I RUN.
Not toward Harmony Hall with the others, but to the left, trying to draw Other Amelia in the opposite direction of my friends. This is between us, just her and me. The two Amelias.
But that doesn’t mean I want to face her.
I tear across the grass, clutching my flute. Lightning streaks overhead, as if pointing the way, and a few drops of rain land on my skin. I pull my jacket over the flute and run faster. My heart pounds in my ears, screaming at me to go back. But I don’t dare stop. If the ghosts can paralyze the Maestros, there’s no telling what Other Amelia will try to do to me.
Is she behind all this?
Has she been waiting all this time, just toying with me, while planning her real attack? She’d seemed mostly harmless before—annoying, infuriating, and scary—but not deadly.
Now, I think she might be fully capable of throwing me off a cliff or drowning me in the lake.
She knows what she wants, Darby had said. And she knows how to get it.
Apparently, getting revenge on the girl who took her place was enough to make her break through the wall between life and death. And she brought all her ghost friends with her.
I round Harmony Hall and break for the woods. After all, didn’t Mrs. Le Roux tell me the trees are there to guard the school? Maybe they can guard me now.
The trunks of the echo trees fly past as I dash deeper into the forest. Looking back, I see Ghost Amelia flickering behind me, still pursuing, but losing ground. Feeling surer of my path now, I charge onward.
But no matter how fast I go, Ghost Amelia is always behind me, a faint silver light in the trees. I can still hear the roar of the tornado, but it’s distant now, and mostly I just hear my own panting.
My strength starts to flag. My legs grow weaker and my feet scream inside my too-small shoes. It feels like I swallowed fire, my lungs are burning so badly. Every breath is a painful gasp.
“Please,” I find myself saying, “please leave me alone. I’m sorry! I never meant to take your place!”
If she hears me, she doesn’t care.
The woods around me are unfamiliar. I realize I’ve circled the school, getting lost in my panic. Instead of going deeper into the Echo Wood, I turned right at some point and kept going, and now I’m completely confused. But when I try to stop and get my bearings, I feel Other Amelia’s cold fingers brush the back of my neck.
Chills slide down my spine.
I’ve felt that touch before, the day Jai found me Composing in the woods. I fell into the stream and a strange hand pulled me out.
Why did she help me then? What made that day different?
When the ground beneath my feet starts to crunch with rocks and not leaves, I realize I took the wrong direction completely.
I’m running toward the cliffs below the school.
With a yelp, I slide to a halt, but not fast enough. The edge of the cliff lunges out of the darkness, and suddenly I’m tipping over it. I drop my flute in an effort to regain my balance.
Even so, my feet slide right off the edge, and then, so suddenly I can’t even scream—
I fall.
Everything is silent
frozen in slow motion
as my stomach rises into my throat and the world drops away beneath me—
And then a chilly hand grabs mine.
I slam against the cliff’s face, but I’m not falling anymore.
With a groan, I reach up, and another cold hand reaches down to help. Scrabbling at the rock with my shoes, I do my best to climb, while the person on top of the cliff drags me up and over.
Finally, after what seems an eternity, I land on solid ground and sob in relief. I’ve never felt so happy to lie so still.
“What,” says a voice, “are you doing?”
I freeze, then slowly, slowly look up.
The ghost kneels over me, her face a picture of shock.
“You almost killed yourself!” she says.
With a groan, I roll onto my back, then sit up. My whole body is aching.
“You’re . . .” I look her over, really seeing her for the first time. For some reason, she’s clearer and more solid tonight than she’s ever been before.
She looks only a little older than me. Her hair is long and curlier than I’d realized. And she’s wearing a Mystwick uniform, of all things, beneath a black graduation gown. Not a ghostly shroud after all.
“You’re . . . not Amelia Jones,” I finish.
“Darling.” She gives me a sympathetic look. “You’re Amelia Jones.”
“I know I am! Who are you?”
“You still don’t know?”
She smiles.
And
time
stands
still.
Every single hair on my body rises up.
Because at that moment, I do know.
I know, because that face is the face I’ve been holding in my memories all my life.
A face I’ve been dreaming of.
An impossible face.
“No,” I whisper. I stumble to my feet and walk a few steps away. “No, no, this isn’t real.”
“Amelia . . .”
“I must have hit my head or something. This is a dream. I’m unconscious.”
Tears squeeze from my eyes. I don’t dare look at her. I can’t. It’s too much. I’ll bust open.
“Amelia, look at me.”
Shaking, I slowly turn around.
And there she is.
Mom.
I make myself look at her, to let it sink in. She doesn’t look as old as she was in the photos Gran has of her and me when I was a baby. She looks younger, maybe Rosa’s age, and of course there’s the uniform . . . I realize then that this is the version of Mom I know best, because this is what she looks like in the photo in my flute case.
Mom on her Mystwick graduation day.
Everything inside me breaks at that moment. I run to her, half expecting to run right through her. Instead, I feel her arms wrap around me. I crush myself against her, feeling like I swallowed the tornado, storm and all. I don’t even mind that she’s a bit cold; it’s like hugging a snowman.
