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She tossed her hair and sniffed. “What makes you think I’m at your beck and call?”
I almost walked right through her, but my nerve faltered at the last second. I hated the way it felt, like jumping into a freezing swimming pool—or being pushed in. Lydia hated it, too—which almost made it worthwhile.
But not quite.
“Move,” I said.
She came a half step closer. “Since when do I take orders from murderers?”
See what I mean? Passing the blame much? As if I’d forced her to start the Sunshine Club and fall madly in love with an evil spirit. As if it had been my idea for him to devour her life force. I’d tried to talk her out of it. I’d even tried to save her—and, rather pathetically, kept trying, way after the point where she was savable. But there’s no way to convey that to an angry ghost.
They just don’t listen.
“I get it, okay?” I said. “You hate me. You tried to kill me, and it didn’t work. But take comfort in the fact that you definitely ended my day on a low note, and move along, please. See you in a few weeks.”
Her eyebrows went up.
When she didn’t move, I held my breath and charged forward. The frigid rush of blood in my veins left me light-headed, with Lydia’s outraged yelp resonating in my ears.
What happened next took me by complete surprise.
A second blast of cold hit me from behind, and then Lydia was in front of me again.
The double dose was like a hundred full-body ice-cream headaches. I doubled over in pain, wondering if it was possible to die of ghost-induced hypothermia. My fingers were so frozen I couldn’t feel them. I stumbled, put my hands out, and sank to the floor before I could lose my balance and fall.
After a minute, the feeling of imminent freezing-to-death passed, and I looked up at Lydia. She stood on the step by the door that led into the house. The effort of passing through me had left her a little hunched over and slightly more see-through than usual. And when she spoke, her voice was weaker.
“I’ll leave you alone,” she rasped, “when I feel like it.”
She disappeared through the door, and I heard the light ka-chunk of the lock turning.
I got up a moment later, my legs like tree stumps being stuck with a million pins. The circulation gradually came back as I made my way to the door. I knocked a few times before giving up. My parents were probably in the kitchen with the TV on, so I went around to the front of the town house.
My little sister, Kasey, pulled the door open just as I was about to turn the key in the dead bolt. Her hand tightened on the doorframe when she saw me, soaked and shivering like a half-drowned rat. She, on the other hand, practically glowed, her long hair draped over her shoulder like a gold silk scarf.
Once upon a time, I’d been worried about Kasey fitting in and making friends, but that had proved to be yet another shining example of my general cluelessness about how the world works.
My sister was A-list. She’d growth-spurted over the fall, and now she was almost as tall as me. Her hair was long and caramel blond, just wavy enough to make every hairstyle look effortlessly natural. She had an i
It would have been completely insufferable, except she was so nice.
Even the niceness would probably have been insufferable if I hadn’t been so relieved that she wasn’t a total outcast.
One per family was plenty.
Most important to me, she’d been through hard times with ghosts just like I had—but she had moved past those times. She was free from worrying about evil spirits and power centers. Free to be normal and happy.
She was safe.
And I intended to make sure that she stayed that way.
“I got caught in the rain,” I said, before she could ask.
From the kitchen wafted the mixed scent of simmering spaghetti sauce and fresh-baked sugar cookies. “Get any good pictures?” Dad called.
Someone was chopping something. The thunk of the knife on the cutting board stopped as they waited for my answer.
“Not really,” I called, careful to hover in the shadows. “I’m getting a little bored with photography, to be honest. I might cut back.”
Kasey’s eyes widened almost imperceptibly, but she didn’t say anything. I walked past her toward my bedroom, trying to stay steady on my trembling legs.
* * *
The ridiculous thing was, I knew exactly how to stop Lydia.
All I had to do was get up the courage to go to her house and find her power center—whatever object was holding her to this world—and destroy it, and I’d be free. Free of her, and (though I only let myself hope for this in my most desperate and pitiful of moments) maybe even free of the ghosts that haunted my photos. Who was to say the two problems weren’t related?
The trouble was, when I contemplated facing Mr. and Mrs. Small, my hands began to sweat and my mind went all wobbly. Their daughter’s death had basically ruined their not-so-great-to-begin-with lives. Under the weight of their desolate gazes, there was no way I’d be able to play it cool enough to concentrate on finding something that had been precious to Lydia—much less obliterating it.
The whole situation was like an itch I couldn’t bear to scratch.
Lydia believed I was a murderer. The kids at school never came out and said anything, but I could see in their eyes that they suspected me, too. After all, when Lydia went ru
And maybe what scared me most was that underneath all of my denial and nightmares and anger…some part of me might figure out it actually was my fault.
Here’s a hint of how my life used to be: all I had wanted from the day I turned sixteen was a car. I begged, I cajoled, I bargained. Amazing how when you have a cute boyfriend and a popular best friend and everything in your life is just one peppy, perky little party, something like a car can seem really, really crucial. After everything went down with Aralt, I finally forgot about cars. I forgot to care about them, forgot to nag Mom and Dad about them.
So of course I got one for Christmas.
It was an act of profound sympathy on the part of my parents, I guess, because God knows my behavior and grades thus far in my junior year hadn’t exactly been car-for-Christmas-worthy. I’d even gone back to my old habit of skipping classes on a fairly regular basis. But Mom and Dad were insanely excited, giggly and pink-cheeked. I tried to give them a little pink-faced giggling right back, but I think they saw through it.
I could tell Kasey did.
The car was six years old and ugly: brown, rounded off at the corners like a bubble or an egg or something—with a big splotch on the backseat that I’d just as soon never find out the cause of, thank you very much. But it was a car. It had windows and locks and seats and a gas pedal—and it was mine.
I fell in love immediately.
Grandma was off windsurfing in Australia with her women’s club for the holidays, so it was just the four of us—Mom, Dad, Kasey, and me. We finished opening presents in about ten minutes and ate our traditional holiday breakfast of scrambled eggs and a giant pile of artery-clogging bacon. I took my trying-too-hard parents on a drive around the neighborhood.
Then the house fell back into deathly silence.
Kasey retreated to her bedroom to talk to her boyfriend, Keaton Perry (could someone please tell me how on earth my little sister was old enough to have a boyfriend? And a senior, no less?), and I went to the living room and turned on the TV. The local news was playing, and the anchors were decked out in cheesy holiday sweaters. They were joking and jolly, talking about Santa Claus as if he really existed, that thing adults do to humor the kids who are mostly just humoring adults.