Lightbringer (27 page)

Splashing a second dose against her arm, Wendy couldn't help marveling at the way the peroxide slipped right through his hands. She could feel the wetness but her arm was now numb from wrist to elbow and with Piotr helpfully gripping her forearm it took no time at all to pat the area dry and apply another layer of dermabond to the wounds.

“Here,” she told Jon, tearing off a long strip of gauze with her teeth. “Start here and wrap.”

“Let me do it,” Chel snapped from the doorway, pushing past her brother and snatching the gauze out of his hand. “He can't fix a boo-boo to save his life.” Chel eyed the wounds and heaved a dramatic sigh. “I always knew you would flip out one day,” she muttered, wrapping Wendy's arm with an expert finesse that spoke of years in cheerleading, of countless bound ankles, wrapped scrapes, and an endless succession of hastily bandaged knees. “But did you have to cut so deep? These are totally gonna scar.”

“Not that I don't appreciate the help, but why does everyone think I did this to myself?” Wendy asked, exasperated.

“I always figured your goth-kiddie thing was a big cry for attention,” Chel said, taping off the end. She pulled a tissue from the box and swiped at her nose and under her eyes. “The next logical steps are emo poetry and a knife fascination, right?”

“Shut up,” Wendy replied and gestured for Jon to collect the bags. Piotr was already halfway down the stairs and sliding neatly through the kitchen wall. She knew that he would be waiting for them in the car, hopefully in the back seat. “Come on, let's get a move on.”

“Go cry in a corner, emo kid,” Chel said, brightening and leading the way downstairs.

Wendy laughed despite herself. “Can it, buffy, before I kick your ass.” They collected the car keys and locked the doors, letting themselves out into the first spray of falling rain.

Accustomed to the ebb and flow of the hospital traffic, Wendy dropped Chel and Jon off at the front door, flicking off the heater as soon as they'd gone. Piotr had ridden in the backseat the whole way, making the already chilly air bitter cold.

They had no time to talk; Wendy found a parking space almost immediately.

“Not the Lost?” he asked, keeping pace as Wendy sprinted through the stinging rain.

“No,” she cried against the rising wind. “The White Lady!”

Shocked into stillness, Piotr stumbled to a stop but Wendy kept going. “The White Lady? When? How?”

“Walkers, I'd bet,” Wendy gasped, dodging through the doors and out of the rain. Glancing around to ensure no one was listening, Wendy wrung her hair out over the non-slip mat and dug through her purse until she found her cell headset. Luckily Jon and Chel were nowhere near—they would remember that her cell was broken and still on the floor at home—but to anyone else she would appear to be on the phone. Rude in a hospital, sure, but not crazy.

“Look,” she murmured, taking the long route to the floor Mrs. Barry said Eddie was on. “There's something I've been meaning to tell you.” Then, walking at a slower than normal pace, Wendy filled Piotr in on her way to Eddie's room. This time she bared it all, outlining the dreams she'd been having for months, the major visits from the White Lady, and even the White Lady's demands of the previous evening.

“She's got my mom, Piotr,” Wendy finished up. “And now Eddie. I know I should have told you we were in contact before, or at the very least about Dunn, but I guess I was hoping it was just my dreams running away with me. I think that I didn't even really believe it was really her until this morning, when I woke up without my tongue ring. See?” She stuck her tongue out. “I mean, I believed it was her but I didn't
really
believe, you know?”

“I understand,” Piotr said, “and I forgive you for not speaking up before. If I were in your situation I might not have believed it either. It seems so outrageous! But…I have got no clue what she wants with me. Do you know?”

“No idea,” Wendy said. “Maybe because you're a Rider?”

Elle spoke in his mind then, the memory of her words so sharp and cutting that Piotr physically flinched:
She understands all about duty, I bet. That's why she kept you, Piotr, not just any ol' Rider but the big cheese who
started
the Riders, away from us when we needed you most. That's why you, Mr. Hi-You're-Dead-Here's-How-The-Afterlife-Works himself, was off neckin' with a
monster
when you should have been here running a shift!

“Impossible,” Piotr murmured. “It…it can't be true.” His vision shutter-shifted again—live-dead-live—before the world was once more washed in grey.

“Piotr?” Wendy asked, hand at his elbow, “Piotr, what's wrong?”

