Afterlife

by Claudia Gray

  He opened his eyes. They looked deeply at each other for a long second, and I thought, in desperation, I’ve lost him. For real, this time.

  “Join me,” she said, “and live again.”

  Lucas flung her hands from his shoulders. “No.”

  Mrs. Bethany stepped back, one hand to her throat. “Mr. Ross — ”

  “You threw that guy away like he was nothing,” Lucas said. “You trashed him, and it doesn’t matter to you one bit. You’ll destroy the wraiths like they ‘ re nothing, including — including the ones most like living things — and that doesn’t matter to you either. I can’t do that, not ever, not even to.. . . You know, I don’t care what magic you work. Even if you pull it off, even if you give yourself a heartbeat, you ‘II still be dead inside.”

  Silence. They stood there, regarding each other as though they were strangers. Mrs. Bethany looked — sad. Crushed. At last she said quietly, “I had hoped you would be a part of this.”

  “I had hopes,” Lucas said. “But I’d never be a part of this.’ He ran for the door and out onto the grounds.

  How could I have doubted him, even for a second? Lucas had stood by me. He had kept my secret. In the face of the ultimate temptation, he had walked away without any doubts. Amid my astonishment and horror, I also knew a deep, powerful joy. I raced after him, a breeze high above the grounds, shaking down red and gold leaves from the trees so that they scattered behind me.

  Lucas ran into the forest, and at first I thought he must be going after Samuel, though I couldn’t imagine what we could do to help him. Instead, as 186 soon as the trees concealed him from the school — in a small glade that I recognized as the place we’d first met — he collapsed to the ground, on his hands and knees. His breaths came raggedly, and I realized he was on the verge of tears.

  I took form slowly, giving him time to tell me to go, if he wanted to be alone. But he fumbled in his pocket, grabbing my brooch, and handed it to me. As soon as I felt the jet, my body became entirely solid, and Lucas clutched me to him with all his strength.

  “There’s a way out,” he gasped. “There’s a way out, and I can never take it.”

  I held him tighter. Why hadn’ t I realized how much worse this would be for him? He’d been promised a release from an existence he considered worse than any jail — and it was true; every one of Mrs. Bethany’s promises was true. It was the doorway out, and he would never walk through it.

  Then I considered that. A small, scared feeling quivered inside me, but I didn’t let it take me over.

  I held Lucas as he buried his face in the curve of my shoulder, his whole body shaking with suppressed emotion. Until I was sure, I couldn’ t speak.

  Finally I said, “We could do it.”

  Lucas shifted back, enough to see my face. “Do what?”

  “The ritual. What Mrs. Bethany did.” I steadied myself. “I could bring you back to life.”

  “No. You’d be giving up whatever life or existence you have left, and then you ‘d be gone forever.”

  “You offered to do the same for me,” I said. “Remember?”

  “And you were brave enough to die in my place.” Lucas brushed his thumbs across my cheeks and cradled my face in his hands. “I’m not gonna give you anything less.”

  I hugged him again, and he sank against me like he was exhausted. Mrs. Bethany would never hold power over him again, I knew, and yet his burden was heavier than ever. It would never get any easier. Neither of us would ever die, or ever live again.

  Chapter Eighteen

  LATER THAT NIGHT, UP IN THE RECORDS ROOM, we told the others what we’d seen. So, instead of just Lucas and I being in total shock, each of us sat around mutely for about an hour. Mrs. Bethany’s feat — returning a vampire to life — defied every physical and supernatural law any of us had ever known, and yet there was no denying what we’d witnessed.

  Balthazar repeated, for about the eighth time, “It’s still so … unreal to me. That there’s a way back to being alive.”

  “Doesn’t tempt me,” Patrice sniffed, as though she hadn’t spent the first ten minutes after our revelation repeating “Oh, my God,” over and over. “I found out the hard way — once someone’s dead, in whatever way they happen to be dead, it’s best to leave things as they are.” She suddenly seemed to be highly interested in her rings. but I knew she was remembering her long — lost love, Amos, whom she had brought back as a ghost. Although Patrice was too private to ever share the full details, it was clear the results had been tragic.

