I was eight when I died, and that’s what I should start with.  I won’t say it was the best thing that ever happened to me, because who would ever say that?  No, it wasn’t the best. But it did give me a chance to become something more than just another random eight-year old girl.  It gave me the chance to meet Hawk, become his friend. And from there, to become his conscience. My name is Sally, and this is the story of how the two of us came to be not just ‘him and me’ but ‘us’.

​

I’m not entirely sure where I should begin, but I guess my death would be the best place to start.  It seemed a lot like any other Saturday morning. Mom and Dad and I were walking to the park. Mom was distracted, getting calls from her work, and Dad was upset but smiling and putting on a brave face.  I can see all this now, in hindsight, but back then all I knew was that it was time to play and they were walking too slow.

We were heading for the corner and I was pulling on Dad’s arm, trying to get him to walk faster.  Mom was on her phone, yelling at someone for messing up. She did a lot of yelling. I don’t remember now what her job was.  Some corporate executive type job. I remember she traveled a lot, and I didn’t get to see her much except on weekends. That’s why Saturday was always so important.  This was the first Saturday in months it had been dry enough for us to go to the park.

​

When we got to the corner Dad and I looked for cars while Mom kept talking on the phone.  She’d finally stopped yelling and was explaining something in what I used to call her ‘stupid’ voice.  It was the same one she always used to explain to me what I’d done wrong whenever I was in trouble, as if I were still a baby.  Or a dummy. I felt bad for whoever was on the other end of the phone. Dad started to walk across the street, holding my hand and smiling at me.  I remember looking at him and smiling back. He made a face at me and I laughed, and that’s when the world flipped upside-down.

​

I don’t really remember what happened after that.  I know there was a loud noise of some kind, a crash, and I remember Dad letting go of my hand.  I remember Mom screaming. It was a strange sound, not what I was used to, and it scared me. I mean, Mom screamed at people all the time, but never like that.  I tried to turn my head, to see what made her scream like that, and something hit me. I remember flying, and then nothing. Not until I got up.

​

I woke up with a sheet over my face.  The first thing I did was freak out and I threw the sheet off and sat up.  I guess I should have realized something was wrong with me when all the people around me started staring, but I was scared.  I wanted my parents. I looked around and saw two other people laying on the ground, covered with the same white sheets that I had covering me.  I know I’m only eight, technically, but even then I wasn’t stupid. I really, really wanted to cry when I saw the sheets, but I couldn’t. It didn’t matter that my heart was breaking or that I was staring at the covered corpses of my parents.  All I wanted to do right then was burst into tears but no matter how much I wanted to my body simply wouldn’t let me.

​

When you’re a Revenant one of the things you can never do again is cry.  Everything about being dead is different. Breathing isn’t necessary anymore, and neither is eating.  Everything that a person needs to stay alive is just…pointless. It’s a sudden change, like walking from a hot room to a cold one, and a shocking one too.  I think most of us adapt to it pretty quickly, but for me, the changes on top of the trauma were overwhelming. I couldn’t think, couldn’t understand. My brain just kept bouncing from one thing to the next without pausing to let me think.

One of the changes I kept coming back to was what I could see.  I could see the world like before, but the people in it were different.  I could see them, but they weren’t really people anymore. Just these green blobs.  Some were brighter than others. All of them stayed as far away from me as they could, as if I had done something terrible and they were afraid of me now.  

​

The world isn’t as bright and bold and out there as it was when I was alive.  Being dead is so very different. Smells are muted, sounds are muffled, and lights are dimmed.  Taste is gone, because, after all, what do the dead need with food? I had all of this hit me as I stared at the police, the paramedics, the people who were scattered around staring at me.  Everything about my existence had suddenly changed, and I did what any eight-year-old would do when confronted with a bunch of people she didn’t know, and couldn’t trust.

​

I got up and ran.

​

I spent a long time running.  I don’t just mean that literally.  Yeah, I ran from the rescue workers, but I was also running from what had happened.  And from what was going to happen. I just didn’t know it at the time.

​

I don’t know exactly how long I ran for.  Minutes, hours, days, weeks…years? Maybe.  Maybe not. Time doesn’t really mean anything once you’re dead.  You can watch it passing, but it doesn’t touch you anymore. I know I took the time at some point to clean myself up, get cleaner clothes, straighten my hair, wash off the blood…  I kept running away from people whenever I saw them. I hid, I waited, and when I knew they weren’t looking I’d dash off to wherever I ended up next. It wasn’t like I cared. All I knew was that I was dead, my parents were gone, and for some reason I was left alone, walking around and trying to figure out why.  Why me?

​

All that changed the day I hid in the bricked-up basement of an abandoned white house.  I don’t remember what drew me there, or why I decided to hide when I knew—I knew—there were still Hunters on my trail.  Maybe it was because the little white house reminded me of home.  Maybe it was because there was a hospital just down the street. Or maybe it was because it just seemed safe.  Whatever the reason, I crawled into that basement sometime in the morning, and took the time to spread my stuff out to take stock of what I had left.

