Sweet baby Jesus, what now? Hopefully she wouldn’t explode this one.
I glanced up and met a gaze almost identical to mine in the mirror. Emily and I looked a lot alike. It wasn’t just the eyes—which she had again—or the white hair; there was something to her expression that reminded me of my own face. She looked a bit older than me, which was funny because she had been an old woman when she died. A lot of ghosts were like starlets—they always wanted to look like they did in their prime.
“Thank goodness you’re there,” she said.
“You’re not going to try to kill me again, are you?” I asked warily.
Her brows lowered in annoyance. “I didn’t try to kill you, girl. I’ve done nothing but try to get your attention, but you don’t listen all that well.”
Now I knew where I got my prickly nature.
“What’s going on with you?” I asked. “Where are you? Who are you afraid of?”
She ignored my questions, peering around the edge of the mirror as though looking for something—or someone. “Is Wren with you?”
“No.” Thanks for the reminder that I’d been tossed over for a ghost.
She glanced over her shoulder. “Lark, listen to me. You’re in a lot of danger. You can’t trust him.”
“Trust who?”
Another exasperated look. “You know who. Noah McCrae.”
Oh. This was fabulous. Why couldn’t I have been wrong about him? Why couldn’t he be an awesome guy who wanted nothing more from Wren than to hold her hand and do whatever it was that love-struck ghosts did? “Why not?”
“It’s all about revenge.” Emily’s blue-eyed gaze was earnest as it met mine. “Against me.”
“Revenge for what?”
She glanced away. “For what I did to his sister.”
“The sister whose death sent him to the crazy house?” I’d read about it in his file.
“No, the other one.”
It took me a second to realize she was being sarcastic. Another family trait, obviously.
“You toasted her, didn’t you?” I’d like to think I was brilliant to have come to that conclusion, but I was just following along.
Emily nodded. Her hair glinted silver in the mirror. “She turned bad as a spirit. Really bad. Noah was a medium, so he was able to communicate with her, which was why his parents had him committed to Haven Crest. She drove him to the brink of real madness—she persuaded him to kill someone. I couldn’t let her continue. So, I snuck into the family crypt and sent her on to her rest. Or her torment. Or whatever happens when we’re allowed to move on.”
“Someone’s bitter,” I muttered.
“Lark, Noah McCrae killed himself so he could take his revenge on me.”
If she had reached through the mirror and slapped me, I wouldn’t have been more shocked. “What was that?”
I swear on Wren’s grave she rolled her eyes. “Listen to me—Noah McCrae blames me for what happened to his sister. It doesn’t matter that perhaps I gave her the peace she sought. To him, I killed her more effectively than the fever she’d contracted. He killed himself shortly after. Do you know what happens to a medium when they die?”
I shook my head. “I’m kinda learning this stuff as I go.”
Emily sighed. “That’s because you’ve had no one to teach you. You and your sister are the first Melinoe in generations.”
“Melinoe?”
She shook her head, as though that weird word wasn’t important, even though she’d used it like it was. “When a medium becomes a ghost, they have some power over other ghosts—like a pied piper or snake charmer.”
Well, that was just awesome. “How does he do that?”
“Ghosts are drawn to them when they’re alive, and that charisma doesn’t go away when they die. If left alone, it simply makes for a ghost with a lot of charm and friends, but when nurtured and honed...”
I sighed. “You get Charles Manson and the Family.”
Her expression turned grim. “Exactly.”
I couldn’t even enjoy the fact that she got the reference, despite having died a good fifty years or more before Helter Skelter became more than just a Beatles song.
In the mirror, Emily glanced over her shoulder. I didn’t blame her for being paranoid. “I wish I could explain everything to you and teach you what you need to know, but I can’t so long as he’s got me trapped here. With Alys and I separated, I’m weaker, and he’s made me more so by polluting me with his own energy. I’ve only had this much time with you because he’s with your sister. You have to keep her away from him, Lark. He’s going to use her to further his own agenda.”
“Which is?”
“I don’t know.”
Of course she didn’t.
“He hasn’t made me privy to his plans. I do know that what he plans to do isn’t nearly as important to me as the fact that he plans to destroy the two of you to achieve it.”
That got my attention. “Destroy us? Define destroy.”
“If he kills you it will only make him stronger.”