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He stared sadly at the part of the sidewalk I’d been talking to. “I wish I could see them.”

I wished he could, too. If ghosts could hang out together, they’d be less lonely, and they wouldn’t be so desperate for living company. Then again, they might stick around that much longer.

“Let’s do this,” Logan said with quiet determination. “I want my afterlife to be more than a rehash. I want it to mean something, and not just for me. But it’s gotta be all on my terms, like that lady promised. No DMP recruitment commercials, just our own music and the covers we pick.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Dylan asked.

“My new band. Let’s put an ad online. Here, I’ll tell you what to say.” While Dylan scrambled for his phone, Logan barreled ahead.
“‘Ghost front man seeking talented, all-post-Shifter band.’” He drew his hand across the air, as if the words would be written on a movie theater marquee.

“Wait, wait.” Dylan thumbed the text into his notepad function.

Logan started to pace and gesture, the old excitement returning. “Let’s say, ‘Preferably punk, but accept alt-rock or alt-metal. Covers, originals. Performance experience preferred.’ No—‘required.’”

My stomach queased as I watched Logan plan his next leap into the public eye. He’d be dragging me with him again.

Dylan spoke as he got it down. “Should I give them my cell number?”

“No, some of them might be weird. Oh! You know what’d be better?” Logan jabbed his finger at Dylan’s phone. “Have them e-mail links to their clips or videos. That way we can tell if they suck, and I won’t have to reject them in person.” He bounced on his toes. “This’ll be so cool. I bet we’ll get a ton of auditions.”

“E-mail them to who? Me or Aura?”

“Aura, would you—” Logan stopped short when he saw the look on my face. “Dylan, go inside. Tell them we’ll be in soon.”

Dylan sighed, then snapped his phone shut. “Send the kid away. What else is new?”

I watch him go, then whirled on Logan. “Thanks for remembering your new career might have a teeny effect on me.”

“You don’t have to be a part of this.”

“Yes, I do! Everything you say to the press has to come through me. That DMP lady can keep things under control, but only I can keep you from ruining my life.” I slapped my hand against the brick building. “Great start, by the way, showing up here tonight. Why didn’t you
warn me, or better yet, do what you were told and stay home?”

“Because I didn’t—” Logan shoved his hands against his scalp. “Because I knew you’d tell me not to come.” He clasped his hands behind his head. “I’m sorry for dragging you into all this shit again. Let’s just forget it.”

“No. This is too important, to you and all the ghosts who need help.” I knew that not just any ghost could change the world. The same charm and energy that would’ve made Logan a rock star in life could make him a hero after death. “Besides, maybe you need to do this to pass on.”

“I need to do something bigger than myself.”

“Whoa, he finally admits there is such a thing. Alert the media.”

“No, don’t alert the media.” He grinned at me. “Wouldn’t want to ruin my diva reputation.” When I didn’t return his smile, he dropped his hands to his sides. “I really screwed up tonight, didn’t I?”

“Yeah.”

He stepped closer, his violet form reflecting in the pub’s front window. “Can you forgive me?”

I gritted my teeth. “You know not to ask me that while I’m still mad.”

“Sorry.” He brushed his ethereal hand over my arm. “Do you still love me?”

“I’ll always love you, Logan.” I moved around him, heading for the front door. “But right now, I don’t really like you.”

I
flopped into the low seat of Zachary’s Mini Cooper, collapsing under the weight of my layered clothing.

“Warm enough?” he cracked as he examined my parka and heavy gloves.

“They call it a killing frost for a reason.” I noticed his hands were bare, though the car’s heat was off. “It’s supposed to be spring, but this is colder than it was most of the winter.”

“At least the sky will be clear.”

Great, we’d been reduced to talking about the weather. I pulled up my hood, far enough so I couldn’t see him from the corner of my eye. As the drive passed in silence, I kept my hands folded in my lap to keep from switching on the radio. Even the Spanish-speaking GPS would’ve been a relief, but Zachary didn’t need directions to our monthly place of work.

