I grabbed an arm of the couch and fought through the pain to pull myself upward. While I moved, the weight in my chest grew heavier, stronger. I tried to ignore it until, finally, I managed to get myself into a seated position. From there I shot Gabrielle an angry glare.
“Who are you people, really?” I demanded, panting from my efforts. “Where am I? And what the hell did you do to me?”
“That’s a lot of questions for seven a.m., Princess.”
“Amelia,” I corrected automatically.
“Fine. That’s a lot of questions for seven a.m., Amelia.”
“Gaby,” the boy scolded, still not rising from his chair. “Stop taunting her—she’s been through enough.”
Gabrielle rolled her eyes. “Like I don’t know.”
“Yeah, but you got to choose. From what you told me last night, you weren’t exactly forthcoming with this girl, were you?”
“Choose what?” I croaked. “Would someone please start explaining things? I’m grateful you guys saved me from the other ghosts, but—”
“The Faders,” Gabrielle interjected.
“The what?”
“Faders,” she repeated in a blasé tone. “That’s what I call the ghosts who tried to trap you.”
“So … you’ve had experience with them before,” I said slowly. My brain began to pluck memories and phrases from last night’s attack. One word in particular came to mind: “intermediary.” When I spoke again, I did so carefully. Guardedly.
“How do you know the Faders, exactly?”
Gabrielle and the boy shared a look. When she turned back to me, her eyes seemed decidedly less flippant.
“We’ll … get to that,” she said haltingly. “But maybe we should start with the basics. You already know I’m Gabrielle.” She placed her fingertips on her chest. Then she pointed to the boy. “That’s my brother, Felix. We’re the Callioux twins.”
I raised one eyebrow. “Twins?”
“Fraternal,” she said.
“Yeah, I got that part. It’s just … you two look like you’re different …”
“Ages?” Felix offered, grimacing. “Well, we look like that because we are. Now, anyway.”
“Now?”
Felix didn’t respond but instead shot his sister another pointed look. She sighed heavily and met my eyes.
“Felix is twenty,” she said. “But I’m seventeen and, like, ten months. I have been, for a little over two years.”
I waited for her to tell me she was joking. When she didn’t, I balked.
I knew the implication of what she’d said better than anyone. Still, I had to ask the important question out loud. Just in case.
“You’re … dead?”
“Yup,” she said, popping the p. “A little ghostie ghost, just like you.”
I remained silent for a moment. Then, in a hushed voice, I asked, “How?”
“You mean, how did she die?” Felix said. “In a car accident. The same one that killed our parents.”
He spoke plainly enough, with no emotion registering on his face. And yet—even from across the room, even though I hardly knew him—I could see a glint of pain in his eyes. It made my stomach clench, that glint. How on earth did someone lose his entire family in one fell swoop? Even if part of it had obviously returned to him?
“Yes, yes, it’s all very tragic,” Gabrielle said, drawing my attention back to her. “My boyfriend accidentally jerked the wheel out of my dad’s hands, and our car went over the Crescent City Connection Bridge. We haven’t seen him or our parents since.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “You died falling off a bridge?”
She scrutinized me for a second. Then her eyes widened in genuine surprise. “You too? Seriously?”
When I gave her a dry, close-lipped smile, she barked out a mirthless laugh. “Wow. Of all the dumb luck.”
“Tell me about it,” I said dismissively, wanting to get back to the subject at hand. “So, you died, Felix survived, and you came back to haunt him?”
Felix shifted forward in his chair, nodding. “Pretty much, yeah. I must have been thrown from the car or something, because the emergency crews found me on the shore a couple hours later. Everyone else in that car died, though, including her jackass boyfriend.” Gabrielle made a noise of complaint, but Felix cut her off: “That’s too good a word for Kade LaLaurie, and you know it. I don’t care if he was some frat boy honors student; that guy was a total freak. I’m still not convinced he didn’t intentionally cause that crash. Sorry, Sis, but you had the worst taste in guys.”
