Bodies remembered.
As Tav continued speaking, the words pouring out of them like a river full of springtime thaw, Eli wondered what would happen to the men with beer bottles and shiny cars when Tav returned. She had a vision of Tav standing on a frozen river, with feathered wings burning black and red, their eyes dark with power.
She blinked, and the vision was gone.
“The first time I saw a ghost was two years ago,” said Tav, coming to the part in the story they wanted to tell. Their voice strengthened, and their wrist bones aligned. Eli could hear them snapping into place with her magic-enhanced senses. “I was standing in a bus shelter downtown, and he looked more lost than anyone I’d ever seen.”
Tav went over to the ghost and offered him a quarter, thinking maybe he was homeless. He stared at the shiny coin in their hand for a long time.
“He was looking at his reflection,” they explained. “He didn’t recognize it.”
In the coin, Tav saw through the body of the man and into something else. At the time, they thought it was a soul. Now they knew differently.
“I saw what he really was,” they said. “It was sadness and revenge, and I recognized myself in it. And in that moment, he recognized something in me, too.”
They stood with the ghost for a long time, waiting for the bus, or maybe for the sun to rise. A couple of teenagers wandered over, stoned and talking shit. Young, scared, and showing off for each other. Here, Tav’s voice faltered for a moment.
Maybe the teenagers said something to Tav or maybe they didn’t. Eli wondered. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe it mattered too much. Maybe that laceration was still healing, and Tav didn’t want to rip off the scab. Eli was certain that something had been exchanged — looks, words, knuckles.
“The ghost ate them,” Tav said calmly. “Not like an animal eating its prey; it was more like … the stuff inside, that I thought was a soul, came out of the body and drank them. At the end, they were just dried leaves on the pavement. And the ghost was stronger; I could see its light through the skin, without looking at a reflection. He looked back at me, smiled, and vanished. He wasn’t a monster,” they added. “Although he did monstrous things.”
“He was a monster,” said Eli quietly. “You can’t forget that. The next one could eat you.” But the ghost wasn’t the only monster in the story, and Eli understood that Tav saw monstrosity in the humans around them, and they needed Eli to see that, too.
Eli had always known that she was a monster. A monster to hunt monsters. Tav’s story explained why Tav hadn’t been afraid of her.
“The ghost you met at The Sun — that was him. He started following me around after that, and when I met the Hedge-Witch, he came with me. She said no one had ever recruited a ghost before. I was the first.” Pride shimmered in their voice.
After meeting the ghost, Tav started looking for magic, and after months of dead ends and sleepless nights, they found it: the glittering thread leading to The Sun and the Hedge-Witch.
The Hedge-Witch. Tav spoke of her with admiration and love. The one person who believed in Tav, who had offered them not only magic but revolution.
“She understood,” Tav told Eli. “She saw what was happening to the city — the threats, the angry young men blaming their problems on us, on queer people, people of colour, immigrants. She could taste the fear and hate. She made The Sun a safe haven for us, a place where we could rise up. Stop being afraid. We could use magic to fight back.”
“That’s why you moved out,” said Eli. “Your parents couldn’t understand.”
“They tried. They understood how bad it was getting, with the hate marches and rallies.” A shadow snagged on their throat, and Eli watched as they turned away from the part of the story they didn’t like. Eli felt a surge of fury at the humans who had wanted to deny Tav their humanity.
“They wanted me to keep my head down, stay safe, be careful. And I couldn’t explain to them the Hedge-Witch’s power — how it could make us strong.”
Eli placed a hand on Tav’s forearm. A current of electricity thrummed through her fingertips. They didn’t shrug it off.
“Every time the Hedge-Witch teaches us a spell or lets us taste magic, it feels like coming home,” Tav explained. “Cam doesn’t like it. He thinks it’s becoming an obsession.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
They both laughed. Eli bravely pressed her shoulder against Tav’s, the monster-lover who craved magic like life force, whose passion or maybe obsession had led them to cross worlds. A survivor and warrior in a war that Eli had never seen.
Understanding suddenly crystallized in her mind.
“Cam came here for you,” she said.
“Yes.” Tav’s voice lowered, the undiluted joy now mixing with guilt and worry. “I tried to talk him out of it, but he’s stubborn. He worries about me.”
A comet streaked across the sky, burning another question into Eli’s body. “Are you going back?”
Tav propped themselves up on one elbow and looked down at Eli. Their face was lit up by the moonlight. Eli’s breath caught in her chest.
“Yes. I’m not a witch. I don’t know what I am, or why I can see magic, but I’m human. And I’m proud of being human, even if humanity sucks sometimes. The human city made me who I am, so it’s mine, and it’s broken, and I’m going to fix it.” They spoke passionately, fiercely, and Eli could see a sliver of tooth like a portent.
Again, that image — Tav on a river of black ice, winged like a fallen angel. Stars raged overhead. The ice cracked —
“Eli?”
“What?” The afterimage of fire lingered on the inside of her eyelids.
“What are you thinking?”
Eli tried to bring back the vision of flame and ice, but it was lost.
“You want to fix the city or break it?” she challenged.
“Sometimes they’re the same thing.”
“I think so, too.”
After a moment, Tav lay back down. Together, they stared into the galaxy and somewhere in it a human city that held their past and future.
Twenty-One
“Go into the forest,” Circinae said. “Go into the forest and bring me four leaves from the quietest tree.”
The night was dark, stars piercing the sky like shrapnel. The forest was silent, watching the girl. Waiting.
One misstep, a single mistake. A root that moved like a snake. A pit opened and Eli fell into the earth.
Dirt in her mouth. In her ears. In her eyes.
She couldn’t breathe.
Roots wound themselves around her body.
Where was Tav?
Who’s Tav? Eli wondered, and then she remembered.
Wake up, she told herself. You have to wake up!
The roots wound tighter around her rib cage. She closed her eyes, swallowed dirt, and grasped the dream with both hands.
The dream fell apart like wet tissue, pieces of it peeling away at her touch.
Eli opened her eyes. She was back in the wastelands.
She was partially buried in sand, grit in her ears and eyes and hair. Her lungs were tight. Three crimson suns blazed overhead. Eli wondered what part of the galaxy they were moving through now. She knew they would come back to the City of Ghosts soon, and the silver moon that she had grown up watching from both the human and the witch worlds. They always did. Eli hauled herself up, sand pouring off her body like water. She spat out a mouthful. Her tongue felt raw and sore. The wastelands stretched before her like an ocean. They looked impossible to cross.