by Stacey Kade
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. Thank God.
But that brief moment of dizzying relief quickly dissipated, replaced by a growing sense of panic. She wasn’t filling in the way she should have. I could still see through her. For the first time, she actually looked like a traditional ghost, at least the way they were most often depicted on television and in movies.
No, no. Not good. Her energy was low enough that she couldn’t even fully appear.
“Say something nice!” I shouted at her, fighting the urge to grab her and hold on. I wasn’t sure what would happen, what I would do, if my hands passed through her.
Her lips moved to form words, but no sound emerged, and her eyes widened. She knew something was wrong. She looked down at herself, her blond hair sliding forward over her shoulder as she took in the extent of her nonexistence. And when she lifted her head to face me, tears sparkled in her eyes. She took a deep breath and straightened her shoulders before raising her hand slowly and turning it palm out. Stop…or good-bye.
“No!” I moved closer to her, within touching distance. “You have to do something.” I’d never felt more helpless in my life. I couldn’t do anything to help her. Then a flash of brilliance—or utter idiocy—struck. “Claim me again.” A stronger tie to me, one with a firmly held position smack in between the living and the dead, might help, even if it was only reinforcing a connection that already existed. I refused to blink, my eyes burning with the effort, as though my gaze would hold her here. “Claim me again,” I repeated, hearing the plea in my voice and praying she could, too.
Her gaze met mine and held it as she said the words. I still couldn’t hear her, but I caught a few of the words on her lips. “Will Killian.” And then last, so slowly that there was no doubt what she was saying. “Mine.” Tears slipped down her face, and I knew that no matter what differences there were between us, this wasn’t the way either of us wanted it to end.
She closed her eyes and repeated the words over and over again, just as I had earlier.
The air around her wavered, like when you open the door to a car that’s been closed up for hours on a hot summer day. And then suddenly she was there…fully there.
I reached out for her hand at the same time she grabbed for mine. We moved toward each other, narrowly avoiding banging heads in our hurry. She wrapped her arms around me, and I buried my face against the side of her warm neck and in her hair. I could feel her trembling…or maybe it was me.
“It’s okay. You’re okay,” I murmured against her skin, but I wasn’t sure which one of us I was talking to. Maybe both of us.
“You’re right. I think he’s crazy,” I heard one of the tennis court kids declare loudly in a tone that suggested a great debate had been resolved. And for once in my life, I did not care in the least.
Will would not stop looking at me.
And it wasn’t the hey-you’re-so-attractive kind of looking that I was used to, once upon a time. That would have beenfine. No, this was more like compulsively-checking-every-five-seconds-to-see-if-you’re-still-here-and-not-slowly-disappearing-before-my-very-eyes kind of looking. Which was a little disconcerting.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked for the twelfth time in fifteen minutes, with another sidelong glance at me in the passenger seat. Once we’d managed to disentangle ourselves from our stance in the middle of the road, he’d led me back to the Dodge with a tight grip on my hand. His eyes were red. He’d been crying. So had I. Though neither of us was talking about that.
“Stop asking me that,” I said, trying to sound as snappish as I would have normally. But I couldn’t blame him, for the staring or the asking. I kept checking my hands and feet to make sure they were actually there and not see-through. In the grand scheme of things, I hadn’t been gone for all that long. I’d disappeared for hours before, after the emotional turmoil of learning my mom was tossing my stuff and my dad was having a new baby. But I’d never, never come back as faintly as I had this time.
I’d shouted and he couldn’t hear me. I could see it in the panic on his face. I was going, going, gone—like falling off the side of cliff in the movies—until I managed to find a foothold and stop myself. But who knew how long it would last? That bit of rock or vine always gives out, doesn’t it? The only question was when.
Even now I could feel the ebb and flow of energy in a way that I had not since right before the light showed up to take me away from Will’s hospital room a few months ago.
