by Lee Nichols
“I feel like I’m at a pep rally,” Lukas said, shaking his head, but I could tell he was pleased. “Let’s go meet the snobs.”
“You think their parents are going to be snobs?” I asked.
“He meant the kids,” Natalie said.
“Oh, right.” The three of us would always be something a little different, never quite fitting in. “At least there’s Harry and Sara.”
“Yeah,” she said. “They’re too rich to be snobs.”
I felt a little guilty for laughing, but it was kind of true. Too rich to bother snubbing anyone.
Downstairs in the foyer, we discovered Mr. and Mrs.
Stern putting on their coats. Mrs. Stern was dressed in a charcoal gray satin blouse and black pants, and Mr. Stern in a navy suit.
“You’re going out?” I asked.
“It’s Parents’ Night, isn’t it?” Mr. Stern grumbled. “Hate these things.”
“John,” Mrs. Stern said warningly.
He glanced at us apologetically. “Oh, right. Should be fun.”
“What—because you’re on the board?” Natalie asked. “You don’t have kids there anymore.”
Mrs. Stern wrapped a black cashmere scarf around her neck. “We have you, don’t we?”
Natalie and Lukas and I all looked at each other. We had one of those mind-meld moments, when you know what your friends are thinking—because you’re thinking the same thing. Maybe our parents had failed, but we had the Sterns, and that wasn’t nothing.
“I hope one of you is presenting,” Mr. Stern said, breaking the short silence. “At least that breaks the tedium.”
“Trig,” I answered.
“Fencing,” Natalie murmured.
“I got stuck with Latin,” Lukas said morosely.
“Emma, you didn’t get fencing?” Mr. Stern grinned. “Color me surprised.”
I smiled back, and we shuffled to the freezing garage and into their Porsche Cayenne. I sat in back between Natalie and Lukas, like a buffer zone. They were learning how to be “just friends” again, but I got the impression sometimes they were one smoldering look away from falling off the wagon.
At least it was a short drive and I was toasty.
Then Mrs. Stern cleared her throat. “Natalie, I … I should’ve said something earlier, but I didn’t know how to tell you.”
“Uh-oh,” Natalie said.
“You are so busted,” Lukas told her.
“I didn’t do anything!” she said. Then, a little quieter, “I don’t think.”
Mrs. Stern turned around in the front passenger seat. “I knew your mother. Before she left the Knell. We were friends.”
Natalie frowned, like she couldn’t imagine her mother knowing the sleek, wealthy Mrs. Stern. “You and my mom?”
“It’s a small community,” Mrs. Stern explained. “For a few years, we were very close.”
“What happened?”
Mrs. Stern put her hand on Mr. Stern’s arm. “Boys.”
“You mean because my dad wouldn’t let her hang with you anymore?” Natalie asked. “How could she abandon a friend for a guy?”
“Yeah,” Lukas said sarcastically. “What was she thinking?”
I jabbed him with my elbow and whispered, “Not about you, Lukas.”
“It’s never about me,” he grumbled, but he shut up.
“We’re in the parking lot, Alex,” Mr. Stern said. “If you’re going to tell her, tell her now.”
Mrs. Stern bit her lip. “I haven’t seen her for a long time, but … your mother may be here tonight. I called her.”
I waited for Natalie to explode, but instead she looked like a frightened deer. I couldn’t remember her ever being at a loss for words. I grabbed her hand and squeezed tight.
“How could you do that?” Lukas snapped at Mrs. Stern, then turned to Natalie. “You don’t have to see her. I’ll walk you home.”
“Me, too,” I said. “Whatever you want.”
“I called to tell her you were with me,” Mrs. Stern told Natalie. “And how wonderful you’d turned out—how proud she should be of you. We don’t know what’s going to happen with Neos. I didn’t want her to lose you before she saw you again. I know what that feels like.” She tried to shake away the loss of Olivia, and Mr. Stern laid a comforting hand on her thigh. “Anyway, I told her it was Parents’ Night. I’m sorry if I did the wrong thing.”
