Finally, soundlessly, he says, The old supply room. She keeps them there. What are you going to do?
I don’t answer. I pull my hand away and float through the next wall, away from the man who betrayed us all, away from the distant sound of corn ripping through the alley floor. I have other things to do.
The supply room is small and dark and filled with cloth-swaddled bundles, like someone’s good china. I have to solidify to begin picking them up. As the cloth falls away to reveal the mirrored surfaces beneath, the whispers of the dead begin to fill the air, soft susurrations demanding their release. I don’t have to wait for them to ask me twice.
The mirrors shatter when I drop them, scattering silver glitter across the floor. As each glass explodes, the ghost it contains bursts free and takes solid form, until the room is so packed that it’s a good thing I don’t need to breathe; there is no air here. Only bodies from wall to wall, angry, agitated, snarling bodies. They want revenge. I don’t need to talk to them to know that, or to know that the only way I can keep control of this situation is to act fast. Right now, I am their savior, the one who got them out of the glass where they’d been prisoned. Give them time to realize that things have changed—that action is possible—and I’ll lose them.
I grab one of the empty frames from the pile of broken mirrors and slam it against the nearest wall. The sound is big enough, sudden enough, that most of them turn to look at me. The others follow half a beat behind, unwilling to be left out of whatever’s about to happen.
“This everyone?” I demand.
Muttering and whispers answer me.
“Delia’s back in Manhattan playing coffin nail, and Danny’s not on our side anymore, but there’s more than those two in our city. So is this everyone? Count your heads, or your hands, or whatever suits you, but tell me if the breaking’s done.”
This time the muttering is louder, before one of the gang-girls says, “This is all of us. Where’s the witch who brought us here?”
“Outside. In the corn.” I glance to the wall, then back to the woman who spoke. She looks the same as she always has. Not so all of them. Some of the ghosts are older than they should be, faces seamed with new lines, hair streaked with new runnels of gray. “How much time did she have you bleed?”
The mutters contain numbers this time. Years: she bled off years, some her own, some belonging to other people. This was the use she saw for us, prisoned under glass and giving youth back to those who don’t deserve it, all while forbidding us to move on. My heart hardens a little more. That’s good. It’ll need to be hard for what’s to come.
Some things are anathema to softness.
“She’s a corn witch,” I say. “The soil listens when she speaks. Her ma’s here, and Mill Hollow answers best to family. We need to keep her distracted long enough for Brenda to come and bring things to a finish. Then we can go home. Back to Manhattan. Back to our dailies.” Because we don’t have lives, not really; we’re the long-dead, the cold, and the lost. But we still have our daily routines, the steps we go through, the things we choose to do. Those are the things we all want to return to.
“How?” asks a hollow-eyed man in a grocer’s apron.
I smile. I shrug, spreading my empty hands wide.
“I have no idea,” I say. “But we start by going through that wall.”
I point. They follow my hand, and when I let go of solidity and drift through the brick, they follow me.
We flow through the wall like a river of ectoplasm and rage, surrounding Teresa, sliding through the corn, even as the leaves slash at the substance of our skins. She shrieks, furious and impotent, and we swirl around her, untouched and untouchable. She would kill us, if we weren’t already dead. She would prison us back under glass, if all her mirrors weren’t broken, ground down to dust and rendered useless by our escape. The same mirror can’t catch two ghosts, and with all the fragments mixed and mingled on the floor, all mirrors are the same mirror. Her only weapon is her life, which is so precious, and so temporary.
Her shrieks turn pained when the first ghost brushes against her skin and forces the years she gave them back into her body. She smacks them away, hair lightening and skin loosening as I watch. There are too many of us and only one of her. We could weaken her an inch at a time, a death of a thousand cuts and a million stolen moments. What happens to a living body aged past its natural dying day by the dead? Will she collapse, or will we turn her aged and immortal, unable to let go, unable to move on?