SO, THE WRAITHS THOUGHT THEY COULD CLAIM me for their own? Well, they were wrong, and I intended to prove it.
“I’m not yours,” I said to the wraith who floated in front of me. She wore a white, filmy sort of dress, maybe an old-fashioned nightgown; I wondered if it was what she’d died in. If so, I was stuck in a white camisole and blue cotton pajama bottoms with little clouds on them for all eternity. I looked down and saw the pajama bottoms, slightly translucent like the rest of me but definitely the same. Great. “I belong to myself. That’s it.”
“But you’re one of us now.” Her aqua-green face shone in the soft dawn light. “Don’t you see how much better this is?”
Lucas turned to Balthazar. “If she’s a ghost—a wraith—then how do we contact her?”
“I’m right here!” I called. But they didn’t hear.
Balthazar looked entirely lost for words. “I don’t—vampires and wraiths—we learn how to avoid them, not how to talk to them.”
“Who would know?” Lucas’s eyes were desperate. “Is there a way? Any way? I don’t know of one—maybe there isn’t one—Dammit, there’s got to be one. Gotta be.” He glanced down at the grave, and then shut his eyes tightly.
“I’m thinking, okay?” Balthazar didn’t look much more encouraged than Lucas. “Do you know anybody in Black Cross who could tell us something?”
Lucas groaned. “Plenty of people. None of whom I can ever speak to again. Except—maybe—”
He was considering it—seriously considering reaching out to Black Cross, although the hunters might well be under orders to kill him on sight. Oh, no, I thought. Lucas can’t do that. He’s upset, he’s confused, it’s a terrible idea—
The world dissolved into bluish fog again, and I lost any sense of a corporeal body. Although in some ways that sensation was liberating—kind of like flying in dreams—I didn’t enjoy not having a body. Bodies were good. Bodies told you where you were and what you could do. Already I seriously missed having one I could rely on.
As I attempted to pull myself into some kind of shape, the wraith coalesced beside me in the mist. “You’ll actually learn to have fun with this in time. But it takes some getting used to.”
“I’m not getting used to it today.” When I spoke only to her, the words had begun to feel like talking—even if nothing was actually said aloud. “We have to discuss what’s happened to me.”
“So, talk.”
“Not while we’re—floaty and lost and whatever! Take me someplace real. Someplace we can both be real.”
“Fine, be that way.”
In the blink of an eye, the mist vanished. She and I stood in the attic of Vic’s house, not far from the dressmaker’s dummy, which still wore its jaunty plumed hat. I could smell the musty old books and see the clutter piled high—although a little less, since he’d provisioned our wine-cellar home. The wooden slats of the floor showed vividly through our translucent feet.
She smiled at me, still smirking a bit. The wraith could have been pretty, if it hadn’t been for the expressions on her face. Her fair hair was stick straight and cut short in a bob. She had a narrow chin, a strong nose, and sharp, knowing eyes. It startled me to realize that she was probably a year or two younger than I was.
Well, that she’d been a year or two younger when she died. For the first time, I realized I would never get any older. That somehow felt more final than all the rest.
The wraith said, “I’m Maxie O’Connor. I died here almost ninety years ago. I’ve haunted this house ever since. You’ll feel drawn to this place, too, since you died here and everything, but I’m telling you right now, this house is mine. I let you guys camp in the basement as a favor to Vic, but that’s all. Visit, don’t stay.”
Like I’d even want to visit. Her name sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it and didn’t much care. “You’re a wraith.” The next part was hard to say, but I managed it: “Like me.”
Maxie nodded.
Ugh—a wraith. I’d learned to hate and fear the wraiths during my last year at Evernight Academy. As far as I could tell, all they did was frighten and torment people. The one in Raquel’s house had been a true monster. Now I was one of them. The revulsion I felt cut me deeply; it was like it would’ve been better to be nothing at all. For the first time, I truly understood Lucas’s resistance to becoming a vampire. Turning into something I’d never meant to be—never wanted to be—meant losing something important about myself, maybe losing myself entirely. He’d seen that all along.
Despite my dying hopes, I had to ask: “And there’s—there’s no way back? To being alive, I mean.”
