Free Ghost Shadow (Moon Shadow Series Book 4) by Maria E Schneider Page A

hesitated, but Martin would merely wander away if I didn’t follow. Nervously I puffed myself after him. “The last time I visited the edge with you...Is it required to be naked to coerce the weave into doing what you want?”
    Martin nearly blew himself halfway across In Between. His laugh started as a ghostly shout and dissolved into chuckles that pushed him around in a circle of fits and starts. “Heh-heh. Oh, heheheehee. No, but my nakedness irks the witch. Adriel is an amazing power, but she could stand to unbend some.” Martin cackled some more.
    “Good thing because I don’t even know how to get naked,” I muttered.
    That set him off again.
    When he could finally speak, he said, “I dress myself with bits of this and that, same as when I was topside. This place isn’t earth, but it has a voice. If you listen, you can gentle it and bend it where you might want. Same as earth.”
    I wasn’t certain of that. But at least any follow-up ordeal wouldn’t require me to stand naked in front of the cat and his friends. And most of the time Martin didn’t bother to fully form himself, which was fine. His granite face was more than enough.
    As we sidled back to the edge, he asked me to list all the rooms and people I’d seen. Predictably, those memories brought us near the hospital. Reminiscent of walking through a graveyard, only the opposite, I could see blurred images of the living walking the corridors. There were at least two nurses, a doctor in a lab coat, and a gaggle of visitors whispering. The group nearly ran over the cleaning lady when she stepped around the linen cart to hand an orderly a set of clean sheets.
    “Oh, hey Julia,” the guy acknowledged her, glancing up from his phone. His name tag read “Paul” in big black letters. “Since you haven’t filled the linen closet just yet, can you also drop a set of those in room 202 on your way by?” Without waiting for an answer, Paul smashed the clean sheets in the crook of his elbow and ducked into the doorway next to the one with the visitors.
    The patient in that room was facing the wall, but turned with a groan when Paul walked in. Something about the man’s bald head sparked a memory, but Martin distracted me when he sang, “Well, lookee there.”
    I drifted his way to find him in front of a chilled storage area containing rows of bagged blood. If blood spatters on a sheet could attract a demon, I certainly didn’t intend to frequent a blood bank on a regular basis. There were bags of the stuff just waiting for a demon—or a vamp. My mouth dropped open.
    A female vampire, dead as could be, picked up two of the bags, scanning one of them with a handheld device. She was dressed in a purple nurse’s smock, but it fit her curves well, making her somehow very elegant, even in death. Her hair was smoothed into a French twist, and like Patrick, a bat-like visage hovered behind her.
    Just how many vampires were walking around dirt-side, anyway?
    I backed off until the fog rolled in and obscured every single bit of the other side.
    “Odd, those vampires,” Martin said. “Did you notice the aura of death?”
    “Their lifelines are gone. Patrick was like that too. Dead, but the glow of life radiates through them from borrowed energy.”
    He tapped one finger on his nose. “It’s not easy to meditate here with all these distractions. You can’t learn if you are busy watching people and wishing you were there. Come along, and I’ll teach you elsewhere.”
    We drifted peacefully for a while before Martin coaxed the weave to reveal an empty canyon. The location didn’t surprise me. “Did you die here?”
    He hummed. “I came here from there.”
    “That sounds like a yes.” He might choose to Mickey Mouse around with the idea of death, but I wasn’t inclined to float around fooling myself. Maybe there was a part of me left alive over there, but for now, I was as good as dead and just as hampered.
    “It’s easier for me in this spot,” he