Bridge of Souls

by Victoria Schwab

  “Cass,” says Jacob, at my side. “She’s not here.”

  But she has to be.

  She can’t …

  Tears prick my eyes, blurring my vision until the square is nothing but vague shapes and shades of gray, a world out of focus.

  Focus.

  My camera. Every time I looked at the Emissary through the lens, it was an inky mass, a pitch-black pool against the backdrop of the world. I lift the camera now, and look through it, sliding the focus on the lens as I scan the crowded square, looking for the darkness, the shadow on the frame, searching for something, anything out of place.

  Nothing, nothing—and then I see it.

  A horseless carriage.

  It’s black as night, black as the space behind the skull’s eyes, and it’s cutting straight through the crowd, surging away and out of the square.

  And I know Lara’s in there.

  She’s not gone, not yet.

  But I have to find out where she’s going.

  I start forward after the carriage, colliding with a ghost.

  He scowls and shoves me. “Watch it, girl.”

  I lower my camera, and the square comes back into violent focus, a teeming mass of movement and spirits, too many starting toward me.

  Jacob pulls me away from the ghosts, even as I lift the camera and slide the focus, still searching, searching. But I’ve lost sight of the carriage.

  We cut back into the world of the living, the transition so jarring I have to brace myself against the wall for a moment until my vision clears. My heart races in my chest, with panic, but also with hope.

  The horseless carriage must be going somewhere.

  I just don’t know where.

  I don’t know how long I have.

  I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.

  But I know people who will.

  I take off, down one block and up another, skidding to a stop in front of Thread & Bone. I fling open the door. Or I try to, but it holds fast. I push again before noticing that the sign on the glass says CLOSED.

  No, no, no.

  I rattle the handle. I pound on the door. But the lights are off, and no one answers, and I can’t get through to the Society room and all the old members without being let in by a Society member.

  Jacob peers through the glass, then pulls back, shaking his head. “No one’s here,” he says. “Except the cat.”

  This can’t be happening. Not now.

  I need the Society.

  “Cassidy,” he says, “we know where one of them is.”

  Of course. Lucas Dumont.

  Official Inspecters guide. And Society historian.

  I’m breathless and queasy by the time we get back to the LaLaurie Mansion, the heat smothering my lungs. I’m secretly hoping that my parents and the crew will all be standing on the curb waiting for us, but it hasn’t been an hour yet, and they’re not outside, and I don’t have time. Lara doesn’t have time.

  I push open the gate, step back into the arched alcove, and the Veil rises in warning. I step through the door, into the darkened foyer, and the other side groans and pushes at me, but there’s no sign of my parents, or the film crew, or Lucas.

  I listen, trying to make out their voices over the pounding in my head, and hear footsteps overhead. I hurry down the hall, but the moment my foot hits the stairs, the Veil surges around me, carrying the clink of champagne glasses and the wave of an anguished scream, as high and long as a kettle whistling on the stove. Waves of anger and grief fold over me as the Veil forces me to my hands and knees on the steps.

  No, no, no, I think as it reaches up through the floor, the thin gray curtain wrapping tight around my wrists as it pulls me down.

  Jacob pulls me back.

  The airy pressure of his hands on my shoulders: the only thing holding me here in the land of the living.

  “Don’t let go,” I plead, throwing all my energy against the other side.

  He shimmers a little with the effort. “I’ve got you,” he says, holding as tight as a ghost can as I look up and see Mom and Dad coming down the stairs.

  “Cassidy?” says Mom.

  I don’t know what they’ve felt or seen in here, but the EMF meter is shut off in Mom’s hand, and Dad’s mouth is set in a grim line. Lucas trails behind them, along with Jenna and Adan, their cameras hanging at their sides, their faces drawn. Lucas looks at me, brow furrowing when he sees I’m alone, but Dad’s the one who asks.

  “Where’s Lara?”

  I swallow, struggling to form the lie. “She’s … with her aunt.”

  The words are weak, my voice cracking.

  “Are you okay?” asks Mom, and the question makes my eyes burn. I can’t bring myself to say yes, so I shake my head and say, “I don’t feel well. Can I go back to the hotel?”

