Belatedly she grabbed at the fading shadow only to have it slip out of her grasp. This wasn’t her forte. Her grandmother had only taught her how to banish spirits, not keep them around. She hadn’t previously wanted to keep any around.

Gilly didn’t intend to eavesdrop. It wasn’t like she made a habit of listening in on conversations, but she couldn’t help it when this one went on at full volume right behind her. Or rather, half of it went on at full volume. She had the feeling that she was the only other person on the street who could hear the second half of the argument.

This was because most conversations didn't include the dead as a participant.

She may not have meant to listen in, but as the two teenagers walked past, she followed a few steps behind and did so anyway. Ghosts were common enough, sure. She found them attached to objects or buildings or people often enough that she had turned finding them into a sort of career. She didn’t get paid for it, really, unless you counted the occasional trinket one had left behind, so maybe ‘career’ wasn’t the right word. ‘Hobby’ implied she'd chosen this path, when it was more that it had picked her. One day she’d walked into her grandmother’s antique store, same as she’d done billions of times before, to find no less than five ghosts staring at her. Her grandmother had always said the place was haunted, but Gilly hadn’t believed her. If it hadn’t been for her magic deciding to manifest, she still wouldn’t. Ghosts were just so absurd. Energy shouldn’t linger after someone died and it certainly shouldn’t attach itself to, say, the watering can she’d freed one from last week.

So, no, coming across a spirit wasn’t what drew her curiosity. It was that someone else could see one.

The pair were about her age, although for all she knew, the ghost could have died at sixteen a century ago. The living one got a lot of stares from the people passing by. It could have been his outrageous outfit-- a bright yellow and purple leotard, with his painted face glimmering in stage makeup-- or the strange looks could have been because he appeared to be talking to himself.

The ghost, wearing a lavender sweater the color of the other’s hair and a pair of cargo shorts, would have passed anyone’s notice if they’d been alive. Sure, their skin was pallid and their hair nearly white, but the rest of them looked normal, down to the skateboard they carried and the sneakers on their feet. What would have been unremarkable in a human struck her as impossible in a ghost. Every other spirit she’d come across had been entirely grey monochrome. No neon skateboard wheels or hot pink shoelaces or purple sweaters of any kind before now.

She had to be right, though. Human teenagers didn’t hover an inch or two off the ground or have voices that reverberated through her skull without passing through her ears. As Gilly trailed behind, she noticed scars crisscrossing the back of the ghost’s neck. Possibly how they’d died? The afterlife didn’t seem to be bothering them much. From what she’d heard so far, this one led a far more interesting life than she did.

The human shook his head, long hair falling out of his messy bun. "Mom is going to kill you. You know that, right?"

"Too late."

"Ugh. Okay, she'll find a way to bring you back, then she'll kill you. You know how she feels about skateboards."

"That's because your dad tried to put wings on the back of one to make it fly."

"And you chose the hill at the guild. That's like a 90 degree drop! You could have crashed!"

"And?"

"You're impossible!"

Come to think of it, none of the ghosts she’d come across before had been this self-aware, either. Usually they were echoes of the past, repeating a routine from their lives. Some existed more in the present; those were always malicious and latched onto someone or something simply to cause trouble.

Okay, judging by the conversation, this one had caused trouble, but not in the usual doors slamming, objects being hurled kind of way. And if they were attached to the boy, he obviously wasn’t concerned.

Gilly was so drawn in that she didn't notice when the two of them stopped at a crosswalk until a clammy coldness coated her skin for just a moment. Then the skateboard clattered to the ground as the ghost vanished. Frit! She’d walked straight into them. Belatedly she grabbed at the fading shadow only to have it slip out of her grasp. This wasn’t her forte. Her grandmother had only taught her how to banish spirits, not keep them around. She hadn’t previously wanted to keep any around.

The human scrambled to catch the skateboard before it rolled into the street. It took him a second or two to register that his friend wasn’t by his side and an unfamiliar girl was. He spared her one raised eyebrow before calling out, “Skia?”

When he didn’t get a response, panic began to tint his voice. He shoved the skateboard under one arm and reached out into open air with the other. “Skia, this isn’t funny.”

Gilly tapped his shoulder to get his attention, then signed to him, “I’m sorry. I think I banished them.”

She didn’t expect him to understand and was reaching into her backpack for a notebook when he grabbed her by her sleeve and dragged her out of the way of foot traffic. He signed back, “What do you mean, banished?”

“It was an accident!”

The bracelets on his wrists jangled together as his gestured words grew frantic. “How can you accidentally banish someone?”