​

There wasn’t much.  Just what I’d managed to scavenge.  Two pairs of ragged jeans, one two sizes too big, and both with the knees wearing out.  A striped orange and gray sweater, a plain blue t-shirt, a pink one that said ‘Momma’s Guurl!’ across the front, and an extra pair of rolled-up socks that once had been white but now were closer to gray.  There was a travel tooth-brush and a bar of soap, a small watch with a cracked screen that still worked, a worn black notebook held shut by a rubber band, three ratty pencils, a sharpener, a pocket knife with a broken blade, and a rumpled and thin brown blanket.  These were my possessions, all I had left in the world, and as I carefully folded my spare clothes to make them as small and neat as possible I wondered what I would do next. Then the unthinkable happened.

​

A scruffy and uncoordinated boy scrambled through the same broken window I’d used and landed with an “Oof” on the floor.  I froze and stared as the boy—six or seven, hard to tell in the poor light from the window, but I was pretty sure he was younger than me—slowly groaned and picked himself up.  Then he seemed to realize I was there, and his head whipped around so he could stare at me with the same wide-eyed panic I’m sure shone from my own eyes.

​

He blinded me, in a way.  I think I mentioned this before, but living things glow.  They glow with a green light, the brightness dependent on how much life they have left to them before they die.  He didn’t though. He shone with a blinding yellow light that made me feel like I was staring at the sun. I blinked and tried to block out that light, my body frozen with the shock of it.  It felt like forever, but maybe only took a minute or so, and I was able to see him and not just his energy. The brilliant yellow was still there, but was blocked out partly by his normal appearance, something that to this day I have no clue how I pulled off.

​

“Who’re you?” I finally asked, my voice cracking from disuse.  It had been a while since I’d spoken, and I wasn’t sure I could get my lungs to work enough to let me.  He jumped like a startled rabbit and scrambled back towards the window. “Wait!” I cried, stepping forward, and he froze completely.  He’d frozen under the window, directly in the light, and I could see him better now. He was wearing plain clothes, just a pair of corduroy pants and a ratty green sweater, dirt smeared all over his front as if he’d been crawling on the ground.  There was another smudge on his face, a brown spot, to the left of one of his eyes, though it didn’t match the mess on his front.

​

A bruise.

​

“Please,” I said, as gently as I could.  “I’m not going to hurt you.”

​

“Liar,” he said suddenly, then blinked as if he hadn’t meant to say anything at all.  His shoulders slumped suddenly and an all-too-familiar look of defeat consumed his expression before he dropped his head to stare at the ground.  It was as if all the fight had gone out of him and he was resigned to whatever happened next. “So hurry up already,” he sighed sadly. I changed my mind.  He was small, but probably older than he looked. I don’t think I sounded anywhere as grown up as he did.

​

“Hurry up with what?” I asked, confused.  He looked up at me then, shock twisting his face before it closed off completely.

​

“You…you aren’t going to hit me?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper, but even then it was loud enough to hear in the silence of the room.  It felt so nice, for once in the darkened nightmare my life had become, to have someone willing to talk to me that I didn’t want to let it go.  Slowly, so he could easily see what I was doing, I set aside the shirt I’d been folding and twisted my legs so I could sit cross-legged on the floor.

 

“No,” I answered, and he relaxed a tiny bit as it became clear I wasn’t planning on getting any closer to him than I already was.  “My name’s Sally,” I continued. “What’s yours?”

 

“Hawk,” he replied carefully.  Hawk slid away from the window a bit and settled himself comfortably on the floor, but not so comfortably or so far that he wouldn’t be able to flee if I gave any indication of turning unfriendly.  His instinctive self-preservation was something I recognized easily, having honed it myself over the last…however long it had been since I died. “What are you doing here? Do the others know you’re here?”  I tensed when he referred to others and I saw his eyes widen.

​

“No!” I cried out and he flinched violently away from me and towards the window and his escape.  It reminded me of what he’d said, and suddenly I understood what had caused the bruise on his face.  He’d been beaten up, and had come here to escape. As much as I was afraid for myself, now I felt as though I needed to be afraid for him, too.  “No,” I repeated, a little calmer this time. “No one knows I’m here. Please, you…you can’t tell anyone I’m here.”

​

“Why?” he asked, and this time it was my turn to look at him sharply.  I looked at his face and saw something there, something I couldn’t figure out but it looked an awful lot like…sympathy.

​

“There are people after me, and if they find me…bad things will happen to me.”

​

“Okay,” Hawk shrugged.  “I won’t tell anyone you’re here if you don’t tell anyone I’m here.”  He said it so simply, so matter-of-fact, that something inside me burst free and for the first time in a long time I laughed.

​

Joy.  A simple enough word, encompassing a complex and convoluted concept.  Something I didn’t know I would ever be able to feel again. Hawk smiled at me, a hesitant, awkward smile, as if he’d never really done it before, and I smiled back.  That was where we began. Where our friendship started.

