Sisters of Salt and Iron

by Kady Cross

  Because if I was right about Noah, I was probably going to have to destroy him. And my sister might not forgive me for it.

  WREN

  The ghosts of Haven Crest were quiet and watchful when I returned later that day. I left Lark with Ben to look into the ghost they’d encountered. I probably ought to have stayed and helped—or at least checked to see if I knew the ghost, but I wanted to be with Noah instead, and Lark would show me a photo of “Woodstock” if and when she found one.

  I wasn’t normally so selfish. At least, I didn’t think I was. Sometimes the expectations of human behavior confused me. Ghosts didn’t have the same morals or rules. We were pretty much creatures of instinct, and my instincts wanted to see Noah, even though it had been only a couple of hours since I left him.

  I had enjoyed spending time with Kevin, but not like this. True, Kevin and I hadn’t been able to interact the same way as I could with Noah, but being with Noah felt so much more electric. When I was with him I felt...alive. At least what I imagined alive would feel like.

  The town had started reclaiming two of the old buildings on the property, fixing them up to turn them into offices. Renovation work ran from Monday to Friday, and Noah had told me that so far the ghosts in those buildings were all right with the changes as the buildings were being restored to much of their original appearance. It would be the former living areas—and those who haunted them—that suffered the most. Some of those buildings might even be completely destroyed. None of them knew for certain what was going to happen to their homes.

  When Noah told me that, I volunteered to find out. I had meant to ask Lark to see if she could find the town’s plans on the internet, but forgot. I made a mental note to make certain I did that later that day.

  It was Sunday, and there shouldn’t have been any construction on-site, but there were men and women wandering around a section of the property. That’s why the ghosts were watchful, most of the residents of Noah’s building gathered in front of the windows nearest the lawn where the living stood, talking, gesturing at various areas of the grounds.

  “It used to be the sporting area,” Noah explained when I asked what the empty space was. “In my day they played croquet. Later they used it for everything from badminton to baseball to picnics.”

  “They don’t seem to be playing any sort of game,” remarked Miss April. She was a pretty young girl who looked as though she’d been there longer than even Noah, judging from her long dress, which had a high waist and short sleeves. “If they are, it’s most uninteresting.”

  I smiled. “I don’t think they’re playing anything. It looks like they’re putting up a stage.”

  A few ghosts murmured in understanding.

  Noah nodded, giving me a warm glance for solving the puzzle. “For the impending musical performance.”

  “It’s awfully high,” another ghost whose name I didn’t know commented as he pushed his head through the broken window for a better look. “A man would break his neck if he fell off that.”

  “They need to be high,” said Robert, a man whose hair was almost as long as mine, “so people can’t climb up and attack the band.”

  “Attack?” Noah asked with a frown. “Is the music so offensive?”

  I laughed, and so did Robert. “No, man. People love musicians and get so into the music they just want to get close to the performers. I once climbed a human pyramid to get close to Janis Joplin.” He smiled, revealing teeth that had seen better days. “She touched my hand. Best night of my life, man.”

  “It sounds terribly rude,” Miss April commented. “No offense, Robert, but in my day one sat quietly during a recital.”

  “If an audience doesn’t go nuts for you, you’re doing something wrong,” came a new—and oddly familiar—voice.

  I whipped around. Standing there, in the middle of the upstairs gallery, was a tall, thin young man with long dark hair and a lopsided grin. His eyes were outlined in black, and his leather pants were so tight I could see the outline of his kneecaps—and more of him than I wanted—above his boots.

  “Joe?” I couldn’t help the surprise that filled my voice. “What are you doing here?”

  Joe Hard had been dead since before Lark and I entered our worlds. He’d been in some sort of rock band when he died. From what I’d heard he’d been slightly famous. He was a flirt, but he seemed fairly harmless.

  He grinned at me—the sort of smile I’m sure he’d used to charm girls when he’d been alive. “Hey, Red. How’s kicks?”

