“I guess it does,” Brenda agrees. “Which way?”
I tell her, the directions coming as quick and easy as a breeze that’s been waiting years to blow. As I speak, I crank down my window, letting the smell of Mill Hollow fill the cab from top to bottom. Brenda looks at me thoughtfully for a moment before mimicking the gesture, until the wind blows clear through, carrying everything the Hollow has to offer us. I can even smell corn. Small patches, not sprawling, endless acres, but that seems to be enough to put some soldier in her spine; she’s sitting straighter when she hauls on the wheel and sends us rolling toward town, her eyes fixed on the windshield and the distant fight to come.
“Danny usually did a good job of hiding that he was dead,” I say. “How did he get mixed up in this?”
“He’s working with a witch,” says Brenda. “Thing about witches is we can always spot the dead when we find them up and walking around. It’s how I found you. Whoever it is wouldn’t have to have been looking for a corporeal haunt. They could have just been walking past the comic book store and spotted him out of the corner of their eye, and the rest is horrible history.”
“How come you can see us and we can’t see you?” The question has frustrated me for years. I don’t make any effort to hide that as I fire it at Brenda, eyes narrowed and lip pushed outward in the beginning of a pout. “It’s not fair.”
“You say that like somebody put this system together on purpose,” says Brenda. There’s no rancor in her tone. “We don’t have checks and balances, Jenna. We don’t have a system of countermeasures to avoid abuse of power. Witches can see ghosts, ghosts can’t see witches. Witches can’t see each other, either. We’re shadows on the wall of the world, and we find each other through abuses of power, half the time. Trees start dying, or lambs are born with two heads . . .”
“Or all the ghosts go missing,” I say softly.
“That, too,” Brenda agrees. “It’s not fair, all right? If it were, you wouldn’t have witches like Sophie, who can barely keep herself together on the good days. You wouldn’t have corn witches born in cities and steel witches born in small towns with nothing taller than the church spire. It happens because it happens. The universe isn’t fair.”
“Ugh.” I drop my head into my hands. I can’t see much of anything, anyway; it’s too dark out there, and maybe that’s a mercy. The Hollow still smells like home, but I’m smart enough to know that time changes a place. It won’t look like home when the sun comes up. It’ll look like someplace else, someplace almost familiar, someplace impossibly strange.
I should never have come here. That’s the long and the short of it. I should have stayed in New York with Delia, walled up in my apartment, taking care of my cats, and not putting myself into the line of fire. I’m Jenna-who-runs. I don’t belong here.
But I’m not Jenna-who-runs anymore. I’ve put her aside, and some of the ghosts who’ve gone missing are my friends. I would want them to look for me, even if it meant going back to their personal versions of Mill Hollow, the towns and cities they’ve left behind as they roved out from their graves. I would want them to care. That means I have to. And besides . . .
“We don’t know that Danny is here voluntarily,” I say, raising my head. “Any ghost who’s been around more than a few years knows not to fight with witches if you don’t want to wind up prisoned in glass. This witch could be forcing him to do this.”
“Yes, they could,” says Brenda. “They might not be, though. Danny could be doing this of his own free will.”
The thought is chilling. “I don’t know why he would.”
“Why does anyone do anything?” asks Brenda. “That’s one thing the living, the dead, and the witching have in common: the mind is a mystery to all of us. Maybe he resents the fact that he died. Maybe the witch made him promises they don’t intend to keep. Maybe it’s something else altogether. I knew one witch from Arizona who worked with his own great-grandmother to defraud people. Held séances that always bore fruit, because she was happy to appear when he called her name. People are strange.”