“You think?” Lukas said. “After the way she treated Natalie—”
“It wasn’t her,” Natalie said in a small voice. “She called the Knell to help me. Do I have to go back with her?”
“Of course not,” Mr. Stern said reassuringly. “You’ll stay with us as long as you like.”
“She only wants to see you, Natalie,” Mrs. Stern said. “If you’d rather not, we’ll all go home.”
“You don’t have to,” I told Natalie.
She took a deep breath and told me, “You’re not the only one who’s tough around here.”
“You’re right.” I grinned at her. “Let’s go get her.”
“Emma,” Mrs. Stern cautioned.
“I mean meet her,” I said innocently, as Lukas fist-bumped me in the dark.
Inside Thatcher’s front hall, a group of sophomore girls stood at the door, answering questions and handing out programs. The immense room was pretty at night, with the chandelier glowing, the marble floors polished, and a fire roaring in the hearth, illuminating the stairway and hanging tapestries. Gorgeous bouquets dotted the room, overshadowing the huge silk flower centerpiece, and the faint strains of classical music played, barely audible above the chatter of conversation.
Lukas made straight for the banquet table, while the Sterns mingled among the other parents. Natalie and I found a relatively quiet corner to check our names in the programs and search for her mother.
“Do you see her?” I asked, folding my program closed.
“We’re scheduled at the same time,” Natalie said, ignoring my question. “We can’t go to each other’s presentations.”
“It’s not too late to leave before she gets here.”
“I’ll be nervous without you.”
“Natalie, stop avoiding the subject.”
“Maybe she won’t come,” she finally said, but I couldn’t tell if that would be a good thing or bad.
She scanned the crowd for her mother, and I did the same, struck again by how eastern everyone looked. A bunch of rich parents in California would’ve looked completely different: skinnier, more casual and athletic. Instead of fake-tanning and visiting personal trainers, Thatcher parents tended more toward fine dining and art openings.
Then a woman came through the front doors, looking a little jet-lagged and a lot out of place. Her steel gray hair was fixed in a long braid down her back, and she removed a full-length brown parka, revealing a long brown skirt and boxy pink sweater. But as she spoke to the sophomore girls, the light caught her profile, and there was something familiar there.
“Is that her?” I asked, pointing.
Natalie caught her breath. “Yeah.”
“She looks … sort of sweet.”
Natalie shot me a look.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean that.”
She gave me another look.
“Unless, you want me to mean it?”
Natalie let out a noise of frustration. “Let’s just go talk to her.”
She grabbed my hand and dragged me through the crowd. She stopped in front of her mother, who had moved toward the fireplace, and said, “You came.”
Her mother’s face seemed to crumble. “Should I not have?”
Up close, I saw she’d once been beautiful, like Natalie, but at the moment she just looked exhausted and unsure. And the usually self-confident Natalie was frowning silently at the floor.
“I don’t want to embarrass you in front of your friends,” her mother said.
“Embarrass me?” Natalie said. “Is that what you think?”
“I don’t know what to think,�
�� her mother said in a small voice.
Natalie just shook her head, and the two of them stood there, miserable and silent.
I scanned the room, but couldn’t find the Sterns or Lukas. And I shouldn’t have to find them. This was Natalie’s mother—she should be the person helping Natalie in an awkward situation like this, not the person who caused the awkwardness. And when I thought about that, I found it inexcusable. She’d sent her fantastic daughter to live with strangers, defenseless, traumatized, and alone.
Okay, maybe my feelings were partly meant for my own parents, but I was still really pissed off for Natalie. I clenched my fists, flushed and livid, and snapped at her mother. “What is wrong with you? How could you have sent Natalie away? Don’t you know how special she is? How much she needed you? Then you show up at Parents’ Night, like that’s really who you are? You don’t deserve to have people think you made this beautiful, strong, amazing girl.”
A few heads turned at my raised voice, but before I could continue, Max appeared at my elbow. “You’ll have to forgive my sister,” he said to Natalie’s mom. “She’s a pit bull.”