  I had no idea what that meant. “Uh, good.”

  Noah stepped up to stand beside me. “Wren, would you mind giving me an introduction?”

  “Oh, yes. Of course. This is Joe. Joe, this is Noah.”

  They nodded, eyeing each other in that way that only men seemed to do.

  “So, why are you here?” I asked again. I suppose I should have asked how as well, but it was almost Halloween, and I didn’t know Joe’s history. The last time I’d seen him was in the police station the night Mace and Lark had been arrested for trespassing on Haven Crest property.

  Joe raised a skinny arm and pointed at the window. “That stage they’re building? It’s for a concert that Dead Babies is performing in my honor. Olgilvie came down to check out construction. You know I couldn’t resist coming with him.”

  Just like some ghosts haunted places, others were attached to people or objects. Joe had attached himself to Officer Olgilvie, a cop against whom he had some sort of grudge. It had to be bad, because when Joe looked at Olgilvie he looked like he wanted to rip him apart, but he hated him enough that he wouldn’t do it. He wanted to torture him instead. I couldn’t blame him. Olgilvie had it in for Lark, which made him a jerk in my book. I hadn’t been around that long, but Joe was the first spirit I’d ever met who tethered himself to a person. Daria had been the second.

  “Where’s that sweet sister of yours?” he asked.

  “Home,” I replied.

  “She coming to the concert?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you?”

  I frowned. “Yes. Why?”

  He shrugged his leather-clad shoulders. “Just wondering. Do you suppose you could tell J.B. that I’d like to talk to her?”

  J.B. stood for Jail Bait, and it was a term Joe applied to young women. Apparently he meant it as a compliment, even though it sounded vaguely criminal to me. “I’ll tell her.”

  He smiled again. There was a sadness in Joe’s eyes that hurt to look at. It was like all of his pain was in his gaze, and every time he looked at me, an invisible iron blade cut me to thinly sliced ribbons.

  “Thanks, sweetheart. Sorry to interrupt your party.” And just like he’d appeared in the room, he was gone in a blink.

  “Who was that?” Noah demanded.

  I stepped back from the anger in his voice. “I told you. His name is Joe.”

  Noah’s eyes burned with blue flame, and his lips were tight. “What is he to you?”

  I stared at him. Out of the corners of my eyes I saw the ghosts flicker out of the room, leaving us alone.

  “Are you jealous?” I asked.

  He stiffened. “Perhaps. Ought I be?”

  If I hadn’t thought he’d be offended, I would have laughed. “No! Joe is... Well, I’m not sure. I don’t know him well enough to call him a friend. But calling him an acquaintance doesn’t seem right, either. He’s certainly nothing more.”

  “Ah.” Noah’s posture relaxed a little. He looked sheepish. “I see. Forgive me for my loutish behavior. I thought he was someone you were once close to. He spoke to you in a very familiar manner.”

  “I think that’s just Joe.”

  “He must have been someone of great importance if this concert is to be held in his honor.”

  “I think he was very popular
, yes. I don’t know his music, though.”

  “Who is this Olgilvie he spoke of?”

  He was asking an awful lot of questions, and I would rather talk about him, or even myself, than all these other people and things. “A police officer. He doesn’t like my sister and our friends very much. I don’t think he’s a nice man.”

  Noah took my hand in his, our auras blending together. “I don’t know how anyone could be anything but charmed by you.”

  “You’re making up for being jealous very nicely,” I teased with a smile.

  He smiled back. He was so very, very handsome. “I am glad to hear it. Now why don’t you tell me what brought you back here so soon. As much as I’d like to think you returned for me alone, I do not think that’s it.”

  My smile faded. “I wanted to ask for your help.”

  His expression sobered. “Of course.” He began moving, and I followed, drifting throughout the building with him. “Anything.”

  “Last night after we left the party, a ghost attacked my sister and a friend.”

  “Is your sister all right?”

