Sparks (24 page)

"For once I agree with Brian," Jules argued. "Wandering around in other worlds didn't help Leslie. We should let the cops do their job."

"And how many more of them could get hurt trying to catch her?"

The chatter of the debate washed over her. Anya slid into the bathtub, curling around the nest of eggs. The eggs had warmed the coins beneath them, heating them to the temperature of bathwater. Anya's breath fogged the porcelain side of the tub. Sparky spooned around the other side of the nest, rested his head on her collarbone.

Anya put the coin on her tongue, whispered, "Charon."

And the world went black.

T
HE WORLD WENT BLACK
.

And then it turned inside out and opened up.

Anya felt weightless, the warm drifting sensation of dozing in warm bathwater. She opened her eyes to find herself floating above the bathtub, nose to nose with her own face.

Startled, she kicked backward. Like a clumsy swimmer in a pool, she backed up and managed to get her feet on the floor. But the pressure felt different; heavier. She looked down. Sparky sat beside her on the floor, tail wagging. He gleamed with pure amber light, much more strongly than he did in the physical plane. The mottles and speckles on his body churned white and orange, playing over his skin like the shadow of fire.

Anya looked down.

She wasn't herself. Her hands were covered with articulated copper scales, moving up and over her body in a suit of segmented armor. She wore a breastplate polished to a blinding gleam. True to Ciro's word, a translucent silver cord extended from her navel to the limp body in the bathtub. She reached up and felt a helmet covering her head, molded to the back of her skull.

"Welcome to your astral self.
"

Anya turned. Charon stood on the floor, hands in his pockets. He looked much the same as he had as a ghost--a rocker in the wrong era--but he was surrounded with a gray aura that dissipated at the edges like smoke. His eyes burned cold blue in the haze.

Anya turned her copper hands up to the light. "I saw myself like this once before. Only once." The copper armor had erupted from her salamander torque to protect her from the fiery breath of the king of salamanders, Sir-rush. That had been the breath that killed her lover, Drake.

"The astral shows people as they really are. Like the philosopher said, 'As within, so without.'"
Charon nodded.
"But I've gotta say, that's very impressive.
"

Anya leaned over the edge of the bathtub. Panic laced through her. The eggs were gone.

"The eggs!" she cried.

"You're wearing them,"
Charon answered. He pointed to a belt of beads around her waist. When Anya looked closer, she could see that the belt was made of the tiny eggs, strung together like a girdle. When she touched them, she could feel the heat of them, hot as coals.

"I don't know what you are, but you're awfully shiny."
Renee sat on the bar stool and gave her an appraising look. In this world, Renee was wreathed in a sultry pink light, accompanied by the smell of lilies.

"You can see me?" Anya asked.

"Sure, doll."
She cast a wary look at Charon.
"I see him, too.
"

"Don't worry,"
he said.
"I'm not taking you anywhere.
"

Renee's pencil-thin eyebrows dropped, and her lashes fluttered.
"Good. Somebody has to stay behind to watch the old man.
"

She gestured toward Ciro. It was then that Anya understood that it wasn't just her that was different in this sidereal world. It was the world itself and everything in it.

The other humans in the room seemed rooted in place, as if time ran slower for them, and oblivious to her presence. They were blurry around the edges, and Anya could see light surrounding them. Ciro was surrounded by a white shimmer that flickered like a lightbulb almost ready to go out. When she came close to him, she could nearly hear it buzzing.

Katie stood arguing with the others, blooming a serene turquoise flame. Jules was gesturing and saying something beside her, surrounded by a shining gold light that Anya found oddly comforting. Max hummed beside him, crackling in an orange-gold energetic flare.

Brian stood at the perimeter, arms crossed. Anya reached out to touch him. Where the others were bathed in bright, vibrant color, his aura was murky. Bits of green and black fizzled in a swirling, confused mass. When she touched his skin, her hand passed through him, as if she were a ghost.

Charon put his hand on Anya's shoulder, and she jumped. His grip was solid.

"Why can't I touch him?" she asked. "And how come you can touch me?" She wasn't sure she liked the reversed roles.

"You're essentially a ghost on this plane, subject to the same laws as ghosts. You can't affect the physical world. But things on the astral plane can interact with you.
"

"What am I seeing?" Anya whispered, squinting at Brian's fuzzy aura.

"Afterimages. The astral world is a sidereal plane--it exists parallel to the physical world. It intersects with the physical plane where energy moves, whether it's the energy of thought, memory, or life.
"

Anya looked up. The bar itself was rendered in shades of gray. But it wasn't the same as she remembered. Paintings hung over tables that didn't exist before. The windows weren't blackened out and boarded shut, they were stained glass. Even the door handles seemed to be from a different era.

"This is the building's memory of itself. When humans talk about residual hauntings, they talk about the energy impressions a place has made over time, through people tracking through it and focusing their thought energies on it. Sometimes deep impressions make it right through to other planes. Sort of like when you press very hard with a pen on a piece of carbon paper, and the image is transferred to the layer below.
"

Anya glanced at the ghost of the flapper. "Renee, is this what you see?"

The flapper nodded, her feather earrings floating away from her shoulders. She touched a stool upholstered in rich leather.
"This is how I remember it. Sometimes I think I'm the only one who does.
"

Anya turned back to Charon. "We have to find Hope. I released most of the spirits she'd trapped in reliquaries, but she has Pandora's Jar. And all the ghosts from the museum."

Charon frowned.
"Those are old ghosts. Powerful ones. She'll be ready to put up a fight.
"

"How can we find her?"

