it,” Callie said. “Find something else.”
“And if it succeeds, everything is fine?” Raleigh asked.
Penny shared a look with Iris. “To an extent. It would get you a body back. You’d be stable. No more turning into a ghost. But … you’d lose memories of the years you spent in Simon’s body. Very likely.”
“Very likely,” he quietly repeated.
Callie didn’t say anything. She looked at the floor and slowly shook her head.