After she shot her brother a withering glare, Gabrielle continued the story. “Moving on,” she emphasized. “It only took a couple days for Felix and me to find each other again. Actually, he found me, looking all lost and confused outside our family crypt the day of the funeral.”
“At first I thought she’d survived, too,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “I mean, I’d never seen a ghost before, so I didn’t really know what I was looking at.”
“You are a Seer but didn’t know it until you almost died,” I concluded.
Felix nodded. “Guess so, although I didn’t learn what that word meant until we started researching why she didn’t have any senses, and no one could see her, and she couldn’t touch anything.”
“Nothing?” I asked, trying to keep my tone as bland as possible. I didn’t want to reveal the reason for my curiosity to the twins. But since the first moment I touched Joshua, I’d wondered whether the electricity we experienced was specific to all ghosts or just specific to … us.
I frowned heavily. Right now I didn’t want to think about the fact that “us” didn’t exist anymore.
Felix noticed my expression and gave me a curious glance. Fortunately, he didn’t press me about it but instead answered, “Nothing. That’s what finally made us realize she was dead.”
Gabrielle snorted. “Yeah, that and the fact I could send myself to Michigan and back in two seconds.” She shifted forward in her chair, rearranging the kimono around her long legs. “Too bad that was around the same time we also realized that our folks were in major debt when they died. The bank sold off our house in Metairie to pay the bills. By the time all the legal stuff was done, Felix was of age and no one was too worried about where he’d live. So after that … we were homeless.”
I frowned, letting my eyes circle the interior of the apartment. “Looks like you’re doing pretty well now.”
Felix’s gaze followed mine, and he began to squirm. But despite her brother’s obvious discomfort, Gabrielle grinned wickedly, clasped her hands, and leaned forward.
“Did you know,” she said conspiratorially, “that a lot of Hollywood stars have bought town houses and apartments in the Quarter? Would you believe that some of them don’t put in alarm systems? Would you also believe that most of these people hardly ever visit, especially when they’re about to go bankrupt and a court orders them to six months of rehab?”
She cocked her head toward a framed photograph sitting on one of the side tables. There, flashing a high-wattage smile at the camera, was one of the most famous actresses in the world. Even I knew who she was, and I’d been dead for more than a decade.
“Oh, my God,” I gasped. “This is her apartment? You’re squatters? Aren’t you afraid of getting arrested?”
Gabrielle cackled. “Me? No. But Felix obviously is.”
“Hell yes, I am,” he chimed in gruffly. “Especially since I’m the one who busted the lock on the downstairs door so you could carry out this epically stupid plan.”
His sister, however, just rolled her eyes. “Live a little, Felix. Besides, if you believe the tabloids, the bank’s probably going to foreclose on this place before she gets out of rehab. Other than some clothes and the bedding, we haven’t touched anything. The sheets on the furniture, the pills on the coffee table—it looked like that when we got here, it’ll look like that when we leave.”
I shook my head, incredulous at her daring show of cou
rage and stupidity.
But really, the saga of the Callioux twins wasn’t the most important thing in my afterlife right now. Ultimately, I wanted to know why my fingertips could touch the rough slipcover beneath me; why I could still smell the strange scents of the French Quarter; why my body felt beaten and tired long after those sensations should have faded.
“Okay, so now I’ve got your backstory, breaking and entering and all. But what about me? Why do I feel so weird? Why do I feel at all?”
Once again Gabrielle and Felix exchanged wary glances.
“Tell her, Gaby,” he urged.
She held his gaze for a moment longer, clearly drawing upon his strength for what she had to say next. After a disconcerting silence, she turned back to me.
“Put your fingers on your neck, Amelia,” she commanded softly.
“Put … what?”
She demonstrated by taking the fore- and middle fingers on her left hand and pressing them to her neck, just below the jawline. I frowned in confusion but then followed her lead.
After all, what could it hurt?
Only a few seconds after I’d done so, however, I jerked my hand back and shot up to sit rigid-straight on the couch. My eyes widened uncomfortably as I stared at Gabrielle. When she nodded in confirmation, I let out one hissing breath.
