A Ghost of a Chance Chapter 4 — Wearing White Doesn't Make you One of the Good Guys A Comics Retcon Story by Maggie Finson

And she finds an enemy she can't simply kill.

The kid was actually on his knees with his hands folded like he was praying. But those prayers were to me, and I was a most unforgiving deity. I was Fury incarnate, Vengeance personified, Retribution in your face. Forgiveness wasn’t one of my strong suits.

But I didn’t kill him.

“Please!” He was begging and it was pathetic, but real. “I didn’t know they were going to do this. I didn’t KNOW!”

He was telling the truth, too.

The three thugs he’d come into the store with were dead, their brains and guts decorating the inside of the little mom and pop store they’d come in to rob. And to prove a point.

If the kid had come in intending to help kill the old couple who owned and ran the store he would have been dead with the others. I knew that, but he was still guilty. And I had my own rules about that. No probation, no second chances. You killed an innocent, planned to do that, or even participated in something resulting in same, you paid for it with your own life. Pass Go? Fuck that. Go to jail? What did I just say? This ain’t monopoly people. You screw up on my watch, you die. Simple as that.

“I needed the money.” He pleaded. “They didn’t say anything about the rough stuff. I tried to stop them!”

He had. And was showing the bruises and blood to back that up. His cohorts hadn’t been sympathetic when he stopped what they’d planned as an example for others who refused to pay the ‘insurance’ fees their gang imposed on local merchants. The old couple was alive because of that, too.

But still, he had been in on the plan, and I had my own drives, some of which I had very little control over.

But I knew this kid.

Not just as some street tough headed for a bad end.

He was my alter ego’s neighbor. A good kid, overall, who was always helpful and considerate of others, even the cheap little whore who lived next door to the apartment he shared with his mother and little sisters.

“Mama’s sick and can’t work.” He went on, not begging, just telling me. I could tell the difference. “They’re going to kick us out of the apartment. We needed the money to pay the rent, and the doctors for Mama.”

For the first time since I’d come back from the dead I did something human. I considered being merciful.

Shaking my head I strode up to him and grabbed his chin in a bone white hand to pull his eyes up so they would look directly into my own blood red and glowing orbs. “Danny Estevez, that’s no excuse for what you were helping to happen.”

“No, no it isn’t.” He answered with a tremor in his voice. “If I have to die for the mistake, then I’ll die. Just do something for Mama and the girls when I’m gone. Please.”

“Go home, Danny.” I gave his face a light slap and turned away from him. “Just go home and remember this. Next time I won’t be so — gentle. If you get involved in something like this again, your life, and your soul are mine.”

“Si, si, si! Gracias mi diosa.”

“I’m no damned god.” I answered roughly. “Just go home and remember what I said here. If there’s another time, you’ll die.”

“You aren’t the bad thing Las Autoridades say you are.” He softly told me and I tried to ignore him, still keeping my back to him.

“No, not this time.” I whispered then gave my voice the sepulchral force it could project when I was this thing, this Specter, this terrible and unforgiving avenger. “Now get out of here before I change my mind.”

He left and I waited a few moments before I left the scene to make sure the Chu’s were going to survive their injuries long enough for emergency services to reach and save them. But his last words were still almost reverent. “I will make you proud mi Diosa. I promise you.”

Once he was gone I shook myself then left, wiping the wetness from my cheeks and refusing to admit they were tears. But for the first time in my new existence, I’d exercised something I’d started to think I was incapable of. Mercy.

I looked at the envelope in my hand then at the door I’d quietly walked to from my own little apartment. The nameplate under the apartment number said Estevez and I thought about what I was doing for about the fiftieth time in the last hour.

Mama Estevez, Julia, had never judged anyone, just shared her love, her generosity, and herself with anyone needing it. Even with a little two bit whore who happened to live next door. And now she was sick and needed help that no one was offering.

“Get it over with, Deena.” I told myself and shoved the envelope under the door. “Easy come, easy go and I can earn it back in a couple of good nights. She never needs to know where it came from.”

I returned to my own little apartment and didn’t once worry about the money I’d left under my neighbor’s door. It would pay a couple of months rent for them, buy a few groceries, and there was a typed note with the address of a clinic not far away that would get the medicine Julia needed to get better for free.

Yup, little Deena strikes again. I still swear that I am NOT the whore with a heart of gold, I’m too cynical for that, but I still ended up giving my neighbors my rent money for the next three months because they needed it and I had it.

Dammit. Life had gotten so damned confusing since I’d died.

I was floating above things again, thinking and just — well being — without much of anything definite in mind for the moment other than working to figure myself out. Which was not something I really wanted to look at all that closely as of yet.

“You are troubled, Diana Spectre.” The voice interrupted my non-thoughts.

“Yeah, you could say that.” I answered almost absently while looking over the area of the city I now called home. “I don’t know who, or what I am any longer, and I’m not just talking about the turning into a girl thing or being your presence on Earth for vengeance.”

“As I told you earlier, and have shown you,” the voice answered. “Vengeance without compassion is simple murder. Compassion without strength is powerless. Strength with no direction is nothing more than useless pride. But without pride in what you do, nothing else has meaning. You have done good things since I claimed you Diana Spectre. Be proud of those and accept the bad things as part of who and what you are. Until you do that, there will be no peace for you.”

