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“I don’t get it. Wouldn’t you have been donating, not taking?”
“Power drains can work both ways. It’s the main reason the Circle cut off the connection to your pentagram—they were afraid you would reverse the flow.”
“Marsden seems to trust you.”
“Perhaps. But the Council as a whole decides most issues, with the head of the Council there to advise, to set up the meeting agenda and
such. He has only one vote unless there is a tie, and on the subject of my joining the Circle as a full member, there was close to a consensus.”
“Nice friends you have there.”
“On such a matter, they were wise to be cautious. But we have strayed from the point. Necromancy is illegal. It is grouped with other prohibited manifestations of magical ability, such as those possessed by the children you are helping. But the mere fact of someone being a necromancer doesn’t make them evil. The power can be misused, but the same is true for any magic.”
“You seem to have a different take on it than the Circle.”
“When I was young, the differences between dark and light magic were not as clear-cut as today. The only difference was the way power was acquired and the uses to which it was put. Magical energy is no different than any other—it can be perverted or it can be used for good.”
“Well, my father’s was perverted.”
“You can’t know that!”
“Yes, I really can.” I rubbed my eyes. I didn’t want to have to spell it out, but this was apparently face-up-to-crap day and no one had told me. Not to mention that the truth was pretty damn obvious. Pritkin wasn’t stupid; he’d work it out for himself soon enough. I preferred that he heard it from me.
“Energy is the only coin of the ghost world,” I said. “Once you’re dead, money, the things it can buy, prestige—all that goes by the wayside. Ghosts are only really interested in two things: revenge, or whatever reason they hang around, and energy. Mostly energy, because without it, they’ll fade away.”
“Not fade,” Pritkin corrected. “They transition to other realms.”
“Yeah, only most don’t want to go. And power is what they need to hang around. It can be generated by things like Billy’s talisman or gleaned from places that have a significant psychic residue. People in serious distress shed life energy like skin cells, and in an old house or a graveyard, there’s often enough built up to sustain one or more ghosts. Graveyards are particularly popular because more distressed people show up all the time. It’s kind of like a supernatural grocery store, always getting new deliveries.”
“I don’t understand what this has to do with your father.”
“Everything. The only other way to get life energy once you’re dead is to beg, borrow or steal it from someone who already has it. For a ghost, that means cannibalizing other spirits, which they do all the time, or getting it directly from a living donor. The latter is a lot more uncommon unless the spirit is really pissed off or unbalanced, because attacking a living body uses up more energy than it gains.”
I stopped, having finished Ghost 101 and feeling strangely reluctant to go further. Intellectually, I knew that my father’s crimes weren’t mine, that I shouldn’t feel any guilt over them. But emotionally, it felt like the taint of what he’d done had rubbed off on me, as if it was my fault somehow. I scrubbed my arms. The sun suddenly didn’t feel all that warm anymore.
“So, like I said, life energy is hard to come by and highly prized. It’s the only thing my father could have offered the spirits who worked for him.”
“Jonas said he could command them,” Pritkin reminded me. “They may have had no choice.”
“I’ve never heard of anything like that, but I don’t claim to be an expert on necromancy. Some people think that’s what clairvoyants are—minor-level necromancers—but it isn’t true. I can see ghosts and donate energy to the dead, but that’s it. I can’t bring anyone back to life—or any semblance of it. But I do know something about ghosts. And most spirits wouldn’t have been able to go around gathering intelligence without a regular energy draw.”
“Perhaps some are stronger than others.”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t work that way. Strong, weak, whatever you were in life—when you’re dead, you’re dead. And ghosts use up energy even faster than humans do. Their haunts normally only provide a subsistence. To do extra work, they need extra power. Like I give to Billy.”
And for the first time, it struck me as perverse that I had such complete power over anyone. I’d always thought of our relationship as a fair trade—I gave something, Billy gave something, and we both benefited from the arrangement. Billy had saved my life dozens of times, just as I had helped to sustain his. Quid pro quo. Only now I wasn’t so sure.
Was it really equal when one party could walk away from a deal, and the other couldn’t? Billy could live without me. He survived for a century and a half before we met, because his necklace provided the same subsistence for him that most ghosts received from a house or graveyard. But that’s all it was, a subsistence. Without regular donations from me, Billy couldn’t go more than fifty miles away from the talisman, and even within that range, he couldn’t do much.
What would it be like, I wondered, to be tied to an object that could end up anywhere, dragging you with it? To be too weak to do more than watch life go by—a life you no longer had? How had he lived for so many years with no companionship? Of course, he could talk to other ghosts, if he wanted to take the risk of being cannibalized. But even then, ghost conversation tended to be a little one-sided.
Like our relationship.
I decided that maybe I owed Billy an apology, although what I could do about the problem was debatable. He was a ghost; I couldn’t change that. But maybe I could do a little more to show my appreciation for all he did for me. Maybe I could make a conscious effort not to take advantage of him.
Maybe I could try a little harder not to be like my father.
“Donating life energy is not a crime,” Pritkin said, obviously still not following me.
