14
Simon met us at the emergency room. They’d checked Natalie’s heart and lungs and treated her for hypothermia. They wouldn’t let us see her, but Simon had guardianship papers and they allowed him in.
He’d brought fresh clothes for all of us, and Lukas and I changed in the bathrooms. When I returned to the corridor, I found Simon pacing, looking overwhelmed.
“Is she okay?” My stomach tightened. “Tell me she’s okay.”
“She’s fine—she’s spending the night and we’ll collect her in the morning.”
“Can I see her? I want to tell her I’m sorry.”
“She knows,” Lukas said, stepping from the men’s bathroom, drying his hair with a handful of paper towels. “You didn’t stop saying it the whole drive here.”
“I want one of you to tell me what happened,” Simon said.
“She freaked,” Lukas said.
“Natalie?” Simon asked.
“No, me,” I said. “It was the siren. It was more than a hum this time. We could see her. And she spoke to me.”
“That’s a siren?” Lukas asked.
“She got into my head. She told me … she convinced me that Natalie …” I choked back a sob. “If Lukas hadn’t stopped her, I don’t know what would’ve happened. Face-to-face, the siren’s too strong for me. I lose all control. She plays on my worst fears.”
“That’s why we’re a team,” Simon said. “What else happened?”
We went out to the car, and on the drive home we told him the rest. “Neos sent her to weaken me,” I said. “And it’s working.”
“We’ll stop him,” Lukas said. “We’ll stop them both.”
“How?” I asked.
We both looked at Simon in the light of the dash, but he didn’t answer.
Natalie returned home the next morning, plotting to become a candy striper in order to flirt with one of the doctors. In other words, she was fine. In fact, she was worried about me, so we spent the day lounging together with a tray of Anatole’s goodies.
As we lay on her bed, downloading free games onto my iPhone, I apologized again.
“Would you stop already?” She quickly ran her finger over the surface of the phone, killing zombies on the screen.
“I just— Ooh, get that one!” I advised over her shoulder. “You know I don’t want you to die, right?”
“You mean, in this game or in real life?” Natalie asked.
“Real life,” I said. “You could die in the game, so I can have a turn.”
The game switched screens to a new level and she grinned at me. “Too bad, sucker.”
I smiled back, relieved she didn’t blame me for the siren, happily helping her move to the next level.
That night, I slept the dreamless sleep of the glutton … until I woke with a start, frightened by the proximity of a ghost. I knew it wasn’t Nicholas or Celeste, because they came and went without me noticing.
I pulled my dagger and Coby drifted forward. It’s me.
Oh, thank God! I pressed my hand to my heart. Are you okay? I haven’t seen you since the wraiths. You look all right. Are you? I was gonna summon you, but—
Settle down, he said, his ghostly face amused. I’m fine.
God, I just wanna hug you. Where’ve you been?
Licking my wounds. Those wraiths are nasty.
You saved us. I don’t know what we would’ve done without you.
You would’ve lost, he said, with a hint of his old smile. But that’s me, Coby the Friendly Ghost. I searched the Beyond, finding out about Neos.
Don’t do that! That’s what got Martha killed.
He gave me a look. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m already dead.
Well, but you could be deader. I don’t want you any deader.
I’m not staying forever, you know. His voice was soft and gentle. Once we get Neos, you’re going to dispel me.
I can’t do that. Which was a lie. I won’t do that.
Yes, you will. You owe me.
I swallowed and changed the subject. What’s the Beyond like? I’ve always wanted to know.
Like a … a bad dream. Not a nightmare—one of those dreams where nothing makes sense. You ask for help, but your words come out wrong and the answers don’t make sense. You forget who you are and what you’re looking for. I can sense Neos, but I can never locate him—he hides himself somewhere.
We’ll find him, I said, but my voice lacked conviction. I was still freaked out about the siren.
And what about Harry and Sara? he asked.
They’re okay, I lied.
I’ve seen them. They’re not okay.
So I bowed my head and told him everything.
You have to tell them the truth, he said.
