Afterlife

by Claudia Gray

  Those distant clouds weren’t so distant anymore; the entire sky seemed to me to be darkening, although sunlight shone down on everyone else.

  The cool, damp breeze that rushed through my hair didn’t touch anybody else on the road. I realized that the skies above were, for each person here, a reflection of their spirit; as I grew more afraid and unsure, the storm came.

  Christopher didn’t answer. “This work is important. It will demand much of you. But the good you could do is beyond measure.”

  I agreed with him. It sounded worthwhile — more than worthwhile. Important. The kind of thing I’d wanted to spend my afterlife doing. But the 137 idea of letting go of the people I loved !held me back. “Why don’t you do it? You’re so super — powerful and everything, according to Maxie.”

  “I was not born to the wraiths. I have not your natural power. My talents are meaner, and self — taught over time.”

  “Why don’t you train everyone else here to do the same?”

  “They are not as powerfully anchored to the mortal realm as I have been,” he said. His gaze was distant. “My connection has lasted longer than most, more intimately than most.”

  Lightning flashed, and I felt rain begin to patter onto my hair and jeans, despite the fact that nobody else was getting wet. “I can’t. I’m sorry — I see that what you want me to be is a good thing — that it’s important — but I can’ t.”

  Christopher didn’t look as discouraged by my refusal as I would’ve thought. “You have time to consider the matter,” he said. He was right, of course; we literally had eternity to go over this. As I edged away from him, already eager to leave, Christopher hurriedly added, “You need not be entirely separate from those you care for, even here. Your powers would allow you to hear them.”

  “Really?” Not that this was that big a selling point for me — l mean, I wanted to remain with the people I loved, not just able to reach them. But knowing that those bonds survived here was encouraging, somehow.

  Apparently encouraged himself, Christopher nodded. “Reach into the depths of your own spirit until you find, within, someone that you love.” What was that supposed to mean, reach into my own spirit? Then I remembered what I’d thought about the skies overhead. They were a reflection of my innermost self; I should concentrate on the darkening storm.

  I closed my eyes but could still see the brilliance of the lightning through my eyelids. Cold raindrops spattered on my face, but I held out my arms, accepting the storm as part of myself.

  And then my eyes flew open wide as I heard my name — as a scream.

  Someone’s in trouble, I realized. My first thought was Lucas, but I realized that the voice in the thunder sounded familiar.

  It sounded like my father.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “DAD,” I WHISPERED. I COULD HEAR HIM — THOUGH “hear” wasn’t quite the right word. It was more a matter of sensing him, feeling his fear and anguish through the sound of the thunder and the chill of the wind whipping around me.

  “Will you go to him?” Christopher didn’t seem to approve or disapprove; he just watched, like he was taking my measure.

  Could I face my father again? Face the risk that he would reject me forever, or turn against me?

  Then the thunder rumbled one more time, and I felt the fear in my father’s heart more strongly than the fear in my own. Something terrible was happening, something much more important than the answers I needed. If Christopher turned against me now — if he tried to trap me in this place — I had to find Dad if I could.

  “Yes,” I said . “I’m going.”

  Christopher wasn’t angry; that was the first moment I felt that perhaps I could trust him. “Then I shall hope for your return.”

  ‘Til come back,” I promised Christopher. “I want to know more.”

  “And I want to tell you.”

  “How do I reach my father?”

  “When the person you love wishes for you so desperately,” Christopher said, “you will find it impossible to be anywhere else.”

  His face looked sorrowful as he said it, so much so that I wondered who had wished for him. But I couldn’t worry about Christopher for very long, not with Dad in danger or despair or whatever it was that clouded the skies above. I couldn’t worry about myself, either. My fears had been only a kind of selfishness; I saw that now. This land of lost things gave everything. whether seen or unseen, a brilliant clarity.