She wasn’t sure of that herself. Previously she’d had to concentrate and use tools to get her magic to work and even then the spirits sometimes got stubborn and didn’t want to go. And it turned out all this time all she had to do was walk into them? She repressed a shudder as memories of some of the ghosts she’d had the pleasure of meeting crossed her mind. No thanks. “Maybe they wanted to be set free?”

He shook his head rapidly. “No way. Skia wouldn’t leave me. You did this. You’re going to bring them back.”

“But I’ve never brought anyone back before!”

“Congratulations, there’s a first time for everything. How do we summon a ghost?”

--------------

It took a name exchange and some back and forth conversation while juggling the skateboard before Gilly thought to tell him that she could hear perfectly fine. After that they came up with a plan. Well, the start of a plan. It was plan-adjacent, anyway. What they needed were things familiar to the ghost-- Skia, she had to remember this one knew their name-- and that meant going to their home.

Gilly expected burned down ruins after seeing Skia’s scars. Instead Ametrine led her a few streets over and through a long tunnel into a grass courtyard full of people. She blinked in the sudden sunlight. On all sides of the courtyard were brightly-painted walls and balconies. She’d lived in Silveridge her whole life and hadn’t known this neighborhood was here, a stone’s throw away from her grandmother’s shop. Distracted by the noise and activity, it took her a good ten ‘Hey, Ametrine, where’s Skia?’s to realize something important.

“Wait, they can all see ghosts?”

“I can’t even see ghosts.” That explained why he hadn’t immediately known his friend had vanished. “But I’m the only one who can hear Skia. They’re just really good at letting people know they’re here.”

“How?” This was wild to Gilly. She’d never met a ghost people actually wanted around. Not that she’d met Skia yet, not after fumbling the introduction so badly.

Ametrine held up his arm and shook it. A few of his bracelets lit up with the movement. “For one? They’ve got these, too. People can see the light even if they can’t see them.”

Gilly hadn’t noticed any jewelry on Skia. Their sweater must have covered their wrists. “How can they wear bracelets?”

Ametrine stared at her. “With their arms?”

“No, I mean, how can they wear stuff? They’re a ghost. They should only be able to wear whatever they died in.”

Ametrine stopped walking. Sadness warred with annoyance until a stubborn frown settled on his lips. “When you meet Skia, don’t you dare tell them that. Not that they’re dead, they know. The other thing. Look, Skia’s special. If there’s a rule, they’re going to break it. And not just like, no swimming in shark-infested water, although they’d probably try that, too. More like they don’t know how ghosts are supposed to be, so if they think they can do something, they usually can.”

His attention was on fiddling with his bracelets rather than Gilly, which was fine because she wasn’t sure what to say in response.

“I can hear Skia because I got a black eye once. It was all swollen up and I couldn’t read what they wrote when they asked what happened. Skia got really scared for me and they used all their energy to make themself heard. After that, they couldn’t talk or move anything for two days. I thought they were gone.”

Now he looked up and met her eyes. “That’s why I know they wouldn’t choose to leave. They promised me they wouldn’t go anywhere. Wherever they are now, they’re trying to get back. We’re going to help.”

All she could do was nod.

“Come on, me and Skia’s apartment is upstairs.”

She followed Ametrine into one of the buildings and up a flight of stairs. It wasn’t too long before another question flowed through her hands. “Your parents let you live by yourselves?”

Ametrine stopped at a purple door-- no surprise there, considering what he was wearing-- and fished a set of keys out of his bag. “It was getting stupid crowded with nine people. Me and Skia finally got them to agree to move our room into the empty apartment down the hall.”

“Move your room?” She assumed he meant packing their things and putting them somewhere else, but no.

“Yeah. Don’t the rooms in your house know when they’re needed and go away when they don’t?”

“No?” Gilly hadn’t known that was an option. Great, now she’d be staring at doors for a while to make sure they didn’t decide to go somewhere else and leave her stranded. She’d think he was making it up if not for the fact that magic could do strange things. She was a medium, for Petra’s sake.

“Huh. Weird.”

The small apartment was pretty much what she expected: a lot of second-hand furniture and moving boxes still stacked by the door. The two beat up wooden stools at the kitchen counter caught her eye-- did this mean Skia could eat or did Ametrine live with someone else he hadn’t mentioned? A board game was set up on the table by the couch, which had a well-loved blanket pooling from the seat down to the floor. Off to the side was a piano with tubes sticking out of the lid. Not organ pipes, those would have made sense. These were glass tubes spiraling in loops.

