A few days passed, again filled with nothing but school, training, a macrobiotic diet, and homework. Then one afternoon, Simon greeted us at the door of the museum. “Change of plans,” he said. “Dress warmly.”
We shuffled upstairs to slip into wool socks and fleeces, then back downstairs into the kitchen to gulp green tea and chew trail mix, as Anatole looked on in dismay. Celeste attempted to soothe his offended sense of propriety, while Nicholas grinned at me over his Game Boy.
Lukas said, “Hey, ask the kid if I can have a turn.”
I blinked at him. “Why don’t you just compel him?”
“Because you’ll yell at me again.”
I asked Nicholas to share.
“Plus,” Natalie said, “I told him if he keeps being rude, I’ll tell everyone at school that the two of you are secretly dating. He’d be an outcast in like three seconds.”
Lukas snorted, accepting the Game Boy from Nicholas.
“Gee, thanks,” I told Natalie.
“No problem.”
Simon called from the front hall. We found him waiting at the door, dressed in an olive turtleneck and his long camel coat. He greeted us by saying, “I’m sure Emma’s told you about the message from her brother.”
Natalie nodded, but Lukas complained. “What? I didn’t even know she had a brother.”
“That’s ’cause you’re an idiot,” Natalie murmured.
“For the last time, I am not an idiot!”
“Children,” Simon said.
They shut up, and I filled in Lukas about Max sending me a message. “So where are we off to?” I asked, as I shrugged into my black peacoat. “Did you find Neos’s burial site?”
“No,” Simon answered. “We’re on a fact-finding mission.”
“Intriguing,” Lukas mocked.
As usual, Simon ignored him. “The last time a ghostkeeper visited this place, he was killed by wraiths.”
“Really?” Lukas cracked his knuckles. “That’s more like it.”
“Where?” Natalie asked, frowning. Lukas had never dealt with a wraith before; he was excited at the prospect, but Natalie and I knew better.
“The mausoleum,” Simon said.
“What mausoleum?” Lukas asked, handing the Game Boy back to Nicholas, who’d followed us.
I opened the front door. “The place where Neos stole my mother’s amulet.”
“What amulet?” Lukas asked. “Why do I always feel like I’m missing key pieces of information?”
Natalie grinned. “Because you’re an—”
“Don’t say it!”
Simon sighed. “Just get in the car, you two.”
The car was an electric blue Yaris. Lukas called shotgun, and Natalie and I squeezed into the back while Simon drove.
“Couldn’t the Knell afford something better than this?” Natalie asked, her knees pressing into Lukas’s seat. “It has that rental-car smell.”
“Yeah,” Lukas said. “Like old shoes and popcorn.”
“Nah. That’s movie-theater smell,” Natalie said. “This is more like baby wipes and tuna fish.”
“Can you imagine if we showed up at school in this thing?” I asked, thinking of Sara’s BMW.
“I’ve seen worse in the parking lot,” Lukas said. “There’s that junker Focus.”
“That doesn’t count,” I said.
“It belongs to that kid who wears that green tracksuit over his uniform,” Natalie explained.
I shifted in my seat, trying to get comfortable. “You ought to flirt with him. He’s some kind of computer geek. He’ll probably end up one of those tech billionaires.”
“Oh, that guy,” Lukas said, nodding. “What about the blue Su—”
“Quiet!” Simon snapped. “Don’t you children realize where we’re going? We’re not off to the candy store. We’re headed to a cemetery where one of our own was killed. You should use this time to focus your powers. And if not, have a little reverence for a ghostkeeper who was killed in the line of duty. Get your heads on!”
We were quiet for three miles as we all contemplated Simon’s outburst. Then Natalie broke the silence. “You still didn’t say why you chose this car.”
“It gets good mileage,” Simon ground out.
It was four o’clock when we arrived at the cemetery, and shadows were lengthening over the gravestones. The snow that fell on the day of Coby’s funeral had melted, but patches of ice lurked in potholes and under drifts of brown leaves. Simon parked, and we crossed the street and stood at the wooden gates. A stone wall surrounded the graveyard, the smallest and oldest in Salem.
