As Wendy flew the distance from the CZS in Durham, North Carolina, to her home in Georgia, her heart was figuratively breaking and she felt a sadness, an enormous loss. She hadn’t actually flown, she was flung from the area by Isheanesu’s incantation, and she moved through the air with her back to her destination as her tears were drawn away from her eyes like they fell horizontally.
Anesuishe caught her and they cried together, but then Wendy regains her composure.
“Isheanesu is still there with that man!” Wendy screams frantically. “Why am I here? I can stop Tin, but Ishe can’t! I have to go back!”
Anesuishe wrestles her to the ground, struggling against Wendy’s strength and the strain of forcing her spirit form to interact with the physical world. They sit on the floor, Anesuishe softly crying while she holds Wendy tightly as she cries her eyes out. Aile stares on with a look of anguish on her face. Fang covers her mouth and settles on both her knees next to Aile, and Stephanie stands behind them looking away from the sad scene.
Suddenly, Isheanesu tumbles into the house and rolls over onto his face in front of Wendy. She and Anesuishe gather at either side of him and turn him over. He is pale and he looks like the more conventional conception of a ghost now; he is gray and there is a haze like smoke surrounding him that dissipates a foot away from his body. He slowly comes to consciousness and sits up between his female relatives. Then he looks at himself, his smoky arms and legs with alarm on his face. He looks to Anesuishe.
“He is very strong,” Isheanesu says. Anesuishe’s eyes are wide and she covers her mouth. “You know what this is?” He holds up a hand and there is the solid form of his soul, lifeless and gray in color, and the smoke drifts eerily up and disappears.
“He burned you,” Anesuishe says. “He wields the light of the eternal heat of creation. Those incantations are older than humanity. I didn’t believe them…” she trails off into a sob.
“Are you in pain?” Wendy asks, her anguish gone, replaced by concern and resolve to help.
“I am not,” Isheanesu says and he smiles at Wendy. “In all honesty, Brave Anesu, with each passing second I feel more whole, more connected to everything than ever before in my existence. The man Tin has weaponized his connection to a realm of light, the primordial heat there, to send his spiritual enemies to the last death. The last death is unavoidable, and it is beautiful, nothing for a spirit to fear, and yet, even in my bliss as I slowly return to the natural state of all spirit energies, I am sad that I, too, must leave you so soon after you have lost your Great uncle. But you, Wendy, Brave Anesu, are his spiritual daughter, he will live on in you. As will I. When I am finally evaporated by the light of heaven.”
“But Great uncle just disappeared,” Wendy says. “Maybe there is something we can do. Is there an incantation that will help him Anesuishe? Fang, do you know anything about this?”
Wendy stands next to Isheanesu now, staring at Fang who removes her hands from her face.
“The light of first creation cannot be extinguished, it dissipates as the soul does. As Anesuishe said, this is soul magic that should not work on human souls. It is soul magic of a dead people who lived very long ago. Their knowledge of the world we inhabit was far more advanced. We could save him, if we knew what the one who did this to him knows.”
Wendy looks to Anesuishe.
“If I possess his body, I can maybe access his mind, his memories.”
“I could possess him, Anesu,” Anesuishe says.
“None of you will go anywhere near Tin or the CZS,” Wendy says sternly. “I can do this.”
“What about your body when your spirit leaves it?” Anesuishe asks.
“I will leave it here, travel back to Durham as a spirit. I can incant and be there in no time.”
“You should not be that far away from your body,” Anesuishe says. “The further you go, the longer you go, the more your edges will blur and spread and you will have trouble fitting comfortably inside yourself.”
“I understand, and I can do this.” Wendy pauses and looks away from everyone and out a window. “Great uncle taught me about this. I can do it.”
Wendy’s spirit rises easily from her body as she lies on the couch in her living room. She looks like a faint reflection of the body resting peacefully, clothes and all and she stands with Anesuishe, Fang, Aile, and Stephanie.
“I’m going to get what we need to save Ishe,” Wendy says to them. “If I have enough time, I’ll try to free the boys so we can have a chance of shutting that place down.”
“What can I do?” Aile asks, eager to be of some help.
“Just protect this house. I don’t think anyone followed us here, but I don’t want to lose anyone else. That can’t happen. Promise me, you will keep this place safe.”
“I promise,” Aile says. “I’m not nearly as good at it as Alia, but she taught me how to feel people’s minds. Your friends are being controlled by something. If you can free them from whatever it is, then they’ll be ok. Ivan is trying so hard to speak with me, I can feel him struggling out there, but he can’t break through.”
Wendy nods and then turns her attention to the man Tin and his inhuman powers.
At the CZS, Tin and Rhode enjoy lunch in the third floor cafeteria. It is relatively empty and Miriro floats nearby as they all converse.
“Alien ghosts,” she says wistfully. “It makes sense but I’ve never encountered them.”
“The First People weren’t aliens,” Tin says. “They evolved from something else that was alien, so they were first generation Earthlings. They were strong with magics, not just spirit magics either.”
“I am pleased to have come across you and this organization,” Miriro says. “I cannot wait to travel with Rhode through the wormhole with your colleague’s armies. I am very eager to see more of the universe.”
Tin smiles.
“It is the least I can do. You’ve brought the Brave to me and I have her Great uncle, the last Brave that was as strong as this one. If not for those First People’s tricks I learned from the books in the COHH annals, things would have gone the other way. She threw ice! How is that possible?”
“You know elemental incantations,” Miriro says, “even Rhode knows these.”
“It’s really not the hardest thing,” Rhode chimes in as he chews a bite of his sandwich.
“The light of creation is elemental, you could do more with it than evaporate spirits. You could burn the living.” As she spoke, the angles of her face arched and she expressed a twisted pleasure at causing so much destruction.
Suddenly, Tin is tackled out of his body, and Rhode and Miriro startle at the blur of him and Wendy tumbling and fighting, sometimes passing through walls and tables, other times crashing into them and causing destruction.
“Dr. Worthington is gonna be pissed when he gets back,” Rhode says as Miriro nods and the two watch the conflict.
Wendy says an incantation that allows her to force Tin’s spirit form to interact with physical objects when she is touching him, and she is strong enough to grab him and slam him against tables and chairs. He slips from her hands and he incants, blasting heat and light at her that she dodges and then incants to take control of the energy that she has never encountered before, and redirect it at Tin. It hits him hard and he yells as he incants a shield that only partially materializes in time to protect him, and the force is enough to make him fall to the floor.
Wendy zips into Tin’s body while his soul is disoriented. She accesses the latent memories of his brain that still echo in the absence of Tin’s spirit and consciousness. She can feel the actions necessary to call the light of creation, to harness it and maneuver it, she can feel the words of the incantation to bring it forth. But she can’t know more, where it comes from, she needs Tin’s deep memories for that. She does get echoes of his plans for her. She learns that her Great uncle is not gone, but in order to retrieve him, she will have to disentangle him from Tin’s energies.
She also learns that Tin was tasked with finding her and delivering her to a man named Dr. Worthington who wants to use her powers like he is using Ivan, Clay, and Kevin.
Wendy slips from the body of Tin, then out of the cafeteria, and finds all of them and a few others, strapped to beds in a laboratory. There are five people, two of which, a black and white man, are unfamiliar to her. They are all unconscious but writhing in agony, some of them screaming. Ivan is the loudest and she wants to do something, but there are so many restraints and tubes in and on their bodies.
She doesn’t know what they will do with them all, but she knows that she can’t allow her powers to be exploited like this.
Wendy decides to leave, hoping that what she has learned will help Isheanesu before he is gone forever.
PRL Serials 