I took a deep breath, trying to ignore the lighter, floatier, disconnected feeling that came with being outside of Lily’s body. Like I might drift away at any second. I hated it. When Will let go of my hand to drive, it had taken every ounce of my considerable self-possession not to scoot closer (it wasn’t like I needed a seat belt to keep me alive if we crashed) and grab hold of his arm or a fistful of his (awful) T-shirt, as if he were an anchor keeping me here. But when it came down to it, that wouldn’t stop me from disappearing, and I couldn’t stand the idea of slowly losing the feel of him until there was nothing.
So I kept my hands to myself and stayed on my side of the car.
“If you want, I can take you home…to my house…or the Turners’,” he offered, with another cautious look at me. “And you can rest if you—”
“I’m dead, not sick,” I said sharply. “Remember?” Like either of us needed any greater reminder than what had just happened.
He flinched, actually hunching his shoulders like I’d hit him. But pretending otherwise, particularly now, wasn’t going to do us any good. It was kind of pointless, wasn’t it? I felt tears welling up again and forced myself to look away from him, out the side window.
“So that’s it? With Erin, I mean?” I asked, my voice rougher than normal. I hoped he wouldn’t notice or call me on the abrupt subject change. He’d filled me in on what I’d missed, though most of it I’d already pieced together on my own. “She made off with Lily’s body.” That little bitch. “To go party, eat hamburgers, and drink beer or something?”
We were on our way to check at Krekel’s now, stopping at every liquor store along the way (thanks, Mom, for that bit of knowledge) for a quick peek around the parking lot. She couldn’t buy beer—not looking like Lily, who barely seemed as old as she was—but given what I knew of Erin, and what Will had told me, she probably had her fair share of experience with “hey, dude”-ing it from older guys.
Will nodded wearily.
I resisted the urge to shout I told you so. He’d come down so hard on me about how I was doing as “Lily,” and I’d tried to warn him that someone else might be worse. But now was not the time to interject that bit of retaliatory wisdom…even if it was the truth.
“You can say it,” he said, reading my thoughts. He looked away from the road to raise an eyebrow at me in challenge.
I shrugged. “It’s not as much fun if you’re expecting it.”
He cracked a smile. “I bet.”
“So…if we find her, then what?” I asked, forcing the words out past my fear of speaking them. They implied there was something beyond this moment, which I wasn’t sure there would be for me, and I didn’t want to tempt fate or God or the light or whoever had come up with this masterful plan. I squelched the surge of anger rising up from my gut, but with limited success. I was so tired of being tossed around like someone’s doll…or a chess piece. First I’m stuck here, then I’m not, and then I’m sent back—maybe to save Lily—and then definitely not. What the hell? And now I was supposed to just sit here and, what, wait with Will for whatever energy I had left to disappear? That SUCKED. Beyond the telling of it, frankly.
Will rubbed his hand over his face. “I don’t know.” He sounded tired, defeated. I realized he was out of his depth as well; not what he’d signed up for, either. Right about now, he probably wished he was out ghost-busting with Mina somewhere.
I reached out hesitantly and touched his shoulder. And this time, when he glanced over at me, his expressio
n was different, with a warmth that shone through his weariness and worry. Unable to resist, I scooted closer to lean against him, and he put his arm around my shoulders, resting his cheek momentarily against the top of my head.
“We’ll figure this out,” he said, sounding more certain. “If we can’t find her, we’ll go after her brother. He’ll know what she’s going to try, where she’ll want to go.” He paused. “Crap. I just left him there. I told him I’d be right back,” he said, almost to himself.
“What?” I asked, confused.
“I was talking to Malachi when I figured out you might be in trouble.” He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. We’ll work it out. We’ll find Erin and evict her, and then…” His voice trailed off.
Yeah, the and-then part was the tricky bit.
“Will.” I sat up slowly and his arm slid off my shoulders. “We need to talk.”