As she tried to make sense of this, a few small lights floated over to land on Ametrine’s hand. They reminded her of fireflies until one settled on her own hand and she saw that it was just a speck of light, more like the floating embers from a campfire. It remained there for a few seconds before fluttering away with the rest to circle the suncatcher hanging in the window.

Ametrine must have noticed her confused expression. “Light elementals. My parents have a bunch of them hanging around their place. A few followed us here when we moved.”

That explained absolutely nothing, but Ametrine didn’t seem inclined to talk about these more. He picked up one of the game pieces from the table and asked, “Where do you want to do this summoning thing?”

Not that Gilly really knew what ‘thing’ this was going to be. Her only guess would be her usual banishing only backwards. “Where does Skia spend the most time?”

“Bedroom. We’ve had that longest.” Which made sense if the room had moved with them. However that worked. He pointed. “It’s the door on the left. I’m gonna find the things Skia likes best and I’ll be right there.”

Gilly paused by the piano on her way to the door. She checked to make sure Ametrine wasn’t looking and softly tapped one of the keys. When nothing happened, she tapped it harder. This time there was a distant tink, like it was being played several rooms away. Maybe adding the tubes had broken it? She shrugged and kept walking.

Ametrine’s bedroom was more lived-in than the rest of the apartment. It was also obvious that two very different people lived here. Or unlived here. Half of the room was cozy, with pale purple walls decorated with a few paintings and a rack of hula hoops hanging above the bed. Two desks, one overflowing with clutter and the other with neatly stacked books, were pushed against another wall. The other half of the room was… loud. That was the only way she could think to describe it. The walls were a blinding neon pink where they weren’t black. Comics were drawn on the dark surface in what appeared to be chalk, so she guessed this was a kind of chalkboard. No bed-- presumably Skia didn’t sleep even if they might eat? Instead there were racks of skateboards and skates next to an easel. A nearby table was heaped with painting supplies and canvases. What floor she could see under all the clutter was splattered with paint.

Gilly would have preferred to set up the circle on the side she assumed to be Skia’s, but with no clear space on the floor she had to settle for Ametrine’s. She left the container of salt in her bag-- something to keep spirits away was probably not the answer-- and pulled out a set of candles. Those should be okay. Normally she cornered the ghost into a circle and then snuffed out the candles to dismiss them. In theory, lighting them would help call a spirit.

She’d located her lighter at the bottom of the bag and was pulling it out when Ametrine snatched it from her hand. “No candles.”

She frowned up at him. “That’s what I always use.”

“No candles. Skia’s scared of fire. If you light them, they’ll stay away.”

“Do you have a better idea of something I can light in a circle?” She was the experienced one here. As far as she’d learned, Ametrine was only familiar with one ghost in particular.

Although that was kind of the point, now that she thought about it.

Ametrine tapped his fingertip against his lip. “I guess I could go out to the store and get fake candles. Skia might be okay with those... No, wait, hang on!”

He dropped the lighter into her bag and went over to his bed to pull down one of the hula hoops. “Tada. Light up circle coming right up.”

He twisted a spot on the hoop that looked identical to the rest and it began to glow a rainbow of colors, much like a larger version of the bracelets he wore. Then he turned it off and set it on the floor next to where she knelt.

“It’s not very wide.”

“Neither’s Skia. They’ll fit. Now what do we do?”

“We put Skia’s stuff inside the hoop.”

She’d never spent much time thinking about why ghosts attached to the things they did. She usually found them haunting jewelry, books, dolls… although once there had been a single safety pin. That one had taken forever for her and her grandmother to track down because it had gotten caught on the underside of a carpet. There was a book in the collection Ametrine handed her, but it was a kid’s math textbook, not an ancient manuscript. Then there was the skateboard. A game piece in the shape of a large, lumpy animal, maybe a hippo. A bright red kazoo. A handful of wrapped candies, all strawberry. A jumble of bracelets made from cheap, colorful beads. A dull knife that might have something to do with painting since it was speckled blue. A pair of pink heart-shaped sunglasses.

The last thing Ametrine placed in her hand was the necklace he’d been wearing. It was cool to the touch, despite having been against his skin. It vibrated slightly, as though gears turned inside the locket. Before she could place it in the circle, he stopped her. “Nothing will happen to it, right? Because that’s my dad’s and he’ll be really upset if something does.”

Ah. A family heirloom. That was more like it. “It’ll be fine. Worst case is Skia possesses it and then I’ll have to pull them out.”

She’d done this part dozens of times before. Summon the spirit from the possessed possession, hold it in the circle for however long it took to get it to leave, blow out the candles, sweep up the salt. This time she’d only have to get a ghost who wanted to be here to show up. How hard could that be?

