Twenty-one

DEREK RETURNED BEARING SHOPPING bags and cash. I’d given him my bank card and PIN, and he’d found an ATM without a camera. My card still worked. He’d withdrawn my limit of four hundred dollars. We couldn’t do this again—every time I used it, the bank would know I was still in Buffalo, and Derek was afraid the Edison Group might be able to find that out.

He handed me the cash and receipt, discreetly folded. Tori snatched the receipt and opened it.

“My God, is this your bank account or college fund?”

I took it back. “My dad direct-deposits my allowance. After fifteen years, it adds up.”

“And he just lets you access it?”

“Why wouldn’t he?”

“Um, because you could spend it. No, wait. Let me guess. You’re too responsible for that.”

“She’s smart,” Simon said.

“Is that what you call it? I was thinking more …” She yawned.

My cheeks heated.

“Enough,” Derek growled.

“Yeah, don’t forget who gave you money for this.” Simon nudged Tori’s shopping bag.

Tori’s jaw twitched. “It was twenty bucks for food and a blanket, and I’m keeping tabs. I’ll pay her back. I’m responsible, too. Just not”—she waved at my receipt—“disgustingly responsible.”

I took my bag from Derek. “So what did I get?” I reached inside. “A backpack. Two sweaters. Thank—”

The sweaters unrolled, and Tori choked on her mouthful of soda, laughing.

I turned, slowly and calmly, to her. “Your choices?”

She lifted her hands. “Uh-uh. I offered to pick something out, but Derek insisted.” She turned to him. “No wonder you were gone so long. Must have had a hard time finding ones that ugly.”

He’d bought me two identical gray hooded sweatshirts, made from the tacky polyester found only in the cheapest discount stores, the kind that shimmers like plastic and picks at your skin.

“What?” Derek said.

“They’re fine. Thanks.”

Tori reached out and caught the tag, then laughed. “I thought so. They’re boys’. Size twelve boys.”

“So? The women’s cost more. I figured it wouldn’t make a difference with Chloe.”

Tori looked at me. Then she looked at my chest and started to laugh.

“What?” Derek said.

“Nothing,” Tori sputtered. “You’re just being honest, right?”

“Tori?” Simon said. “Shut up. Chloe, we’ll grab something else for you tomorrow.”

“No, Derek’s right. These will fit. Thanks.” Cheeks burning, I mumbled something about trying them on and fled the room.

When dusk began to fall, we settled in for the night. It was only eight o’clock and Tori complained bitterly. Derek told her she was free to stay awake, as long as she didn’t use the lantern batteries and could still wake up at dawn. We weren’t living in a world of light switches anymore. We had to use the sun when we could and sleep when we couldn’t.

That was fine by me. I wasn’t in the mood for a slumber party. Simon had tried cheering me up, but that only brought me down all the more. I didn’t want to need to be cheered. I wanted to roll with the punches, bounce back smiling.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Aunt Lauren. I thought of Rae, too, and my dad, but most of all I thought of Aunt Lauren. I could tell myself Dad and Rae were safe for now. The Edison Group wouldn’t bother my father as long as he knew nothing about them. And Rae was well on her way to “rehabilitation,” according to that file. But with Aunt Lauren, I could find no such rationalization for the Edison Group to keep her alive. Every time I opened my eyes, I expected to see her ghost standing in front of me.

Even when I managed to force myself not to worry, the only alternative was more mundane concerns and a general feeling of disappointment.

I’d found the guys. I’d brought Simon his insulin. I’d single-handedly uncovered the secrets of the Edison Group. My reward? Having Tori take potshots at me every chance she got, trying to make me look bad in front of Simon.

If there was any point in my life when I should have been anything but dull and boring, it was now. I could talk to the dead. I could raise the dead. In the last week, I’d plotted and schemed enough to win a spot on Survivor.

Yet all I could picture was Tori yawning.

It was nice having Simon defend me, but it wasn’t any more than he might do for a little sister. I kept thinking of that—the way he’d come to my defense, the way he’d squeeze my hand, the way he’d lean in and whisper to me—and I wanted to read more into it. But I couldn’t.

