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Before materializations like this one started occurring, I honestly thought I’d learned to control them—learned how to prevent the ghostly vanishings that transported me, unwilling, to someplace else, sometime else.
I was wrong, obviously.
It wasn’t that I wanted to materialize away from Joshua tonight. Far from it. But over the past few months, I’d come to the sad realization that we couldn’t go much further than we already had, physically, without me disappearing into thin air. Every time we kissed too long, or held each other too closely, I’d vanish. If Joshua’s fingers strayed too far below my collarbone—zap, to a deserted car lot. If I loosened just one of his buttons—poof, to the top of a picnic table at some rest stop on the side of the highway.
Each time I vanished, I could materialize back instantly, free from ice or any other kind of harm. But the mood was always dampened, to say the least.
And each time I vanished, I slowly learned my lesson: unless I kept a tighter guard on my emotions, and my actions with Joshua, I had no control over what happened to my body.
I guess I hadn’t learned the lesson well enough. Not yet.
I couldn’t help but sigh loudly. This situation was so unfair I could almost taste it, tart and bitter on my tongue. After all, my desire wasn’t so crazy, so outrageous, that it needed to be denied in such a harsh way. What I wanted—what Joshua and I both wanted—was simple, and normal, and genuine.
And obviously impossible.
I lifted my head from my knees and sighed again. There was nothing I could do about the problem now except get back to Joshua and try to make things right. As right as they could be anyway.
I closed my eyes and focused on the house beneath me. I heard a soft whoosh of air, and when I opened my eyes, I found myself sitting on a bed, staring into the familiar glow of Joshua’s bedside lamp.
If only all my materializations could be this controlled.
Behind me I heard the shifting sound of bedsprings. I threw a wary glance over my shoulder and saw Joshua. He’d propped himself against his headboard and faced forward, frowning in deep thought.
I’d expected to find him frustrated, or angry, or maybe even a little sad. Instead, Joshua simply looked … intent. Like he was trying to solve some difficult problem.
Sensing my presence, he stirred and caught my eye. Without leaning away from the headboard, he stretched his arm across the bed to me.
“Hey, stranger,” he said with a slight smile.
I groaned, turning more fully toward him before I took his offered hand. “How long was I gone this time?”
“Not too long—only a few minutes. Getting better, I think.”
I snorted. “Better? Seriously? It’s hardly getting better if it just keeps happening.”
Joshua shook his head and smiled wider, undeterred. “You’re wrong, Amelia. The disappearances are getting shorter and shorter. I bet they stop happening altogether soon. It’s going to get easier—I promise.”
In the face of his perpetual optimism, I bit my lip to keep my mouth shut. Or to keep my response locked inside, more like it.
How could I tell Joshua the truth about what I’d really been thinking lately: that our relationship would never get easier? That if things were this difficult now, when we were both young, they would grow insurmountable as Joshua aged.
Because, inevitably, Joshua would age. Very soon he would graduate from Wilburton High School and move away to college. At some point he would probably want a girl he could introduce to his family, one whom all of them could see and half of them wouldn’t want to exorcise. A girl he could make out with for more than ten minutes. A girl with whom, maybe someday, he’d start a family.
A girl I could never be.
Still biting my lip, I looked at Joshua more closely. The soft, hopeful look in his eyes told me that he didn’t share my troubled thoughts. At least, not at the moment.
“So, where’d you go this time?” he asked, taking his hand from mine and brushing a strand of hair off my face.
I pulled my lip from my teeth and tilted my head to one side. “Your roof, actually.”
Joshua’s eyes widened. After a long, stunned pause, he cleared his throat. In an intentionally calm voice, he asked, “Oh? And how was it up there?”
“Icy. Probably freezing.”
Joshua grimaced, from either the idea of the storm outside or the thought of me sitting in it. “This one wasn’t like any of your old nightmares, was it?”
“No, thank God for that,” I said, shuddering.
I hadn’t had a real nightmare in several months, at least not in the way I defined the word “nightmare.”
Before I’d met Joshua, before I’d saved him from drowning in the same river I had, a series of waking nightmares controlled my afterlife. In daylight as well as darkness, I would sometimes lose consciousness and then relive part of my death. Upon waking, I would find myself someplace other than where I’d been just before the nightmare occurred. I’d learned these nightmares were involuntary materializations, much like the ones I experienced now, but worse.
I still wasn’t entirely sure why the nightmares had ended. I suspected it had something to do with the fact that I now remembered the details of my death. Or maybe because I’d fought back against the dark spirits who had engineered that death.
Whichever the case, the end of the nightmares meant the beginning of an entirely new set of troubles. These new—but still unwanted—materializations, for example. And then there were the weird dreams, like the one I’d had tonight.
I didn’t like thinking about the dreams, but after one occurred, I just couldn’t stop. I obsessed over their details, trying—without much success—to find a pattern in them, or a reason for them.
So far each dream differed in content from the previous one. But they all shared a pretty common theme. All of them happened at night, when I shouldn’t have been sleeping, and all of them were incredibly disturbing.