Because, although I hadn’t experienced it in a very long time, I recognized what I felt in the tender skin of my neck.
A pulse.
Chapter
TWENTY-TWO
Hope surged within me, so strong it made me dizzy again. My pulse sped with excitement. Now that I felt it again, I don’t know how I could have mistaken that pounding at my temples for anything else.
“Am I … am I alive?”
Gabrielle frowned guiltily and shook her head. “No. Sorry. You’re not actually alive—your body just thinks you are. It’s sort of like … an illusion.”
Everything inside me wilted. My right hand wavered at my neck, just over the place where I’d felt blood and heat coursing through my skin.
“What do you mean, ‘an illusion’?”
She wrung her hands in her lap as she struggled to come up with the best explanation. “You’re kind of … how do I put this? You’re kind of undead. Or the living dead. Pick your supernatural euphemism.”
My stomach twisted violently. I didn’t want to believe her. Yet I knew, beyond doubt, that I’d been dead yesterday. And now I was … something different.
“What are you saying?” I whispered. “That I’m a … a zombie?”
Unbelievably, Gabrielle smiled. “I don’t think so. You aren’t craving brains, are you?”
I sputtered for a moment, my mind leaping between confusion and anger. Then, weakly, I answered, “No. Not yet.”
My stomach let out a sudden, audible growl, and Gabrielle laughed. I clutched my hands to my abdomen and looked down at it in wonder. Then my eyes shot back up to hers.
“Where’s my dress?”
Gabrielle gave me a sheepish, one-shouldered shrug. She reached down to the floor and brought up a shapeless bundle of filthy, decaying fabric. If not for the familiar bodice, I almost wouldn’t have recognized the tattered silk, which looked like it had been stored somewhere damp and dank for … well, for a decade. Now the fabric literally disintegrated in Gabrielle’s hands. As I stared, gray flakes of it fluttered to the floor like ash.
“The transition affected you, not the clothes. So your dress … kind of didn’t make it,” she said. “I had to put you in one of the actress’s bathrobes when this thing started to get a little PG-thirteen.”
My eyes flickered to Felix, whose cheeks flushed. I said a silent prayer of thanks that Gabrielle had been the one to dress me … even if I couldn’t understand how.
I rubbed at my temple, where a headache inexplicably pounded. “This all happened because of that ceremony last night, didn’t it? Because of Voodoo?”
“Yes—because of a Lazarus spell.”
A shiver ran down my spine. “A what? You’d better start explaining. Like, now.”
Gabrielle shifted, still looking a little guilty. “I will, but I have to go back a bit, okay?”
I gave her one cold nod, and she went on.
“Even before I died, I was into Voodoo. Mostly just for fun, although my grandpa actually practiced it. Once, before he died, he told me about the Conjure Café. He said it was run by an old friend—one of the most powerful Voodoo priestesses in New Orleans. So when I realized that I was dead, I started haunting the place. Watching Marie, learning whatever I could. Mostly about the dead, and how to make my own spells.
“About two months ago I hit pay dirt—Marie finally left one of her conjure books open to a page with something called the Lazarus spell on it. It was perfect, exactly what I’d been looking for, except for a few minor details. So I memorized it and added my own little twists. Then I made Felix swipe some items from the Conjure and go with me to the St. Louis cemetery. There, with his help, I performed the first Lazarus ceremony—the one that changed me.”
“Like the ritual performed last night?” I asked.
“The exact ritual. It’s similar to all those Haitian Voodoo rituals you see in documentaries but different in one important way. In Voodoo, resurrection magic typically reanimates the body without the soul. But I figured out a way to revive the soul … without the living body.”
“How?” I demanded, my voice frosty with skepticism.
