“Wait,” I say. “Rats have ghosts?”
This time, the look Sophie gives me is pitying and indulgent, the look of a teacher dealing with a recalcitrant child. “Of course,” she says. “Anything can leave a ghost, if it has something worth waiting for. They don’t need much time to move on, though. Rats only live four years, if they’re lucky. So I give them what they need, and they go where they go, and I miss them.”
Sophie could be older than I am, older than Brenda, if she’s constantly bleeding time off into her rats. I don’t say anything. I just wait.
“There are always ghosts in the sewers, skittering and scattering and not ready to come to me and ask to go yet,” says Sophie. “Sometimes they stay for years, or they wait until their loved ones are almost used up, and they take all the time from them, and let them have a little longer. But they’ve gone. They’ve all gone. I didn’t realize until I saw that the human ghosts were gone, too. All the rats I talked to thought that they were coming to me, asking to move on. They weren’t. They haven’t. No one has asked me to hold their paw and show them the next thing in a long, long time. Months, even. They’ve been going without me. Or they haven’t been going at all. They’re just gone.”
Sophie makes more sense here, surrounded by her rats, but she still doesn’t follow the paths of human logic the way I would expect her to. I pause, and ask, “Are you saying they’re not reaching their dying days? They’re just disappearing?”
“Exactly,” says Sophie.
“And the human ghosts, they’re disappearing the same way,” says Brenda. “They’re not passing on. They’re just vanishing. You and Delia are the last ones I know of in the city.”
“You said that already.” The words make me uncomfortable. They’re not an accusation, not quite, but there’s something unforgiving buried in them. Why do we deserve to stay when everyone else is going? Where are they going? Why?
“I’ll probably say it again. Something’s wrong, Jenna. You’re not safe. You need to tell Delia she’s not safe either. Who would take care of that damn parrot of hers if something happened to her?”
I blink. “You know about Avocado?”
“Kid, I know about everything,” says Brenda, a small smirk on her lips. She turns back to Sophie. “Did the rats see anything?”
“Yes,” says Sophie, and her voice is sorrow, her voice is apology, her voice is wind blowing past my gravestone in the middle of the night. It was always going to come to this. In a world of ghosts and witches, it was always going to come to this. I was a fool for thinking it could be anything else.
Haltingly, she says, “A woman came. The rats didn’t see her every time, but they saw her enough times to think that she came every time. Sometimes, they just weren’t watching. A woman came, and she had a bag over her shoulder, and she approached the dead, and asked them questions, until they looked at her.”
“That’s when she pulled out the mirror.” It isn’t a question. I know how witches interact with the dead—and nothing but a witch could have come in and pulled this many ghosts away.
Sophie nods. “They were all different mirrors.”
“They would have to be.” Ghosts can be prisoned in any sort of glass, but if you want to hold them—if you want to keep them there long enough to get some use out of them—you need a mirror that holds significance for them. Best are the ones that held their reflections while they were alive. “How did she know what mirrors to use?”
“That’s the first real question,” says Brenda. “She must have known who they were. But some of those ghosts have been in the city for centuries. So how could a woman who doesn’t live here know which mirrors to use?”
“How are you so sure she doesn’t live here?”
“The rats don’t know her face. More importantly, I don’t know anyone who fits her description, and I know every witch and ghost in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Don’t look so surprised. I was a farmer before I came here. I keep track of my crops, for the sake of the fields around them.”
I should probably be uncomfortable with Brenda referring to me as a “crop,” but under the circumstances, it’s almost comforting. It’s been a while since anyone was keeping track of me. “So you’re saying a witch came from out of state and stole all the ghosts?”
“I am.” Brenda’s voice is grim. “I have an idea of what she’s going to do to them.”
So do I. There’s only one thing the living ever want from dead who don’t belong to them: immortality. And if this witch has those ghosts prisoned in glass, she’s going to get it.
8: Sleepover in Manhattan