MOM HAD TO CHASE DOWN Minh and Adam to stop them from running off into the night by themselves. Once she wrangled them, she couldn’t persuade the boys to come back inside the house, so she wound up dropping them off at Minh’s house since Cam was done with his movie anyway.
Then there was the whole matter of the ghosts who’d shown up to deliver a cryptic warning. Kristina was lying on my bed, spent from the massive amount of energy she’d used expelling them from the house.
“How could you not know what they meant?” I asked, frantically lighting as many candles as I could find. “How could you not know who they were?”
“I don’t know, Baylor,” she said, sounding weak. “Clearly it’s never happened before.”
“Shouldn’t you be in the Beyond asking some questions?”
“I will tonight,” she said. “But right now, I just want to rest and think.”
“But they said I need to be careful! Careful about what?!”
“I’m not sure.”
“They said a change is coming, Kristina!” I said, placing a third candle on the windowsill. “My soul is at stake?” I peered out the window, half expecting to see a Bruton or something worse staring back at me. “That sounds pretty bad if you ask me.”
“Baylor, I can assure you, you’re perfectly safe,” Colonel Fleetwood said. “Nothing to worry about.”
“Did we not just live through the same fiasco, Fleetwood? You’re joking right?”
“Clearly they were just trying to scare you.”
“Actually, you’re scaring me,” I said, throwing my hands up, “because you’re not taking this seriously. How did they enter the house? What happened to the protections?”
“They were actually the boys’ relatives,” he said with a shrug. “We could feel it. That kind of connection can’t be faked.”
“So then my little brother’s friends”—ha! Friends. Poor Jack was never going to have friends after those boys told everyone about what they experienced—“conveniently both had relatives with special powers in the Beyond?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t feel any negative energy. They were being influenced by someone in the Beyond,” he said. “No doubt about that. The main question is, quite simply, why?”
“Yes, Colonel,” I said, turning slowly to look at him. “That literally is the main question we’ve been trying to address here. Such incredible insight on your part!”
“Baylor,” Kristina said, sitting up, “stop it.”
“No,” I said, feeling myself grow livid, “because maybe you don’t have all the answers, but he should. He’s one of our spirit guides, and he shouldn’t be standing here, twiddling his thumbs, while you’re the one taking care of threatening visitors.”
“If he’d taken care of them,” she said pointedly, “and I hadn’t, that would have made me look really, really bad.”
“Do you . . . do you think anything here made you look good?”
“If I hadn’t taken action, the Higher Powers in the Beyond would have noticed,” she said, standing up, “and they would have held it against me that I didn’t fight back when you felt endangered.”
“But why was I in danger in the first place? Our protections are in place, and you all are here—even Uncle Charlie.”
“Hey!” he said.
“Really? Come on,” I said. He glared at me.
“Baylor, do you think there’s an invisible brick wall or something between you and the other side?” Kristina asked.
“What? No. But I mean, you guys are here, and I’m wearing this dumb necklace, so that should be enough to stop anything from crossing over.”
She threw her head back in laughter. “You can’t be serious. Baylor, the other side is just there,” she said, exasperated, throwing her arms out around her. “It’s everywhere. We can do our best to protect you from the evil, but we can’t possibly protect you from everything that feels like stopping by for a visit. If something more powerful from the other side wants to send you a message, then guess what? You’re getting the message.”
“What?” I said, dazed.
“Baylor, after the Rosalie incident, it was clear things were changing,” she said. “Your powers are growing, and mine are too, and everything we’ve known for the last couple years is going to start changing. Okay?” She put her head into her hands and seemed to squeeze hard. “I’m sorry. I should have spelled this out earlier, but I didn’t know how, and I still don’t really know the extent of what that means.” She turned my way, her eyes wide and desperate. “But look, Baylor, just this week you’re suddenly walking through dreams and communicating with kids who are floating in an ocean hundreds of miles away. It’s happening so fast.”
Colonel Fleetwood flitted over and ghost-hugged her, which was an odd thing to witness. Ghosts hugged by submerging their bodies into each other, so they essentially morphed into one figure for a few seconds.
“Okay,” I said after a few seconds, “enough of that.” They didn’t move. “Separate!” I said while clapping hard.
Kristina turned to me and glared. “We’re hugging, Baylor. What’s the issue?”
“You’ve just gotta, you know, leave room for the Holy Spirit, right?” I scrunched up my face. “Looked a little tight to me.”
