by Kady Cross
“So, unlike Kevin you will hit girls?”
He shrugged. Thankfully he seemed to realize that I was joking. “I’ll let you hit me.”
“Let?”
“Oh, sorry. I’ll let you try to hit me.”
Smack talk—I loved it. “You’re on, Jackie Chan.”
Ben laughed. “You know he’s Chinese, right?”
“Yeah, but he’s the only martial artist I know other than Bruce Lee, and I think you’re sweeter than him.”
“You knew him personally, did you?”
“I might. You don’t know who I’m hanging out with beyond the veil.” Unfortunately, Joe Hard was the closest-to-famous ghost I’d ever met. Why couldn’t I meet cool ghosts? Most of them just seemed to want to rip my face off. I bet Kurt Cobain wouldn’t be so violent.
“Wren wants to start spending more time in the Shadow Lands,” I said suddenly.
Ben didn’t miss a beat. “Is that her ghosty place?”
That was as good a description as any. “Yeah. She thinks she needs to meet more people like her.”
“That’s probably a good idea, right?”
“Yeah.”
He glanced at me. I guess I hadn’t sounded all that convincing. “It’s not like she’s going to meet anyone she’ll like better than you.”
“I know.” What the hell, I might as well be completely honest. “I just feel like this is going to change everything.”
“That doesn’t mean it’ll be a bad change.”
“I guess not.” Still not so convincing. I couldn’t even convince myself.
Suddenly, Ben pulled the car into a gas station, turned it around, and pulled back out onto the road—headed back the way we’d come. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“I don’t feel like going home,” he said. “Want to do something?”
Yeah, I did. “Okay.”
We went to Marle Lake, where I had gone kayaking.
“Want to go for a walk?” he asked.
“Sure.” Walking with him was definitely better than going home and thinking about ghosts.
There was a wooded path not far from where we parked, and that was where we went. It was late afternoon now and it was getting a little cool, but the breeze felt so good on my face. Ben had loaned me a sweater that he’d had in the car, so I was nice and warm.
“This is weird,” I said after a few minutes.
“What?”
“I’ve never just spent time with a guy who didn’t want to argue or make out.”
“Which did Mace want to do?”
I laughed. “Why does everyone want to know about me and Mace? We’re friends. At least, I think we are. Sometimes I’m not sure.”
Ben shrugged. “The two of you seem to have a connection.”
“He found me lying in a pool of my own blood, Ben. He saved my life. Yeah, we have a connection. We’ll always have that connection. That doesn’t mean I’d rather be with him than you.” That was true. Mace was gorgeous. Mace seemed to get me more than most people, but he also pissed me off and sometimes made me very self-conscious.
He squinted at me with a self-deprecating smile. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“All right, then. No more about Mace.”
“Good.”
“Except that he’s mean and unattractive. Right?”
I laughed. “Very. An ogre, really.”
We walked a little farther, talking about movies and books. And then, on the path near the edge of park where it met a field, I saw a man—or rather, what used to be a man. He was a ghost now. Covered in mud and grass and...mushrooms. Gross.
I stopped. So did Ben. “What is it?” he asked.
“Dead guy.”
He glanced in the direction I was looking. “So?”
“I’m just so sick of dead guys.” Really. If I never saw another ghost—other than Wren—I’d be freaking happy.
“Ignore him.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“Lark, if you were like me and couldn’t see ghosts, would there be anything keeping you from walking around that trail?”
“No.”
“Then pretend just for now that you don’t see ghosts and let’s keep walking.” He offered me his hand. Taking it would mean we kept going, and I would have to walk past that ghost like it didn’t matter. I would pretend that I was just a normal person.
I took his hand.
And dropped hard to the ground. My knee struck a tree root as my vision went black. Suddenly, I was in a building at Haven Crest, kneeling on the floor. Blood, thick and clotted like canned cherries, crept down the walls. The lights above my head flickered off then on with a menacing hum.
Ben was on the floor in front of me, on his back, limbs splayed. One of his eyes had been gouged from his skull, leaving a gory, gaping hole. The other eye was open wide—staring at me. Beyond him lay the bodies of our other friends, broken and battered, eyes torn from their sockets. Drops of blood covered their faces, dripped across the dirty floor. I followed the trail with my gaze. The carnage rendered me mute, unable to even sob.
The blood led to an eyeball, alone on the floor—a tiny, octopus-like thing with its trailing tentacles. A dirty, bare foot dangled just above it. I looked up. Sitting on the reception desk was Wren. Her bloodred hair was a matted tangle around her head. Her eyes were huge and black—no whites at all. Around her mouth, her face was crusted with dried blood. In her hand was a morbid limp-balloon bouquet of hazels, browns and blues.
She was chewing. I didn’t want to know what.
“Lark,” she said. Her voice was a horrible groan—like a screen door with rusted hinges. She hopped off the desk, landing in a squat. Her gore-caked fingers dug into the tiles, still clutching her trophies. She crouch-crawled toward me. It was then that I noticed she was wearing a hospital gown—stained and foul. She was gaunt and feral, and smelled of death. Her nails clicked on the floor.