  Dad presses the back of his hand against my forehead, and Mom looks worried. It’s only been a few days since I fainted in Paris.

  “Of course,” says Dad.

  Only Lucas seems to sense that something went wrong, though I don’t know if it’s the lie, or the pleading in my eyes when I look at him.

  “I’ll walk Cass back to the hotel,” says Lucas.

  “Are you sure?” asks Mom. “We have the B-roll to film but—”

  “It’s no trouble at all,” he says, and I gratefully follow him out the door, Jacob on our heels.

  “What happened?” Lucas asks as soon as we’re outside, and it spills out of me: our idea to lure the Emissary, the setup in the séance room, how everything went right until the moment it went wrong, how the Emissary took Lara instead of me, the horseless carriage I saw in the square, the Society headquarters closed.

  “I have a key,” says Lucas, pulling it out from his pocket as we hurry toward the shop.

  “I don’t know where it’s taking her,” I ramble. “She wasn’t in danger until I—”

  “She was always in danger, Cassidy,” Lucas says. “She understood that, even if you didn’t.”

  Tears spill down my face, and I dash them away. She’s not gone. Lara Chowdhury is the smartest, most stubborn girl I know. She’s not gone.

  I just have to find her.

  I can’t read Jacob’s mind the way he reads mine, but I can tell he feels guilty, too. We couldn’t have known the spell would hurt him.

  The tarot card reading whispers in my head.

  No matter what you choose, you will lose.

  “You should have let me go,” Jacob whispers now, and if he were flesh and bone, I would punch him.

  Instead, I snap, “Well, I didn’t. I couldn’t. I won’t. I’m not losing either of my friends today.”

  Lucas looks at me, but doesn’t seem flustered by the fact I’m yelling at someone he can’t see. I wonder if he’s ever been flustered. He reminds me of Lara in that way. If Lara were here instead of me, she would know what to do. I try to summon her voice in my head. Slow down, it would say. Stay calm, just think.

  I take a deep breath. “One of the past members of the Society said that if the Emissary caught me, it would take me back, to the place beyond the Veil.”

  Lucas nods, pushing his glasses up his face. “That makes sense. According to most of the accounts I’ve read, the world is broken into three spaces. The land of the living, the Veil between, and the place beyond.”

  “I know how to get from the living to the Veil,” I say. “There’s a kind of curtain. But how do you get from the Veil to the place beyond?”

  “I’m not an in-betweener,” says Lucas, shaking his head as we cross a busy street. “But I’ve read enough to know it’s called the Bridge of Souls. It sits at the far edge of the Veil. The good news is, it isn’t a curtain, or a door. It’s a place that must be crossed. Sometimes it’s a road, sometimes it’s a tower filled with stairs, sometimes—”

  “Could it be a real bridge?” asks Jacob.

  “What?” I turn, and realize that Jacob has stopped walking. He’s standing in front of a tourist shop, staring at a
large map of the city in the window. And he’s pointing at something. I double back and stand beside him, surveying the map. There’s the French Quarter and the Garden District, the cemeteries scattered like graves across the city.

  I follow Jacob’s hand up, to the top left edge of the frame, where the crescent of the city gives way to the coast of a massive lake.

  And there, jutting out across it, is a bridge.

  A bridge so long it vanishes off the side of the map.

  “The Causeway,” says Lucas, stepping up beside me.

  And just like that, the pieces slot together in my head.

  Dad’s voice, when we first got here.

  It’s home to the longest bridge in the US. The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway—you can’t see one side from the other.

  The weird push-pull Jacob and I both felt in Metairie Cemetery, coming from the direction of the lake. But what if it wasn’t the lake?

  What if it was the bridge?

  “Are you sure?” asks Jacob.

  And the truth is, I’m not. And I know that if I’m wrong, I could be too late; I could lose Lara.

  But if Lara were here, she would tell me that I’m an in-betweener, and I have to learn to trust my gut. And if I close my eyes, and manage to quiet the sounds of the Quarter, the chaotic rhythm of the Veil, I can feel something. The opposite of the force that draws me toward Lara. That push instead of a pull, like magnets facing the wrong way.

