Hourglass (21 page)

In the mist, a face began to take shape. A girl, perhaps my age, with short, fair hair—whom I’d seen many times before.

“The wraith.” My words sounded real to me now, although I didn’t think any living person could hear me. “You’re the wraith. I didn’t recognize you before.”

“I’m hardly the only wraith,” she said. Her smile was thin and sort of smug; right now, I wanted nothing more than to slap it off her face. “And, yeah, we sound different on the other side, don’t we? Like ourselves.”

“What’s happening to me?” I demanded. “Am I really dead? If so, are you keeping me from—from going to heaven or into the light or just going to sleep, whatever it is people are supposed to do after they die?”

She stroked the mist around us with a wide sweep of her arms, clearing the swirling fog. “There are plenty of choices, you know. And I’m not holding you back from any of them.”

Now that the fog had cleared, I realized I could see beneath us. We seemed to be suspended above the trees outside the house. Movement below caught my attention—Lucas and Balthazar, driving their shovels into the earth, hard at work digging my grave.

“This was my dream.” If only I could have wept. I needed to cry so badly. “One of the dreams I had about you—Do you remember them?”

“Of course not.” She looked almost offended. “They were
your
dreams. Your visions of the future. I wouldn’t have anything to do with them. If you saw me, it’s the same way you saw them—as part of what’s to come.”

“You said I didn’t want to know what they were doing. Because if I’d looked that hard—I would have foreseen my own death.”

The wraith cocked her head, and her fair hair ruffled in some unseen breeze. “It’s time for you to forget about the life you lost. It’s time to embrace your future.”

“Forget? You think I could forget Lucas? And what kind of future am I supposed to have when I’m
dead
?” The mist thickened around us, blotting her out. “Leave me alone.”

Then I thought of Lucas and willed myself to his side.
I’m coming back to you, I promise. I’m here!

The mist vanished. I found myself in the clearing behind the Woodsons’ property, looking down at a small mound of earth. Balthazar patted the surface of the dirt down with the back of his shovel while Lucas knelt by the grave. I could smell the sweat from their skin, the loamy scents of the soil and summer grass. The sky had lightened to a soft pink. A new day had started, without me.

Lucas bowed his head, weighed down by misery. Witnessing him like that was more than I could endure.

Please see me
, I thought. I concentrated on all the sights and smells around me, on everything that was real and solid. I made myself part of the world.
Lucas, please see me, please, please
—“Lucas!”

Both of them jumped backward. Lucas said, “Did you hear that?”

Balthazar nodded. “It—it sounded like—It can’t be.”

Yes! I had it. Focusing even harder on the here and now, I put every ounce of my will into the memory of how my body had felt. How I had looked. For a moment, I could feel myself again—phantom limbs, phantom hair—and both Lucas and Balthazar gasped. They’d seen me!

But my elation distracted me, and I knew I’d faded from their sight almost instantly. Could I do it again? I wasn’t entirely sure how I’d managed it the first time. Being dead was
hard.

“Balthazar,” Lucas said, “have I gone crazy?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So you saw her, too?”

“Yeah.” Comprehension swept over Balthazar’s face, but whatever revelation he’d had didn’t look like a good one. “Oh, my God.”

“What? What do you know?” Lucas said.

Balthazar started pacing beside the grave “If Bianca was born because some wraith helped out two vampires—”

“Right,” Lucas said.

“And one of the options for her future was becoming a full vampire—”

“Yeah,” Lucas said. His eyes widened.

“Then the other option must have been for her—not simply to die but to become a wraith. That’s why the Oliviers were so frantic for her to change. The alternative to being a vampire was
never for Bianca to live as a human being. It was always for her to become a wraith.” Balthazar blinked at the spot where they’d briefly glimpsed me. “And now she has.”

I really wanted Balthazar to be wrong, but unfortunately, every word he’d said made sense.

“See?” The wraith—the other wraith, I should say—seemed to drift beside me. “It’s like we always tried to tell you.”

I said, “What do you mean, ‘always tried to tell me’?”

“You remember.” She smiled triumphantly, and in that smile I saw the message I’d been given at Evernight Academy, in letters engraved in frost.
“Ours.”

