Shadowland

by Meg Cabot

  Kelly went, “Are you mental?”

  I chose not to dignify that with a response. “See you tomorrow, Kell,” was all I said.

  A few minutes later, the phone rang again. I picked up, since it appeared I was on a winning streak. And I wasn’t wrong. It was Father Dominic.

  “Susannah,” he said in his pleasantly deep voice. “I do hope you don’t mind my bothering you at home. But I just called to congratulate you on winning the sophomore class—”

  “Don’t worry, Father Dom,” I said. “No one’s on the other extension. It’s only me.”

  “What,” he said, in a completely different tone of voice, “could you have been thinking? You promised me! You promised me you wouldn’t go back to the school grounds alone!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But she was threatening to hurt David, and I—”

  “I don’t care if she was threatening your mother, young lady. Next time, you are to wait for me. Do you understand? Never again are you to attempt something so foolhardy and dangerous as an exorcism without a soul to help you!”

  I said, “Well, okay. But I was kind of hoping there wasn’t going to be a next time.”

  “Not be a next time? Are you daft? We’re mediators, remember. So long as there are spirits, there will be a next time for us, young lady, and don’t you forget it.”

  As if I could. All I had to do was look around my bedroom just about any time of day, and there was my very own reminder, in the form of a murdered cowboy.

  But I didn’t see any point in telling Father Dominic this. Instead, I said, “Sorry about your breezeway, Father Dominic. Your poor birds.”

  “Never mind my birds. You’re all right, and that’s all that matters. When I get out of this hospital, you and I are going to sit down and have a very long chat, Susannah, about proper mediation techniques. I don’t know about this habit of yours of just walking up and punching the poor souls in the face.”

  I said, laughing, “Okay. I guess your ribs must be hurting you, huh?”

  He said in a gentler tone, “They are, some. How did you know?”

  “Because you’re so pleasant.”

  “I’m sorry.” Father Dominic actually sounded it, too. “I—yes, my ribs are hurting me. Oh, Susannah. Did you hear the news?”

  “Which? That I was voted sophomore class vice president, or that I wrecked the school last night?”

  “Neither. A space has been found at Robert Louis Stevenson High School for Bryce. He’ll be transferring there just as soon as he can walk again.”

  “But—” It was ridiculous, I know, but I actually felt dismayed. “But Heather’s gone now. He doesn’t have to transfer.”

  “Heather may be gone,” Father Dominic said gently, “but her memory still exists very much in the minds of those who were…affected by her death. Surely you can’t blame the boy for wanting a chance to start over at a new school where people won’t be whispering about him?”

  I said, not very graciously, thinking of Bryce’s soft blond hair, “I guess.”

  “They say I should be well enough to return to work Monday. Shall I see you in my office then?”

  “I guess,” I said, just as enthusiastically as before. Father Dominic didn’t appear to notice. He said, “I shall see you then.” Right before I hung up, I heard him say, “Oh, and Susannah. Do try, in the interim, not to destroy what’s left of the school.”

  “Ha-ha,” I said, and hung up.

  Sitting on the window seat, I rested my chin on my knees and gazed down across the valley toward the curve of the bay. The sun was starting to sink low in the west. It hadn’t hit the water yet, but it would in a few minutes. My room was ablaze with reds and golds, and the sky around the sun looked as if it were striped. The clouds were so many different colors—blue and purple and red and orange—like the ribbons I once saw waving from the top of a maypole at a Renaissance fair. I could smell the sea, too, through my open window. The breeze carried the briny scent toward me, even as high up in the hills as I was.

  Had Jesse, I wondered, sat in this window and smelled the ocean like I was doing, before he died? Before—as I was sure had happened—Maria de Silva’s lover, Felix Diego, slipped into the room and killed him?

  As if he’d read my thoughts, Jesse suddenly materialized a few feet away from me.

  “Jeez!” I said, pressing a hand over my heart, which was beating so hard I thought it might explode. “Do you have to keep on doing that?”