In each dream I saw people for whom I cared but couldn’t speak to them, couldn’t touch them. Sometimes I saw Joshua, watching me with a cold, impassive expression while I begged him for help. Sometimes I saw Jillian drop to her knees in pain as Eli—the cruel ghost who had tried to acquire my soul for his demonic masters—tore the life from her.
Or sometimes I saw my father’s ghost, wandering lost beneath the ruins of the bridge I’d destroyed several months ago in an effort to protect Joshua and Jillian from Eli. In those dreams my father called out to me. He asked, in a broken voice, why I hadn’t yet freed him from the dark netherworld that waited just outside the living boundaries of High Bridge.
I hated those dreams the most.
Tonight’s dream, however, was a new one. Never before had I watched myself like some outside observer; never before had I seen myself hurting, maybe even dying, in a setting I didn’t recognize.
I didn’t exactly have the clearest memories of my life before death, but most things I recalled had at least a touch of familiarity to them. Nothing about tonight’s dream, however, seemed familiar—not the dark room or the shabby furniture. The only aspect of the room I recognized was the girl on the couch. Me, maybe.
So … what on earth was I supposed to make of that?
I shook my head and curled up beside Joshua without touching him. Joshua mirrored my position, facing me. My long silence didn’t seem to bother him, probably because I’d had so many of them lately.
“Well,” he finally said. “At least tonight’s materialization wasn’t a nightmare. But you did sit up screaming earlier. Do you want to tell me what that was about?”
My eyes darted down to the pillow beneath my head, away from Joshua’s intent gaze. I shrugged. “Another one of those weird dreams I keep having. This one was different, though. Weirder.”
I felt Joshua twitch beside me. “How so?” he asked.
I continued to study the pillow while I described the dream’s eerie details. When I finished, Joshua blew out a puff of air.
“That’s … well, that’s creepy, Amelia.”
“Very. And the even bigger issue is that I don’t sleep. The fact I’m dreaming at all makes me think these dreams are—I don’t know—important maybe? Tonight’s dream really makes me wonder. Everything seemed so real: the sounds, the smells.”
“And you’re sure you saw yourself alive in this one?”
“Well … not completely sure. The girl looked a lot like me, but there was something else about her. Something I can’t put my finger on.”
Joshua frowned, thoughtful. “Maybe the girl was just some, you know, manifestation. Of your worries.”
Despite my apprehensive mood, I couldn’t help but laugh. “Wow, Dr. Mayhew. Someone’s been doing his psychology homework.”
“My favorite elective.” Joshua chuckled good-naturedly. Then he yawned.
I propped myself up on my elbow, glanced over his shoulder at his bedside clock, and fell back onto the bed beside him.
“We can talk more about this later,” I said. “It’s past four already, and you’ve got a calculus final today.”
“Don’t remind me.” He groaned, pulling his own pillow around his ears in a U shape. “Why sleep at all? I’ll probably get a better score if I just try to hallucinate the answers.”
“I’m not going to let you hallucinate your way through your last final. We’ve been studying for weeks. So … sleep.”
With the pillow still pressed to his ears, Joshua shook his head. But even through the fabric, I heard the muffled sound of another yawn.
I guess I didn’t need to give him any more commands or warnings because soon, without further protest, he began to drift off. Eventually, his breath deepened enough that I knew he’d fallen asleep again.
With an enormous sigh, I rolled over to stare blankly at the ceiling. For a while I tried to stay calm and restful. To run through a few of the calculus equations Joshua had struggled with the most. But soon, instead of numbers, my head started to spin with all the lingering questions that still plagued me.
Several months ago I thought I’d finally solved my greatest problems. I’d begun to piece together the sketchy details of my past and gain control of my ghostly powers. I’d prevented Eli from trapping me in the dark netherworld and forcing me to become a sort of grim reaper like him. Even Joshua’s grandmother Ruth and her coven of ghost hunters had left me alone as some sort of repayment for saving Jillian’s life.
So I’d earned a chance to enjoy whatever time I had left with Joshua, right?
Wrong.
Instead, my new, Eli- and Ruth-free existence had only become peaceful enough to allow another mess of problems into it. There were too many things to think about, too many issues I couldn’t resolve. Like the haunting image of my doppelgänger languishing in that dank room. Or my total inability to kiss my boyfriend for more than a few minutes. Or … or …
“Ugh,” I muttered in disgust, but then clamped my lips shut when I heard a small hitch in Joshua’s breath.
When he began to breathe evenly again, I carefully slipped off the bed and tiptoed to the broad window seat on the other side of the room. I curled up on the seat’s thick blue cushions, tucking my feet beneath me and pressing my forehead to the windowpane.
Right now I’d give just about anything to feel the glass, cold and soothing against my skin. No such luck, though. I felt only the numb pressure of the pane in front of me and the cushion beneath me.
Just two more objects in the living world I couldn’t really touch.
Forehead still pressed against the window, hair hanging around my face so I couldn’t see anything but the dark, icy view outside, I shook my head. Then I burrowed more fully into the cushions, settling in for another troubled night spent obsessing over the things I would never be able to change.
