Текст книги "Body and Soul"

Автор книги: Стэйси Кейд

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Copyright © 2012 by Stacey Kade

All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 114 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011-5690.

ISBN 978-1-4231-7287-1

Visit www.disneyhyperion.com

Table of Contents

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To my editor, Christian Trimmer:

Thank you for giving me the chance to tell these stories and for helping me make them better than I ever dreamed they could be. I am so grateful to be one of your authors.

Malachi the Magnificent, Consultant to the Stars, had a storefront in a dingy, rundown strip mall between a sketchy-looking Laundromat and a closed-up nail salon with a big, bright orange health department sticker plastered on its door. It couldn’t have been less magnificent if he’d tried.

My heart sank. This was the guy we were going to for help on life-and-death matters?

I looked over at Will in the driver’s seat. “You’re kidding, right?”

“What’s wrong?” he asked, making the turn into the crumbling and pothole-filled lot, which was—surprise, surprise—basically empty, even on a warm and sunny Friday afternoon.

“Look at this place! It’s about six seconds from being raided by the police…or Health and Sanitation.” I shuddered.

At least Madame Selena had had her own building…about sixteen inches from the edge of the highway, but still. And she had a turban. Say what you will, but it certainly added an air of mystery to her, like what, exactly, she was hiding under it.

“Appearances can be deceiving.” Will looked over at me pointedly.

I shoved her… myfine brown hair away from my eyes and glared at him. “Oh, ha-ha. Very funny.”

I’d been stuck inside Lily Turner’s body for almost a month now. My well-intentioned attempt as a spirit to simply borrow her body for the purposes of communicating with the living had backfired in a huge way. And now I had to pretend to be Lily. Or try to, anyway.

I’m an expert at pretending. I spent a lot of years and even more effort convincing people that the perfectly put together and trouble-free Alona Dare they knew and seemingly loved was the real deal instead of a carefully crafted and maintained cover.

But being a whole other person—someone I’d never met—that was a stretch, even with my skills.

I’d read Lily’s diary (revoltingly full of naive gushing about Ben Rogers—barf ), reviewed the contents of her pathetic closet, and dug into the depths of her medicine cabinet (cheap makeup in the wrong color palette and one bottle of expired antibiotics—boring).

But none of that told me how to beher, especially around her family. And I was failing…miserably. I didn’t know Lily’s favorite color, that she was allergic to strawberries (found that one out the hard way), or that she hated that old Backstreet Boys song “Everybody,” which her younger brother, Tyler, played over and over again just to bug her. I’d just tuned it out and chalked it up as another example of Tyler’s bad taste, in music this time instead of fashion.

Trauma and brain injury could explain away a lot, but not enough. The Turners had given me space in the beginning to “adjust,” but now, unsurprisingly, Mrs. Turner was pressing for more time, more interaction…just more from me. And I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t be their Lily even if I wanted to…and in a funny-odd kind of way, I really did.

I didn’t blame the Turners, and I didn’t want to hurt them—they’d been so patient and nice to me—but I felt like I couldn’t breathe with all this pressure. Pressure not only to be Lily Turner but to be the correct Lily Turner, the one they all remembered.

And Will was no help. His experiences with Lily had been mostly at school. He didn’t know much of anything about her home life, at least not in enough detail to be useful.

Their friend Joonie might have had more info, given her former crush on Lily, and she’d even called from Boston a couple of times to check on “me” after hearing “I” had woken from the coma. But I’d kept the conversations short and as generically polite as possible, feigning memory loss. She sounded like she was actually doing all right living with her sister, and the last thing I wanted was to say or do anything that might cause her to worry and come rushing back here. Nota good idea, for a lot of reasons.

So, in short, this being-Lily thing was a mess. One I needed out of as soon as possible, but definitely before school started back up in a couple of weeks. That was the one thing that could make this situation worse—going back to school as Lily Turner. Or as a freaking junior.

