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“I’m a fairly private person.”
“That’s just a pretty way of saying you’re antisocial.”
I grinned as my sister laughed. “That, too.” I liked this girl. I really hoped she wasn’t playing me.
“I like this girl,” Wren commented. “I really hope she isn’t playing us.”
That thing they say about twins being on the same wavelength, feeling the same thing, thinking the same thing? It was true, and the whole dead-vs-living thing just cranked it up to eleven. The only reason I was alive was because Wren had felt something was wrong and had come looking for me the night I’d partied with a bottle of vodka and a razor blade. Good times. And I felt her anguish the entire time I was locked up and she couldn’t do anything to help me.
She’d done more than anyone else. More than our parents or any sanctimonious doctor. And I had been so pissed that she’d played a part in saving me, because I had thought death would finally put us in the same world.
It wasn’t my time to die, she’d said—as if she had any way of knowing.
We walked in silence for a bit, my grandmother’s house coming steadily closer. I’d only lived there a few days—since Dad had dropped me off with a guilty look and my own credit card—but it already felt more like home than my old house had in a long time. We’d lived in this town since I was three, but after my...accident, my parents had moved to Natick up in Mass. Mom needed to run away, while they decided I needed to endure daily torture at the hands of my peers. Whatever. I wasn’t bitter. Much. And at least here I didn’t have to see the look on her face when my mother looked at me. Not that she looked at me very often.
“So,” Roxi began, ending my pity party, “want to hang out later?”
My inner alarm went off, screeching “abort!” over and over. “Uh...”
“I’m going over to ’Nother Cup at eight. It’s open-mike night. Kevin McCrae’s playing. You know him, don’t you?”
Oh, yeah. I knew him.
“Yes!” Wren screeched in my ear. “Say yes! Say yes or I’ll bring Mr. Havers over to visit.”
Mr. Havers was the old dude who liked to haunt for the hell of it. He had few teeth and was as bat-shit crazy as a dead guy could be. And he smelled like a horse. “Yes,” I said through clenched teeth. “I know him. That sounds great. I’ll meet you there?”
“Sure.” Roxi grinned. “It will be fun.”
“Yeah. Big fun.” Could I sound any less sincere? An evening spent around more staring people with my sister rhapsodizing about Kevin McCrae—the one person other than me who could hear her. And the one person I wanted to see less than Mace. Woot. And I was such a fan of coffeehouses with blatantly unclever names.
But when was the last time I’d been out? When was the last time I’d spent time with people my own age who weren’t dead or mentally unstable? Or the last time I had to worry about curfew? Did I even have a curfew?
We stopped at the foot of my grandmother’s driveway. The smooth pavement led to a large slate-gray Victorian with eggplant trim. Large maple trees grew along both sides of the drive, forming a canopy that was just starting to show a hint of color.
“Your grandmother drives a Volkswagen Beetle?”
There was no missing the little car—it was purple. “Yes.”
Roxi squinted. “Are the taillights shaped like flowers?”
“They are.” I didn’t mention that the interior was green. Chartreuse. Nan had it custom done.
The dark-haired girl nodded. “Pretty.” She glanced down at her feet. “Listen, I know you don’t want to talk about it, but I’m really glad Mace found you.”
She forgot to add “lying in a pool of your own blood with your wrists sliced open.”
“Thanks.”
Roxi nodded as she lifted her head. “Okay, so I’ll see you at eight.”
“Sure.”
She grinned. “Great. See you then.” She turned to walk away, then stopped. She glanced over her shoulder with a lingering smile and looked somewhere over my right shoulder. “’Bye, Wren.”
My sister stood at my left, but the effect was the same. Wren’s eyes widened, and I wondered if Roxi would ever know how much those two words meant to her. How much the thought meant. Wren lifted her hand and waved, even though Roxi had already set off down the street.
We walked up the lane, finally alone.
“What did you do to Andrew?” I asked.
Wren shrugged. Her blouse slid down on her shoulder. “Scared him a little, that’s all. I told you, nothing permanent.”
“Then why wasn’t he in class?”
“He had to go home.”
“Why? And please don’t say he was bleeding from the eyes.”
She shot me an indignant glance. “He peed his pants.” Yes, the scariest person I knew said “peed.”
“That’s it?”
“Isn’t that enough?” she shot back.
I held up my hands. “Just making sure.”
My sleeves had fallen down my arms when I raised them, and Wren grabbed my left forearm before I could lower both. Her thumb was like velvet against the satin of the scar that ran down the throat of my wrist. Tears filled her bright blue eyes.
