#ectober23

“I never dissected you, my dear boy,” said Vlad, with an expansive gesture.  A bit of wine spilled from his glass.  He was drunk, too.  

“As if you could,” said Danny with a snort.  “I said you tried to dissect me.  There’s a difference, cheesehead.”

“No, no,” said Vlad.  “I never tried to dissect you.”

Danny rolled his eyes.  “Are you splitting hairs over whether or not you wanted to vivisect or dissect me?  Really?  Really?”

“I’m not splitting hairs, I’m making a cogent distinction!  And I never wanted to vivisect you, either.”

“What d’you call wanting to cut me up to figure out how I work, then?”

Vlad sniffed.  “Vivisection is strictly for things that are alive.  Dissection is for things that are not alive.  We are both alive and dead, and therefore such an act would fall under neither category.  Therefore, therefore, I came up with my own term.”

“What?” said Danny, drinking more wine.  Clearly, he wasn’t drunk enough to make dealing with Vlad painless yet.  If that was even possible.  “Vladisection?”  As much as Vlad mocked Danny’s father for his naming sensibilities (some of which were Mom’s fault, anyway), the names he came up with were much worse.  

Danny was never going to let him live Dalv down.  Seriously.  

“Divisection!” said Vlad triumphantly.

Danny nearly choked on his wine.  

“I considered hemisection and demisection, but hemisection is already taken.”

“By what?” asked Danny, phasing off the wine he’d spilled.  

“Something to do with tooth surgery,” said Vlad, waving his hand.  “Unimportant.”

“And demisection?”

Vlad ignored him.  “Divi.  A noble and little-used prefix, ideal for our purposes.”

“I don’t like how you’re lumping us together, there, Vladdie.”

“It accurately indicates that we are divided between two states, those of life and death.”

“I dunno that I feel all that divided.  I think that’s always been a you thing,” lied Danny.  He’d had his phases, back when he’d been a teenager.  He’d gotten over it.

“And, in a stroke of genius–”

“Kinda think that word’s overused these days,” observed Danny.  

“Let me speak Daniel.  It’s no wonder you’re getting a ‘B’ in Introduction to Relativistic Astrophysics and General Relativity.”

“Y’know what, I’m impressed you can even say that with how drunk you are.”  Danny sure wasn’t going to try.  He already bit his tongue too often, now that his fangs had come in.  

“As I was saying, in a stroke of genius, divisection also includes the first syllable from each of the terms that are so often misused in its place.”  Vlad nodded sharply, and drained his wine glass.  “I didn’t try to dissect or vivisect you, I wanted to divisect you.”

“I can’t tell if you’re serious or not,” said Danny.  

“I’m dead–” Vlad hiccupped, “--deadly serious.”

“You’re embarrassing, that’s what you are,” said Danny.  He leaned back to get a better look of the moon overhead.  “I really, really don’t know why I’m hanging out with you.  Divisection.  Can’t believe you tried to cut me up, and now you’re calling it divisection.  No respect.”

“It was that thing again,” said Vivian.  “How did it get in?”   

It was the first time Danny had heard her speak since…

Since she'd died.  

“Technology,” said Gwensyvyr, grimly, “a road we could not take.”

Right.  The thing.  “Jazz, could you…?”

“Yes, sorry,” said Jazz.  She stepped forward and, when Danny relaxed the shield, used the thermos to suck up the remains of the ghost.  Danny would have to see if he could steal some of his mother’s gloves to wash that out.  He wouldn’t put any ghost in such a small with blood blossom residue if he could help it.

The weaker ghosts started to come forward again, surrounding the family closely.  None of them, to Danny’s relief, seemed to be hurt very much.  

Irene took a deep breath.  “I will set the table.  Danny, how many of our honored ancestors will sit with us?”

“Um,” said Danny, looking at the packed room.  

“Vivian and I, only,” said Gwensyvyr.  “I think that should be easier, yes?  Your other relatives here are closer than I, yet still distant.”

“Two,” said Danny.  “Queen Gwensyvyr and… and Vivian.”

“Former queen might be a more apt title,” said Gwensyvyr, as Vivian winced.  “I am queen only among the dead.”

“Two,” said Irene.  “Two.  That makes twelve of us.  Twelve.  Twelve place settings.  Do we even have anything decent to serve…”  She walked away, towards the kitchen.  “Iris, George, come help me.”

Everyone else sort of shuffled into place around the table, zombie-like.  Except for Lewis.  He picked up one of Joanna’s heavy heraldry books and started using it to smash his phone.

"I could have handled it," murmured Danny as he bent to pick up his bowl of cereal.  He’d knocked it to the floor at some point during the very brief fight.  “The ghost.  You didn’t need to– You could have been hurt again.”

“And you could have been hurt.  For what reason do you think I have stayed, except to watch over my cherished descendants, hm?”  

Leo walked over with a wad of paper napkins and handed them to Danny.  “Is Vivian really here?”

“I’m here,” said Vivian, her voice so faint and distant it could have been carried from miles away by an errant breeze.  

“She’s here,” Danny said.  

Leo’s face crumpled.  “I’m sorry,” he said.  “I’m sorry.  Vivian.  I don’t– I didn’t–”  He shuddered.  “I’m sorry.”

Vivian didn’t say anything, but she was crying.  

Irene and her children came back into the dining room with plates and sandwiches.  They set the table in a precise way that felt strangely familiar, as if Danny should recognize the ritual they were following.  When they were done, there were twelve place settings, and each of them had a sandwich, a glass of water, a folded napkin, and a sharp knife.  

“Honored ancestors, I invite you to our table,” said Matthew, with a small bow.

There was a long awkward silence as Gwensyvyr and Vivian maneuvered around and through two of the chairs to ‘sit’ in them.  The silence only grew longer and more awkward still afterwards.

