“Are you sticking around?” I asked as I started for the bathroom. “Or going back to Haven Crest?”
Wren shrugged a shoulder. She didn’t look at me. WTF? “No. They need some time to recover from losing Robert. I’d feel like an outsider, and after what he did to you, it’s not like I would mourn him.”
I wanted to remind her that he’d wanted to hurt Kevin, too, but I didn’t. She was so weird lately I didn’t know what to say or do. Was Halloween the ghost equivalent of a period? Was my sister caught up in a tide of raging, spectral PMS?
Whatever. I really didn’t have the energy to worry about it. I didn’t respond or ask any more questions. I walked into the bathroom, shut the door and turned the faucets in the tub. I undressed as the water heated up, so when I stepped into the tub I was hit by a pelting blast of hot water.
My gawd, it felt good.
I scrubbed myself pink, washed and conditioned my hair. I’d put it in a couple of braids before I went to bed and then finish drying it in the morning. The braids would give me some nice waves, and I wouldn’t need to do much in the way of styling, which meant I could sleep a little later. Yay.
After I rinsed the last of the conditioner out, I turned off the water and wrung my hair. I yanked the shower curtain to the side and reached for my towels. The bathroom was full of steam.
I wrapped a towel around my head and dried off with the other. It wasn’t until I pulled on my robe and turned toward the mirror that I saw it. My stomach dropped.
There, on the fogged glass, was a note. It was written backward—as though from the other side of the mirror.
WREN
“Who wrote it?” I asked, when I saw the words fading on the mirror.
“Who do you think? Alys, obviously.”
Beside me, Lark scowled in her bathrobe. But when did Lark not scowl? It seemed to me that she spent most of her time with that expression on her face. Sometimes I wanted to hit her. Other times I hoped her face froze like that.
Once in a while—like now, since I’d been the one to make us leave the void, where my sister was certain Alys was trapped—I felt like it was my fault that Lark always seemed to be upset. I mean, if it wasn’t for me she’d probably have a normal life, right? Then again, if it hadn’t been for her being born alive, I could be the one with that normal life.
What if I grabbed her by the back of the head and slammed her face into that mirror? She’d stop frowning then, wouldn’t she? I took a step toward her.
Clarity knocked me back a step. What was I doing? Had I really been about to physically attack my sister? What was wrong with me?
This wasn’t me. This wasn’t right. It had to be the approaching All Hallows’ Eve. I was too young for the madness that came from “lingering” too long in the world of the living. Wasn’t I?
I had to do something—something right. I was not going back to the void—I didn’t even know if I could do that by myself—and I didn’t feel right going to Haven Crest and spending time with Noah when he’d had to destroy a friend. But there was something going on, and Lark had faced too much of it on her own already.
Maybe I would be alive if not for her, but I don’t know if I’d want to live if she wasn’t with me. That was what was important. As much as I liked Noah and sometimes Lark upset me, she was my anchor. She and I were what mattered.
All that mattered.
“I’ll go to the Shadow Lands,” I announced. “I’ll see if I can find Emily, and if I can’t find her, I’ll see what I can find out about the void.” Iloana—an old woman I liked—might have some answers. There was also this library in my world that held the most wonderful books—some that had never even been written but only dreamed. If I couldn’t find something to help us there, then it didn’t exist.
The lines in Lark’s forehead smoothed. I knew she’d sleep better knowing that one of us was able to do something. In the past twenty-four hours she’d been attacked by a ghost, destroyed him, gone into the void and had two spectral messages. She was due for a rest.
“Thanks, Wrennie.”
The weariness in her voice weighed on my shoulders. This was her life, and my death. Our burden. We didn’t know how or why, it just was. And there was no running away from it. Lark had tried that once, and it hadn’t been pretty for either of us.
When she turned to me, her arms open, I stepped in and wrapped mine around her. It would probably seem weird to most people, but whenever Lark and I connected in some manner, it felt like I was whole. We hadn’t connected as much lately as we used to. She had Ben and school, and I had...well, I had my collection, my own interests and now I had Noah. Still, I needed the other half of my soul, and that’s what I honestly believed my sister to be.