But that was easier said than done. What I’d accomplished was rare—possessing a body for any length of time was virtually unheard-of. Getting me out would be one hell of a trick. Keeping Lily alive without me would be another. Her body was now, in theory, dependent on the energy my spirit provided. So, in short, even if we could find a way to get me out, I couldn’t leave unless we could find a way to save Lily, too—a way to bring her spirit back from the light or some kind of energy substitute or something.

Essentially, we were looking for a two-for-one miracle. But after only a few weeks, we’d exhausted most of our semibrilliant ideas and reached desperate-measures level. We’d take anything now, any clue to point us in the correct direction.

Hence, Malachi the allegedly Magnificent.

“What’s so special about this one again?” I asked as Will pulled into a parking space. “Aside from raising our chances of catching hepatitis, I mean.” I looked at the nail salon and shuddered again.

Malachi would be the third “psychic medium” (a.k.a. “big faker”) we’d seen in the last couple of weeks. And frankly, he didn’t seem any more promising than the others.

“He has a star by his name…I think,” Will said, cutting the engine.

“You think?” I demanded.

He shifted uneasily in his seat. “It’s not exactly clear, okay? I’m pretty sure it’s a star.”

“So, just to clarify, we’re here in janky-land because of a possible doodle?”

He looked at me, stung. “Hey, we’ve been over this. If you have any better ideas—”

“Just…let me see it again.” I waved my hand impatiently at him in a “gimme” gesture.

He glared at me but twisted to the side to reach into his back pocket, and I tried hard not to notice that doing so made his shirt pull tighter against his chest and brought him so much closer to me. Like, touching close.

Heat crawled up my neck into my face, and I looked away, hoping he wouldn’t notice. God. This body thing—technically, in this case, I suppose it was hisbody and my reaction to it—was killing me. Could I please be non-corporeal again? Now? I did not like this…flesh and blood intensity. It was all out-of-control feeling, and I did not DO out-of-control.

“Here.” He bumped my arm with the back of his hand, holding out a carefully folded rectangle of yellow paper.

I snapped it from his fingers, and he sucked a breath through his teeth. “Careful!”

Will treated the page like an artifact from a previous age, and I suppose, for him, it was. After our other resources (pretty much just the Internet) had failed to produce any new information on my predicament—or really, any information at all, other than calling for a priest—Will had dug into some boxes of his dad’s stuff in the basement. Most of it was random useless junk his mother couldn’t bring herself to throw away—a half-finished pack of gum, old birthday cards from Will’s grandma, an almost empty bottle of cologne, an old answering-machine tape, grocery lists with Will’s dad’s illegible scrawl.

I suspect Will had been hoping for a secret journal—something detailing his father’s struggle with being a ghost-talker over the years—that his mother had somehow overlooked or written off at the time as an attempt at fiction. I know he wanted to get a better handle on who his dad was, the kind of person he’d been, since his dad had lied to him for most of his life. But there was nothing like that in the boxes. And for the record, my hopes had been dashed as well, since he didn’t conveniently find a vial of mysterious liquid labeled EMERGENCY ONLY: FOR WHEN YOUR SPIRIT GUIDE BECOMES TRAPPED IN A BODY.

So…no diary of confessions, no bottle of secret formula, but tucked into a city map of Decatur was this folded-up page torn from the Psection in the yellow pages. The Psychic section, specifically. But what Will was interested in was the strange marks and undecipherable notes in his dad’s handwriting near several of the names/ads, even though we had no idea what any of the nonsensical scrawls meant.

Will’s dad was a bit of a mystery to him, so no matter how cryptic the messages on the page, it was more than Will had had before. From what Will had told me, his dad was never particularly chatty about the gift they both shared. Daniel Killian preferred to pretend that everything was normal, no matter what kind of toll that took on him and his son. I personally thought that was kind of crappy of him, especially given that he then bailed on Will and Will’s mom by offing himself a few years ago.

But whatever. I guess maybe I wasn’t the best judge of parental behavior at times, either.