“There’s a lot of …” Natalie didn’t finish her sentence. She didn’t have to; we all felt the lingering ghosts vying for our attention. Old ghosts were powerful, and some of these had been around for three hundred years.
“Yeah,” Lukas said.
“Why are there so many?” I asked Simon.
“It’s a nexus, concentrated in this cemetery. That’s no doubt why Neos lured the other ghostkeeper here with the amulet. He has a lot of power in a place like this.”
“But he doesn’t know we’re here, right?” Natalie asked, anxiously.
“Of course not,” Simon said. “Nobody knew we were coming here until just now. We’re perfectly safe.”
I almost mentioned that Yoshiro had thought the same about the Knell, but the words stuck in my throat. I tried to comfort Natalie instead. “If it’s a nexus, then we’re more powerful here, too.”
“Right. So this is the plan,” Simon said. “I’ve hit a dead end with my research into Neos’s final resting place, and I’m hoping to find a new lead. We’re going to question the ghosts. I have a list and a map of the graves. We’ll start here and loop around.”
“We’re going to ask if they know where Neos is buried?” Natalie asked.
Simon nodded. “They probably won’t, but they may know about the amulet. Items such as that sometimes leave ripples in the Beyond. Maybe it’ll provide a way we can track him.”
“They’re ghosts,” Lukas said. “You really think they’ll rat out one of their own?”
“They’re not all like that,” I said. “You’re living with some of the good ones.”
Simon led us down the gravel path along the fence. I glanced up at the fading light. “Just once, I’d like to do this at noon.”
“Here,” Simon said.
Natalie examined the grave. “ ‘Tobias Smith, loving husband and father.’ ” Then she summoned him. Tobias was a young, stooped man who’d been balding before he died. I relayed Simon’s questions to him, and repeated back the unhelpful answers. Then we moved on to the next grave.
An hour and ten summonings later, exhausted and shivering, we’d circled all the way back to the wooden gates without learning anything useful.
“There’s one more place to check,” Simon said, looking up from his list. “The tomb where the ghostkeeper was murdered.”
My mind flashed on a memory of my dream, the poor, pudgy ghostkeeper whose skin had been licked away by wraiths. I glanced toward the tomb in the corner of the cemetery. Made from granite with black iron gates and gargoyle statues, it looked like the place you’d find a vampire.
The others crunched down the path toward the tomb, as I trailed behind. The evening gloom fell around us, and the cemetery felt increasingly wrong, the background murmuring of ghosts reaching a high, dissonant pitch.
No one else seemed to notice, but when I stopped to listen, I heard strained whispers though the rustling of the leaves: Run, hide, they’re coming.
I watched Natalie draw upon her power; I felt the call of her summoning. She closed her eyes and I heard three voices, stronger than the rest, beating in a steady rhythm: Feed, feed, feed.
Wraiths.
“Natalie, wait! Stop!”
But I was too late. Natalie unleashed her power, and three wraiths seeped into our world through cracks in the Beyond. Paper-thin skin dangled from their insectoid forms throbbing with hunger and hatred. They were freshly hatched and bloodthirsty and took Natalie, Simon, and Lukas by surprise.
Time slowed. I tried to scream, but I was trapped in fog. The humming was back, blocking out the sound of the ghosts and wraiths. An insistent note, pushing everything else from my mind. Terror rose within me, but then quickly slid away, replaced by a removed sense of calm as the humming began to take on a distinct lullaby-like melody.
As soon as Natalie realized what she’d summoned, she panicked. She scrambled backward and tripped over the edge of the path as a wraith caught her around the neck and scorched her face with its fetid breath.
Simon screamed a few garbled words and shot quick bursts of dispelling energy at the wraith. The wraith screeched and trembled, then turned toward him. Simon’s attack wasn’t working, but at least Natalie took the opportunity to roll away and summon again. I felt the power radiating from her body, reaching far beyond the cemetery.
I stood watching from a tremendous distance, completely disengaged from my own feelings.
The wraith turned on Simon, and he shot another burst of power that the wraith shrugged off. Lukas was faring better. He used compelling force to channel the speed of an attacking wraith, flipping it over his head and onto a gravestone shaped like a miniature Washington Monument.