“It’s all right,” I told her.
“Did it hurt?” she asked. Wren didn’t have much of a concept of physical pain, having never experienced it. She had no scars and she never would—not unless there was something in the afterlife that neither of us knew about. She’d never asked me about them before.
“Not as much as I thought they would.”
“I’d take them if I could.”
“But you can’t.” I gently pulled my arm away. “They’re mine.” And the only thing other than our hair that set us apart as two separate people instead of two halves of one.
(#ulink_3dd4aaa2-8fd6-59ff-8908-451c5c9aaf16)
WREN
Sometimes I watched Lark sleep, just to make certain nothing happened to her. She didn’t know that I did it or she wouldn’t have closed her eyes. She said I “creeped” her out when I did things like that. What else was I supposed to do? I didn’t sleep—I didn’t need to. I had tried to once, but I got bored. As a child I’d figured out—with Lark’s help—how to pass through books so that I could actually read them. Thankfully our grandmother had a fabulous library—not as good as the one in the Shadow Lands, but it was more than adequate.
When we were little, Lark asked me if I lived in Heaven. I told her I didn’t know. I still didn’t. It was an untruth that the dead had all the answers. We just had different questions.
The truth of where I “lived” was that it was big and peaceful and muted. No bright colors—except for my hair—no loud noises, no strong smells. Certainly nothing like the wave of deliciousness that greeted me when I phased through the door of our grandmother’s kitchen. My sense of smell wasn’t that developed, but spending time in this world had helped strengthen it, and what I smelled was good.
“Oh,” I said. “What is that?”
“Peanut butter cookies,” Lark told me. “Best smell in the world.”
“Can I have one?” I sounded so pathetic, and I was. We both knew the only way I’d ever taste that delicious scent was if Lark let me in, and I’d already violated her space once today.
My sister smiled, indulging me like she always did. She had such a big heart, especially where I was concerned. “Sure.” I forgave her for asking what I’d done to that boy in her class. It wasn’t as though she didn’t have reason to ask, especially after what I’d done to that orderly in the hospital our parents had put Lark in. I scared him so bad they took him away sobbing. He never came back, but I visited him from time to time.
“I didn’t hurt him,” I insisted, needing her to know the truth. I didn’t have to tell her who or what I was talking about. She knew. Lark just nodded. She didn’t like to talk to me in front of other people anymore. I understood why, but it still hurt sometimes. Other times it made me angry. People got hurt when I got angry, so I tried to stay calm.
“Hello, girls,” Nan greeted us. “Hug.”
She was five feet tall and slim with a head of thick hair dyed a color almost as bright as mine. According to Lark she didn’t look like a grandmother, but Charlotte Noble felt like one.
Lark hesitated—she always did. It was my fault, this distrust she had of people, even those who should have her complete faith. Just by being, I’d made her life so much harder than it should have been. She didn’t like to hug, and I wished I could hug everyone I met. When we first came here, Lark let me in so I could feel our grandmother’s arms around me. Today, I simply moved through the tiny woman, letting her sweet warmth sift through me.
To my delight, Nan smiled. “Wren, you’re like walking through a patch of sunshine, dear. Lark, just come hug me and get it over with, girl. I won’t bite you.”
I watched, anxious as the two most important women in my existence embraced. Was it my imagination, or did Lark relax a little? True to her word, Nan didn’t bite. I’d been nervous for a moment.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a flicker of something in the next room—just a passing shadow flickering in the afternoon sunlight. Was there someone else in the house? I moved slowly into the room, hoping to catch our visitor, but there was nothing, not even a trace of spectral energy. That was disappointing. It would have been nice to meet another ghost—a friendly one.
In the Shadow Lands I had form and substance, but in the living world I was nothing more than a projection. It was annoying. In the Shadow Lands I could eat a cookie—if they existed there. The dead didn’t need to eat. We didn’t get our strength from food.
We got it from the living. Humans left a trail of life energy like slugs left slime. Maybe not the best analogy, but it was almost like they exhaled a little bit with every breath. We drifted along sucking that up. Sometimes a ghost would get greedy and siphon from a person. Heightened emotion meant more life force. Ghosts particularly liked the taste of fear. That was why so many hauntings were terrible things.
Fear tasted like my grandmother’s cookies smelled.
I looked around one more time, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe I had spent too much time in this world and my eyes had started to play tricks on me, or maybe I was becoming as suspicious as Lark.
