“Becca’s here,” Raye said, though she didn’t turn my way.
“Where?” Owen asked. He didn’t look so good.
I hurried over. Reggie yipped.
“Hush,” I said to him, then touched Owen’s hair. “What’s wrong?”
He didn’t answer, didn’t seem to see me, and I turned to Raye. I caught a clue an instant before I caught sight of my dead self still on the rock.
“Fuck me.”
“Nice,” Raye said.
“I’m not a kindergarten teacher.” I hadn’t had to watch my language even when I’d been alive. “Why am I here?”
“I don’t know. I summoned Henry.” She waved at the candles, which were set on a pentagram carved into the dirt. I wished, and not for the first time, that I knew half as much as she did about witchcraft. Maybe then I wouldn’t be dead.
“If I’d been thinking clearly I would have just summoned you.”
“Why?”
“Physician heal thyself.” Raye pointed to my body.
“Huh?”
“Remember when you were attacked and Henry tossed your attacker into a wall?”
“A little random there, Raye, but … yeah.”
“Henry’s a ghost. With powers. Now, you’re a ghost.”
“I still have my powers?”
“Why don’t you try them and see?”
I didn’t need to be told twice. I moved to my own side, got a freaky shimmy of déjà vu when I stared into my own eyes. I laid my palm on my bloody chest.
Nothing happened.
No spark. No sickening slurch of skin coming together. Nada.
I pulled back my hand. Raye stepped up next to me.
“Try it again.”
I did, and understood. I couldn’t touch things as a ghost. “I’m not…” I didn’t know the word.
“Corporeal,” Raye said.
“You would know. Now what? I need a body to heal my body.”
“Too bad I don’t have your—” She stopped. “Wait. Possess me.”
“Not,” I said at the same time Bobby blurted, “No, Raye,” and Cassandra choked.
“Without you the three is two,” she said. “Make that one since I have no clue where our other sister is. You think this is bad?” She waved a hand at dead me. “It’s going to get worse if I’m all that’s left between the Venatores Mali and the witches.”
“You aren’t all that’s left. You have them.” I lifted my chin toward the others.
“They don’t have powers.”
“Do too,” Cassandra muttered.
“And so do Henry and Pru.”
“That’s worked out great so far. You’re dead.”
She had a point. Still—
“Possession, Raye?”
“It got a bad rap because of The Exorcist.”
“Ya think?”
She closed her eyes. “Do it.”
“Do what?” I had no idea how to possess someone.
She opened one eye. “I don’t know. Jump?”
So I did.
*
Owen had been reluctant to breathe for fear he’d miss a single exchange between Raye and the ghost of Becca. Not that he could hear anything but Raye’s responses, but as long as she was making them he knew that Becca was here.
He’d certainly come a long way from thinking they were all nuts. If they were, he was too. While once that would have terrified him, now he almost embraced it. Without Becca he’d gladly consent to being locked away and medicated forever.
“Jump,” Raye said, and Bobby reached for her, but an instant before his fingers touched her arm, she changed.
Not physically. Not really. But something in the air shifted, and then so did she.
Bobby snatched back his hand, then rubbed his fingers along his jeans as if they’d been burned.
Raye stood differently, like Becca, though Owen wasn’t sure exactly how Becca stood. Maybe he was just hoping for this to work so badly. Her hair stirred, and in the depths of the dark strands, streaks of red waved.
“Raye?” Bobby said, and his voice shook. He saw it too.
She glanced over her shoulder and everyone gasped. Her eyes were much lighter, hazel instead of brown.
“It’s all right.” The voice that came out of her mouth was an echo—two voices not one. She turned back. “I know what to do.”
She placed her palm on Becca’s wound and sparks flew, so many more than there’d ever been before. Thunder rumbled over the lake, and clouds billowed on the horizon.
Owen whispered the word that had become his personal chant. “Please.”
Then Becca sat up with a gasp that was more like a shriek, and Raye collapsed like a marionette without strings.
*
One second I was in Raye—I was Raye, and she was me, I knew things about her, saw things that had happened, felt what she had felt, knew what she knew—the next I was myself.
It hurt. I hurt. The world spun. I saw Raye fall, and I wanted to go to her, but the instant I moved, I had to put my head between my knees or pass out. Coming back from the dead was a little harder than it looked.
“Becca?”
I kept my cheek on my knee so my head wouldn’t fall off my neck. Owen hovered just out of reach. I held out my hand, and he took it.
“You okay?”