I glanced involuntarily toward my bedroom. The temperature drop my mom had referenced likely meant a spectral visitor, or ten. I could hear vague whispers coming from the hall as they talked among themselves. At least they knew enough to know I wouldn’t like finding them here and were trying to be discreet. Without a spirit guide to keep them in line, they’d been breaking all kinds of rules lately, like coming to my house and waiting for me in my freaking bedroom.
But I’d find a way to deal with it, if I had to. I wasn’t going to hold my mom prisoner with my problems. She’d already been through that enough.
I cleared my throat. “So, uh, whose house?” I asked. “I mean, are you going there, or is he coming here? And when is—”
She shook her head. “I’m going to tell him no.”
“Because you’re not ready or…”
She avoided my gaze.
I sighed. “Because of me.”
“You’re my son,” she said fiercely, looking up at me. “And we take care of each other.”
I nodded, recognizing the words as similar to those she’d said in the hours following my father’s funeral. It had been only the two of us for years now.
She straightened up. “Besides, you need me right now with Alona off flitting around somewhere, paying no attention to her duties.” Her mouth tightened in disapproval.
I grimaced at the lie I’d given her to explain Alona’s absence and the increase in ghost activity around me. I couldn’t tell her that Alona was directly responsible for Lily’s amazing “recovery.” My mom had handled the ghost-talker thing fairly well, but Alona’s spirit in Lily’s body? That was beyond even her most liberal thinking. And she’d never particularly liked Alona to begin with, so I didn’t want to make things worse.
“Mom, as much as I appreciate that, there’s nothing you can do,” I pointed out, trying to be as careful as I could not to hurt her feelings. “This is something I have to work out on my own.”
“I know that,” she said, with exaggerated patience. “I’m certainly not capable of helping you resolve any of your”—she eyed the basement door, which was open a crack, checking to see that Sam hadn’t returned—“issues.” She reached out and took my hand, squeezing it. “But I can at least make sure you have a safe place to be yourself until you figure it out.”
I shook my head, feeling the sting of tears in my eyes and nose. “You shouldn’t have to give up your life, not any more than you already have.”
She waved my words away. “Who says I’m giving up anything?” She stood and took her mug to the sink. “That farmhouse of his is a wreck still, especially the kitchen. And in six months or a year”—she shrugged—“his renovations will be done and maybe you’ll be ready to be on your own. It’s not the end of the world.”
But I could hear the forced note of cheeriness in her voice. Sam had already proposed multiple times, and moving in together was less than what he wanted. How long would he be willing to wait for that? Especially without knowing the truth about what was going on with me.
My mom had decided that she didn’t want Sam to feel forced into believing something that most people found pretty far out there. Okay, fine, but without that context, he might think she’d never come around. That we were like those permanently messed-up, codependent mothers and sons. Norman Bates and his mom, or whatever.
“Do me a favor,” I said.
She turned away from the sink and raised an eyebrow at me, her hands already covered in bubbles from scrubbing the tea mug. She always cleans when she’s upset, especially when she’s not admitting that she’s upset. “What’s that?” she asked, obviously suspicious that I was going to try to talk her into something.
“Just…don’t say no yet.”
She opened her mouth, but I kept going before she could speak. “Give me a couple more weeks. Tell him you need time to think about it, if you have to, but don’t tell him no. Please.”
“Nothing is going to change that quickly.” She looked tired suddenly. “I don’t want to give him false hope.”
“I’m working on something, okay? I just need a little more time.” If I couldn’t at least find a lead by then, it probably wasn’t going to happen any time soon. In which case, contingency plans would need to be made. And living at home forever was not one of them.
My mom narrowed her eyes at me. “William, if you’re putting yourself in danger—”
“Totally safe, promise.” Which was true…to an extent. Leaving things as they were would be far more dangerous—that much was certain.
She nodded slowly, not quite sure whether to believe me. “All right.”
“Thanks.” I stood, shoved my chair in, and, before leaving the kitchen, took the extra couple of steps to kiss her cheek, startling her. “I got this. Don’t worry,” I said, wishing I felt as certain as I sounded.
But first things first. Before I could continue working on a way to get Alona back in spirit form—and consequently, giving my mom her life back—I had to address a more immediate problem. I left my mom at the sink, with the sound of Sam’s footsteps coming up the basement stairs, to head back to my bedroom.
Once upon a time, my house had been a ghost-free zone. I had done my best to hide my identity as a ghost-talker, and the few ghosts who’d figured it out had never managed to follow me home.
Ghosts are not omniscient. They don’t know anything more than they did when they were alive, other than what they learn by watching, listening, and, well, walking through walls. So my exact address had remained a mystery to them, thankfully.
The trouble was, as soon as my reputation started to spread—thanks in part to Alona’s initial desire to make sure everyone knew she was my guide and therefore better/more important than the rest of them—more spirits started recognizing me on sight. And constantly staying on guard and making sure I wasn’t followed became more difficult. When Alona had been my guide, she’d kept everyone in line, literally. But now? Not so much.