  Vic nodded. “Raising the dead brings up serious monkey’s paw issues, definitely. What do you think, Ranulf?”

  Ranulf, by far the calmest of the vampires in light of this news, shook his head. “I was alive for seventeen years,” he said. “I have been a vampire for approximately thirteen hundred years. This is truer to my nature, now.”

  “I’d do it,” Balthazar said. His eyes met mine apologetically. “If it didn’t involve killing a sentient being, that is. If it were anything else — I mean, anytllinrl’d go back in a second.”

  “So we know what she’s after now,” Lucas said. His eyes had an unearthly focus; he was strategizing, I realized, as a way of distracting himself from pain. “And we know we want to stop her. So we need to find the traps. Clear this place out and make it safe for Bianca, not to mention any other wraiths Mrs. Bethany hasn’t already snared.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Balthazar said. He had taken the only real chair in the room, while Vic and Patrice took the beanbags. Ranulf and Lucas were both sitting on old crates, and I was levitating about halfway to the ceiling. “Do we just want to divide the grounds up into sections, go through 188 them when we can?”

  Lucas shook his head. “I want to make one massive sweep. She’s probably laying new traps all the time, but if we could get this place cleared out for a little while, it might make it easier to track what she does from here 0111 out.”

  “When are we supposed to do that?” Patrice said. “Someone’s going to notice.” Lucas began, “Late at night, maybe — ”

  “Hang on,” Vic interrupted. “I’m about to be brilliant. What about the Autumn Ball?”

  Evernight Academy’s biggest dance — the vampire version of the prom — was only a week away. Ranulf had a date, but to the best of my knowledge, nobody else did. As I rolled the idea around in my mind, I liked it more. “Everyone will be out, be busy, and lots of people will go into different rooms to make out or sneak a beer or whatever. That makes it good cover for pretty much anything we would need to do.”

  “There’s no we here,” Lucas said. “It’s too dangerous for you.”

  I wanted to argue, but in this particular case, Lucas wasn’t being overprotective. Sending a ghost to find ghost traps would be a little like sending a vampire to inspect a stake factory. “Well, then, it gives me something to watch while you guys are busy. It’s a perfect distraction — Balthazar, remember how you and I were able to go through the school records last year?”

  After the words came out, I wished I could have pulled them back; it was never a great idea to remind Lucas, or Balthazar, that Balthazar and I had been on a date last year.

  The silence that followed hung awkwardly in the room, until Vic couldn’t take it anymore. “Okay!” he said, too cheerfuUy. “So we’re all going to the Autumn Ball. Ranulf and I have dates — what about you guys?”

  “Since when did you get a date?” I asked, joining his effort to brighten the mood of the evening.

  Vic looked sheepish. Ranulf said, “Upon questioning, my date revealed that she has a friend lovely in visage yet unfortunate in matters of romance. We have therefore arranged for Vic to accompany her to the ball. “

  “You found him someone,” I said. “Hey, it works.” It occurred to me that Maxie would probably be somewhat jealous about that.

  ““d planned to travel that weekend,” Patrice said, “but I suppose if I stayed, I could wear my new Chane!. What do you say, Balthazar?
Let’s be partners in crime.”

  Balthazar sighed. “Sure. But one of these years, I hope to go to this party with somebody who actually wants to date me.”

  “So that just leaves Lucas,” Vic said. Then his face fell. “And that gets kinda awkward.”

  Lucas shrugged. ‘Til be the guy who doesn’t go. I can just dig around up in the dorms.”

  “No,” I said. Although I hated this, I knew it was true: “The people who go to the party are the ones who have the most freedom that night. Otherwise, the teachers will think that if You’re not in your dorm, you’ve got to be up to something.”

  “You want me to ask some other girl out on a date?” His disbelief would’ve been funny, if it weren’t such serious business.

  “Uh, no. But is there someone you could maybe go with just as a friend?” I hesitated, realizing that Lucas only had one other friend at school — but maybe she would do. “Like Skye?”

  “Would she understand it’s not a date?” Patrice said.