“It might get a little crowded.”

“Don’t tell me you have a ghost in it already.” She hadn’t noticed one, but that could explain why it felt like it was trembling.

“Of course not. It kinda has some of my parents’ soul in it.”

This... was less like it. “It has what?”

“Only part of it!”

Gilly looked from the necklace to Ametrine and back to the necklace. It seemed to pulsate stronger unless that was her own heartbeat she was feeling. Quickly, but carefully, she placed it between the kazoo and the textbook. It was one thing to control something that was already dead. She had no desire whatsoever to play with the spirits of the living.

“And this has what to do with Skia exactly?”

“Oh. They’re in there too.”

She was beginning to question her choice of career. Maybe it wasn’t too late to tell her grandmother that she wanted to be an accountant instead.

It took her a moment to find the button on the hula hoop. When it was lit, she set it on the floor and signed a few words of command. Now to wait. She crossed her fingers for luck that Skia would pick anything but the necklace. She could deal with a haunted kazoo. She had a feeling the locket was beyond her skill.

Seconds ticked by into minutes and Ametrine started to fret. “It’s not working. Why isn’t this working?”

Gilly didn’t know. It could be that they did need candles. Maybe Skia didn’t understand her signed words, although she’d never run into a ghost who couldn’t; something about being dead made ghosts polyglots. Maybe Skia’s things weren’t personal enough to summon them. Maybe they had a fear of hula hoops as well as fire.

Ametrine took a step closer. Gilly held out her arm to keep him back. Skia wouldn’t hurt him, but it was possible the circle might, especially if they accidentally summoned something else. “Wait.”

“We did it wrong. Maybe you banished them too far. What if they’re not coming back?” Ametrine tried to step around her but she stood her ground and tugged him back.

Neither of them noticed the skateboard beginning to roll until it hit Gilly’s ankle. She took a step backwards, grabbed at Ametrine to steady herself, and ended up pulling both of them down. As they hit the ground, the lights of the hula hoop flared, bright enough to make her eyes water. She kept her eyes shut tight while she fumbled behind her. Her hands found the hoop and eventually the button to shut it off. Ametrine should have told her it had a setting that could be seen from the moon.

Another voice, spoken through laughter, made her eyes snap open. “I can’t tell if you fell from heaven or tripped on the last steps out of hell. Either way, you found me.”

Ametrine launched himself up and into Skia’s arms. Gilly’s mouth gaped when he didn’t fall through to the floor again. He could touch ghosts? Even she couldn’t touch ghosts. In fact, she was pretty sure Skia must have had their foot through her side at one point. Either that or she’d been sprawled in an invisible pile of ice cubes.

Skia pulled back so they could make a face at Ametrine. “You thought the sunglasses were important?”

“You wear them all the time.”

“Well, yeah. Because I have style.”

Ametrine’s eye roll matched Gilly’s opinion there. He let go of Skia so he could help Gilly to her feet. Once she was up, she stepped out of the hoop. It was turned off and in theory shouldn’t call anything else, but she’d rather not take the chance.

Hoping that Skia could understand, she signed, “What brought you back?”

“Not the sunglasses.”

Ametrine couldn’t roll his eyes any harder. “Skia.”

Skia turned to Ametrine and grinned. “You, of course.”

Ametrine blushed, which made Skia laugh again. It was a strange sound, hollow and distant, but it wasn’t malicious. Neither was the smacking kiss they placed on Ametrine’s cheek.

This was sweet and all, but Gilly was dying to know more. Nothing about Skia was normal for someone who was supposed to be dead. “Why did he work? I need to know for future ghost purposes.”

“What, there’s more ghosts you want to bother? Can’t the dead walk home in peace anymore?” Skia didn’t seem to be annoyed, though. They grinned as they reached for Ametrine’s hand and held it up for her to see. “He’s more important to me than anything else. Which he’d know if he stopped to think about it. Seriously, the sunglasses?”

Before Ametrine could do more than open his mouth, Gilly asked him, “And what’s this about your parents’ souls?”

Skia mock-whispered to Ametrine, “Does she always ask so many questions?”

“Yeah. Your turn to answer them.”

Skia’s answer was drowned out by the deep tone that echoed off the walls and shook the floor. For the second time in five minutes, Gilly stumbled.

Ametrine let go of Skia to grab Gilly by the shoulders. “You didn’t touch the piano, right? Please tell me you didn’t touch the piano.”

--------------


(If you want to know more about these characters, check out the secondary character page. Gilly and Ametrine also appear in the story "Bottled Spirits" which you can read here.)