“Oh, yeah, it’s easy as pie.” Maxie smirked. “You just snap your fingers. That’s how come I didn’t change back to being human years ago.”
“You don’t have to be sarcastic.”
“True. I don’t have to. I threw that in at no extra charge.”
Maxie had been the wraith who had attempted to kill me at school. I now realized that might have been the high point of our relationship. Then I thought about that for a second. “Wait—I saw you at Evernight Academy. Repeatedly. How could you be there when you were haunting this house?”
Like it was the most obvious thing in the world, Maxie said, “Vic, of course. I’m connected to him, and he traveled to Evernight. From there, I was able to contact you.”
“You’re Vic’s ghost.” I remembered how fond he’d been of Maxie. Obviously he hadn’t interacted with her very much.
“Why don’t you just appear to him outright?”
“It’s difficult to appear to the living. Those two guys downstairs—”
“Lucas and Balthazar.”
“Lucas I knew, but not the vampire. They’re hot, by the way. And you had them both on the string? Nice job.”
I ignored that comment. “You don’t talk like somebody who lived ninety years ago.”
“I’ve spent the past seventeen years hanging out with Vic.”
“That would explain it,” I muttered.
She continued, “Well, the guys downstairs—you can appear to them because you seem to be powerfully emotionally connected to them both. That usually helps. Even then, it’s usually not a sure thing. With Vic—” Maxie hesitated, and I realized that this subject was delicate for her, though she evidently didn’t want me to see it. “I didn’t meet him until years and years after I died. He grew up in this house.”
“And he used to read stories to you, when he was little,” I said.
“He told you that?” She didn’t quite know how to keep talking, after that. If ghosts could blush, I suspected she’d be brilliant pink. “Well. Yeah. So, maybe I could materialize for him now. But at this point, I think it would scare Vic.” More quietly, she added, “I don’t want him scared of me.”
“You didn’t worry about scaring me,” I said angrily. “You appeared to me at Evernight—a lot of you did—and you frightened me out of my wits every time. You nearly killed me twice, and one of those times was definitely on purpose. So forgive me if I don’t think you’re actually that softhearted.”
She looked angry. “But you were ours! You were always ours!”
“Stop saying that!” I wished I could’ve hit her, but I suspected my hand would whoosh right through her incorporeal body, which would both be unsatisfying and deeply creepy.
“It’s true!” Her blue eyes blazed. Maxie was obviously somebody who could not be pushed. “You were born to be a wraith! And not just any wraith but one of the pure ones. Okay? You’ve got it good. You’re strong. Your power can help the others. The wraiths need you, and your parents wanted to go back on their word and steal you from us.”
“First of all, giving a person another choice isn’t stealing.”
Maxie cocked her head. “But your parents didn’t give you that choice, did they?”
“Neither did you, so stop acting high and mighty about it.” My mind whirled from all the new facts I had to process. “One of the—pure ones? You mean, one of the children born to vampires, one the wraiths created, right?”
“About time you caught on.”
Maxie could tell me a lot, I realized; she offered the answers I’d waited for my whole life. But she wasn’t ever going to be a friend. For her, I suspected, I was a means to an end.
To what end?
“Other ghosts need—ghosts like me,” I said. When Maxie nodded, I continued, “To help them do what exactly?”
“You make us stronger. You help us materialize, so we can connect with the world again.” Maxie drifted along the length of the attic. Her feet didn’t touch the floor, which startled me, although I couldn’t have said why. “Stop with the self-pity and imagine what it would be like, months and years and centuries of only that blue mist. That’s how it is for some of us. The ones who get lost like that—they’ll do anything, anything to take form again. Sometimes they can only do it by attaching themselves to people’s fear and making it worse. But most wraiths want another choice. Another way. You can give them that.”
I remembered the ghost who had tormented Raquel for so much of her life. Had hurting her been his only way to escape from a prison of mist? Was he one of the wraiths who had made the wrong choice?
Maxie added, “When we’re around you, a lot of us, we can do many things we wouldn’t be able to do alone. Like, all of us were able to appear to you at Evernight, even though we had to push through the barriers. You weren’t a full wraith yet, but that power was still inside you.”
