A night for tossing and turning, lost in nightmares of Aunt Lauren and my dad and Rae. I kept waking up, gasping and sweating, everyone around me sound asleep. I’d gulp cold air and calm down enough to join them only to have the nightmares return.
Finally my sleeping brain found a distraction in the same place my waking brain had: thoughts of the dead body in the other room. No objective, sympathetic examination of his situation this time, though. I dreamed of dragging that poor spirit back to his shell, screaming and cursing me.
Then the dream changed and I was back in the crawl space. The musty, awful stench of death surrounded me. I felt Derek behind me, the heat of his body radiating, as he whispered, “Chloe, come on.”
Come where? I was trapped in the crawl space, with those horrors crawling toward me, cold skeletal fingers touching me, the stink of them making my stomach churn.
Derek shook me, and I tried to push him away, tell him he wasn’t helping—
“Chloe!”
I jerked awake, the dream evaporating. Above me, green eyes glinted in the darkness.
“Derek? What—?”
He clamped his hand over my mouth. His lips moved to my ear. “Are you awake now? I need you to do something for me.”
The urgency in his voice knocked any sleepiness from my head. I squinted at him in the darkness. Were his eyes feverish? Or was that just their usual weird glow, like a cat’s in the dark?
I pulled his hand away. “Are you Changing again?”
“What? No. I’m fine. Just listen, okay? Remember the body in the other room?” He spoke slowly, carefully.
I nodded.
“You’re going to think about that body for me, okay? About the spirit that was in it. You need to release the—”
“Release? I—I didn’t summon—”
“Shhh. Just concentrate on releasing it without waking the others. Can you do that?”
I nodded. Then I tried to sit up. Something heavy held my legs to the floor. I pushed onto my elbows. Derek lunged so fast all I saw was his dark form coming down on me, hands going to my shoulders, slamming me back into the ground, pinning me down.
I freaked. I didn’t stop to wonder what he was doing. My brain just registered a guy on top of me in the middle of the night, and instinct kicked in. I lashed out, arms and legs flailing. My nails caught his cheek, and he fell back with a grunt of pain.
I scrambled up, legs still weighted down…and now I saw why. A corpse was crawling up me.
It was the one from the next room, little more than a skeleton, covered in clothing and strips of leathery flesh. Greasy hanks of hair patchworked its skull. Its eyes were empty pits. Its lips were long gone, leaving a skull’s permanent grin of rotted teeth.
When I let out a whimper, it stopped and tried to hold its head upright, skull swaying from side to side, eye sockets searching blindly, jaws opening with a guttural gah-gah-gah.
I let out a bona fide “Scream Queen” shriek that rang through the room.
I kicked and fought, trying to get out from under the thing. Derek grabbed me by the armpits and yanked me out. He slapped his hand over my mouth, but I could still hear my scream, echoing around me. He growled for me to shut up and as I tried to obey, I realized it wasn’t me screaming now.
“What is that?” Tori shrieked. “What is that?”
The flick of a flashlight. A beam shining in our eyes. And then she really screamed, loud enough to make my ears ring. The corpse reared up, mouth opening, screaming back, a high-pitched wail.
Simon woke up, too. When he saw the corpse, he let out a string of profanity.
“Shut her up!” Derek snarled to Simon, jabbing a finger at Tori. “Chloe! Calm down. You need to calm down.”
I nodded, gaze fixed on that thing. I tried to remind myself it wasn’t a “thing” but a person, yet all I could see was a skeleton held together by bits of flesh, that eyeless head swaying, those teeth clicking—
I inhaled, in and out, fast.
“Calm down, Chloe. Just calm down.”
There was nothing calming about his tone, just an impatient snap, telling me to stop freaking out and get to work. I pulled from his grasp.
“You need to—” he began.
“I know what I need to do,” I snapped back.
“What is that thing?” Tori gibbered. “Why is it moving?”
“Get her out of here,” Derek said.
