She pointed toward their little group. “Robert, you’ve met Eleisha, and I believe you already know Philip. This is Wade. He is the one who trained Eleisha and Philip to waken their abilities.”
Eleisha let her take over as the whole scene took on a surreal quality, as if Robert was an out-of-town guest meeting Rose’s family. Even without using her gift, Rose’s voice carried a tone of wisdom, of reason. Any mortals passing by would not have bothered glancing their way. Eleisha did find it strange that Robert didn’t flinch at them having a mortal in their group—he didn’t even seem to notice the difference. Julian would have found this unthinkable.
Robert nodded once to Wade, but he couldn’t seem to stop looking at Philip’s face and clothes and hair, but with doubt in his eyes, as if he was questioning Philip’s identity. Why? Eleisha wanted to try to read his thoughts, but she dared not. He would feel her.
“You’ve been alone?” Philip asked him abruptly. “All this time?”
Robert’s jaw twitched, and he offered a short nod.
“Me, too,” Philip said, tossing his head toward Eleisha and Wade. “Until them. It’s better with them. Like being alive again.”
A flicker of pain crossed Robert’s face. It passed. “But you’re telepathic now? I . . . I don’t expect you to know anything if a mortal trained you, but can you at least hunt safely?”
Eleisha winced at such a question being asked aloud in a public garden.
Philip said something in French so quickly she couldn’t follow it, and then he looked around. “This place is too open, no? Come.”
As if all was decided, he didn’t wait for an answer and began walking for the front gates. To Eleisha’s relief, Robert fell into step behind him. Wade followed. Rose’s eyes filled with hope as she watched them.
Not too bad, Eleisha flashed into her mind. It’s a start.
Rose looked at her. No, not too bad.
Mary Jordane was beginning to panic. She’d been looking for Eleisha since the night Julian landed in San Francisco . . . and come up with nothing.
It wasn’t that she’d lost her ability to track the dead.
The problem was that an overwhelming sense of the dead seemed to be everywhere. Since coming back into the world of the living, she’d encountered only a few other ghosts.
But a weird, misty veil of death hung over this entire city—along with too many other ghosts who were all dressed in old-fashioned clothes. In desperation, she’d finally talked to the spirit of a sailor down on the docks to try to find out why.
His answer was not helpful.
Apparently some stupid earthquake happened in the past here . . . like a hundred years ago! Who cared what happened a hundred years ago? You couldn’t even buy an iPod back then. But a bunch of people who weren’t ready to die and who weren’t expecting to die got squished or buried or burned up in fires, and their spirits ended up tied to apartments and houses and restaurants and bars.
A ghost who remained in this world, who was tied to a person, would pass over either into the gray plane or the afterlife once the living person finally died as well. But a ghost tied to a place remained on this plane as long as the place still existed in some form.
So Mary was having trouble picking up the slightly different “blank spot,” as she called it, among all the life energy that helped her separate the living dead from the ghosts. It was frustrating, and it was pissing her off, and Julian was getting impatient.
He’d called her back last night, and he was really mad when she couldn’t tell him anything yet. He scared her worse than he ever had before.
Tonight, she worked harder to separate the blank spaces in the fabric of energy, to shift through and find the right kind of undead presence. She couldn’t really explain the difference, even to herself, but the first time she’d felt Eleisha, the signature had been more . . . solid than a ghost.
She struggled to find that signature again. It was hard against the sea of death all around her, but she wasn’t going back to Julian empty-handed.
About an hour past dusk, she felt something, and she materialized slowly behind a statue in the Golden Gate District. She focused again and instantly felt a much stronger rift.
She blinked out, followed the path, and rematerialized inside some kind of fancy garden with no flowers.