Текст книги "Body and Soul"

Автор книги: Стэйси Кейд

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

She lied. She freaking liedabout the light. Did Alona have no limits? No moral boundaries? Jesus.

I focused on the road, all too aware of the silence between us. Even though I hadn’t done anything wrong, I got the distinct sense that Alona was upset with me, which was rich. It was never her fault, always somebody else’s. In this case, maybe the light was to blame because she hadn’t received specific directions and had felt forced to make something up. Whatever.

I shook my head in disgust.

And yet, in spite of myself, I couldn’t help imagining what it must have been like for her to find herself back here that first morning, without any information, any guidance on why or what to do next.

Anyone would have been terrified, wondering if they’d done something wrong or if there’d been a mistake or if this was some kind of punishment from on high. After all, who gets sent back from the light ever, let alone after almost a month?

And Alona, always with control issues, would have been even worse. She’d spent most of her living years trying to contain everything, to keep her life—her mother’s condition and her father’s complete lack of willingness to get involved—from imploding. Variables that were beyond her ability to influence ate at her, worried her until she’d done everything she could to manage them and create contingency plans. I knew this girl, probably better than she knew herself.

Still, that didn’t make what she’d done right.

In fact, it made it sting more. She’d been lying to me, not just when she’d met up with me after graduation on her bench, but also when we were kissing outside the Gibley Mansion last month, and when she’d held my hand in the car yesterday. She’d been lying, if only by omission, that whole time. I didn’t know what to do with that. She couldn’t have found another time, an early point in our…whatever it was we had…to tell me the truth? Had she really not trusted me until today?

Don’t get me wrong: I knew, logically speaking, that she’d had plenty of reasons not to trust me, and that it was a significant change for her to tell me a truth she found personally humiliating, even now, when she knew I’d probably be angry.

But I guess I just thought we were well past that point. And it hurt and made me feel a little off balance to learn I was wrong.

I pulled into the parking lot of Krekel’s and found a space.

Alona cleared her throat. “So, what’s the plan?” She was trying to sound normal.

“We’ll take a look around, talk to some people.” I shrugged, avoiding her gaze. “See if they’ve seen her.” My fear was that even if Erin had actually come here, she was already long gone and no one would remember anything.

“I’ll handle the looking, you take the talking,” Alona said with a nod.

“You think?” I muttered. Given that no one else could hear her, it was the only option that made any kind of sense. And no, it wasn’t the most mature response ever. Sue me. I was still struggling with the bomb she’d just dropped on me.

She stiffened. “Hey, you know what? I said I’m sorry, and if that’s not good enough—”

“Actually, you didn’t,” I said, biting off the words.

She stopped, frowning, her head cocked to one side as if she were mentally replaying our earlier conversation. “No, I’m pretty sure I—”

I just looked at her.

“Oh.” She stared down at her hands for a long moment before glancing up at me. “Okay, well…I’m sorry,” she said defiantly, chin jutting out in challenge, daring me to…what, gloat? Like that was at all what I felt like doing in this situation.

“Fine, whatever. Let’s just do this.” I reached for the door handle.

“It’s not…I wouldn’t do the same thing now, okay?” she said quietly. “I just—”

“Didn’t trust me,” I said, my mouth tight.

“Didn’t know you,” she corrected. “And now I do.” She met my gaze without flinching.

The steadiness in her clear green eyes reassured me that she meant what she said, and some of the anger and uncertainty bubbling in my chest melted away. But not all of it. How was I supposed to know if we were really on the same page? That she wouldn’t, at some point, reveal some new level of duplicity? Maybe it was my turn not to trust.

I sighed and shoved open the door. “Let’s focus on one thing at a time for now.”

She nodded and followed me out, but not before I caught the flash of hurt in her expression. I supposed she probably wanted something more for one of her rare apologies, and maybe she had a point, but this was as much as I could manage at the moment.

“Be subtle,” I said as we started for the restaurant. “Remember, if you could see her, she can probably see you, and she’ll know what you’re after.”

Alona nodded, but I got the sense her mind wasn’t entirely focused on the task at hand.

“And if you start to feel…” I hesitated, not sure what to say.

“Less than myself?” she asked, her lips twisting into a wry smile.

“Don’t even talk to her, just come find me.”

She nodded again.

I felt my heart pounding harder than normal as we walked into Krekel’s, which was packed with the late lunch/early, early dinner crowd, and past a family that seemed to consist solely of screaming children and some people our age that I didn’t recognize. They were just out living their normal lives, blissfully unaware of everything happening beneath the surface.