  I loved him for asking about Lark first. “Yes, but the ghost claimed that he was there to kill our friend, who had no idea who the ghost was. It was Kevin, the one I told you is a medium.”

  Noah’s brow creased. “That’s odd. Most spirits respect mediums, or want to use them as conduits. I’ve never heard of a ghost trying to harm one. The ghost had no attachment to the place or your friend?”

  “None. Lark thinks that maybe it was retaliation for what we did to Josiah Bent.”

  “And you want to know if I’ve heard anything?”

  I twisted my hands together. “Yes. I don’t want to ask you to break any code of loyalty between the ghosts of Haven Crest, but my sister could have been hurt. Our friend could have been killed.”

  “I haven’t heard of anything. Nobody’s even muttered Bent’s name since you sent him packing. I think most were happy to be out from under his thumb. But I don’t know everything that goes on here. Did your sister happen to mention what the ghost looked like?”

  “She said he looked like he was from the 1960s or ’70s. And that he smelled of patchouli.” I wasn’t terribly certain just what that smelled like, but maybe he would. Being dead since I was born meant that I didn’t have much of an olfactory sense.

  He shook his head. “Would you like me to ask around? I don’t know if anyone will confide in me, but I can try.”

  Oh, what a relief! “That would be so wonderful of you. Thank you.”

  His expression turned flirtatious. “You can thank me with a kiss.” He took my hand and pulled me closer.

  I smiled, a sense of intense giddiness washing over me. “Just one?”

  Noah’s arms wrapped around me. “We can start with one. It may take more for you to fully express your gratitude.”

  I laughed, and then his lips touched mine, and I stopped laughing. I stopped thinking. In fact, I think the entire world just stopped. At least, that’s how it felt.

  If Noah found out who the vengeful ghost was, then Lark would have to like him. Kevin, too.

  They’d have no choice.

  LARK

  “Found him!” The words rushed out of me like I’d just won a million dollars.

  Ben set his laptop aside and got off my bed to walk over to the desk where I sat. I didn’t always use my desk, but I knew that if I sat on the bed with him while searching the files Gage sent, I wouldn’t get any work done. Ben was just too tempting.

  As it was, it had taken me almost two hours of poring over patient intake records to find him. Ten years equaled a lot of new faces at Haven Crest. People were hospitalized for all kinds of reason back then—even people who were mentally challenged were locked up in asylums. I mean, it was a little disturbing just what could get people committed back then. Don’t even get me started on the nineteenth century. It was only for the fact that believing in evolution had been grounds to call someone mad that I hadn’t totally violated my sister’s privacy and tried to find Noah. For all I knew he could have gotten locked up for using the wrong fork at a dinner party.

  I had every intention of checking into Noah, it was just that Woodstock—aka Robert Alan Thurbridge, Jr.—was more important at the moment.

  Ben leaned over my shoulder. He smelled like cinnamon. “That’s the guy that attacked you and Kevin?”

  “Don’t sound so impressed,” I drawled. “He was a lot scarier in Kevin’s driveway, trust me.”

  In his admittance photo, Robert Alan Thurbridge, Jr. was obviously stoned out of his ever-loving mind. I wasn’t all that educated in drugs that weren’t prescribed antipsychotics, but I knew what someone looked like when they’d been given some pretty serious shit. Thurbridge looked as though he’d been taking elephant tranquilizers with a side of Xanax.

  His long hair was stringy in the photo—not as full and wild as it was as a ghost. His eyes were heavy-lidded and dull, and his face puffy from too many drugs. He was scruffy and looked as though he hadn’t showered in days, which he probably hadn’t.

  “Death was an improvement,” I remarked. “He must have gotten at least a little bit healthier at Haven Crest. Physically, anyway.”

  Ben kissed my temple before looking back at the screen. “It says he was admitted because of bouts of paranoid schizophrenia.”

  I snorted. “Bet the drugs didn’t help.”

