A Vial of Life (A Shade of Vampire #21)(44)

But it meant that I’d lost the trail again. Now I might need to wait hours before it started up… although it had sounded so close to me. It’d been louder than ever a few seconds ago. I was certain that it came from somewhere in these very fields surrounding me.

I stopped amidst the potato crops and scanned the area once again. To my left was a thin line of trees, marking the border between the potato and cauliflower fields. At the end of this row of trees was a small farmhouse that hadn’t been inhabited for decades. Although I’d spent most of my life on this island, I was quite sure that I had never stepped inside of it, even as a child.

Then I spotted something strange. Gathered beyond the building, deeper into the cauliflower crops, was a crowd of people. Except, as I moved closer, they weren’t exactly people. They were… ghosts. Perhaps fifty of them, all hovering near the farmhouse.

I was momentarily stunned. I found myself rooted to the spot, just staring at this odd crowd. There were men and women of all ages, and even some children. Some wore casual, modern clothes like jeans and t-shirts, while others wore outfits that looked like they belonged in the eighteenth century; the women wore long, heavy frocks, while men donned breeches, cravats, and pleated coats. The only thing in common was that their attire looked ripped and ragged, and sometimes even stained with blood. That, and they all appeared to be humans, or rather had been humans in their former lives.

What in the world…?

Through my confusion, I realized that this was the first time I’d thought about the fact that ghosts even wore clothes. I looked over my own form. I was wearing the same clothes I’d worn before leaving my body—a cloak, ripped shirt and pants—only now the fabric had almost become a part of me. The garments were just as intangible and wispy as the rest of my form. I couldn’t take the clothes off, or even touch them—my hands just ran through them, as they did with everything else I tried to make contact with. It appeared that ghosts took on an identical appearance to the body they left behind. Almost like some kind of distant reflection, a shadow of their former selves.

Heads turned toward me as I arrived within ten feet of the crowd. They looked me over curiously.

“Who are you?” I asked in a hushed tone—hushed not because I had any reason to be quiet, but because I was still in a state of surprise.

I received several frowns before spirits from the crowd began calling out their names. “Augustus Croft. Tiffany Adkins. Tim Forney. Charlie McGuire. Lucinda—”

I held up a hand. I really wasn’t interested in knowing their names. “Wait, wait. I mean, where do you come from? Why are you here?” My confusion deepened as I gazed around at their bedraggled forms. “Did you all take the potion too?”

They appeared to be bewildered by my last question.

“Potion? What’re you talking about?” The woman who’d called herself Lucinda stepped forward. She appeared to be in her late twenties, with ebony skin and curly black hair tied up in a bun over the top of her head. From her rich accent, I guessed that she was from the Caribbean. She wore a suit that reminded me of those worn by air stewardesses—a gray skirt and jacket with a brooch attached, and a blouse whose front was drenched in blood.

I tore my eyes away from the crimson stains. “Did you not take a potion?” I asked. “A light blue liquid administered by a witch. It separates a person from their body and turns them into a ghost.”

She looked at me as though I was crazy. “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.

How could these people have become ghosts and not heard of the potion? From what Arron had told me, I’d gotten the impression that people who died normal deaths didn’t become ghosts. That was what the potion was designed for—detaching a person from their body, but still allowing them to remain in their previous existence without moving on to… whatever awaited after death.

I glanced around at the other ghosts again. They also looked blank at my mention of the potion. Maybe there was another way to become a ghost after all. Maybe Arron had not given me the full picture. Perhaps he had not even known it himself.

“Where have you all come from?” I asked, trying a different tack.

Lucinda was the first to reply. “From 1982. I died in a plane wreck.”

I raised a brow.

“The plane I was working on, chartered for Hawaii, crashed over the Pacific before we ever made it there,” she explained.

“And that’s how you became a ghost?”

Now it was the woman’s turn to quirk a brow. “Uh, yes.”

“But how?” I asked, more to myself than to her.

She shrugged. “How do I know? One minute I was being thrown about the plane and the next, the pain vanished and I became… this.” She eyed herself over.

I fixed my focus again on the other ghosts—particularly the section that did not appear to be from this century, or even the last.

“You didn’t all die in the same crash. Where are the rest of you from?”

Lucinda gestured toward a group of eight ghosts behind her—two children, five women, and one man. “They were on the plane with me. Passengers. As for the rest of these people, I’d never laid eyes on them in my life until arriving here on this island.”

An elderly man with an eyepatch over his right eye drifted toward me. He wore a beaver hat, a long-sleeved shirt, and black pants that stopped at his knees, beneath which were long brown stockings. “I died in a shipwreck, about two hundred years ago now. On a voyage from Japan to the Philippines.”