​

It lasted days.  Seems sad to put it that way, but our friendship only lasted a few short days before a Hunter finally came for me.  Hawk was hurt—the only reason I know now what happened to him was because of what he did—but back then I didn’t know.  Not right away. He always came in the early hours of the afternoon, around 12:30 or so, and when it got to be 2 and he still hadn’t shown up I started to worry.  I crept out of my hiding place, leaving my things behind, and made my way towards the towering wall of green that marked the fence surrounding the Seattle Children’s Hospital.  His home.

​

Hawk had told me many times that the hospital was his home, and that he was stuck there, whether he liked it or not.  I knew he hadn’t forgotten. To be honest, I was worried the other kids had beaten him up again, and if so I wanted to know how bad.  He always tried to hide it, but I knew he was getting hit a lot. When you’re dead you notice things, and I always noticed how he’d try to hide a wince, or make his slow, cautious movements seem like natural hesitance.  I noticed, but I never said anything. He was younger than I by a year, but even back then I could tell he was stubborn about it. It was his problem, and he didn’t want me to try and help him with it.

​

So, when I went looking for him, I wasn’t expecting to see him come crawling slowly out from under a hole in the brush separating the yard hospital from everything else.  He was pulling himself forward out of the hole using only one arm, and the other I could see him holding carefully at his side, a fracture brace supporting it. His hair was mussed and ragged, and when he got to his feet I saw the dirt covering his front couldn’t hide the swelling around his eye.

​

I don’t think I’ve ever been so angry.  He’d been punched in the face, at least once, and his arm had been fractured.  I opened my mouth to give him a piece of my mind but the expression on his face when he looked up and saw me standing there stopped me in my tracks.

I’ve seen a lot of things, but that was the closest I’ve ever seen anyone living to sheer panic.

“What are you doing here?” he hissed at me as he scurried forward awkwardly and grabbed my shoulder with his good right hand.  “You can’t be here. He’ll find you.”

“Who will find me?” I asked, confused.

“Me,” another, older voice interjected suddenly and the two of us twisted to see a man in Hunter black approaching, his crossbow raised and aimed right at me.  I had forgotten. In the rush of worry for my new friend I had forgotten the danger I was in, and the Hunter’s Guild had found me. I did the only thing I could think to do with the panic gripping me.  I turned around and ran.

​

Something slammed into my back heavily and I fell to the ground, my legs suddenly not listening to me anymore.  I heard the sound of a scuffle behind me and—using only my arms—managed to push myself up enough to see what was happening.  Hawk had charged the Hunter, probably to give me a chance, and the man was fending him off one-handed. Then the heavy hilt of the crossbow swung and before I could cry out a warning the man had thumped Hawk on the head.

​

“No!” I shouted as Hawk crumpled.  The man caught him in a surprisingly gentle grip and lowered him to the ground slowly.  “Please!” I continued. “Don’t hurt him!”

​

“I’m not going to hurt him,” the man said, then snorted.  “Well, not any more than I already have.” Hawk settled gently on the ground, dazed, the man turned his attention back to me.  “You, on the other hand, are finished.”

​

“How did you find me?” I asked dully, my eyes never leaving my friend.  That’s what he was. My friend. And now it was all over, before I’d ever really had a chance to be his friend.

​

“I didn’t come here looking for you,” the man shrugged.  “I was here because I was asked, but not because of you.”  That finally got me to look at him, and I quickly realized he was telling the truth.  I laughed. He didn’t see the irony and instead pulled a small, clear ball out of the pouch on his hip.  “Time to go, girl,” he said to me before he began to mutter under his breath. I didn’t even have time to do more than whimper in fear before he cast his spell and I was hit with a bright beam of light.

​

Being confined is not a pleasant experience.  It’s all light and heat and pain, and there’s a deep-seated instinct to struggle against the force that’s pulling you closer, deeper, further into that light.  I didn’t want to go, knew if I went, that would be the last I ever saw of my friend. The last I ever saw of Hawk.

​

I could hear myself screaming as the spell continued its work.  It echoed strangely around me, a doubling of sound, as if my body and my soul were slowly separating.  I was engulfed in the light, sucked deeper into its source, and when everything finally stopped I found myself in a wide, white expanse, empty of everything.  I don’t even know how long I was there, though, confused and hurt and even angry, before things changed again.

​

The white expanse of nothingness cracked and then shattered around me like glass, a violent force pulling me up and out, through the void, and it felt as though I were being torn to pieces.  All I could do was scream. Then another force pulled me back together, pulled me deep inside a familiar yellow warmth.

​

Hawk.

​

I was pulled inside his consciousness, captured by his desire for me to come back, to not leave him alone.  It’s a dangerous thing for a magic user as powerful as he is to have wishes. It took him years to learn how to properly control himself, and even now he messes up sometimes.  So long as he has me, though, there’s only so many ways he can go wrong, only so many bad choices he can make. Because I’ll help him however I can, whether it’s as his conscience or as his friend.  He saved me from oblivion. It doesn’t matter that I’m trapped, that I technically don’t have a choice in the matter. He’s my friend, more now than he ever was before. I’m a part of him now, an automatic reflex he consults whenever confronted with a choice.  Good or bad, for whatever the price, we’re permanently joined together. Friends. Companions. It’s for the best. Why?

 

Because now, no matter what, neither of us will ever be alone.