  He was leaning, sort of nonchalantly, against one of my bedposts, his arms folded across his chest. “I’m sorry,” he said. But he didn’t look it.

  “Look,” I said. “If you and I are going to be living together—so to speak—we need to come up with some rules. And rule number one is that you have got to stop sneaking up on me like that.”

  “And how do you suggest I make my presence known?” Jesse asked, his eyes pretty bright for a ghost.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Can’t you rattle some chains or something?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so. What would rule number two be?”

  “Rule number two…” My voice trailed off as I stared at him. It wasn’t fair. It really wasn’t. Dead guys should not look anywhere near as good as Jesse looked, leaning there against my bedpost with the sun slanting in and catching the perfectly sculpted planes of his face….

  He lifted that eyebrow, the one with the scar in it. “Something wrong, querida?” he asked.

  I stared at him. It was clear he didn’t know that I knew. About MDS, I mean. I wanted to ask him about it, but in another way, I sort of didn’t want to know. Something was keeping Jesse in this world and out of the one he belonged to, and I had a feeling that something was directly related to the manner in which he’d lost his life. But since he didn’t seem all that anxious to talk about it, I figured it was none of my business.

  This was a first. Most times, ghosts were all over me to help them. But not Jesse.

  At least, not for now.

  “Let me ask you something,” Jesse said so suddenly that I thought, for a minute, maybe he’d read my mind.

  “What?” I asked cautiously, throwing down my magazine and standing up.

  “Last night, when you warned me not to go near the school because you were doing an exorcism…”

  I eyed him. “Yes?”

  “Why did you warn me?”

  I laughed with relief. Was that all? “I warned you because if you’d gone down there you would have been sucked away just like Heather.”

  “But wouldn’t that have been a perfect way to get rid of me? You’d have this room to yourself, just the way you want it.”

  I stared at him in horror. “But that—that would have been completely unfair!”

  He was smiling now. “I see. Against the rules?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Big time.”

  “Then you didn’t warn me”—he took a step toward me—“because you’re starting to like me or anything like that?”

  Much to my dismay, I felt my face start to heat up. “No,” I said stubbornly. “Nothing like that. I’m just trying to play by the rules. Which you violated, by the way, when you woke up David.”

  Jesse took another step toward me. “I had to. You’d warned me not to go down to the school myself. What choice did I have? If I hadn’t sent your brother in my place to help you,” he pointed out, “you’d be a bit dead now.”

  I was uncomfortably aware that this was true. However, I wasn’t about to let on that I agreed with him. “No way,” I said. “I had things perfectly under control. I—”

  “You had nothing under control.” Jesse laughed. “You went barreling in there without any sort of plan, without any sort of—”

  “I had a plan.” I took a single furious step toward him, and suddenly we were standing practically nose to nose. “Who do you think you are, telling me I had no plan? I’ve been doing this for years, get it? Years. And I never needed help, not from anyone. And certainly no
t from someone like you.”

  He stopped laughing suddenly. Now he looked mad. “Someone like me? You mean—what was it you called me? A cowboy?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean from somebody who’s dead.”

  Jesse flinched, almost as violently as if I’d hit him.

  “Let’s make rule number two be that from now on, you stay out of my business, and I’ll stay out of yours,” I said.

  “Fine,” Jesse said shortly.

  “Fine,” I said. “And thank you.”

  He was still mad. He asked sullenly, “For what?”

  “For saving my life.”

  He stopped looking mad all of a sudden. His eyebrows, which had been all knit together, relaxed.

  Next thing I knew, he’d reached out, and laid his hands on my shoulders.

  If he’d stuck a fork in me, I don’t think I’d have been so surprised. I mean, I’m used to punching ghosts in the face. I am not used to them looking down at me as if…as if…

  Well, as if they were about to kiss me.

  But before I had time to figure out what I was going to do—close my eyes and let him do it, or invoke rule number three: absolutely no touching—my mother’s voice drifted up from downstairs. “Susannah?” she called. “Susie, it’s Mom. I’m home.”

