Afterlife

by Claudia Gray

  Dana slumped, as if crushed. She and Lucas had grown up together — and she also had been indoctrinated by Black Cross, to the point where she would consider vampirism the worst possible fate. Maybe she was the only person who could fully comprehend the depth of Lucas’s self — loathing now. Then her eyes fixed on mine, flashing with anger. “How come you didn’t behead him?”

  As horrible as that was to contemplate, I’d considered it difficult enough to know my answer: “Because I’d been a vampire myself. I knew it wasn’t always the worst thing. I thought maybe he could handle it, and maybe he can.”

  “You were never anything but a vampire,” Dana shot back. Raquel watched us argue with wide eyes, as if afraid to remind either of us she was there. “How do you know what’s the worst thing? I know for damn sure that if I got changed, I’d want somebody to make sure I never woke up undead. It’s the most sacred promise we make to ourselves. Lucas and I promised each other that a thousand times.” She was breathing hard, her 153 outrage growing. “If you loved him, you’d have done that for him.”

  It was a slap in the face, even though I knew Lucas had forgiven me for it. “It’s easy to make promises. But if you had been there — if you’d seen Lucas lying there dead, and knew that you could either lose him forever or talk to him again in just a couple of hours — it’s not that easy anymore.” Once again, I wished it was possible for wraiths to cry; it hurt to carry such a sad memory and have no way to vent my grief. “As difficult as this is for him, he has his friends. He has me. Is that honestly worse than never having anything else, ever again?”

  Dana sat in silence for a few seconds. “I don’t know,” she finally admitted. “But what I say goes, okay, babe?” Her eyes met Raquel’s. “If I get changed into a vampire, you make sure I never, ever see the sunrise.”

  “I promise.” Raquel’s voice was so quiet, so sure, that her love for Dana filled the room. If Lucas and I had ever talked about this — if I had made him that promise — could I have been strong enough to let him go? As strong as Raquel? I wasn’t sure.

  For a few long moments, Raquel and Dana looked only at each other, and Raquel held Dana’s hand tight. But then Dana turned back to me. “Is that what you came to talk about? Lucas?’ Her tone softened slightly. “Does he need to speak to me? Because . .. if you need me to sneak into that crazy vampire school for him, I’ll do it.”

  Raquel blurted out, ;;What are you guys doing back at Evernight Academy? Are you nuts?” Then she shrank back again, still afraid of me.

  “It’s working out, sort of. Mrs. Bethany wasn’t even angry. It’s like she hates Black Cross so much that — she enjoys having taken Lucas from them.” I hadn’t realized that until now, but I didn’t doubt that was part of her reaction. “Anyway, I wouldn’t suggest showing up there as a Black Cross hunter. But there’s another Riverton trip coming up fairly soon. Unless … would Black Cross come after him again, if he leaves campus?”

  “Next time Mrs. Bethany’s going to have people there waiting for them,” Dana said, shaking her head. “Black Cross knows that. If they ever run 154 into Lucas again, they’ll turn on him in an instant, but they wouldn’t target Riverton after failing there the first time.”

  “Then that works. Maybe you could come to Riverton again, Dana. Lucas — !think he thinks you wouldn’t want to see him.”

  “That boy never did have any sense.” Dana’s scowl told me that she loved Lucas as much as ever. ;’Name the day. We’ll get there.”

  I took in our surroundings for the first time — a cheap but comfortable hotel room, with enough clutter around to show that they’d been here for a while. Saving up money for private accommodations was impossible in Black Cross, where any money was supposed to belong to the group rather than the individual. “So, you guys really did it. You left Black Cross for good.”

  “Not like we had much choice in the matter after we’ d fired at Kate,” Raquel said. For the first time, she met my eyes without flinching. “But we’d do it again in a heartbeat.” Then she winced, obviously afraid that was a tactless thing to say to a dead person.

  Dana sighed. “We started having doubts after what they did to you two in New York. Then, when they turned on Lucas in Philadelphia — that was the breaking point. We lit out a couple weeks ago. Holed up here, but we’ll find a real place sometime. We’re making minimum wage and feeling fine.”