It took only about ten minutes to determine what I’d feared was reality. Erin/Lily wasn’t here, and no one seemed to have seen her. So she hadn’t come here, or she’d slipped in and out without anyone noticing. Either way, we had no way of knowing where she was now or even where to start looking.

“They have security cameras,” Alona pointed out, once we were back in the parking lot heading toward the car.

“Yeah, and how do we explain why we need to see what’s on them, without getting the police involved?” I wanted to avoid that for as long as possible. If I could get things back to some semblance of normality before the Turners found out something was amiss, all the better. “And even if we could, the cameras won’t tell us where she went from here.”

“So now what?” she asked. “Check every tattoo parlor, strip club, and doughnut shop between here and the Indiana border?”

I stopped in the process of pulling my keys from my pocket and stared at her. “Strip clubs? Really?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Closest thing to a party at two in the afternoon, probably, right?”

“I have no idea.” I tilted my head to one side, regarding her with curiosity. “Do you?”

“You wish,” she snapped, clearly offended.

In spite of everything, I almost smiled. “We’re going to Malachi’s,” I said, unlocking the car.

Alona made a face. “That place is so gross,” she muttered. “Seriously, a few hundred bucks more a month and he could have a place that doesn’tlook like a front for a Russian mail-order-bride service.”

“Better office space isn’t exactly his top priority,” I said, opening the driver’s-side door for her to scoot across the seat. She could have opened her door, but with all the people in the parking lot, it didn’t seem like a good idea. I hoped she wouldn’t fight me on it.

“What does that mean?” she asked with a frown, climbing in without complaint.

I followed her in and slammed the door shut. “It means Malachi has other ways of attracting business.”

I waited until I’d backed out of the space in the crowded lot and got us on the road to Malachi’s before sharing everything he’d told me about his sister’s death, my dad’s visit, and their unusual method for obtaining new customers.

“That’s what she meant by Misty being just business,” she said, more to herself than to me. “So they’re haunting people to make money, and they picked Misty because of me, because I was her best friend and I died?”

I nodded. “And because they thought her family probably had enough money to make it worthwhile.”

“Son of a bitch,” she whispered. Then she straightened up. “Malachi… Edmund’snot going to have to worry about his sister being dead anymore, because I’m going to make sure he joins her.”

And that was pretty much how I felt about it, too.

But when we got to Malachi’s storefront, it was as abandoned and locked up as when I’d been there earlier, and this time, the back looked the same. No van, no boxes, no Edmund.

The jerk had taken off. Evidently he’d gotten tired of waiting around for Erin. Or maybe he thought that she’d catch up to him if she could, and if not, well, then, that wouldn’t be so bad, either.

“Shit.”

Alona raised her eyebrows at me. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know his last name,” I explained through clenched teeth. “I have no other way to track him down. I don’t even know for sure if Edmund is really his first name. It’s not like I asked for ID.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t be such a whiner.” She marched past me toward the back door.

“What are you—”

She disappeared inside before I could finish the question.

With a sigh, I moved closer to the door so she could shove it open for me, which she did a second later, almost clipping me in the face.

“I hope there isn’t an alarm,” I said.

“Here?” she asked incredulously. “Please. Like anyone would wantanything in this place.” She stepped back, making space for me to walk into the dim back rooms of Malachi’s office. Only the buzzing fluorescent fixture above the sink in the kitchen was on.

“He took everything with him,” I pointed out. “He was packing up to leave town, remember?”

She shook her head mockingly. “How would you survive without me?”

I stiffened.

She grimaced and waved the words away. “Never mind.…I didn’t mean…” She took a deep breath and flipped her hair back behind her shoulders, a pale gleam of gold in the dim light. “People are never good about getting rid of everything. Tamara Lindt got outed on that thing with the student teacher because she lent her phone to someone without deleting all the evidence.”

Tamara Lindt. That had been a scandal from way back in sophomore year. Even I’d been aware of it, which was saying something. She and this slimy d-bag college senior on assignment from EIU had had a thing in the equipment room…during school lunches. He’d been using her, from what I’d heard afterward, while “dating” several other girls on campus at the same time. Someone started a rumor that spread like, well, a juicy rumor, and it eventually got him kicked out of school, ours and his. Tamara had never seemed particularly grateful, but she wasn’t spectacularly bright, as I recalled. The biggest question had always been who had found out and how.

