The nurses wondered how I’d managed to give myself second-degree burns over both hands, and I told a disjointed story about confusing a pot of cold water with a pot of boiling water. They looked at me funny, but bandaged the burns and gave me a hard-core painkiller.
I told them I wanted to go home, then admitted I didn’t have a ride. I couldn’t work my iPhone with my fingers bandaged, and I didn’t really want them calling Natalie in the middle of some ghostly event, so they left a message on the museum’s answering machine.
They tucked me into a bed surrounded with curtain walls, even though I wasn’t remotely tired. Then the painkiller hit and I fell asleep almost instantly, to the sound of crabby patients and crying babies. I dreamed that acidic ghast-drool was dissolving my hands.
Then a voice interrupted my dream. “Wake up, sweetie. We don’t have much time.”
“I don’t want to go to school,” I murmured.
“Emma! Wake up!”
I woke, groggy and disoriented. “Muh?” I sat up, and forgot the flare of pain in my hand when I saw my father and mother standing beside the bed. “Oh my God. You came. You’re here!”
“Shh,” my father hushed me. “They don’t know.”
“Who?” I asked. “Why are you hiding? Nobody thinks you killed anyone.”
“Shh,” he said again. “Let us look at you.”
I looked back at them. There was more gray in my father’s dark hair, and a stubbly beard marred his usually clean-shaven chin. He looked like he’d aged ten years since I’d last seen him two months ago.
My mother looked worse. She had dark shadows under her eyes, and her black sweater and pants engulfed her slight frame. Her face was gaunt and her skin jaundiced—she looked old and ill.
Fear clutched my stomach. “Are you sick?”
“I’m fine.” She ran a hand over my hair. “You look so grown-up and beautiful. I like your hair.” The short haircut she’d never approved of was finally growing out. “I’ve missed you.”
“Why did you leave me like that?”
“To protect you from Neos—to draw his attention away from you.”
“Well, that didn’t work,” I said. “How could you not tell me who I was? Who you were?”
“We knew you were special, Emma,” my father said. “We knew your powers far outstripped our own, but we didn’t know how to protect you.”
“We needed to buy time when we realized Neos was returning,” my mother continued. “We couldn’t trust the Knell—we knew he’d corrupt them. We needed to keep you away from ghostkeeping until we figured out how to stop him.”
“But you put me in a psych ward. How could you do that?”
For a moment, neither of them spoke. Then my father said, “We panicked. We didn’t know—”
My mother laid a hand on my shoulder. “We were wrong. Does it help if we say that? We only wanted to keep you safe.”
I took a deep breath, unsure whether I was ready to forgive them. At least they admitted they’d made a mistake.
“Do you know about our history with Neos?” Dad asked.
I nodded. “You were a team with him and Rachel.” I blinked away sudden tears. “Daddy, when I met her, she was possessed by a wraith, and I—I—”
“We know,” my mom said gently. “You didn’t kill her; Neos did. Never forget that. In fact, you saved her, Emma, from doing even more damage to the Knell—and the Knell was her life.”
I nodded and reached to put my bandaged hand onto hers, and saw her fingers were tinged with purple, fuzzy streaks outlining her fingernails, like some strange bruise.
Simon’s voice replayed in my head: Asarum stains. It changes the pigmentation.
“Oh my God,” I said, falling back onto my pillow. “You’re taking that drug.”
“It’s only an herb.” She moved her hands away. “And I’m trying to save you.”
“That’s why you’re hiding—because you know the Knell disapproves.”
“The Knell’s not in a position to disapprove,” my father said.
“You don’t understand,” my mother told me. “We’re trying to help you fight Neos. He’s linked to me; he’s using my powers. If I regain them, maybe he’ll lose them. I’ve got nothing without this, Emma.”
I turned to my father, a little dizzy from the painkillers. “And you let her? Look at her—I thought she was sick, Dad!”
He swallowed. “I know—I told her not to, but she insisted and—”
“Get the amulet, Emma,” she interrupted. “You need to take the amulet from Neos.”
“Why? How?” I yawned, the drugs catching up with me. “I don’t even know—”
“We don’t know, either. Neos needs to perform some final rite with it—we don’t know what, exactly. But if you take the amulet, maybe he won’t get any more powerful.”
“He’s bad enough already,” my father said. “We need to—”
“Someone’s coming,” my mother whispered.
“Wait! Why did you send me that note, telling me not to trust Bennett?”
“We knew Neos would try to infiltrate the Knell, and we thought he’d target Bennett,” my dad said.
“But he’s not—” I stopped midsentence. Was I sure that I was in love with Bennett? Yes. Sure that he loved me? Yes. Positive I could trust him? No. Maybe if he’d been here, but I had no idea where he was or what he was doing. Could he defend himself against Neos? Rachel hadn’t been able to.