The stone impaled the wraith, and it shrieked and writhed, but refused to die. Instead, it started levitating higher, and Lukas forced it back downward—until he heard Simon shout for help. He turned and saw Simon peppering the other two wraiths with dispelling power, and hardly slowing them as they advanced on him and Natalie.
Lukas compelled the wraiths away from Simon, and they began to slither toward him, ignoring Simon and Natalie.
Natalie gasped at me. “Emma, wake up! They’re going to kill Lukas!”
I couldn’t move, couldn’t push past the humming in my mind.
As the wraiths pushed toward Lukas, the third wraith—now freed from the impaling monument—jumped him from behind and slashed with serrated teeth at his neck. Lukas dropped to one knee and threw the wraith past him—then he staggered, clutching the back of his neck, blood seeping through his fingers. He barely managed to stay on his feet, facing all three wraiths as they came toward him. A clawed hand swept forward to slash his face, as a blur of gray sprang from nowhere and tackled the wraith.
It was Coby! That’s who Natalie had summoned, along with the two ghost jocks who liked to heckle me. Coby drove the wraith into a marble gravestone, and the ghost jocks pounded it brutally.
Quarterback Coby quickly assessed the situation and barked orders at the ghost jocks, and the three of them attacked the other two wraiths in a unified front. In some ways, they were better prepared than ghostkeepers, because the wraiths couldn’t burn their skin—but they didn’t have our abilities.
And wraiths were more powerful than any ghosts. While Coby and the jocks bought the others time, the final outcome remained inevitable.
What the hell’s wrong with Emma? Coby asked Natalie.
But, of course, Natalie couldn’t hear him. She kept yelling at me to fight, to help, and I kept standing there, watching from a great unfeeling distance.
The wraiths slammed through the ghost jocks, vanquishing them back into the Beyond. Then they leaped at Coby. He was quick. He faked right, moved left, hurdled one gravestone, and dove through another to land beside me.
What’s happening? he asked. Is it Neos? This place stinks of his power.
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t get myself to form words over the melody in my head.
They’re gonna kill Natalie, and then you. And then they’ll—
A wraith slashed at him, and Coby twirled away and dove right at me. Right into me. He seemed to shimmer into true visibility for an instant, then pain burst through me, like a hundred wasps stinging me everywhere.
I screamed, and Coby’s voice echoed in the agony of my mind: Nobody can save them but you.
The wraith caught Coby, slammed him into the ground, and started slashing at him with hooked fingers. But the pain and his words had snapped something inside of me. And for the first time that night, I knew what I needed.
My dagger.
I grabbed for the hilt in my pocket and leaped at the wraith pinning Coby. As I moved, I gathered all my rage and strength into a ball of lightning in my palm—then pushed the power into the blade.
A spectral edge of dispelling energy coursed from the hilt to the tip of the dagger, and I buried it in the back of the wraith’s neck and twisted. A horrible death-cry tore through the graveyard, and the other two wraiths paused.
I didn’t.
A ribbon of compelling power unfurled from my left hand into a noose that closed around the larger wraith and drew it toward me. It struggled and writhed, hands clawing at the path and the graves. It wasn’t strong enough. I yanked close, like a fisherman reeling in a catch, and plunged my dagger into its heart. Its mouth opened in a wordless scream, and I snapped its neck with my elbow.
The final wraith screeched and sprang for Natalie—I spun the dagger in my hand and threw.
Sparks wheeled in the air as the blade cut through the falling light and plunged hilt-deep into the wraith’s empty eye socket. The wraith melted to the ground, hollow screams echoing in the evening.
“Tell your master he’s next,” I said.
Then I pulled my dagger from its eye, broke its neck, and fainted.
I didn’t remember the car ride home, except for one odd flash of conversation.
“I’ve never seen her like that,” Natalie said.
“No one’s ever seen anyone like that,” Simon said, his voice hard.
I woke in my own bed in the middle of the night, and gasped in panic. Then I groped around in the dark, and found the dagger under the extra pillow on the bed.
My hand closed on the hilt and I fell back to sleep.