“Seven,” Lark replied.
He swore again. “Wake me up in half an hour.”
Lark grabbed him by the shirt front before he could fall back onto the carpet. She was pretty strong, my sister, though it was more impressive against ghosts than humans. I could see the muscles in her arm straining against the weight of his torso.
“You’ll get your ass up now,” she informed him, holding his upper body a good foot above the floor. “My grandmother will be up soon, and Ben will be coming to get me for school. I am not going to be the one who explains why you’re here.”
Mace glared at her. “Ben won’t freak out—he’s too zen. And get your morning breath out of my face.”
“My morning breath? Dude, you smell like you rolled around in sweaty beer that someone else puked up.” But she let go of him and stepped back. “C’mon.”
Cursing under his breath, Mace struggled to his feet. Standing, he raised his arms above his head and stretched. This lifted the hems of the two shirts he wore, revealing a thin expanse of flat stomach that was surprisingly tan and surprisingly muscular.
“You’re staring,” I said to my sister.
Lark rolled her eyes at me. Mace lowered his arms with a frown. “Did you hear something?”
“It was Wren,” Lark informed him. “It’s the Halloween thing again. Do you want to shower? You can use the one down the hall.”
He shook his head. “No. I need to get home. Mom will worry. I’ll see you at school.”
Lark put on her robe and saw him out. When she came back, it was with a look of relief on her face. “Nan isn’t up yet,” she said. “God, that was weird. I love the guy, but nothing makes life more awkward than waking up to the friend who drunkenly spilled their heart out to you. Thank God you were here. I didn’t know what to say to him.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Kevin told him that he and Sarah had been messing around.” Her gaze turned shrewd. “That’s why you’ve been pissy about the two of them lately, isn’t it?”
I nodded. The memory of seeing Kevin kiss Sarah after telling me we could never really have any sort of relationship still hurt. “Poor Mace.”
“I think Kevin honestly feels bad.” Lark removed her robe. “I respect him for having the nads to confess. It’s going to take a while for him and Mace to patch things up.”
I could have said at least five things about Kevin at that moment—none of them nice—but Lark was right. He’d done the right thing breaking it off with me, and it probably hadn’t been easy. And for every bad thing I could say about Kevin, I could think of ten that were good, so I didn’t say anything.
“Mace must think of you as a good friend,” I said, following Lark into the bathroom. She turned on the shower.
“I guess he figured since he’d seen me at my most vulnerable, he could let me see him at his.” She pulled off her pajamas. “He was pretty messed up.”
I didn’t ask her if anything had happened between them, because I knew it hadn’t. Lark wouldn’t do that. And I didn’t ask what Mace had said to her because that wasn’t any of my business, and she’d tell me if she wanted. Besides, I didn’t really care. I had my own things to worry about.
My sister pulled back the shower curtain and stepped inside. “Did you find out anything in the Shadow Lands?”
“To find out about Emily and Alys I had to make an appointment with Special Collections in the library.”
“What?” Her voice was slightly muffled by the spray. “That’s crazy.”
“I know!” I felt better having her agree. “So I can’t get to them until Wednesday.”
“What about the void? Did you research it?”
“Um, no.”
“Wren.” My name dripped with disappointment.
“I’m not going back there.” And she couldn’t make me. Although we both knew she could, really.
“That’s why we need to check into it—see if there’s another way to help Alys without actually going in there.”
“Oh.” I was such an idiot. “Okay, I’ll look. But there’s something else I want to talk to you about. It’s about Noah.”
“O-kay.” The word seemed dragged out of her mouth, as if her teeth were trying to hold it in. “What about him?”
“I think he may be related to Kevin. His last name is McCrae.”
The hooks that held the shower curtain to the rod scraped against the metal as Lark yanked the curtain open enough to stick her face out. “Really? Did he tell you this?”
I shook my head. She was going to make a big deal out of this, I just knew it.
Her eyes widened. “Did you go snooping into his Shadow Lands library file?”
When she put it that way it made me feel like a character on one of those TV shows she liked to watch where there was melodrama at every turn. “Sort of.”