I sulked in my room for a solid hour before getting sick of my own mopey ass and forcing myself to get up and do something. Not what Heru wanted me to be doing, and not sleeping, despite it being well past midnight. No, I had a loophole in mind, a way to figure out more about the root cause of the strange activity at the school without actually disobeying Heru and going there—yet.
I swapped my yuppie jogger outfit for my own worn, once-black sweatpants and one of the ratty, oversized T-shirts I liked to sleep in, grabbed my laptop, and left the room. Barefoot, I padded up the hallway to Garth’s bedroom door and knocked gently. When I didn’t get a response, I knocked again, a little louder this time.
Bleary-eyed, he opened the door. “Kat?”
“Oh good, you’re up.”
“Well,” he said, voice husky with sleep, “I wasn’t, actually—”
I flashed him an apologetic smile, then pushed past him into his bedroom. “Did you mean it about wanting to help me?” Eva, his snooty calico cat, lay primly on the corner of his mussed bed, giving me the ol’ stink-eye.
“Yeah,” Garth said. “Of course.”
“Cool, because I need your help.” I set my computer down on one side of the little table set up in front of the room’s picture window. Garth’s laptop already rested on the far side. “Please”—I waved to the chair on the other side of the table—“sit. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Garth yawned, slowly making his way to the chair. “Can’t this wait until morning? You won’t have to make your speech for another day, at least.”
I pulled out the chair on my side of the table and sat. “That’s not what I need your help with. At least, not tonight.”
Garth frowned, pulling out his chair and joining me at the table. “Oh?”
“We need to do some research.” I met his eyes. “On ghosts.”
Believe it or not, the authorities weren’t really taking the whole haunted high school thing seriously. Other than reports filed after a few unexplained incidents earlier in the week that resulted in minor injuries, there was no evidence that police other than the officer posted there full-time had even visited the school. There wasn’t even anything in their records about the kids who’d been found unconscious, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the school had even reported the incidents.
“There’s nothing else?” I asked Garth as I stared at him over the screens of our laptops. He wouldn’t let me into the police database all by myself, so I had to settle for accessing the info through him, one of Seattle’s former finest. “No ‘we’re keeping an eye on it’ tag or anything like that?”
Garth shook his head. He was sitting across from me at the little tea table in his room, minor awkwardness and genuine friendship the only other things between us. “My guess is they think it’s all a senior prank.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Seriously? You really think some teens could coordinate a hoax like this with the whole school?”
Garth lifted one shoulder. “You’d be surprised what kids are capable of . . .”
I snorted. “Trust me, bud, I know.” Considering that I’d been seventeen years old when I made the decision to sacrifice my ability to age further in order to activate my Nejeret traits and enter the echoes to save Lex, and I’d barely been eighteen when I decided that going after Mari was a peachy idea, I had a pretty good idea of the capabilities of teenagers.
“I saw the ghosts—or whatever,” I reminded him. “This is real.”
Garth rubbed the side of his face with one hand, his faint stubble making a scratching noise. “You know that,” he said, “and I know that, but they don’t.”
I lowered my eyes to my own computer screen and started typing in the internet search bar: Newport High School haunting real.
“What’s your plan?” Garth asked.
“See what unofficial info is out there about this,” I told him, already skimming the search results.
“I’ll help,” Garth said, refocusing on his computer screen.
We spent nearly two hours like that, sharing what little useful information we found among the heaps of bullshit. I was about ready to give up and give the cards another shot—as daunting as that sounded after the last reading—when Garth leaned in closer to his computer screen. His eyes moved back and forth rapidly as he read through whatever he’d found. A gold mine, from the looks of it.
“What?” I stood partway, craning my neck to get an upside-down view of his screen. He was on a message board of some kind. “What’d you find?”
“A site called Super Truthers,” Garth said without looking up. “Apparently it’s a hub for people to gather and discuss conspiracies to cover up major supernatural phenomena.”
“That’s a real thing?” Frowning, I pushed my chair back and came around to his side of the little table. Super Truthers, indeed, was a real thing. “Cool,” I said, coming to stand behind him. I bent over, resting my forearms on the top rail of his chair and skimming the screen over his shoulder.
