“I’ll take Havoc. At least I’ll be doing something this way, not just standing around watching. I hate not being able to help,” Tamara told him, heading for the door. Then she turned back, braids swinging. She was smiling. “Good luck talking to the dead.”
Once Tamara left, Call felt very alone. It was just him and Aaron and two crazy old ladies and a corpse.
“Okay,” he said. “What do we do?”
“As I understand it,” Alma began, reminding Call that she probably wasn’t all that sure, “you have to imagine the chaos magic running through the brain of the deceased, like blood. You have to send chaos energy through it, activating the mind.”
That sounded hard. And not very specific.
“Activating the mind?” Aaron echoed. He looked as baffled as Call felt.
“Yes,” Alma said with more certainty. “The chaos magic approximates the spark of life, allowing the dead to communicate.”
Anastasia gestured toward Jen’s body on the table. “Call and Aaron. Come closer and look at the girl.”
They moved toward the table uncertainly. Jen’s eyes were closed but there was a smear of blood on her cheek. Call remembered her laughing at the awards ceremony. It seemed incomprehensible that she would never smile or flick her hair or whisper a message or run through the corridors again.
This was what Constantine had wanted to stop, he thought. This feeling of wrongness. The going away of life and meaning. He tried to imagine if it were someone he really loved lying there, Alastair or Tamara or Aaron. It was hard not to understand where Constantine had been coming from.
He wrenched his mind back to the present. Understanding where Constantine had been coming from was not what he was supposed to be doing. Finding the spy was.
“Reach for each other,” Alma instructed. “Use each other as counterweights. You carry within you the power of chaos, of ultimate nothingness. What you are reaching for is the soul. Ultimate existence. Use that to reach Jennifer.”
That made a little more sense, Call thought. Maybe. He exchanged a quick glance with Aaron before they both closed their eyes.
In the dark, Call balanced himself. It was easier, now that he had practiced, to fall into that inner space. It was like everything rushed away, even the pain in his leg, and everything was black and silent, but in a comforting way, like a familiar blanket. He reached out and felt Aaron there. Aaron’s self, his Aaron-ness, cheerful reliability layered over a darker core of determination and anger. Aaron reached back for him, and Call felt strength flow into him. He could see Aaron now, the outline of him, bright against the dark.
Another dim outline seemed to float up toward them. Hair that looked white, like a photo negative, streamed behind her.
Jen.
Call’s eyes flew open, and he nearly yelled. Jen hadn’t moved on the table, but her eyes were wide-open, their black irises filmed over. Aaron was staring, too, shocked and a little sick.
Jen’s mouth didn’t move, but a flat voice issued from between her lips. “Who calls me?”
“Um, hi?” Call said. When she’d been alive, Jennifer had always made him nervous. She was one of the older, popular girls. He’d had enough trouble talking to her then. Talking to her now was nerve-racking on a totally other level.
“It’s Call and Aaron,” he went on. “Remember us? We’re wondering if you can tell us who murdered you?”
“I’m dead?” Jennifer asked. “I feel … strange.”
She sounded strange, too — there was a hollowness in her voice. An emptiness. Call didn’t think her soul was present, not really. More like the traces of it, the memory of what was left behind when it departed. Just hearing her talk freaked out Call so much that he was afraid he might start laughing from panic. His heart hammered in his chest and he felt like he couldn’t breathe. How was he supposed to break it to her that she wasn’t alive anymore?
He reminded himself that it wasn’t really her. She didn’t have feelings to hurt.
“Can you tell us about the party?” Aaron asked, polite as ever. Call gave him a grateful look. “What happened that night?”
Jennifer’s mouth twisted into the shadow of a smile. “Yes, the party. I remember. I was having fun with my friends. There was a boy I liked, but he was avoiding me and then — then the lights went out. And my chest hurt. I tried to scream, but I couldn’t. Kimiya! Kimiya! Stay away from him!”
“What?” Call demanded. “What about Kimiya? What happened? Who’s she supposed to stay away from? She’s not the one who did this, is she?”
But Jennifer seemed to be lost in the memory, her body thrashing around, her words turning to one long, continuous scream.
Call had to focus on the magic. He closed his eyes and tried to go back to seeing that dim outline of Jen, that photo-negative version. In the dark, he saw her, faded and tattered. If he wanted to, he knew he could make her speak words that were not her own. But he needed her to have her own voice, not his. So he chased those shining leftovers of a soul, glad she was preserved only a short time after the soul’s departure. He channeled more chaos magic into her, to shore them up.
When he opened his eyes, her features had gone slack.
“Jennifer, can you hear me?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, her voice flat and affectless. “What do you command?”
“What?” Call looked over at Aaron. He had gone very pale.
“Oh no,” Anastasia said. Her hands went to her mouth, one clapped over the other. Alma’s eyes had gone wide and she reached out as though she could stop something that was already over. “Call, what have you done?”
Call looked down at Jennifer and she looked up at him, with eyes that were beginning to swirl.
“Call,” Anastasia whispered. “Oh no, not again — not again.”
“What?” Call was backing away, shock spreading through him. What? seemed to be all he could say or think. “I — I didn’t — I’ve never done that before —”
But I have, as Constantine. I’ve done it a hundred, a thousand times.
Jen sat up on the table. Her black hair flowed down around her bone-white shoulders. Her eyes were swirling fire.
“Command me, Master,” she said to Call. “I wish only to serve.”
“It is you,” said Alma, looking at Call with a dawning horror. “Little Makar — why did no one tell me?”