SO, THE WRAITHS THOUGHT THEY COULD CLAIM me for their own? Well, they were wrong, and I intended to prove it.

“I’m not yours,” I said to the wraith who floated in front of me. She wore a white, filmy sort of dress, maybe an old-fashioned nightgown; I wondered if it was what she’d died in. If so, I was stuck in a white camisole and blue cotton pajama bottoms with little clouds on them for all eternity. I looked down and saw the pajama bottoms, slightly translucent like the rest of me but definitely the same. Great. “I belong to myself. That’s it.”

“But you’re one of us now.” Her aqua-green face shone in the soft dawn light. “Don’t you see how much better this is?”

Lucas turned to Balthazar. “If she’s a ghost—a wraith—then how do we contact her?”

“I’m right here!” I called. But they didn’t hear.

Balthazar looked entirely lost for words. “I don’t—vampires
and wraiths—we learn how to avoid them, not how to talk to them.”

“Who would know?” Lucas’s eyes were desperate. “Is there a way? Any way? I don’t know of one—maybe there isn’t one—Dammit, there’s got to be one. Gotta be.” He glanced down at the grave, and then shut his eyes tightly.

“I’m thinking, okay?” Balthazar didn’t look much more encouraged than Lucas. “Do you know anybody in Black Cross who could tell us something?”

Lucas groaned. “Plenty of people. None of whom I can ever speak to again. Except—maybe—”

He was considering it—seriously considering reaching out to Black Cross, although the hunters might well be under orders to kill him on sight.
Oh, no
, I thought.
Lucas can’t do that. He’s upset, he’s confused, it’s a terrible idea—

The world dissolved into bluish fog again, and I lost any sense of a corporeal body. Although in some ways that sensation was liberating—kind of like flying in dreams—I didn’t enjoy not having a body. Bodies were good. Bodies told you where you were and what you could do. Already I seriously missed having one I could rely on.

As I attempted to pull myself into some kind of shape, the wraith coalesced beside me in the mist. “You’ll actually learn to have fun with this in time. But it takes some getting used to.”

“I’m not getting used to it today.” When I spoke only to her, the words had begun to feel like talking—even if nothing was actually said aloud. “We have to discuss what’s happened to me.”

“So, talk.”

“Not while we’re—floaty and lost and whatever! Take me someplace real. Someplace we can both be real.”

“Fine, be that way.”

In the blink of an eye, the mist vanished. She and I stood in the attic of Vic’s house, not far from the dressmaker’s dummy, which still wore its jaunty plumed hat. I could smell the musty old books and see the clutter piled high—although a little less, since he’d provisioned our wine-cellar home. The wooden slats of the floor showed vividly through our translucent feet.

She smiled at me, still smirking a bit. The wraith could have been pretty, if it hadn’t been for the expressions on her face. Her fair hair was stick straight and cut short in a bob. She had a narrow chin, a strong nose, and sharp, knowing eyes. It startled me to realize that she was probably a year or two younger than I was.

Well, that she’d been a year or two younger when she died. For the first time, I realized I would never get any older. That somehow felt more final than all the rest.

The wraith said, “I’m Maxie O’Connor. I died here almost ninety years ago. I’ve haunted this house ever since. You’ll feel drawn to this place, too, since you died here and everything, but I’m telling you right now, this house is mine. I let you guys camp in the basement as a favor to Vic, but that’s all. Visit, don’t stay.”

Like I’d even want to visit. Her name sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it and didn’t much care. “You’re a wraith.”
The next part was hard to say, but I managed it: “Like me.”

Maxie nodded.

Ugh—a wraith. I’d learned to hate and fear the wraiths during my last year at Evernight Academy. As far as I could tell, all they did was frighten and torment people. The one in Raquel’s house had been a true monster. Now I was one of them. The revulsion I felt cut me deeply; it was like it would’ve been better to be nothing at all. For the first time, I truly understood Lucas’s resistance to becoming a vampire. Turning into something I’d never meant to be—never wanted to be—meant losing something important about myself, maybe losing myself entirely. He’d seen that all along.

Despite my dying hopes, I had to ask: “And there’s—there’s no way back? To being alive, I mean.”

“Oh, yeah, it’s easy as pie.” Maxie smirked. “You just snap your fingers. That’s how come I didn’t change back to being human years ago.”

