“And your freedom matters more than mine; is that it?”
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to. The answer is in the situation, in the fact that he would help a witch harm his own kind rather than risk himself sounding the alarm. That’s almost being charitable. It assumes she approached him and not the other way around; that he’s just a coward and not a traitor.
“Why?” My question is soft, almost gentle; I want him to think he can make me understand.
“It only takes one ghost to anchor a city,” says Danny. “I knew Delia would never leave. I managed to make Teresa understand. Nobody who was haunting Manhattan was actually buried there, so we couldn’t count on bones; it had to be her. I had her convinced that you were anchoring Mill Hollow. She would have left you alone. She would never have gone looking for a replacement ghost.”
“Does everybody know about anchors but me?” I demand, throwing my hands up. Then I pause. Something about the way he said that . . . “What do you mean, a replacement ghost?”
Danny looks uncomfortable. “Forget it.”
“No, I won’t. What do you mean?”
“Ghosts don’t just happen. Someone has to make them. That’s why we all died so early, and why so many of us had freak accidents. People like Delia, who came back because she wanted to, they’re the rare ones.”
The storm that killed me was unseasonable and strange. I don’t want to think about it right now. If I think about it, when I’m already prisoned in glass with no way out, I may just start screaming. “So?”
“So I tried to protect you by making her think you were the anchor, so she wouldn’t make a replacement. You’re the one who’s always saying we have an obligation to other people. To help them.”
I stare at him. I don’t know if he can see me; I hope he can. I hope he understands the hate and dismay I’m directing at his face. “She knew I wasn’t the anchor; she said as much to me. I was trying to convince you to volunteer at the suicide hotline, not giving you permission to lock other ghosts in mirrors so rich assholes can use us as the fountain of youth. This isn’t helping people.”
“Getting old doesn’t help them either.”
“Getting old is natural. It’s what we didn’t get. Every time I take a call, I am fighting to help someone else get old. This is sick. It’s wrong, and you need to let me out of here.”
“That’s not going to happen. I could maybe convince Teresa not to sell you right away. If you wanted to stay. We could talk more about why this is okay. Why this is how things ought to be. If you wanted.”
I’m so tired. “Go to hell, Danny,” I say, and he looks surprised for a moment before he puts the mirror down and disappears.
I start to pace. I’m trapped in glass. I’m going to be exploited and held prisoner forever, like an unwilling genie in a breakable bottle. The old stories said you needed to cover all the mirrors after someone died so that they wouldn’t prison your ghosts. They also said the first person who looked at their reflection after a ghost did get caught would drop dead on the spot, frightened out of themselves, but Teresa looked at me, and she lived. Is it because she’s a witch? Are witches immune to that sort of terror? Is it because she’s the one who prisoned me there? Or is there something else I ought to know, something I’m missing because this has never happened to me before?
One ghost to a mirror. Can’t share your prison. And people who look in mirrors containing the dead sometimes die for no apparent reason, like they weren’t able to stand what they saw. Ghosts can move time. What if that’s not all that we can do?
Trouble with being a teenage runaway is no one tells you anything. Most people grow out of it, though; start making connections, start making allies, start making friends. Forty years I’ve been running, and I can count the friends I’ve made on the fingers of one hand. They’re bright, precious things, every one of them, but they’re not enough. They didn’t tell me the things I needed to know. Forty years in the ground, and I’m still lost when it comes to the realities of what I am.
In a world of anchors and moorings, I am a nail in someone else’s coffin, and no one can tell who’s been buried beneath me.