Betrayal (15 page)

I started to call Natalie back when the front door burst open. I stepped into the foyer, saying, “I was just calling you. Do you remember my friend Abby?”

But it wasn't them. It was Sara, out of breath and frightened, her chestnut hair wildly disarranged. “You have to come right now,” she said.

“Why? What happened?”

She clutched my arm. “It's Harry. He's on the roof at school.”

“If bodysurfing in the freezing ocean didn't bother him—”

“He's not playing this time,” she said, and her voice wavered with fear. “I tried to stop him. I didn't know where else to go. I don't even have my phone with me. You were the closest.”

I pulled the red parka from the closet and slipped into a pair of snow boots. One good thing about becoming a ghostkeeper: I was learning to handle emergency situations. “Where is he, exactly?”

“The roof of the gym. We've been drinking up there between classes. I left him after school, but I started to worry he'd try to drive himself home, so I went back to check on him.”

“And he's still there.”

“He won't come down. He's talking crazy—worse than usual.” She caught me with a desperate gaze. “I drove as fast as I could—I think he's going to jump, Emma. What if he's already—”

Her voice wavered on the edge of hysteria, and I found myself starting to panic. I couldn't take another death. Not Natalie, not Harry. Not any of them. But I still had a chance. One chance.

“He's not going to jump,” I said, pulling the chain that held Emma's ring from around my neck. “I promise.”

Tears streamed down her face. “The last time you promised …”

I'd promised her that I wouldn't hurt Coby. Instead, I got him killed. I swallowed back tears of my own. “This time's going to be different.”

I shoved my finger into the gold band, and the second it crossed my knuckle, I turned into a ghost.

I didn't stay long enough to hear Sara's shriek of surprise. I flew out the front door and over the walls surrounding the museum grounds. Simon had explained that ghosts use some ethereal connection to the Beyond to travel. But even as a ghost, I couldn't venture into the Beyond. Instead, I thought about where I expected to find Harry, and then I was there.

Harry sat on the flat gravel roof, his legs dangling over the edge, wearing a long black wool overcoat. Just sitting there clasping an almost empty bottle of Stoli to his chest and smiling into the emptiness, the saddest smile I'd ever seen.

“I'm sorry,” he said, to the breeze. “I can't do this without you, man. Not even for Sara.”

He thought he was talking to himself, that he was alone—but he wasn't.

Coby sat quietly beside him. He glanced at me, then back to Harry. My appearance as a ghost didn't surprise him. While he'd been possessed by Neos, he'd seen me turn into a ghost.

The hardest thing is not being able to talk to them
, he said.

Yeah.

But you can talk to him. Fix this, Emma.

I nodded and sat on the edge of the roof beside Harry, trying not to look at the ground, still covered in patchy white snow. We were a long way up.

I removed the ring. “Harry.”

Harry started when he saw me. “How did
you
get here?”

“The question is, how did you?”

“I climbed,” he said.

“You know what I mean, Harry.”

He took another swig; then I eased the bottle from him and took his hand. It was like ice, from sitting in the thirty-five-degree weather. We sat there for a while in silence, the three of us watching twilight turn into dusk.

“Nobody understood why we were best friends,” he said. “The All-American Boy and the … me. Whatever I am. But we knew each other, you know? We never had to explain.” He wiped tears from his cheek with his sleeve. “How could I not know how unhappy he was?”

Tell him I wasn't unhappy
, Coby said.

“He wasn't unhappy.”

“Yeah. He killed himself because he was just so damned cheerful.” He laughed, a hollow sound. “That's how I'm going to go, too.”

“He wasn't sad, he wasn't depressed.” I took a deep breath: now for the truth.

Tell him what happened
, Coby nudged, before I could continue.

Gimme a second!

“He didn't kill himself,” I finished. “He's still here.”

“If you say he lives in our memories, I swear I'll take you with me when I jump.”

“That's not what I'm going to say. I …” I shook my head. “You're not going to believe me, not unless I do something pretty ugly.”

Do what?
Coby asked, but I ignored him.

“When I was a kid,” I started, “my parents sent me to an institution. A psych ward.” And I told him the story, from when Neos attacked me as a child, to Coby's death at Redd's Pond. “And here's the thing, Harry. I summoned Coby back. He's a ghost, sitting right next to you.”

There was a gasp behind us, and I turned to see Sara. From the look on her face, she'd heard most of what I'd said.

“What did you do?” she said. “You just disappeared. And now you're saying Coby's a ghost—”

“He's right here, Sara,” Harry said sarcastically, waving his arm through the air beside him, where it went right through Coby. “You just have to
believe
.”

“No, you don't,” I said, removing my gloves and standing behind Coby.

You ready?
I asked him.

For what? Are you going to hurt me?

Not you
, I said, and pushed my hands into his chest.

Back at the mausoleum, when he'd dived through me to break the siren's spell, Coby had shimmered into visibility for a moment. Simon thought that because I summoned Coby—and because I'm
me
—we were linked. Just as Neos and I were linked through my blood, Coby was part of me, part of my energy.