  I closed my eyes and thought of my father. For the first time in months — since I’d died — !didn’t just think of the idea of him. I let myself remember so fully that it filled my heart. Tucking me into bed when I was a baby. Slow — dancing with Mom while Dinah Washington played on his old hi — fi. Making small talk with our neighbors in Arrowwood in an effort to fit in. Taking me to the beach because I loved it, though he hated sunlight. Griping about having to get up early in the morning, with his hair sticking out all over the place. Acting out his resurrection from the dead m with one of my old Ken dolls, to an audience of one very interested little girl and some highly surprised Barbies. Everything that made him Dad.

  When I opened my eyes. he was there.

  Or rather, I was back with him, at Evernight. Night had fallen — no telling how long it had been since I’d left. It had felt like minutes but could have been hours or days. My father stood in the center of the school library — The library! I thought, terrified, remembering the trap that had been here. But Lucas had taken it away, and perhaps it hadn’t been replaced. I felt fine. My father, on the other hand, seemed to be bracing himself against high winds. No, not “seemed to” — a gale — force wind had whipped up inside the room itself, each gust ice cold. I realized he was trapped; ice had formed between the bookshelves, creating a ten — foot — high frozen maze with my father in the center and no way out. A blue — gray shimmering form could just be made out in the far corner, someone skinny to the point of boniness, very old, almost bald. It could’ve been male or female. It was certainly a wraith.

  “It tries,” the thing wheezed, in a voice that sounded like cracking ice. I recognized it: one of the Plotters. “It tries, but it’s too stupid to know what it’s doing wrong.”

  Dad said, “You’ll be pulled in. You can’t hold out forever.” But he didn’t sound like he believed it. His eyes didn’t look angry or scared, just sad — the way they had when I’d seen him on the couch when I first retumed to Evernight. The way Lucas had looked when he went into his fatal battle with Charity. I realized why Dad had been thinking about me, calling to me; my father believed he was about to die his final death.

  He’d been trying to lure this ghost into a trap, I realized — I could see one of the coppery seashell boxes at his feet, cracked in two and now apparently powerless. Why was Dad helping Mrs. Bethany?

  The wheeze turned into a cackle. “Freeze it cold. Break it in two. No more head, no more noise.”

  Dad’s face didn’t change, because he probably didn’t know what the wraith was talking about. But I knew. I’d used the power myself — the ability to reach inside a vampire and turn its body to ice. I’d seen how powerfully it could hurt vampires, and I didn’t doubt it could kill them.

  The wraith swooped down, the malevolent spirit from my worst nightmares, the embodiment of everything that still terrified me about ghosts. I didn’t know what to do; I didn’t know if I had any power over other wraiths. Could it destroy me as well as my father? What could I do?

  Instantly, I thought of my coral bracelet and the records room, and my spirit rematerialized tl1ere. Vic, who was sitting on a beanbag and reading a comic book, half snorted, half choked on a mouthful of soda when I appeared. “Whoa! Bianca, you gotta warn a guy.”

  I’d hoped for Lucas or Balthazar. but I’d take whatever help I could get; even a simple interruption might make the wraith leave. “My dad’s in trouble — get to the library! Quick!”

  just as fast, I thought of the gargoyle outside my old window — and I was there, ho
vering outside my old room. It was worth scaring the crap out of my mother if that got her down to the library to help Dad, but she Wasn’t there. Frustrated, I zipped down along the stones, seeking a familiar face; luckily, Patrice was there, alone, putting the fmishing touches on her manicure. I realized she was the one I’d needed all along. I frosted the window so fast it shook, and she opened it to thrust her head outside. “Bianca?”

  “The library! Bring your mirror, now!”

  I have to get back to Dad. But the tether I’d traveled along before had snapped; that kind of connection didn’t seem to work here in the mortal world. I’d have to take the long way. The only way to avoid leaving ice in my wake was to calm down and slow down, but this was no time for that.

  I zoomed through Patrice’s room and down the hallways, ignoring the frost and the eerie blue lights that rippled around me, eve n when the other students began to scream. Skye, emerging from the shower, nearly dropped her towel, and I could see the wet strands of her hair freezing into icy points. Sony, I thought absently. I couldn’t worry about anyone right now besides my father.