  I point in the direction of the feeling and open my eyes.

  “Is the bridge that way?” I ask.

  And Lucas nods.

  “Spirit compass,” says Jacob. “It’s like a brand-new superpower.”

  Which is great, but we’re in the middle of the French Quarter, and judging by the map, the bridge is miles away.

  “How do we get there?” I ask, but Lucas already has his phone out.

  “I know someone who can help,” he says, making a call.

  I can hear a bubbly voice answer on the other end. “Hello, hello!”

  “Hi, Philippa,” he says. “We’ve got an emergency. Code Seven. Can you bring the car? Yes, to Thread and Bone.”

  “Code Seven?” I ask when he hangs up. “What does that stand for?”

  “Don’t ask questions,” says Lucas.

  I flinch. “Sorry, I was just wondering—”

  “No,” says Lucas, “Code Seven means don’t ask questions. We had to add it, because Philippa’s rather chatty, and sometimes, time is of the essence.”

  We stand on the curb and wait, my chest tightening with every passing moment as I shift Lara’s red backpack on my shoulder and clutch the broken evil eye in my pocket as if it will buy me time.

  Hang on, Lara, I think. Hang on.

  “She’s really smart,” says Jacob. I look up at him. I’m pretty sure, when it comes to Lara, it’s the first nice thing he’s ever said. “She’s really smart,” he says again, “and stubborn, and she knows lots of tricks, so I’m sure she’ll be okay until we get there.”

  I bite my lip and nod, hoping he’s right.

  “You should know,” says Lucas, “Philippa’s car is a bit unconventional.”

  I half expect to see her pull up in a horse-drawn carriage.

  Instead, she arrives in something so much worse.

  “Oh no,” says Jacob as the car drives up onto the curb, looking like a stretched-out station wagon.

  It’s not a station wagon, of course.

  It’s a hearse.

  Philippa leans out the driver’s side window, her white-blond hair rising like a plume over her head, a funeral lily tucked behind one ear.

  “Hello again,” she says. “Someone need a ride?”

  Philippa may be driving a hearse, but she treats it like a race car, running all the yellow lights and half the red ones.

  “Better than an ambulance,” she says brightly. “People always get out of the way.”

  “Careful,” says Lucas as she swerves between cars, accelerates fast enough that the coffin in the back jostles and slides.

  “The living are so squeamish when it comes to the dead,” Philippa says.

  “Sometimes the dead are squeamish, too,” says Jacob, who’s sitting beside me in the back. “I, for one, am not thrilled that there is a body in this car.”

  Well, there is a coffin behind us, covered in flowers. Neither of us have actually looked inside the coffin to find out if—

  “Oh, that’s Fred,” says Philippa, waving her hand.

  A shiver runs down my spine, and Jacob and I both lean forward to get farther away from the polished wood.

  “So,” I say, trying not to think about Fred. “You drive a hearse?”

  “Not usually. I mean, it’s my boyfriend’s car, but he lets me borrow it when it’s free.”

  I look over my shoulder, wondering at her definition of free. “Is there always a coffin in the back?”

  “I told you,” she says, waving her hand again. “That’s just Fred.”

  “She’s talking about the coffin,” explains Lucas.

  “Right, the coffin. We call him Fred,” says Philippa. “He’s empty,” she adds, almost as an afterthought.

  I sigh a little with relief, but then inhale sharply as Philippa swerves between two trucks and hits the gas. Lucas closes his eyes. And this, I think, is how I’m going to die. Again. Not in a river, and not at the Emissary’s hands, but in a hearse, hurtling through afternoon traffic toward Lake Pontchartrain.

  I grip the broken evil eye charm in my pocket, squeezing until my fingers ache. I wasn’t sure if we were right about the bridge, but as the hearse races north, I can feel it, like a shadow at the edge of my sight, a patch of cold on a warm day, and I know we’re going the right way.