He eyed me warily. “What is there to talk about? If you’re still upset about this morning”—he hesitated—“you were right. I should have handled that better. You just…the changes took me by surprise.”
I sighed. Some things between us might have grown and shifted, but this was the same—I was still the more pragmatic one.
I took a breath and forced myself to take on a matter-of-fact tone. “You need to accept that this might be the end. That this”—I waved down at my solid-for-the-moment form—“is a temporary stay of the inevitable.”
“No,” he said without even looking at me, like that was all there was to it. He’d declared it and so it would be. Right.
I shook my head, exasperated. “You know what the Order said: Lily and I are dependent upon each other. I wasn’t even supposed to have survived without Lily for this long.”
He lifted a shoulder in a stiff shrug. “And you’ll be fine as soon as we find her again and—”
“If we can find her. If I have the strength to kick Erin out. If I can keep her out,” I said wearily. “Have you thought about that? What’s to stop her from taking Lily back, assuming I can even boot her in the first place? How many times do you think I can go through that and survive?”
He didn’t respond.
“And more important, what gives me the right? More than Erin, I mean.” The first time, I had done it to save Lily. But this wouldn’t be about that. It would be about saving my skin, metaphorically, and I wasn’t sure I could do that. It didn’t feel right.
Will glanced over at me with a reproving frown. “You were sent back here to help me. Maybe Lily, too.”
Crap. It was, I supposed, time to come clean. I leaned my head back against the seat. “About that…” I hesitated. “You know, it’s not exactly like there was a big booming voice in the sky giving me directions or anything.”
His frown deepened. “Uh-huh.”
I shifted uncomfortably. I shouldn’t have waited this long to tell him. But when it happened, when I first came back, he was still mostly that guy who was kind of annoying and weird, but cute. And then, somewhere along the way, things had changed, and he became somebody I needed in my life for more than practical reasons, and telling the truth sort of became impossible. “I don’t really remember anything,” I said quickly. “I remember feeling safe and warm and at peace, but…that’s pretty much it.”
“Until you got sent back,” he said.
I grimaced.
“Right?” he pressed.
“I woke up in your room that first morning and saw your graduation gown hanging on your closet door and kind of freaked,” I admitted. It hadn’t taken a lot to figure out that time—a lot of time—had passed. I’d actually come back on the morning after Will’s birthday—I’d found the leftover cake and a small pile of unwrapped presents on the kitchen table. And I knew Will’s birthday was at the end of May. Then there were the trees outside, much greener than I remembered, and the air, much warmer and closer to summer.
“I needed some time to think,” I said. “So I took off for a few days, trying to get things clear in my head.” At Misty’s, I learned exactly how long I’d been gone: almost a whole month! That was also where I’d discovered Leanne’s plot to humiliate Ben at graduation. “At the time, all I could think about was getting back to the light, and I only knew of one way to do that.” Which was to do exactly what I’d done to get there in the first place—help Will Killian.
“So…I told you I’d been sent back to help you,” I said, wincing in anticipation of his response. Oh, this was so not going to be good.
“You lied,” he said tightly, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the steering wheel.
“I…made a logical leap based on presumed facts,” I argued, even though I could hear exactly how weak that sounded. “You needed help, and suddenly I was back. It seemed logical that the two things were related.”
He pulled abruptly off the road and into an abandoned gas station and jammed the gear shift into park before turning to face me, his cheeks flushed. “You lied! Worse, you told me what you thought I would believe.”
“Which doesn’t mean it couldn’t still be the truth,” I said, resisting the urge to shrink back into my seat at the sound of the hurt and pain in his voice. He would not make me feel bad about a choice I’d made before I really knew him.
“Oh, my God, Alona.” He scrubbed his face with his hands.
“Well, what did you want me to do?” I demanded. “Say, ‘I don’t remember anything’? You would have thought I was hiding something.”
He shook his head. “Don’t make this about me. It’s all about you and getting rejected. You can’t stand the idea that someone, somewhere, turned you down.”
