Queen of the Dead (15 page)

She nodded slowly, not convinced. “It’s hard to know what her experience has been since she hasn’t started talking yet.…”

And if I was talking, I’d be finding one of many ways to tell him to…“Go away.” The words escaped my lips, shocking me more than anyone. I’d been thinking them hard enough to actually give them voice. Lily’s voice, in fact, which was lower and huskier than my own.

“Lily!” Mrs. Turner sounded both thrilled and horrified.

“It’s okay,” he said with a laugh that sounded more like a nervous dog’s bark than anything related to true humor. “For someone who’s been through as much as your daughter, I certainly understand wanting to be left alone. She deserves some peace, and it’s up to the rest of us to make sure she gets it,” he said, his stare boring through me like a warning.

Was he attempting to threaten me with an exorcism? Ha, bring it. Except…wait, what happened to exorcized spirits? If it was just getting me out of Lily, fine. But if it was intended to get rid of me by sending me into oblivion? No, thanks.

“Um, yes,” Mrs. Turner said, now sounding flustered herself. “Speaking of which, it’s probably best if she focuses on getting some rest now.”

In other words,
leave
, dude.

He nodded, getting the message. Finally.

“A quick blessing, first?” he asked, but he was already standing over me before either of us could answer. His thumb, cool and kind of clammy, traced a cross on my forehead lightly while he murmured words of blessing.

He jerked his hand back as soon as he was finished, as though he expected me to go up in flames. And frankly, I wasn’t sure that he was wrong. Except that I’d been in the light once and then I’d been sent back here, not wiped out of existence. So, I couldn’t be so bad, right?

In any case, nothing happened, which seemed to confuse him. And it was probably a good thing I didn’t have more control over Lily’s body because I might have been tempted to throw myself around a bit on the bed, just to mess with him.

Mrs. Turner stood up. “Thank you so much, Father. We certainly appreciate your time.”

He nodded again and slowly backed toward the door until he’d gotten some distance from me. Then and only then did he turn and leave the room, rather abruptly and without another word.

She sighed and sank back down into her chair. “Sometimes I just don’t know where they find these people who work for the church.”

I waited until I was pretty sure the priest was gone. “Call Will’s house,” I said, carefully enunciating, but even still, the
S
s dragged out too long.

Mrs. Turner tipped her head at me. “You’re a regular chatterbox now, Lils.”

“Call.”

“Lily, it is four in the morning,” she said with exasperation. “I’m not going to call their house and wake everyone up.”

Except I happened to know that Julia worked the early morning shift at the diner most days and was likely already up anyway. “Please. Need Will.”

She softened. “I’ll call when it’s reasonable, after eight at the earliest.” She reached out and squeezed my hand with a reassuring smile. “But, honey, what you need to tell him, I’m sure he already knows.”

I seriously doubted that.

“W
here is she?” A loud female voice demanded, and for a second, I thought Alona had somehow found out about Mina already and was preparing to do some damage to one or both of us.

But when I forced my sleep-gritty eyes open, it wasn’t Alona, but Liesel standing in my bedroom just in front of my door. My
closed
door. You’d think she’d have taken that as a hint, but I’d long ago learned ghosts weren’t much on subtlety.

I groaned. It was early—the sky outside my windows still a predawn gray—and two nights of little or no sleep was beginning to wear on me and my patience. “What do you want, Liesel?”

She folded her arms over her chest and stalked to the foot of my bed, her dress rustling loudly. “She didn’t even talk to you about us, did she?”

I struggled to focus and sit up. “Who?”

“Alona!”

Something about this was ringing a bell, dimly. Alona
had
mentioned something about Liesel yesterday morning, but nothing specific. I shook my head.

“I knew it,” she spat. “She’s always sabotaging me. I bet she didn’t even tell you about Claire and Todd.”

Todd? Who was Todd?
No, I did not care. I wasn’t awake enough yet to care. I rubbed my hands over my face. “Where’s Eric?” I asked, realizing suddenly that he wasn’t with her. No one has ever accused me of being my best in the morning.

She looked away with a sniff. “He couldn’t be bothered. I don’t know why; it’s only our whole afterlife at stake.”

Or maybe he knew something she didn’t, which I suspected to be the case. Eric and I had had a couple of conversations over the last few weeks—usually while Liesel and Alona were sniping at each other—which had led me to believe that Mrs. Pederson and her love life (or lack thereof ) might not be Liesel and Eric’s biggest obstacle.

“You need to talk to Eric,” I said wearily, “and you need to not be here when Alona shows up.” Because I seriously did not want to witness the inevitable fallout when Alona discovered Liesel had come here without permission.

I glanced at my clock to see how much time was left, and stopped dead. It was 7:58 a.m.

I felt a surge of alarm and leaned closer to make sure I was reading it correctly. I was. Another check of the window revealed rain on the glass. What I’d taken for early morning was, in fact, just the start to an overcast day.