Unfortunately, the dead look pretty much like the living, unless their clothes are obviously outdated or you catch them passing through a solid object, which they can’t do when they’re around me anyway. So, checking to make sure the strange guy behind you on the sidewalk is, in fact, breathing and not a ghost trying to stalk you is a little tricky.
As it turns out, ghosts don’t usually mind being asked about their status in the living world—it’s attention, and for most of them, they’ve been running short of that for years—but the living tend to kind of…freak out.
I’d done the best I could to be careful when coming to and going from my house, but it only took one or two of them to track me down and then spread the word. Consequently, my bedroom at times now had more ghosts in it than a hospital, cemetery, and funeral home combined. Fun.
As soon as I hit the hallway, someone noticed me, and the whispers that I’d been able to ignore in the kitchen started to rise in volume until they hit what could only be described as a clamor. Five or so ghosts were crowded into the hall in a half-assed kind of line that started at my bedroom doorway and crossed in front of the bathroom.
Doing my best to project a calm that was in complete contrast to the sweaty nervousness I was feeling, I ignored the voices and the hands reaching out to grasp me.
“Will, please—”
“I need you to tell them—”
“—you help us?”
“—stop him from selling the house?”
No one tried to pin me down—that was good—and I managed to slip through into my bedroom. I shut the door, catching someone’s fingers between it and the frame. An indignant and surprised yelp followed.
Yeah, some of them were still trying to adjust to the idea of having physicality around me. That was actually a good thing. It meant they weren’t as likely to try physical coercion or violence to get what they wanted…yet.
In my room, the ghost situation was worse—probably ten of them—but at least I recognized most of them as people from the list
Alona had begun assembling for me a few months ago. They knew I’d been working on helping them. They’d seen Grandpa B., one of their former fellow haunters, go into the light, and I’d told them about how Liesel and Eric had finally found their peace last month. So they wouldn’t get too pushy…most likely.
“Any luck?” a ghost in a poodle skirt asked hopefully, her ponytail swinging as she got off the foot of the bed to greet me. A bunch of faces turned toward me expectantly, including that of a vaguely familiar-looking woman wearing a tight blue business suit, her dark red hair in a fancy twist. She actually pushed her way forward from the back to hear my response.
They all thought I was looking for Alona. It was, again, a story I’d been forced to come up with on the fly to explain her absence and my diminished ability to help them. There were too many of them, and without Alona, I couldn’t get as much done. Not to mention the time suck that researching anything and everything to try to separate Alona from Lily had turned out to be.
Leaning back against the door, I shook my head. An audible groan went up from them at once, as if they’d rehearsed it. And I suppose, in a way, they had. They were showing up here two or three times a week now, with the same question, and I was always forced to give the same answer.
Telling them the truth would have been a mess. If other ghosts knew what Alona had been able to do—taking on a body, possessing it, for lack of a better term—there might be a run of them trying to do the same on anyone they found who seemed to be in an unconscious or comatose state. And that was the last thing we needed. Most of them probably wouldn’t succeed…or not for very long, at least. It took a great deal of power, apparently, to do what Alona was doing. A red-level spirit or above, according to the classification system the Order used. Still, we weren’t entirely sure of the effects these attempts might have on the living, nor did we want a rash of five-minute-long possessions, which would, frankly, be creepy as hell.
So as far as anyone in the spirit world was concerned, Alona had taken off for locations unknown after we’d had a fight. That last part, at least, didn’t require much of an imagination stretch.
The poodle-skirt girl shook her head, ponytail bobbing with the movement. “You should have apologized right away,” she said disapprovingly.
“How do you know I was the one in the wrong?” I asked, offended in spite of the fact that we were talking about an argument that had never happened.
“Please.” She rolled her eyes and flounced over to perch at the foot of my bed again.
“I keep telling you, she’s gone.” Evan, the creepy janitor dude from my former high school, spoke up, smashing his mop down impatiently into the bucket/wringer that was always with him. “Disappeared, poof, vamoosed. She doesn’t respond when you summon her. She’s not here at her time of death.” He shook his head. “The bond is broken. She ain’t coming back.”
Which was all true, but not the direction I wanted this conversation to go. I held my hands up and tried soothing. “We don’t know what—”
“No, I think we do.” He jabbed a finger in my direction. “And you need to start focusing on what’s important, not chasing after your piece of ghosty tail.” He smirked.
A barely muffled round of snickering emerged from the crowd, and I felt my face get hot. Evidently, Alona and I had not been as discreet as I’d thought. Technically, there wasn’t anything wrong with our relationship. Except, I suppose, the part where I was alive and she was…not. Still, it wasn’t like that. We’d known each other when she was alive, and we were the same age…Oh, forget it.
I tried to rally and regain control over the room, despite all the smirking faces. “And I take it you want me to start by helping you?” I asked Evan.
“I’ve been waiting.” He leaned his mop against the wall and stepped forward, hands out in an “I’m here” gesture and a grin stretching across his acne-scarred face.
Except he’d been sent to the back of the line by Alona, I knew, which meant that most, if not all, of these people should have been ahead of him. To my surprise, though, none of them protested his advancement, which could only mean they’d given up on the order Alona had established and were desperate enough to see someone, anyone, helped to give them hope that they would one day be in his position.
