Strangers Among Us

by Kelley Armstrong

  And solid. She looked at Xian, imagined touching her, and her eyes watered.

  “They never get caught up in the warfare?” Eddie asked.

  “No. Not them, not their friends. The Prettygirls rise above it all.”

  “And they decide who’s the human sacrifice each year,” Jake grunted.

  Ling shook her head. “The spooks use us to fight each other through the first term, until winter break. When we come back to classes in January, whichever haunt’s won, whichever group’s strongest, they take an outcast . . .”

  “And eat him?” Jake asked.

  “This year, it’s Boys’ Basketball.” She shivered. Their kraken had been drooling over Eddie from day one of the school year. “To stay off the menu, you need to have a spook of your own. You have to qualify to get into a club.”

  “Qualify,” Eddie repeated.

  “Rite of passage,” said Jake. “Standard spirit stuff.”

  Eddie frowned at Ling. “When you kissed me last month, the week before the accident—”

  Ling interrupted again; she wasn’t going to talk about that, not in front of Jake. “In Drama, you audition for a show. That’s how you get Xian to protect you.”

  “Your sister told you this?” Jake asked.

  “She wanted to be sure I’d join a club,” Ling said. “Polly’s naturally outgoing, popular.”

  “I get it. She was afraid you’d end up dead because you’re shy?”

  Eddie laughed. “Shy? Her?”

  “She’s hiding in the school basement, kid.”

  In the fall musical, Ling had played Queen Victoria. Now she wrapped herself in that royal persona, raising her chin, as if the boys were nothing, fleas on the carpet. “Polly never knew where the spooks came from, Jake.”

  “Oh, that part I know.” The bird pecked at a cheap plastic totem pole. “I put ‘em here.”

  “You?” Eddie said.

  Jake nodded. “Couple hundred years ago, these spirits were overrunning the forest, complicating life for the People.”

  Ling said. “What people?”

  “The People.” Eddie pointed from a doodle on his cast—a stylized Native bear—to his red-brown skin, so like Jake’s.

  “Ah,” she said, embarrassed.

  Preening his chest feathers, Jake continued, “The spooks traveled here with settlers from overseas. European ghosts, Chinese ones, Japanese, African. When they landed, though, the spirits didn’t have proper holy sites. No ancestral homes, no power places. They were drawn to ours. They scared off the fish during the salmon run, lured women over cliffs, brought dead warriors back to life . . .”

  “Enough, we get it,” said Eddie.

  “The People came to me. ‘Raven, they said, can’t you oust these bums?’ I might’ve said no, but I’d just convinced this juicy frog to jump down my gullet, only to find out he was magic. Enchanted prince, some bullshit. Down in my belly, he’s yelling to get out. Swears the next time some girl kisses me—and girls do kiss me—” he purred to Ling.

  “Girls kiss all kinds of people,” Eddie grunted. Ling, still playing Victoria, ignored him.

  “Imagine getting kissed with an enchanted prince in your gut. He turns into a man, you get blown up from the inside out. I’d had to puke the frog up. I was hungry, pissed off, inconvenienced . . .”

  “Yeah,” Eddie said. “Your life’s a vale of tears.”

  “Is heckling me your way of asking for help, Cojo?”

  “Helping? Letting me get hit by a car?”

  “Wah wah. Off the sacrificial altar and into a tiny collision. You came out ahead, kid.”

  Ling broke in. “What’s this have to do with school?”

  “Back then this was part of the forest.” Jake smiled, and it was an old man’s smile, his skin wrinkling like her grandfather’s. “It was a hollow in the hills, with cedars like a roof over top. The tallest tree for miles stood here, and I had a nest in it. A holy place. A lodge.”

  “So . . .?” Ling leaned against a prop sofa.

  “I invited the invading haunts to a potlatch. My valley was the kind of place that drew ‘em; most came figuring they could wrestle it out from under me. I fed them salmon and berries and venison steaks, offered them smoke, opium—everything they wanted. Gave ‘em presents, got ‘em laid . . . it was one stupendous party. Finally they got tired. ‘Hey, Host, where we gonna sleep? The forest floor’s covered in rocks and hunks of wood.’”

