*
I gaped at Hollis, but before I could respond, the roar of an approaching car engine made me jump. We’d reached the junction where the wooded trail joined with the main drive leading up to the school, and I whipped around in time to see a pair of headlights careening out of a hairpin turn and rocketing up the hillside.
I stumbled back at the sight, reaching to pull Hollis with me, only to find him not reacting to the vehicle at all—he just stood there, staring at me in that strange way of his. It was creepy, really, so I hissed: “What do you mean, the killer’s a what? Like a tree?”
“No, not like a tree,” he snapped peevishly. “You’re an idiot.”
“Then what are you talking about?”
But Hollis refused to answer. Instead, he folded his arms and set his jaw, like I’d offended him in some way. I didn’t get a chance to ask more questions because the approaching vehicle—which turned out to be a silver pickup, its bed filled with a crowd of shouting students—blared its horn and came to a screeching stop beside us. The air reeked of burned rubber.
“Hollis English!” The driver of the truck leaned out of the window. “Holy shit. What the hell are you doing out here?”
Hollis said nothing, but I stepped forward, put on my friendliest smile. “We were just heading back to campus. Want to give us a ride?”
“Who are you?” a girl from the back asked me. She wore a Giants hat and knelt on the wheel well. “I’ve never seen you before.”
A guy seated beside her shone a flashlight at me—the reflective piping on my vest lit up in an embarrassing way—and he hooted. “Look at that! He’s a safety escort, Z. Hollis needs a grown-up to walk around with him.”
The girl clapped her hands. “That makes total sense.”
“Doesn’t it?”
She looked at me again. “So how long have you been working here?”
“Huh?”
“You’re one of the new hires for the grounds staff, right? That’s why you got stuck doing this?”
Her friend rolled his eyes. “Jesus, Z. He’s a student. Probably doing work-study or something.”
I nodded.
“Come on,” the driver said impatiently. “I don’t give a fuck who the kid is so long as he doesn’t jack us. Get in the back already. Let’s go.”
We scrambled into the truck bed, where I promptly thanked everyone and introduced myself. Hollis, on the other hand, remained a sullen heap, pulling his knees to his chest and refusing to say anything, despite the fact everyone appeared to know who he was.
“You coming to the after-party?” The girl with the Giants hat squeezed between us. She seemed to want to make things up with me. “Or are safety escorts not allowed to have any fun?”
“What after-party?” I asked.
“At Pike house. Hollis knows about it. He’s supposed to be helping host the damn thing, but you know how he is.”
“Not really. We just met tonight.”
The girl grinned. “He hasn’t tried to convince you to go ghost hunting with him, has he?”
“Uh, that hasn’t come up.”
Her eyes sparkled. “But he told you about the ghosts, didn’t he?”
I glanced at Hollis, who looked more miserable than ever. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, he told you,” the girl said brightly. “I can tell. And look, we all think he’s nuts, but who knows? Maybe he’s right. Maybe we’re all being haunted.”
“Haunted?” I echoed.
She pinched my arm. “He’s not going to puke, is he? He looks like he’s going to puke.”
“He might. He’s had a lot to drink. More than he should’ve, that’s for sure.”
Hollis lifted his head, just enough to glare at me. “You know, I can hear you, Perez.”
“Sorry,” I muttered.
He kept up with the glaring long enough to pull his whiskey bottle from his pocket and drink more.
The girl whispered in my ear, “Don’t worry about him. He’s always like this. He’s been strange ever since . . .”
“Ever since what?” I asked.
“Never mind. He just needs to have fun. And you know, after that shitty thing I said to you earlier, maybe you do too.”
I hesitated. “Yeah, maybe.”
The truck rocked through a pothole, sending the girl bouncing against me. She laughed at my startled expression. “Well, in that case,” she said. “There’s no excuse. You have to come to our party.”
*
The truck paused briefly at the security gate before finally rolling on to campus. The ground fog beneath us had grown so dense the road had all but vanished. Everything else still twinkled with beauty, with seclusion; the Dover Springs property was a lush woodland oasis consisting of almost two hundred acres of tree-lined trails, quaint classrooms speckled among the redwoods, and swinging footbridges that stretched across burbling creeks.
Clustered on the east side of campus, a row of stately frat houses sat far from the freshman dorms, close to the trees, and after we’d parked in the nearby student lot and were walking up toward Pike house, the girl with the Giants hat pulled a pair of devil horns from her purse. I watched as she slipped them on over her baseball hat before digging around for a glittery silver halo that she gently placed on top of my head.
“What’s this for?” I asked.
“You’re going to need it where we’re going.”
“I am? What kind of party is this?”
“You still don’t know?”
“No.”
The girl grinned as she trotted up the front porch steps ahead of me. “Heaven and hell.”
Part—all right, most—of me longed to follow her, but when I turned to look for Hollis, I felt a twinge of guilt. Or shame, really, for having abandoned him. While everyone else from the truck was flooding into the frat house, he remained standing off to the side, in the shadows, with his broad shoulders slumped and his hands in his pockets.
“Nice halo,” he muttered as I walked over to him.
“I bet I can find you one.”
He shook his head. “Go get laid if you want. You don’t need to take care of me.”
“I don’t want to get laid.”
“Everyone wants to get laid.”
“Well, I don’t,” I insisted.
He pouted. “I’m not hunting ghosts, by the way. Zoe hears what she wants.”
“Yeah, well, you were the one who said we were all in danger from a killer who wasn’t a person. What’re people supposed to think?”
“We are in danger!” he cried. “All of us! Right now. Well, technically, you aren’t. But the rest of us are.”
“Why not me?”
His eyes flashed. “You really want to know?”
“Yes!”