“So, basically, I was born and died so you guys could have some extra batteries.” How was that news supposed to make me feel better? “I don’t have to help any of you. I’m going back to Lucas.”
“Will you just wait? Please?”
Maxie faded almost to transparency, and in the few shadows of her face that I could still discern, I could see how hurt she looked. After almost a century in Vic’s attic, she was probably lonely. And maybe she’d been dead so long that she’d forgotten how terrible it was. My pity didn’t outweigh my caution, though.
“If you need a friend,” I said slowly, “you have to act like one.”
The attic, and Maxie, disappeared. This time, the fog hardly seemed to close around me before I found myself back where I wanted to be—with Lucas.
In the blink of an eye, I had returned to the wine cellar, where Lucas and Balthazar sat at the small table. They looked even more exhausted than they had before. Lucas leaned against the green wall, stubble shading his angled jaw. The dark circles beneath his eyes made it look as if he’d been beaten up. Next to him, Balthazar leaned his forearms on the table, and his head drooped forward.
Neither of them could see me, apparently. I was so happy to see them that I couldn’t even be upset about my invisibility.
My hearing kicked in mid-sentence, as Balthazar said, “—phone call, maybe, or a letter. That might be a smarter move.”
Lucas shook his head. “The cells move around too much to be sure of a letter, and she lost her cell phone during Mrs. Bethany’s attack. Four hundred years old, and you never bothered learning anything about the guys who hunt you?”
He was baiting Balthazar, like he always did, but the sting in the words was gone. Their old rivalry had become no more than a reflex for them.
Balthazar ran his finger along the wall of the wine cellar, tracing an irregular shape—movement without purpose. “You said Black Cross tracked e-mail, too.”
“Yeah, but I can at least be sure Mom will get the e-mail. If she knows something—maybe even if she doesn’t—she’ll come.”
Then Lucas shivered, and his eyes narrowed. “You feel that?”
He knows me! Lucas knows I’m here!
“Yes.” Balthazar turned to search the room, and I hoped against hope that he’d catch a glimpse of me. But his gaze traveled past the spot where I felt myself to be. “I think she’s back.”
“It’s definitely Bianca,” Lucas said, after a pause.
“I agree. It—it feels like Bianca. And that perfume she used to wear sometimes, the stuff with the gardenias—”
“Yeah.” Lucas glanced over at Balthazar, obviously not thrilled that somebody else could recognize the scent I’d worn. But he seemed more relieved than angry. Maybe the most important thing for Lucas now was having someone who could convince him that the haunting was real, and not evidence that he was going crazy.
“Is it any consolation?” Balthazar asked quietly. “Knowing that something of her lives on?”
“What do you think?”
Balthazar sighed. “No, of course not.”
“I want her here.” Lucas slumped forward onto the table. “I keep thinking, if I want it bad enough, if I just figure out how, I can undo everything that’s happened and go back to when she’s safe. Like this can’t possibly be for real.”
“I remember that feeling.” Balthazar lifted his head and stretched his shoulders, grimacing as though it hurt. “After Charity—after what I did to her—I wanted it not to have happened so badly that it seemed impossible I couldn’t make it right. I couldn’t make myself believe that the universe could work so differently from the way it should work. Obviously, I know better now.”
Lucas frowned. I realized what he was going to say. No, no, Lucas, don’t, you remember what this does to him, don’t!
“Charity’s in town,” Lucas said.
So much for telepathy.
Balthazar straightened in his chair. “You’ve heard rumors, found evidence of the tribe—”
“No, we got kidnapped by the tribe about a week before Bianca—about a week ago.” Lucas swallowed hard, then kept going. “Charity was hot to turn Bianca into a vampire. She had some stupid idea that it would make you and her and Bianca one big happy undead family.”
“She was going to kill Bianca?” Balthazar looked so wounded, so disappointed in her. Despite the ample evidence that Charity was a psychopath, he still believed in his sister and loved her as much as ever. His faith would have been touching, I decided, if it hadn’t been so willfully blind. “You rescued her, though.”
