Free Revenant by Phaedra Weldon

exactly are hackles?
    “So”—I held up my right hand, index finger in front of him—“let me get this straight. If I create a spell—first off, I can’t memorize it, so I have to write it down.”
    He sighed, crossing his arms over his chest. If he had a watch, I was sure he’d check it. “Yes.”
    “And—if someone did steal this spell—they could use it against me.”
    Again, a sigh. “Yes. Can we go now?”
    I winced. “Why in the hell do you want me to go with you so bad?”
    Now that produced an even bigger sigh. More like a groan. “You cannot be that thick. How much of those notes have you read?”
    “Obviously not enough,” I said, putting both my hands on my hips.
    “As a Wraith, you possess certain abilities no one else has. Even the Phantasm.”
    That much I’d gathered over the past seven months. When he didn’t continue, I leaned toward him. “And?”
    “And nothing—I don’t know what all you can do.” He smiled. “But I do enjoy finding out. Let’s go.”
    “Wait, wait, wait.” I pulled my arm away from him. He was getting mighty grabby lately. “You haven’t told me why you want to get to the morgue. If these are bodies—why are you so eager to see them?”
    “Not the bodies,” TC said. “The Revenants. I’m more than sure there is at least one there—” He paused. “I can’t sense them. Not like I can sense other Symbionts. But why else have them brought to that morgue?”
    “Oh, I don’t know—to keep them all in one place maybe?” I wasn’t real thrilled about going back to the morgue, and I was sure Lex was still there. And if she was, she’d want me to stick my hand in that sticky, oogy, cold, nasty . . . thing again. If there was a soul in there somewhere, I hadn’t sensed it. And I really didn’t want to get that close to it again.
    “Are you scared?” He raised an eyebrow at me, and though I hated to think it, he looked damn good in the light of Mom’s tea shop.
    “I’ve already seen the bodies. What’s there to be scared of?”
    “Exactly.” He turned and vanished, though his thought lingered in my head. Let’s go.
    I really hated being pressured into doing something I didn’t want to do. But then again—what he’d just told me kinda sounded like what I’d read. But from a different perspective. The Dioscuri described the First Borns as the survivors of the first Phantasm war. But how did my great-uncle arrive at that conclusion in his notes? Had a First Born told him?
    Lex’s conversation with me earlier kept surfacing as well. It also hadn’t escaped me that Lex was one of these Revenants. The whole vampire thing sort of gave it away—that and knowing about this spell. And if I understood the logic, the First Born inside her was called Yamato. But Lex had called it a Symbiont—was that the same thing as a First Born?
    And TC’s opinion of them seemed a bit prejudiced. Man . . . who knew there were so many layers to the Abysmal plane? I didn’t even want to get into the Ethereal.
    Really.
    I didn’t.
    Becoming the Wraith while in body—how can I describe this? Or even relate the first time it happened after all that Horror craziness last month? I’m not sure there is a way. The first time came when I wanted to go back to the explosion, to see for myself what had happened. It was after Cooper died, and I wasn’t feeling right. I’d kept seeing the death mask—skulls—everywhere I looked.
    I’d been standing in my room at Mom’s, then I was moving up through the roof, through the attic (needed a cleaning!), and into the sky. Hovering.
    It’d been almost instantaneous. I’d wanted to be OOB, and I’d planned on lying down on the bed to leave my body in a comfortable position. But—as I’d hovered there above the building—I realized I still had it.
    I STILL HAD MY BODY!
    And as I looked at it—held out my hands and arms—I saw that my skin was no longer its natural olive, but black and mottled. My clothing had changed as