“Peace?” I gave a halfway bitter laugh. “And when I attain this ‘nirvana’ you’re talking about, this peace, will I be finished? Will I move on to wherever I was headed when you conned me into taking your offer?”

“No, Diana Spectre, you are what you are and will remain so.” Voice answered gently. “Yet once you find that quality you will be more than that. Much more.”

“And just what, exactly, will that be?”

“What you were intended to be all along, my child. Balance.”

I didn’t know what that was supposed to mean, but didn’t argue the point just then. I didn’t have the heart or mental energy for it.

Introspection aside, there were other things I still needed to do, so I shook off as much of that mood as I could and got started.

More girls had gone missing since I’d had that short conversation with Ritchie and nothing had turned up yet on his two missing girls Lainie and Sue. In my Deena form I’d been asking around but either no one knew a thing or the ones who did weren’t talking. As Diana I searched through the city for any trace of the missing girls and had come up with a big blank with that so far.

“This is frustrating.” I muttered while looking into a dank, dark riverside warehouse just to see if there was the slightest hint of anything regarding that or just something that would give me something to do when my own senses told me I was needed.

That kind of thing had been happening more often than not recently, and The Voice didn’t have to call me if I was already in my Spectre form anyway, I just felt the need and followed it when the compulsion hit.

“Uh oh, this is sooo not good.” I whispered once I’d appeared where the trouble was. I definitely felt the tingly, invasive sense of what I now recognized to be magic, and it was flooding the street I found myself in as if some metaphysical dam had broken.

It was all coming from a darkly clad figure in the center of the street. I could see downed police, civilians and more importantly, a terrified young woman in the creature’s grasp.

“Ahhh, at last.” The bad guy, and yes it was a male even though his face was shrouded and his form was hidden in swirling shadows that I had difficulty seeing through, looked right at me. “The so terrible and fearsome Spectre. I have been waiting for you.”

“So here I am.” I answered with more calm than I felt. “You could have, you know, just given me a call.”

“That is what this is, my dear.” He answered with a shrug. “I am The Necromancer, so you and I have things in common, I use the dead, you are one of the dead. Bow to me.”

“You’re kidding, right?” I questioned as some force worked its way into my mind and tried to force me into doing what the nutcase had commanded. I slapped it away and was gratified to see the guy flinch.

“You dare REFUSE me?!!” He roared. Okay the guy was more than a simple nutcase, but I was still working out ways to stop him from doing any more harm to the innocents who were still caught in the street. “I COMMAND YOU, UNDEAD SPIRIT!”

Something pulled at my soul, or what was left of it, and slammed me into the pavement. “Ooof! Now that’s a first. But dream on tall dark and ugly. I’m not yours to order around.”

I regained my feet and had my weapon out instinctively snapping off several rapid shots at him. Which did nothing at all. To him at least. The girl at his feet writhed as in agony with each shot I’d fired.

“You can’t harm me, spirit.” He gloated while gesturing to the poor girl, who was now screaming. “The pain you try giving me goes to this one.”

That stopped me for a second while I worked out a few things. I could see a nebulous something that extended from the goon to his hostage and see the dark, pestilential pulsing as it both took things from her and sent other things in return. Neither of which was good at all. This guy was seriously bent and bad news all around. “Let her go.”

“This girl is nothing.” He sneered and reached down to pull something that twisted and screamed in his hand and negligently tossed it away. “She is no better than the others I have taken, fed on, and used. You, though, I have a use for. Come to me or I will take more, and more, until you do. I will empty this city of life if it takes that. But you WILL come to me willingly, undead creature.”

I moved then, to end up face to face with him and smelled rot, decay like nothing I’d ever experienced before, and a sense of his own lack of anything resembling a soul. And reached a hand out to rip that penumbra surrounding him apart.

To find myself on my back twenty feet away feeling as if I’d stuck my hand into the biggest light socket on Earth. But he was staggered too, and snarled. “This is far from over, Spectre. You and I will see one another again.”

Then he vanished in a swirl of darkness that I could neither stop or follow.

I could only scream my anguish, my rage at what he’d done. But I did manage to get that under control and checked my surroundings. The girl was dead, and looked as if she had been for some time even though I knew that wasn’t the case. Worse, what was left of her body showed a pair of bullet wounds that I knew I’d caused.

I’d killed her. One of the innocents I was supposed to defend and it was my doing that caused her death. It was almost more than I could take.

Others were starting to get up, all moving away from the horrid tableau I was part of, but I had no time to be concerned about them. They, at least, were still alive.

“Necromancer!” I screamed to the heavens, to Hell, to anywhere my voice would reach as my rage ignited something I had never felt before with such intensity. Unreasoning, pure, and terribly frightening need to kill, to kill anything, anyone at all just to release the anguish I was feeling. “I AM VENGEANCE INCARNATE. I’M COMING FOR YOU!!!”

Then I faded into that no-space I used where I raged, cursed everything in creation and then some until I ran out of energy for that.

Then I wept until there was nothing left to come out.