And so what? With everything that was going on, was I really feeling sorry for myself because a cute guy wasn’t interested in me “that way”? That made me worse than boring. It made me the silly twit Derek seemed to think I was.

Speaking of Derek … and I’d really rather not … had I forgotten what he could be like? No, I’d just forgotten what it felt like to be on the receiving end. Between him and Tori, at least I’d come out of this with a thicker skin. Or lose every ounce of self-confidence I had.

A night for tossing and turning, lost in nightmares of Aunt Lauren and my dad and Rae. I kept waking up, gasping and sweating, everyone around me sound asleep. I’d gulp cold air and calm down enough to join them only to have the nightmares return.

Finally my sleeping brain found a distraction in the same place my waking brain had: thoughts of the dead body in the other room. No objective, sympathetic examination of his situation this time, though. I dreamed of dragging that poor spirit back to his shell, screaming and cursing me.

Then the dream changed and I was back in the crawl space. The musty, awful stench of death surrounded me. I felt Derek behind me, the heat of his body radiating, as he whispered, “Chloe, come on.”

Come where? I was trapped in the crawl space, with those horrors crawling toward me, cold skeletal fingers touching me, the stink of them making my stomach churn.

Derek shook me, and I tried to push him away, tell him he wasn’t helping—

“Chloe!”

I jerked awake, the dream evaporating. Above me, green eyes glinted in the darkness.

“Derek? What—?”

He clamped his hand over my mouth. His lips moved to my ear. “Are you awake now? I need you to do something for me.”

The urgency in his voice knocked any sleepiness from my head. I squinted at him in the darkness. Were his eyes feverish? Or was that just their usual weird glow, like a cat’s in the dark?

I pulled his hand away. “Are you Changing again?”

“What? No. I’m fine. Just listen, okay? Remember the body in the other room?” He spoke slowly, carefully.

I nodded.

“You’re going to think about that body for me, okay? About the spirit that was in it. You need to release the—”

“Release? I—I didn’t summon—”

“Shhh. Just concentrate on releasing it without waking the others. Can you do that?”

I nodded. Then I tried to sit up. Something heavy held my legs to the floor. I pushed onto my elbows. Derek lunged so fast all I saw was his dark form coming down on me, hands going to my shoulders, slamming me back into the ground, pinning me down.

I freaked. I didn’t stop to wonder what he was doing. My brain just registered a guy on top of me in the middle of the night, and instinct kicked in. I lashed out, arms and legs flailing. My nails caught his cheek, and he fell back with a grunt of pain.

I scrambled up, legs still weighted down … and now I saw why. A corpse was crawling up me.

It was the one from the next room, little more than a skeleton, covered in clothing and strips of leathery flesh. Greasy hanks of hair patchworked its skull. Its eyes were empty pits. Its lips were long gone, leaving a skull’s permanent grin of rotted teeth.

When I let out a whimper, it stopped and tried to hold its head upright, skull swaying from side to side, eye sockets searching blindly, jaws opening with a guttural gah-gah-gah.

I let out a bona fide “Scream Queen” shriek that rang through the room.

I kicked and fought, trying to get out from under the thing. Derek grabbed me by the armpits and yanked me out. He slapped his hand over my mouth, but I could still hear my scream, echoing around me. He growled for me to shut up and as I tried to obey, I realized it wasn’t me screaming now.

“What is that?” Tori shrieked. “What is that?”

The flick of a flashlight. A beam shining in our eyes. And then she really screamed, loud enough to make my ears ring. The corpse reared up, mouth opening, screaming back, a high-pitched wail.

Simon woke up, too. When he saw the corpse, he let out a string of profanity.

“Shut her up!” Derek snarled to Simon, jabbing a finger at Tori. “Chloe! Calm down. You need to calm down.”

I nodded, gaze fixed on that thing. I tried to remind myself it wasn’t a “thing” but a person, yet all I could see was a skeleton held together by bits of flesh, that eyeless head swaying, those teeth clicking—

I inhaled, in and out, fast.