She sighed and freed herself from the colonel’s grip. “I don’t even have the energy to hate you,” she said. “I feel so awful for Jack. I really think we may have ruined his childhood. He’s going to grow up and be one of those people who works silently behind a desk and then goes home to his studio apartment and heats up frozen gas station burritos for dinner and doesn’t interact with humans. We’ve ruined him.”
“That’s not gonna happen,” I said.
She shook her head, her eyes wide. “I hope not.”
There was a weird pause as we considered Jack’s future, but then a wave of tiredness hit me and I was elated. Finally—the day was over. I could go to sleep, and wake up in the morning and not feel so bad about things.
“Are you all heading to the Beyond, or are you keeping watch in the night?”
“Well,” Kristina said dryly, “apparently it doesn’t even matter anymore, so . . .” She shrugged. “Good luck.”
I had a feeling she was kidding, but I wasn’t 100 percent sure.
“Are . . . are you putting up other protections?”
“Baylor,” she said, “you’ll be fine for tonight. Just be careful if you go dreamwalking.” She paused. “Better yet, just exhibit some self-control and don’t go dreamwalking for once. That would solve a lot of issues, actually.”
I waved them good night while chuckling to myself. Self-control? Was she forgetting I needed to somehow leave a piece of my soul with Archie and Helena? I was in for a long night.
* * *
I thought I’d be tossing and turning and restless in bed all night, but I somehow wound up falling asleep in only a few seconds. I found myself in the middle of an ocean, along with my family and friends, practicing for our upcoming swim meet.
“Just twenty more miles until we reach the shore!” J said between strokes.
“That’s nothing,” my dad called out. “This is a piece of cake compared to teaching math to some of my students.”
Waves thrashed around us, and for some reason I was perfectly content to glide forward through the waves, to pretend I was a dolphin and be one with the ocean. It was peaceful in a way.
“Okay, we’re entering Shark City,” Bobby called out.
That got my attention.
“What?!” I said, suddenly snapping to attention and noticing the hundreds of fins cutting through the water ahead of us. “Why would we swim through that?”
One of the sharks popped up through the water, its expression deeply pained.
“We’re not all vicious, Baylor,” it said. “You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.”
“Don’t make me feel bad,” I said, “I’m really stressed out right now, and sharks don’t exactly have the best track record, you know.”
“So you’re going to judge all of us based on the actions of a few?” it said. “That’s a horrible thing to do.”
“It seems logical to me.”
“We don’t even like the taste of humans,” it said. “You taste like rotten tuna fish cans.”
“How would you know that?”
It shrugged casually. “I made some mistakes in my youth,” it said, “but what’s important”— it leaned forward and stared deeply into my eyes—“is that I’ve changed.”
“I don’t have time to talk about this!” I snapped, remembering I was on a mission. “I shouldn’t be talking to you at all. You’re a shark! I need to go talk to Archie and Helena!” I hunched into a ball, sprang up, and dolphin-leaped out of the water and through the air, somersaulting onto Loved Ones’ Lane.
“Dang righteous sharks,” I muttered as I sprinted down the black lane, the shooting stars twinkling around me, “wasting all my time.”
As I reached the end of the lane, I ran a little faster and plunged off the edge, doing a little flip on my way down into the ocean. I swam in the normal direction, unimpeded by activist sharks, and arrived at the boat, where Archie and Helena lay unmoving, their bodies rocking along with the waves. A chill passed through my body; they looked like corpses.
“Archie?” I called out, pulling myself onto the boat. “Helena?”
They both stirred lightly. “Baylor?” Archie said. “That you?”
“Yes,” I said, not sure of what to do. Archie’s skin had somehow taken on a sickly pallor, and with the light of the moon illuminating his face, he looked like he’d been stuck in an industrial freezer. The light was doing other weird tricks, too, as it seemed to shimmer around us in different colors and light up both the space just around the boat and the sky, like otherworldly heat lightning.
“What is that?” I asked, mesmerized. It was like the aurora borealis was deciding to show off just for us. The thought crossed my mind that maybe they were auroras, that Archie and Helena had drifted so far north they’d arrived in Iceland. But that couldn’t be—they’d have suffered the effects of hypothermia by now.
“What’s what?” he asked, his voice low and tired. It seemed a miracle he could say anything at all.
“The lights,” I said. “Can’t you see them?”
He gave a cursory turn of the head, but didn’t move otherwise. “I see only the dark.”
“Weird,” I said, “anyway, listen, I might have figured out a way to find you, but it’s not going to be easy.”
“What is it?” he asked, suddenly sounding more alert. “Can I help?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, genuinely not sure what he could do to rip off a piece of my soul. “This is going to sound weird, but . . . but I need to leave a piece of my soul here.”