I let out a breath and made a deliberate effort to unfold the page more carefully, and Will relaxed a little. He did have a point—the lines where it had been folded were already softening from the wear and tear we’d given it in the last few weeks. If it had been an actual historical document, it might have been faring better—parchment or whatever they used to write on back in the old days might have actually held up better than this cheap-ass paper.

The psychics shared a page with listings for property managers and prosthetic-device manufacturers. Malachi the Magnificent’s ad (God, could he sound any more like a little kid’s party magician?) was circled several times, hard enough to dent the page, and had what might have been a star by it.

Or an ink blot.

I sighed. Will’s theory was that his dad must have been checking into these people for a reason, maybe as part of his work for the Order. The publishing date, printed in tiny letters at the bottom, indicated the page was from five years ago, right about the time Will’s dad had finally quit working for them. The Order of the Guardians was essentially a group of ghost-talkers who’d taken it upon themselves to save living humankind from all of us big bad spirits. Never mind that ghosts were once living people, too. Lily and I had both almost succumbed to their relentless “protective” services. Will and I weren’t exactly their biggest fans these days, and that feeling was probably pretty mutual. Will had heard from them only once after everything that happened. As far as I knew, most of the leaders thought Lily had recovered on her own, and Will was simply no longer interested in joining their organization, much to their disappointment. The one who knew better, who had witnessed what went down in the janitorial closet at the hospital—my guess was, he was staying quiet to avoid losing control over his division. He’d been abusing his authority…and his daughter.

Still, the Order had some serious power players, and if they’d been interested in these “psychics,” maybe one of them might actually be valuable in some way. Maybe someone knew stuff we didn’t. Wouldn’t be hard; most days it felt like we knew nothing.

Folding up the page to hand it back to Will, though, I noticed something I’d missed before. “The other side of this is—”

He focused his attention on the steering wheel, running his thumb over a cut in the plastic. “I know.”

The section right before Psychics? Psychiatrists. His father hadn’t been crazy, as Will’s mom and others had probably suspected at the time, but depressed? Uh, yeah. People don’t generally take their lives via train because they’re feeling hunky-dory.

“Are you sure he saved this because of the psychics or…”

He just looked at me.

Yikes.“Okay, then. Never mind.” Will had few sore spots. This was one of them.

I finished folding the page and held it out to him.

He took it and put it back in his pocket. “He didn’t make any marks on the psychiatrist page. Not that one or the one still in the phone book. I checked.”

“I wasn’t implying that he—”

“Let’s just go, okay?” He opened the car door and got out without waiting for an answer.

Hey, look at that. I could upset people even when I was trying to be nice. Too bad I hadn’t realized this talent sooner. I could have saved myself the effort of coming up with all those perfectly pointed insults.

I followed him, climbing out of the car with way more effort than should have been necessary. My left leg was stiff from sitting for just the twenty minutes or so it had taken us to get here.

I gritted my teeth, forcing myself to stand up on it anyway. I hatedthis. So broken and clumsy and…not me.

I’d spent years training, working out, and not eating to get mybody, the one I’d had before. I was varsity cheerleader captain, people; that’s more than good genetics. It’s work.

But Lily…she was shorter, softer, curvier. Not fat, exactly, but not the athlete I’d been, either. Not even close. And don’t even get me started on the clumsiness. If there was something to trip over in a ten-foot radius, she found it…the hard way. Some of that was because this body had been in a coma for the better part of a year, and some because of the accident that had put her there. I had weekly physical therapy appointments to address those issues and hopefully get this body back to the point where I could exercise on my own. But a good portion of it would never be “fixed.” It was just her. And now, me.

I stepped back, shoved the door shut…and slipped on the loose gravel on the asphalt. I clawed for the door handle to catch myself, but it was too far away. I braced myself for the bone-crunching impact with the ground, but hands caught at me at the last second, pulling me up and against a solid, warm body.