Lucas shook his head. “The ghosts did that.”
“The wraiths saved you?”
“That’s what it seemed like at the time.” Lucas’s gaze became more distant. “Now I see it, though. What they were really doing was making sure Bianca would die when they wanted, the way they wanted. So they’d get their prize. If Charity had done it, she’d have been doing us a big favor.”
“I told you before, being a vampire isn’t the same as being alive.”
“It beats being a ghost, though, doesn’t it?” Lucas pushed back from the table, too angry with himself to sit still. “If Bianca were a vampire, she’d still be here. She’d have her friends back, and she could go see her parents, and—nothing would have changed.”
Balthazar’s expression darkened, nearly to anger. “Everything would have changed for her. And you know that.”
“I could touch her,” Lucas whispered. “She would be here. I’m never going to touch Bianca again.”
Never? Really never? The sorrow of it overwhelmed me. Then the kitchen suddenly looked very misty, became very far away. No, not again!
The blue foggy nothingness swallowed me once more. I struggled against it, but I had no fists to fight with, no feet to plant firmly upon the ground. All my will seemed to count for nothing. In my misery and desperation, I felt as frightened and bewildered as a lost child crying for her parents.
And then I wasn’t in the mist any longer.
Instead, I had appeared at Evernight.
I glanced around, trying to understand what this could be. I knew it wasn’t a memory because I was sitting on top of the gargoyle outside my bedroom window—not something I’d ever done before. It didn’t feel like a dream, either, though I couldn’t guess what wraiths’ dreams felt like, if they even had them.
No, weird though it was, the most logical guess was that I’d somehow just transported myself back to Evernight Academy. Maybe my afterlife assignment was to haunt Mrs. Bethany or something.
Peering downward, I saw the gargoyle’s scowl. Had I bruised his dignity by perching on top of his head?
For the first time since Vic’s attic, I had a definite sense of physical form. I could even see my feet dangling past the gargoyle’s claws. So I pressed my hands against the window glass, mostly just to do something with my hands, but also in hopes of peering inside.
When my fingertips touched the glass, frost flickered across the surface. I watched the tendrils spread in featherlike patterns, completely covering the pane. So much for snooping about what was going on in my old bedroom, but the effect was kind of cool.
Noise from the ground below made me look down. To my surprise, several trucks were parked on the driveway, and at least a dozen people seemed to be milling around. The other summers I’d spent at Evernight Academy had been almost unbearably quiet. Nobody came to visit, save a few deliveries and the laundry service. So who were these people?
I realized the truth as soon as I recognized that they were all wearing coveralls. These were the workmen rebuilding Evernight.
Before that moment, I hadn’t heard much of anything—mostly, I thought, because I hadn’t been listening. How weird, to have to choose to hear. Now I could make out the growling of buzz saws and the thumping of hammers. Most of that seemed to be coming from the roof, but probably people were hard at work on the inside, too. Despite the fact that I loathed Evernight Academy, I hated Black Cross even more, so it gave me grim satisfaction to think that the damage done by Black Cross’s fire was being undone. Mrs. Bethany wouldn’t stand for anything else.
Then I heard a voice from inside my bedroom. “Adrian?”
That was Mom, calling my father.
I turned back to the window, eager to catch a glimpse of her, but frost still covered the pane of glass. That had to be what Mom was looking at. Rub the glass! I thought. If you clear the glass, you can see me!
Footsteps echoed inside the apartment, coming closer. Then I heard Dad say, “Oh, my God.”
I pressed my hands against the glass eagerly. Too eagerly—the frost thickened, Now it would be even harder for them to see me. But they would, wouldn’t they?
“We knew the wraith would return.” Dad’s words were hard, even cold. “Mrs. Bethany warned us.”
“But here—in Bianca’s room—” Mom sounded like she was crying.
“I know,” Dad said quietly. “They’re still looking for her. At least we know they haven’t found her yet—that she’s still alive.”
Oh, Dad. I covered my mouth with my hand, as though I could still cry and had to hold back the tears.
“And this time we can cast them out,” my mother said, voice shaking but determined.
