Dedication

To my new son, Wyatt –

you are my greatest challenge, and my biggest reward.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

The entire world had gone dark, and I had no idea why.

No matter how widely I opened my eyes, no matter how many times I craned my neck or spun around in search of even one speck of light, I found none. There was nothing but thick, impenetrable darkness.

Before I’d opened my eyes to all this pitch-black, I had the vague impression that I’d just been someplace warm, familiar. Someplace safe.

But wherever I was now, I didn’t feel safe at all. I felt sightless and trapped. Like I was on the verge of being consumed by the darkness … like it was trying to eat me whole.

Although I couldn’t see, I could still hear things: the swish of my long dress as I whirled in useless, searching circles; the hiss of my increasingly panicked breath.

I heard something else, too—some sound I couldn’t quite identify. Not at first.

It started softly, almost muffled. A strange noise echoing out from beneath layers and layers of cotton. But as the sound grew in volume, it also deepened. Slowly, it transformed into something stronger. Something that more closely resembled a continuous thudding.

When the thudding gained a certain steadiness—a rhythm—I sucked in one sharp breath.

I recognized the sound now, and it made me want to scream.

If I were anyone else—anything else—I probably wouldn’t have reacted that way. After all, the rhythmic thudding of a heartbeat usually meant something positive. It meant life.

But for me, an audible heartbeat meant only one thing: someone nearby was dying.

It wouldn’t be me, of course. I hadn’t felt a genuine heartbeat in my chest since the day I drowned, on the night of my eighteenth birthday more than ten years ago.

The sound I heard now was definitely made by a living heart. And I couldn’t fight the horrible suspicion that it belonged to someone I loved.

Joshua Mayhew, for instance. Or even his little sister, Jillian. Both very much alive, and both of whose heartbeats I monitored carefully after I’d worked so hard to protect them.

Hearing that terrible thudding now, I forced myself to calm down and focus more intently on the darkness. I strained and squinted, peering into the dark until, blessedly, weak light began to shimmer along the edges of my vision. I watched each new sliver closely, silently praying that it would reveal the owner of that heart. Selfishly praying that it wouldn’t be Joshua. As I waited impatiently, another realization struck me: I could rely on senses other than sight and hearing. This was strange, considering the fact that ghosts can’t smell, taste, or feel anything outside themselves. At least not very often.

Yet I could smell a sweet, musty decay all around me. It overlay the scent of damp air. Combined, the scents had an almost disorienting effect. The smells, the heartbeat, the shifting darkness—all of it made me dizzy and uncomfortable.

Thankfully, the light grew brighter, and I could finally see that I stood in a dim room. Across from me, heavily slatted shutters ran from a wood-planked floor up to a beamed ceiling. The shutters blocked most of the light from what could only be the sun, shining outside a wall of windows.

Furniture filled the room: randomly placed chairs and end tables, as well as a low coffee table that flanked a couch. Flung across the couch, in some sort of makeshift slipcover, was a white bedsheet. And flung across the sheet was a person.

At first I thought she might be a child. On closer inspection, I realized the tiny figure was actually closer to my own age. She had curled into a protective ball on the couch, spine pressed to the back cushions and sharp hip bone jutting up in the air. Her head lolled sideways onto one of the couch’s arms, and her dark brown hair cascaded in a tangle to the floor.

Even in the darkness of the room I could see the unhealthy sheen of her skin. Sweat glistened upon her sunken cheeks, and her eyes fluttered behind their closed lids.

Something about the girl’s face gave me an actual chill. Something about her features …

I leaned closer for a better look, and, at that moment, the girl opened her eyes to stare blankly into the room. Her eyes were red rimmed and unfocused, addled by either sleep or some kind of chemical. Probably the latter, judging by the overturned prescription bottle that had spilled a rainbow of pills across the table in front of her.

Under normal circumstances—if anything about this scene could be classified as normal—I would have been worried about this girl. However ineffectively, I would have tried to find someone to help her. I would have grasped at her with my dead, incapable hands.

But these were not normal circumstances.

Because just one sight of the girl’s eyes rooted me to the floor. Those eyes, though bloodshot and bleary, were still a luminous green, shining out from a face I knew very well.

My own.

Death, a voice rasped in my head. It always starts with death.

I bolted upright with a shriek.

Immediately, I felt the press of a hand upon mine. My adrenaline surged at the unexpected touch, and I moved to jerk away from it. Whoever had pressed against my hand grabbed it more tightly and held me firmly in place. It took a few more seconds of struggling before I calmed down enough to look at the face of my captor.