That a ghost killed you? Sure, that’ll work.
If that won’t work, figure out what will. They’re hurting, Emma, and they need you. His voice was cold and rough, lacking any trace of the sweet guy I used to trust more than anyone else.
I nodded, knowing I’d run out of excuses. And that I needed to face up to the fact that Coby would never be the same.
He looked like he was about to say something more, but instead drifted to the window and through it, floating over the maple tree outside and twisting in the air before landing with his feet on the ground. I watched through the pane of glass as he vanished into the night.
The next few days passed uneventfully. A sad medley of school, training, and missing Bennett. Yeah, I had his playlists, but they weren’t enough.
Then Simon took a break from investigating Neos’s final resting place to give us a lecture about the principles of the Beyond, but we were more interested in hearing how the search was going. Apparently William and Gabriel had come to the same conclusion as Max, and everyone in the Knell was trying to pinpoint the grave.
Well, everyone but us; we were training to stop Neos once they found his single weakness. If he had one.
“How hard can it be to find the grave?” Natalie asked. “Aren’t there burial records?”
“They’ve all been expunged,” Simon told her.
“So the body just disappeared?” Lukas shook his head. “They knew he committed suicide; they must’ve taken him to the morgue.”
“I’m sure they did,” Simon said, and his lips narrowed.
“What was that?” Lukas said.
“What was what?”
“That thing you did with your mouth.” He looked at Natalie. “Did you see that?”
“Yeah,” Natalie said. “There’s something he doesn’t want to tell us.”
“I want to tell you what you need to know,” Simon said. “If you want to defeat Neos, you need to understand the principles of the Beyond.”
“I’ll tell you what we need to know, Simon,” I said. “If we’re going to face Neos together, we need to know everything. Either we’re a team, or we’re not.”
He didn’t say anything for a minute, then nodded. “The Knell found where Neos had been buried—in California. They sent two teams. Two of the top teams.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“The grave was empty,” he said. “The body had been exhumed and moved.”
But there was more. I could hear it in his voice. “And?”
“Neos was expecting them.” Simon pinched the bridge of his nose. “They walked into an ambush. Wraiths, just like at the mausoleum—except they didn’t have Emma.”
“What happened?” Lukas asked, quieter than usual.
Simon shook his head. “We lost two teams.”
He told us about the teams, the members he’d known, and though his face remained expressionless, it was clear he was grief stricken. He’d been holding himself together for us.
The Knell was falling apart. Yoshiro’s death had staggered them, and losing two of the best teams felt like a killing blow. William and Gabriel were desperately trying to keep everyone together, trying to stem the tide of panic. They’d even suggested that our team move into the Knell building, but Simon refused.
“We need to continue training without distraction. I don’t want to lose anyone in this team.” Then he told us about the principles of the Beyond, which wasn’t much more than Coby had told me. I tried to figure out how I could use any of it to fight off the siren. In the end, I decided to up my blocking skills. Martha had taught me how to shut down the voices in my head, but I worried the siren wasn’t communicating with me in the same way, and that putting up walls would have no effect. Simon agreed to help me figure something out.
During the next week, our training gained a sense of urgency. We pushed ourselves harder than ever. Even the Rake noticed, after I slipped past his guard and slashed his arm. He told me I’d become a “tolerable” knife-fighter, which from him was high praise. Maybe I’d actually be okay.
We were dedicated, but it was impossible to maintain the pace, training three extra hours a day. Lukas finally snapped, and disappeared for an evening of Wii with some kids from school. Then Natalie insisted that she needed a shopping spree.
I finally broke down, too, but in a nerdy way. I stayed late after school one day, in an attempt to catch up on homework. I settled into the library, stuck in my earbuds, and cued one of Bennett’s playlists, only engaging in a brief fantasy about what it would be like to study together. I bet he looked cute with a book.
At the other end of my table, some boys from my Trig class were discussing where they were headed for winter break. The Bahamas sounded good this time of year. Maybe the thing with Neos would all be over by then, and Bennett would be home for Christmas. I briefly obsessed about the perfect gift for him and came up with nothing. So I finally cracked my biology text and got to work.
