Page 38 of The Rising Tide
“And how do you plan to do that?” Marcus asked. He had his head tilted as he had during most of Scout’s “magic” lessons, inviting Scout to hazard a guess or make his best try. Unlike Alistair, who had demanded studying, answers, and rote memorization, Marcus seemed to value critical thinking above everything else.
“Well, Lucky and I saw the spirit trap by touching hands—we spit on them first, but, uhm, I’m not sure if we have to—”
Larissa, Kayleigh, and Piers all had their palms up in front of their mouths and were eyeing each other as if to see who would spit first.
Scout laughed. “I take it you all are in?”
“When I was twelve, I had a séance in my room with my best friend,” Larissa said excitedly, “and the Ouija disk floated in the air for about thirty seconds before falling to the board and cracking in half. Until now, I didn’t think anything cooler than that would ever happen to me.”
Piers looked at her sideways and snorted, so Scout got the feeling there was more to it than that.
“Were you having a sleepover?” Kayleigh asked, enthralled. “I’ve read books where people do that, but I never had one myself.”
Larissa gave her a big-eyed look and then looked at her cousin. “Uhm… Piers?”
Lightning gave his cousin a game smile in return. “Honey, we’re not with our usual crowd, okay? Run with it.”
Larissa shrugged and spat in her palm, and everyone else followed suit.
Scout shook Larissa’s hand first.
The results were, well, less than spectacular for Scout. He could see all the shadows while holding her hand, but far away, as though filtered behind layers and layers of tulle. But the look on Larissa’s face was enchanted, and Scout gave her a moment to look around before gently releasing her palm. Curiously enough, the shadows didn’t fade, and as Scout squinted, he realized that he could see them without help, now that he knew how to look.
“You saw that?” he queried.
“That wasamazing,” she said, hopping up and down on her toes and making her ponytail bob. “Piers, you’ve got to try it. It’s… you’ll see!”
Larissa was probably mildly gifted; the séance she’d talked about proved that. But Piers’s trick with light was a little more serious, and as Scout clasped hands with him, Piers looked around appreciatively—and shuddered.
“Is the light changed?” he asked, squinting around. “It’s… there’s an ambient illumination here that’s neither sun nor moon. And I don’t think it’s healthy.”
Scout glanced around the clearing too, and while the washerwoman still scrubbed, the young lovers still quailed, the little girl still mourned, and the man on the bench still yearned, he saw that Piers was right. The quality of the light was almost polluted, a noxious brown/green film that coated the entire tableau.
“But do you see the spirits?” Scout asked curiously.
“Oh! Yes. They’re… they’re brilliantly lit. Like the principal actors in an old movie.” Piers glanced around again, frowning. “In fact there’s, you know, lighting themes.” He tried to turn his body to get a better look at the lovers when his hand parted from Scout’s.
Scout stayed rooted in the ghostly tableau, and Piers moved far away, as though their physical closeness had been the anomaly and he was actually far enough away to need a telescope to be seen. Curiouser and curiouser, he thought,Alice in Wonderlandstyle. Without Piers’s touch, the expressions on the spirit’s faces grew contorted somehow, and as Scout stared at the nearest one, the washerwoman, it appeared that her eyes hollowed and her skin and muscle shredded until she was left a moving corpse, lost in the administration of her one task, the cleaning of the memorial bench.
He took a step toward her, and another, only to be brought up short by a very real hand on his shoulder.
He stopped hurriedly, the spirits in the trap losing focus a little, although the light remained exactly as Piers had said—toxic and ambient.
“Lucky,” he said softly, smiling. The memory of their kisses moments before suffused him, sending a rush of blood under his skin and making his vision of the spirt trap rosy somehow. “Sorry—what was I doing?”
Lucky’s own expression was concerned as he stepped into Scout’s personal space. Suddenly the spirit trap was both clearer and less consuming. All of Scout’s being was focused on Lucky’s warm, living body. “Well, you and Piers disappeared, and then Piers came back, and we could see you partway.” Lucky grimaced. “I got worried. I thought, you know, you might need a hand getting home.”
Scout felt the smile on his lips, the sort of serene sense of well-being that was centered on the man touching him. “Their expressions,” he said, not sure he could explain this without it becoming a horror movie. Maybe it had been—tattered skin and shredded flesh certainly wasn’t a fairy tale—but it had also been… technical.
Something magical had happened, and magic had rules.
And one of those rules was that using it took energy, and Scout was suddenly very tired, very hungry, and very ready for a break.
“Scout?” Lucky said, his look growing more concerned. He moved closer until Scout could feel the warmth of his body. “Scout, what about their expressions? Scout!”
Scout’s knees buckled, and he literally fell into Lucky’s arms. For a moment, the world around them whirled, and then they were both alone on the beach, looking at two other lonely figures sitting on a sand dune near the water’s edge.
The stars hung above them, brighter than Scout had ever seen stars in a night sky, and the world around them was even darker.