“Plus he’s too old for you,” Mom added. “You need someone your own age. Isn’t there a boy at school, who—”
“Mom!” God, how could she annoy me already? We’d only been together like ten minutes.
They both stepped away from the bed. “We love you.”
“Don’t go! I need—” But with a swish of the curtain walls, they were gone.
The nurse checked on me as I lay there in a daze. My first thought when I saw my parents was that they’d finally come for me. I could forget all about ghostkeeping and go back to my old life in San Francisco.
But what was there to go back to?
I didn’t want to be three thousand miles from Bennett, wherever he was. Or Natalie or Lukas and Simon. Or Harry and Sara. And would Coby be able to find his way through the Beyond that far? What about the house ghosts? I wasn’t sure—even when this was all over—how a life with my parents fit into all that.
My friends needed me. They needed me more than I needed my parents. Which worried me. But there was strength in it, too.
“Oh my God!” Natalie shrieked, waking me from a dreamless sleep in my hospital bed. “Emma, what happened?”
“I thought I made it clear that you were to venture nowhere without us,” Simon barked. He never sounded so stuck up as when he was worried about one of us.
I forced my eyelids open and found them surrounding the bed, worry etched into their features.
“Dude, killer war wounds.” Lukas eyed my bandages. “Are you going to be all scarred and everything?”
I smiled, tears in my eyes. “I’m so glad to see you guys.” I eyed the clock on the wall. 3:12 a.m. “What took you so long?”
“The ghosts were a bitch,” Natalie said.
“What ghosts? Were you attacked? Have you been gone this whole time?”
“Yeah,” Natalie said, “Maine is …”
“Freaky,” Lukas finished. “The guy we went to see had, like, no powers.”
I pushed my hair behind my ear with a bandaged hand. “Because someone stole them?”
Natalie shook her head. “Even before that, he was a total low-level. You would’ve scoffed.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” I said. “I don’t think less of people because they’re not mega-ghostkeepers.”
“Okay,” she admitted, “I would’ve scoffed.”
“Anyway,” Lukas said. “It didn’t matter. His house was totally infested with ghosts.”
Simon explained that the man was in his sixties, and despite his limited communicating abilities, there was something magnetic about him. He’d collected dozens of ghosts over the decades—and they were distraught when he lost his ghostkeeping powers. He’d been living with them like roommates for such a long time, and suddenly he couldn’t even see them anymore.
“The question is, who took the guy’s powers?” Natalie said. “We could’ve used you, Em. Without a communicator, it was like a bad game of charades. The ghosts miming, us guessing—”
“Don’t forget the old man wailing in the background.” Lukas mimicked a terrible keening noise.
“What’d you find out?”
Natalie held up four fingers.
“Four words …”
She nodded. Then held a finger to her ear.
“Sounds like …”
“Oh, stop it,” Simon said. “It was another ghostkeeper. As far as we could tell, some dark ghostkeeper snuck in, middle of the night, worked some serious magic I’ve never heard of, and when he woke in the morning his powers were gone.”
“Neos?” I asked.
“That’s what I thought,” Simon said. “Except he wouldn’t have left witnesses.”
“Good point. And if he knew about Abby, he’d be using her against me.”
I told them about how she lost her powers to some “cute guy.” Then the nurse came with a wheelchair and rolled me to the door, even though I felt fine except for my bandaged hands.
We got into the Yaris, and I said, “Simon, how does that drug work? The herb you talked about, Asarum?”
“What’s that?” Lukas asked.
Simon filled him in and then asked me, “You think Neos is using Asarum again? He can’t—it’s only for the living.”
“No, but … what if someone else is? Would that explain the dark ghostkeeper? Like Neos, but without the grisly murders?”
A look crossed Simon’s face, like it was possible.
“Who’d do that?” Lukas asked.
“Maybe Neos has a henchman,” Natalie said. “Or it was that psycho siren who tried to drown me.”
“Or my parents,” I said.
“What?!”
I explained about my mom and dad. “But what if it isn’t that? Maybe Neos just possessed a ghostkeeper to steal that Maine guy’s powers. We still need the amulet, and we still need to know where Neos’s body is.”
Simon ran a hand through his hair. “We’re no closer to finding his corpse. Maybe getting this amulet isn’t a bad idea.”
“Where is it?” Lukas asked.
“Embedded in Neos’s tongue.” I started fiddling with my bandages. “I’m not sure how I’m going to get that out.”
“The dagger?” Lukas suggested.
“Ew,” Natalie groaned. “Can I call in sick that day?”
“We need to find him first,” I said.
Simon made a noise in his throat. “Or wait until he finds us.”