And unlike any other ghost—the house ghosts or Edmund—when Coby's spectral form intersected with my real one, we established an interference pattern. Which made him visible.

For a few seconds, my fingers felt no worse than freezing—then the pain started. It was like holding my palms on a hot stove. Waves of agony passed from my hands into my arms. I clenched my jaw and didn't move. I used just enough compelling energy to prevent Coby from slipping away to save me the pain.

“What the hell?” Sara said.

“Is that …” Harry dropped the bottle of vodka to the ground. “Is that … what
is
that?”

Coby began to glow, his skin and clothing taking a solid presence, his melancholy expression appearing to Harry and Sara.

Harry suddenly looked from my trembling hands directly into Coby's eyes. A look of wonder and joy crossed his face. He opened his mouth, then closed it again without saying anything.

“I can't,” I said, between gritted teeth, “stand this much longer.”

Sara stepped toward Coby, her arms open for an embrace, but Coby raised a hand to stop her.

Say something
, I told Coby.
See if they can hear you.

“Everything Emma says is true.” His voice reverberated across the roof. “I love you both. Stop hurting yourselves. Live your lives the way I'd want you t—”

The pain overcame me, and I released my compulsion on him and jerked my hands away. Except unbinding myself from Coby wasn't so simple: a backlash of power blasted from the spot where we touched, knocked me on my butt, and made Coby fizzle into nothingness.

“Emma!” Sara bent next to me. “My God, your hands!”

I looked at my hands, then quickly away. They were a livid red, puffy and swollen, with blisters already forming.

Sara clasped me by the wrists and helped me to my feet. “We have to get you to the hospital.”

“But Coby—did you see? Do you believe me?”

Harry patted the place where Coby had been. “ ‘There are more things in heaven and earth …' ”

“Harry!” Sara scolded. “Now's not the time for Shakespeare. Help me with Emma. Look at her hands.”

He looked, then blinked. “Good Lord! That's one nasty case of phantasmagorical squirrel pox.”

“Did you see him?” Sara said, suddenly smiling again. “Did you see him?”

“Figures he'd make such an offensively good-looking ghost,” Harry said, in mock disgust. “But we have to take care of the living.”

And to underscore the point, he burped vodka in my face.

Sara peeled out of the school parking lot in her BMW. I looked outside instead of at my throbbing hands as she sped along the narrow village streets to the hospital on the outskirts of town. My breath left steam on the inside of the car window.

“This is insane! How can Coby be a ghost?” Sara glanced in the backseat where Harry was sprawled. “Is he here now?”

“No,” I said. “Can you turn off the heat? The hot air hurts the burns.”

“Oh God, I'm sorry. What happened to your hands?”

“I get burned if I touch ghosts for too long.”

She let out a puff of air. “I just, I can't … he's been watching us, hasn't he? I felt him. I thought I was fooling myself.”

“He's been messing with my playlists,” Harry slurred. “I keep finding his favorite songs cued.”

“One day, I came home and found a whole stack of books on my bed,” Sara said. “Stuff he gave me over the years.”

I smiled. “He misses you guys.”

Sara pulled into the hospital parking lot. “Where do I park?”

“Turn left,” I said. “I was just here with Natalie when she almost drowned.”

“That really happened?” Harry ran a hand over his face. “I thought she was being a drama queen. I'm such an ass.”

“What do you mean, almost drowned?” Sara asked. “When did that happen?”

“At the beach party,” I said. “A ghost tried to drown her.”

“The one that killed Coby?”

“No, but that one sent this one. It's a long story.”

“I can't believe we're talking about ghosts,” Sara said.

“Because you are narrow-minded,” Harry said. “I've spoken to you about that before.”

“Oh shut up—you're drunk. If you were sober, you wouldn't believe a word.” She stopped at the emergency-room entrance. “I can't park here.”

“I'll be fine,” I said, “if you can open the door for me.”

Harry stumbled from the backseat to let me out. When I brushed past him, he fell to the ground.

“Oh God, Harry,” Sara said. “We'll meet you inside, Emma.”

Harry mumbled something cryptic about a bucket and a horse, then threw up in the bushes.

“Just get Harry home,” I told Sara.

“We're not leaving you alone. Not after … everything.”

“Yes, we are,” Harry said, straightening. “Jeeves, take me to rehab!”

“What?” Sara asked. “Are you serious?”

“Cross my heart and hope to—” He peered around. “Is he still here?”

I shook my head. “Nope.”

“In that case, I'm deadly serious. Serious as a heart attack. I need rehab, stat. They have a room with my name on the door.” The manic light faded from his face. “And damn, if you don't take me now, I might start thinking I don't need to go.”

Sara glanced at me.

“You know he needs to,” I said.

Sara nodded and started to grab my hand, then remembered and touched my arm instead. “Emma … I'm sorry. We both are.”

“I'm not!” Harry insisted. “I'm magnificent.”

We ignored him, and I smiled at Sara, with tears in my eyes. Then they drove off and I stumbled into the emergency room. The double doors went
swish
and I caught the eye of a passing nurse.

I showed her my hands and said, “Ow.”

15

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.”