  “We might be eating ramen,” Raquel added, “but we’re eating.”

  A weird silence fell in the room. I began, “Raquel, I actually came here to talk to you.”

  “I’m sorry.” Raquel was trembling, but she got out of bed. She wore a beat — up old T — shirt and sweatpants — and of course the leather bracelet, the one I remembered so well it had possessed the power to draw me here. “Bianca, I’m so, so sorry. You’ll never know how … forget it, how I feel doesn’t matter. You were a good friend to me, and I should’ve protected you, and I didn’t. I suck. If you want to haunt me or — or whatever, I know I deserve it.”

  I hadn’t realized how much I needed to hear that. But there were also things I needed to say. “I lied to you. I had my reasons, but still. If I’d told you the truth in the right way, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad.”

  “That doesn’t excuse what I did,” Raquel said, her voice shaky. She kept balling her hands into fists, so worked up that it startled me. “You could’ve been killed. I mean, killed killed. You know what I mean. When I realized what they were going to do — if I had known that, I would never have told. Not ever.”

  “I know. I always knew that, I think. Besides, you guys came through for Lucas when it mattered the most. That’s the main thing.”

  As I smiled unevenly at Raquel, she tried to smile back. The weight of her old betrayal hung between us, but lighter somehow than it had been before. It was going to take more time to heal, but at least now it was all out in the open. We were back on the same side. Everything else, I decided, could heal over time.

  “I didn’t come here to talk to you about that, actually,” I said.

  That caught Raquel up short. After glancing at an equally bewildered Dana, she said, “Then why are you here?”

  “The wraith who haunted your old house,” I said, bracing myself for what was to come. “The one who hurt you.” Raquel’s dark eyes searched mine, as if pleading with me not to bring up anything that painful. “What about it?”

  “We’re going to take care of him — for good.”

  As it happened, Dana and Raquel were living in a suburb of Boston, not terribly far from where Raquel had grown up. Also, when they’d left, they’d taken one of the Black Cross vans with them.

  “Some might call it stealing,” Dana said cheerfully as we piled into the old van, which smelled like gunpowder and Fritos. “But seeing as how Black Cross stole it from a dead vampire in the first place, I think of it as repurposing the vehicle. Sounds nicer, don’t you think?”

  “Looks like you repurposed some weapons, too.” I glanced over the armory in the back. “Stakes, holy water, and … is that a flamethrower?”

  “You never know when one will come in handy,” Raquel said, and I had to smile.

  Our joking around didn’t last for long, though. The closer we got to the house, the tenser Raquel became. She had shotgun in front; I was the phantom in the backseat. “How is this going to work?” she asked.

  “It’s pretty simple: I sort of didn’t mention I hadn’t done this before. No need to add to her nervousness, right? “We just need a mirror. Does 156 one of you guys have a compact? You know, for powder, makeup?”

  We were at a stoplight, which was why both Dana and Raquel were able to turn around and stare at me. After a second, Dana said, “Hi, have we met?”

  “Okay, no makeup in the car,” I said. “But we have to get a mirror.”

  A quick stop at an all — night drugstore yielded one powder compact. Although I had more substance than not, getting through the packaging was difficult for me, so I le
t Raquel handle it. She tore at the paper and plastic, hands shaky, making way more of a mess than necessary.

  “I haven’t talked to them in a long time,” she said, prying the compact out. “And now I’m just going to show up at two a.m. and be all, hey, remember that ghost you said doesn’t exist?”

  “Maybe we don’t have to wake them,” Dana said. A fine rain began to fall, and she hit the windshield wipers, with their soft slap — slap sound.

  “Is this ghostbusting business loud, Bianca?”

  “Urn, it can be. But it doesn’t have to be.” I hoped that was true. “We’ll try.”

  Raquel had always been very clear about the fact that she Wasn’t wealthy, like most of the living and dead students at Evernight. Her neighborhood Wasn’t as bad as I’d always imagined it, though. Maybe I was just naive and thought being poor meant living in a slum like one they showed on bad TV shows, with burning cars and gang members everywhere. It was just a quiet neighborhood with small houses that didn’t have much in the way of yards. Instead of squalor and violence, everything wasjust kind of gray and run — down, with some half — hearted, sloppy graffiti on the trash cans.