What does she mean by that? I tried to imagine what she could be referring to—some trick Mrs. Bethany had figured out, perhaps—
It hit me like a wall: a terrible rush of force pushed me away from the window, the gargoyle, Evernight Academy, and anything else that was real. The physical form I’d inhabited dissolved like a sand castle beneath a wave. I was too overwhelmed to know anything save that I was lost in the mist again, nothing and no one, a dead thing.
“Why did you go there?” Maxie demanded. Her presence, annoying though it was, served as my only touchstone in the swirling unreality of it all. “Do you want to be destroyed?”
“I’ve already been destroyed.”
“That’s what you think.” I could hear a sort of smug smile in her words. “It can be much, much worse than this.”
“How, exactly, does it get worse than dead? I can’t be with my parents ever again. I can’t be with Lucas ever again.”
“True. Well, mostly true.”
“What do you mean, mostly true?”
“There’s one way you can say hello to your precious Lucas. It’s going to hurt both of you more than if you just did the decent thing and moved on—but you never know when to leave well enough alone, do you? Here—try this.”
I felt as though I were being thrown forward, and then I saw Lucas. He was still in the wine cellar, but now he was alone, lying on the floor, fully clothed but with a pillow beneath his head and a sheet pulled over him. I had the sense that it hadn’t been too long since I’d last seen him—it was probably afternoon at the latest—but I realized exhaustion must have demanded that he get some sleep. Balthazar was nowhere to be seen.
Lucas stirred fitfully beneath the sheet. For a moment, I wondered why he was asleep on the floor—before I remembered that I’d died in our bed. Probably Lucas didn’t even want to lie down on that bed alone.
“You said you wanted to be with him, right?” Maxie said.
“So, do it.”
Just like that, Lucas and I were in the bookstore in Amherst, alone in the basement room where the textbooks were kept. He was kneeling on the floor, holding an astronomy textbook in his hands. A comet trailed fire on the page.
“Lucas?” I said.
He looked up, and his eyes were instantly alight with relief and wonder. “Bianca? You’re here?”
“Yeah, but—where’s here?”
Lucas dropped the book and clutched me in his embrace. The shock of feeling his arms around my back, of the welcome pressure of his body against mine, made me cry out in surprise and delight.
“You’re alive,” he whispered into my ear. “I thought you were dead. I was so sure you were dead.”
But I am dead. “Lucas, where are we?”
“I was going to find you in the stars. See?” Instead of gesturing at the astronomy book he’d dropped on the floor, Lucas pointed upward. To my bewilderment, I saw not the ceiling of the bookstore but the night sky, sparkling and bright. Lucas said, “I knew I could find you there. Remember the part of Romeo and Juliet you quoted to me that time, when you were trying to convince me Juliet was an astronomer, too?”
I whispered, “‘Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars. And he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night, and pay no worship to the garish sun.’”
“Yeah,” he murmured into my hair. “That’s why I knew I could find you there.”
Understanding sank in. Sadly, I said, “This is a dream.”
“I’m not dreaming.” Lucas hugged me more tightly. “I won’t believe it.”
I was in Lucas’s dream. Raquel had told me about her ghost attacking her in her sleep; I should’ve realized the wraiths could travel into sleeping minds. So I could be with Lucas but only in his dreams? It was so little, and yet at least it was something to hold on to. “Every night,” I promised him. “Every night, I’ll be here for you.”
“It’s not enough. I need you. Don’t let this be a dream.”
The reality around us vanished in an instant. Once again, I seemed to float very near the ceiling, looking down at Lucas, whose eyes had just opened. He grimaced and rubbed his face with one hand. In some ways, he looked even more tired than he had that morning.
“Bianca? Are you there?” he said. I couldn’t answer him, but he understood anyway. “You’ll always be there, I guess. Just too far away to touch.”
Being with him in dreams would give me some comfort, I realized, but it would only torment Lucas. He wouldn’t be able to hold on to the experiences the same way I could. More than that, I wasn’t sure I could make him understand that our togetherness in dreams was real. If I visited him every night, all I would accomplish would be to make him grieve for me anew, over and over again.