At six, I walked back to the museum, only slightly freaked by the pitch-black sky. I was relieved to see the house lit up, and rushed into the warm foyer, ready to explain my absence, but it was eerily quiet. I’d expected Simon to come stomping in, demanding to know where I’d been. I hadn’t told Natalie and Lukas about my study plan, because they would’ve joined me, and we’d have gossiped all afternoon and accomplished nothing.
In the kitchen I found Anatole stirring rice into soup, and asked him where everyone was.
Je ne sais pas, he said with a shrug. That’s why I make ze soup. So they may eat whenever zhey return.
Weird. I checked my phone for messages, and found three from Natalie.
Hey, it’s me, she said. We’re on the way to Maine. A ghostkeeper says he’s been stripped of his powers. He doesn’t know what happened. The Knell’s sending us to investigate. Where are you? Call me.
Her second message said, Simon is so pissed at you. He says we’ll be back by dinner. I’ll bring you a moose.
The third message, which she left twenty seconds after the second one: Simon wanted me to tell you— Indecipherable conversation in the background. Oh, just tell her yourself. Then Simon’s voice came: Don’t go anywhere! Stay home. Stay out of trouble. In the background I heard Natalie say, Don’t be so dramatic. You’ll scare her. And Lukas said, You can’t scare Emma. She does the scaring. Then Natalie again. Wait, did you hang up? And the line went dead.
I looked at my phone. Another ghostkeeper had lost his powers? Just like Abby. The idea turned my stomach, because it meant there was another force in the world that we didn’t understand. Possession, wraith-making, the siren, and now someone was stealing powers.
I started to call Natalie back when the front door burst open. I stepped into the foyer, saying, “I was just calling you. Do you remember my friend Abby?”
But it wasn’t them. It was Sara, out of breath and frightened, her chestnut hair wildly disarranged. “You have to come right now,” she said.
“Why? What happened?”
She clutched my arm. “It’s Harry. He’s on the roof at school.”
“If bodysurfing in the freezing ocean didn’t bother him—”
“He’s not playing this time,” she said, and her voice wavered with fear. “I tried to stop him. I didn’t know where else to go. I don’t even have my phone with me. You were the closest.”
I pulled the red parka from the closet and slipped into a pair of snow boots. One good thing about becoming a ghostkeeper: I was learning to handle emergency situations. “Where is he, exactly?”
“The roof of the gym. We’ve been drinking up there between classes. I left him after school, but I started to worry he’d try to drive himself home, so I went back to check on him.”
“And he’s still there.”
“He won’t come down. He’s talking crazy—worse than usual.” She caught me with a desperate gaze. “I drove as fast as I could—I think he’s going to jump, Emma. What if he’s already—”
Her voice wavered on the edge of hysteria, and I found myself starting to panic. I couldn’t take another death. Not Natalie, not Harry. Not any of them. But I still had a chance. One chance.
“He’s not going to jump,” I said, pulling the chain that held Emma’s ring from around my neck. “I promise.”
Tears streamed down her face. “The last time you promised …”
I’d promised her that I wouldn’t hurt Coby. Instead, I got him killed. I swallowed back tears of my own. “This time’s going to be different.”
I shoved my finger into the gold band, and the second it crossed my knuckle, I turned into a ghost.
I didn’t stay long enough to hear Sara’s shriek of surprise. I flew out the front door and over the walls surrounding the museum grounds. Simon had explained that ghosts use some ethereal connection to the Beyond to travel. But even as a ghost, I couldn’t venture into the Beyond. Instead, I thought about where I expected to find Harry, and then I was there.
Harry sat on the flat gravel roof, his legs dangling over the edge, wearing a long black wool overcoat. Just sitting there clasping an almost empty bottle of Stoli to his chest and smiling into the emptiness, the saddest smile I’d ever seen.
“I’m sorry,” he said, to the breeze. “I can’t do this without you, man. Not even for Sara.”