He stared back at me, his eyebrows furrowed above dark blue eyes. With one of his hands grasping mine, he ran the other through his black hair and then rested his palm upon the back of his neck—a nervous, worried gesture.

Without warning, I threw my free arm around my captor’s neck and pressed my lips to his.

At that moment I didn’t care that I was dead and shouldn’t have been sleeping, much less dreaming; I didn’t care that I’d dreamed about myself in some unfamiliar, near-death state; nor did I care that I should behave more carefully around the boy I now kissed since I was invisible and he wasn’t.

All I cared was that Joshua kissed me back.

Wherever his hands clutched at my bare skin—my arms, my shoulders, my exposed thigh—they ignited a shower of fiery sparks. Even my lips burned from their contact with his.

This minor miracle happened every time we touched. At each press of my ghostly flesh to his living, Joshua and I both experienced waves of sensation that, with prolonged contact, turned into the actual feel of each other’s skin.

Maybe this was unique to me and Joshua, maybe not. For all I knew, every ghost-to-spiritually-aware-human interaction happened this way. Whatever the case, I knew one thing for sure: I never grew tired of it.

I sighed quietly when Joshua pulled his lips from mine. Although I sighed in disappointment that our kiss had ended, I also sighed in relief. As Joshua leaned away from me, I could see we were alone in his bedroom, lying on his bed. No one had seen us kiss.

But my relief turned into embarrassment when I realized that, during our kiss, I must have rolled on top of him. Joshua was now beneath me, with my thighs pressed against either side of his hips. My filmy white dress—the one in which I’d died and was now cursed to wear forever—had crept up to a seriously inappropriate height on my thighs.

Gape mouthed, I stared down at Joshua. His mussed hair and his lack of a T-shirt told me that my post-nightmare shriek had woken him up, too. And his broad grin told me he wasn’t even slightly embarrassed by our current position.

“Yikes,” I murmured. I moved to roll myself off, but he pinned me to him by wrapping one arm around my waist.

“Aw,” Joshua protested. “No ‘yikes,’ Amelia. Why don’t you make yourself comfortable up there?” His grin turned wolfish as he secured his other arm around me.

I scowled. “Joshua Mayhew, even if I’m in your bed every night, I’m not … cheap.”

Although his bedside clock read 3 a.m., Joshua laughed so loudly his entire family could have heard him, if they were awake.

“Amelia Ashley,” Joshua teased. “The fact that you’re in my bed every night means I don’t think you’re cheap. And, for the record, I think it’s adorable that you used the word ‘cheap.’ You are aware it’s the twenty-first century, right?”

“What can I say? I’m a twentieth-century kind of girl,” I grumbled; but I let him tug me closer, until I had to drop my arms on either side of him to keep myself upright.

Hovering there, I studied Joshua’s face for a moment: his midnight-sky colored eyes, his full mouth, his high cheekbones. Then I peeked at the nearly bare body extending beneath that face. And beneath me.

“Well,” I murmured, “since I’m already here …”

Then I dipped down and pressed my lips to his again.

Beneath my kiss, I felt Joshua smile triumphantly. As he moved his mouth against mine, he placed his fingertips on the delicate skin beneath my jaw. Then he ran them down my throat to my collarbone, where he traced them lightly back and forth.

I moaned quietly, and, in an instant, Joshua rolled us over so that he stretched out above me. I closed my eyes and placed my hands on his bare back, anticipating the moment I would feel his skin, smooth and warm and real. In my excitement, I hitched one leg up and wrapped it around Joshua’s hip.

And with that gesture, I stopped feeling anything at all.

I opened my eyes and sighed, not really surprised by what I now saw above me. Instead of the ceiling of Joshua’s bedroom, a maze of trees branches—bare except for a heavy layer of frost—tangled together. A mix of rain and sleet now fell noisily around me. Luckily, I couldn’t feel the sting of ice as it battered my shoulders.

As I pushed myself into a seated position and took in the rest of my surroundings, however, I didn’t feel very lucky. To my right, a squat brick structure—a chimney, I think—rose up toward the sky. Beneath me, row upon row of shingles sloped precariously down toward a very familiar backyard.

Excellent. I always wanted to know what the Mayhews’ roof looked like.

At that dry thought, I pulled my legs into my chest, wrapped my arms around them, and lay my head on my knees. Then I puffed out a big, angry sigh.

I guess I should have been grateful, considering how short a distance I materialized tonight. The last time this happened, I’d opened my eyes to what I’m pretty sure was an entirely different county.

