to dawn on me that passing out and leaving my dad conscious might be a really stupid idea, I put my hand on Stone’s head.
Air—good . . . well, if not good, serviceable, smelly air—filled my lungs. I hacked like a smoker on a three-day bender. My lungs hurt.
“You are in death.” Dad hit lecture mode from word one. “A living being crossed into death. There is so little chance you could have survived that, Allison. No one can step into death if they are fully alive. And yet here you stand. It does make me curious. What part of you is dead, my daughter?”
I didn’t know. My sense of humor, maybe? My tolerance for his being a jerk? Or maybe because my Soul Complement was in a coma and his soul was already in death—that counted. I was too busy coughing and trying to breathe to be philosophical.
He shook his head, dismissing the question as easily as he dismissed me. “To survive you will need to stay in contact with something that is neither fully alive nor completely dead. Something that exists in a between state. A filter between life and death.”
“You’re dead.” I finally managed to exhale. “All dead. Why could I breathe when you touched me?”
“That answer is complicated.” He looked up and down the street, then at the building next to us, as if getting his bearings, and started walking down the street.
I followed him, and Stone somehow sensed the need to stay under my hand. There was no one on the streets with us, no wind, no rain. When I glanced up, it was nothing but terra-cotta sky and hard white light.
“Tell me you’re dead,” I said.
“Very much so. That doesn’t mean I’m not without resources.”
Which meant part of him, some of him somewhere, was alive. Great. I did not trust my dad. I never had. For good reason. And that very calm, trustworthy face he was wearing made me twitchy.
“Where are you alive? Why?” I asked. “Who’s helping you?”
“That is not important.”
“Yes, it is. What is your angle in all this, Dad? I have lost track of whose side you’re on.”
“I am on magic’s side. To see that it falls into the right hands. My motives are not yours to question.”
“I’ll question your motives until the day I die. Again. For reals.”
“This is real,” he said quietly. “Very real. If you are to survive, you need to put your stubbornness aside and listen to me.”
“Oh, I just love that idea.”
“Love it or not, your options are limited. Living flesh does not travel well in the world of death. I believe if you stay in contact with the Animate, it will filter the . . . irritants of death long enough for you to accomplish your task.”
He made it sound as if he were teaching me the ABC’s and knew there was no way I’d ever make it to Q.
He stopped and glanced back down the street the way we’d come. “Faster would be better.”
He grabbed my arm and propelled me down an alley. I shook free of him, my other hand still on Stone’s head, and looked over my shoulder.
Watercolor people. And not the nice kind. Unlike the other Veiled I had seen in life, these ghostly people barely resembled people. With their twisted bodies and sagging faces, they resembled movie zombies more than ghosts. They also looked solid.
And hungry.
Stone growled.
The Veiled heard him, turned our way, sniffing, scenting, crooked hands tracing half-formed glyphs, as if they could use magic to find us.
“Veiled?” I asked.
“Quiet,” Dad said.
Stone’s ears flattened. He stopped making noise but his lips were pulled back to expose a row of sharp teeth and fangs.
Dad traced a glyph in the air and magic followed in a solid gold line at his fingertips. I wasn’t using Sight, yet magic was clearly visible. That wasn’t how it worked in life. Magic was too fast to be visible. Here, it was slow and fluid.
He finished the glyph. Camouflage glittered in the air like a filigreed screen. He whispered a word and the glyph stretched and widened, creating a swirling shell around us. I swallowed, but could not taste anything. That was different from in life too. Magic didn’t smell or taste here.
Or maybe I just wasn’t dead enough to sense it.
The Veiled were almost on us.
“This way,” Dad whispered. He rolled his fingers, catching up the lines of the Camouflage glyph and balancing it on his open palm. He pushed his palm outward in