Huh. “Text messages?” I guessed.

Alona grinned. “Left herself logged in to Facebook. Her inbox was full of his sleaze.”

I knew it.

She moved deeper into the room, fumbling for the light switch and waiting for me to catch up so she could turn it on. “We’ll find something. Trust me.”

But Edmund, if that was his name, was much better than Tamara “Daddy Issues” Lindt, because he’d taken every scrap of paper with him. Even the garbage cans were empty. Probably a wise choice when running a semiscam.

Except for a disturbingly wrinkled apple in the mini-fridge, there was no sign that anyone had even been here recently.

“Here,” Alona called faintly from the waiting room.

I poked my head through the door to find her crouching next to a stack of chairs. “What?” I asked.

“The chairs and stuff are rented.” She pointed at something on the bottom of a chair. “There’s a label with a company name and phone number.”

“So?”

She stood up. “So,” she said with exaggerated patience, “you need information about Malachi, like his real name. They’ll have it with his credit card info. Unless he’s running that kind of scam, too.” She frowned. “Let’s hope not.”

Oh, Lord.

“And how do you suggest we get that information? Break in? We don’t even know where that place is!” I did not especially treasure the idea of spending the rest of the day finding this place and then waiting for everyone to leave so we could get in, while Erin ran around town doing whatever she wanted.

“We could,” she said with a shrug. “But calling and asking them is a lot easier.”

“They’re not just going to give us his personal information,” I said in disbelief.

“Phone. Gimme.” She held her hand out.

“They’re not going to be able to hear you,” I reminded her. I crossed the room, digging my phone from my pocket.

She pursed her lips. “This would be so much easier if I could do this myself.” She scowled at me and she flickered. Her edges went soft for a second, and I could almost see through her.

I caught my breath. “Alona…”

Her eyes snapped shut, and she furrowed her brow in concentration, murmuring positive comments in a whisper I could barely hear, let alone understand.

But apparently it was the thought that counted and not the volume, because after a second, she stabilized, becoming fully solid once again.

“Are you all right? Do you need me to—”

She shook her head and held up her hand to cut me off.

Okay, evidently we weren’t discussing this issue.

After taking a deep breath, she straightened her shoulders. Then she snatched the phone from my hand, consulted the number on the bottom of the chair, and started dialing. “Call them and say…” She paused, clearly thinking. “Tell them you’re the landlord and all this furniture is supposed to be cleared out. You need the tenant’s contact information, all of it. And if you can’t get ahold of him, or someone’s not over here in the next ten minutes, you’re going to throw it all out.”

And we had to hope the rental place was farther than ten minutes away, I supposed. “Wait. If I’m the landlord, why wouldn’t I have his contact information already?”

But it was too late. She shoved the phone into my hand, and it was ringing.

I glared at her.

“They’re not going to think that far ahead,” she said quickly. “And if they do, hang up.”

“Remember how much you hate the idea of jail and germs,” I said in a low tone.

“Jail? For what, impersonating a slumlord?” She sniffed. “Doubt it.”

“Hello?” a female voice said in my ear.

“Uh, hi,” I said, feeling ridiculous.

“Just be angry. Really angry!” Alona hovered at my elbow, coaching, which I ignored; but I did try to sound stern and landlordish, though I hadn’t a clue what that might actually sound like.

As it turned out the bored receptionist probably would have given me Malachi’s social security number, blood type, and anything else I asked, to avoid having to actually do work or walk away from FarmVille, or whatever was holding her attention.

“His real name is Edmund Harris,” I said to Alona after I’d hung up. “And his home address is in Decatur. Four twenty-two Sycamore, Apartment B. I can’t believe that worked.”

“Me either,” she said, shaking her head. “You were a ter riblelandlord.”

I rolled my eyes. “Let’s go.”

The apartment was empty. Dents in the dingy brown carpeting showed where the furniture had been. A cheap plywood entertainment center still remained in the corner, heavily listing to one side.

“Oh, my God, it’s like that part in Empire Strikes Backwhere they can never get into light speed,” Alona said with a disgusted sigh.

I stared at her.

Catching sight of me, she scowled. “What?

“Nothing. I just…” I tried to find the words. “Alona Dare making a Star Warsreference. I never thought I’d live to see the day.”