As Simon hauled Tori away, I tried to relax, but my heart was racing too fast for me to focus. I shut my eyes, only to feel something on my foot. My eyes opened to see fingers reaching for my leg.
I scuttled back. A filthy rag-covered arm reached out, finger bones scratching the newspaper on the floor as it tried to propel itself forward, too broken to lift itself. How could it even move? But it did. Just like the bats, inch by inch, coming toward me—
“You called it,” Derek said. “It’s trying—”
“I didn’t call anything.”
“Somehow you summoned it, and now it’s trying to find you.”
I concentrated, but at the first touch on my leg, I skittered to the side. The thing paused, skull wobbling, then those empty eye sockets locked on me as it turned in my new direction.
“You have to release it,” Derek said.
“I’m trying.”
“Try harder.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and formed a mental image of the corpse. I pictured the ghost trapped inside and imagined drawing it out—
“Concentrate,” Derek whispered.
“I am. If you’d shut up—”
The corpse stopped, like it could hear me. Then it reached out, blindly, searching. It found my leg and its finger started feeling its way toward my knee. I steeled myself against the urge to pull away. It needed to find me, so I let it. Ignore that and focus on—
“What did you do the last time?” Derek asked.
I glared over at him.
“I’m trying to help,” he said.
“You’d help a lot more if you’d shut—”
His glare matched mine. “You need to release it, Chloe. With all that screaming, someone’s bound to have heard us, and you’ve got about five minutes before they burst through that door and see a corpse crawling—”
“Is that supposed to help me?”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Out.”
“I just—”
“Out!”
He retreated. I closed my eyes and envisioned the skeleton, the trapped spirit—
A bony finger touched the bare skin where my shirt had twisted away from my jeans and I jumped, eyes flying open to see it right there, the skull a few inches from my face, bobbing and weaving.
The coarse scraggly hair brushed my throat and I whimpered. It went still. Then the skull moved closer still. I could smell it now, the faint stench of death I hadn’t noticed earlier, churning my stomach, the thought of someone in there, trapped in that rotting—
It moved closer.
“Stop. P-please stop.”
It went still. We hung there, eyeball to eye socket as I took short quick breaths, calming myself without inhaling its stink too deeply.
I waited for its next move, but it didn’t make one.
I’d told it to stop, and it had.
I remembered those gruesome old pictures on the Internet of necromancers leading armies of the dead. I remembered the book Dr. Davidoff had given me about the powers of necromancers.
The power to communicate with the dead. The power to raise the dead. The power to control the dead.
“M-move back,” I said. “P-please.”
It did, slowly, teeth clacking. A guttural sound rose from its chest. A growl.
I knelt. “Lie down, please.”
As it did, it lifted its face to me, skull moving from side to side like a snake, its growl a rattling hiss. I heard that hiss and I looked into those empty eye sockets and I felt hate. Waves of loathing rolled off the corpse. It wasn’t obeying me because it wanted to, but beca
use it had to. It was an enslaved spirit, summoned by a necromancer, slammed back into little more than a skeleton, forced to make it move to obey the will of its master.
I swallowed hard. “I-I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to call you back. I wasn’t trying to.”
It hissed, head still moving, as if it would love nothing more than to show me what death felt like.
“I’m so sor—”
I swallowed my words. The ghost trapped in there didn’t want apologies. It wanted freedom. So I closed my eyes and concentrated on making that happen, which was a lot easier when I didn’t have to worry about it creeping up my legs.
As I visualized tugging the spirit out, the chattering stopped so fast I peeked, thinking I’d accidentally commanded it to be silent. But the skeleton had collapsed in a motionless heap by my feet. The ghost was gone.
Twenty-two
I TOOK A DEEP, shaky breath, rubbed my face, and looked up to see Derek’s figure filling the doorway.
“If you think someone might have heard, we should grab our things and go,” I said, my voice remarkably steady. “We’ll leave him where he is, so he’ll be found and buried.”