"There's one place in the city where all ghosts pass through. We should be able to catch her trail there, at Michigan Central Station.
"

Anya's brow wrinkled underneath her helmet. "That's been closed for decades."

"It's been closed to humans. Not to the rest of us."
Charon gestured to the door.
"C'mon. I'll show you.
"

Hesitantly, Anya followed him through the door of the Devil's Bathtub. When she stepped out onto the street, she stopped short and gasped. Sparky ran into the back of her armored legs and grumbled at the affront.

She'd expected to see what she always had: a cracked downtown street, traffic, telephone poles, maybe a bit of litter or a parked car decorated with tickets. But the road was nearly empty, unfolding like a black ribbon, winding around buildings from various eras: the 1920s, 1930s, and beyond. Snatches of music from the jazz era played through open windows, and a Model T tooled down the street. A tree had taken root in the sidewalk, shining absinthe green, and Anya could see its roots digging below the pavement in perfect symmetry to the branches reaching overhead to the dusky sky.

Two doors down, a brick warehouse collapsed without a sound, dissolving into dust that blew downwind like a sandstorm. Anya covered her nose as the sand blew past, smelling like shattered clay and with bits that glittered like glass.

"What's happening?" she gasped. The red dust rolled past her ankles and down the streets.

"That's what happens to things that are forgotten here."
Charon shrugged, as if seeing a three-story building dissolve was a usual event.
"Memory is the key thing. Energy makes things live. Thoughts are energy. If no one--ghost or human--thinks about something, then it disappears.
"

The dust blew past, leaving a blank and empty lot, filled with a black void that seethed and churned. It was the most complete destruction of anything Anya had ever seen. Instinctively, she recoiled from it. But it felt familiar. Her fingers touched her breastbone, where that terrible dark fire burned. It smelled like oblivion.

"We've gotta get going. I'll explain the laws on the way."
Charon walked a motorcycle from the shadow of the Devil's Bathtub. Anya wasn't a fan of motorcycles. Firefighters and paramedics called them "donorcycles." Charon's ride was an old, beat-up bike that reminded Anya of something she would have seen in a World War II documentary.

"That's your... transportation here?"

Charon must have sensed her squeamishness. A smile played around the corners of his mouth, the first she'd seen on him. It wasn't an unpleasant expression.

"What did you expect? I ditched the boat a couple thousand years ago.
"

Anya couldn't tell if he was joking or serious. She climbed on the bike behind him. Sparky scrambled up to her shoulder, and she awkwardly put her arms around Charon's waist. He radiated cold through his coat, a chill that seeped through her metal armor and made her shudder. His coat smelled like incense.

Charon stomped on the accelerator. The bike responded with a sound like a choked lawn mower and took off. Anya's stomach lurched and her chest tightened. She heard Sparky's claws scraping on her armor as he shifted around her neck. From the corner of her tearing eye, she saw him leaning his head into the wind. His tongue and gill-fronds unfurled, and he seemed to taste the air lashing around them.

Anya shuddered. At least she was wearing a helmet.

Through slitted eyes, she watched the landscape whip past. Black road unfurled under a dusk-reddened sky. Streetlights had begun to flicker on, but they were a hodgepodge of styles: gaslights, electric lights suspended from ornate posts, and lights suspended from sleek aluminum arms. Some civil engineer, somewhere, must have been dreaming of them enough to give them form and shape here.

The buildings shifted, like clouds across the sky. In some moments, she saw buildings as she remembered them in the physical world: factories, houses, landmarks. But they sometimes reverted to earlier eras. Some spaces were rendered in more clarity than others: Two ghosts playing checkers in a park were surrounded with exquisite detail, down to each blade of grass. Anya imagined that they'd played every weekend for decades. Waiting areas of doctors offices were lit, with each dog-eared magazine sketched in boring, painstaking detail. Classroom desks could be seen through windows with plastic chairs pulled up behind them. Walls and train cars decorated with graffiti were sharper than blank, new ones. Supermarkets and gas stations faded into a blurry, decaying haze--no one apparently gave much thought to these, and they were quite literally falling apart.

Charon turned off by the river, the bike rattling and growling along the street. The River Rouge sliced through the twilight like silver rapids, much faster and clearer and stronger than in the physical world.

Charon caught her looking, shouted back to her,
"Water's like that, strong here. It gave rise to that myth about evil not being able to cross running water.
"

"Is that true here?"

"Not any place I've ever been. Well, not without magickal interference.
"

Anya assumed that was a lot of places. She shouted over the wind as it tore at her voice: "What are you, anyway? Are you
the
Charon? The guy fishing for dead souls on the river Styx? Or is that an affectation?"

She felt his muscles tense under her arms.
"How about you?"
he countered.
"Are you
the
Ishtar?
"

"Of course not."

"We all inherit pieces of things that make us what we are, whether we want them or not.
"

Anya poked him in the ribs, which caused the bike to wobble dangerously. "Quit being so fucking cryptic."

"You really are clueless, aren't you?
"

"Yeah. I am."

"Do you know what an avatar is?
"

"That's the thing you create to represent yourself in a video game. Everyone makes themselves look like they're a lot hotter than they really are and goes off into some fantasy world to slay ogres and get virtual sex."

Charon laughed. Anya felt it rumbling under her fingers before the wind ripped it away.
"If it were only that easy. Let me back up a sec. Do you know what an archetype is?
"

"I'm not
entirely
stupid. I remember reading about Jung and his archetypes. They're constructs of ideal people that exist in the collective unconscious. Warriors, magicians, tricksters... that kind of thing. There was a guy on PBS a lot of years ago who talked about them." Anya was impressed with herself for retaining that much from Mythology 101.