We didn’t speak again until we got to our sky-mapping site, a small grassy strip next to a field in northern Baltimore County. As we parked alongside the mile-long lane to the farmer’s house, I noticed that wheat was starting to shoot up from the field. I wondered if it could survive the freezing night—or if
I
could, for that matter.

We laid out our blanket, then I opened our star map portfolio, my gloved fingers fumbling with the tie.

Zachary slid a piece of paper in front of me. I held it up to the flashlight, which had a red-painted lens to protect our night vision.

It was a website printout, listing the exact minutes of the last several solstices and equinoxes. Zachary had highlighted the two most recent in orange.

December 21: 10:14 p.m.

March 21: 12:05 a.m.

“Was he with you then?” Zachary asked.

I nodded, stunned into muteness. Zachary’s theory seemed true. Last Thursday night, Logan had come through my window as a shade, then turned to a ghost, then become human. All at the time of the equinox.

If it happened once, it could happen again, on the summer solstice. Theoretically.

“I’ll draw.” Zachary unfolded the portfolio in front of him. “You find the stars.”

I located the first half-dozen constellations while he sketched out the celestial equator and the ecliptic, the course that the zodiac, the
sun, and the planets traveled—sort of a superhighway in the sky.

“Leo’s a new one this time.” I leaned across him to point to the eastern edge of the star map. “So the brightest star, Alpha Leo, is—”

“Regulus,” he said. “The Lion’s Heart. It’s actually a triple star.”

I checked the constellation book for Beta Leo, the second-brightest star in the constellation. “Next is—”

“Denebola, in the tail. Got it.”

I thumped the book down in front of me. “Well, you seem to know it all, as usual, so I’ll just wait in the car, where it’s half a degree above freezing.”

“Go on, then, if it’s that bad.”

So much for clearing the air. He wouldn’t even take my bait to pick a fight.

Would we be like this until the end of the year? All week in school, I’d bolted every time we came near each other. But sitting with him now in the dark, watching his fingertips trace precise arcs across the paper, and seeing the familiar angles of his face in the flashlight’s deep red glow, made me want to do the exact opposite of running away.

He set the pencil in the center of the portfolio. “I’m sorry I was so harsh with you the other night.”

I clenched my jaw to stop my teeth chattering, from the cold and from surprise. “I deserved it.”

“You were honest with me.”

“Lying always makes things worse.”

“That doesn’t stop people from doing it.”

“So you forgive me?” I asked.

“There’s nought to forgive. You’re not my girlfriend. You can do what you want with whoever you want.”

I want you.
But to tell him that now, after admitting I’d almost had sex with my temporarily reanimated sort-of-ex-boyfriend, seemed really inappropriate.

It was the truth, though. And if I had the guts to confess what happened with Logan, I could find the courage to ask Zachary to the prom. Even though he’d probably say no.

“Becca said yes, by the way.”

My insides turned as cold as the air around me. “To the prom?”

“She says she likes Italian food, so if you could recommend a restaurant …” He glanced at me. “Besides the one we went to.”

My mouth opened, but the only word I could think of was
NO
.

He picked up the pencil. “Never mind, I’ll look it up.”

“If you want traditional,” I rushed out, “go to Da Mimmo’s. But Becca probably likes cutting-edge fusion-y food, so maybe take her to Milan on Eastern Avenue.”

“Thanks very much.” His voice was void of anticipation, like he was planning a business meeting. “I want it to be nice. It’s her last prom and probably my only one, if my dad and I go back to the UK in June.”

One word cut through the sirens screeching in my head. “What do you mean, ‘if’?”

“His assignment could get extended.” Zachary looked at me from the corner of his eye. “You and your boyfriend are making a lot of work for him.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. Dad’s never happier than when he’s working himself to death.” Zachary massaged his wrist. “I think he’s close to something big. It must keep him up at night, because he’s knackered all day.”

He went back to sketching lines, which I noticed were unusually shaky.

I slapped the constellation book shut. “Logan’s not my boyfriend.”

He stopped drawing but didn’t look up. “What is he, then?”

“I don’t know. But since that night, he hasn’t stayed in my room. It’s not like it was between us back in the fall, before he turned shade.”

“Except for that small bit on the equinox.”