“You don’t have to be sarcastic.”

“True. I don’t have to. I threw that in at no extra charge.”

Maxie had been the wraith who had attempted to kill me at school. I now realized that might have been the high point of our relationship. Then I thought about that for a second. “Wait—I saw you at Evernight Academy. Repeatedly. How could you be there when you were haunting this house?”

Like it was the most obvious thing in the world, Maxie said, “Vic, of course. I’m connected to him, and he traveled to Evernight. From there, I was able to contact you.”

“You’re Vic’s ghost.” I remembered how fond he’d been of Maxie. Obviously he hadn’t interacted with her very much.

“Why don’t you just appear to him outright?”

“It’s difficult to appear to the living. Those two guys downstairs—”

“Lucas and Balthazar.”

“Lucas I knew, but not the vampire. They’re hot, by the way. And you had them both on the string? Nice job.”

I ignored that comment. “You don’t talk like somebody who lived ninety years ago.”

“I’ve spent the past seventeen years hanging out with Vic.”

“That would explain it,” I muttered.

She continued, “Well, the guys downstairs—you can appear to them because you seem to be powerfully emotionally connected to them both. That usually helps. Even then, it’s usually not a sure thing. With Vic—” Maxie hesitated, and I realized that this subject was delicate for her, though she evidently didn’t want me to see it. “I didn’t meet him until years and years after I died. He grew up in this house.”

“And he used to read stories to you, when he was little,” I said.

“He told you that?” She didn’t quite know how to keep talking, after that. If ghosts could blush, I suspected she’d be brilliant pink. “Well. Yeah. So, maybe I could materialize for him now. But at this point, I think it would scare Vic.” More quietly, she added, “I don’t want him scared of me.”

“You didn’t worry about scaring me,” I said angrily. “You
appeared to me at Evernight—a lot of you did—and you frightened me out of my wits every time. You nearly killed me twice, and one of those times was definitely on purpose. So forgive me if I don’t think you’re actually that softhearted.”

She looked angry. “But you were ours! You were always ours!”

“Stop saying that!” I wished I could’ve hit her, but I suspected my hand would whoosh right through her incorporeal body, which would both be unsatisfying and deeply creepy.

“It’s true!” Her blue eyes blazed. Maxie was obviously somebody who could not be pushed. “You were born to be a wraith! And not just any wraith but one of the pure ones. Okay? You’ve got it good. You’re strong. Your power can help the others. The wraiths need you, and your parents wanted to go back on their word and steal you from us.”

“First of all, giving a person another choice isn’t stealing.”

Maxie cocked her head. “But your parents didn’t give you that choice, did they?”

“Neither did you, so stop acting high and mighty about it.” My mind whirled from all the new facts I had to process. “One of the—pure ones? You mean, one of the children born to vampires, one the wraiths created, right?”

“About time you caught on.”

Maxie could tell me a lot, I realized; she offered the answers I’d waited for my whole life. But she wasn’t ever going to be a friend. For her, I suspected, I was a means to an end.

To what end?

“Other ghosts need—ghosts like me,” I said. When Maxie nodded, I continued, “To help them do what exactly?”

“You make us stronger. You help us materialize, so we can connect with the world again.” Maxie drifted along the length of the attic. Her feet didn’t touch the floor, which startled me, although I couldn’t have said why. “Stop with the self-pity and imagine what it would be like, months and years and centuries of only that blue mist. That’s how it is for some of us. The ones who get lost like that—they’ll do anything, anything to take form again. Sometimes they can only do it by attaching themselves to people’s fear and making it worse. But most wraiths want another choice. Another way. You can give them that.”

I remembered the ghost who had tormented Raquel for so much of her life. Had hurting her been his only way to escape from a prison of mist? Was he one of the wraiths who had made the wrong choice?

Maxie added, “When we’re around you, a lot of us, we can do many things we wouldn’t be able to do alone. Like, all of us were able to appear to you at Evernight, even though we had to push through the barriers. You weren’t a full wraith yet, but that power was still inside you.”

“So, basically, I was born and died so you guys could have some extra batteries.” How was that news supposed to make me feel better? “I don’t have to help any of you. I’m going back to Lucas.”