  “He was probably self-medicating. Wow. He tried to kill his own father because he thought he was covering up evidence of alien abductions. And that wasn’t the first time he’d been arrested for something violent. Looks like each time it was because of a delusion. He died there in 1973. Hanged himself.”

  “Poor bastard,” I muttered. I knew what it was like to not know if you were crazy or not. For the longest time people told me Wren wasn’t real, and for a little while I let myself believe them. Bell Hill Psychiatric Hospital cured me of that. If it hadn’t been for Wren, I probably wouldn’t have survived.

  Then again, if it hadn’t been for my sister, I wouldn’t have been admitted. But I didn’t blame Wren. She couldn’t control what we were any more than I could.

  “Okay,” Ben began. “We know he’s part of the Haven Crest haunt. Now what? It doesn’t say where he’s buried.”

  “They had a special plot for suicides,” I said. “Or, his family sounds like they might have been well-off—maybe he’s buried in a family plot somewhere.” That was going to be really inconvenient, if it was the case. “It might not even be his bones anchoring him here if he died after the hospital started cremating patients to conserve plot space. Do we know when they started doing that?” I was scrolling through the file to see if it said anything. Ben went back to the bed and sat down with his laptop, clacking away at the keys.

  “Google says Haven Crest started cremating their dead in 1980. Our guy’s gotta be in the ground, then.”

  “I’ll check that cemetery layout we found when we went after Bent.” I paused, my hands dead over the keyboard. “I’m sorry,” I said, glancing over my shoulder.

  Ben frowned. “For what?”

  “That Bent wasn’t the end of it. That there’s a new ghost and a new danger for me to put you guys in.”

  He stared at me, his eyebrows coming together in a frown. “None of this is your fault.”

  He was sweet to say that. “Maybe not, but I feel like I attract trouble, and my friends just get swept up in it.”

  “That ghost—Woodstock, Thurbridge, whatever his name is—came looking specifically for Kevin. That’s not on you.”

  “But why Kevin?” I asked. “Why didn’t he come for me?”

  My boyfriend shrugged. “Maybe he thought Kevin would be an easier target.”

  “Maybe.” It was as good an explanation as anything I
could come up with, but it still didn’t sit well with me. Maybe I just made things more complicated than they needed to be.

  But I had a very uncomplicated solution brewing inside the thick walls of my skull. And it was one I wasn’t going to share with Ben. I wasn’t going to share it with anyone until I had proof, because at that moment, it was driven by nothing more than paranoid suspicion.

  “Wren’s been spending a lot of time at Haven Crest lately. I’ll show her Thurbridge’s photo and see if she recognizes him.”

  Ben closed his laptop. “Does that bother you? Her spending time there?”

  It was serious conversation time—not like killer ghosts weren’t serious. I closed my computer as well and got up from the desk to join him on my bed. He took my hand in his. He was warm and strong. All he had to do was hold my hand, and I felt like I could take on the world. Or at least the ghosts in it. I wasn’t sure I liked that he had that much power where I was concerned, or that it felt so good.

  “Yes,” I admitted. “It bothers me a lot.”

  “Because of Bent? Or because of something else?”

  We both knew what “something else” was. “My prejudice against mental hospitals? Yeah, that’s some of it. A lot of it, actually. Mostly I worry that being around that many ghosts will make her want to be one of them.”

  He looked at me like I was speaking backward. “She is one of them.”

  “No. She’s not.” I tried to pull my hand away, but he held tight. It wasn’t enough to hurt me, just to keep me from withdrawing like I wanted. “She’s not like them. I don’t want her to be like them.”

  “Like them how?”

  “Crazy. Mean. Dangerous.” My gaze locked with his, and I hoped he could see me pleading for him to understand. “She’s never been alive, Ben. She doesn’t even have that to keep her from becoming something dark. The longer ghosts hang around, bitter and lost, the more they become monsters.”