“That’s right. It’s a pretty cool material, naturally malleable and versatile.” She wrinkled her nose a little. “Once you get over the inescapable ick factor, that is. It is not the nicest texture imaginable. Like some raunchy mix of spiderweb and eel skin. From what our oldest accounts say, not even Yaga completely loved working with it.”
“Intriguing, yet also gross,” I said, making a face. “So if ghosts are inclined to flock to you, how do you keep from being haunted? Or even possessed?”
“Well, we do have a fair amount of activity at The Bitters, which can’t really be helped.” She touched the jewel suspended above the hollow of her throat, still aglow. “That’s where our garnets come in. The living and the dead can’t—or shouldn’t—mix too much, and the same goes for working with ectoplasm. The garnet fixes us here, stabilizes our living energy like an anchor. Makes sure we don’t risk our own essence when fraternizing with the other side.”
“And that’s why it’s glowing now?” I asked, a little anxiously. “Because you’re, uh, fraternizing as we speak?”
She nodded, still trailing her fingers over the jewel’s facets. “There are shades in the Witch Woods, what you might call active ghosts. And they’re very eager to latch on to anything alive.”
“I knew it!” I hissed, flinging a panicked look at the whirlpool of mist curdling around the edges of our makeshift picnic blanket. “That’s what the mist is made of, right? Ghosts?”
“No, no, the ghosts live in the trees,” she said, waving my concern away.
“Talia. In no way is that better.”
“Maybe not, but it’s true,” she said, with a little shrug. “They slip through the tears in the veil, and then they affix to the brightest life they can find—which, here, happens to be the wood itself. Sometimes they stay for a long time, even centuries. Long enough for their inhabitation to distort the tree’s shape.”
I shuddered a little, twitching my wrap tighter around me. “Honestly, that sounds like it super blows for the tree.”
She patted the oak’s hideous trunk, smiling at it as if at an old friend. “I don’t think they mind so much. Unlike a person, an inhabitation doesn’t drive the tree insane. And the lodged shades are anchored, less restless. No real danger to anyone who wanders into the woods.”
“What is it that the shades want, anyway?” I asked, trying to understand why she seemed so sympathetic to them.
She drew her lower lip through her teeth, considering. “To be alive again, mostly. Which is a tall order, but understandable; I think we can all agree that being dead and restless sucks the big one. Barring a do-over, I think they just want to be seen by someone. To be touched. You know, pretty much the same things everyone wants, even while alive.”
She leaned closer to the tree, stroking the trunk in a slow, deliberate way, like you’d pet a skittish horse or some other leery animal. As if beckoned by her touch, a dark vapor began rising from the bark.
It sifted through the tree’s rough skin, coalescing into ferny fronds of ectoplasm; glistening, gelatinous, inkily alive. Once freed, it curled and roiled, churning itself into a roughly humanoid silhouette. Something that insinuated a feminine shape, with the suggestion of overlong and thinned-out limbs, and a smoky curlicue like a plume of hair. It had no discernible features, save for two eyelike patches of deeper darkness in the smudge that passed for its face. In the green-skewed light of our lantern, it looked like some baleful specter conjured up by Maleficent.
When the apparition bent toward us, I thought my heart might leap out of my mouth and go tearing off into the undergrowth. The only thing that kept my shit remotely together was the utter lack of fear on Talia’s face as she looked up at the shade.
“Hey, sweet pea,” Talia crooned to it, her voice low and even as she reached up to cup the general vicinity of the thing’s cheek. “How’ve you been, hmm?”
It leaned into her palm like a cat, issuing a series of faint keening sounds that made all my hair stand on end. Talia merely smiled in response, as if this was the equivalent of a pleasant and normal exchange.
“Of course, whenever I can,” she said to it. “I know it’s been a minute this time, but I’d never come through without saying hello.”
“What is that, Talia?” I said softly, almost afraid to speak. “Or, who?”
The shade twitched toward me at the sound of my voice, before turning pointedly back to Talia, as if it had decided it couldn’t care less that I was also there. I felt, perversely, kind of hurt.