“I-I do not know,” he whispered, but that was a lie. The fight he'd had with the other Riders had been so intense, so unlike their normal spats. Elle, he knew, was truly furious with him. Worried over Dora, feeling exposed in her own haven, and overwhelmed with betrayal that Piotr, her Piotr, had been not only spending his time with a member of the living, but the Lightbringer herself, Elle had said some harsh things.

But had she said some
true
things? That was the question.

Before Piotr would have said no. But now…now he wasn't so sure. His vision blinked again.

If it had just been Elle, maybe he could have forgotten the entire fight, gone back the next day and made up. But it had been James and Lily too, the three of them ganging up, all saying the same thing.

Lily:
Years passed and with them passed the man I'd known. Who you are now is not who you were then.

Elle:
I think it's pretty clear that Petey never remembers anything, do ya Pete?

James:
She's telling the truth. You're older than Moses, Peter. You're older than anyone any ghost I know's ever met.

“Piotr? Piotr!” Wendy's hand was on his arm, and she was shaking him. Her eyes were wide, lids drawn back so the whites showed on all sides, her pupils only specks in the vast warm brown of her irises. The heat was baking off her in waves. “Piotr what's wrong?”

“I am fine, it is nothing,” he said, pulling away. He felt shaky and scared, tottering on the edge of some very important clue that he couldn't quite grasp. It was aggravating, like having a phrase on the tip of your tongue, knowing that you knew it but being entirely unable to spit out the words. “It's nothing.”

Wendy heaved a deep breath and he wrapped a cool arm around her waist. “Let's go see your friend.”

Careful inspection of Eddie's body proved Wendy's theory correct. Eddie's soul was nowhere near his physical shell. A length of his cord was there, extending from his navel in a thick cable that appeared, after close examination, to have been chewed off, but the soul that should have been attached to such a vibrant, healthy cord was completely missing.

“It's just like my mom,” Wendy whispered, brushing the side of her hand across Eddie's cheek. She turned away, swiping quickly at the corner of each eye.

Mrs. Barry, looking up from her place at Eddie's bedside, wiped her puffy eyes with the corner of a hospital towel. “What was that, Winifred?”

“Nothing, Mrs. Barry,” Wendy said meekly. “Nothing important.”

“You're such a good friend, dear,” Mrs. Barry said, grasping Wendy's wrist with fingers wiry and lined with wrinkles. Losing her husband had aged her prematurely, made her bony and wan; losing Eddie appeared to have sped up the process. Though she couldn't be positive Wendy was almost sure that Mrs. Barry's hair was greyer at the temples than before, that the lines bracketing her mouth were deeper. Though she didn't voice her opinion, Piotr, prowling around the tiny room, apparently agreed.

“Something's been at her too,” Piotr said, leaning into Mrs. Barry's personal space and examining her face closely. She shivered and released Wendy's wrist, reached for her jacket and shrugged it on. “My word,” she fussed. “They do keep it cold in here, don't they?”

“Can't you see it?” Piotr asked, pointing at her mouth and the corners of her eyes. “That residue?”

Now that Piotr had pointed it out, if Wendy squinted just right, she could barely make out what he was referring to. There was a pale, thin film overlaying Mrs. Barry's face, a clinging mesh so fine she imagined she'd need a ghostly microscope to be able to truly examine it in detail.

“I don't know what it is,” Wendy said aloud and took Eddie's hand in her own to cover the outburst when Mrs. Barry looked at her curiously. “The hospital just has to keep it frigid, I guess. Think he needs a blanket?”

“I asked already,” Mrs. Barry exclaimed as Piotr dug his hand in the side of her face. “It's a spirit web, I think,” he said. “Whatever it is, it's put down roots.”

“But that awful head nurse,” Mrs. Barry continued as Piotr worked his hands in and out of the flesh of her cheeks, rocking his fingers under the strands to gently lift them away. “She says their linen supplier is running late with the delivery! Then she said if I were willing to wait she'd see if any of the other beds of the floor had a blanket free. Can you believe that?”

“Be careful,” Wendy said and then cleared her throat. “You have no clue where those extra blankets have been, I mean. Anyone could have been sitting on them. Germs.”

Nodding frantically, Mrs. Barry grabbed her free hand. “You are so right, dear! And that's just what I told that nurse. I said, ‘Now you listen here, young lady, I'm not going to have my only son covered in the filth of other people, no ma'am!'”