He thought he was talking to himself, that he was alone—but he wasn’t.
Coby sat quietly beside him. He glanced at me, then back to Harry. My appearance as a ghost didn’t surprise him. While he’d been possessed by Neos, he’d seen me turn into a ghost.
The hardest thing is not being able to talk to them, he said.
Yeah.
But you can talk to him. Fix this, Emma.
I nodded and sat on the edge of the roof beside Harry, trying not to look at the ground, still covered in patchy white snow. We were a long way up.
I removed the ring. “Harry.”
Harry started when he saw me. “How did you get here?”
“The question is, how did you?”
“I climbed,” he said.
“You know what I mean, Harry.”
He took another swig; then I eased the bottle from him and took his hand. It was like ice, from sitting in the thirty-five-degree weather. We sat there for a while in silence, the three of us watching twilight turn into dusk.
“Nobody understood why we were best friends,” he said. “The All-American Boy and the … me. Whatever I am. But we knew each other, you know? We never had to explain.” He wiped tears from his cheek with his sleeve. “How could I not know how unhappy he was?”
Tell him I wasn’t unhappy, Coby said.
“He wasn’t unhappy.”
“Yeah. He killed himself because he was just so damned cheerful.” He laughed, a hollow sound. “That’s how I’m going to go, too.”
“He wasn’t sad, he wasn’t depressed.” I took a deep breath: now for the truth.
Tell him what happened, Coby nudged, before I could continue.
Gimme a second!
“He didn’t kill himself,” I finished. “He’s still here.”
“If you say he lives in our memories, I swear I’ll take you with me when I jump.”
“That’s not what I’m going to say. I …” I shook my head. “You’re not going to believe me, not unless I do something pretty ugly.”
Do what? Coby asked, but I ignored him.
“When I was a kid,” I started, “my parents sent me to an institution. A psych ward.” And I told him the story, from when Neos attacked me as a child, to Coby’s death at Redd’s Pond. “And here’s the thing, Harry. I summoned Coby back. He’s a ghost, sitting right next to you.”
There was a gasp behind us, and I turned to see Sara. From the look on her face, she’d heard most of what I’d said.
“What did you do?” she said. “You just disappeared. And now you’re saying Coby’s a ghost—”
“He’s right here, Sara,” Harry said sarcastically, waving his arm through the air beside him, where it went right through Coby. “You just have to believe.”
“No, you don’t,” I said, removing my gloves and standing behind Coby.
You ready? I asked him.
For what? Are you going to hurt me?
Not you, I said, and pushed my hands into his chest.
Back at the mausoleum, when he’d dived through me to break the siren’s spell, Coby had shimmered into visibility for a moment. Simon thought that because I summoned Coby—and because I’m me—we were linked. Just as Neos and I were linked through my blood, Coby was part of me, part of my energy.
And unlike any other ghost—the house ghosts or Edmund—when Coby’s spectral form intersected with my real one, we established an interference pattern. Which made him visible.
For a few seconds, my fingers felt no worse than freezing—then the pain started. It was like holding my palms on a hot stove. Waves of agony passed from my hands into my arms. I clenched my jaw and didn’t move. I used just enough compelling energy to prevent Coby from slipping away to save me the pain.
“What the hell?” Sara said.
“Is that …” Harry dropped the bottle of vodka to the ground. “Is that … what is that?”
Coby began to glow, his skin and clothing taking a solid presence, his melancholy expression appearing to Harry and Sara.
Harry suddenly looked from my trembling hands directly into Coby’s eyes. A look of wonder and joy crossed his face. He opened his mouth, then closed it again without saying anything.
“I can’t,” I said, between gritted teeth, “stand this much longer.”
Sara stepped toward Coby, her arms open for an embrace, but Coby raised a hand to stop her.
Say something, I told Coby. See if they can hear you.