Ouch. That stung.
I sat up straight. “Has the flip side of this occurred to you yet?” I asked, starting to get angry. “That I stuck with you and helped you even though it wasn’t a mandate from God, or the light, or whatever?”
He was silent.
“No, I didn’t think so,” I snapped, flopping back in my seat.
“You did it because it benefited you.” He gave me a dark look.
“And you, too,” I pointed out quickly. “But whatever. That’s the past. I’m trying to do the right thing here and now.” I flipped my hair behind my shoulders, and for a moment, I was surprised when it actually stayed back. I guess I’d gotten more used to being Ally than I’d realized. “I’m telling the truth today when I didn’t have to.” That was a big deal. To me, at least. Why didn’t he get that?
He snorted. “Do you want a parade?”
His words landed as a heavier-than-expected blow, and I flinched. It wasn’t like him to be quite this sarcastic. And I was trying to change, couldn’t he see that? I forced myself to keep going, not to snap at him. “My point,” I said, emphasizing that I had one, “is I don’t have the right to be ‘Ally’ any more than Erin has to be…”—I frowned—“well, whatever she’s calling herself.”
I imagined Mrs. Turner trying to adjust to another name for her daughter and felt a surprising pang. She’d made my life as Ally more of a pain than it had to be, but only because she actually cared. Now she’d have to deal with Erin’s version of Lily. And that wasn’t fair at all to her. It was weird. If Mrs. Turner had been like my mom—out of it and only concerned about herself—then my pretending to be Ally would have been easier, and I probably wouldn’t have cared half as much. But maybe some things are better when they’re more difficult, I don’t know.
“Even if we find Erin and get her out, I wasn’t…sent here to do anything. To be Ally.” It killed me to say that out loud. To admit that I didn’t know why I was back, that maybe there wasn’t even a reason. But I couldn’t let Will continue operating under that lie.
“The point is,” he said, mocking me, but with real anger threaded through his tone, “is that Erin doesn’t give a crap what people call her as long as she’s doing whatever it means to be alive. Her definition of it, anyway.”
I shuddered, imagining what that might be. It was like rental-car syndrome, only worse. Tha
t limo for prom? No one cared what happened on the inside, because it wasn’t like it was our car.
“So forget about the reason you were sent back, or all the reasons you weren’t—”
I flinched at the venom in that last word.
“—and just help me find Erin and Lily,” he said. “Then we’ll worry about what to do next, and who has the right to do what.”
And how to deal with you…He didn’t say it, but I could hear it nonetheless. Great. I’d be looking forward to that. Maybe I could disappear first.
“All right,” I said finally. I could help—or try, at least. If only to spare the Turners another call to the hospital…or jail.
He nodded curtly and put the car back in drive without another word.
Well, at least there wasn’t any more crying. Guess I’d fixed that.
She lied. She freaking lied about the light. Did Alona have no limits? No moral boundaries? Jesus.
I focused on the road, all too aware of the silence between us. Even though I hadn’t done anything wrong, I got the distinct sense that Alona was upset with me, which was rich. It was never her fault, always somebody else’s. In this case, maybe the light was to blame because she hadn’t received specific directions and had felt forced to make something up. Whatever.
I shook my head in disgust.
And yet, in spite of myself, I couldn’t help imagining what it must have been like for her to find herself back here that first morning, without any information, any guidance on why or what to do next.
Anyone would have been terrified, wondering if they’d done something wrong or if there’d been a mistake or if this was some kind of punishment from on high. After all, who gets sent back from the light ever, let alone after almost a month?
And Alona, always with control issues, would have been even worse. She’d spent most of her living years trying to contain everything, to keep her life—her mother’s condition and her father’s complete lack of willingness to get involved—from imploding. Variables that were beyond her ability to influence ate at her, worried her until she’d done everything she could to manage them and create contingency plans. I knew this girl, probably better than she knew herself.