Sparks of electricity run up my spine. Pete said that to me here, on the last night he was alive, referencing the fact that our friendship ended on my fifteenth birthday, when I caught him making out with Kat. Seeing it now is not reassuring.
Then Pete’s voice comes out of the ATM speaker. It’s a little tinny, but mostly clear, and I know Riley hears it, too, judging by the freaked out look on his face. “Damien,” Pete says, “it’s about time. Welcome back, birthday boy. We’ve got so much to catch up on.”
As soon as he says that, there’s a loud click, and then one of the big glass doors falls open, inviting us into the darkness.
I’ve seen enough horror movies to know that nothing good can come from going inside this building, but I do it anyway. Because, seriously, what am I going to do, walk away? I’d spend the rest of my life wondering what the hell was going on. It’s one thing to have heard Pete’s voice yesterday, or at least to think I did. After a while, I could probably have convinced myself that it didn’t actually happen. But this is different.
This is a lot harder to ignore, especially since Riley obviously heard and saw everything, too.
“I thought you were leaving,” I whisper, once we’re inside. Whispering seems like the right thing to do, even though Pete’s ghost can probably still hear me. Not that he’s actually a ghost, because that’s impossible. Or at least I thought it was, up until a minute ago. I’m starting to have my doubts.
“Are you serious?” Riley whispers back.
“You didn’t have to come with me.”
“There’s no way I was letting you go in here alone. I came to check this out with you, and that’s what I’m doing. Even if you don’t want me here.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Okay. Good.” He sounds relieved.
And as much as this isn’t Riley’s problem, and as much as he should probably be making a run for it while he still can, I’m kind of glad he’s here. Because I don’t actually want to be alone with a ghost. At the Golden City Banking and Finances building. On Halloween.
“Okay, Pete,” I say, mostly to the ceiling, since I don’t know how to address someone I can’t see. And now that I’m not whispering, my voice sounds way too loud in the empty room. “I’m here. So—”
Me and Riley both jump as the door slams shut behind us. There’s another click as it locks.
Whose idea was it to come in here again?
I make electricity flicker along my hand, just so we’re not totally in the dark. And in case any ghosts come flying at me, because there’s a chance they can still get fried, just like anybody else, and I want to be prepared.
“That’s new,” Pete says. His voice comes out of all the computers on everyone’s desks, each one at a different volume, so that it sounds like there are a dozen of him talking at once. “Last time I checked, you only had that filthy hero power. I guess you really are a mixed breed.” He laughs.
“Are you sure he died?” Riley whispers.
“Yes. I’m sure.” This whole scenario would be a lot less creepy if it turned out Pete was still alive and was just messing with me—and he’d be for sure zappable—but he hit the pavement from, like, a million stories up. I made a point not to look at the body, but there definitely was one. And a funeral, which I wasn’t invited to, for obvious reasons.
“Oh, I’m dead all right,” Pete says. “My boy here killed me.”
Lightning surges in my hand, no longer just sparks. “That’s not what happened.”
“’Course, he couldn’t do it himself. Had to get his little sidekick and his mommy to do it for him.”
“Your sidekick?” Riley asks, and there’s just enough light that I can see the worry on his face.
“Sarah didn’t kill anyone.”
“Tried to, though, didn’t she?” Pete says. “She was so desperate to save you.”
“To save all of us,” I correct him.
He ignores me. “And here it is, hasn’t even been a year, and you’ve already replaced me. Perkins, is it?”
Anger flares in my chest when he calls Riley that. “Shut up, Pete. You don’t get to talk to him.”
“Oh. See, now that’s why you’re here in the first place. You think you can control everybody, tell them what to do.”
“What’s he talking about?” Riley whispers.
Pete laughs again, his voice echoing across the computers. “Great question! I’m so glad you asked. Are you keeping score here, Damien? That’s one point for the new friend—not that you ever really have friends—and zero for you.”
“What the hell do you want, Pete?!”
“I want to play a little game. Perkins can play, too.”
Lightning crackles along my skin. “We’re not playing any games.”
“Oh, yes, you are. You see, you’re not calling the shots anymore. The whole time I knew you, we always had to do what you wanted. Not tonight. Tonight, you do what I say, or you don’t get out of here.”
I look behind me at the glass doors. They might be locked, but that wouldn’t stop a blast of lightning. “I can leave whenever I want. You’re not keeping us here.”
“Here are the rules. I’m going to ask you a few questions, and all you have to do is tell the truth.”
“That’s all?” Riley asks, sounding pretty skeptical.
“Look at that,” Pete says, and I can hear the smile in his voice. “Seems like you don’t know him so well, after all. This is going to be fun. Way better than that Halloween when Damien convinced me to give him all my candy. You remember that?”
“That was a long time ago. We were still trick-or-treating. And you could have said no.”
“So it’s my fault you’re a manipulative bastard? It’s my fault you never think about anybody but yourself, huh? Shouldn’t surprise me, coming from you.”
“It wasn’t all of your candy, either. Only some of it.”
“Only the ones you liked. You said there was an outbreak of food poisoning and that those brands were being recalled. You said your mom had a way to test for it.”