“Calm down, Chloe. Just calm down.”

There was nothing calming about his tone, just an impatient snap, telling me to stop freaking out and get to work. I pulled from his grasp.

“You need to—” he began.

“I know what I need to do,” I snapped back.

“What is that thing?” Tori gibbered. “Why is it moving?”

“Get her out of here,” Derek said.

As Simon hauled Tori away, I tried to relax, but my heart was racing too fast for me to focus. I shut my eyes, only to feel something on my foot. My eyes opened to see fingers reaching for my leg.

I scuttled back. A filthy rag-covered arm reached out, finger bones scratching the newspaper on the floor as it tried to propel itself forward, too broken to lift itself. How could it even move? But it did. Just like the bats, inch by inch, coming toward me—

“You called it,” Derek said. “It’s trying—”

“I didn’t call anything.”

“Somehow you summoned it, and now it’s trying to find you.”

I concentrated, but at the first touch on my leg, I skittered to the side. The thing paused, skull wobbling, then those empty eye sockets locked on me as it turned in my new direction.

“You have to release it,” Derek said.

“I’m trying.”

“Try harder.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and formed a mental image of the corpse. I pictured the ghost trapped inside and imagined drawing it out—

“Concentrate,” Derek whispered.

“I am. If you’d shut up—”

The corpse stopped, like it could hear me. Then it reached out, blindly, searching. It found my leg and its finger started feeling its way toward my knee. I steeled myself against the urge to pull away. It needed to find me, so I let it. Ignore that and focus on—

“What did you do the last time?” Derek asked.

I glared over at him.

“I’m trying to help,” he said.

“You’d help a lot more if you’d shut—”

His glare matched mine. “You need to release it, Chloe. With all that screaming, someone’s bound to have heard us, and you’ve got about five minutes before they burst through that door and see a corpse crawling—”

“Is that supposed to help me?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Out.”

“I just—”

“Out!”

He retreated. I closed my eyes and envisioned the skeleton, the trapped spirit—

A bony finger touched the bare skin where my shirt had twisted away from my jeans and I jumped, eyes flying open to see it right there, the skull a few inches from my face, bobbing and weaving.

The coarse scraggly hair brushed my throat and I whimpered. It went still. Then the skull moved closer still. I could smell it now, the faint stench of death I hadn’t noticed earlier, churning my stomach, the thought of someone in there, trapped in that rotting—

It moved closer.

“Stop. P-please stop.”

It went still. We hung there, eyeball to eye socket as I took short quick breaths, calming myself without inhaling its stink too deeply.

I waited for its next move, but it didn’t make one.

I’d told it to stop, and it had.

I remembered those gruesome old pictures on the Internet of necromancers leading armies of the dead. I remembered the book Dr. Davidoff had given me about the powers of necromancers.

The power to communicate with the dead. The power to raise the dead. The power to control the dead.

“M-move back,” I said. “P-please.”

It did, slowly, teeth clacking. A guttural sound rose from its chest. A growl.

I knelt. “Lie down, please.”

As it did, it lifted its face to me, skull moving from side to side like a snake, its growl a rattling hiss. I heard that hiss and I looked into those empty eye sockets and I felt hate. Waves of loathing rolled off the corpse. It wasn’t obeying me because it wanted to, but because it had to. It was an enslaved spirit, summoned by a necromancer, slammed back into little more than a skeleton, forced to make it move to obey the will of its master.

I swallowed hard. “I-I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to call you back. I wasn’t trying to.”

It hissed, head still moving, as if it would love nothing more than to show me what death felt like.

“I’m so sor—”

I swallowed my words. The ghost trapped in there didn’t want apologies. It wanted freedom. So I closed my eyes and concentrated on making that happen, which was a lot easier when I didn’t have to worry about it creeping up my legs.

As I visualized tugging the spirit out, the chattering stopped so fast I peeked, thinking I’d accidentally commanded it to be silent. But the skeleton had collapsed in a motionless heap by my feet. The ghost was gone.