As I spoke, I had this crazy idea that Derek might actually be impressed by how I’d finally handled it. But he just stood there, fingering the scratch on his cheek.
“I’m sorry about that,” I said. “I panicked when you—”
“I gave you the option of leaving earlier. I said if that”—he gestured at the corpse—“was a problem, we’d find another place.”
“And I thought it wasn’t a problem, as long as I didn’t summon any ghosts.”
“But you did.”
“I was asleep, Derek.”
“What were you dreaming?”
I remembered and went still.
“You dreamed that you summoned him, didn’t you?”
“I—I didn’t mean—” I rubbed my face. “Normal people can’t control their dreams, Derek. If you can, then I guess you really are smarter than the rest of us.”
“Of course, I can’t. But it was a bad situation—you being close to a dead body. You should have known that from the crawl space.”
I did know that, especially after the incident with the bats. My gut had told me to leave, but I hadn’t had the nerve to admit my fear. I was afraid of being weak. Afraid of being mocked by Tori, of pissing off Derek, of disappointing Simon. In trying to be strong, I’d been stupid.
I wanted to own up to my mistake and tell Derek about the bats. But when I saw his expression—the intolerant arrogance that said he was right and I was a silly little twit—there was no way I was admitting anything.
“Everything okay?” Simon stood behind Derek, trying to see past him.
“It’s…he’s gone,” I said. “The ghost.”
“Good, because I think I heard someone coming.”
“And when were you going to warn us?” Derek snapped.
“I wasn’t going to barge in and interrupt Chloe.” He turned to me. “Are you okay?”
“Of course she’s okay.” Tori came up behind Simon. “She’s the one who summoned that thing. She should be asking if we’re okay, after being woken in the middle of the night and totally traumatized.”
“You weren’t too traumatized to grab your hairbrush,” Simon said.
“As a weapon, okay? I—”
I stepped between them. “Did someone mention we’re in danger of being discovered? Let’s grab our stuff and move.”
“You’re giving orders now, Chloe?” Tori said.
“No, I’m making suggestions. If you choose to ignore them, that’s fine. Stay behind and explain the dead body to whoever’s coming.”
“Yes,” said a voice behind me. “Maybe you should explain that, little girl.”
A figure stood across the room, only his outline visible in the dark. I turned back to the others, but no one had moved. They were all just looking at me.
“Chloe?” Simon said.
A man stepped from the shadows. His long hair was only streaked with gray, but his face was so lined he looked eighty. My gaze dropped to his sweatshirt, emblazoned with a Buffalo Bruins logo. Then I looked at the skeleton on the floor, twisted just enough for me to see the same logo, faded almost to nothing on the tattered shirt.
“Chloe?” he said. “Is that your name, brat?”
“I-I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to summon you.”
Simon jumped in front of me. “Look, ghost, I know you can hear me. It was an accident.”
The man lunged through Simon. I fell back with a yelp. Simon spun, but Derek yanked him aside.
“Who’s Chloe talking to?” Tori asked.
“The ghost she summoned,” Simon said.
“Grab your backpacks,” Derek said. “We need to get going.”
As Simon and Tori took off, Derek followed my gaze, figuring out where the ghost stood. “She didn’t mean to raise you. She apologized, and we’re leaving, so it won’t happen again. Go on back to your afterlife.”
The ghost strode over to glare up at Derek. “You going to make me?”
“He can’t,” I said. “And he can’t hear you either. I am sorry. Very—”
He wheeled on me. I shrank away again, but Derek put his hand against my back, stopping my retreat.
“He can’t hurt you,” Derek whispered. “Stand firm and tell him to go.”
