Sisters of Salt and Iron

by Kady Cross

  I frowned. “That makes no sense.”

  “I know, but it’s true. And I was afraid that maybe you would think I had something to do with the attack on him.”

  “Why would I think something like that?”

  He shrugged. “I have a connection with the boy, and someone who I considered a good friend tried to kill him. You have to admit it sounds odd.”

  “I would never, ever believe that you would hurt anyone, let alone have them killed.”

  “I’ve hurt plenty of living people, Wren. Those who trespass in my domain are too scared to return, and if they do, they don’t do it a third time.”

  I should have been bothered by his confession, but I wasn’t. I understood it as only another ghost could. “Regardless, I would never have thought you capable of hurting Kevin in such an underhanded way.”

  He lowered his head so that he had to lift his gaze to mine. “But since I didn’t tell you then, you’re suspicious of me now.”

  “That’s not it.” I shook my head. “But I am a little upset that you think I would suspect or turn on you so easily. I thought we were friends.”

  He took my hand. “Wren, it’s because I want to be more than your friend that I behaved so stupidly.”

  I stared at him. “Oh.”

  He moved closer, so close that not even a breath could pass between us. “Do you forgive me? Or shall I persuade you?”

  I smiled. I knew what sort of persuasion he intended. “I do,” I told him, “but I don’t mind a little persuasion.”

  And then he kissed me, and nothing else mattered.

  Until the front door burst open and a group of noisy living people walked right into our house of the dead.

  WREN

  They were kids—not much older than Lark and me, but I didn’t recognize them from school, which meant they probably went to the local college. There were six of them—four boys and two girls.

  “This place is awesome!” One of the boys enthused, stomping around like he owned the place. He took no notice of the spirits staring at him or the ones he ignorantly walked though. There wasn’t the barest shred of sensitivity in him, or he’d have felt something.

  The two girls—one a blonde and the other a brunette—stood close together just inside the door. “We shouldn’t be here,” the brunette said. “I feel like I’m being watched.”

  Nice observation, Veronica Mars, I thought.

  “Yeah,” the blonde joined in. “It feels disrespectful.”

  Noah and I exchanged glances. I could tell he was surprised to hear that sentiment from someone who was alive, or a “breather,” as some of the dead rudely referred to them.

  “Why are they here?” demanded Miss April. She’d just calmed down, and now she looked angry enough to manifest again.

  “Did you hear that?” one of the boys asked. He had red hair and freckles and a friendly face.

  “Hear what?” Stompy Boots asked.

  His friend looked around. His gaze fell upon the general area where Miss April stood, but it didn’t focus. “I thought I heard a voice.”

  “You’re trippin’,” said yet another boy with dark skin and a shaved head. “You need to stop watching all those Japanese horror movies. There’s nothing here.” But his gaze was nervous as he glanced around.

  The ghosts pulled together, forming a horseshoe around the young people. We watched the living with a shared curiosity that ranged from benign to openly hostile as they treated the building as something to which they had a right.

  Stompy Boots stood in the middle of the foyer, hands on his narrow hips. The hoodie he wore looked to be three sizes too big for him. “This will be great. It’s far enough away from the stage that no one will see us, but close enough that when they start letting people in we’ll be able to get up front.”

  “What time on Wednesday?” asked the fourth boy, who looked a bit out of place with his dyed black hair and piercings.

  “Just before five,” Stompy said. “There’ll still be a lot of people working here, but it will be getting dark, so we should be able to sneak in here no problem. We’ll spend the night and get so close Eddie’s sweat will soak us.”

  That really didn’t sound appealing—I didn’t care who this Eddie was. I assumed he was a member of Dead Babies. Even with that assumption I failed to see the appeal in getting covered in a waste product from his body.

  “They say they’re going to spend the night!” Miss April turned wide, angry eyes toward Noah. “What are we going to do?”

  Stompy walked up to what used to be the front desk and hopped up onto it, dangling his legs over the side, kicking his feet against it. “This place definitely has enough room for a dozen people. We can have a party after the concert. Harris says his older sister can score us some Molly. I doubt security can even see this place from the road.”

  A sound of opposition rose up around me; the ghosts of Acton Hall turned to Noah for a solution. He was their leader, whether he wanted the job or not. The girls in the doorway pressed closer together, their nervous gazes darting about the hall.

  “I won’t allow humans to take over and further damage our home,” he told them. “Wren, you may want to leave.”

  When I looked at him, my brow raised, he continued, “I intend to rid us of these intruders by whatever means necessary. I know you have living friends, and this might make you uncomfortable.”

  I did have living friends. And we’d met because they had been foolish like this lot, poking about where they shouldn’t and being disrespectful of the spirits there. But they’d also crossed paths with a very, very malicious ghost who’d tried to kill them. Noah wasn’t going to hurt anyone; he only meant to scare them away. People who have been scared by ghosts tend not to mess with them again.

  I’d be doing these kids a favor, really.

  I smiled at him. “I’m with you,” I said. Oh! The smile he gave me in return was delicious.

  Noah turned to the gathered spirits. “Be gentle, my friends.” His voice rang through the hall. I noticed one of the girls looked up, as though she heard it; one of the boys, too.