  My journey to the library probably took no more than a couple of minutes, but it seemed like eternity. When I went through the doors, a quick swipe of wood through my whole body, I cotuld see flickering blue light reflecting on and within what was now an enormous cage of ice. Somewhere in the middle of that crackling, sparkling prison was my dad. I pushed through the ice to the center.

  There, to my horror, I saw Dad — swaying on his feet, leaning back at an impossible angle, pushing desperately against the fist of ice that was buried within his chest.

  The wraith cackled. “Stupid it. Stupid it.”

  “Get away from him!” I screamed. Not knowing what else to do, I threw myself into it from the side, as hard as I could. It simply went filmy and let me topple thr — ough. But I at least provided a distraction; the wraith pulled its icy hand from my father and turned toward me.

  It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. At first I’d thought it was only old, but old people didn’t look like this. The “flesh” that it manifested didn’t seem to fit any longer — its lower eyelids sagged so far that I could see the full eye socket, and its lips drooped over its jaws, down by its chin. I backed away untilI touched the ice; I could’ve gone through it, but that would have meant abandoning Dad.

  I heard a soft voice say, disbelieving, “Bianca?”

  Dad! But I couldn’t look at him right now; this wraith needed to stay focused on me and not him.

  The wraith’s round, eerie eyes lit up — literally, as though they were gas flames. I had no idea we could do that and seriously did not want to start. ··A baby,” it said.

  “I might be new to this, but I promise you, I can — ” What could I do? “I can out — haunt you any day if you don’t leave him alone.”

  “You can take us there,” it said, shuffling forward with an eagerness that was slightly childlike, and tl1erefore more disturbing.

  Was this what Christopher had meant? That I was supposed to help creepy things like this?

  Then I felt bad. If I hadn’t been able to create a body, and interact once more with the people who loved me, maybe I would have turned creepy, too. If it could go to that land of lost things. maybe it would stop being so scary and start to look like itself again. If I’d thought working with dead people was going to be pretty all the time — especially given some of the dead people I’d already known — then that was stupid of me.

  Til take you,” I promised. I didn’t exactly know how to do that yet, but already I understood that if I couldn’t pick it up quickly, Christopher could help me. “Just let this man go, okay? We can go there right now.”

  The wraith hesitated. Maybe it couldn’t believe its good luck.

  But then its flaming eyes narrowed, slits of unearthly ftre blue. “It doesn’t get to run away,” it hissed. “Not after what it did.”

  “I don’t care what he was doing. It doesn’t matter! You can leave this place now. Isn ‘t that more important?”

  It didn’t answer me. The wraith had to think, I realized — it was divided between hope and hate, unable to choose one over the other.

  Softly. I added, “Where we’re going . .. it can be beautiful. It’s better than haunting a school. anyway. You have to see it. Come on.” I forced myself to offer my hand to the wraith, though its fingers were clawlike and bony.

  For another moment, the wraith hesitated. I dared to glance over at my father and wished instantly that I hadn’t; tears were running down his cheeks as he looked up at me, and I thought maybe he was crying because I had turned into something so horrible — something just like this creature that had tried to hurt him.

  Then the wraith suddenly shrieked in rage. “It doesn’t! It doesn’t get to run away.” Hate had won.

  It dove for my father, and I tried to get between them. I couldn’t stop the wraith, exactly, but it was like we somehow tangled up in each other neither of us solid, neither of us distinct. Like fluffernutter in a sandwich: a gooey, sticky mess. The wraith’s spirit curled around my own, sicker and sadder than I’d realized, and I shuddered in revulsion.

  “Get away from me!” I pushed the wraith away, and it worked. The ghost sprang above us, a coiled blue streak of electricity just beneath the ceiling. I had a sudden image of it coming down as a thunderbolt. Who would it strike first? My dad or me? And what would happen when it did?

