by Stacey Kade
I led her down the hall to the front door and out onto the porch, where she carefully made her way down the steps, clutching my arm with one hand and the railing with the other. She was definitely not moving as smoothly as Alona had been, so there were side effects of her taking over this body.
“I’m starving,” she announced, when we reached the bottom. “Hurry up.”
“You were just eating ice cream,” I said tightly. With raw cookie dough on top, seemingly without a care in the world about fat grams or any of the other stuff Alona usually complained about. That should have been my first clue, I realized. Not to mention the fact she’d been sharing a bowl without freaking out about Leanne’s germs.
“But I didn’t get to finish,” she noted with a pout, as I led her to the car and helped her in.
“We’re going to get something right now,” I promised, with absolutely no intention of doing so.
“A cheeseburger with fries,” she said, still sulking. “And the beer, don’t forget the beer.”
So, definitely not Alona. “Right, fine.” I slammed her door shut, the wheels turning in my brain. I’d gotten the impostor out of Misty’s; step one complete. But now what?
I opened the driver’s-side door and slid behind the wheel. My brain was buzzing with anxiety and too many questions. Was it better to confront her immediately or try to play along a little longer? She obviously wanted me to believe she was Alona. And where was Alona? Oh, God, if she was gone for good…
I dared a glance from the corner of my eye to find Ally—no, it was Erin, and I had to remember that—staring down at her hands in an admiring manner, as though pleased with the manicure…or, you know, just that she had a physical form that could have a manicure.
Shit. I had to play this carefully. She was possessing Lily’s body, and I couldn’t make her get out. It was like having a built-in hostage. She could theoretically hurt “herself ” (a.k.a. Lily) at any time or threaten to do so to keep me in line.
I started the car and backed out of the driveway, on to the street.
Okay, think. I can’t keep her in the car forever. Taking her to the Turners’ was out of the question. And I couldn’t exactly lock her up at my house.
God, when had things gotten so complicated?
Edmund. Maybe Malachi/Edmund would have something to say about this. It was his freaking sister, after all.
“I screwed up, didn’t I?” she asked, just as I realized the silence had dragged on for a few seconds too long. She turned to face me, her eyes glittering with a hardness that had never been there with Lily or Alona.
I shivered, seeing something alien behind such a familiar face.
“What was it, the fries or the beer?” she asked, still not sounding too concerned about her cover being blown.
No point in further pretending, I guess. “Both,” I said.
She gave an annoyed sigh. “I should have known. She was probably counting calories.”
And her mother was, until recently, a raging, out-of-control alcoholic, not that that was any of her business. “Erin, right?”
She nodded, pleased.
“Where is Alona?” I asked tightly.
She laughed. “Gone. Vanished,” she proclaimed, sounding way too self-satisfied.
I winced, even though I’d been expecting that. “Permanently?”
“How should I know?” she asked, sounding annoyed.
“What did you do?” I demanded.
She heaved an exasperated sigh. “I don’t see how it matters now.”
“It matters,” I said, trying to keep my voice level.
“Is this about the ceremony?” she asked with a frown.
The what? I stopped the words from coming out just in time. A ceremony? There was no ceremony. At least, none that Alona had mentioned to me. “How do you know about that?” I asked instead, trying to weasel more information out of her without giving anything away.
She shrugged. “Alona said something about needing you there for a ceremony, but I figured she was just trying to stall me, keep me out.”
Oh. My chest ached. That was exactly what Alona must have been trying to do. And even though I hadn’t known what was going on, I still felt like I’d failed her.
“Like that’s even fair,” Erin scoffed. “She had her turn.”
“So you ambushed her instead?” I muttered.
“What?” she asked.
I shook my head, feeling the tension creaking in the back of my neck. “Just tell me what happened.”
She shrugged again. “I tried to claim her at first, as my ghost-talker, but that didn’t work any better with her than it did with you.” She rolled her eyes. “But once I figured out she was your spirit guide, it wasn’t that hard to put it all together. Then when I grabbed her, this body sort of pulled me in and forced her out.”
Wait, Alona was still my spirit guide? That would explain why Erin hadn’t been able to make the connection with either of us. We were still connected to each other. Or, at least, we had been up until an hour or so ago. And I’d just left her there.
I shook my head, pushing those thoughts, and the fear squeezing my chest, aside. If anyone could have survived all of this, it was Alona. Maybe another spirit taking over Lily’s body would have been enough to save her. If Lily’s body didn’t need her anymore, maybe that would give her more energy to sustain herself. Maybe.
She smoothed her hands down her body in an utterly creepy manner. “Must have been nice having it all in one package, huh?” She grinned and elbowed me, none too gently, in the ribs. “A spirit guide in a tight, living body. All the perks.”
I grimaced and shifted away from her. She made it sound so gross. It wasn’t like that, had never been like that. We hadn’t even known that Alona was still my spirit guide after she took over Lily’s body. But I doubted Erin would believe me, and I didn’t want to waste my breath explaining something she’d never understand. So weird the way Erin changed everything about Lily into something creepy and threatening, in a way that Alona had not. It said something about how much the soul or spirit in charge mattered. “What do you want?” I asked.
