The Year of Shadows by Claire Legrand Page B

high terrace windows, I saw shadows. Solid, twisting, vaguely human-shaped shadows like the ones Henry and I had seen that day in the lobby.
    The burn on my arm stung with sudden coldness.
    “We’ve seen these before,” I said. “That day in the lobby, the first day we saw you.”
    “Yes.”
    “You said that was part of some test,” Henry whispered furiously. “Were you lying?”
    “Yes, and I’m sorry for that. But I didn’t want to frighten you away before we could even explain ourselves.”
    I followed the shadows’ flickering movement across the ceiling. It was mesmerizing. “What are they?”
    Frederick exhaled, sending goosebumps down my back. “They are shades. Ghosts who could never find their anchors, who were never able to move on. Ghosts who were tempted into Limbo. We used you to drive them away, that day in the lobby. I apologize, but . . . they are much stronger than we are, and they wouldn’t leave us alone.”
    I rubbed my burn. “They hit us. They left marks behind.”
    “They hate humans. They are terribly jealous of you, and yet they love you too,” Frederick said quietly. “You have what they have forever lost: life. Mostly they stay away from you. The pain of remembering is too great. But sometimes they cannot help themselves.”
    I inched my head a bit farther out the door. The shades scampered across the ceiling, darting in and out of the moonlight like spiders. Darkness trailed off of their bodies like black fog. When the light hit them, they glittered. Like my burn.
    “You said something about Limbo,” Henry whispered. “What’s Limbo?”
    “There is the world of Death, where the Dead go,” said Frederick. “There is the world of the Living, which holds the Living and the ghosts. Then there is Limbo, which is between the two. Once a ghost enters Limbo, it becomes a shade. It can travel back and forth between the world of the Living and Limbo. It can even touch things in the world of the Living, if it wants to. You see?”
    One of the shades careened into a chandelier. The diamonds clinked and shuddered. Soft shrieks drifted down afterward.
    “That doesn’t seem fair,” I said. “ You can’t touch anything.”
    “No, but at least I can perhaps move on someday. Sooner rather than later, if we have your help.” He smiled shyly. “Shades, on the other hand, can never move on. Or at least,I’ve never heard of it happening. They’re not the best conversationalists, shades. I only know of them what we have managed to piece together through watching them. You see, in Limbo, their minds are clear. They remember that they have anchors, somewhere in the world of the Living. They remember that they would like to move on. But once in the world of the Living, they forget all of that. They become hardly more than mindless beasts, confused and vicious. Thus, they can never remember, and they can never move on. They can touch things, oh yes, but they can never find peace.”
    “How do you know all this?” Henry demanded.
    “We told him,” Tillie said, jutting out her chin. “And Mr. Worthington told us. And other ghosts told him. You have to study your enemy. We know shades.”
    “So shades are shades for eternity?”
    Frederick nodded, his eyes fixed on the ceiling.
    Eternity : forever, and ever, and ever; an endless amount of time.
    I tried to wrap my brain around the idea. I’d heard that the universe was eternal too, spreading out in all directions, and if you tried to find the edge, you never would. You’d just keep on flying through space, forever .
    I grabbed onto the door frame, suddenly dizzy.
    “What do the shades want?” Henry said beside me. “Why are they here?”
    “Shades exist wherever ghosts do,” Frederick said.“They hate us because we have what they can never have: a chance to move on. So they haunt us, try to lure us into Limbo.”
    At the word Limbo , the other ghosts shivered. Tillie and Jax had to hold Mr. Worthington together so he didn’t