A sharp clunk rang out beneath me as someone’s foot connected with the wooden leg of the chair in which I now sat. I looked up in time to see Jillian’s eyes dart guiltily down to her bowl of cereal.
I spared a quick glance at Joshua. He must have heard the sound too, because he glared at his sister across the breakfast table. I, however, just shook my head and pulled my elbows off the table. Obviously, I wouldn’t get to spend the morning sulking with my head in my hands as I’d originally planned. Instead, I would once again have to play peacemaker between the unwilling and the unreceptive. And these days I didn’t know which Mayhew sibling was which.
I placed what I hoped was a calming hand on Joshua’s arm, but he’d already begun to growl a warning at his little sister.
“Jillian, I swear …”
“Don’t swear, Joshie,” she taunted, the corner of her lips twitching. “Mom and Dad don’t like it when you swear.”
Joshua’s scowl deepened. “Seriously, if you don’t stop it—”
“Stop what?” she interrupted, raising her eyebrows innocently. She turned from one side to the other as if to solicit support from their parents. The older Mayhews, however, couldn’t have been more disinterested in their children’s fight. Joshua’s dad stayed buried behind his newspaper, and Joshua’s mom focused intently on her breakfast—almost too intently, as if deliberately avoiding any involvement in her son and daughter’s endless bickering.
So Joshua could have—should have—let the incident blow over. He could have ignored Jillian, like the mature older brother he was supposed to be. Unfortunately, our rough night had made Joshua as cranky as I was, and he decided to react.
Before I could utter the words Let it go, Joshua, I heard another sharp crack from under the table. When Jillian immediately yelped and bent down to grab her shin, Joshua grinned in triumph. Obviously his kick, unlike Jillian’s, had met its mark.
Upon seeing her brother’s grin, Jillian howled.
The howl echoed throughout the kitchen, nearly rattling the silverware and cereal bowls with its force. The sound was so piercing, Jillian’s parents had no choice but to pay attention. Newspapers and coffee cups dropped to the table as the older Mayhews let out almost identical, frustrated groans.
Rebecca focused upon Joshua first, fixing him in a gaze that could have frozen lava.
“One morning,” she said, shoving her mug farther away from her. “Just one morning I’d like to eat breakfast without having to break up a fight.”
I looked over at Jillian, who continued to moan in pain, albeit with a hint of glee in her hazel eyes.
“Sorry we bothered you, Mom,” she whimpered, intentionally quivering her bottom lip. “But Joshua just won’t leave me alone.”
“Are you sure, Jillian?” Rebecca asked. “Because I could have sworn I heard the first kick come from your direction.”
I had to choke back a laugh. Jillian, however, was less amused by her mother’s ability to simultaneously ignore and monitor her children. Jillian began to sputter wordlessly, a faint pink flushing across her cheeks as she came to the realization that her howls hadn’t fooled anyone. While she floundered for a response, her father tapped his fingers impatiently upon his discarded newspaper. He caught his wife’s eye and then shrugged.
“What do you think?” he asked her. “Ignore this stupidity or ground them both from the party?”
“Ignore?” Joshua offered, but not loudly enough to rival Jillian’s shriek of protest.
Her blush darkened to a livid red at the suggestion that she couldn’t attend tonight’s party, which promised to be the biggest of the semester. Worse, this was the first party that her parents had finally given her permission to attend—permission they’d only granted after Joshua and Jillian had both sworn, on penalty of military school or a nunnery, to stay far away from High Bridge.
This punishment was tantamount to social homicide, and Jillian knew it. So she blurted out what must have been the first defense that came to mind.
“I don’t know why you’re punishing me for anything,” she shouted. “Joshua’s the one who made Grandma Ruth leave—he deserves a lot worse than I do.”
The moment the words left her mouth, all the livid red drained from Jillian’s face. Just as quickly, an uncomfortable silence fell over the table. Each pair of eyes turned slowly, incredulously, toward Jillian.
To Jeremiah and Rebecca, such an accusation must have sounded outrageous, not to mention completely unfair. As far as they knew, Joshua hadn’t caused his grandmother to abruptly pack up her few possessions last month and move to New Orleans to live with Jeremiah’s sister and her family.
But Jillian and Joshua both knew the truth about what had really driven Ruth from this house.
Me.
Only a few months ago I’d inadvertently cost Ruth Mayhew almost everything she held dear. In doing so, I’d apparently taken away any reason she had for staying in Oklahoma.
Like Joshua, Jillian, and a surprisingly large number of people in Wilburton, Ruth was a Seer—a living person who, after some life-altering, “triggering” event, could see ghosts. But unlike Joshua (and, so far, Jillian), Ruth made it her mission in life to exorcise the dead. To banish them from the living world forever.
Ruth, and many other Seers, had moved to Wilburton expressly for that purpose, since High Bridge and the river beneath were such hotbeds of ghostly activity. Over time Ruth had earned her place as the cold, unrelenting leader of the Seer community, a role that she happily filled.
Until I came along and ruined everything.