I glared at him. “What are you doing here?”
“See what I mean?” he asked Natalie’s mom.
“Shut up,” I told him.
“Mom told me to come,” he explained. “Because they’re late.”
“Typical.” Though I was glad they hadn’t forgotten. “Anyway, you’re not exactly parental. The Sterns came—at least they’re good parents.”
“Right,” he said. “That’s why Bennett gets along with them so well.”
“Are you purposely goading me?”
“Yes.” He pulled me away from Natalie and her mother. “Emma, let Natalie work this out for herself.”
I glanced back at Natalie. “She needs me.”
Then Mrs. Stern slipped through the crowd and took Natalie’s mother in a hug and said, “The three of us should find someplace quieter.”
I started to follow, but Max took my elbow. “Let them go.”
“I have to go with them.” Instead of subsiding, my anger had turned into agitation. I wanted to pace or scream—something just wasn’t right.
“I’ll handle this, Emma,” Mrs. Stern said.
“But you’re not pissed off enough,” I protested.
“I am,” Lukas said, stepping around Mrs. Stern. “I’ll go.”
16
Despite her dumping him, I knew Lukas still cared about Natalie and that he’d take care of her, so I let Max drag me to the other side of the great hall. But instead of calming down, my skin began to crawl. What I thought had been agitation over Natalie and her mother crystallized into something else.
Neos was here. Somewhere near this crowded room, amid the chatter and the clinking glasses, the cracking of the fire and the faint strains of violin, I sensed the scratchy, unearthly whisper of his wraiths.
I froze in place, drawing my power around myself like a cloak, my gaze flitting through the milling crowd, terrified I’d spot the inky tattered flesh of a wraith. I could almost taste Neos in the air, rancid and poisonous.
He felt close as the crowd surged around me, and I probed with my powers, searching for him. “Do you feel that?” I whispered to Max.
“I feel you,” he said. “What’re you doing?”
“Neos is here.” The moment I said the words, I realized I was wrong. “No, he’s not. His ashes. I’m feeling his ashes.”
Power sparked inside Max, and he turned businesslike. “Where?”
“I don’t know, it’s still muffled.”
Then we both felt it. An eruption of spectral hunger and rot that sent malevolent echoes throughout the room. Max pointed toward one of the back hallways. “There?”
“Yeah. I thought it was closer, but …” I shook my head. “You get the others, I’ll go ahead.”
“By yourself?”
“Simon said we had to be fast. We’ve got maybe fifteen minutes,” I said. “Go!”
Max said, “If you get hurt, I’ll kill you,” then started shouldering through the crowd toward the door through which the others had disappeared.
I weaved through a bunch of parents drinking wine. The sense of being surrounded by Neos’s power stayed with me, but I kept my focus on the strongest eruption of nastiness and followed it into the hallway.
When the door closed behind me, the noise and heat of the main hall became muffled. My hand moved to my hip, but of course I had no dagger.
“Okay, Emma,” I said in the deserted hallway. Not just to myself, but to the other Emma. This was her house; her power still resonated through these walls. And yeah, maybe Neos had staged every step of this fight, but that had to count for something.
My spine tingled so sharply that it felt like pinpricks. I drew my power into my arms and my clenched fists. This wasn’t just Emma’s house—this was mine: my school, my friends. My life. And I wasn’t going to let Neos take it from me.
The clattering of my heels sounded flat and lonely in the corridor as I crept toward the spectral stench. I passed the first two student lounges, the doors to the computer lab, and one of the classrooms, and came to the end of the hallway, where I found a dark stain on the floor. Except that was no stain, that was an inky-black shadow, a shadow with no source, cast by no light.
It was a rip in the veil between the worlds. My power swirled around me as wraiths poured out of the Beyond. Three of them, insectoid and famished, with tattered skin and insatiable hunger. Their whispers almost deafened me: Neos, Neos, crack the skin and suck the flesh. They rushed me, bony claws grasping, gaping mouths spitting acid.