  Eddie curled up, cross-legged on the floor, wrapped in the story.

  “I had to provide, eh? I rolled up a section of the forest floor, and underneath was a layer of soft soil. ‘Here,’ said I. They curled up, and kept right on complaining. ‘Hey, Host, we’re cold.’ So I shook off some feathers to give ‘em a blanket. Were they finally happy? ’Course not. Wah, wah, these stars are too damned bright. ‘Lie down and shut your eyes,’ I said, and when every troublesome piece-of-shit myth was on its back, eyes shut, I rolled the forest back over top of them. Made it nice and dark and warm. They started to snore. All I had to do then was lay out a square of rocks to hold down the edges of the land and leave them to sleep.”

  “But now?” Eddie asked.

  Jake shrugged. “I’m guessing there’s a hole in the seam around the blanket. A mooncake sized hole, if what Ling’s saying is true. Twenty-five years ago some kid pried up one of my rocks, and now there’s a little light and noise creeping in. Those Van Winkling gods hear you kids, trapped and bored, tearing into each other. They’re drawing power from the warfare.”

  “You’re saying it’s our fault?” Eddie scoffed.

  “I’m saying we find this stone and put it back, they’ll doze off again.” Jake tilted his head, eyeing Ling. “Can you get it from Marianne?”

  She imagined school without the haunts. An ordinary school with ordinary classes. Teachers, petty fights and a safer place.

  But Xian. . . . She looked into the qi-lin’s eyes, felt the love there.

  Maybe . . . maybe she didn’t have to give up Xian. Maybe, with Jake around, the dying would stop.

  “Ling?”

  She shook her head.

  “Suit yourself, toots. But remember—you dragged me into this.”

  Her? How? By kissing Eddie and giving him the sight?

  With one thunderous wing flap, Jake vanished upstairs, leaving them alone.

  Eddie looked at her through narrowed eyes, his sliced, stitched face wearing the critical frown he turned on his cartoons.

  Ling shifted. He was between her and the staircase. “So . . . you saved Jake’s ass?”

  He nodded. “There’s this story. Raven was cheating on a man. Um . . . doing it with the guy’s wife. Husband came home, caught them, beat the crap out of Raven. Mashed him flat, broke his bones, tossed him down the outhouse.”

  “Ewww.”

  “Supposedly he didn’t mind that much. In the tales, he’s very philosophical about lying in sewage . . .” He spoke slowly, as if distracted, examining Xian. “Anyway, I’m at my grandfather’s place, just after that Friday—well, I’d seen some weird things around school that afternoon. After you . . .”

  “I remember,” Ling said hastily. “Go on.”

  “Between you kissing me and Mike smacking me pretty hard at lunch, I thought the ghosts I’d seen, at school, were hallucinations. But when I get to Grandpa’s, I hear the toilet singing.”

  “Singing?”

  “Yeah. Guess who’s down there?”

  “Jake? Does that mean he cheated with . . . your grandmother?”

  “Let’s not go there.” He shuddered, raising the plaster-clad hand to his ear. “Raven talks me into putting a hook on Grandpa’s fishing rod. I flush it, reel it back, and up he comes, mashed flat, stinking so bad I pass out . . .”

  “Gross,” Ling said. “And when you woke up?”

  “Gone. I didn’t think I’d see him again.” Eddie rubbed the line of stitches on his cheek. “But when the Basketball Boys went after me, he turned up and buzzed �
�em.”

  “He didn’t save you from the car.”

  “Whatever doesn’t kill you, right?”

  “I hate that saying.”

  “Sorry.” He wasn’t really listening; his good hand drifted up, as if to brush her chin, or cheek.

  The bell rang.

  “Sorry, gotta go.” Pushing past Eddie to the stairs, Ling made a run for it, Xian at her heels.

  Weeks passed. Tensions climbed. Gretchen pushed Fat Melissa down the stairs and Jake caught her in mid-fall. Then Marianne turned on one of the other Prettygirls, Irina, supposedly over her boyfriend. Irina almost caught a wickedly spiked volleyball with her face that day, but Jake flapped a wing and gusted it off-target.

  The kraken and the Basketball Boys had switched their attention to the outcast Goth, Andy Holmes. Even with Jake running interference, the taunts of ‘fag’ kept coming.

