One of the strangest things about being a wraith was how real Jaelle still felt. When she touched her skin, it felt as warm and alive as it always had. She moved as she used to, breathed as she used to, and when the destroyer of worlds erupted in the center of a back-water gas station, her stomach dropped just like a living person’s might.

Got she hoped Mal had killed them. And not killed himself in the process. 

“What was that?” If possible, Debbie Peterson’s voice had doubled in pitch, and her face had gone deathly pale. She reached out as if to grip Jaelle’s arm, but Jaelle stepped back before the other woman realized she wasn’t actually all there. “Were those men terrorists?!”

“I didn’t even see the bomb!” Liam Peterson said.

Jaelle held up her hands. “Let’s not jump to conclusions. I’ll just—“

A spray of gunfire interrupted her, and Jaelle went cold. Mal hadn’t killed them. How was that possible? Nothing could have survived that blast. Nothing. Unless someone else was shooting. Had the police come back? Were they firing on Mal cause they didn’t understand?

Liam pulled his wife down—the most sensible thing either of them had done recently. Jaelle copied the movement as though there was any chance that a stray bullet might actually hurt her. From the road behind them, the sound of squealing tires pierced the thick, Louisiana air, and Debbie looked more horrified by this than anything that had happened so far. “They’re getting away?!”

“We don’t know that,” Jaelle said. “That might have been back up arriving. I’ll go check. You two stay here. You are now important witnesses and your testimony is vital for your country. If you call yourselves patriots, you’ll protect that information by laying low.”

A bit theatrical, perhaps, but Jaelle had half-learned English through Netflix.

It seemed to work for Liam. He gave her a stalwart nod, and Jaelle had to give it to Eleanor. There was magic in a sharp blouse. Something that made you look like you knew what you were doing.

“Alright. I’ll return soon.” 

As soon as she was out of sight, Jaelle ran, blurring through trees rather than bothering to go around them. She hit the washed-out concrete in half the time it had taken her to get the Petersons away, once again invisible to the mortal eye. The lot was a wreck. Debris lay everywhere, a rainbow of garish advertising beneath shattered glass, cinderblock, and burning insulation. It smelled horrible.

The black car was still there, one of its tires blown out so that it sagged, lopsided onto a steel wheel. A still corpse lay against one of the pumps, its head gone but the rest of the body untouched. It was male and entirely hairless.

Jaelle couldn’t bring herself to look into the gas station where she had last seen Mal. Couldn’t bring herself to check if his body was still whole or if he had impaled himself on debris from his own explosion. 

Compared to that horror, to the return of existing alone while she slowly lost herself to the degradation of mind that awaited a soul without a body, dealing with the corpse was easy. When Jaelle was born, some few hundred years before the current day, people had not been so good at hiding death. They died more often, for one. No more fragile but much worse equipped to deal with the uncertainties of illness and injury. There was not the same availability of chemical preservatives, and families of the Roma cared for the bodies of their deceased.
Jaelle was no stranger to the bodies of the dead.

She crouched down beside it, looking for tattoos or sigils or other identifying marks. There was nothing on his skin that she could make out, but something odd shined from his mangled neck. Silver ichor dripped from wire flashing that seemed to disappear into his spine where nerves ought to have been according to the seventh-grade anatomy home-school course that she’d watched on Youtube. More nodes mixed in the pulverized contents of his skull, a soup of grey matter and machine. Jaelle turned away, reeling. If she could have vomited just then, she would have, but she hadn’t eaten in three centuries.

That left only Mal. Hidden in the remains of the gas station. She was going to have to go in there. There was no one else.

The thing that made feeling real so incredibly odd was that nothing else ever did. The flames still licking around the gas station's ruined entrance did not warm her, and the hanging metal beams did not cut or bar her way. Jaelle moved through it all, this endless dreamland of her not-life, looking for the person who had rescued her from the void.

“Mal! I swear to GOD if you’re dead, I’m going to find your spirit and kill you!” She wouldn’t, really. But still, it was the principle of the thing. “Mal!!!”