“What’s wrong with you?” Liesel asked with great disdain.

“Did you see Alona?” I demanded. “Was she here?”

“This morning?” she asked.

I nodded, feeling like my head might bobble off in my anxiousness to answer and get her response.

“I just walked in a few minutes ago. Nobody was here but you,” she said, staring at me as if I was crazy.

But I wasn’t. Alona was late, fifty-five minutes to be exact, and that
never
happened. It couldn’t. She showed up here every morning at precisely 7:03 a.m., the time ofher death. It was a function of our ghost-talker/spirit guide bond.

Something was wrong. Fighting a feeling of panic, I stood up, snatched my jeans from the floor, pulled them on, and started tearing through the laundry on the floor, looking for my shoes. They seemed to have disappeared into one pile or another last night when I’d kicked them off.

“What is going on?” Liesel asked.

“Alona’s missing,” I said grimly. She’d left here yesterday all full of fire and some kind of plan for vengeance (against me, of course). Something must have happened. I envisioned her seeking out Mina to tell her exactly what she thought about Mina’s hair, among other things.

Oh, God. That would probably get her boxed for sure. But Mina would have mentioned an event like that last night, wouldn’t she have? Or maybe not—considering all that had happened. I could easily see Mina waiting to drop that little tidbit of information at exactly the time that would benefit her the most.

“How do you know she didn’t just quit?” Liesel asked.

I stopped my frantic search for footwear and looked up at her. “What do you mean?”

She shrugged. “Alona shows up here every morning because she’s your spirit guide, right?

“Yeah, so?”

“So, maybe she’s not here because she quit.” Liesel sounded a little too self-satisfied.

“And
why
would she do that?” I asked through gritted teeth.

“Because I told her one day you were going to toss her over for someone who was alive, that she was just convenient for now,” Liesel said.

“Damn it, Liesel!” I couldn’t believe this.

“What? That’s not true?” She eyed me shrewdly. “You know it is. You aren’t going to spend the rest of your life—”

“My life is none of your business,” I snapped. “When did this happen?

“Two nights ago.”

No wonder she’d reacted so badly yesterday morning, with Liesel filling her head with all this crap. Not that Alona ever would have been happy that I’d been out with Mina or that I was turning down her request about her parents, but she might not have been quite as apoplectic about it.

“This is your fault,” I said to Liesel, pointing the one Chuck I’d managed to find, so far, at her.

“Me?” she asked, laying an offended hand on her chest. “What did I do?”

A knock sounded at the door. “Will, is everything okay in there?” my mom asked. “I heard shouting.”

I grimaced. Of course; the one morning she didn’t have the early shift at the diner. “I’m fine. I’ll be right out,” I called, and then stepped closer to Liesel. “You haven’t seen Alona since?” I asked in a quieter voice.

“Would I be here looking for her if I had?” she asked in a rather snotty tone.

Fine. Whatever. I sat down to jam my shoe on, and by virtue of sheer luck, discovered my missing one by sitting on it. Excellent.

I needed to find Alona to make sure she was all right, at least. If, after that, she still didn’t want to be my spirit guide…well, then, I’d have to deal with that when the time came. Just the idea, though, of her not being in my life was hard to imagine, and I didn’t
want
to imagine it. I would miss her.

Ask me if I’d ever thought that would be possible a year ago. Hell, two months ago.

The trouble was, I had no idea where to begin searching for her. In theory, if she’d resigned as my spirit guide—could she even do that without me being aware of it?—then she’d probably woken up back on Henderson Street where she’d died. But that had been almost an hour ago. She could be anywhere by now.

My mom knocked again.

“Mom, I said I’m okay,” I said, struggling to keep the irritation out of my voice.

“It’s not that,” she said, opening the door. She looked pale, standing there in a tattered plaid flannel robe with the house phone clutched to her chest. I hadn’t even heard it ring.

“Is everything all right?” I asked, with the sudden sick assurance that it wasn’t.

She nodded, her eyes bright with tears. “It’s the hospital. St. Catherine’s.”

Oh. Oh, no. Lily.
It felt like all the air had knocked out of me suddenly, even though I’d been expecting this call for months now. I nodded numbly. “When did she die? Last night or—”

“No, no, sweetie.” My mother swept into the room and knelt to give me a one-armed hug. “It’s not that. She’s awake! Lily’s awake.”

I stared at her. “Lily Turner?”

My mother laughed. Her tears had clearly been of the happy variety. “Of course. How many other Lilys do you know?” She held the receiver out to me. “Her mother’s on the phone. She says Lily has been asking for you.”

But that was just not possible. I’d looked everywhere for her spirit after that accident. Lily was gone. Not dead, but certainly not alive and definitely not capable of waking up and asking for me.