She holds me tight, just the way I remember her doing when I was little. My face burrows into her shoulder and my hands meet behind her back. I squeeze her the way Gran squeezes me, like I’ll never let go. Like I can pin her to the world of the living by sheer force of will.
My heart explodes in my chest. My throat twists into a knot. I breathe so hard and fast that a sob slips from my lips and tears squeeze from my eyes to run down my face. My body isn’t big enough to contain this moment. The world isn’t big enough to hold it all.
The feeling expanding inside me is the strongest magic I have ever felt in my entire life.
My mom is here.
My mom is holding me.
I press myself into her, trying to make myself believe this is real. Wondering that she doesn’t seem like a stranger. My memories of her are so fuzzy, sometimes I can’t even picture her face, and yet . . .
I know her.
She presses one hand into my hair and kisses my temple.
“How?” I murmur. “How is this possible?”
“Sweetheart, you made it possible.”
Reluctantly, I pull back, but I take both her hands. “Me?”
She nods, then starts to whistle.
The tune is familiar, something I’ve heard before . . . No, something I’ve played before.
In my treehouse.
After my horrible audition.
When I was so upset and lost that I didn’t half know what I was doing. I just grabbed my flute—Mom’s flute—and played the notes that were spinning around inside of me. I’d thought it was some sort of summoning spell, the way all the leaves and twigs were swirling around.
“My spell,” I whisper. “That day in the woods . . .”
Mom nods. “It was a black spell, Amelia. A very powerful one, to open the path to death itself.”
“A black spell? But . . . it was like a rainbow of color.”
“They’re called that not for their color, but because they’re forbidden. Make no mistake of what that spell was—or that you Composed it.”
I stare at her. “I brought you back. Like that day I made it snow in the Echo Wood. I was thinking of snow while I was Composing, only I didn’t know I was Composing. And when I made all the leaves fly around, I was actually thinking about you. About how I’d give anything to just talk to you, even for a moment.”
I remember it with perfect clarity—how I’d imagined my mom then exactly as I see her now: in her graduation gown, with her Maestro’s pin. And somehow I summoned her exactly as I’d pictured her.
She nods. “You pulled me right through the veil between life and death. I tried to talk to you then. Oh, how I tried to hold you! But I was too weak, too thin. It was all I could do just to watch you, while you had no idea I was there.”
I look down at her ghostly pale hands in mine. They’re still a bit see-through. My fingers are visible through hers. “But why like this? Why couldn’t I bring you back . . . you know, all the way?”
Her hands tighten on mine. “Amelia, you must never try that. Not ever, do you hear me?”
“But why?” My heart leaps around, singing with a hope I never even dared imagine possible. “Mom, if I could really bring you back—”
“Amelia, no!” She sounds like Gran when she says it. “Summoning the ghost of the dead is one thing. Bringing them back to life is another. It’s beyond dangerous. It’s twisted. And it always has terrible consequences.”
“But you don’t know that! If I could summon you here, I could do anything! Mom, I have to try. I have to—”
“I do know, Amelia. I do.” She sinks down to the ground, her form flickering. I drop with her, refusing to let go of her hands. We face one another on our knees, Mom’s eyes squeezing shut. “I know better than anyone the cost of such magic.”
“Mom? What do you mean?”
Her eyes open, then slowly lift to meet mine.
“Because, Amelia,” she sighs. “I brought you back. And I paid for it with my life.”
Something opens inside of me.
A big, black hole. It swirls with dark clouds, flashes with understanding.
At the bottom, a memory.
Black water. Strong current. Dark river.
My breath, gone. All light, gone. My parents, gone.
Me, gone.
The memory has been with me all along, lurking deep in my mind. It darted out from hiding the day Phoebe threw me in the lake, and again in the little practice room when Miss Noorani tested me with illusions. So much has happened since then I’d almost forgotten about it.
Somehow, I knew, but I just couldn’t believe.
“Amelia, listen to me very carefully,” Mom says, and it’s like she’s talking from a great distance away. “When you were little, we would go camping, you and me and your father. We had a favorite spot, by a river. But that night, it rained. It rained so hard the river rose. Our tent flooded. Your father and I were packing everything into the car, so we could drive home. And then . . . you were gone. You toddled off to the water, and it just . . . snatched you up.”
Her voice shakes. Her hands tremble in mine.
“We found you downriver, but it was too late. You were . . .” She stops, her eyes closing, tears like ghostly pearls running down her cheeks. “Your father ran to get help, but I couldn’t give up yet. I still had my flute.”
She lets go of my hands to pick up the instrument, which still lies in the dirt where I dropped it. She holds it in her palms lovingly.
“I was a Composer too, Amelia.”
I press my hands to my lips, murmuring, “You brought me back.”