  “Kraken wants Andy now, doesn’t it?” Eddie asked one day, looking worried and guilty, but Ling walked away without answering. After that she avoided everyone, spending her breaks reading plays, playing Face with Xian, cutting classes with the other Drama Queens and using the time to rehearse the spring musical.

  Not seeing was all she could do. Raven would keep saving people. Or he wouldn’t. And if he didn’t, it wasn’t her fault.

  Weeks passed. Nobody died.

  One afternoon when she had the stage to herself she and Xian danced, the two of them whirling around each other without quite touching. The deer’s hooves struck against the wooden stage, sending off sparks, a fiery stream of gold that drifted between Ling’s fingers and through her hair as she spun.

  She couldn’t give this up. It was seeing that had caused their mother’s breakdown, when Ling was only ten. Polly saw the death in everyone she touched. Their younger sister screamed so much and spoke so little that Daddy had put her into a school for autistic kids.

  But Xian loved her. The qi-lin made seeing bearable.

  Collapsing in a panting heap to the stage floor, she was startled by the sound of clapping. Jake was perched up on one of the stage lights, watching.

  She fought to still her breath as Xian glared up at him.

  “If you got the stone from Marianne, Xian would be solid,” he said.

  “Her prince spirit wouldn’t let me near her.”

  “So you have thought about taking it from her?”

  “Why don’t you grab it, Jake?”

  “You think being a visionary’s hard to deal with, kid? Try being at ground zero if a couple of us Old Ones go at it beak and claw. The whole damn blanket will come tearing up.”

  “You’ve been keeping everyone safe.”

  “Just bartering for time.” He caught a ghostly spark with his beak, adding it to the clamshell necklace. “The spooks need that death every year, Ling. It’s fine for you kids to fight and never resolve anything—you get out of here eventually. The haunts can’t leave. Xian can’t leave.”

  “You don’t know what they can do!”

  “They’re stuck in a nightmare. You wake ‘em up in the fall with your noise and your lust and your angsty pubescent hum. They jockey for position, they play your games, but winning means nothing if there’s no prize. Bloodshed siphons off enough tension to put them to sleep while you’re gone for the summer . . .”

  “It’s your spook garden, Jake,” she interrupted. “You planted them here.”

  “Who gave Eddie the Sight?” His eyes were dark as storms. “You dealt yourself in the game when you decided to save him. You want to play god? Get the stone, Ling Yuan.”

  “Get it yourself, asshole.” With that, she ducked into the girl’s shower room.

  Club Day was a mummery, a day-long orgy of boredom: in the morning, each school club did a presentation for the students and staff. The morning run-through was just a rehearsal. In the afternoon, all the parents and the School Board showed up for the real thing. This meant the whole school sat through the entire mind-numbingly dull show twice.

  But it was anything but boring for Ling. No one had died. Yet. And the spirits would take that death today, unless Jake could keep them all safe.

  The Yearbook Club opened the festivities with a slide show before yielding the stage to the Debate Society. Then—just before everyone slipped into boredom-induced coma—the Basketball Boys thundered out, each player doing a lay-up before gathering around their Regional trophy for a photo. The kraken swam amid their legs, eyes glinting.

  As the band began honking its way through a Souza march, Ling saw people getting restless. Haunts glided through the gym, hungry and watchful. Blood was in the air.

  The tension eased off when Eddie and Andy Holmes showed up, late, walking beside the Vice Principal, whose cobweb veils had thinned to crepe. A tiny wisp of a haunt trailed behind them, its small shape so dim Ling couldn’t make out its features. Andy was holding a crudely lettered sign, orange posterboard with blue letters that read, “MacKenzie Secondary Comedy Club.”

  An anxious murmur ran through the assembly.

  Miss Marino glared everyone into silence. “Right. We have a new club today. Ed will tell you about it.”

  Eddie shuffled up to the microphone. It howled feedback, and he fumbled it off. “Anyone can join,” he said. “You have to tell a joke. It can be the dumbest thing you ever heard. It can be ‘Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.’ See, I’m done. Knock-knock jokes, whatever. That’s our initiation.”