“The Lazarus spell is based on an offering,” Gabrielle said. “An exchange has to be made in order for it to work. When it does, the resurrection gives ghosts a quasi-physical form, and some amazing abilities. Like, we can make ourselves visible to the living whenever we want. And because we aren’t really alive, we can’t get hurt. Plus, we get to wear different clothes and hairstyles again, which is—in my opinion—an absolute necessity. The resurrection gives us sensations, too. We get to smell things … we even get to eat again.”
Felix cleared his throat and gave his sister a pointed look. “Except for …?” he prompted.
Gabrielle’s mouth twisted in frustration and reluctant defeat.
“Okay, okay.” she conceded. “There are a few drawbacks. You see, magic only works on the basis of a trade. To gain a few things, you have to give up some others.”
So far she’d given me nothing but sunny reviews about my new, in-between state of being. But I could hear the evasion in her voice.
Fighting my growing nausea, I kept my tone low and dangerous.
“What exactly did I give up for this, Gaby?”
She pinched her lips into a thin line, grabbed a loose curl of her Afro, and twisted it wildly around her index finger. Finally, at the moment my patience had almost run out, she spoke. Hesitantly, like she already feared my reaction.
“In order to live this half-life,” she said, “you have to deal with a few negatives. First, you had to experience that pain last night, where the force of the change lights you up and makes your heart act like it has restarted. So … that was one sacrifice. Next, you can’t vanish at will anymore, I think because you’re more substantial now. And last, you had to … to give up … something else.”
I gave her a withering look and leaned closer. “What ‘else,’ Gabrielle?”
She fiddled silently with her hair for a few more seconds and then, in a rush, said, “Touch. We think you’ve lost the ability to touch.”
“But I can touch stuff right now,” I argued. I demonstrated by slapping my hand against the slipcover beneath me and tugging on the terry cloth lapel of my robe.
Gabrielle smiled apologetically.
“Yeah, you get that kind of sensation back. But … well, there’s something that made you special. It’s the reason why I agreed to help your boyfriend in the first place. I thought you’d keep it after the transformation, but there must have been a complication. We didn’t figure out until last night, when Felix tried to touch you.” She cringed before finishing: “We’re pretty s
ure you’ve lost the ability to touch the living.”
I stared at her blankly. “What?”
Gabrielle tilted her head toward Felix in some sort of unspoken signal. He nodded and pushed himself out of the chair. Then he strode over to the couch and knelt beside me. Frowning, he laid one gentle hand upon mine.
Or, at least, he tried to. Where our skin touched, I felt nothing. No electricity or sparks. Just the standard numbness I’d felt before this transformation.
I yanked my hand from under his. “That doesn’t mean anything. That could just be specific to you and me.”
“Maybe,” Gabrielle said doubtfully. Her expression told me she knew exactly who I was thinking about when it came to touching. “Maybe the only living person you could touch was Lover Boy. We can always get him and find out …”
I shook my head weakly. “No, we can’t.”
She had the decency to look regretful for a moment. Not for a very long moment, however, as she cheerfully offered, “You can still touch me, if that makes you feel better.”
I simply scowled at her. After that I sat motionless, trying desperately to process all this information. While I did so, a few sneering comments and denials ran through my head—rebuttals to everything Gabrielle had just said. But instead of voicing my thoughts aloud, I fell back against the couch.
“I don’t feel so well,” I whispered, and my stomach snarled again as if to back me up. Felix gave me a sympathetic glance before grabbing a designer trash can from under a side table and placing it next to my feet.
“Thank you,” I murmured absently, unable to look him in the eye. For a while I just slumped into the sofa cushions, thoughtlessly monitoring the heavy thud in my chest. My mind had gone empty. Blank.
Until one word whispered in my head.
Joshua.
It felt wrong to say his name, even if I didn’t do it out loud.
My head started to spin with questions. Had I really lost my ability to touch him? And did it even matter?
Of course it mattered. It mattered terribly. Although I’d sworn to protect him—even if that meant never seeing him again—I couldn’t stand the idea that I would live at least some kind of life without him in it. Every time my heart beat, every time I experienced some previously lost sensation, he wouldn’t be there to share it with me.