She arched an eyebrow at me. “At least one of us did.”She crossed the small room to the tiny hallway, which presumably led to a kitchen and bathroom. “Besides, it’s only because you made me watch it, like, a hundred times,”she called back, her voice sounding hollow in the empty space.

“It’s a classic, and it was twice,” I said, following her to a minikitchen. If I stood with my arms outstretched, I probably could have touched both walls. “And only because you fell asleep in the middle the first time.”

She shrugged dismissively. “The Dagobah stuff was so boring. No Han Solo.”

She looked around the room at the cabinet doors hanging open and sighed. “There’s nothing here.”

I should have figured that. He had, after all, been packing up to leave town.

“All right,” she said in the tone of someone done messing around. “Phone.” She held her hand out.

I pulled my phone from my pocket but held on to it. “Who are you—who am Icalling?” I asked cautiously. I’d saved the number the rental company receptionist had given me for Edmund, but I didn’t think calling was a good idea. “Malachi…Edmund, whatever, he’s not going to be thrilled to hear from us.” In fact, I was afraid calling him might make him bolt farther than he already had.

Alona shook her head. “I’m not calling anyone.” She peered with a grimace into an open drawer. “We’re going to—”

Before she could finish explaining her plan, my phone rang, echoing loudly in the empty apartment and startling both of us.

I looked at the number. Uh-oh.I felt a renewed surge of panic. “Uh, Al, did you have your phone on you when Erin—”

“No. Mrs. Turner still has it confiscated,” she said, bumping the drawer shut with her hip and moving closer to me. “Why?”

I held up my phone and showed her the words lily’s cell flashing on the screen. “Someone’s noticed you’re not where you’re supposed to be.”

Her eyes widened. “Answer it!” She reached for the phone.

I lifted it over my head, away from her grasping hand. “No way; it has to be the Turners,” I said. If Mrs. Turner had dropped Ally off at Misty’s this morning, it wouldn’t have taken much for her to connect the dots. Mrs. Turner had probably called Misty, and Misty had told them about their newly recovered daughter leaving with the guy Mrs. Turner hated most. Great.

“Exactly. You have to tell them I’m okay.” She crossed her arms and glared at me. Interesting that she cared so much about them now, when all she’d talked about before was how difficult it was to be around them.

“Except I don’t actually know if youare okay. The version of you that they know, anyway. And they might get a call about you– her—being very notokay at any time.” I didn’t know much about our legal system, but vouching for the safety of a girl who later turned up hurt or in jail or something struck me as a particularly bad idea.

She bit her lip.

There was a loooonggap between the final ring and the voice-mail signal, and even the happy little chime sounded angry.

“Shit,” I muttered.

“Are you going to listen to it?” she asked, seeming more anxious than I would have imagined.

“No,” I said, stuffing the phone back into my pocket. No sense in confirming things were as bad as, or worse than, I figured they already were.

“They’re going to be worried,” she mumbled, sounding annoyed; but she wouldn’t look at me, focusing instead on a splotch of something on the chipped and fading tile floor and kicking at it with the tip of her gym shoe. After all this time, she couldn’t fool me. If she was annoyed at anyone, it was at herself for caring.

“I know.” I looped an arm over her shoulders and pulled her toward me. She didn’t resist. What was it about family that had such an immense hold on you, even if it wasn’t your own, even if they didn’t understand who you really were?

And suddenly, pieces of what I knew about Edmund Harris connected in a new way. I turned away from Alona and started for the hallway.

Alona followed me. “Where are you going?”

“I know where Malachi, Edmund, whatever his name is—I know where he went,” I said over my shoulder. It’s where I would have gone if I’d been in his situation, or what I knew of it, anyway. But I wasn’t sure how long he would stay.

“Where?” Alona persisted.

I picked up speed, feeling like every second that passed was vital and one we could never get back.

“Home.”

Except, as it turned out, Will meant hishome, at least as a first stop.

“I can’t believe you don’t have Internet on your phone.” I flopped back in the passenger seat of the Dodge. We needed more information about Edmund—like another address—and without the ability to look it up on the go, which had been my plan, returning to his house and his computer was the fastest option.

“Do you know how much that costs every month?” he demanded.

Actually, I didn’t. When I’d been alive (the first time), I hadn’t worried about it, and I hadn’t yet regained phone privileges in my new reality, obviously. I thought about the message sitting in his voice mail from Mrs. Turner and flinched again.

