Ghost Perfume | ✔

Chapter 16: Sew Me Back Together (Part 1)

Hardly visible in the light of the self-consciously old-fashioned lanterns on the forest floor - but burning in my inner sight - an unraveled ghost twitched and twisted in silent agony, attached to something inside the man. The same disgusting torture held a ghost tight in the woman beside him.

In pieces. These ghosts were in pieces.

Were they conscious? I thought I saw a flicker of a contorted expression, now here, now gone.

"Only the strongest, most resolute, may survive,'' the woman said. Her voice was thick and beguiling, confident.

I heard it as if from far away, from underwater. I felt strange. Was I here? Was it real?

I was looking at something like the reverse of what Jackal had tried to do to me, wasn't I? These living had taken over the threads of the dead.

My eyes darted around the circle, and my heart pounded: an eerie ring of ghosts looked back at me.

Most, I didn't recognize. The red-threaded souls, I saw, were a collection of the dead like any who usually came to me - real and regular people who'd died in different stages of their lives, confusion drawing their brows, fear and hope widening their eyes and pulling at their mouths. People like Andrew, like Lena and Carl, like Brenda. People who deserved freedom.

The burned threads were a stranger group, some of them in strange clothing. There was a small, button-nosed, apple-cheeked adolescent in printed pajamas, my age or even younger, with a mop of straw-like hair and an incongruous viciousness and worldliness in his wide eyes. I didn't need to ask to know that he'd been dead a very long time. An old, stooped man in a suit floated beside him, white hair slicked back and a fur-edged cloak draped over his shoulders, and he'd have passed for an odd sort of gentleman but for the Machiavellian tilt to his beady eyes. There were two tall, proud women in their thirties, similar enough to be sisters - long-necked and long-haired with hourglass figures - and one looked wary, but the other gave me a look of fascination and desire, like Jackal had given me when he first saw me. She wore a cloak like the stooped man's, but hers was weirder still, with animal heads hanging off its sides. The sight pulled vaguely at a memory. Had I seen a cloak like that before? Or heard of it?

Two of the circle, I recognized. Sharp-faced Jackal, frowning, floating in place immediately to the right of the two speakers. And a pale and frightened young woman who looked like Ellie, staring between me and Jane.

They were tied by silver threads that had a presence in the material world: the living had their throats tied to the threads of the red-threaded ghosts, who were in turn tied to the burned ghosts. I was reminded of manacles. But it was impossible, for a material thing to hold the thread of a soul ...

I squinted with the inner eye. Yes, the silver threads did appear in the ghost plane, but they were colorless there. I could just faintly make out their outline.

"We are like the eagle that hunts and swoops to catch the rat,'' the man on the stone said. "We are like the lion that chases and tears to pieces the gazelle prey. We are magnificent ...''

He wore draping white fabric like you saw on the statues of Ancient Greek gods in pictures. Yes, it was a full-on Ancient Greek costume, clasped asymmetrically at his collarbone and falling to his feet. One of his shoulders and parts of his upper body were bared despite the chill in the air. He was muscled and white and smooth, as if really trying to emulate a hairless statue, except that his beard was heavy. The woman who stood beside him wore a similar draping dress, baring a lot of smooth, strong white flesh as well, but hers was more elaborately tied. A circlet of olive leaves sat in her dark hair, which was tied up, except for a few long curls that dangled artfully to her neck.