Free Against a Brightening Sky by Jaime Lee Moyer

she looks so, so much like Sunny.”
    She brushed trembling fingers across the ghost’s image, a startling gesture from Isadora. That she didn’t immediately faint was a bigger surprise. I’d felt the moment of a person’s death, known the pain of their last seconds and struggle to cling to life, but those were fleeting things for me. I could grit my teeth and go on.
    Powerful emotions and the pain of others—both living and dead—sought Dora out, lingered, and grew stronger. Being swept away was a real danger, one she couldn’t take lightly. Seeing her willingly touch a ghost was a shock.
    â€œI don’t have the vaguest idea what you’re talking about, Dora.” I stood shoulder to shoulder with her, watching the ghost who’d shadowed me all day and ready to catch Isadora if she did faint. “You need to explain it to me.”
    â€œI was married for several years while I lived in Europe. My husband, Mikal, was killed while on a hunting trip with friends. A rock slide is what I was told.” A shadow of old grief, old sorrows, moved across Dora’s face. “Losing Mikal is why I left the Continent and moved to Atlanta.”
    â€œI didn’t know.” I touched her shoulder. My understanding of why Dora felt her relationships were cursed became painfully clear. “I’m sorry.”
    â€œThat was a long time ago, Dee, and I rarely talk about it. But this ghost of yours looks a great deal like a cousin of Mikal’s. Everyone in the family called her Sunny and I took up the practice once we became friends. How much the two of them look alike took me by surprise, but Sunny was much older than this girl. I haven’t seen her since I left Europe. That’s more than twelve years now.” She touched the ghost’s face one last time and stepped back, folding her arms over her chest and shivering. “You won’t be able to banish this ghost or shut her out of your life, not unless she leaves willingly. There are haunts that some of the old texts refer to as memory wraiths. Other old stories call them mirror ghosts, for obvious reasons. Memory wraiths are extremely rare. I’ve never seen one before today.”
    I followed Dora’s lead and touched the mirror. Cold glass was all I felt, no sense of who the princess had been nor any lingering trace of how she’d died. I’d felt far too many ghosts die in the past to think of this as normal. “I can see her, but she’s not really there.”
    Dora studied the princess in the mirror. She was more thoughtful, working out the puzzle, now that shock had worn away. “No, she’s not. The grimoire I studied maintained that mirror ghosts are never fully in the world of the living or the spirit realm. They exist in a kind of limbo between life and death. They are reflections of a memory, frozen in time exactly as remembered.”
    â€œA reflection of a memory.” I turned to check on Connor, somewhat surprised our conversation hadn’t woken him. A part of me wondered if the princess had a hand in that. “Then the question becomes whose memory does she belong to? We’ve established it’s not one of yours. And I’ve never seen her before this morning.”
    â€œNo, definitely not a memory of mine or yours. The memory of this princess belongs to someone else. That she appears to have attached herself to you is really rather confusing.” Dora paced a few steps to the left to stand next to Connor’s bureau, never taking her eyes off the mirror and the image of the princess. “Come stand over here, Dee, but don’t block my view of the mirror as you move.”
    Dora always had reasons for her requests and I’d learned not to question. I did as she asked, making a wide circle so she never lost her view of the ghost. Once I was standing next to her again, Isadora looked away from the mirror.
    â€œFascinating. There’s no