Before materializations like this one started occurring, I honestly thought I’d learned to control them—learned how to prevent the ghostly vanishings that transported me, unwilling, to someplace else, sometime else.

I was wrong, obviously.

It wasn’t that I wanted to materialize away from Joshua tonight. Far from it. But over the past few months, I’d come to the sad realization that we couldn’t go much further than we already had, physically, without me disappearing into thin air. Every time we kissed too long, or held each other too closely, I’d vanish. If Joshua’s fingers strayed too far below my collarbone—zap, to a deserted car lot. If I loosened just one of his buttons—poof, to the top of a picnic table at some rest stop on the side of the highway.

Each time I vanished, I could materialize back instantly, free from ice or any other kind of harm. But the mood was always dampened, to say the least.

And each time I vanished, I slowly learned my lesson: unless I kept a tighter guard on my emotions, and my actions with Joshua, I had no control over what happened to my body.

I guess I hadn’t learned the lesson well enough. Not yet.

I couldn’t help but sigh loudly. This situation was so unfair I could almost taste it, tart and bitter on my tongue. After all, my desire wasn’t so crazy, so outrageous, that it needed to be denied in such a harsh way. What I wanted—what Joshua and I both wanted—was simple, and normal, and genuine.

And obviously impossible.

I lifted my head from my knees and sighed again. There was nothing I could do about the problem now except get back to Joshua and try to make things right. As right as they could be anyway.

I closed my eyes and focused on the house beneath me. I heard a soft whoosh of air, and when I opened my eyes, I found myself sitting on a bed, staring into the familiar glow of Joshua’s bedside lamp.

If only all my materializations could be this controlled.

Behind me I heard the shifting sound of bedsprings. I threw a wary glance over my shoulder and saw Joshua. He’d propped himself against his headboard and faced forward, frowning in deep thought.

I’d expected to find him frustrated, or angry, or maybe even a little sad. Instead, Joshua simply looked … intent. Like he was trying to solve some difficult problem.

Sensing my presence, he stirred and caught my eye. Without leaning away from the headboard, he stretched his arm across the bed to me.

“Hey, stranger,” he said with a slight smile.

I groaned, turning more fully toward him before I took his offered hand. “How long was I gone this time?”

“Not too long—only a few minutes. Getting better, I think.”

I snorted. “Better? Seriously? It’s hardly getting better if it just keeps happening.”

Joshua shook his head and smiled wider, undeterred. “You’re wrong, Amelia. The disappearances are getting shorter and shorter. I bet they stop happening altogether soon. It’s going to get easier—I promise.”

In the face of his perpetual optimism, I bit my lip to keep my mouth shut. Or to keep my response locked inside, more like it.

How could I tell Joshua the truth about what I’d really been thinking lately: that our relationship would never get easier? That if things were this difficult now, when we were both young, they would grow insurmountable as Joshua aged.

Because, inevitably, Joshua would age. Very soon he would graduate from Wilburton High School and move away to college. At some point he would probably want a girl he could introduce to his family, one whom all of them could see and half of them wouldn’t want to exorcise. A girl he could make out with for more than ten minutes. A girl with whom, maybe someday, he’d start a family.

A girl I could never be.

Still biting my lip, I looked at Joshua more closely. The soft, hopeful look in his eyes told me that he didn’t share my troubled thoughts. At least, not at the moment.

“So, where’d you go this time?” he asked, taking his hand from mine and brushing a strand of hair off my face.

I pulled my lip from my teeth and tilted my head to one side. “Your roof, actually.”

Joshua’s eyes widened. After a long, stunned pause, he cleared his throat. In an intentionally calm voice, he asked, “Oh? And how was it up there?”

“Icy. Probably freezing.”

Joshua grimaced, from either the idea of the storm outside or the thought of me sitting in it. “This one wasn’t like any of your old nightmares, was it?”

“No, thank God for that,” I said, shuddering.

I hadn’t had a real nightmare in several months, at least not in the way I defined the word “nightmare.”

Before I’d met Joshua, before I’d saved him from drowning in the same river I had, a series of waking nightmares controlled my afterlife. In daylight as well as darkness, I would sometimes lose consciousness and then relive part of my death. Upon waking, I would find myself someplace other than where I’d been just before the nightmare occurred. I’d learned these nightmares were involuntary materializations, much like the ones I experienced now, but worse.

I still wasn’t entirely sure why the nightmares had ended. I suspected it had something to do with the fact that I now remembered the details of my death. Or maybe because I’d fought back against the dark spirits who had engineered that death.