“Are you okay?” Will’s voice in my ear sounded shocked. “I was coming around to help you.”

His arms were wrapped around me underneath Lily’s… mysizable chest—another big change, frankly—and I could feel his heartbeat thudding way too hard against my back. I’d scared him. Me, too.

“Fine. Just…I’m fine. Let go already.” But he didn’t, probably because that would have involved dropping me. My face burned, as I imagined what I must have looked like, flailing and falling like a total klutz.

Once I got my feet back under me properly, he let go. I straightened my shirt—a hideous yellow baby-doll number—and raked a hand through Lily’s blah-brown hair before turning to face him. “Thanks,” I said grudgingly.

“Welcome.” He towered over me now. His skin was still far too pale, and he still dressed like the angel of death in a black T-shirt and dark jeans. Three small silver hoops in his left ear caught the light and glittered beneath his black hair, adding to his whole nothing-but-trouble image. But his eyes, an icy blue I’d once thought creepy and cold, now did funny things to my insides when he looked at me intensely like this, his brow furrowed.

It made me want to tackle him, and not in the football way. Well, I mean, I guess the method was the same, but not the purpose.

A smile flickered at the corners of his mouth. “You’re staring,” he said.

Damn it.My face went hot again, and I turned away to limp toward Malachi’s storefront. The blushing was another side effect of this stupid body. When I’d been a spirit, I’d still felt things, of course, but it was weaker, mere shades of this intensity.

“So, what’s the plan?” I asked over my shoulder, doing my best to pretend the last three minutes hadn’t happened. “Same as last time?”

With the other faux ghost-talkers, Will had gone in asking to communicate with his recently deceased cousin, Maria…who, of course, didn’t actually exist and never had. Yet they’d never failed to come up with detailed descriptions of her, obviously based on Will’s appearance, and always told him how happy she was now. Not a single one of them had ever bothered to explain that some spirits—most, actually—are unreachable. Only the ones who have unresolved issues and tend to stick around after death—in Middleground, as Will called it—could communicate.

And the money they charged for all this nonsense? Ridiculous. We’d already spent almost everything Will had earned in his brief career as a busboy. There were serious dollars to be made in this area, especially as the real deal. Not that Will would ever even consider that.

Will easily caught up to me on the sidewalk leading to Malachi’s storefront, and stepped ahead to grab the door. “Yeah, I think the Maria story works—”

He stopped suddenly enough that I smacked into his back, my nose colliding sharply with his shoulder blade. Short! I was short now, damn it!

Eyes watering, I stumbled back. “Walk much?” I demanded, rubbing my stinging nose.

He didn’t respond, just stood there, head cocked to one side, staring into Malachi the Magnificent’s windows.

A chill skittered over my skin. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“There are ghosts here,” he said quietly over his shoulder. “More than usual.”

Ghosts are everywhere, as I’d learned after my own death and return as a spirit. Even at the other fake ghost-talkers’ locations, there’d sometimes been a few tagging along after the other clients, people they were attached to, or one or two who’d read the “psychic” sign out front and hoped it was for real.

“Really?” Holding on to Will’s arm for balance, I leaned around him for a look. Not that I’d be able to seeanything. Even though I could apparently hear spirits—a side effect of being a spirit stuffed back into a body, or maybe because I’d been trapped in Lily’s body during a near-death experience, we weren’t sure—seeing them was not my forte.

I squinted and all I saw were a few blurry, smudgy spots that had no discernible source. My ghost vision coming in? Or poor window cleaning on Malachi’s part?

“Are you sure?” I asked Will.

“A guy in a Lincoln-type top hat is talking to a woman in a nightgown and…” He leaned closer to get a better look in the window. “There’s some girl dressed for spring break at the beach, and a dude in the far corner is holding what appears to be a severed arm. His own.”

I jerked back. “Ew. So Malachi is actually legit?” You’d think he’d have moved on up to the less skanky side of town, if so.

