I couldn’t prevent her snacking on him by manipulating the web, but there was a chance I could do something else. It was the only option I could find. Knowledge acquired; it was time to stop seeing.
That proved easier said than done. I fought to reseal the Soul Taker’s rips in my mind, but it was harder to close those paths than it had been to tear them open. I flailed, drowning in the river of enlightenment.
My mouth tasted of copper and salt—and then I was safe, my feet on the ground and my mind my own. I stared into my mate’s golden eyes and all that I saw was him, the taste of blood on my tongue.
I thought for a moment that I’d bitten my tongue or something and the pain had brought me back. The blood in my mouth tasted like pain. Then I saw that Adam’s mouth was bloody, too, and there was a fresh wound healing on his forearm.
He’d bitten himself and pressed his mouth to mine. Blood strengthens bonds, and he’d used his to give me the power to save myself from the Soul Taker’s cursed gift. Adam was the most loving person I’d ever met, though sometimes his love language was painful to everyone involved. I’d learned that I had to be brave to love him.
Worth it.
He stepped back, and turned me to face the fading ghost. I hadn’t been lost in the flood of understanding for long, I thought. The spider had only consumed a few more inches of his extremities. But when I looked into Jack’s face, I saw that his awareness, his sharp fear, was fading, too—his bright blue eyes were dulling.
“Jack,” I said urgently. He looked at me, but I couldn’t tell if he really saw me. This wouldn’t work if he didn’t help.
“Jack O’Malley,” I said, stealing all the dominance I could from Adam. My voice carried an Alpha’s authority and my own power over the dead.
The demand hit the ghost and he swayed, lifting one of his arms in a futile effort to touch me. There was so little of him left.
I had understood what I needed to do just a second ago. But while I wasn’t paying attention, that knowledge had drifted away like a half-remembered dream. I couldn’t tell Jack how to save himself because I couldn’t remember.
Memory. Ghosts are like a memory, I thought, and in that moment, I understood exactly why that was. Then the understanding left me, but I didn’t need to know why.
When we see a ghost, pay attention to it, it becomes more attached to our world, my brother had once told me. His next words, if I remembered them correctly, had been, So don’t do that.
“I see you,” I told Jack, focusing on him, trying to capture his eyes as if I were a vampire instead of a…whatever I was.
“Rory,” Elyna said urgently. “His name is Jack Rory O’Malley.”
Names are important—the fae won’t reveal their true names, and change them as often as they can. Names have power. Names remember.
How was it that Peter Pan saved Tinker Bell? It wasn’t the children clapping their hands—although they had. Peter Pan was a story. Fiction. A lie. But stories are powerful lies because they are true in a way that real life isn’t.
“I see you, Jack Rory O’Malley,” I said.
Peter Pan had saved Tinker Bell with belief.
“Jack Rory O’Malley.” This time I said Jack’s name with authority, knowing with absolute certainty that Jack stood before me now. In that moment, I believed that he was real.
The spider couldn’t feed upon him if he was real.
I wasn’t expecting the crack of sound, like a blown fuse, or the sudden flash as all the lightbulbs in the big chandelier over my head, all the lightbulbs in the reception room, the little connected office, and at least some of the ones in the hall lit up.
For just a moment, the moment it took for the lights to remember that there was no electricity to power them—for that instant, when the little reception room was lit up as bright as day, Jack O’Malley was visible to everyone, whole and complete, and as real and solid as flesh and blood and life. I could hear the thump of his heart.
Adam stiffened.
Elyna cried, “Jack?”
She reached for him, but before she could touch him, the lights went out and her hands passed through him.
“Jack?” This time Elyna’s voice was nearly a whisper.
There was a soft sound that did not originate from anyone in the room. It might have been a laugh. It might have been “Good girl.” I looked, but I didn’t see the spider.
“Is he gone?” Adam had his command face on, and that told me he didn’t know what to think, either. At some point he’d cleaned off his lips. The wound on his arm had healed, though his skin was still stained with blood. “Is Jack gone?” he clarified, directing the question at me.
“No.”
Jack was trying to comfort Elyna, though he could not touch her and she could not hear him. But I wasn’t worried about him just now.
“Did you see where the spider went?” I asked.
Adam helped me look. The room wasn’t big, but then neither was the spider, by comparison. We started at opposite ends and searched thoroughly. I noticed that Adam had quit treating Elyna as an enemy. I thought it was probably due to her obvious distress over Jack. My husband was a romantic at heart. He was still keeping an eye on her, still alert, but not wary.
“If it’s here, we’re not going to find it,” Adam said, moving the couch back to its original position.
I crouched so I could look under the end table. There was a wad of bubble gum, but no silver spiders. I flopped down on my butt.
“Oh, it’s still here,” I said direly.
Beside me, the chair creaked as Elyna sat on it with the grace of someone who’d grown up in an era when women only wore dresses, knees and ankles together. She rubbed her hands before putting them on her thighs to still them.
She was uncomfortably close. I turned to face her and shoved myself back a couple of feet in the process.
“Mercy,” the vampire said. Then she looked away from me and blinked rapidly. Tears, I thought. But it could have been some other emotion.
“I don’t have any photos,” she said in a small voice, still turning her face away from me as if there was something fascinating about the wreath on the door. “The ones I’d had…before…were gone. I haven’t seen my husband’s face since…for nearly a century.” She looked at me then, and I couldn’t read the expression on her face at all. “Since the day I killed him, in fact.”
There was nothing I could say to that.
“I am a monster, after all,” she said. “We are all of us monsters in this room, I think.” She pointed at Adam. “Werewolf,” she said. She pointed at herself. “Vampire.” She made a whirling “somewhere” gesture and said, “Ghost.” She pointed at me and waited.
“Not a werewolf, vampire, or ghost.” I didn’t owe her my identity, and too often others’ ignorance of who and what I was had saved the day. Instead, I gave her a part of the truth, the part she already had. “Psychopomp sometimes.”
She looked blank. That was okay. It was a weird word.
“I have a knack with ghosts,” I clarified.
“Okay,” Elyna said after a moment that she used to tell me she knew I wasn’t giving her the whole truth. “Okay. That spider—”
“That was not a spider,” said Jack with emphasis.
I’d been looking everywhere but at him. I’d spent the last ten minutes searching for a spider I knew we weren’t going to find and trying to figure out what to do about Jack. More specifically, what to do about whatever I’d done to him. I worried about it. He didn’t feel the same as he had before the spider—or whatever she was—had tried eating him. He felt more solid, grounded.