  Andy stepped up, reading from a printed page, some joke about a parrot in a freezer that had been making the rounds on the internet.

  The wispy haunt became more substantial, and Ling saw it was a white hound, a puppy with reddish ears.

  “Wonder what’s that supposed to be,” she muttered.

  “Hunting dog of Arawn, I think.”

  She jumped. Jake Raven was behind her, body canted forward so his beak was inches from her ear.

  “Arawn was the Welsh god of the underworld. Okay guy, I guess. Kinda morbid. Eddie’s grandfather—the fellow with the cute Haida wife and the short temper—is from Swansea.”

  She tipped up her chin, retreating behind her Victorian lady face again.

  “This is bogus!” the basketball captain bellowed.

  “We got a club form from the office and we got an initiation,” Eddie shouted, over a rising wasp-hum of student voices.

  Suddenly, Emily staggered out of the bleachers, clutching her oft-burned hair. Hoots and growls rose around her, and someone threw a paper coffee cup. Latte sprayed out, staining her dress.

  “Emily!” Eddie waved her over.

  She ran to the stage, mounting the steps two at a time. “How many teachers does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

  The voices rose to a howl, drowning out the punch line. The white puppy got larger.

  Another kid got ejected from his pack—tripping down the bleachers, propelled, no doubt, by a shove. He crashed to the floor at Coach’s feet, shaking him momentarily out of his webbed-up doze.

  Students pushed new outcasts onto the gym floor, and Eddie kept taking them. Soon they didn’t bother going onstage; they started telling jokes the second their friends turned on them. People were screaming, the din of panic amplified by the gym’s echoey acoustics. Each time a group rejected one of its own, the kid would run to join Eddie.

  There was nobody unprotected, nobody the kraken could kill.

  The gym floor was bumping up and down under Ling’s feet, like a blanket with fighting cats underneath.

  Now, all at once the other Drama Queens were pummelling Jazinda. Jazinda, who was always late for rehearsal, who could never get her lines right or sing on key. Jazinda, who’d been included at Ling’s insistence, but who hadn’t really worked out. They were seizing the chance to get rid of her.

  “Stop!” Ling threw her arms around Jazinda’s neck.

  Xian was nearby, pawing at the floor, bucking. She reared, eyes wide and beseeching, and Ling was almost overcome by a sudden urge to
shove Jaz away.

  “No!”

  The qi-lin danced in a harried circle, as if something was nipping at her flanks.

  “They all need that death,” Jake murmured. “Xian too.”

  Ling looked away.

  The Prettygirls’ haunt, an elegant blonde prince, glided out of the bleachers. Striding up to Miss Marino, he whispered a few words before wisping away the last of her cobwebs.

  “Edward Cojo,” Marino shouted, and the screaming stopped all at once. “Nobody said you could start a riot. Report to the study cubicle outside my office!”

  Detention. A relieved murmur ran through the gym.

  Eddie’s mouth dropped open as Marino’s lacquered nails closed on his shoulder. She dragged him into the hall, the white hound trotting anxiously behind. The other haunts followed: the kraken, the prince, the gargoyle, the nine-tailed fox, the Valkyrie. Xian gave Ling one cool glance before clopping out too.

  Going for the kill.

  For a second the only sound in the gym was panting, as if everyone had been sprinting. Then a shriek tore into the silence. The effect was instant. People slumped forward and sighed. A few girls buried their faces in their hands, sobbing in relief.

  Marino clacked back in, fully shrouded and covered in busy spiders. She plucked the clipboard out of the Principal’s hands. “Next club!”

  “I guess that’s that,” said the low voice in her ear.

  “No!” Ling jumped to her feet, whirling on Jake, seizing one black wing so he couldn’t fly off. “You’re going to save him.”

  “No mooncake stone, no miracle. Someone’s dying today or the whole blanket shreds.” He hopped back, eyes flinty, slipping out of her grip. The handful of feathers in her hand turned to a crumpled piece of paper. On it was a cartoon doodle Eddie had done: her and Xian, dancing.

  “He’s one of your People,” she pleaded. “You owe him.”

  “Don’t you get it, kid?” His voice was almost fond. “Eddie don’t want someone else to die in his place.”

  Her eyes misted. “You could—”