Walking Dead

When I’d first come to this place, it was the most rigid, well-defined little plot of land I’d ever seen. The grass had been mown to a millimeter height, so dry and sparse the ground could be seen between blades. The benches had been austere, uncomfortable things, and the pathways had been narrow and very straight. A pond at the northern end had been shallow with a trickle feeding it, and the sky had been gray. In my defense, I’d been dying at the time, but anybody looking around might’ve guessed I’d been dead a long time already.

It’d gotten a lot better since then. It had nothing on some of the lush landscapes I’d seen representing my friends’ souls, but there was some life there now. Moss grew on what had been stark walls, wearing down at their edges. The desperately precise footpaths were buckling a little as roots began to grow under them, and stone benches had turned to wood, far more inviting. The grass was richer in color and in amount, and no longer kept to a uniform height. There were even places along the walls where it’d grown into tall fat bunches with thick roots that would be difficult to loosen if I wanted to tidy up. The waterfall and pond bubbled cheerfully, and I could no longer see the distant southern end, where mist and trees obscured a door into the land of the dying. It was an altogether nicer place to be, and I was as proud as I was relieved.

Now, if I only had any idea how to let somebody else in. Coyote’d waltzed in and out as though it was his own territory, and the only other person who’d visited had taken advantage of my lousy shields and slipped in like a snake. My own pride wanted to make a better invitation to Billy than that, especially after he’d wounded it with his personal-boundaries comment. I wanted to prove myself.

I’d cobbled together my idea of proper shielding from Star Trek, and insofar as I imagined them at all, I imagined them rather like a big blue pearly bubble surrounding me and my garden. Presumably phasers set on “stun” wouldn’t break through, and I trusted Billy wouldn’t be shooting to kill. I curled my fingers in the grass, admiring how it was long enough to grasp, and tried to make a Billy-shaped hole in the pearlescent glow.

Billy-shaped, to me, meant a mix of a minivan and a police car. I liked vehicle metaphors, but usually I didn’t get mash-ups. Melinda was a hundred percent minivan. Morrison was that damn gold safety-rated Toyota. I was Petite, which didn’t work all that well if I thought too deeply about it, because a 1969 Mustang was a much sexier car than I was a person. Still, if anything’d been my heart and soul over the last decade, it was the purple Boss 302 I’d put everything into since I bought her out of somebody’s barn. Even then, she’d been in better shape than I was, but like it or lump it, she was the shape of me in my head. Billy, though, got mixed up between the professional detective and the family man, at least when I thought of him. His own sense of himself, in car terms, had been more minivan.

An image formed within the shape of the doorway I was trying to make for Billy. It wasn’t him: it was slighter and somehow more ethereal or feminine, though it shared the same general sense of gentle kindness I thought of being an inextricable aspect of my partner. I blinked, but it was gone before I’d even completed the action, so barely there I wasn’t sure I’d seen it at all. I looked around, trying to find it again, and didn’t notice Billy walking in. My first clue I had a visitor was his, “Huh,” as he looked around.

Presumably “huh” wasn’t supposed to get my back up, but it did. “What’s that mean?”

“Tidier than I expected, that’s all.” He gave me a quick smile, and I blinked a few times, adjusting my mental picture of Billy to match his own.

They weren’t violently different. He looked younger and slimmer in his astral projection, but I thought most people did. He also looked more delicate. Not fragile by any stretch of the imagination, but less burly than the guy I saw every day, and not in a way that a lower body weight accounted for. It was a more feminine aspect than I’d expected, despite knowing he often wore women’s clothes off duty. He wasn’t now, but his clothes were soft: a silk shirt with discreet poet’s ruffles, and pants loose enough to flow with his movements. My long-standing theory had always been that Billy cross-dressed to exact revenge against parents who gave him the unfortunate nickname of Billy when their last name was Holliday, but seeing his mental image told me just what a jerk I was for being a smart-ass, even if I’d kept it to myself. I wondered briefly what I looked like to him, and decided not to ask. People contained multitudes. Apparently I contained multitudes of buttheads. I didn’t want to know what that looked like.

“It’s messier than it used to be.” I got up and gestured toward the far end of the garden. “The door’s down there. If I’ve got ghost riders, would they be hanging around the gate to death’s country?”

“They’d probably be trying to get away from it.” Billy slid his hands into his pockets and wandered down one of the pathways. My shoes vanished, leaving me to wiggle my toes in fresh grass as I walked beside him. “There were some things I wanted to tell you before Morrison drummed you under. Do you always go under that fast?”

“No.” I left it at that. Anything more invited too many questions. They were probably all being asked anyway, what with Morrison volunteering to play little drummer boy, but at least I could pretend that wasn’t beyond the norm.

Billy arched an eyebrow, then visibly put curiosity aside. “Right. Okay. My window for seeing ghosts is forty-eight hours, maximum. The gift doesn’t run deep enough to see beyond that.”

“Except your sister.”

He gave me a sharp look. Not disapproving, just sharp. “Yeah. But blood’s thicker than water, and Caroline and I were close.” The air cooled, thin fog pooling around us as we walked down to the foot of my garden. This was my favorite part of it, new and full of promise. Ivy hung over the walls, making it look much lusher than the northern end, and I hoped the walls would keep fading farther and farther back, giving me more to explore. “My point,” Billy said, “is that the cauldron ghosts were all older than that, so we’re dealing with something I don’t have much experience with.”

“When you say ‘much’ you mean ‘any,’ right?”

He gave me that look again, though it was softened by the fog. “No, I mean ‘much’ because Caro is—was—an exception. If it turns out you’ve got a rider, I want you to step back and let me deal with it. Get out of here if I tell you to.”

“Are you nuts?”

Billy stopped and looked down at me. Even with the delicacy added to his makeup, he was still bigger than I was. I quelled the urge to make myself a little taller in the garden of my mind, so I could measure up to the visitors. “If you’ve got a rider, it’s someone or something strong enough to get a toehold in somebody brimming with shamanic magic. With life magic, Joa

There was a certain irrefutable logic to that. “What if you do get possessed? What do I do?”

“Get a priest and perform an exorcism.” Amusement creased Billy’s face at my expression. “I mean it. It’s a violent way to send them over, and it’d be my last choice, but—well, you could say if it does happen, it is my last choice. Don’t worry. It’s not likely to happen.”

“That doesn’t reassure me at all.” I forged ahead and crouched to pull the door key out from a little hole dug in the earth. A robin cheeped and I smiled, happy it was there. My garden wasn’t exactly overflowing with wildlife, but there ought to be a robin to go with the hidden key to a secret door. “If we open the door and there’s nothing there, I’m in the clear, right? I mean, if I’ve got a door between life and death, and that’s where ghosts stay, then they should be here if they’re here at all.”

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