  “We’re lucky it’s raining,” Raquel said. “Everybody would be out on the corners if it weren ‘t.”

  The house in the middle of the block belonged to Raquel’s family. We realized as soon as we got out of the car that no one was home. “Where would they be?” Dana asked, as we peered through the windows at packed — up boxes. “The furniture’s in place, so they haven’t moved.”

  “With Frida, maybe?” Raquel squinted. “It looks like they’ve pulled up part of the kitchen floor. Maybe that water pipe burst again, and they’re fixing the damage.”

  “They’re not home,” I said. “That’s the important thing. We can do this now.”

  Raquel went very still. “I’m not sure I can.”

  Dana put an arm around her shoulders. “It’s okay. If you want to stay out here, that works, too. Right, Bianca?”

  I started to agree with her, then stopped myself. “You can stay out here if you want to,” I said. “But I think you should face this thing.” Her white lips pressed together, Raquel shook her head.

  “Come on, Raquel! Since when do you run away from a fight?” She wouldn’t look at me any longer, but I kept going. “If you don’t see this happen, then You’ll always be scared of it. Always. But if you see us defeat it, then that’s the last way you’ll remember it. Beaten. Isn’t that what you’d rather see?”

  “Back off, okay?” Dana got betvveen us. “Don’t push her.”

  “No,” Raquel said. She touched Dana’s shoulder, gently edging her aside. “Bianca’s right. I’ll go in.”

  As the rain fell softly around us, pattering on the metal awning overhead, Dana jimmied the front — door lock as swiftly as Lucas could’ve done.

  Too bad I wasn’t in Black Cross long enough to Jearn that trick, I thought.

  The door swung open with a creak. Dana tiptoed in, trying not to make a sound; Raquel, face pale, followed. I allowed myself to become mostly vapor, a soft blue mist right behind them.

  “Whoa,” Raquel said, clearly taken aback. “That’s — spooky.”

  “Shhh! We’re trying to be quiet here!” Dana held the compact in front of her, like she hoped to use it as a shield. I would need to take the compact from her, but that would come once I could take form again.

  “That’s okay, “I said. “Sooner or later, we want it to know we’re here.”

  I stretched my consciousness throughout the house, discovering that I could sense the layout of the rooms without seeing them, that I knew which one had belonged to Raquel — part of her essence lingered there.

  So did something else.

  The voice resonated on a frequency that Wasn’t quite sound, merely vibration, in the ether we shared. Little girl. Little girl. You’ve come back to play.

  Raquel started to shake. “It’s here,” she whispered. “I can tell.”

  She hadn ‘ t heard the voice, I realized, nor had Dana; they were both looking around wildly, as if expecting the wraith to appear from any 158 direction, at any second. And yet Raquel knew the presence of this thing on a deeper level than I could comprehend. I wondered how deep a link had been formed — how deeply this wraith had sunk its claws into her.

  Did you bring playmates for me?

  Suddenly I could see a room, not this one — a different, false reality surrounding me, slightly transparent but enclosing, too, like a cell made of glass. It looked like a small child’s bedroom. At first I thought this must have been what Raquel’s room looked like when she was a child, but then I corrected myself; she would never have spent so much as one night in a room this pink and frilly, with a canopy bed and dolls stacked in row after row. I’d never seen so many dolls — And I’d never seen any dolls who were watching me right back. Somehow they were looking at me, their glassy black eyes all too alive. I heard a soft rustling among their fluffy petticoats, and one of the dolls leaned sharply to the side, as if it had fallen. They were alive but not alive, watching but not watching, and just completely creepy. It was enough to scare the crap out of me, and I was a ghost.

  This is somebody’s idea of a child’s room, I thought. Their over — the — top imitation of where a little girl would sleep. Created by some guy who’s spent way too much time thinking about little girls in bed.

