I nodded. “I’m good. We need to talk. Emily’s in trouble.”
She swore as she stuck the keys in the ignition. Her expression was grim when she looked at me.
“Great.” But she didn’t sound the least bit happy. “I think Alys is, too.”
LARK
The moment we arrived home we went straight up to our bedroom. On the drive, Wren had told me about what the ghost at Haven Crest had told her, and I filled her in on seeing Alys in the bathroom.
“There’s something going on,” I muttered as I yanked open the top drawer of the desk. “Anytime we’ve seen Emily she’s seemed on edge—like she’s doing something wrong. And Alys has popped in and out like a newbie ghost. She should be stronger than that.”
“They shouldn’t even be here. Should they?” Wren paced the length of the room—or rather, she floated along the top of the carpet. “They were different, like us, but they ought to have moved on. The girl said that Emily had a warning for us.”
“Yeah, that ‘he’ was coming for us.” I dug through the papers in the drawer. “Whoever ‘he’ is.”
“How did you know?”
I barely glanced at her. “I’ve been having dreams. I think they’re of Alys. Everything’s black, and there’s danger all around me.”
“If Emily wants us to find her, Alys must be in some sort of danger.”
“Of course she is.” I dug deeper in the drawer. God, I was such a slob! “Would you expect anything less from our ancestors?”
“What are you looking for?”
I pulled the spirit board that had belonged to Emily and Alys out of the drawer and held it up like it was a prize. “This.”
Wren made a scoffing noise. “A spirit board? What can that do that I can’t?”
I shot her a narrow glance. “Ego much?” I wanted to chalk it up to Halloween, but she was different—I could feel it. Was it Noah? Or was the bigotry Wren claimed I had toward ghosts clouding my judgment? Regardless of the fact that he’d taken me to Woodstock’s grave, I had the feeling that he would have been just as happy to turn his back on the whole thing.
“You know what I mean.” She drifted toward me. “It doesn’t even have a planchette.”
I looked at the board, my fingers tracing the image on the wood. It was old, but heavily lacquered, preserving the image on it. Twins—one with white hair, the other with red, standing so that they faced each other from opposite sides of the wood. Their clasped hands were in the center of the board. The way they were linked made me think of a planchette. Maybe that was because of what Wren had just said, or maybe it was a message from Emily and Alys for those of us who came after them.
And maybe it was time for me to do some more digging into the family history.
“I don’t think we need a planchette,” I told Wren. “I think we are the planchette.”
She looked at the board where my hand rested in the center. A moment later, her fingers settled on—in—mine.
Bam! It was like a punch to the face that left me seeing stars. I blinked, and then realized we were someplace else. Someplace...dark.
Not just dark. This place was black.
I clung to Wren’s hand. Where the hell were we? A light wind ruffled my hair, bringing the smell of dirt and wood. Was that scratching I heard? And crying? The back of my neck tingled, as though invisible fingers had brushed against my skin.
“Where are we?” I whispered.
“I think it’s the void,” Wren replied, her voice shaking. “Lark, we’re in the damn void!”
Wren rarely swore, and it was even more rare for her to show fear. It was important that I calm her down, even though I was freaking out myself. “We don’t know that’s what this is.” But it fit the description.
The void was a place we’d first heard about as kids. A ghost we’d encountered at a bed-and-breakfast in Maine while on vacation with our parents had explained that it was a dark, endless kind of place, where souls could be trapped or imprisoned. Solitary confinement for ghosts. It was said that ghosts that lingered too long, who became so corrupt they couldn’t move on, were sent to the void for eternal torment. I didn’t believe that any more than I believed in hell, but this place was scary—like the dark cellar of a house that hadn’t been lived in for a hundred years.
Like a grave.
“Why would the board bring us here?” I wondered.
“Who cares? Let’s just get out of here. Now!”
It wasn’t very often that I was the calm one and Wren was the one hanging on by a thread. “It brought us here for a reason.”
“I don’t care!”
“Just listen for a minute!”
We fell silent. I listened—hard. Past the crying and the scratching and the wind, I heard a voice.
And it was calling our names.
“Do you hear that?” I asked.
Wren tugged on my hand. “We have to get out of here.”
I held tight to her fingers. “Do you hear it? There—it’s coming closer.”