“Will you just wait? Please?”

Maxie faded almost to transparency, and in the few shadows of her face that I could still discern, I could see how hurt she looked. After almost a century in Vic’s attic, she was probably lonely. And maybe she’d been dead so long that she’d forgotten how terrible it was. My pity didn’t outweigh my caution, though.

“If you need a friend,” I said slowly, “you have to act like one.”

The attic, and Maxie, disappeared. This time, the fog hardly seemed to close around me before I found myself back where I wanted to be—with Lucas.

In the blink of an eye, I had returned to the wine cellar, where Lucas and Balthazar sat at the small table. They looked even more exhausted than they had before. Lucas leaned against the green wall, stubble shading his angled jaw. The dark circles beneath his eyes made it look as if he’d been beaten up. Next to him, Balthazar leaned his forearms on the table, and his head drooped forward.

Neither of them could see me, apparently. I was so happy to see them that I couldn’t even be upset about my invisibility.

My hearing kicked in mid-sentence, as Balthazar said, “—phone call, maybe, or a letter. That might be a smarter move.”

Lucas shook his head. “The cells move around too much to be sure of a letter, and she lost her cell phone during Mrs. Bethany’s attack. Four hundred years old, and you never bothered learning anything about the guys who hunt you?”

He was baiting Balthazar, like he always did, but the sting in the words was gone. Their old rivalry had become no more than a reflex for them.

Balthazar ran his finger along the wall of the wine cellar, tracing an irregular shape—movement without purpose. “You said Black Cross tracked e-mail, too.”

“Yeah, but I can at least be sure Mom will get the e-mail. If she knows something—maybe even if she doesn’t—she’ll come.”

Then Lucas shivered, and his eyes narrowed. “You feel that?”

He knows me! Lucas knows I’m here!

“Yes.” Balthazar turned to search the room, and I hoped against hope that he’d catch a glimpse of me. But his gaze traveled past the spot where I felt myself to be. “I think she’s back.”

“It’s definitely Bianca,” Lucas said, after a pause.

“I agree. It—it
feels
like Bianca. And that perfume she used to wear sometimes, the stuff with the gardenias—”

“Yeah.” Lucas glanced over at Balthazar, obviously not thrilled that somebody else could recognize the scent I’d worn. But he seemed more relieved than angry. Maybe the most important thing for Lucas now was having someone who could convince him that the haunting was real, and not evidence that he was going crazy.

“Is it any consolation?” Balthazar asked quietly. “Knowing that something of her lives on?”

“What do you think?”

Balthazar sighed. “No, of course not.”

“I want her
here
.” Lucas slumped forward onto the table. “I keep thinking, if I want it bad enough, if I just figure out how, I can undo everything that’s happened and go back to when she’s safe. Like this can’t possibly be for real.”

“I remember that feeling.” Balthazar lifted his head and stretched his shoulders, grimacing as though it hurt. “After Charity—after what I did to her—I wanted it not to have happened so badly that it seemed impossible I couldn’t make it right. I couldn’t make myself believe that the universe could work so differently from the way it should work. Obviously, I know better now.”

Lucas frowned. I realized what he was going to say.
No, no, Lucas, don’t, you remember what this does to him, don’t!

“Charity’s in town,” Lucas said.

So much for telepathy.

Balthazar straightened in his chair. “You’ve heard rumors, found evidence of the tribe—”

“No, we got kidnapped by the tribe about a week before Bianca—about a week ago.” Lucas swallowed hard, then kept going. “Charity was hot to turn Bianca into a vampire. She had some stupid idea that it would make you and her and Bianca one big happy undead family.”

“She was going to kill Bianca?” Balthazar looked so wounded, so disappointed in her. Despite the ample evidence that Charity was a psychopath, he still believed in his sister and loved her as much as ever. His faith would have been touching,
I decided, if it hadn’t been so willfully blind. “You rescued her, though.”

Lucas shook his head. “The ghosts did that.”

“The wraiths
saved
you?”

“That’s what it seemed like at the time.” Lucas’s gaze became more distant. “Now I see it, though. What they were really doing was making sure Bianca would die when they wanted, the way they wanted. So they’d get their prize. If Charity had done it, she’d have been doing us a big favor.”