  “Show yourself,” I demanded. In the other reality — the actual one — I could see RaqueR and Dana both jump. “Stop hiding behind the dolls.

  Come out.”

  “The dolls,” Raquel whispered. She must have dreamed of them before.

  In the dream bedroom, the dolls rustled some more, toppling into piles so that their gold and brown curls tangled together. In the center, I saw him.

  If I hadn’t been able to feel the depth of Raquel’s fear, I might have laughed. This wraith didn’t look scary — just fat and kind of bald. Not very tall, either. And yet, as he studied me, tilting his head from side to side, there was something in the vacancy of his stare, and the greediness of his smile, that unsettled me 0111 every level.

  Pretty. Pretty red hair. Have you come to play with me?

  He shuffled out from the cloud of dolls. His body was naked, and disgusting, and my fear turned quickly to revulsion, then to anger.

  I said, “I’m not here to play.”

  Resonate, Patrice had said. I didn’t know how to do that, so I just concentrated on him, and thought of my own death. I remembered that strange sinking feeling of my body giving in, giving way. I remembered Lucas’s tears as he clutched my hand. It came back to me too vividly to bear — and yet I could feel the wraith being brought closer by the memories. I found my mind shaping words as though they were an incantation: By all that divides us from the living, I divide you from this place. By all the dm*ness that dwells within us, I consign you to darkness. By all the death that gives me power, I take your power from you.

  The wraith began to shriek, an unearthly wail that reverberated throughout the house. Dana grabbed both of her ears, perhaps in pain, and dropped the compact to the floor. Raquel didn’t flinch. She grabbed the mirror and tossed it toward me, and I materialized just enough to catch it in my hand.

  The moment I did, the force of the magic began drawing the wraith into the mirror. As I angled the mirror, the way Patrice had said, the wraith came apart before my eyes, not in a pretty mist like I was used to, but as though it were a physical thing being dismembered, blood and sinew, shrieks of pain. Yet it turned into so much dust as it flew into the mirror, howling the whole way — Until there was silence. The dream world had vanished. We stood in the living room, staring at the ice — caked mirror I held high above my head. “Is that … did we get him?” Dana asked breathlessly, her hands still at her ears.

  “Oh, my God.” Raquel took a shuddering breath. “We caught it.”

  “And as long as we don’t break the mirror, it can never get out again.” I’d f
ought it. I’d won. I knew how to stand up for myself against a wraith now; did that mean I was finally free?

  “It’s trapped in a mirror?” Raquel blinked. “It’s not in the phantom zon e or something?”

  I shrugged. “Wherever it is, it can’t get out again.”

  Raquel started to laugh, a sound of pure joy, and then she flung her arms around me. With all my strength, I kept myself as solid as I could, because the hug felt way too good to miss.

  “You did it,” she gasped. “You did it. That horrible thing — ”

  “It’s okay.” I patted her back as I realized her laughter was turning into tears. “It can’t get you again.”

  “You did that for me after what I did to you.”

  “I did it for me, too — ”

  “just shut up, okay?” Raquel hugged me tighter, and I took her advice and just held her while she cried. Over her shoulder, I could see Dana smiling at me beatifically, like I was her new favorite person in the whole world.

  Once Raquel had settled down again, I handed her off to Dana for more hugging and returned my attention to the mirror. It was thickly iced, yet it seemed to me that I could glimpse something moving in the reflection.

  “What are we going to do with that thing?” Raquel said. “Encase it in cement?”

  “That’s not a bad idea.”

  Then I felt the pull — almost physical, like I was being dragged.

  “Bianca?” Raquel took a step forward. “You’re turning invisible.”

  “Riverton! Don’t forget!” I called, before I lost the ability to make sound. ““ll make sure Lucas is there!”

  “Bianca!” Raquel shouted again, but in an instant I was gone, somersaulting through the blue misty nothingness. I landed — or so it seemed, anyway. I looked down at soft green grass, then turned my face up to see Maxie standing above me. She wore a strange coat of some dark fur that looked more creepy than luxurious.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded. “You’re siding with them against us now?”