  Then the wraith screamed, a pitiful sound, and dissolved into bluish smoke that swirled down toward the library door. Within a second the light had gone out, and there was silence.

  I realized what must have happened. “Patrice?” I called.

  “It’s in my new compact!” she called from beyond the ice. “Which just happens to be Estee Lauder. This thing had better not break it.” Then I heard the sound of Vic’s amazed laughter. “That was incredibly cool.”

  “I try,” she said.

  The ice walls surrounded my father and me. Although I guessed they’d melt eventually, I didn’t like the idea of leaving him in there alone to be 143 found in the morning. “Can you guys break us out?”

  “Yeah, hang on!” Vic sounded excited about the whole process. “I’m gonna use the emergency fire ax. Try out some of Ranulf’s moves.”

  As I heard them going into the hallway for the fire ax, I knew that there was no other way to avoid it. Bracing myself, I turned to once again face my father.

  “Bianca,” he said again. His cheeks were wet from tears. “It’s … really you?”

  “Yeah.” My voice sounded so small. “Dad, I’m sorry.”

  “Sony? n Dad grabbed me and hugged me so hard that my semisolid body almost gave way, but I held on. “My baby girl. You don’t have to be sorry for anything. You’re here. You’re here.”

  And I knew that he didn’t care that I was a wraith, or that I’d been so stupid and wrong about so many things, or that we’d fought the last time we talked. My dad still loved me.

  If I could have cried, I would have. As it was, the joy that spread through me turned into light and warmth, a soft glow like a candle — and I could feel it soothing my father’s pain. “I missed you, “I whispered. “I missed you and Mom so much.”

  “Why didn’t you come to us?”

  “I was scared you wouldn ‘ t want me anymore. Now that I’m a wraith.”

  “You’re my daughter. That never changes.” Dad’s face was creased with pain. “We hated them so much . . . were so afraid of them. Of course you were scared. We were so — obstinate and shortsighted about this. We should have talked to you.”

  “If I’d known . . .” I didn’t know what I would ‘ve done, if I had known. Would I have turned into a vampire? Chosen my present path? I couldn’t tell, and it didn’t matter. We were here now. “I’m sorry I ran away like that. I know I scared you.”

  My dad’s expression suggested that I hadn’t known the half of it, but he never stopped embracing me. “It’s that boy. He w
as always a bad influence on you — ”

  “Dad, no. I made the decision to go on my own. Lucas helped take care of me, but it was my choice. If you’ re angry about it — and I don’t blame you — you have to understand that it was my fault. Only mine.”

  Dad stroked my hair, but said nothing. I knew he didn’t believe me.

  “Lucas needs your help,” I whispered. “He’s having trouble with the transition. He hates what he is and can’t get over it. You could help him.”

  “That’s too much to ask.”

  “That’s what I’m asking.” But after what I’d put my father through in the past few months, maybe I didn’t have the right to demand a whole lot, at least not now. “When you’ re ready. Think about it.”

  The library doors squeaked, and I heard Vic yell, “Fire brigade’s here!”

  My dad and I took hands as Vic and Patrice started chopping their way through the ice. They were laughing — apparently it was wet, messy work — which let me whisper to him privately, “Can we go see Mom?”

  I thought he’d be so thrilled, but instead he hesitated. “We should wait. Not long — I need to think about how best to handle it.”

  My heart sank. “You think Mom wouldn’t be able to accept this. She hates the wraiths. Is she going to hate me?”

  “Your mother loves you forever,” Dad said fiercely. “just like me. But her experiences with the wraiths have been worse than most. After the Great Fire of London, and the mass destruction of the ghosts there, the few wraiths that remained were — insane doesn’t even come close. Celia lingered for days with her injuries, and would ‘ ve died if I hadn’t — well. While she was trapped between life and death, she had some terrifying experiences. You’ll never know how hard it was for her to agree to the brief encounter with the wraith that created you. This stuff frightens her pretty badly to this day.”