She nods, raising the flute to her chest, fingers knotted around it. “I Composed a resurrection spell, and right before my eyes, you sucked in a breath and your eyes opened. But magic like that is very hard to control. The spell went wild, until I was no longer playing it—it was playing me. That’s what can happen when you Compose something too big. Composing is driven by weaving your willpower into your notes, which means you have to concentrate fully and completely on the thing you want your magic to do. You must want it with your whole being, with a perfect purity of focus. But if your focus wavers even a little—because of fear or doubt or anger—then the magic takes control of you, and it consumes you. Do you hear? When I Composed that spell by the river, I had just a seed of doubt in my heart, just enough fear that it wouldn’t work, and that’s why it backfired on me, even as it saved you.”
Her words frighten me. The magic she’s talking about, it’s so big, so powerful, so beyond anything I can understand . . . So I nod, and her face relaxes. She pulls me into another hug.
“I missed you,” I whisper. “I can’t lose you again.”
“Oh, Amelia.” She kisses my hair, over and over. “You never lost me. I’ve always been with you, tucked between the notes you played, hidden behind your measures and scales and arpeggios. That is how you remember me, and that is how I remain a part of you. But I can’t stay with you like this. I don’t belong to this world anymore, and even if I tried, for as long as I remain here, other things can get in too.”
“Other things? Do you mean those other ghosts?”
“Just so, my love. When you opened that doorway three months ago, it was just big enough for me to slip through—a door opened. But by leaving your spell unfinished, you also left a powerful amount of magic uncontrolled—a door that continued to open, wider and wider. And that loose magic has been tethered to you all this time, following you wherever you went, getting more unstable.” She pulls back, raising her hands to frame my face. Her eyes are silvery as the moon. “That’s what I’ve been trying to warn you about. I knew it was only a matter of time before the veil between life and death broke altogether, and the others would escape through the spell you created. I’d hoped you could stop it before it went this far.”
I suck in a breath as understanding floods through me. “I thought you were someone else, someone trying to sabotage me. But you were trying to talk to me.”
“I needed you to embrace the part of you that is most powerful, the part of you driven by your instinct and your belief.”
“My Composing,” I whisper. Thinking back to all the times she blew away my music sheets or interfered with my playing, it now makes sense. She was trying to tell me I didn’t need the music, that I could make my own. She was trying to get me to stop following the notes on the page, so I could listen to the notes inside. “That day you wrote on the whiteboard,” I say, “you spelled poser.”
“Composer,” she replies. “If you had let me finish, anyway.”
“And the message in the soup, telling me to watch out—”
“It was supposed to say, Watch out, there are a bunch of ghosts coming. Or something like that.” She pauses, wincing. “I ran out of soup.”
“You were trying to help me, all along.”
“It wasn’t easy. I was so weak, and every time I tried to reach you, I only got weaker. But tonight’s Halloween, the night when the wall between the living and the dead is at its thinnest. That’s why I’m able to talk to you now, when I couldn’t for all those months. It’s why I can hold you. But it’s also the perfect time for those others to break through. Those ghosts, Amelia, they’re the worst of the worst. They’re the spirits of people who have scores to settle in this world, who want to seek out revenge on people they once knew and wreak havoc on countless lives for no other reason than that it makes them feel a little bit alive again, and they’ll do anything to stay in this world—even if it means destroying the school and everyone in it so you can’t send them back. They know that a musician powerful enough to release them is also powerful enough to banish them again.”
My stomach lurches. “We have to stop them.”
“You have to stop them,” she replies. “It’s your spell, Amelia—you decide what it does. Do you remember the Second Rule of Musicraft?”
Lest you be doomed by your own art, always finish what you start.
“I have to finish the spell,” I whisper. In my treehouse that day, I’d broken off playing because I’d been so surprised by the magic I’d created. Which means all this time—just like Mrs. Le Roux had warned—that magic has been hanging around, getting more and more unstable. My mom knew, and she was trying to tell me. “And I have to focus on what I want that spell to be. That’s how Composing works—like you said, and like Jai tried to tell me. Weaving my willpower into music.” What had they called it?
Purity of focus.
Mom nods. “You must not only finish it, but decide how will you finish it. Close the spell. Tie up all that loose magic.”
A bubble of hope rises inside me—then bursts.
“But I can’t Compose whenever I want. I’m not like you. I can only do it by accident.” Groaning, I let my face sink into my hands. “I screwed up the biggest audition of my life. I fail even when I play every note exactly right! I’m not like the other kids here, or the other Amelia. She was the real musician. I’m not even like you!”
But Mom smiles.
“Exactly. Because you’re you, Amelia, someone special and unique and powerful. But your magic will only ever be as strong as your belief in yourself. That is the only way you can save your friends and your school and make things right.”
She holds the flute toward me.
“It’s time for you to decide: who is the real Amelia Jones?”
I stare at the flute. It seems to glow in the ghostly light she casts. Ever since she was taken from me, I’ve longed to talk to her and ask her what I should do. And now she’s telling me.
But the strength to do this has to come from me, not her.
My magic is only as strong as my belief.
My hands shake. My heart beats like a drum.
All I’ve wanted was a chance to prove I could do it. To her. To Gran. To the Maestros and all the students.
But now I realize, the only person I ever needed to prove myself to was me.
Drawing a deep breath, I look my mother in the eye and give her a nod.
I reach out and take back the flute.