Whichever the case, the end of the nightmares meant the beginning of an entirely new set of troubles. These new—but still unwanted—materializations, for example. And then there were the weird dreams, like the one I’d had tonight.

I didn’t like thinking about the dreams, but after one occurred, I just couldn’t stop. I obsessed over their details, trying—without much success—to find a pattern in them, or a reason for them.

So far each dream differed in content from the previous one. But they all shared a pretty common theme. All of them happened at night, when I shouldn’t have been sleeping, and all of them were incredibly disturbing.

In each dream I saw people for whom I cared but couldn’t speak to them, couldn’t touch them. Sometimes I saw Joshua, watching me with a cold, impassive expression while I begged him for help. Sometimes I saw Jillian drop to her knees in pain as Eli—the cruel ghost who had tried to acquire my soul for his demonic masters—tore the life from her.

Or sometimes I saw my father’s ghost, wandering lost beneath the ruins of the bridge I’d destroyed several months ago in an effort to protect Joshua and Jillian from Eli. In those dreams my father called out to me. He asked, in a broken voice, why I hadn’t yet freed him from the dark netherworld that waited just outside the living boundaries of High Bridge.

I hated those dreams the most.

Tonight’s dream, however, was a new one. Never before had I watched myself like some outside observer; never before had I seen myself hurting, maybe even dying, in a setting I didn’t recognize.

I didn’t exactly have the clearest memories of my life before death, but most things I recalled had at least a touch of familiarity to them. Nothing about tonight’s dream, however, seemed familiar—not the dark room or the shabby furniture. The only aspect of the room I recognized was the girl on the couch. Me, maybe.

So … what on earth was I supposed to make of that?

I shook my head and curled up beside Joshua without touching him. Joshua mirrored my position, facing me. My long silence didn’t seem to bother him, probably because I’d had so many of them lately.

“Well,” he finally said. “At least tonight’s materialization wasn’t a nightmare. But you did sit up screaming earlier. Do you want to tell me what that was about?”

My eyes darted down to the pillow beneath my head, away from Joshua’s intent gaze. I shrugged. “Another one of those weird dreams I keep having. This one was different, though. Weirder.”

I felt Joshua twitch beside me. “How so?” he asked.

I continued to study the pillow while I described the dream’s eerie details. When I finished, Joshua blew out a puff of air.

“That’s … well, that’s creepy, Amelia.”

“Very. And the even bigger issue is that I don’t sleep. The fact I’m dreaming at all makes me think these dreams are—I don’t know—important maybe? Tonight’s dream really makes me wonder. Everything seemed so real: the sounds, the smells.”

“And you’re sure you saw yourself alive in this one?”

“Well … not completely sure. The girl looked a lot like me, but there was something else about her. Something I can’t put my finger on.”

Joshua frowned, thoughtful. “Maybe the girl was just some, you know, manifestation. Of your worries.”

Despite my apprehensive mood, I couldn’t help but laugh. “Wow, Dr. Mayhew. Someone’s been doing his psychology homework.”

“My favorite elective.” Joshua chuckled good-naturedly. Then he yawned.

I propped myself up on my elbow, glanced over his shoulder at his bedside clock, and fell back onto the bed beside him.

“We can talk more about this later,” I said. “It’s past four already, and you’ve got a calculus final today.”

“Don’t remind me.” He groaned, pulling his own pillow around his ears in a U shape. “Why sleep at all? I’ll probably get a better score if I just try to hallucinate the answers.”

“I’m not going to let you hallucinate your way through your last final. We’ve been studying for weeks. So … sleep.”

With the pillow still pressed to his ears, Joshua shook his head. But even through the fabric, I heard the muffled sound of another yawn.

I guess I didn’t need to give him any more commands or warnings because soon, without further protest, he began to drift off. Eventually, his breath deepened enough that I knew he’d fallen asleep again.

With an enormous sigh, I rolled over to stare blankly at the ceiling. For a while I tried to stay calm and restful. To run through a few of the calculus equations Joshua had struggled with the most. But soon, instead of numbers, my head started to spin with all the lingering questions that still plagued me.

Several months ago I thought I’d finally solved my greatest problems. I’d begun to piece together the sketchy details of my past and gain control of my ghostly powers. I’d prevented Eli from trapping me in the dark netherworld and forcing me to become a sort of grim reaper like him. Even Joshua’s grandmother Ruth and her coven of ghost hunters had left me alone as some sort of repayment for saving Jillian’s life.