I smiled as my power flowed around me until I was covered with a translucent layer of energy, compelling and dispelling magic swirling together. I backhanded the first wraith and it burst into shards.
The second wraith lunged for my throat and I sidestepped, spun, and elbowed it in the back of the neck. A spectral joint snapped and the second wraith dissolved. The third wraith hesitated, hissing and spitting.
A ray of power shot from my fingertips, melting it into a black tarry stain on the floor. But it wasn’t dead. The tarry stain thickened and grew and took the form of a child—a little blond girl who stared at me with big, pleading eyes.
But I’d met this kind of wraith before, and I wasn’t going to waste any tears this time. She crawled toward me, inky tendrils sprouting from her fingernails, and I blasted her into dust.
Her death seemed to trigger a reaction. More wraiths boiled from the Beyond, maybe a dozen of them—hard to tell where one ended and the next began. I kneed one wraith in the face and twisted another like a dishrag as I heard footsteps running toward me from behind. Max yelled, “The ashes, Em! Where are the ashes?”
Oh, God. I’d gotten so caught up in killing wraiths, I’d forgotten. “I don’t know—not here.”
“Find them,” Lukas said. “We’ve got this.”
Following him and Max were Natalie and the Sterns—and Natalie’s mom, looking terrified but willing. As a group, they rushed toward me, bristling with ghostkeeping powers. Natalie and her mother held hands and Natalie used her reverse-summoning power to banish a wraith, which she’d never been strong enough to do before—she was directing her mother’s power, too. When Natalie and I held hands, we always interfered with each other, but she and her mother seemed to work together on some instinctive level.
“This is why, Natalie,” her mother cried. “This is why I didn’t want this life for you.”
“This is why,” Natalie yelled back triumphantly, banishing another wraith. “Why I love it!”
Then Lukas plowed into a bunch of wraiths, parting them like Moses parted the Red Sea—slamming half against one wall and half against the other, while Max and Mrs. Stern started ripping into them. Mr. Stern hung back—unable to see the wraiths, but ready to rush in and drag anyone away if necessary, which struck me as the bravest thing of all.
They looked pretty good, but that was a lot of wrait
hs, and I wasn’t sure they could win. Actually, I was pretty sure they couldn’t.
“Neos sent these as a distraction,” Mrs. Stern told me. “To keep you from finding the ashes.”
I still hesitated. What if they lost because I left them?
“Don’t let him win,” Natalie told me. “Move your butt, Emma.”
She was right. I had to trust them. I backpedaled, and while the wraiths howled and snapped and swarmed after me, the others held them back.
Fifty feet down the hallway, with the sound of the battle echoing behind me, I sensed another source of Neos’s power. It came from the main hall, a dull throb of anger and hate. Crap. We’d left the students and their parents totally defenseless.
When would my parents get here? They could be helping. And where the hell was Bennett? He promised he’d be here.
I ran, bursting through the doors into the main hall, full of heat and noise. Then I stopped. Nothing looked different, but everything felt wrong.
The ashes were here. In the main hall. They’d always been here.
Except I still couldn’t tell where, exactly. I sidestepped through the crowd, ignoring everyone, my powers stretched to the limit, as I closed in on the ashes. Then a hand grabbed my elbow from behind.
I stomped backward on the person’s foot, then spun to elbow them in the throat, and Sara yelped. “Ow! Ow-ow-ow!”
“And that,” Harry said, reaching to steady her as she hopped, “is why I never dance with Emma. Those monkey toes of hers are dangerous.”
“The ashes are here,” I whispered, as the spectral energy thickened in the air. “And …”
“And what?” Sara said, rubbing her foot.
I turned my back to the crowd. “Ghosts. Lots of ghosts.”
“Good ghosts?” Harry asked hopefully. “Like Casper?”
“Don’t make a face,” I told them. “But they’re possessed. I think, like, a quarter of the people in the room.”
So, of course, Harry loudly said, “Seriously?” and scanned the crowd.
Sara slugged him in the stomach, and as he bent over in pain, I scream-whispered into his ear. “They’ll come after us if they know we know, you idiot.”