Erin laughed, and I shuddered.
“What do I want?” she repeated. “Nothing more than I’ve got right here, baby,” she said, slapping her thighs. “It’s a little beat up, sure, but nothing I can’t work around.” She sounded delighted. “I’m going to live it up.” She winked at me like this was all no big deal. Like she hadn’t potentially sentenced Alona to a more permanent form of death. “Now, are we going to get burgers or what?” she demanded.
I drove on autopilot, steering the car toward Krekel’s, Alona’s favorite burger place, and thinking furiously. I needed a plan. One thing was for sure: I couldn’t let her out into the world like this. God only knew what Erin would get up to if left to her own devices, and she was, for all intents and purposes, Lily. Around here, someone would eventually recognize her, and that would be bad. Not to mention her parents, who would be worried sick about her. And what if Alona wasn’t gone and she needed Lily’s body back? The Order had said the two of them had become dependent on each other. Lily seemed to be doing okay with Erin in Alona’s place, but Alona didn’t have that same option.
Locking Erin up, at least until I had a better grasp of the situation, seemed to be the only logical solution, as much as I hated the idea. But where? Maybe Edmund/Malachi would have an idea.
I looked over at Erin, her arm on the rest between us. She was weakened by her transition into Lily’s body; I could probably drag her along pretty easily. But some of what I was thinking must have shown on my face.
“Oh, no.” She snatched her arm back and scooted away from me. “I’ve already wasted too many years watching and not living. You’re not going to do that to me again. You try to lock me up somewhere and I’ll scream until someone calls the cops.” Her chin jutted out in determination, pushing aside any doubts I might have had that she would do less than she claimed. And the Turners, when
they got wind of it, as they surely would, would probably press charges against me, thus eliminating any chance I had of fixing this mess.
“In fact,” she said, “I think you can let me out here.” She nodded at the red stoplight we were approaching.
“Here?” I asked, incredulous. “We’re not even close to anything, and she can’t…you can’t walk—”
“We’ll manage,” she said, already tugging at her seat belt.
“Erin, wait,” I said, fighting desperation. “What about Edmund? I know he’ll want to see you and—”
“Right,” she scoffed. “Like I’m going to waste any of my time on him.”
“He’s your brother,” I argued.
“Fat lot of good that did either of us,” she muttered. She yanked at the handle and shoved the door open as soon as we reached a stop.
I lurched across the car to grab her, but she slipped away. Then she surprised me, ducking her head back in and mashing her mouth against mine in a rough parody of a kiss.
I jerked back, hard enough that my elbow banged into the steering wheel.
“I would have expected better from you,” she said in mock disappointment before slamming the door shut.
The light turned green, and someone behind me honked and held it, loud and obnoxious. But I refused to move. “Get back in the car, Erin,” I shouted. I felt my face burning, imagining what this must look like to the other drivers. No, I’m not some jerk threatening his girlfriend. I’m trying to keep a ghost from kidnapping a body that doesn’t belong to her.
“Stalking is illegal, Will,” she warned loudly, her voice muffled through the closed door but clear to anyone who had their windows rolled down. Her gaze darted to the cars behind me, a tiny smirk playing on her lips as someone else added his horn to the mix.
“Erin!” I shouted again, as a truck from somewhere behind me whipped into the turn lane and zoomed around me. A squad car coming from the other direction slowed down, the officer staring at me through his window.
Shit. “Get back in the car. Please!” I tried one more time.
Watching me through narrowed eyes, Erin took a deep breath and started to scream.
Out of choices, and expecting the sound of sirens any second, I straightened up behind the wheel and hit the gas.
Hating myself and Erin, I watched her become a smaller and smaller figure in the rearview mirror, like I might never see her again, and feeling half relieved and half freaked at the idea.
I doubled back around the block as soon as I could, but the neighborhood had streets that curved oddly, and unexpected culs-de-sac.
By the time I got back to the intersection, she was gone, of course. Either she was hiding somewhere, or she’d hitched a ride with a stranger.
God, she was going to end up dead in a ditch somewhere, and it would be all my fault.
The light was red (again), and while waiting for it to change, I rested my head on the steering wheel, wishing for things to be different, wishing for Alona, wishing I could go back to the days when my biggest problems were Principal Brewster and getting through class without any ghosts noticing me. That had been a vacation compared to all of this. A really, really sucky vacation, but a vacation, nonetheless. I didn’t need Alona to tell me I was in over my head with this body and soul stuff and sinking fast. But I wanted her here, more than anything.
I shook my head. I had to get her back. I had an idea about how to do that, thanks to something Erin had said. But just one. And if it didn’t work…
I clenched the wheel. No, it had to work. That was all there was to it. Because I didn’t know how to live with any other outcome. And if it didn’t work, Alona wouldn’t live at all.
I broke speed limits retracing familiar streets and flying past landmarks on my way toward Groundsboro High.