And yet, I doubted that her mother, Mrs. Turner, would ever in a million years make something like that up.

So…what did that leave? I had no idea.

My head swimming, I stood up and took the phone.

“You.” I pointed at Liesel. “Don’t go anywhere.” She’d helped cause this problem with Alona; she would help me solve it, by God.

My mom raised her eyebrows at me but said nothing.

Liesel flung herself, sulking, down at the foot of my bed, “Whatever. You better be ready to help Eric and me after this. This thing with Todd isn’t going to last forever.”

Todd again, whoever the hell he was. I ignored her and put the phone to my ear.

“Hello?”

“Will, it’s Mrs. Turner. Lily would like to—”

In the background, I could hear a ruckus, a familiar voice, one I hadn’t heard in almost a year and thought I’d never hear again, saying something in a demanding tone. It sent a chill over my skin. If I’d been wrong about Lily’s spirit being gone, God, what else had I been wrong about? I’d been so sure.…

“In a minute, Lily,” Mrs. Turner said, sounding slightly muffled.

“She’s still a little hard to understand sometimes,” Mrs. Turner said to me. “But we’re working on it. She’s been asking for you, pretty much since the moment she woke up. I made her wait until it was a decent hour, and as you can hear, she’s not happy with me.” And yet the joy in Mrs. Turner’s voice, that her daughter was awake and annoyed with her, was evident.

“I’ll put her on now,” she said. The phone rattled a little, and I heard Mrs. Turner say, “Here you go, honey,” in the distance.

“Will?”

Even though I’d been expecting it, hearing Lily say my name sucked the air out of my lungs and made my eyes sting with tears.

“Yeah,” I managed.

“I need to see you.” She was enunciating carefully, but other than that she sounded almost, well, normal. “Can you come to St. Catherine’s, please? Now?”

I heard her mother admonishing her in the background for the demand. But Lily persisted. “Now?”

“I’m on my way,” I said.

Lily Turner had moved to Groundsboro about a year and half ago from a small town in Indiana. With her conservative clothes and heavy, almost southern accent, she hadn’t fit in at our school, which worked out well, since neither had I. Most people had assumed I was goth. In truth, I was just trying to be as invisible as possible. Dark clothes, earbuds in all the time, quiet in class—it was my way of disappearing. I’d been trying to avoid attracting the attention of all the ghosts wandering the halls, but it had worked equally well at repelling most of the living as well.

I liked Lily, though. She was different. I’d been going toschool with the same people since kindergarten, and most ofthe time it was like they’d all been brainwashed by the samecult leader. Any sparks of real personality were snuffed out by the need for conformity within all the little individual cliques. Jocks wore their letter jackets on certain days. The band kids created goofy T-shirts with sayings nobody else understood. Alona’s crowd rose to the top by shoving everyone else down.

But Lily was an outsider. She asked smart questions and really listened to the answers, offering opinions that might not have been the “right” ones. She didn’t know the right ones, not for our school. Not in the beginning, at least.

She was pretty, too, though not in the same fantasy crush way Alona was. She was more like the girl you’d want as your lab partner and your date for Homecoming, even if all you were going to do was sit at a table in the back and watch with amusement as the popular girls wept and raged over their loss in the race for queen.

At one point, I’d thought there might be something between us, a chance for it to be more than friends.

In the end, though, things had changed, the way they always do. Lily had harbored a secret obsession with the first-tier (a.k.a. popular people)—seeing them like Hollywood royalty. In the beginning, I think it was just because she’d never seen anything like them before, except in television and movies. Her high school had consisted of a hundred kids total, and they’d known one another since birth. So, pretty much all the mystery and intrigue was gone. But not here at Groundsboro High: here we had mystery, intrigue, and drama—oh, the never-ending drama—to spare. It was like watching a soap opera play out before your very eyes…or living in one.

Unbeknownst to me, our mutual friend Joonie, one of Lily’s only other friends, had had a crush on Lily from day one. She took a chance one afternoon and confessed her feelings to Lily with a kiss. Though Lily tried to handle it the right way and let Joonie down kindly, Joonie’s home life (nothing was ever good enough for her controlling and conservative minister father) was such shit that she kind of freaked, afraid her dad would find out what had happened.

Accusations and threats were made, and the two of them stopped speaking without ever telling me what had happened. Lily left us and started hanging about the edges of the popular crowd, seeking scraps of their begrudging acceptance. And then Ben Rogers, dickhead extraordinaire, had plucked her out of obscurity. He “dated” her for about a month, and then he dumped her publicly at a first-tier party.

Lily had been devastated, realizing finally that Ben and his crowd weren’t as wonderful as everyone seemed to think. She’d left that party in tears and tried to call both Joonie and me on her way home. Then she’d missed a turn on her drive and slammed into a tree. She’d never woken up from that night.