“See,” Garth said, pointing to the screen, “each of these threads is about a different ‘event’ that’s supposedly been covered up.” He touched his fingertip to the screen and scrolled down the page with a flick of his finger. There were hundreds—maybe thousands—of entries on the message board. With another flick of his finger, he scrolled back to the newer entries at the top of the page. “Look at that.”
The topmost entry under the pinned “Rules of the Super Truthers Board” post was titled “Newport High School—Poltergeists or Shadow People?”
“Shadow people?” I read aloud. It sounded pretty accurate. “What’s that?”
Garth clicked on the thread, taking us to a new page. “It’s one of the seven classes of hauntings—intelligent, demonic, demonic possession, residual, poltergeist, elementals, and shadow people.”
I stared at the side of Garth’s face.
After a few seconds, he leaned away, meeting my confounded stare. “What?”
“How the hell do you know that?” I narrowed my eyes. “Or did you just pull that out of your ass?”
A faint flush colored Garth’s cheeks, and he looked away, returning his attention to the screen. “I watch a lot of shows about ghost hunting, alright? It’s just a thing that I find fascinating.”
I was still staring at him. It was like I didn’t know him at all. Which, I supposed, I didn’t, not really. A few days of great sex hardly leads one to really get to know a person. Now that we were working on being just friends, no body parts to distract each other with, we were bound to learn all kinds of interesting—and surprising—things about one another.
“Stop it,” Garth said without looking at me.
I suppressed a laugh and turned my outward attention to the screen. “Stop what?”
“Judging me.”
I coughed to cover up the tiny, choking laugh that escaped. Garth liked ghost hunting shows. I don’t know why, but I totally loved that about him.
“So,” I said, voice tight with restrained amusement, “tell me the truth—did you really just stumble upon this website, or did you already know about it?”
Garth straightened his posture and cleared his throat, but he kept his mouth shut.
“Fine.” I gave his shoulder a squeeze, then stood up. “Don’t tell me.” I headed back to my chair and sat, pulling up the Super Truthers website on my computer.
We’d been perusing the NHS thread for fifteen minutes or so when I felt the distinct sensation of being watched. I glanced at Garth. He was staring at me, but his expression wasn’t one of “Ah-ha!” It was filled with concern, and my stomach turned into a bottomless sinking pit.
“What?” I said, returning my focus to a post listing other locations reporting similar paranormal activity to Newport’s over the past couple weeks.
According to the post, each and every location had been an overflow site for area hospitals during the Cascade Virus outbreak. And each place had had a pretty hefty death toll, if the numbers posted were to be believed. Each location was either a middle school, a high school, a college, or a community center—specifically youth-focused community centers. I knew for a fact that tons of other types of buildings had been used for hospital overflow; either the poster was only reporting handpicked information, or whatever was going on seemed to be centered around places that young people frequented. That thought sent a chill up my spine.
I clicked on the poster’s name—ghoulgirl25—then chose the option from a pop-up menu to send her a message.
Hi ghoulgirl25,
I saw your post in the thread about the hauntings at Newport High School. Can you share where you got your information? And when you were researching, did you notice if other places like businesses or hospitals have been reporting similar occurrences?
“So,” Garth said, drawing out the word, “since we’re on the topic of ghosts and dead people . . .”
I looked at him over the computer screen, but just for a second before resuming typing.
I’m writing an article for my school paper, and I’d like to have as accurate of information as possible. Us believers have to stick together, right?
“And you’re the most recent person I know to have died,” Garth continued.
Shit. Another person trying to get me to talk about that whole dying incident. Garth’s not-so-subtle subject change was my cue to leave.
Can’t wait to hear back from you!
I paused, not sure what name to sign off with. I didn’t need this chick to get any bright, suspicious ideas about who I really was. I quickly typed my mom’s name—Genevieve—then pressed send.
“Well,” I said, snapping my laptop shut as soon as I’d sent the message. “Thanks for this.” I reached across the table and patted the top of Garth’s head. “It’s been real.” I tucked my laptop under my arm and headed for the door.
“Kat, wait.”
I paused with my hand on the door handle. “I can’t talk about it, Garth,” I said softly. Honestly. “I just can’t.”