I wished she had talked to Mace earlier. We—I—owed him so much for saving her life. When I saw her lying on the floor, and what she had done, I panicked. I couldn’t help her except to hold her wrists and try to stop the bleeding. I needed help, and I cried out to anyone who could hear me.
Kevin McCrae had heard me. Some people were more attuned to the frequency of the dead than others. In the human world they were called mediums. Where I came from, they were called “doors.” Kevin was a door I could open, and I didn’t even knock first. He hadn’t even known who I was when I tore into his mind like a madwoman, begging for his help. He didn’t live close to us, but his friend Mace did. Kevin called Mace and asked him to check on Lark, then Mace called 911.
Kevin and I kept in contact after that night. Not a lot, but some. He was the only person other than my sister to have ever known I was in the same room, and he was the person I’d run to when Lark wasn’t there.
He was the reason I wanted to go to the coffee shop that night. Lark knew it, of course. But my sister didn’t know all of it.
Oh, and I wanted to know what Roxi was hiding. There had been sincerity in her invitation, but there had been something else, as well. It was easy enough to assume that the secret was something she thought might convince Lark not to go if she revealed it straightaway. That made me suspicious.
“Anything exciting happen today?” Nan asked as she used a spatula to move the warm cookies from baking sheet to plate.
Lark and I exchanged glances. She knew.
“That lovely Principal Grant called today.” I didn’t believe lovely was the word she really wanted to use. “Told me you’d gotten called to the office because you’d scared a young man badly enough that he wet his pants and had to go home.”
Lark glared at me. I shrugged. “I’m not sorry I did it.”
“I didn’t do a thing to him,” Lark said.
“I didn’t think you did.” Suddenly, our grandmother looked right at me. “You owe your sister an apology, young lady.”
My jaw dropped. I knew she couldn’t see me, but this thing of ours seemed to come from her side of the family, because she was definitely sensitive to the Shadow Lands.
“She does?” Lark asked, speaking for both of us.
Nan nodded. “I know you didn’t hurt that boy, and that your sister’s intentions were good, but you got the trouble for it. You’ll always get the trouble for it. Wrenleigh, you need to think of these things before you act. I know you want to protect Lark, but now you’ve made things difficult for her, so you need to apologize for that.”
There was no way she’d have known if I apologized or not. I could have broken every window in this house. I could have made her sorry she’d tried bossing me around. Neither of those things were going to happen. I was chastised. She was right.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Lark. “I didn’t think. He hurt you and I just wanted to hurt him back.”
My sister nodded. “I know. It’s okay.”
But it wasn’t, was it? I knew Lark had forgiven me—she always did—but her life would have been easier if I hadn’t always been doing things she needed to forgive me for.
Nan smiled. “That’s a good girl.” She held the plate of cookies out to Lark. “Take one for your sister, too.”
Lark plucked two cookies off the cooling plate, gathered up her school books and announced that she was going to do some studying before dinner.
“Liar,” I accused.
Lark ignored me. “Nan, is it okay if I go out later? Roxi Taylor invited me to open-mike night at ’Nother Cup.”
There was no denying how much this pleased Nan—her face lit up. “Of course it’s all right! Do you want to take the car?”
Horror filled me. “No!”
But my sister smiled. “That would be great, thanks.” Because a white-haired girl driving a purple car wouldn’t stand out at all. God, it was a good thing I was invisible to most humans because I’d wish I was if I had to drive in that car. Fortunately, I didn’t have to depend on human modes of transportation.
As we climbed the stairs to our room, I thought I saw something again—a flash of black in my peripheral vision. I whipped my head around, but there was nothing.
“You okay?” Lark asked. “You’re not mad at Nan?”
She sounded a little...afraid. “No! Of course not. I thought I saw something.”
“I didn’t see anything.”
Of course she hadn’t. She could see a lot of things, but she still had the limited eyesight of a living person; they were notoriously shortsighted. “Probably nothing.”
“You know, if you want to go to the coffee shop tonight, I don’t mind if you go without me.”
I looked at her, lips twisting. “And miss seeing the reaction to you driving a grape jelly bean? I don’t think so. Besides, you promised Roxi you would go.”
“Yeah, I know.” She stared straight ahead as she climbed the rest of the stairs. “It would be rude of me to bail on her.”
I didn’t add that it would also be stupid for her to stay home and try to send me away. I wasn’t bound to Lark, I could come and go as I pleased, and tonight it would please me to be there with my sister to make certain no one tried to hurt her. If anyone gave her a hard time—even if it was Kevin—I’d risk Nan’s wrath and make certain they regretted it for a very, very long time.
LARK
