"We have to tell her about Wang An, don't we?"
"Yes." The spirit rumbled through me without saying a thing. Every ounce of me screamed to tell her.
"If we don't she'll find out, wont she?" I thought to him.
The spirit rumbled again. I felt it pulse again and again, pushing on the inside of my mind like it was too big to be contained. I closed my eyes and focused, squeezing its power for both encouragement and strength. I channeled my voice past the green spirit.
"Your grandfather is dead." I said, my voice my own. "You don't have to take care of him any longer."
The red girl's eyes flashed in brilliant anger. She looked at me, through me, and then shook her head. "Not you." That look said. Her eyes roamed around to Lv Bin and the color of her body deepened. She darkened into a sickening red.
Lv Bin met her eyes and took a step back. He moved before I even knew what was happening. His hand disappeared into a bag labeled with the Eight Trigram pattern.
The spirit sensed what I did twice as fast. My hands rose without me telling them to do so and came to a halt in the 'stop' gesture, fingers splayed out and straining. The voice that wasn't mine boomed into the yard. "Don't move." It didn't scream, but the voice was louder than anything I'd ever heard, like it came from every direction at once. "Move and you die." It said again.
I didn't know who he was talking to. "I can't kill a Taoist!" I thought frantically, "You can't be threatening Lv Bin, can you?"
The little girl's furious expression melted into innocence and she rolled large pleading eyes to me. The green ghost's voice boomed through me again.
"Will you go?" It asked her?"
The girl shook her head coldly. "I have so many things left to do. Someone killed my grandpa. I'll hurt them." Her visage flickered within the invisible bindings. Her whole being shook and danced in a million tiny jerks, as if she were testing the walls. "I will have revenge." She added, her eyes not moving from mine. Her face dropped centimeter by centimeter into a hideous inhuman despair.
"Who do you seek?" I thought. The green spirit voiced it for me.
The quivering visage of a blood red girl began to spout name after name that I didn't recognize. I spun the names in my mind, trying to make sense of it when Lv Bin cut in, "Those are the men who desecrated her body! Zheng Baolong, I remember him, the police caught him!"
The red girl straightened and continued to repeat her list of names. "You crafty son of a bitch." I thought at Lv Bin.
"Song Shuangmei, Zheng Hongjun…" the girl went on.
"Those are Xiao Wen's biological parents…" I noted internally. I pushed past the spirit that was controlling my tongue. I felt him give away the reigns easily and I sent him a mental thank you. In my own voice this time, I asked, "Do you hate your parents for sending you to the Wangs?"
The red girl shook her head vehemently. Her voice rose in a shrill screech and then she spoke, her words echoed in a whisper as if they came from far away, "I hate that they killed my sister."
"Wh-" I started, but the answer came in a different way. The girl's eyes widened and locked onto mine. Where the green spirit's presence had been suddenly became red. A wave of red everything took over my eyes, became my eyes, my mind, and then everything.
A baby girl was born on a cold winter night. Her cheeks were brilliantly pink. There was no time to go to the hospital.
"It's a girl." An old woman said in disgust. Zheng Hongjun's mother flashed into my mind, a woman I've never seen, but I knew because Xiao Yi knew. "Why can't you ever have boys?" The grandmother said with a frown.
"We can't kill it. They'll know." The woman's voice whispered. It was like she was standing right beside me. I felt goose pimples sweep over my body a million miles away.
"Pregnant again? It'd better be a boy!" The old woman said.
"If not…" Her daughter pleaded.
"I'll kill it." The old woman cackled. The image changed, everything flooded red again and I only heard the old woman screaming, "Give me a grandson! No!" Then came a hideous sound. Something wet hitting something hard and a scream. My mind filled with the image of a human baby girl, smashed and bleeding.
I felt tears rolling down my face, but I couldn't move. Something was going on between the red girl and the green spirit within me. I felt like I was being pulled from every direction. The screaming filled my mind.
"We have to hide it!" One voice said. Zheng Hongjun, something told me. It was Zheng Hongjun. "Bury it!" The voice said.
My vision flooded with the dead child. It was under ground now. Bloody, broken, and dead beneath the earth. I went with it as it rushed out of the earth. The child's spirit rose, unaware of its death and sought out the nearest source of warmth. "You." A voice said.
"The red girl." I said. The dead spirit invaded Xiao Yi while she was still alive. "You were two spirits…trapped in one girl…" I spoke to the chasm of red invading my mind.
"They thought I was crazy." The red presence returned in a voice now larger than existence itself. I was no longer speaking to the girl standing before me in the physical world. She was me and I was her inside of my own head. A flash of incredible pain seared itself up and down my body. Something was terribly wrong.
"They thought I was broken!" The voice screamed to me, into me, through me. "They sent me to the Wang family because they were murderers!"
"What of Xiao Wen?" I asked, trying to hold onto reality. I could feel my body numbing beyond recognition. My mind was lost in the endless waves of red crashing over me.
"Sister?" The red asked. "She's one of us too."
"Five souls." I felt my lips move. The words weren't mine, but I understood. "You've given her parts of yours. Xiao Wen has five souls. The mirror sees you, but can't hurt you. You used her…" I was coming back to myself. The red pulsed, but waned away from me. I felt the green spirit beating in my chest as if angry it'd been suppressed. "You used her to move around this world!" I felt the words grating out of my mouth. I was all at once furious that this spirit could assume to use my sister for its own gain. I pushed against the red wave in my mind. I squeezed the green spirit's presence and forced it outward with a scream.
"She won't remember." The red girl said. I could see her now, once again restrained before me. My head was pounding and my eyes ached like they'd been open for days. I ground my teeth together and spat. "We're sisters." The red girl said. "Sisters help each other."
I took a deep breath to steady myself. Across the yard Lv Bin and his crew were gaping at me open mouthed. I felt a trickle of something skirt down my face from the corner of my eye. I knew it was blood before I wiped it away. The green spirit roiled inside of my, furious that it'd been repressed by the girl before us.
While I concentrated on regaining my focus, the red girl continued to tell us something worse.