Page 65 of Marked By His Hunger
“So, is it like one big dead cult or party out there?” Olaf asked.
“Really? You think all dead people are like rooting for the same team now?” Emery asked.
I shook my head.
“The dead aren’t organized. But they’re never neutral, either. They have an agenda. They linger for reasons. It’s just, well, I’d always seen them without invitation.”
The table got quiet again and my anxiety stirred.
I mean, I just got here, and even though I was closer to thirty than I was to twenty, making friends hadn’t gotten any easier for me.
I didn’t want to mess this up already.
“That’s why you get travel-sick,” Ursula said softly. “Your magic is sensitive to threshold crossings. The veil destabilizes you.”
That made a horrible amount of sense.
I’d always hated bridges.
Hospitals made me faint.
Funerals were unbearable.
Not because of grief.
Because of crowd density.
Spiritual crowd density.
“How long have you known?” Dietrich asked.
“Well, the first time I realized what I could see, I was six. My grandmother had died the week before.”
“And you saw her?” Ursula asked, eyes brimming with tears.
“Everyone said she’d moved on. But she hadn’t.”
My memories came back strong as everyone made the appropriate noises. I mean what did you say to someone who claimed they’d been haunted by a dead grandmother at the tender age of six?
But I remembered every minute of it. How she’d stood in the hallway outside my bedroom every night for three months.
Not menacing.
Just confused.
I would wake to the sound of soft crying and find her hovering by the bathroom door.
She didn’t understand why no one responded when she knocked.
I told Aunt Gabby.
Her reaction? Well, it left a lot to be desired.
She’d slapped me.
Hard.
“Don’t say that,” she whispered fiercely. “That’s not funny.”