“Yes, except for that! I was happy to see him, okay? I thought I’d lost him forever—again—and then there he was. What would you have done in my place?”

Zachary stared at the edge of the blanket and the dull brown grass that looked pink from the red flashlight. “I don’t know what I’d do.”

“Right, because you don’t know what it’s like to lose someone.”

“I’ve lost someone.”

His sudden confession took me by surprise. “You never told me that.”

“It’s not the same. She didn’t die, she went to Malta.”

Because of his accent or his emphasis, I was confused, until I remembered that Malta was a place. “Is that in Africa?”

“It’s in the Mediterranean, but it might as well be on Mars.”

“Why?”

He pressed his lips together before speaking. “Suzanne’s parents were both MI-X. They wanted to be stationed together, of course, so they didn’t have much choice in where to go. When their project in
the UK ended, they left for their next assignment, in Malta. And took her with them.” He turned the pencil end over end. “We e-mailed and video-chatted for a while, and then … she stopped.”

I wanted to throttle this Suzanne person for putting that shadow of hurt in his voice. “How long were you together?”

“Eight months, three weeks, and a day. A day and a half.”

I didn’t mention that it was a shorter relationship than mine and Logan’s. If Zachary was measuring the time in half days, she must have meant a lot to him.

“My point is,” he said, “if Suzanne had appeared in my room a few months after she left, even after I met you, I probably would’ve done what you did. And she’s not even dead.”

All along, he’d been so patient about me and Logan. It wasn’t because he was a saint—it was because he understood. “You really do get it.”

“I get it. That doesn’t make it easier to hear about you in bed with him.” He started drawing again, his lines heavy. “It was bad enough when he was a ghost and he couldn’t touch you, and I thought, ‘If I wait long enough, she’ll come round,’ and so I waited and waited, but I waited one day too many, didn’t I?” The pencil tip snapped against the paper. “Bugger!” Zachary hurled the pencil into the wheat field.

We sat silent as his curse echoed against the distant hills, then faded. My blood raced from his outburst. Maybe we were finally getting somewhere.

“Sorry,” he said at last.

“That was our only pencil.”

Zachary made another guttural sound, then picked up the flashlight and tromped off into the field.

The loss of his nearby heat made me want to follow him, but instead I pulled my knees to my chest to keep warm—or at least alive.

For five minutes I watched him wander, scanning the rough surface with the flashlight, whose faint red glow reached only a few feet in front of him.

Finally he stopped, picked something up, then came back, his steps as deliberate as they’d been on the way out.

“Did you find it?”

“I found this.” He knelt in front of me. “Put out your hand.”

I kept my fingers clasped around my shins. “What is it?”

“Never mind.” He put the item in his pocket. “If you don’t trust me—”

“Hey.” I grabbed the front of his jacket. “I trust you more than anyone in the world.”

Zachary’s gaze dropped to my hand, then rose, burning, into my eyes. “So what are we doing?”

“Nothing. That’s the problem.” I pulled him to kiss me.

Though my aim was slightly off, and our lips were cold and chapped, I knew in an instant that this was right. Zachary fit me, like the answer to an equation I’d forgotten how to solve.

His groan of relief told me he felt it, too. He slid his arms around my back, and I pressed against him—as much as my parka would allow—wanting to sink into his warmth. I wanted this perfect rightness never to end.

Which of course it did. He broke the kiss, holding my face in his hands. “What do we do?”

My teeth chattered. “Go make out where it’s warm?”

“I don’t mean right now.” Zachary glanced over at the car. “Though that’s no’ a bad idea.” He shook his head. “We’d be too comfortable.”

“Not possible.”

“We have to think.”

“Do we?”

“I asked Becca to the prom.”

“So un-ask her.”

“I can’t un-ask her.”

“You un-asked me.”

“You deserved it.” He cut off my protest. “You did. Hush.” Zachary kissed me again, with even more passion and less precision.

I tore off my gloves and slipped my hands inside his leather jacket, the zipper’s teeth scraping my skin like icy fangs. The prom seemed a million years away.

His lips left mine again, but only to shift to the edge of my jaw. “Should’ve given you another chance,” he said, his breath coming hard, “talked to you again before I called her.”