All of Piotr's fingers were now wedged beneath the web; pulling the threads away was taking real effort at this point. Whatever it was, it had sunk itself deep into her head and cords of muscle stood out against Piotr's neck as he braced his feet against Mrs. Barry's chair and
pulled.
The film began to rip.

“Mrs. Barry!” Wendy cried. When Eddie's mother looked at her quizzically she licked her lips. “Are you okay?” she asked. “You look sort of white.”

“You know,” Mrs. Barry whispered, hand reaching through the web Piotr was yanking free of her skull with all his might. “I do feel somewhat lightheaded. Perhaps I should…sit…down—”

With one final mighty tug, Piotr pulled the web free. Loose all the way to the roots, the thin strands were rounded like the roots of a tree and dripping with dark silver life. Seeking any energy at all, the web waved towards Wendy the moment it separated from Mrs. Barry.

The instant it was out of her face, Mrs. Barry slumped to the floor and Wendy, crying out in disgust, dodged past the nasty thing in Piotr's arms to push the call button. The nurse was there within moments.

“What happened?”

“She fainted,” Wendy panted. “She was just talking and she fainted.”

In the background Piotr had drawn his dagger and was stabbing the web; each thrust of the knife caused the thing to wail and keen in pain, tendrils thrashing madly. Wendy found it immensely hard to concentrate on explaining Mrs. Barry's collapse to the nurse while the web shrieked itself to death in the background. The nurse pushed Wendy out of the room and cried for a doctor over the intercom. Wendy, glad to be free, fled down the hall.

“That was disgusting,” Wendy whispered, walking briskly towards the elevators. Her mother's room was two floors up from Eddie's. Once ensconced in the safety of the elevator, Wendy leaned against the back wall, pressed her hands to her face, and trembled from head to toe. “Why?” she asked. “What the hell was that thing?”

“It was definitely a spirit web,” Piotr said. “It's like a rabbit snare; you throw many in the air and go back later, see what you caught.”

“It was
feeding
off her?”

“It's just collecting life from her a minute or two at a time. From the look of that thing, it's been there for longer than Eddie's been…gone.” Piotr rubbed the back of his neck self-consciously. “When it gets full or the person it takes root in dies, the web detaches and finds its way outside. Spirit webs like to stay warm. It will crawl as high as it can—plant itself on the roof of a building if possible, to be close to the sun—and wait for someone to come along and harvest the life.”

“That is horrible.” Wendy pressed her hand to her mouth. “But if those things are so effective then why aren't they all over the place?”

He shrugged. “I haven't seen a spirit web in a long time, Wendy. They're extremely difficult to produce; you have to find a plant in the Never's wild and then have a ghost insane enough to be willing to gestate one in their own guts. It gives the seedlings a taste for life essence.” He paused. “Wait. High places…” Had that been what the White Lady was doing at the airport that day? Collecting spirit webs? The air towers certainly were tall enough, and with all the living moving through the area there was bound to be at least a web or two to be harvested in the wild.

“Just when I thought death couldn't get any more gross,” Wendy complained. The elevator dinged and the doors slid open. She led the way down the hall and Jon and Chel, sitting on either side of their mom, looked up when Wendy entered.

“Mom's really witty today,” Jon said, scrubbing his knuckles across his face. He gestured to the television mounted in the upper corner of the room. On the screen a pregnant-to-bursting teen was pulling the hair of a skinny blonde girl with one hand and punching her in the small of the back with the other. “I keep telling her that daytime TV is the new opiate of the masses but Mom's of the opinion that reality shows are where the real money is.”

“I still think Nana's ‘stories’ top that list,” Chel added, leaning back in the molded plastic chair and crossing her legs. “You can't beat good old-fashioned soaps.”

“Porn,” Wendy said. “It's a growth industry.”

Grinning at their groans, Wendy settled into Jon's seat while he went to find another chair. They could have sat on the opposite bed, but none of them wanted to be far from their mother. Wendy held her mom's thin, cool hand while Piotr examined the body.

“Any change?” Wendy asked her sister while Piotr probed her mother's midsection, slipping his hands deep inside her guts.

“None.” Chel shook her head, looking their mother over sadly. “I feel like a jerk for saying this, Wendy, but maybe they're right. Maybe it's time to pull the plug. Mom wouldn't want to be strapped down and cooped up, some vegetable in a bed. She'd rather end it.”