Not good.
It was also a problem because it was Evan.
“Well, come on, then.” He stepped around several of the others and patted my desk chair eagerly. “Turn on your machine and let’s get cracking.” He looked from my computer to me expectantly, and the ghosts shuffled and shifted around in my room, moving closer like they wanted to be sure not to miss any of the show.
I sighed. “Evan, you killed people.”
“It was an accident!” he protested.
“I know,” I said wearily. Sort of. To hear Evan’s side of it, he’d only intended to scare the kids he’d caught tagging and egging the school in the middle of the night. Actually, he hadn’t even caught them. He’d heard gossip about the intended midnight prank during the day and planned to stake out the school until they showed. It had, apparently, become a point of pride for the Groundsboro students in the early nineties to torture him by making messes they knew he’d have to clean up. And he’d become equally determined to catch them in the act and turn them over to the cops. Unfortunately—or not, as it turned out—they’d moved up their plans, and by the time he arrived, they were already done and trying to make a not-so-clean getaway. Per Evan’s description, it looked like a chicken factory and a paint factory had exploded simultaneously—minus the feathers…and the fact that there is no such thing as a chicken factory. But whatever. This was Evan’s story.
The perpetrators scrambled to get back into their pickup, even as they taunted Evan on his late arrival. Infuriated and humiliated, he’d accelerated at them in his van, intending to brake and swerve at the last second. Except he didn’t.
He said his brakes had failed, but the police hadn’t been able to find evidence of that. Two kids had ended up dead, and a third one was badly injured. It didn’t help that one of the kids who’d died was the son of a prominent lawyer. Evan had been convicted, given the death penalty, and executed by lethal injection in 2002, right before they put a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois, which still rankled him to this day.
“You’ve already tried apologizing,” I pointed out. He’d attempted to make amends to the affected families before his death, but it hadn’t helped. He was still stuck here, in between. “What else do you want to do?”
“I don’t know!” He folded his arms over his jump suited chest. “That’s your job to figure out.”
Like I didn’t have enough to do? Like my own problems weren’t already trying to hold my head under the water until I quit breathing? At least I was trying to solve them instead of dumping them in someone else’s lap. So, blame it on frustration, momentary insanity, or just forgetting for a second that the guy was a killer—no matter what he said—but suddenly I couldn’t keep my mouth shut any longer. “How about telling the truth, for a change? You didn’t swerve because you didn’t want to, and that’s what’s keeping you here.”
Dumb, Will, definitely dumb.
He lunged at me, and the room exploded in noise.
The woman in the suit, the one who I’d noticed earlier, appeared in front of me suddenly, blocking Evan’s path. “Back off.” She shoved at him, and he stumbled, looking stunned. “And the rest of you, shut it already,” she said to the others. She glanced at me, as if expecting my gratitude and/or approval.
But I was too distracted. I recognized her now. It was Spring Break Girl from Malachi’s place…except she was dressed differently. She’d ditched her bikini top and shorts for a suit that clung to her curves and a fancy, twisty hairstyle, both of which made her look older than the nineteen or twenty she’d probably been. How was that even possible? Ghosts couldn’t change their appearances, not like that.
“Do you really think this is going to get you anywhe
re?” she demanded of the other spirits, hands on her hips. With her attention on them again, I got a better glimpse of the back of her head, which appeared slightly, uh, dented.
I grimaced.
“Who are you?” Evan asked her, sulking. Defeated by a girl—one more float for his pity parade.
She turned and beamed at me with determination and maybe the faintest hint of crazy. “I’m the help he’s been looking for.”
Oh. Crap.
I waited until Will’s car pulled away before I crossed back over to Sacred Heart. I wasn’t ready to be Lily Turner, even for pretend, at this exact moment. Fury and hurt burned in my gut in a potent mix.
I didn’t object to Will caring so much about her; my problem was more that he didn’t seem to care nearly as much about me. I was the spirit here, the soul. Lily, the realLily, not this body, was probably up on a cloud laughing her ass off at all of this. Or…since this wasn’t a cartoon, in the light, completely at peace, unaware and unconcerned about the corporeal struggles of the rest of us. That was more likely.
Bitch.
I’d been there once. In the light. I don’t remember any of it, other than fleeting memories of this sensation of overwhelming peace and acceptance. Then I’d found myself back here on this ball of dirt, stuck between the living and the dead once more, no explanation, no “thanks for playing,” nothing.
I’d told Will what I’d had to, what made the most sense—that I’d been sent back to learn more and to help him. It was easier than explaining that I’d been rejected—me!—and I didn’t even know why.
Actually, if I were being honest, it was even worse than that. Getting rejected without knowing why was one thing. But I’d been in the light for nearly a month before they’d decided to boot me. Like there was some flaw with my character that was visible only upon closer inspection. Or someone had decided I needed a further taste of karma, and offered acceptance only to yank it away, just as Misty and I had done on occasion to those petitioning for first-tier status. At the time it had seemed almost a kindness to at least let them believe they had a chance when most of them didn’t. But now…now I saw things a little differently.