“I’m very sorry.” I straightened and moved forward. “I didn’t mean to summon you. It was an accident—”
“Accident! That was no accident. You and your punk friends thought it would be funny to drag me back into that—that thing.” He pointed at the corpse. “You think I haven’t dealt with kids like you before? Drive me out of my sleeping spot for kicks. Roll me for my boots. Now you come here, conducting your satanic rituals…”
“Satanic? No. W-we—”
“Did you hear that?” said a distant voice. “Someone’s in there.”
Derek swore, then gave me a shove toward the back of the building. Simon and Tori raced in.
“Two men,” Simon said. “Cops, I think. Coming up the front—”
“Back door,” Derek said. “Move.”
The front door banged open. Simon spun and headed for the rear. We followed.
“Hey!” the ghost yelled. “Where do you think you’re going?”
A shove from Derek kept me moving.
“Oh no, you don’t, little girl,” the ghost said. “I’m not done with you yet. You’re going to pay for that stunt….”
He snarled threats right on my heels as we snuck out the back door.
Twenty-three
“IS HE GONE?” TORI asked as I approached.
I nodded and inhaled. The icy night air burned my lungs. I didn’t feel the cold, though—I was wearing my shirt, one of the new sweatshirts with the hood up, and the oversized jacket on top. Sweat dripped down my face as I struggled to catch my breath. I’d separated from the others a couple of blocks back, thinking that without a group, I might lose him easier. I’d been right.
We didn’t know who’d come to investigate the noises. Maybe cops like Simon thought, maybe street people—we hadn’t stuck around long enough to find out.
Now we stood in a parking lot, between a minivan and a pickup. Music boomed from a nearby club. That had surprised me—a packed parking lot and a busy bar so late at night on a weekday. Then I’d checked my watch and realized it wasn’t even midnight yet.
“You shouldn’t have taken off like that,” Derek said.
“I told you what I was doing. It worked, didn’t it?”
“You can’t—”
“Ease off,” Simon murmured. “We need to find a new place to sleep.”
“Thanks to someone,” Tori said.
“It isn’t Chloe’s fault.”
“Sure it is. Even Derek said so.”
“He didn’t mean—”
I held up my hands. “I take all blame. Can we please stop bickering? I know everyon
e’s on edge, but if we’re going to get through this—”
“If you start a speech about how we all need to overcome our differences and work together, I’m going to hurl,” Tori said.
“Well, I would, but I’m afraid this genetically modified supernatural would be eaten by a genetically modified shark.”
Simon burst out laughing. “Deep Blue Sea.” He looked at Derek. “You didn’t see it. Samuel L. Jackson is giving this group of survivors the speech about how they have to stop fighting and to work together. In the middle of it, the shark comes up behind him and eats him. Best death scene ever.”
“And a fitting one for anyone who makes that speech, which is why I’m not going to.”
“But you’re right,” Simon said. “Time to call a moratorium on the bickering.”
“Moratorium?” Tori said. “Oooh, big word. Showing off, Simon?”
We all turned to look at her.
“What?” she said.
“No bickering means no jabs, no insults, no snark, no baiting,” Derek said. “And it means we probably won’t hear another word from you for days.”
“As for this situation,” I said, “I take the blame, so I’ll fix the problem. Stay here and I’ll find us a place—”
Derek caught the back of my jacket. “You still have a pissed-off ghost looking for you and a huge reward on your head. Stay here with Tori. Simon and I will find a new spot.”
Before they took off, Derek turned back to me. “I mean it, stay right here.”
“Even if the owners of these”—Tori rapped the vehicles on either side—“come out?”
Derek ignored her. “She’s your responsibility, Chloe.”
When they were gone, Tori turned to me. “Why do you let him get away with that? He treats you like a little kid.”
I said nothing, just started walking away from the spot where Derek told me to stay.
She smiled. “That’s more like it.”
I led her to a strip of gravel between two buildings. Then I lowered myself to the ground. “This is safer, but still close enough.”
She stared at me. “You’re kidding, right?”
I pulled my jacket sleeves over my hands to keep them warm.
“You actually listen to him?”
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