“Wren. What happened to you?”
Her head cocked to one side—at more of an angle than anything living could ever achieve. “Nothing. I’m just as I ought to be.”
I shook my head. “No. This isn’t you. You’re not a monster. You would never kill anybody.”
She laughed. “Silly Lark! I didn’t kill them—you did. You brought them here. You made it possible for Bent to get them, and to get me. I just took some treats.” She shook the eyeballs at me.
I glanced at my friends—all dead and defiled. How could I have done this? I was doing everything I could to protect them, to keep Bent from getting them.
When I turned back to my sister she was right there in front of me—so close I jumped back. She grinned—baring teeth that were stained with red, and had stringy bits caught between them.
“You know, Lark,” she began in a singsong voice, inching closer. “I’ve always thought you had the prettiest eyes.”
Then she jumped, and I screamed.
WREN
Lark’s scream summoned me immediately to her side. One second I was in the Shadow Lands after leaving the graveyard, and the next I was being ripped through space and time like a piece of lint being sucked up by a vacuum cleaner.
When I appeared beside Lark—who was sitting on the ground in a place I didn’t recognize—she was with Ben. She was pale, and there was the ghost of a man not far away, watching us with interest.
“Did you do something to my sister?” I demanded of him, letting the wind catch me up.
He actually shrank back from me. His face had been partially eaten by animals, but I could see enough to know I frightened him. “No. I’ve never hurt anyone.”
He had that disconcerted look of someone who had died suddenly and traumatically, but was foggy on the details. “Most p
eople don’t end up left to rot in densely wooded areas unless someone brought them there for a reason.” And he didn’t look like anyone’s innocent victim.
The ghost’s response was to fade away.
I turned back to my sister. Ben sat beside her, his hand on her leg. He was asking her if she was okay. Had I corporeal form I might have kicked him then, I was jealous of them being able to touch. Then again, if I had form I would be with Kevin right now. Or someone. Probably.
What if I’d been the one born alive? What if we both had been?
“What happened?” I asked, taking her hand. No point thinking about what never was and could never be.
Lark’s gaze met mine. “What are you doing here?”
Ben glanced in my direction.
“You summoned me.” My anger began to dissipate the longer I looked at her shocked face. “Are you all right?”
She shook her head. “I had another vision.”
“I think I can see her,” Ben said, his tone full of wonder. “Just a little.”
My sister patted his hand. “That’s my fault. You’re both touching me, and I’m upset. It won’t last.”
“Too bad.” He waved at me. “Hey, Wren. It’s cool to see her, even for a little bit. She looks pissed.”
I waved back, and tried to look more pleasant.
“I pulled her here,” Lark explained. “She didn’t have a choice.”
“Huh.” He seemed to find that fascinating. Let it happen to him and see how much he liked it then. He gestured down the path with his thumb. “Do you want me to leave you alone?”
“No!”
I drew back. Lark was afraid of me. Oh, I didn’t like this feeling—like I was trapped in a vise that wanted to slowly crush me into nothingness.
Ben looked surprised, too. “Are you sure?”
Lark shook her head, wisps of white hair lifting in the breeze. “Maybe just for a minute. If you don’t mind.”
“I’ll meet you back at the car.” He kissed her cheek, then rose to his feet and set off down the trail.
I sat down opposite Lark, just enough off the trail so I wouldn’t end up with a bicycle or jogger bounding through my skull. “How bad was it?”
“Bad.” It had to be—she couldn’t even look me in the eye.
“Tell me.” I didn’t want to hear it, but I had to.
“We were at Haven Crest. Everyone was dead—you helped kill them.”
I shook my head. “I’d never do that.” Would I? Could I? “It had to be Bent.”
She lifted her chin and finally met my gaze. “Their eyes were gone.”
Oh. Now it made sense, why she was so afraid. I remembered that night at Bell Hill when I’d gone into Lark’s room. She had been there awhile, and I’d finally managed to get past the drugs and her defenses to visit her. It was one of the first times I’d seen her since she’d shut me out, and I was so worried about her. So anxious.
I was surprised to find someone else in her room—a young nurse. He was in his twenties, maybe. One of those kinds of people who base their career choices on how many people they’ll be able to bully and abuse.
Lark was groggy, wearing only her pajamas. The nurse kissed her, pressed her back on the bed, his hand underneath her shirt.
“Stop,” she said. “Please. Stop.”
He laughed. Laughed. “You just be quiet, sweet-meat. I’ll make you like it.”
“No!” She couldn’t even scream—the lethargy kept her voice a hoarse whisper. She struggled, but he held her arms above her head with one hand as the other crept toward her waist.
“You know you want it,” he snarled.
I’d been shocked into stillness, but not anymore. At that moment I felt a rage that I’d never—ever—felt before. I manifested with little warning. One second I was nothing and the next I was a full-on screaming banshee. The nurse had cried out and sat down hard on the tile floor. He’d looked at me. All of the color had drained from his face. His eyes were so wide I could see the whites around his irises.