“You said that?” Riley asks, sounding way too shocked for someone who’s known me for more than five minutes.
“He’s the one who believed it.”
“We were eleven!” Pete shouts. All the computers turn up to full volume.
“We don’t have to do this,” I tell Riley. Then, to Pete, “I’m not playing your stupid game. We’re getting out of here.”
“Think again, Damien. I’ve got security footage of you breaking in.”
“We didn’t break in.”
The computer monitors flicker on. A black and white video of me and Riley plays on the screens. We’re at the door, looking kind of nervous and glancing over our shoulders before going inside.
Then the image on the screens changes. All the computers start scrolling through spreadsheets like crazy.
“I suppose you didn’t access all these financial records, either.”
Crap. “That’s all you’ve got to keep me here? Blackmail?”
“You can call it that. The police will call it evidence.”
Riley glances at me, then at the door. “Come on, X. Let’s just go. We’ll figure out how to explain this later.”
“X,” Pete says. “That’s cute. But it’s going to be hard to explain why X here blasted through those doors. Anyone could come in and take all these files. But maybe that’s what you had planned all along.”
“Come on,” Riley says again. “He’s just making guesses. We don’t know what will happen.”
No, we don’t. But Pete’s guesses of us getting in trouble make a lot more sense than Riley’s blind faith that we can somehow explain this away. Because, honestly? The explanation for why we’re really here doesn’t paint me in a very good light. It kind of sounds like a recipe for ending up in an asylum, or at least in extensive court-mandated therapy, which I’d really like to avoid.
“I’ll stay,” I tell Pete, “but Riley goes free.”
Riley shakes his head. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“You hear that?” Pete says. “He’s not going anywhere. That’s two points for Perkins so far.”
“Let him go. I mean it, Pete.”
“You mean it. Ha. Stop pretending that you care about anyone besides yourself. Perkins stays, X. As my replacement, I think he’s going to want to hear what I have to say.”
Chapter 4
“YOU REMEMBER THAT SUMMER when I was fifteen and you were fourteen?” Pete asks.
It’s a simple enough question, but I already don’t like where this is going. “Yeah, I remember. We went swimming almost every day. And that ice cream place got that new flavor, raspberry hazelnut crunch, and we ate so much of it, we couldn’t even say the word raspberry without gagging.”
It ended up being a running joke between us at the end of the summer. Whenever things got too quiet or we wanted to change the subject, one of us would say raspberry or hazelnut and we’d bust up laughing.
“Those were good times,” Pete agrees, and from the tone of his voice, I think he actually means it.
Riley studies my face, probably wondering what the hell we’re talking about or what this has to do with me being a selfish bastard.
“The truth is,” I say to Pete, “that really was a great summer. Maybe even my best summer. And it was definitely—”
“Don’t.” There’s no nostalgia in his voice now. No trace that anything from that summer was a happy memory for him, even though I know it must have been. “What did I tell you about lying?”
I lean against the edge of one of the desks, careful not to get my fingerprints on anything, because I’m already going to have enough trouble explaining this if we get caught. “You said you were going to ask me some questions. Well, you asked me one, and I gave you an honest answer.”
He laughs. Not, like, a happy laugh or anything. It’s more like the kind of laugh a murderer would have right before he chopped you up. “That was a question. It wasn’t the question. But you knew that, Damien. Always trying to weasel your way out of everything—that’s you. And don’t tell me it was your best summer ever.”
It was, though. At least, it was the best summer we spent together. It was also the last, and maybe the fact that it’s something I can never get back makes it seem better than it was. “Ask me the question, then. And hurry it up. We have places to be.”
“X,” Riley warns, like he doesn’t think it’s a good idea to provoke a ghost who already has a grudge against me. He’s probably right.
“Watching out for him, huh?” Pete says. “I don’t know you, Perkins, but trust me—I’m doing you a huge favor tonight.”
I shove my hands in my pockets and clench my fists. “Ask the question, Pete.”
“Yeah? You ready for this? If you remember that summer, then you remember I was supposed to spend it with my grandma. She lived out in the country, near my aunt and uncle and all my cousins, and I was going to go stay with her. But that didn’t happen.”
“Plans change. That’s life. You probably had more fun with me, anyway.”
“Shut up!” All the lights flash on and off a couple times, totally exposing us to anyone walking by.
Me and Riley duck down behind the desks. I peer at the doors, checking if there’s anyone out there who might have seen us. “What the hell are you doing, Pete?!”
“Don’t act like you don’t know, like you’re not the reason I didn’t go to my grandma’s that summer.”
So he knows about that. I want to ask him how he found out, but that seems counterproductive. “I did you a favor! You would have been bored, stuck out in the country for three months. You would have hated it.”
“No, I wouldn’t. And my grandma died that winter. Do you remember that?”
Riley sucks in his breath.
“It turned out that was my last chance to see her,” Pete goes on. “I could have spent a whole summer with her, and instead, I never even got to see her again before she died.”
“I...” I felt horrible about that, not that Pete would believe me if I told him.