So I’d earned a chance to enjoy whatever time I had left with Joshua, right?

Wrong.

Instead, my new, Eli- and Ruth-free existence had only become peaceful enough to allow another mess of problems into it. There were too many things to think about, too many issues I couldn’t resolve. Like the haunting image of my doppelgänger languishing in that dank room. Or my total inability to kiss my boyfriend for more than a few minutes. Or … or …

“Ugh,” I muttered in disgust, but then clamped my lips shut when I heard a small hitch in Joshua’s breath.

When he began to breathe evenly again, I carefully slipped off the bed and tiptoed to the broad window seat on the other side of the room. I curled up on the seat’s thick blue cushions, tucking my feet beneath me and pressing my forehead to the windowpane.

Right now I’d give just about anything to feel the glass, cold and soothing against my skin. No such luck, though. I felt only the numb pressure of the pane in front of me and the cushion beneath me.

Just two more objects in the living world I couldn’t really touch.

Forehead still pressed against the window, hair hanging around my face so I couldn’t see anything but the dark, icy view outside, I shook my head. Then I burrowed more fully into the cushions, settling in for another troubled night spent obsessing over the things I would never be able to change.

A sharp clunk rang out beneath me as someone’s foot connected with the wooden leg of the chair in which I now sat. I looked up in time to see Jillian’s eyes dart guiltily down to her bowl of cereal.

I spared a quick glance at Joshua. He must have heard the sound too, because he glared at his sister across the breakfast table. I, however, just shook my head and pulled my elbows off the table. Obviously, I wouldn’t get to spend the morning sulking with my head in my hands as I’d originally planned. Instead, I would once again have to play peacemaker between the unwilling and the unreceptive. And these days I didn’t know which Mayhew sibling was which.

I placed what I hoped was a calming hand on Joshua’s arm, but he’d already begun to growl a warning at his little sister.

“Jillian, I swear …”

“Don’t swear, Joshie,” she taunted, the corner of her lips twitching. “Mom and Dad don’t like it when you swear.”

Joshua’s scowl deepened. “Seriously, if you don’t stop it—”

“Stop what?” she interrupted, raising her eyebrows innocently. She turned from one side to the other as if to solicit support from their parents. The older Mayhews, however, couldn’t have been more disinterested in their children’s fight. Joshua’s dad stayed buried behind his newspaper, and Joshua’s mom focused intently on her breakfast—almost too intently, as if deliberately avoiding any involvement in her son and daughter’s endless bickering.

So Joshua could have—should have—let the incident blow over. He could have ignored Jillian, like the mature older brother he was supposed to be. Unfortunately, our rough night had made Joshua as cranky as I was, and he decided to react.

Before I could utter the words Let it go, Joshua, I heard another sharp crack from under the table. When Jillian immediately yelped and bent down to grab her shin, Joshua grinned in triumph. Obviously his kick, unlike Jillian’s, had met its mark.

Upon seeing her brother’s grin, Jillian howled.

The howl echoed throughout the kitchen, nearly rattling the silverware and cereal bowls with its force. The sound was so piercing, Jillian’s parents had no choice but to pay attention. Newspapers and coffee cups dropped to the table as the older Mayhews let out almost identical, frustrated groans.

Rebecca focused upon Joshua first, fixing him in a gaze that could have frozen lava.

“One morning,” she said, shoving her mug farther away from her. “Just one morning I’d like to eat breakfast without having to break up a fight.”

I looked over at Jillian, who continued to moan in pain, albeit with a hint of glee in her hazel eyes.

“Sorry we bothered you, Mom,” she whimpered, intentionally quivering her bottom lip. “But Joshua just won’t leave me alone.”

“Are you sure, Jillian?” Rebecca asked. “Because I could have sworn I heard the first kick come from your direction.”

I had to choke back a laugh. Jillian, however, was less amused by her mother’s ability to simultaneously ignore and monitor her children. Jillian began to sputter wordlessly, a faint pink flushing across her cheeks as she came to the realization that her howls hadn’t fooled anyone. While she floundered for a response, her father tapped his fingers impatiently upon his discarded newspaper. He caught his wife’s eye and then shrugged.

“What do you think?” he asked her. “Ignore this stupidity or ground them both from the party?”

“Ignore?” Joshua offered, but not loudly enough to rival Jillian’s shriek of protest.

Her blush darkened to a livid red at the suggestion that she couldn’t attend tonight’s party, which promised to be the biggest of the semester. Worse, this was the first party that her parents had finally given her permission to attend—permission they’d only granted after Joshua and Jillian had both sworn, on penalty of military school or a nunnery, to stay far away from High Bridge.