“Everything Emma says is true.” His voice reverberated across the roof. “I love you both. Stop hurting yourselves. Live your lives the way I’d want you t—”
The pain overcame me, and I released my compulsion on him and jerked my hands away. Except unbinding myself from Coby wasn’t so simple: a backlash of power blasted from the spot where we touched, knocked me on my butt, and made Coby fizzle into nothingness.
“Emma!” Sara bent next to me. “My God, your hands!”
I looked at my hands, then quickly away. They were a livid red, puffy and swollen, with blisters already forming.
Sara clasped me by the wrists and helped me to my feet. “We have to get you to the hospital.”
“But Coby—did you see? Do you believe me?”
Harry patted the place where Coby had been. “ ‘There are more things in heaven and earth …’ ”
“Harry!” Sara scolded. “Now’s not the time for Shakespeare. Help me with Emma. Look at her hands.”
He looked, then blinked. “Good Lord! That’s one nasty case of phantasmagorical squirrel pox.”
“Did you see him?” Sara said, suddenly smiling again. “Did you see him?”
“Figures he’d make such an offensively good-looking ghost,” Harry said, in mock disgust. “But we have to take care of the living.”
And to underscore the point, he burped vodka in my face.
Sara peeled out of the school parking lot in her BMW. I looked outside instead of at my throbbing hands as she sped along the narrow village streets to the hospital on the outskirts of town. My breath left steam on the inside of the car window.
“This is insane! How can Coby be a ghost?” Sara glanced in the backseat where Harry was sprawled. “Is he here now?”
“No,” I said. “Can you turn off the heat? The hot air hurts the burns.”
“Oh God, I’m sorry. What happened to your hands?”
“I get burned if I touch ghosts for too long.”
She let out a puff of air. “I just, I can’t … he’s been watching us, hasn’t he? I felt him. I thought I was fooling myself.”
“He’s been messing with my playlists,” Harry slurred. “I keep finding his favorite songs cued.”
“One day, I came home and found a whole stack of books on my bed,” Sara said. “Stuff he gave me over the years.”
I smiled. “He misses you guys.”
Sara pulled into the hospital parking lot. “Where do I park?”
“Turn left,” I said. “I was just here with Natalie when she almost drowned.”
“That really happened?” Harry ran a hand over his face. “I thought she was being a drama queen. I’m such an ass.”
“What do you mean, almost drowned?” Sara asked. “When did that happen?”
“At the beach party,” I said. “A ghost tried to drown her.”
“The one that killed Coby?”
“No, but that one sent this one. It’s a long story.”
“I can’t believe we’re talking about ghosts,” Sara said.
“Because you are narrow-minded,” Harry said. “I’ve spoken to you about that before.”
“Oh shut up—you’re drunk. If you were sober, you wouldn’t believe a word.” She stopped at the emergency-room entrance. “I can’t park here.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said, “if you can open the door for me.”
Harry stumbled from the backseat to let me out. When I brushed past him, he fell to the ground.
“Oh God, Harry,” Sara said. “We’ll meet you inside, Emma.”
Harry mumbled something cryptic about a bucket and a horse, then threw up in the bushes.
“Just get Harry home,” I told Sara.
“We’re not leaving you alone. Not after … everything.”
“Yes, we are,” Harry said, straightening. “Jeeves, take me to rehab!”
“What?” Sara asked. “Are you serious?”
“Cross my heart and hope to—” He peered around. “Is he still here?”
I shook my head. “Nope.”
“In that case, I’m deadly serious. Serious as a heart attack. I need rehab, stat. They have a room with my name on the door.” The manic light faded from his face. “And damn, if you don’t take me now, I might start thinking I don’t need to go.”
Sara glanced at me.
“You know he needs to,” I said.
Sara nodded and started to grab my hand, then remembered and touched my arm instead. “Emma … I’m sorry. We both are.”
“I’m not!” Harry insisted. “I’m magnificent.”
We ignored him, and I smiled at Sara, with tears in my eyes. Then they drove off and I stumbled into the emergency room. The double doors went swish and I caught the eye of a passing nurse.
I showed her my hands and said, “Ow.”