“He couldn’t have known,” Riley says.
Pete scoffs. “And how do you know that? You weren’t there.”
Riley looks me in the eyes. “Because if he’d known, he wouldn’t have done whatever he did to keep you from going.”
“It’s true.” It’s not like Pete’s grandma was particularly old or sickly or anything. She seemed fine. I didn’t know she was going to get pneumonia, and I certainly didn’t know she was going to die from it.
Pete acts like he didn’t hear me. “I found out months later that he talked to my parents behind my back and convinced them there was this girl I liked. That she and I were, like, made for each other, and I’d be heartbroken if I went away for the summer and lost her, and that I was just too polite or embarrassed to tell them. You know how messed up that is, Damien, because when there really was a girl I liked, you didn’t help me get her. You went and stabbed me right in the back. But there’s plenty of time for that later. Right now, we’re talking about how you stole my last chance to spend time with my grandma.”
“Nobody knows when anybody else is going to die,” Riley says, still defending me.
“I didn’t know you were never going to get to see her again, Pete. There’s no way I could have. And if I had—”
“I don’t care about your excuses! You didn’t know, but it doesn’t matter, because you were always taking things from me! So I just want to know why. What the hell was so important that you manipulated my parents into keeping me home for the summer?”
“I...”
“Come on, Damien!” Pete makes the lights flash again, only this time they don’t stop.
“I didn’t want to spend the summer alone, okay?! You were my best friend!”
“Not good enough!”
“It’s the truth!”
“There’s more than that. Better tell me, or someone’s going to notice all these lights and come find you. Oh, there’s someone now, wondering what the hell’s going on. She hasn’t reached for her phone yet, but it’s only a matter of time.”
“What Damien did was wrong,” Riley says to Pete, “but it’s understandable. The not wanting to be alone part.”
“I think I know my boy better than that. Oh, and, Damien? She’s pulling out her phone, and I don’t think she’s texting a friend. The truth. Now.”
Damn it. “You want to know the real reason? When my mom heard you weren’t going to be around for the summer, she decided that meant I was going to paint the house and pull weeds and help her rearrange her lab. I would have been stuck doing manual labor for three months. That’s why I made sure you’d be in town. It was selfish, and manipulative, but I did it anyway. Is that what you want to hear?!”
Pete’s quiet, like he’s thinking that over. The lights go dim and stop flashing.
Riley’s looking at me like... Like he’s surprised I’d do something that awful to someone I supposedly cared about.
Still, it seems like Pete bought it. And even if Riley thinks I’m a terrible person, well, at least he doesn’t actually know how terrible.
But just when I think Pete’s satisfied with my answer, the lights start flashing again. “You expect me to believe that?! Your mom’s never painted her house. And you would have found a way out of it if she did. I don’t think you understand the rules of this game, Damien. Three seconds, and I pull the fire alarm, and then it doesn’t matter if the woman outside calls the cops or not!”
He’s bluffing. Even though he’s a ghost and has absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain by getting me in trouble.
“One.”
“It’s the truth! I could have gotten out of that stuff some other way, but then I still would have been alone.”
“Two.”
Crap.
“Come on, X,” Riley whispers, pleading with me. “Whatever it is, it’s okay.”
It’s not, though
.
“Thr—”
“It was because of your cousins!” The words just burst out of me, and I don’t know if saying them makes me feel better or worse. “Every time you stayed at your grandma’s house, all you could talk about for weeks afterward was how great your cousins and their friends were. You made it clear that when you were there, with them, you didn’t need me. You liked them better than me. And if you’d spent three whole months with them... You never would have shut up about it. You probably would have ditched me for good. And that’s why I did it. Why I made sure you’d be home for the summer. With me.”
The lights stop. Before it goes dark, I catch sight of Riley’s expression and the way his mouth hangs open in shock.
“See?” Pete says. “All you had to do was admit what a horrible bastard you are. And hey, if it makes you feel any better, it’s not like I didn’t already know. I mean, it looks like Perkins didn’t, but he would have figured it out eventually, after you screwed him over a few times.”
It’s dark now, and my eyes haven’t adjusted, so I can’t see if Riley still looks horrified. I could use my lightning to check, but it might attract attention from outside, and the truth is, I kind of don’t want to know.
“That was Round One,” Pete says, right as the elevator dings and the doors slide open. “Are you ready for Round Two?”
Chapter 5
WE GET IN THE elevator. It’s probably the stupidest thing we’ve done all night. But it doesn’t go anywhere, and at least we can have the lights on in here without anyone calling the police. Still, this is Pete we’re dealing with, and I know better than to let my guard down.
“You know what I want to talk about now?” Pete asks. There’s just the one speaker for his voice to come out of, so it no longer sounds like there’s a dozen of him. “I want to talk about Kat. And how you stole her from me.”
I open my mouth to argue with that, but Riley beats me to it. “That’s such crap,” he says, shaking his head. “You can’t steal someone.”
Pete laughs. “So I take it you and him have never liked the same girl? If you had, you wouldn’t still be friends.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
The Haunting of Renegade X Page 3