This punishment was tantamount to social homicide, and Jillian knew it. So she blurted out what must have been the first defense that came to mind.

“I don’t know why you’re punishing me for anything,” she shouted. “Joshua’s the one who made Grandma Ruth leave—he deserves a lot worse than I do.”

The moment the words left her mouth, all the livid red drained from Jillian’s face. Just as quickly, an uncomfortable silence fell over the table. Each pair of eyes turned slowly, incredulously, toward Jillian.

To Jeremiah and Rebecca, such an accusation must have sounded outrageous, not to mention completely unfair. As far as they knew, Joshua hadn’t caused his grandmother to abruptly pack up her few possessions last month and move to New Orleans to live with Jeremiah’s sister and her family.

But Jillian and Joshua both knew the truth about what had really driven Ruth from this house.

Me.

Only a few months ago I’d inadvertently cost Ruth Mayhew almost everything she held dear. In doing so, I’d apparently taken away any reason she had for staying in Oklahoma.

Like Joshua, Jillian, and a surprisingly large number of people in Wilburton, Ruth was a Seer—a living person who, after some life-altering, “triggering” event, could see ghosts. But unlike Joshua (and, so far, Jillian), Ruth made it her mission in life to exorcise the dead. To banish them from the living world forever.

Ruth, and many other Seers, had moved to Wilburton expressly for that purpose, since High Bridge and the river beneath were such hotbeds of ghostly activity. Over time Ruth had earned her place as the cold, unrelenting leader of the Seer community, a role that she happily filled.

Until I came along and ruined everything.

Prior to my showdown with Eli on High Bridge, Ruth was constantly busy. Constantly surrounded by a mass of friends and obedient followers. But when she called off my exorcism so that I could save her granddaughter, things changed, in a way that made me think her mercy hadn’t sat well with her fellow Seers.

Soon after, Ruth spent most of her days sitting sullenly at the Mayhews’ kitchen table and most of her nights sulking in her bedroom. She almost never left the house, and the phone never rang for her. In fact, she hardly even spoke anymore. Sometimes she would toss a resentful glare in my direction; but, for the most part, she suffered her apparent banishment from the supernatural community in an angry, restless silence.

She only broke that silence last month when she announced her desire to move to New Orleans. Ruth packed all her possessions into a handful of cardboard boxes and hired a troop of professional movers. She claimed that boredom with Oklahoma had inspired the sudden move. But like I’d said, Joshua, Jillian, and I knew better.

Within a matter of days she left with nothing but a perfunctory good-bye to her son and his family.

The Mayhews’ initial reaction was one of disbelief. Even amusement. But shortly after the moving van disappeared into the thick line of trees at the end of the Mayhews’ driveway, a sort of hollowness began to echo through the house. Like something was missing.

No, not “like.” Something was missing. However badly Ruth might have treated me, she was still an essential part of this family, one whose absence had a profound effect on its remaining members. For Jillian to make such an accusation—that her brother had caused a dramatic rift in their family—was pretty serious stuff. Not something you just blurted out at the breakfast table in a last-ditch effort to avoid being grounded. Especially when the entire family would spend ten hours cramped in one car tomorrow, driving to the French Quarter to spend Christmas with Ruth.

So if anyone got the chance to respond to Jillian’s accusation, tomorrow would probably give new meaning to the phrase “road trip from hell.” Wisely, Joshua chose this, the tensest moment of an already-tense morning, to act civil. He cleared his throat and gave his parents a tight smile.

“Look, let’s just forget it.” He shot his sister a pointed look—one that said, Stop acting like an idiot or we’re both screwed. Aloud he said, “Sorry for the kick, Jill. Okay?”

In her first intelligent move of the day, Jillian caught the look and nodded. “Okay,” she answered and then, reluctantly, added, “I’m sorry, too.”

The apology lacked sincerity, but the fact that she’d delivered one at all bought her and Joshua a few moments to escape.

Joshua hiked his heavy winter coat off the chair and onto his shoulders with one hand. After sweeping his book bag off the floor with the other, he practically bolted from the table. Jillian scurried to follow. Jeremiah and Rebecca hadn’t even had the chance to reprimand Jillian for her combative comment by the time both of their children—and I—were out the back door.

Outside, Joshua and Jillian gave each other only the briefest of glares before dashing to their respective cars. I said a silent prayer of thanks that the brutal cold kept the two of them from lingering to fight some more. Within a matter of minutes, Jillian started her tiny yellow car and tore recklessly down the icy driveway without bothering to let her windshield defrost completely.

