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

agreed. “Feel the wind.”
    Martin drifted into meditation. His near constant singing became a buzzing.
    I watched in silence. The edge didn’t attack him, nor did it expand to allow him more freedom. Martin’s life force didn’t exactly drift over to the other side either, but he didn’t appear to be trying very hard to go anywhere at all.
    It’s easy to be patient as a ghost. You really don’t have a lot of appointments to keep. I didn’t feel the wind at first, mainly because I wasn’t paying attention and didn’t have much use for air. But as I watched Martin and the canyon, the tiniest bit of a living breeze slipped through to our side. Martin sucked in the air and puffed it out carefully, in rings.
    Now he was singing in smoke signals?
    Since there was no sense in wasting the energy, I hungrily enveloped the bits of warmth and air that drifted my way.
    “You blend with it,” Martin intoned. “You sing to the earth, and she brings you treasure. You sing to the weave, and it accepts you.”
    “I’m not the weave.”
    “But it knows you.”
    “And it hates me,” I muttered.
    Martin was not deterred by my lack of enthusiasm. With nothing better to do, I tried shaping my form to match that of the weave. Maybe it liked thread. I could look like a bunch of strings. Of course, it wasn’t all that easy, and with my eyeballs stretched into a thin line my vision was warped, but anything to tame the lion.
    Then again, Martin still held his shape except he was thinner. He rarely bothered with legs or arms, even now. He was a very utilitarian ghost. He didn’t waste energy, unless you counted his singing.
    I was pretty sure the weave would not appreciate my singing. But what did it want from me? Nothing. I had nothing to offer.
    Stretched out as I was, for the first time ever, straying fabric wasn’t slashing at me. I still couldn’t penetrate it, though.
    I pulled my head together, but like Martin, I kept the rest of me bottled into a small space. Less of me to be available for the cutting block.
    Martin breezed back and forth, dancing to his chant. After a bit, I noticed that he ebbed and flowed with the fabric of the weave. He drifted closer and then floated away. The weave often gave way before him, creating a space. Anytime it did so, the fabric was temporarily thinner as it stretched.
    I stopped watching him and watched the steel bands. In the past, I had worried only about it coming after me or how close it was or wasn’t. The weave was very elastic, but because it flowed, it also resembled running water. It billowed past at a steady rate, bobbing in and out, over and across, and up and down.
    Whenever Martin drifted close, it flowed around him rather than attacking him, but like real water, since he floated slowly, the weave didn’t splash against him. It just thinned, making room until the flow became more uniform.
    The breeze from the canyon, with all its wonderful desert smells, came through every time the weave was sheer enough. The sounds of birds could be heard, a caw here, a twitter there.
    No wonder Martin never had to spend his time hunting energy. He was perfectly capable of meditating his way around the edge, collecting whatever he needed. In this remote area, there was no one on the other side to see or disturb him.
    The thought was a magnet for trouble, or perhaps my intuition worked better with my essence all tucked into my head. A sound, a different pressure, something was behind me.
    I spun sideways, accidentally ricocheting off Martin. He nearly smashed into the weave. My bounce sent me flying over the hellhound, but barely.
    The ugly devil hit the weave as it sprang at me.
    I briefly considered leaping over the pack, but the hounds were skilled jumpers. With such a large pack, one of them was bound to score.
    There were a lot of monsters In Between, but the primal scream that burst through the gray from the living side was so horrendous, shards of the weave froze in place. The howl