“Unless this is a costume party gone horribly wrong…maybe.” Will turned to face me, tension now visibly thrumming through him. “Subtle has to be the key word here. We can’t go in there and let on that we can see them.”

I shrugged. No problem for me.

“Or hear them,” he added.

I made an exasperated noise. “Fine, okay, whatever.”

“Hey, I’m serious.” He reached down and tipped my chin up with his fingertip until I was forced to meet his gaze. “You aren’t my spirit guide anymore. We have no protection, no way to make them back off.”

Ah, yes, another lovely side effect of this in-body disaster. Whatever bond we’d shared as spirit guide and ghost-talker was now gone. Or, at least, the most obvious sign of it. I didn’t show up daily wherever he was at 7:03 a.m., the time of my death. Good thing, because that might have been kind of tough to explain to the Turners.

At one time, I’d also been able to freeze pushy ghosts in place by simply restating my claim on Will. These days, not so much. Actually, for all we knew, it might still work. But it seemed unlikely, given everything else, and it was too dangerous to try. It would mean revealing who I was inside this body and that I could hear the spirits. Then Will wouldn’t be the only one being overwhelmed by last requests.

“I don’t want you to get hurt,” he added, his gaze softening as he took in the scar on my face…Lily’s face.

Lily.I jerked away from him. Will wasn’t immune to the effects of this bizarre situation, either. Even though he knew better, sometimes he looked at me and saw her. I know he did. And he’d never been as concerned about my welfare until it became tied to hers, it seemed.

It wasn’t fair.

“ Iwill be fine,” I said curtly, doing my best to squelch the wounded feeling rising up in me. “Can we just do this already?”

He opened his mouth as if to say something, then closed it, clearly thinking better of whatever it was. Smart. “Yeah. Okay,” he said. “I’ll go first. Stay right behind me.”

I nodded, not about to argue that part of it. Among the other things we’d never tested was whether I’d bump into ghosts, as Will did, or pass through them, as other non–ghost-talkers would. I hadn’t found myself colliding with invisible people yet, but that was no sure indicator, as I knew from experience that ghosts avoided walking through the living whenever possible.

He turned and opened the door, and I stayed on the heels of his worn Chucks as he walked in.

Malachi the Magnificent’s waiting room looked surprisingly similar to that of a doctor’s or dentist’s, only darker, dustier, and reeking of way more incense. There were a bunch of chairs lining the outer edges of the room and in rows toward the middle. A door in the far wall led, presumably, to the back rooms, where the “magic” would happen.

A book lay open on a desk next to that door, with a photocopied sign asking us to SIGN IN, PLEASE! Blah.

Will wrote fake names—Milli Martin and Steve Vanilli—in the book without batting an eye. (Yeah, he thinks he’s funny.)

But then he turned to face the waiting room again and hesitated. I followed his gaze, and for once, I understood. The blurry spots I’d seen before were not smudges on the glass. They were in here and moving. At least four of them, maybe more. The trick was how to avoid them without look inglike we were avoiding them.

I stood on my tiptoes, putting most of my weight on my good leg. “The chairs in the back left corner, maybe?” I whispered to Will. There weren’t as many blurry spots in that direction, though we’d have to pass several to get there. The noise seemed fainter in that direction, too. I couldn’t hear anything specific, just a low murmur of voices, but too many for the half dozen or so living people there, most of whom were sitting silently anyway.

Will looked sharply over his shoulder at me. “You can see—”

I shook my head. “Kinda, sorta. It’s…I’ll explain later.”

He nodded and started toward the chairs I’d indicated, and I was right behind him…until someone caught my eye. A livingsomeone.

I stopped dead, certain that I could not be seeing who I thought, especially not here.

Her normally glossy black hair was a dull and staticky mess gathered in a frizzy ponytail, and she was wearing a tank top and sweats—not the cute kind, either, but the baggy ones you only wear when you’re home with the flu. Still, it was definitely her. Huddled in a chair across from the receptionist’s desk and dabbing her eyes with a soggy tissue that looked about two tears away from disintegrating entirely, was my former best friend.