Joshua had already unlocked his driver’s side door and ducked into it to start the heater before he realized that I hadn’t followed him off the back porch. He looked up at me in momentary confusion, but then his face fell in recognition: he knew from my expression that I wouldn’t be joining him at school today.

He sighed and placed one hand on top of the roof of his truck. “Again, Amelia? Really?”

“I have to, Joshua. You know I have to.”

“No, I don’t,” he said, frowning heavily. “Besides, it’s freezing today.”

I shrugged. “So? It’s not like I can feel it.”

This time I heard a note of defeat in Joshua’s sigh. “Fine. But just be careful out there, okay? Don’t get too close to it.”

I smiled, but not very widely. “I never do.”

Pulling his door fully open, Joshua just shook his head. He didn’t even try to mask his disappointment as he slipped into the cab of the truck.

Just before he slammed the door and started the engine, I called out, “See you back here this afternoon.”

Through the frost on the windshield, I caught one last glimpse of his face—still wearing that disappointed expression—before he backed the truck down the driveway and disappeared onto the main road.

Late that afternoon I stamped my feet on the ice-encrusted grass and rubbed my fists along my bare arms a few times. Then I made a little cave of my hands and placed them in front of my mouth so that I could puff air into them as if I could warm them with my breath. As if I even needed to warm them in the first place. Still, the gestures made me feel more normal. And normal was a feeling I desperately needed right now.

In front of me the river moved more quickly than usual, its waters swelled and muddied by all the sleet last night. The river, however, wasn’t the ugliest part of this scene. That honor went to the remains of High Bridge, only a few hundred feet downriver from me.

The ruined bridge stretched across the muddy water as bleak and stripped as the forest surrounding it. From here I could see the mangled girders and places where large chunks of concrete had fallen, leaving gaping holes around which someone had placed sawhorses and crisscrossed ribbons of yellow tape. More sawhorses guarded each end of the bridge, warning drivers to find some other route if they didn’t want their cars to become aquatic. Along the edges of the bridge, the metal railings tilted at crazy angles as if some enormous force had knocked the entire structure off-kilter. Which, in essence, it had.

At that thought I smirked. I didn’t feel one ounce of regret for wrecking the bridge. I hoped a strong wind sent the whole thing crumbling down into the water below.

I gave it a final scowl and then turned my attention to the barren trees across the river from me. Something about their skeletal branches, clawing at the gray sky, suited my current mood. And my current task.

I closed my eyes and began to breathe heavily, slowly, in an effort to calm myself. To focus. Against the black canvas of my eyelids, I pictured a scene similar to that of the living world today but even colder. A place much darker, too, and more menacing. An otherworldly place where rogue ghosts, enslaved wraiths, and demons waited.

Eli’s netherworld.

I squeezed my eyes tighter, concentrating on the things I remembered about it: the violent purple sky; the gnarled, glittering trees; the river of tar moving toward the dark abyss underneath the netherworld version of High Bridge. Then I pictured the black shadows—dead souls trapped there by Eli under order of his masters—as they shifted among the netherworld trees.

I wanted them to reappear so badly I could almost hear them whispering in the darkness. Begging, in hushed but urgent voices, to be set free. I kept my eyes shut for a few more moments, wishing, praying.

But when I opened my eyes, my heart sank. Nothing around me had changed—not the cold gray sky, not the icy grass, not the muddied river.

I sank to the ground, letting my dress puddle around me. I didn’t want to admit defeat, but I’d started to run out of excuses for myself. Every day I tried to reopen the netherworld, and every day I failed. Why should today be any different?

When I’d decided to pursue this task several months ago, Joshua thought I’d lost my mind. After all, I’d only narrowly escaped an eternity spent trapped in the netherworld. So he had no idea why I would want to waste even a second trying to get back into it.

Even now a small part of me wondered whether Joshua had a point: maybe what I’d spent months doing at this bridge was crazy or, at the very best, in total disregard for my own safety. Honestly, though, I didn’t care about my safety, and I certainly didn’t care about crazy. Not where my father was concerned.

It broke my heart when I learned that my father had died not long after I had. But not knowing what had happened to his ghost hurt far worse, mostly because I knew what waited for him after death.

If my experience as a ghost was any indication, my father was now spending his afterlife in one of two ways: either lost like I’d been or trapped by Eli in the darkness of the netherworld. Since I’d never run into my father during my years of wandering, I had to assume he’d fallen victim to Eli—a fate I obviously couldn’t allow him to suffer.