  “Make certain they never come back!” he cried, and then manifested in front of me. Dear God.

  He was terrifying.

  He was monstrous.

  He was gorgeous.

  As the rest of the ghosts manifested, as well—and the screams started—I felt my own humanity slip away like pulling the sheet off a bed. I let my true nature take over for the second time that day, and as I swooped toward the screaming brunette, I smiled.

  I was free.

  LARK

  There was a dead man in my English class.

  I watched him as he paced the front of the room reciting Marc Antony’s funeral speech from Julius Caesar. It was difficult to hear what the living teacher—a substitute named Miss Chaisson—was saying over his booming voice. I was okay with that, as he was much more interesting. Miss Chaisson had to read from the play, and based on her performance, I’d say she hadn’t much more experience with the subject matter than her students. As for her enthusiasm, that was about on par.

  I’m not a big fan of Shakespeare, but when the lines are read with the right inflection and cadence, it’s a lot easier to understand. Miss Chaisson had neither.

  “Put some life into it, you boorish twit!” the ghost shouted at her from where he stood by the window. “It’s called emoting!”

  I lowered my head to hide my smile. Finally, a ghost that didn’t piss me off. Or make demands of me. Or ask for help. It—he—was a rarity.

  It was only going to get worse the closer we got to Halloween. I had never seen this particular ghost before, and had no idea if he belonged to the school or Miss Chaisson, or someone else entirely.

  I’d seen a few new ones today since my
late arrival. One had been wandering the hall aimlessly with such a dejected look on his face that I actually risked stopping to ask him if he was okay. His name was Reggie White, and he was a former physics teacher who’d had a heart attack one day in class while freaking out on some noisy students. He didn’t know why he was there as he normally spent his afterlife watching over his widow and her new husband. When I suggested that maybe one of his kids went to this school, he perked right up. That was exactly where he needed to be, and off he went. My good deed for the day.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that Halloween messed with ghosts as much as the living. I mean, it was annoying for me to see all of them, and hear them, and all that, but Reggie hadn’t even known how he’d got to the school. His love for his kid had overridden his tether to his wife. That had to mess a spirit up.

  But Reggie was my only good deed. I completely ignored the guy hanging in the stairwell. And I don’t mean he was hanging out. He was hanging—by the neck. I ignored him and his attempts to get my attention because anyone who would hang themselves in a school stairway was an ass-hat. At least Dan had killed himself outside when there had been few people around.

  Still, ghosts were shameless attention whores, and they usually haunted where there was the most chance of being seen. Kids—even teenagers—were more sensitive to ghosts than those over twenty; therefore, they increased their visibility profile.

  As a theory, I thought it was a pretty damn good one. Still, it set me on edge, because I had to be that much more careful about who I looked at or spoke to, because there was always the chance I’d speak to a ghost and someone alive would hear me. I’d already been warned by the principal that I was on thin ice, and that it was only my grandmother’s standing within the community that got me back into the school. The ghosts of Samuel Clemens High had gotten me into trouble before.

  Which led me to develop a second theory. That attention-seeking mechanism was what led ghosts to places where they might be seen. And to people who might see them. People who could interact with them.

  People like me. There wasn’t a ghost in town that wouldn’t rush me if they could. Halloween upped their chances of success. Maybe the school’s increase in the life-challenged population was partly my fault.

  So, there I was, trying to ignore the very entertaining ghost in my English class, when he suddenly turned his head and looked right at me with his gray eyes. He had gray hair, too, and grayish skin. He was wearing a gray sweater and gray pants. Had he never heard of blue? Maybe a little maroon to break things up?

  “You,” he said in that big, booming voice.

  Roxi glanced at me from her seat across the aisle. Had she heard him? Could she see him? Now that she knew ghosts existed, she was much more open to their presence. I didn’t look back at her—I didn’t want the ghost to notice her.

  I ignored Mr. One-Shade-of-Gray and tried to focus on Miss Chaisson.

  “You are the one!” He came at me like a charging bull. “You can see me, can’t you?”

  He was standing right in Jeremy, who sat in front of me. That was rude. Any minute Jeremy was going to— Yup, there it was—he shivered.

  My notebook was open to the page containing what little notes I’d been able to make during class. Carefully, in block print, my letters upside down, I wrote: MOVE.

  One-Shade’s eyes widened as he read what I’d written. Almost embarrassedly, he stepped out of poor, shivering Jeremy to stand in the aisle beside my seat. At the front of the room, Miss Chaisson had finished droning and was trying to get the class to partake in a discussion of the play—without much success. I couldn’t help but feel like she was hoping we could explain it to her, because she didn’t understand it, either.

  “That woman is a menace,” One-Shade sneered. “What were they thinking hiring her to teach English? She would be better suited for home economics.”

  Okay, so he was a rank misogynist and hadn’t taught anything in the past couple of decades.

  TRYING TO LEARN HERE, I wrote. Too bad upside-down printing wasn’t a life skill that would do me any good. WHAT DO YOU WANT?