  “Music?” asks Philippa, already switching on the radio. I don’t know what I expected—rock, or pop, even classical—but what spills out is a series of low gongs, a meditation track so at odds with the racing hearse and my rising panic I almost laugh.

  As we drive on, I hold the red backpack in my lap, running my thumb over the stitched letter L I never noticed on the front.

  “Do you think we’ll get there in time?” I ask.

  I probably just want an adult to lie and tell me things are going to be okay, but Lucas says nothing, and Philippa looks at me in the rearview mirror and says, “I don’t know, Cassidy.”

  And before I can get upset, she slams on the brakes, and if Jacob were corporeal, I’m pretty sure he would have gone through the front window. Instead, he braces himself against the back of the seat. I think of the display case shattering under his fist, of how strong he’s getting, how, until yesterday, my biggest fear was him becoming an out-of-control spirit I’d have to send on. Everything changes so fast.

  “You’re staring,” he says, and I blink, too quick, the way Dad does when there’s a sappy commercial on and he’s trying not to cry.

  “Because you look funny,” I say.

  And he sticks out his tongue.

  And I stick out mine, too.

  I’m glad Jacob’s not a normal ghost.

  I’m glad he’s stronger than ever.

  I need him to be.

  I don’t want to lose him.

  I don’t want to lose Lara.

  I don’t want to lose anyone.

  There is no victory without defeat, said the fortune-teller, but Dad said you can’t tell the future, because we haven’t lived it yet. He said that the cards were only mirrors, reflecting our own thoughts, and hopes, and fears.

  So I know what I’m scared of, but I also know it isn’t set in stone.

  I know that I can save one of my friends without losing the other.

  And I know there’s a third life at stake: my own.

  “We’re here,” says Lucas, and I look up to see the lake spreading on the horizon, a vast gray slick, as far as I can see. And cutting across it, the bridge. Philippa pulls the hearse over onto the shoulder, near the mouth of the lake. Cars go by, slowing at the sight of
a stalled hearse with its flower-draped coffin in the back, but she waves them on as we all climb out.

  I turn my attention to the Causeway Bridge. It stretches like taffy, a rippling line that goes straight to the horizon.

  “Ready?” I ask Jacob.

  “Nope,” he says, but we both take a step forward. This close, I can feel the Veil, and the place beyond it. The Bridge of Souls. Like a pocket of silence, heavy and still.

  Even in the muggy heat, it makes me shiver.

  Up close, the strange push-pull is stronger. Here, it feels like repulsion. Something deep inside me warns me this is a bad place, urges me to run away.

  But I can’t.

  I’m about to reach for the Veil when Philippa says, “Wait.”

  She digs in her pocket and pulls out a piece of candy, a crumpled receipt, a fortune cookie, and a strand of braided red thread.

  She plucks the red thread from the pile of odds and ends, shoves the rest in her pocket.

  “Hold out your hand, Cass.”

  I do, expecting her to put the red thread in my palm, but instead, she wraps it several times around my wrist.

  “It’s easy to get lost in the space between worlds,” she says. “It’s like dreaming. Sometimes you forget what is and isn’t real.” She ties the ends into a knot. “This should help you remember.”

  I think of Neville Longbottom and his Remembrall, the way it turned red whenever he forgot something. The trouble, of course, was he could never remember what it was he forgot.

  But all I say is “Thanks.”

  Philippa waves, and Lucas nods at me. “Be careful,” he says.

  I take a deep breath, and reach for the Veil.

  The gray curtain rushes up to meet my hand. It slides between my fingers, and I catch hold, flinging it aside. I feel the lurch as the ground drops away, taking the light and color and the sound of cars with it. There’s a moment of falling, of cold, and then I’m back on my feet, and the world is darker, quieter.

  But here, at least, there are no dizzying layers, no double vision. Just a bleak stretch of gray.

  Jacob stands beside me, his edges solid against the pale landscape.

  He stares ahead. I follow his gaze, and see the bridge.

  In the land of the living, it was gray, concrete, mundane. But here, it’s something else. Bigger, stranger, a stretch of polished black stone that reaches as far as I can see, the end disappearing into fog. There’s no water, no railing, just a long drop into shadow.