He furrowed his brows, silent for a few seconds, until he said, “You mean like in Harr—”
“No!” I said, “not like that. I thought the same thing, though.”
“Oh, good,” he said, sounding relieved. “I thought you were about to kill me or something for a second there.”
“What! No!”
“And the worst part,” he said with a whisper, “is that I almost felt happy about it.”
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t imagine how he felt. He was so thirsty, so hungry, so broken and battered, to the point where the thought of dying sounded ideal. I gulped. I needed to figure out this whole soul situation tonight.
I thought about the happy summers at my grandparents’ house and tried to imagine myself there, and apply that same feeling to this setting. This dark, desolate setting, where the only objects in sight were an overturned boat and two kids who were one powerful wave away from drowning.
“How can I make this a happy memory?” I said, feeling genuinely frustrated. “It’s impossible.”
“You have to think past the water,” Archie said. “If you don’t, everything will slip away.”
“What have you been thinking about?”
Archie hesitated, but a small smile crossed his face. “My parents. The memories seem so far away and so close at the same time.” He tried to lick his lips, but his mouth was so dry that it was pointless. “I keep thinking of when I was younger, and I used to go running to my parents’ room, and I’d dive into their bed.” He stopped, his voice getting rougher. “And they’d snuggle with me forever and make an Archie Sandwich. And then we’d eat breakfast and play outside. They’d run through the sprinklers with me, over and over, and we’d make Slip ’N Slides, and throw water balloons in the pool.” He swallowed loudly. “I miss them so much, Baylor.”
I had tears in my eyes but didn’t know what to do.
“I’m so sorry, Archie,” I said, wiping my eyes. I sat down and touched his shoulder. “I passed on your message. They know you’re alive. Just keep holding on. We’ll figure this out.”
He swallowed again, but it took a huge effort, like he was trying to push down a golf ball. “I’m trying, Baylor.”
“I know,” I said. “And I am too.” What on earth was I going to do? Why hadn’t I pestered Madame Nadirah for some soul scissors or something to try to cut off a piece of my soul? It sounded painful, but hopefully it’d be as easy as getting a haircut. This whole thought process was absurd; I couldn’t cut something that wasn’t solid. It’d be like trying to slice smoke.
I spent a few minutes trying out different things in case I felt a piece of my soul break: meditation, praying, squeezing every muscle in my body in an attempt to push it out, rocking back and forth (which I quickly realized was an awful idea as the boat began to move with me—I may as well have just pushed Archie and Helena off the boat myself and called it a day).
But there was nothing to be done. I couldn’t just will myself into leaving a part of my soul here. That’s not how it worked.
“I’ll figure this out,” I said, feeling desperate on their behalf. “I promise. I’ll figure it out.”
Using all his energy, Archie lifted up his head and smiled. “Thank you for trying, Baylor. See you soon.”
I nodded and jumped into the ocean to swim back to Loved Ones’ Lane, considering all my options.
I could try again with Madame Nadirah. Maybe she had researched more for me, or perhaps she could reach out to any of her mystic friends, if she had any. I wasn’t sure if she did. I didn’t think there were any national conferences for the spiritually gifted, but I’d also never researched it.
I could ask Kristina to demand someone on the other side do something about this. It was ridiculous—surely they could help. But I already knew they wouldn’t. There were so many other people who were suffering and needed help. They wouldn’t give special dispensation for these two just because I’d asked for it.
I could fly down to Florida and see if I could actually be of use to Archie and Helena’s families. The fact that I was even seeing Archie and Helena was weird enough on its own; maybe being surrounded by their families would help bolster my powers? The thought of flying on a commercial airplane made me shudder, though. Perhaps the amulet would help, but being trapped in a flying tube with a couple hundred other people, and their many, many dead relatives would feel like flying in a very large and very packed sardine can.
I ran out of ideas by the time I was back on the lane, and I walked back to home base slowly, hoping another idea would pop into my brain. Nothing happened, of course.
I was planning on returning to my dream and getting some rest—maybe that would help spur ideas—when I passed Aiden’s door. The shooting stars were so bright, like the light bulbs had been replaced, that I was tempted for a moment to see what he was dreaming about.
No. No, I couldn’t possibly. I’d already done it once and was sure he was suspicious of me, even though he had no real reason to suspect anything.
I was about to head through my door when I stopped again. He had been so mad today, strutting off to who knows where and not returning any of our texts and calls. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad thing to check in? In fact, I considered it a necessary friend duty, just to make sure everything was all right.
Convinced, I doubled back, somersaulted through the door, and immediately realized I’d made a huge mistake.