  “You’re not going to learn a darn thing from her,” he informed me. Snotty much? He was much more entertaining when he stuck to dialogue that wasn’t of his own making.

  I shot him an impatient glare before locking my gaze on Miss Chaisson again. Looking at people who weren’t there made the people around you uncomfortable, and it was a short jump from uncomfortable to thinking you were a nut. Been there, done that, yadda yadda.

  I did have a Bell Hill T-shirt, actually. I should really throw it out.

  Gray crouched beside my chair—nice of him because now I didn’t have to look up. “I’ve heard about you,” he said. “You and your sister. The dead community is very tight in this town.”

  Wow. That was something I’d never, ever wondered about. Sadly, it was a good thing for me to know.

  I nodded, giving him permission to continue. “There’s something going on. Something big. Something bad. ‘By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.’”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Do you have something to contribute, Miss Noble?” Miss Chaisson asked.

  My gaze locked with hers. How did she know my name and no one else’s? Had Principal Grant told her about me? That I was trouble?

  “Do you have something to say about Mark Antony’s speech? What do you think the purpose of his repeated use of the phrase ‘Brutus is an honorable man’?”

  Oh, hell. I hadn’t even heard most of it over Gray’s repetition, and I’d heard even less since he started yammering at me. And now everyone was looking at me, some smirking, most bored, waiting to see if I screwed myself.

  One-Shade set his gray hand upon my shoulder. It was like a hard slap to the head—but inside my skull.

  “Antony makes a mockery of Brutus’s own speech, and of Brutus himself by the repeated phrase. In his speech, Antony points out some of Caesar’s virtues while using Brutus’s own words against him to sway the crowd. In doing this, he downplays Caesar’s ambition—which was Brutus’s main argument against him—and calls attention to what could be seen as Brutus’s own ambition to get rid of Caesar to further his own political career and popularity.”

  Beside me, Roxi covered her mouth to muffle her giggle. One-Shade squeezed my shoulder. “Well done,” he said.

  Miss Chaisson stared at me, her round cheeks flushing a bright pink. “Er, yes. Excellent point. Very good.”

  “Thank you,” I said, but I wasn’t talking to her. I shot my ghostly tutor a sideways glance. He smiled a little, but it faded quickly as Miss Chaisson went on to harass someone else.

  “There’s something going on at Haven Crest,” Gray continued. “Sometime terrible—worse than Josiah Bent.”

  THE CONCERT? I wrote.

  “It has to do with that, yes. A gathering like that, full of young people, is bound to produce elevated levels of psychic and spectral energy. Add that it’s a tribute to a local ghost and on the grounds of the place where there has been the most death since the founding of this town, and you have the ingredients for something terrible indeed.

  “The ghosts of New Devon are scared. If the evil of Haven Crest were to break through to this world, the entire town could be destroyed—not just the living, but the dead, too. We’ll become its slaves, and no one will be safe, not your friends, not even your sister.”

  My head whipped around so fast, something in my neck snapped. I didn’t care if anyone noticed.

  “Yes.” He answered my unspoken question. “Your sister is in danger. She’s always in danger from the darkling dead of this town. Just as you are. She may be Dead Born, but it’s you who are the shade, Lark. The Girl Who Is Her Own Shadow. The Girl Who Walks Between Life and Death. Only you can save Wren, and save the rest of us, as well.”
>
  WHAT DO I DO? My hand shook as I wrote. And what the hell was with all the freaking titles? Who was I, Harry Potter?

  “What you have to.”

  DON’T GIVE ME THAT CRYPTIC CRAP NOW!

  “Be prepared. Fight. And those of us who can will fight with you.”

  Ghosts? On my side? Garbage. No ghost was going to help me fight other ghosts. I looked at him for proof that he was lying—having fun with me.

  He looked completely earnest. Honest. At that moment, I felt like I was the closest I’d ever gotten to knowing what I was, what Wren and I were.

  And I realized I didn’t want to know.

  * * *

  I found Ben, Roxi, Gage and Mace at lunch. Sarah was sitting with some of her cheerleader friends. I didn’t miss her. She’d never gone out of her way to be friends with me, and I hadn’t tried to make it easy for her. At that moment I was just relieved that she was one less person I had to worry about actual Halloween night. Not that I’d toss her in front of a ravenous spirit, but my sister and my friends took top priority.

  Ben walked over to meet me before I made it to the table. He gave me a quick kiss—that sort of thing was frowned on at SC. “You okay?” he asked, dark brows coming together. “You look freaked.”

  “I am freaked,” I replied. Wren wasn’t there, and I really wished she had been. I could use her reassurance.

  “Mace told me about him showing up at your house, if that has anything to do with it.”

  “Honestly? Not a bit.” I hadn’t even thought of trying to explain that in hours. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it first, but my mirror tried to kill me, or rather, something tried to use my mirror to kill me, and I forgot all about Mace.”

  Ben’s frown deepened. His gaze lifted to the cut I’d tried so hard to conceal. “It hurt you.”

  “It tried. If Wren hadn’t protected me, it would have been a lot worse. Can we go sit? If I’m going to tell this story, I only want to do it once.”

  He nodded, took my hand and led me to the rest of our friends.