  “Sure,” I said. “She’d only be looking for a friend to go with, because she’s got a boyfriend back home.”

  “Actually, not so much, “Lucas said. “I heard her telling Clementine earlier today — apparently her boyfriend just dumped her hard. But she said she’d date a guy again ‘about six months after hell freezes over,’ so I’m guessing she’d only want a friend right now. That’s not the real problem, though.”

  “You Wouldn’t attack her,” I said, trying to be soothing. “You’re getting stronger. Besides, you’ll meet her downstairs and be in the center of a crowd the whole time. If you did snap, which you won’t, somebody would be there to stop you.”

  Lucas shook his head. “Too risky. Let me go witl1 Patrice, and Balthazar, maybe you could ask Skye.”

  “I’ve never so much as spoken to her,” Balthazar said. “She probably doesn’t know who I am.”

  Patrice and I shared a look. Balthazar could be obtuse about his own good looks. Maybe he and Skye had never spoken, but there was no way any straight girl or gay guy at Evernight Academy didn’t know exactly who he was.

  “So ask somebody else,” Lucas said.

  More firmly, Balthazar said, “I think spending some time with a human would be a good idea for you.” He glanced at Vic. “An .. . undaubed human. You can’t stay at Evernight much longer, now that things are getting weird with Mrs. Bethany. Eventually you’ve got to test yourself. Try to strengthen your self — control. And like Bianca said, this is as good an opportunity as any.”

  “I guess.” Lucas gave me an uneasy look. “Bianca, are you sure about this?”

  Honestly, I felt a little jealous. Not of anything happening between Lucas and Skye — I had total faith in him. But Skye would get to dress up, go to the ball, and dance with Lucas the whole night long, while I was stuck watching from the ceiling in the spectral version of the pajamas I’d died in. That was a pretty stupid reason to fret, though. “As long as she gets the whole friends thing, yeah. It’s fme.”

  From his place in the beanbag chair, Vic hung his head backward and grinned at Lucas. “Okay, it’s slightly losery to have your best friend find you a date,” he admitted. “But way less losery than having your girlfriend find you one.”

  Lucas scowled at him, though I could tell, despite his bleak mood, he thought it was funny. “Shut it.”

  The preparations for the dance took a fair bit of time; since I wouldn’ t be able to take part in the search, I did what I could on the prep work. We mapped out the different areas of the school and decided who would slip out to which area, and when.

  Lucas seemed possessed by a wild, desperate energy. He strategized more than any of the rest of us, studied longer than before, and made Balthazar practice fencing with him for hours. I thought that he was trying to keep himself in a perpetual state of exhaustion — so that he would be too tired to fully contemplate the fact that there was a way for him to live again, but it was one he could never take advantage of. Even the dancing lessons he took from Patrice were intense and joyless, with Lucas memorizing the steps as though they were Black Cross battle moves.

  As important as our plans were, though, I couldn’t spend all my time preparing for the Autumn Ball search. At moments, I had trouble so much as 191 thinking about it. Something else, just as important, was on my mind. Finally, Wednesday night, the time came.

  I waited in the forest grove with my coral bracelet nearby, eager and yet nervous, until I saw my father coming toward me. Quickly I slipped on my bracelet and ran forward for a hug. He gathered me into his arms, so strong and warm that for a second it was as if I were a little girl again, scared of thunderstorms and trusting my daddy to protect me from the lightning.

  “Is she here?” I whispered.

  “She’s coming.” Dad squeezed my hands. “I broke it to her a couple hours ago.”

  “Is she okay?” Despite my father’s reassurance, I couldn’t stop worrying that my mother Wouldn’t be able to accept me as a wraith.

  “Yes.” There was a strange note in his voice. Uncertainty. Fear pierced me; Dad must have seen it, because he quickly shook his head. “Your mother loves you. She just . . . she can’t accept that something so terrible has happened to you. That’s what upsets her. But it means the world to her to be able to be with you again.”

  Something so terrible.Those words resonated with me, not in a good way. I wanted to turn them over in my mind and discover why, but there was no time — I could hear my mother’s footsteps on the thick carpet of pine needles upon the ground.