“Jesus Christ!”
“No,” I whispered, my voice a growling, terrible vortex. “Not quite.”
I didn’t remember much after that. No, that was a lie. I remembered all of it, but I didn’t like to, and most of the time I refused to remember at all. I’d leaped on him, and when Lark had reached out and touched me, tried to stop me, she’d given me form—for just a second.
It was all I’d needed. I popped my thumb through his eyeball.
Sometimes I still heard his screams. What Lark didn’t know was that I smiled every time I thought of it. That was why I didn’t like to remember.
The doctors thought it was some kind of bizarre accident. The nurse never blamed Lark. How could he? There was no way she could have hurt him like that in the condition she’d been in, and he’d left marks on her. If anyone had examined her they would have seen that she’d been assaulted.
But they didn’t look. The people at Bell Hill didn’t see half of what they ought to have. The nurse had left on medical leave and had never come back—at least not to Lark’s floor.
“You’re afraid I’ll hurt them,” I said, then felt foolish. Of course that was what she was afraid of.
“I’m more afraid for you.” She picked at a twig—snapped it. “I don’t want to lose you.”
That was not the moment to reassure her that she wouldn’t lose me, because if I went bad I’d probably take her with me. “Why don’t you ask me what you really want to know?”
Her head lifted. She looked at me finally. “What?”
Did she think she was that good of a liar? Did she really think she could hide from me? “If I ever want to devour the living, and if I’ve ever thought about killing you.”
Lark swallowed, but she didn’t look away. That made me extremely happy given the circumstances. “Do you?”
“No. Not when I’m just me.”
“You’ve lost your temper a lot lately.”
I smiled. “Well, we’ve been dealing with people who make that very easy.”
She laughed—thankfully. “That’s true. I’ve lost mine a lot, too.”
“That’s what you do.”
She didn’t argue. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. I want you with me, but it’s okay for you to bail if you feel threatened.”
“All right.” Silence fell between us. “Ben’s really cute,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.
Lark actually turned pink. “Yeah. He was...unexpected.” She brushed her hands against her thighs. “I’m sorry about Kevin.”
It was like a knife to the heart, but I could take it. “At least I know he liked me. That’s something.”
She patted my leg. “We just have to find you a nice dead boy.”
“Maybe Bent can set me up.”
“Don’t even joke,” Lark warned, rising to her feet. “Although, you know, if Kevin means that much to you I could always toss him in front of a train. The thought has occurred to me.”
“Don’t you joke,” I shot back, because honestly, it was tempting. Wrong, but tempting.
We walked to the parking lot and found Ben waiting inside his car. He was reading a book with his feet out the window. His face lit up when he saw Lark. It made me both like and hate him at the same time. Jealousy was not a pleasant emotion, and not one I wanted to feel toward my sister.
“I’ll see you at home,” I told her. I might have been dead, but that didn’t mean I wanted to be a third wheel.
She squeezed my hand and then I drifted away, slipping into the Shadow Lands as I made the distance between the park and Nan’s disappear. How would I go about meeting a “nice dead boy,” as Lark had put it? Surely there had to be at le
ast a handful of boys I’d find interesting lurking about. I mean, the definition of unfinished business had to be teenager. Right?
Nan was making dinner when I entered the house. She actually lifted her head when I came into the kitchen. “Hello, Wren, dear.”
I smiled and breezed out into the hall. As I moved toward the stairs to our room, something flashed in my peripheral—a shadow flitting across the wall. I turned my head—there was nothing there.
But there had been.
Frowning, I moved in the direction the shadow had gone. It wasn’t the first time I’d thought I’d seen something in the house, though I hadn’t picked up on any other ghosts here. That didn’t mean anything, though. We could hide from each other just as well as humans could.
I ended up in the sunporch, where Nan did most of her crafty things. There were lots of plants out here, and comfy old furniture that was a little too shabby to be in the main part of the house.
“Hello?” I said. Stupid, really. Humans did it all the time, as though they actually expected a ghost to jump out and say, “Hey ya!”
No answer, but I felt like I was being watched. It wasn’t Bent—this was my sanctuary. I’d never felt another ghost in that house, and it would be difficult for any ghost who wasn’t bound to the house or family to come in. Private homes were even harder to enter than public places—almost impossible for most ghosts. So, was I simply paranoid, or was there someone actually there?
Was I being haunted?
LARK
School on Monday was different for me than it had been before. Ben picked me up and drove me—even though I could have walked the short distance. We attracted a bit of attention arriving together. It was a small high school and I was still big news. I hoped being seen with me didn’t cause trouble for Ben, but beyond that I didn’t care what anyone thought.
Roxi was waiting for me at my locker. Ben had gone on to his, so it was just me and her. She had circles under her eyes and she looked tired.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi. What’s up?” I frowned a little. “Are you okay? You’re not starting to feel sick, are you?”
She hugged her books to her chest and shook her dark head. “No more than I was. I just wanted to say thank you.”