  I looked at Jesse. He jerked his hands away from me. A second later, my mom opened my bedroom door, and Jesse disappeared.

  “Susie,” she said. She walked over and put her arms around me. “How are you? I hope you’re not upset that we let you sleep in. You just seemed so tired.”

  “No,” I said. I was still sort of dazed by what had happened with Jesse. “I don’t mind.”

  “I guess it all finally caught up with you. I thought it might. Were you all right here with Andy? He said he made you lunch.”

  “He made me a fine lunch,” I said automatically.

  “And David brought you your homework, I hear.” She let go of me and walked toward the window seat. “We were thinking about spaghetti for dinner. What do you think?”

  “Sounds good.” I came around long enough to notice that she was staring out of the windows. Then I noticed that I couldn’t remember my mother ever looking so…well, serene.

  Maybe it was the fact that since we’d moved out west, she’d given up coffee.

  More likely, though, it was love.

  “What are you looking at, Mom?” I asked her.

  “Oh, nothing, honey,” she said with a little smile. “Just the sunset. It’s so beautiful.” She turned to put her arm around me, and together we stood there and watched the sun sinking into the Pacific in a blaze of violent reds and purples and golds. “You sure wouldn’t see a sunset like that back in New York,” my mother said. “Now would you?”

  “No,” I said. “You wouldn’t.”

  “So,” she said, giving me a squeeze. “What do you think? You think we should stick around here awhile?”

  She was joking, of course. But in a way, she wasn’t.

  “Sure,” I said. “We should stick around.”

  She smiled at me, then turned back toward the sunset. The last of the bright orange ball was disappearing beneath the horizon. “There goes the sun,” she said.

  “And,” I said, “it’s all right.”

  Suze’s supernatural misadventures

  continue in the second Mediator book,

  Ninth Key

  The following is an excerpt:

  The first time she showed up, it was about an hour after I’d come home from the pool party. Around three in the morning, I guess. And what she did was, she stood by my bed and started screaming.

  Really screaming. Really loud. She woke me out of a dead sleep. I’d been lying there dreaming about Bryce Martinson. In my dream, he and I were cruising along Seventeen Mile Drive in this red convertible. I don’t know whose convertible it was. His, I guess, since I don’t even have my driver’s license yet. Bryce’s soft sandy-blond hair was blowing in the wind, and the sun was sinking into the sea, making the sky all red and orange and purple. We were going around these curves, you know, on the cliffs above the Pacific, and I wasn’t even carsick or anything. It was one really terrific dream.

  And then this woman starts wailing, practically in my ear.

  I ask you: Who needs that?

  Of course I sat up right away, completely wide awake. Having a walking dead woman show up in your bedroom screaming her head off can do that to you. Wake you up right away, I mean.

  I sat there blinking because my room was really dark—well, it was nighttime. You know, nighttime, when normal people are asleep.

  But not us mediators. Oh, no.

  She was standing in this skinny patch of moonlight coming in from the bay windows on the far side of my room. She had on a gray hooded sweatshirt, hood down, a T-shirt, capri pants, and Keds. Her hair was short, sort of mousy brown. It was hard to tell if she was young or old, what with all the screaming and everything, but I kind of figured her for my mom’s age.

  Which was why I didn’t get out of bed and punch her right then and there.

  I probably should have. I mean, it wasn’t like I could exactly yell back at her, not without waking the whole house. I was the only one in the house who could hear her.

  Well, the only one who was alive, anyway.

  After a while, I guess she noticed I was awake because she stopped screaming and reached up to wipe her eyes. She was crying pretty hard.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  I said, “Yeah, well, you got my attention. Now what do you want?”

  “I need you,” she said. She was sniffling. “I need you to tell someone something.”

  I said, “Okay. What?”

  “Tell him…” She wiped her face with her hands. “Tell him it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t kill me.”