Lucas rolled onto one side, punching the pillow beneath his head to provide more support. “I dreamed about you,” he said. “I was in a bookstore, and I was trying to find you—I don’t remember how—God, it’s already slipping away. But you were there. Your being dead was all some big mistake, and I could hold you again. Pretty great dream—until I woke up.”
With a sigh, he threw off the sheets and rose from the floor. He moved stiffly, and I realized he had to be sore. Just as he pulled a carton of juice from the minifridge, I heard footsteps outside. Lucas went to the door and opened it before Balthazar could even knock.
Instead of hello or how are you, Balthazar said, “You were right about Charity.”
“News flash: I already knew that.” The venom had gone out of Lucas’s jabs at Balthazar, but apparently that didn’t mean he was going to stop making them. “You find her?”
“I found someone who knows her. Which means Charity will be aware that I’m in Philadelphia soon, if she doesn’t already.”
“You just let the vampire run off to play messenger?” Lucas took a deep swig of juice straight from the carton. “Not smart.”
Balthazar scowled. “I don’t stake people the first second they could be trouble, which is one of the many differences between us.”
“I guess this means you’ve got to run, huh?”
“I don’t run from a fight,” Balthazar said. “And I’m not abandoning my sister to this kind of existence.”
“Nobody’s making her act like that,” Lucas said as he stowed the juice back in the fridge. “You ought to know that by now. Or did you know it the whole time?”
Balthazar didn’t answer that question. “If I can separate her from her tribe, Charity will come around.”
“What are you going to do? Just keep her locked in a room for a century until she agrees with you?”
“Yes.”
“Man, your relationship is really screwed up.”
“Do you have a better plan for dealing with her?” Balthazar demanded. “Staking is not an option.”
“Says you.” Lucas took a deep breath. “So you want my help on this kidnapping run?”
Balthazar clearly didn’t like having to turn to Lucas for help, but he nodded. “You can handle yourself in a fight. And Charity won’t expect the two of us to cooperate. We could use the element of surprise.”
“When?”
“She’ll make her move at sundown. So, a couple of hours.” Like all vampires, Balthazar could sense how far away sunset and sunrise were. “The sooner we get out there, the better.”
Lucas didn’t need to go after Charity tonight. Really, I wished he wouldn’t go after her ever. She was dangerous, and no matter how good a fighter Lucas was or how strong I’d made him by drinking his blood, Charity would always be stronger. With her tribe by her side, I didn’t see how he and Balthazar could prevail.
But most of the time, I would at least have confidence that Lucas could get through it alive. Now he was exhausted and in mourning. Balthazar, blinded by his own guilt or grief or both, was foolishly taking the two of them out on a suicide mission.
Did Lucas know that? Horror overcame me as I realized that, probably, he did.
I watched him throw on a flannel shirt and lace up his shoes. Dread gnawed at me. Did Lucas think that, if he died, we would be together again? Or was his life not worth anything to him anymore? It was worth something to me. I wanted him to live and be safe and happy for both of us.
Lucas looked like he didn’t care about any of that.
When he was almost done preparing, Lucas paused and went to the small drawer where I’d kept my things. His hand closed around the jet brooch he’d given me—it seemed like so long ago—and I could tell he was trying to take strength from it, the way I always had. Quickly he tucked it into the pocket of his shirt.
Oh, Balthazar, I could kill you for this. Please stop, guys, please.
Balthazar leaned against one of the wine racks, so obviously tired and sad that I took pity on him for a second. Then Lucas said, “Let’s get out there.”
“We need weapons,” Balthazar said.
Lucas, who had never gone out for a Black Cross hunt or even a visit with me without being armed to the teeth, said only, “We’ll figure something out.”
They walked out the door, and I meant to follow—but I couldn’t. About halfway down the path to the driveway, I found I couldn’t go any farther. I seemed to be stuck there, watching them climb into Balthazar’s car.
As Lucas settled into the shotgun seat, I saw his eyes narrow as he looked at the spot where I stood. As Balthazar gunned the car’s motor into life, and they sped off, he turned his head away. Maybe he wondered if he saw something; probably he figured it was only a trick of the light.