  I peeifed past my father, searching for her. As a wraith, my night vision was no longer as sharp as it had been during my vampire life. So I heard my mother gasp first.

  “Mom?” I stepped away from my dad, venturing closer to the edge of the grove, and then I saw her. She stood shock — still, trembling slightly, hands shoved into the pockets of her long coat. “Mom, it’s me.”

  “Oh, my God.” Her voice was almost too quiet to hear. “Oh, my God.”

  She didn’t seem to be able to move, so I went to her — not running, as I had toward my father, but going slow, giving her time to take it in. Mom’s face didn’t move; she just blinked at me, for all the world like a rabbit too scared to run away from the hunter. But when I finally got close to her, she sucked in a deep breath and said, “Bianca.”

  Then her arms were around me, and my dad was hugging both of us, and for a short time there was nothing but warmth and tears and us saying 192 how much we loved each other. It was pretty much totally incoherent, but I didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was that I finally had my whole family back again.

  “My baby,” she said as we broke apart at last. “My poor baby. Are you — trapped here?”

  “Not trapped, but no thanks to Mrs. Bethany.” Time to bring that up later, I decided. “This is one of the places I can travel, and stay. I’ve been here for a while now, because Lucas is here” — my mother’s eyes narrowed, but I kept going — ”and Balthazar, Patrice, Vic, Ranulf, you guys, everyone.”

  She glanced from me to my father. “You’ve been here for the last couple of months, and you can just . . . hang out with your friends? As though it were normal?”

  “It is normal,” I said. “For me, anyway.”

  “We can — we can fix up your old room.” Mom smiled hesitantly. “You could live up there with us, if you wanted to.”

  The thought of hanging out in my bedroom, watching winter snow fall on the gargoyle’s head, seemed like the loveliest pastime imaginable. “I can already travel there. If you guys make it safe for me, I’ll be up there the whole time.” Mom’s expression clouded. “Safe. You mean — getting rid of the traps.”

  “Your mother is frightened,” Dad interjected. “She’s disturbed by what we’ve seen here so far.”

  “Most wraiths aren’t like the ones trapped here at Evernight.” I knew I needed to set the record straight. “Some of them, yeah, they get creepy. just like some vampires do. But t
here are a lot of them who aren’t that different from me. They’re — they’re just people. You don’t stop being who you are just because you died.”

  My mother clearly hadn’t been convinced. “Then why are there so many attacking this school?”

  “They’re attacking this school because they’ve been drawn here. Trapped here. By Mrs. Bethany,” I insisted.

  To my surprise, Dad cut in again. “Celia, think about this. Everything Mrs. Bethany’s taught us, warned us about at this school — it’s more about attack than defense. I think she’s known since the beginning.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “She’s been planning to capture the ghosts all along — ”

  Before I could finish, revealing the miracle within Mrs. Bethany’s plotting, my dad continued, “What I mean is, she’s always known about 193 Bianca.”

  Mom’s hand clutched at the neck of her coat, gathering the wool together against a new chill. “Adrian, what are you talking about?”

  He said, “I mean that Mrs. Bethany is after the wraith, and she always knew that our Bianca had a chance to turn into a wraith someday. Looking back, I suspect that’s why we were offered jobs here in the first place.”

  “Mrs. Bethany is after the wraiths,” Mom said. “And you think Mrs. Bethany is specifically after Bianca. That can’t be true. Why would she do it?”

  Everything fell into place. Mrs. Bethany wanted to live again. She knew that capturing wraiths gave her the power to create life — but only the sacrifice of a powerful, stable wraith would ensure her sanity after the transformation. And I, thanks to my special status as a born wraith, the many relationships that anchored me to this world, and the guidance of other powerful spirits that had found me when they, too, were drawn to Evernight — I would be a perfect example.

  I was Mrs. Bethany’s best chance at returning to life. Not for one second did I think she would hesitate; if she could resurrect herself by murdering me, she would do it, gladly.

  “I know why,” I said. They took hands, as if expecting a terrible blow, and I broke it to them as gently as I could.