  This was sort of a new one. I raised my eyebrows. “Tell him he didn’t kill you?” I asked, just to be sure I’d heard her right.

  She nodded. She was kind of pretty, I guess, in a waifish sort of way. Although it probably wouldn’t have hurt if she’d eaten a muffin or two back when she’d been alive.

  “You’ll tell him?” she asked me, eagerly. “Promise?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll tell him. Only who am I telling?”

  She looked at me funny. “Red, of course.”

  Red? Was she kidding?

  But it was too late. She was gone.

  Just like that.

  Red. I turned around and beat on my pillow to get it fluffy again. Red.

  Why me? I mean, really. To be interrupted while having a dream about Bryce Martinson just because some woman wants a guy named Red to know he didn’t kill her…. I swear, sometimes I am convinced my life is just a series of sketches for America’s Funniest Home Videos, minus all that pants-dropping business.

  Except my life really isn’t all that funny if you think about it.

  I especially wasn’t laughing when, the minute I finally found a comfy spot on my pillow and was just about to close my eyes and go back to sleep, somebody else showed up in the sliver of moonlight in the middle of my room.

  This time there wasn’t any screaming. That was about the only thing I had to be grateful for.

  “What?” I asked in a pretty rude voice.

  He said, shaking his head, “You didn’t even ask her name.”

  I leaned up on both elbows. It was because of this guy that I’d taken to wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts to bed. Not that I had been going around in floaty negligees before he’d come along, but I sure wasn’t going to take them up now that I had a male roommate.

  Yeah, you read that right.

  “Like she gave me the chance,” I said.

  “You could have asked.” Jesse folded his arms across his chest. “But you didn’t bother.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, sitting up. “This is my bedroom. I will treat spectral visitors to it any way I want to, thank you.”

  He said, “Susannah.”

&n
bsp; He had the softest voice imaginable. Softer, even, than that guy Tad’s. It was like silk or something, his voice. It was really hard to be mean to a guy with a voice like that.

  But the thing was, I had to be mean. Because even in the moonlight, I could make out the breadth of his strong shoulders, the vee where his old-fashioned white shirt fell open, revealing dark, olive-complected skin, some chest hair, and just about the best-defined abs you’ve ever seen. I could also see the strong planes of his face, the tiny scar in one of his ink-black eyebrows, where something—or someone—had cut him once.

  Kelly Prescott was wrong. Bryce Martinson was not the cutest guy in Carmel.

  Jesse was.

  Read all the

  Mediator books

  THE MEDIATOR 1:

  Shadowland

  THE MEDIATOR 2:

  Ninth Key

  THE MEDIATOR 3:

  Reunion

  THE MEDIATOR 4:

  Darkest Hour

  THE MEDIATOR 5:

  Haunted

  THE MEDIATOR 6:

  Twilight

  About the Author

  Meg Cabot is also the author of the Princess Diaries series, upon which the Disney movies are based. In the books, though, Princess Mia has yield-sign-shaped hair, lives in New York, and Fat Louie is orange. And those are the least of the differences. The following is a complete list of the Princess Diaries books:

  THE PRINCESS DIARIES

  THE PRINCESS DIARIES, VOLUME II:

  PRINCESS IN THE SPOTLIGHT

  THE PRINCESS DIARIES, VOLUME III:

  PRINCESS IN LOVE

  THE PRINCESS DIARIES, VOLUME IV:

  PRINCESS IN WAITING

  THE PRINCESS DIARIES, VOLUME IV AND A HALF:

  PROJECT PRINCESS

  THE PRINCESS DIARIES, VOLUME V:

  PRINCESS IN PINK

  THE PRINCESS DIARIES, VOLUME VI:

  PRINCESS IN TRAINING

  THE PRINCESS PRESENT:

  A PRINCESS DIARIES BOOK

  PRINCESS LESSONS:

  A PRINCESS DIARIES BOOK

  PERFECT PRINCESS:

  A PRINCESS DIARIES BOOK

  Aside from the Mediator books