This was my one and only brilliant idea: if Alona was still my guide, as Erin had said, and she was back in spirit form, I might be able to “call” her to me. Theoretically, I could call her from anywhere, but the dead who meet their ends violently/unnaturally are always drawn to the places of their death. Calling her from that location might provide enough added pull to drag her back from wherever she’d vanished. It might have even been better to try it at the time of her death, but there was no way I could make myself wait almost a whole day for 7:03 a.m. to roll around again.
Despite my best efforts to focus on the positive, my mind created images of me sitting on the curb next to the spot of pavement where she’d died and calling her…only to have nothing happen.
I shook my head, pushing that thought away. No, she was strong. She had to be okay. She’d survived this long. She’d been sent back from the light, for God’s sake. That couldn’t have happened only for things to end this way. That couldn’t be right. It didn’t make sense.
A tiny voice in my head reminded me that in addition to being unfair, life could also be nonsensical. Messed up. Like my dad killing himself without first giving us the slightest hint that that day would be different than any other. In some ways, I’d thought it would have been better if he’d tried to warn us, even if we’d missed it initially. Then at least maybe it would have seemed more logical. Or maybe it would have simply made my mom and me feel worse for not understanding what he was trying to say.
Either way, one day he was just gone. So quickly it seemed like the air should have rushed in to fill the vacuum where he’d once stood, brushed his teeth, slept.…
I couldn’t lose somebody else like that, without even the chance to say good-bye. Not again. Not her.
“Come on, Alona, don’t do this to me, please,” I muttered, and then stopped, clamping my mouth shut in the fear that those words somehow counted as a call.
But if they had, the passenger seat next to me remained empty. And my heart sank a little further.
I made myself focus on the road ahead of me, dimly aware of the refrain—please, please, please, please—pulsing through me and ticking off the seconds.
The school finally rose up in the distance, and I pulled to a hard stop by the fenced-off tennis courts, the Dodge’s tires screeching on the overheated asphalt.
I jammed the gearshift into park and flung the door open, stumbling out in my hurry. The kids on the tennis court—a couple of boys, too young even to be freshmen, it seemed—stopped hitting the ball around to watch me run.
The trouble was, it had been four months since Alona had died. There was no longer any sign of the violence that had occurred, the life that had ended somewhere here on the double yellow lines.
Was it here, closer to the corner, or farther down the street? Suddenly I wasn’t sure, and I found myself pacing back and forth in the middle of the road, desperate to get this right.
A passing car honked at me.
“Hey, are you okay?” one of the kids shouted.
I ignored it all, aware that my eyes were stinging with tears only when a drop rolled off my chin and splattered on the yellow painted line that I was studying so intently.
I swiped a hand over my face. Stay calm. She’s fine. Erin took over Lily’s body, so she’s the one caught in the cycle now. Alona should be fine. The ache in my chest told me even I didn’t believe this.
The Order had said the two of them would become dependent on each other. After a month in Lily’s body, did Alona have enough energy to survive on her own anymore?
That was the question, and there was truly only one way to find out. I took a deep breath, forcing it past the lump in my throat. I had nothing to lose by trying, except all hope of her ever coming back. If she didn’t answer now, I’d keep calling her; but the odds that her energy level in this situation would improve with time were slim to none.
Another car swerved around me, with the driver honking and shouting through his rolled-down window.
All right, enough delaying, I told myself. Time to try this before someone actually stops and tries to pull me out of the way. Or calls the police.
But I felt like I was ripping away a b
andage long before the wound was healed.
I finally picked a place as close to exact as I remembered it and shut my eyes.
I pictured Alona as I’d seen her that first time after her death. Stalking the grounds in the red gym shorts and white shirt she’d died in, her face flushed with fury and hurt at the people she’d once called her friends turning on her, only days after her death. The way she pushed me to deal with Principal Brewster, helping me until I could manage him on my own, more or less. The silk of her hair catching on my fingertips when we were behind the bushes at the Gibley Mansion. How she refused to accept pity or help unless she had no choice. Just this morning when she’d stood in front of me in her new clothes with the new look she’d created, tilting her head up toward me with that vulnerable smile.
It occurred to me for the first time that while she hadn’t said so, she’d been looking for my opinion. My approval…No, my appreciation.
She didn’t need it. She wasn’t like that. But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t have liked to have it. Spirit or no, she was still human. And all I’d been worried about had been my own too-strong reaction and what that meant for me.
I concentrated harder, funneling my fear and anger at myself into force behind my thoughts. I willed her to appear.
“You’re my spirit guide,” I said through clenched teeth. “You have to come when I call, and I’m calling. Get here. Please?”
That last word sounded dangerously close to begging, and I didn’t care. It wasn’t for Alona, but for whoever else might be listening. God. The light. Someone was running things, and I needed whoever that was to hear me.
Please don’t do this. Don’t send her to me and then take her away. Please don’t. Just don’t. Please. I need her.
I kept repeating those words over and over again, distantly aware of the kids resuming their game and another car or two passing me.
But I didn’t stop until I felt a strange shift in the air, like the world had moved around me, water flowing around a rock.
I opened my eyes, and Alona—a beginning outline of her, anyway—stood a few feet in front of me, looking around with a startled expression.