“Danny,” said Matthew, “where are they?”

“Oh,” said Danny, realizing the problem.  “Those two chairs.”  He nodded his head towards them.  

Matthew sighed in relief and shepherded Danny to the chair right next to Gwensyvyr before taking his own place on the opposite side of the table.  

No one touched their sandwiches.

“Please, honored ancestors, we are ready to receive your wisdom.  

Gwensyvyr folded her hands in front of her, and her clothing began to blur and fade into something simpler and more modern. 

"Perhaps these things are ones I should have spoken to you earlier," she said.  "I will not ask you to forgive me for my lapse in judgment if so.  I had my reasons.  First, I could not, then, I was unsure, after that, there was too much to explain by spelling each word out letter by letter.  And two of those three ran out today, yet I thought, 'What difference an hour?  Two?'" She shook her head minutely.  "Urgency is difficult when one has practiced patience for so long."

"Honored ancestor," said Vivian, quietly, interrupting even as Danny hurried to relay what Gwensyvyr had said to everyone else.  "I think.  I think I should say… what happened to me.  First."

"If you think that best, granddaughter, then I shall not stop you."

Vivian nodded, then turned to Danny.  "You can hear me, too, can't you?"

“Yes,” said Danny.  “Yes, I can hear you.”  He rubbed his eyes.  “I can hear you.”

Vivian nodded.  Briefly, her form flickered bleeding and bloody and bruised, the scars of her death apparent just for a moment.  

“I didn’t die at the same time as everyone else,” said Vivian.  She was using the cadence that Danny knew had been trained into her as a future heir to the throne.  She’d complained about it to him and Jazz, once, when they were all younger.  “I didn’t even die the same day.  They killed me the night before.”  She paused and Danny finished repeating what she had said.  

“That… matches the coroner's report,” said Matthew, slowly.  

It took Vivian another minute to speak again.  “When I’m stressed, I like to walk through the university park.  It’s near my flat.  It’s–  I was stressed that afternoon.”

Leo hiccuped.  

“It isn’t your fault,” Vivian reassured him.  “I would have been stressed anyway.  I went out.  I wanted to get a walk before the sun set.  I had energy, I had…  A man came up to talk to me.  That’s not so unusual.  I wasn’t worried.  I had my taser, I had my panic button, security knew where I was, more or less.  He asked me questions about religion.  About modernization.  I thought he was a reporter.  But then I saw him at the coronation, and–”  She broke off, biting her lip.  “Bastard.”

“Wallace Hadryn?” asked Danny.  “That guy?”

Vivian nodded once, tightly.  “He wanted to know what I thought about the progress faction’s proposal for bringing in overseas business.  Wanted to know if I’d consider ‘canceling outdated traditions’ and make a stand for ‘real progress.’  Just– You know how it is.  It was offensive, but normal.”

Danny didn’t know how it was, but it didn’t matter.  His cousins seemed to.  

“I told him to get lost.  And he said something about trying the nice way one last time.  And then he changed.  He was the same as that thing.  Maybe he was even the same thing.  I don’t know.  I ran.  I hit my panic button.  But then all the lights went off.  All of them.  It was dark.  It was like anything with any electricity just stopped.”  She breathed in deeply, her chest rising in remembered motion.  

“That happens, sometimes, with ecto-energy,” said Jazz.  “But if it was from the same ghost, you’d expect it to break the phone before coming out of it.”

“It might have been the same one, I don’t know.  It could have been something different.  But I was getting away, I was– Then there were the lights.  They were the only lights I could see for at least a mile.  I thought they were normal people.  But you know those stories about not following lights.”  She covered her face.  “That thing was just chasing me towards them.  Herding me.  Ancestors.”  

Gwensyvyr patted her gently on the back.  

“They didn’t want to kill me, at first.  They wanted the Key and the Seal.  They– After, one of them said something about my Key being the last one.  I don’t know what they meant by that.  There were– There were five of them.  Mostly men, I think.  At least one woman.  They had their faces covered.  They didn’t want to kill me, at first.  They said they had a way to make sure I was thinking about the right things, when I became queen, but they needed to put me somewhere safe, first, and they needed the Key and the Seal.  They tried to take them.  I fought.  I fought.  Just like we’re trained to do.  And I–  One of the new ones, the one in charge, not Wallace Hadryn or whatever he was, they weren’t human, either.  I managed to scratch them, and they just…  Just…  They didn’t stop hitting me.  And the other four started in, and I…”  

And she’d died.  

“I was… there.  For a while.  Afterward.  They started talking about damage control.  Changed plans.  One mentioned a backup.  The one in charge told them to be quiet and leave.  They took.  The body.  Then I was there.  And I.  I couldn’t do anything.  For a long time.  The lights came back on.  And I saw…” she trailed off again.  “I had…  There was something like the Key.  It looked wrong.  It was the wrong color.  Everything was the wrong color.  But I could… there was something…  You know that story, about using the compass on the Key?  The one with Prince Yon?  It’s real.  And it brought me here.  And I saw Danny.  And he touched the key, and it…  Turned back.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Danny.  “I still have that.”  Because it wasn’t like he was just going to leave that lying around.  He took it out of his pocket and laid it on the table.  Everyone looked at it.  “I don’t know why it did that.  I’ve never touched part of someone’s, um, skyn skryth,” he settled on, finally, not having another good term for the clothing that a ghost wore because they’d worn it when they’d died or when they were buried, “and had it turn real.”

"Oh, yes," said Gwensyvyr as everyone leaned in to look at the Key.  "That is, as they now say, a feature, not a bug.”

Both Vivian and Danny turned back to Gwensyvyr to blink slowly at her.