A rush of homesickness for my old life swept over me. “Misty?” Her name slipped out before I could stop it. “What are you doing here?” It felt like the world had tipped a bit, sliding people into places they shouldn’t be. I hadn’t seen her in months, not since graduation. Not mine, obviously. But hers and Will’s and everybody else’s that I knew.

She looked up, her eyes red and puffy from crying. Her gaze skated over my face, and she recoiled slightly, probably at the sight of the jagged scar on the left side, from my temple down. “Do I know you?”

Oh, right.I tipped my head forward, letting my hair slide to hide the damage, and buying some time before I had to answer. I didn’t know what to say. She wouldn’t recognize Lily, probably, but…“I—”

“What are you doing?” Will whispered to me, alarm in his voice. “Sorry, our mistake,” he said to Misty, and then started to pull me away.

But it was too late.

“Hey, wait,” Misty called after us. “I doknow you.”

In spite of everything—that she’d stolen my boyfriend and thought I was dead and gone—my heart jumped with the ridiculous hope that my oldest friend had somehow recognized me. I turned back to face her, but she was looking at Will.

I fought against the unreasonable disappointment. It only made sense, I guess, that she’d recognize him. At least he was still in the same body as the one she knew him in from before.

“You went to Groundsboro,” she said, pointing at him. “You’re, like, that freaky goth guy, right?”

Uh-oh.I grimaced, and Will stopped, his shoulders stiff. “Yeah, that’s me,” he said with a tight smile. “Let’s go,” he said to me.

“So…” She got up and edged toward us. “This guy is legit?” She waved her Kleenex-filled hand around at Malachi’s office.

Now Will turned to face her with a wary look, and I could see his curiosity warring with the need to be cautious. We were starting to attract some attention. The noise level had dropped considerably, and if I wasn’t mistaken, a few of the blurry spots were drifting closer to us. “Why do you ask that?” he asked finally.

To my complete shock, her face crumpled and she collapsed into her chair. “Because I need help,” she said in a squeaky, high-pitched voice between sobs. “And I thought you might know if this is actually going to work.”

“This” presumably referring to her consultation with Malachi.

“You’re, like, an expert on all this goth/undead stuff, right?” she asked, sniffling. “And you’re here, so he must be good.…”

Will looked at me, a little panicked. I tugged away from him and went to sit next to her, ignoring his glare of warning. No, Misty hadn’t always made the greatest choices—like stealing my boyfriend even beforeI was dead—but I’d forgiven her for that…mostly. She was the only one—before Will—who’d known the truth about my mom’s drinking problems, and she’d never told anyone or used it against me. I honestly couldn’t be sure if I would have done the same with access to that kind of ammunition.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, patting her shoulder gingerly. She looked sort of…unshowered. Clearly, something was going on.

She took a deep hiccupping breath. “You guys remember my best friend, Alona Dare? She died?” Her voice broke on the last word, and she covered her face with her hands.

I have to admit, it warmed my heart that Misty was clearly still upset about my death, even though it had been months ago. Now, this was the kind of mourning I’d deserved from the beginning.

Will sighed heavily. “Yeah, I remember her.” To the trained ear, though, he sounded far more exasperated than sorry. I scowled at him.

“So, you’re here because of her?” I asked, trying to sound sympathetic while mentally sticking my tongue out at Will. See? Somebodymissed me…even after stealing my boyfriend. Well, let’s just not focus on that part.

Misty nodded, her head still bowed.

Oh, how sweet. She wants to stay in touch with me. I gave Will a triumphant look, and he rolled his eyes.

“I’m sure that wherever Alona is—” I began.

“She won’t leave me alone,” Misty said, her voice muffled by her hands.

“What?” I leaned closer, certain I must have misheard.

“I said…” Misty lifted her head up and met my gaze, righteous anger burning through the last of her tears. “That bitch is haunting me, and I can’t get rid of her.”