The Undead Pool (The Hollows #12)(87)
Author: Kim Harrison

“No. No I didn’t. It’s never worked before!”

Shaky, I stood up. “You need to leave.”

“But you called me. Ta na shay, eram,” a high-pitched voice said, and I spun.

“Holy shit!” Jenks swore, and I stared, Landon forgotten, at the little boy standing before me. He was in a hospital gown, ashen and thin with that ugly ID band on his wrist and pale-rimmed holes in his skin where the IVs once were. His hair had been lovingly arranged, and I recognized the amulet pinned to his coat from the morgue. He wasn’t alive, and as I tried to figure out what to say, he shuffled forward, no expression, no nothing. My middle ached, as if something was being pulled from it.

“I remember this dream,” the boy said, head down. “There you are,” he lisped, shuffling three steps before falling over and hitting the floor with a thud. Ivy reached for him, her face pale as she drew back. “It’s time to become,” he said to the floor.

Horrified, I scrambled to put the chair between us. Holy crap, it was like the night of the living dead in my living room! Jenks was on my shoulder, and Bis flew into the rafters, hissing.

“Rachel?” Ivy said, eyes black and freaking out. “Where did he come from?”

I’d kicked the Goddess out of my mind. Apparently she’d found another, one who couldn’t stop her, and jumped it here. “Ah, the morgue? I think it’s okay,” I said, coming out from behind my chair. Landon was no use, huddled as if he’d never seen a zombie before. Hell, I knew I hadn’t, but I was used to things like this. Leaning over the boy, I carefully flipped him over and stared at his unseeing eyes. Sort of.

“I think she thinks I’m one of her mystics,” I said, and the boy stared sightlessly at me. Either she didn’t know how to work the eyes, or the optic nerve was already dead.

“You are,” the boy said, gaze vacant. “You’re my thought. Come home.”

Okay, I could handle this, and I moved so that his eyes might find mine. “I’m not,” I said, creeping out. “My aura is the same is all. Listen. Your mystics slipping from my line are damaging reality. Can you not use that line for a while?”

“Line?” the boy said, his motions to try to get up faltering to nothing. His eyes met mine, and I froze, pulse hammering. “You’re not my dream,” he said suddenly, and Landon began chanting half under his breath. He sounded terrified. I knew I wasn’t all that happy. “You’re the solid everything lives within. What are you?”

“Rache!” Jenks exclaimed, and my eyes widened as the Goddess suddenly tried to slip into my thoughts again. Breath hissing, I bubbled myself, shifting my aura, then shifting it again. If not for my practice holding my own against demons, I might have been lost. No! I demanded, and my face burned where Jenks’s dust touched me as I felt her soak into me, layer by layer, as if absorbing the chemicals and synapses in my brain and reading them like memory. I’m not you! I’m Rachel. Get out!

Again I shoved her away, and panting, I stood in the middle of the sanctuary, shaking. Landon was crouched by the boy at my feet, and he looked up as I took a gasping breath of air.

“Who is that?” I said, and he shrugged.

“She forgot to breathe for him,” he said. “And with a lack of oxygen, the biological processes fall apart very fast under motion. When the brain quits functioning completely, she can’t stay.”

“Then it’s over?” Jenks said from beside Bis in the rafters. The gargoyle looked totally freaked out, a pale white beside Jenks’s green dust.

“Good.” Ivy cracked her knuckles, her eyes dark and her fear of the dead obvious. “Get out.”

But a jerk on the ley line brought my head up, and I dropped back as a man in a hospital gown was suddenly standing in my church.

“You’re not singular,” the man said, clearly more animate than the boy, making me wonder if he had perhaps just died and he had a larger number of neurons and synapses still working. “You are a complicated dream . . .”

“Tink’s little pink dildo! We got us another one, Rache!”

“I am not a dream!” I shouted, amazed at how quickly my horror could turn to annoyance, and I swear the Goddess almost focused on me. “I’m another entity. I’m . . . a singular,” I said, trying to use words she might understand. “I exist in the mass that creates spaces. We all do. Now will you listen to me? Someone is stealing your thoughts. I’m trying to help.”

The man listed as he shambled forward. “They’re stealing me?” she said, the first hints of real emotion crossing her, and Landon backed to the hallway at the end of the church. “Errant dreams are holding them?” I backed up too as the dead man suddenly lost control of his feet and fell to his knees. “They take them for their own? They are mine! Mine!”

She was angry again. I was losing what little ground I’d gained. “If you could—”

“You know where my thoughts are.” The man’s head slumped, and he fell forward, his body shutting down. “I see it in you, errant singular,” she said, facedown on the floor.

Taken aback, I hesitated and looked at Ivy. It was hard to be afraid of something that kept falling down.

“You’re complex,” the Goddess said, face still planted in the floor, and Jenks dropped down, his dust glowing like a second aura. “How do you not become? Perhaps you exist. Perhaps not. You will be my thought. My thought with . . . independent movement in the mass between spaces.”

Huh?

“You need direction,” she added, and the man collapsed, the strings utterly cut.

No! I screamed, but that fast, she had me, the Goddess learning the electrical impulses of my body in a flash of insight. My eyes flew open, and I felt a surge of shock and pleasure as she saw the world through me, her first spike of confusion vanishing as she dipped through my brain and found out how to make sense of it, learning what a corpse could never teach her. She was in my soul, wild, bright, dark, all things.

“Rachel?” Ivy said, squinting at me in concern. Jenks watched, horrified, as she iced through me, seeing the world through her thousand eyes. I opened my mouth to speak, but the Goddess’s attention was upon the pixies as she calculated the flow of dust by taking in the air currents and heat patterns. Struggling, I tried again. Landon had crept back out of the hallway, smiling wickedly. Feeling my surge of anger, the Goddess fixed on him.