But none of my attempts to help him had worked.

At this point I couldn’t deny my strongest suspicion: that I’d lost whatever ghostly powers I had discovered the night I overcame Eli and his dark masters. Sure, I could still touch Joshua, and I could still (sometimes) control my materializations in the living world. But I could no longer create that supernatural glow upon my skin or feel its surge of power, and I couldn’t materialize into the netherworld.

Arguably, what I did at the river this afternoon was no more productive than what I’d done every few mornings for the last two months: sit on the front porch of my childhood home and watch, unseen, as my mother prepared for her day.

Though my visits were sporadic, I’d easily memorized her daily routine. Each morning she drank two cups of coffee in the front room, staring blankly at either the steam rising from her mug or at photos of my father and me; I couldn’t tell which. After that she left—usually forgetting to lock the front door—and drove off to work in her creaking brown sedan.

Every time I saw her she looked tired and lonely; every time, the sight of her flooded me with angry, impotent guilt. Which was why I couldn’t bring myself to visit her every day. I just didn’t have the strength.

But today I did.

This morning, after I’d left Joshua, I followed my mother to work and watched unseen as she worked a punishing job as the stockroom clerk for the local hardware store. When her shift finally ended at 3 p.m., I materialized to the river, determined to do something—anything—for at least one of my parents.

Now, standing uselessly beside the river, I sighed. However much I wasn’t helping my mother, I certainly wasn’t helping my father, either. This afternoon’s activities had proven as much.

I ran one hand through my hair, tugging at its dark brown ends as if the pressure might force me to concentrate harder. Assuming my concentration had anything to do with my ability to reopen the netherworld. Assuming I hadn’t been barred from it entirely.

I released the poor strand of hair, which I’d twisted fiercely around my index finger, and groaned in frustration. The groan echoed back from the barren tree line, mocking me.

I pushed myself up off the ground and brushed my skirt smooth, although the ice hadn’t actually wrinkled it. Then I turned my back on the river and walked toward the tree line. There, on the trunk of the largest cottonwood, hung a wristwatch. Joshua had nailed it there a few weeks ago, after I’d come home late one too many times.

I leaned in close enough to see both the little and big hands resting near the dayglow five.

“Crap,” I murmured. Late again.

I could try to blame it on the blank gray sky—much darker, I realized, than it looked when I usually left. But what was the point? No matter what my excuse, I’d probably still find Joshua disappointed but unsurprised when I materialized back to the Mayhews’ house. On the plus side, he’d have almost no time to obsess over his calculus final, and even less time to argue his way out of the party I’d finally convinced him to attend.

I cast another brief glance at the watch, and a thought struck me. What if each second ticking away on the watch’s little face meant something? What if those seconds, blending together into minutes then hours then days, had started to create something?

Like a rift. A growing distance between Joshua and me, lengthened by each second that we lived separately—me haunting my parents, and Joshua living his life, as he should.

The rift had already begun to form, I was sure of it. But when would it become too wide to cross? Maybe sooner than I thought …

Suddenly, a blast of frozen December air hit me. I felt the cold along my bare shoulders, and the chilly silk of my skirt raised goose bumps wherever it touched my legs. Before I could react, I heard a soft snap somewhere inside the forest.

I immediately dropped into a protective stance, shoulders hunched and fists clenched. The sudden chill, the mysterious noises … past experience had taught me what—or who—they preceded.

“Eli?” I whispered, staring into the darkness of the forest.

Then I blinked back in surprise at myself.

Because, upon saying his name, my voice had sounded hopeful. Was I so desperate to rekindle my powers, so intent on reentering the netherworld, that I would welcome the reappearance of my enemy? My murderer?

I had to be crazy to want to see him again.

Fortunately or not, nothing answered my whisper. I waited, motionless, but I saw no movement in the woods except the occasional stir of a branch in the wind.

In all likelihood I was probably freaked out over something as benign as a squirrel running across a twig. That explanation made far more sense than the return of my ghostly nemesis who, for all I knew, was trapped somewhere darker than I could imagine. Besides, the cold sensation had disappeared almost as soon as it had arrived, even before I spoke Eli’s name.

But still, I shivered—whether from the memory of the chill, or from the dark thoughts buzzing around my pessimistic brain, I didn’t know. All I knew for sure was that I wanted to leave, now. So I closed my eyes, thought of Joshua, and prayed that this materialization took me where I really wanted to go.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.