“You have to promise me that no matter what happens, you’re going to try to talk to the Turners, to tell them none of it was their fault,” I said quietly. Mr. Turner was barely over feeling guilty for the first time something bad had happened to Lily, and I knew Mrs. Turner would probably blame herself—after she got done blaming Will for being a bad influence or something. And after yesterday’s blowup, Tyler would probably take on his share of responsibility, too, if something happened to his sister. Or if she simply never came home. God, we needed to find this Erin chick…and soon. “It’s important, okay? You need to promise me you’ll talk to them.”

Will frowned at me and tightened his grip on the wheel until his knuckles went white. “Stop it. Stop acting like you’re not going to be fine.”

Did he think I hadn’t noticed when I’d gone all see-through back there? I opened my mouth to point that out, but what good would it have done? He was still angry, and right now it seemed he was determined that I would be sticking around, if only so he could yell at me some more.

The car bumped up over the curb into the driveway, taking out a portion of the dried-out yard with it.

“Wait here.” Will unbuckled his seat belt and got out, leaving the car running.

“Yeah, right,” I said. I switched off the engine, snagged the keys before he got too far away, and scrambled after him.

He caught a glimpse of me following him and sighed heavily. “Do you ever listen?” he asked.

“When someone’s trying to tell me what to do? Uh, no. Besides, who died and made you the boss of me?”

He shot me an unhappy look as he rounded the corner.

“Oh, touchy, touchy,” I muttered. “Like I’m going to just sit out there while you waste time online,” I said in a louder voice. In truth, I didn’t want to be by myself at the moment. It felt like if Will wasn’t there to glare at me, I might slip away. And while I’d accepted that was a possibility, I…I didn’t particularly want to be alone if/when it happened. Besides, it wasn’t like we’d be disturbing anyone. His mom’s car wasn’t in the driveway.

“I think you’re confusing me with you, Miss I Have Nine Thousand Friends on Facebook,” he said darkly, yanking open the screen door and reaching for the doorknob. Then he stopped, flummoxed momentarily by the locked door.

“Oh, ouch, seriously wounding me there.” I dangled the keys over his shoulder, and he snapped them away without so much as a thank-you. “Between the two of us, who do you think has better research skills? I would have graduated with honors.”

“At least Igraduated,” he muttered, stabbing the key in and unlocking the door.

I sucked in a breath. “I think dyingwas a little outside my control, thank you very much.”

“If you say so.” He shrugged, but I saw the corner of his mouth turn up in a faint smile. So maybe I wasn’t the only one taking comfort in the familiar nature of our exchange.

He shoved the door open, and I followed him into the kitchen, where he stopped short and I nearly bumped into him.

“Not now,” he said under his breath, seemingly to himself.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

He turned with a grimace and held his hands up in the classic stop position.

Ooookay.I listened for a second; it didn’t take me long to identify the sound of voices, lots of voices, coming from the back of the house. What the hell?

Before I could ask him, even in a whisper, what was going on, an unfamiliar face appeared in the doorway to the hall. “You’re here,” she exclaimed at Will. Then, when she caught sight of me, her eyes widened. “You found her!”

Uh-oh.

She disappeared from the doorway, and I heard her yell, “They’re here!”

Within seconds, the kitchen was flooded with spirits, many of whom I didn’t recognize, all jabbering at once. They flowed in, surrounding Will and me individually, cutting us off from each other.

“Why didn’t you tell me it was this bad?” I shouted at him over the clamor.

“What were you going to do? We didn’t know you were still my spirit guide,” he shouted back. “And it wasn’t this bad…until now.”

Fabulous. Well, that was helpful. I straightened my shoulders, tossed my hair back, and started to wade my way through to Will, or at least to the last place I’d seen him. The kitchen wasn’t that big.

Of course, most of the spirits were too agitated to pay attention to what I was doing. They kept pulling at me, trying to stop me so they could explain, beg, plead, whatever. Though I couldn’t see Will, I could only imagine it was worse for him.

The last straw came when someone actually grabbed hold of my arm and yanked until I stumbled back.

Not. Cool.I pulled my arm free with a vicious tug that sent my attacker—a soccer mom circa the 1980s, based on her wardrobe and her pink-and-purple-braided headband– eesh—sprawling forward.

I sidestepped her face-plant, but barely. “Enough already!” I shouted.

The room quieted immediately, faces whipping around toward me. Through a gap I could see Will’s pale face. They’d cornered him against the door to the basement.

I took a deep breath to reinstate my claim on him, to tell them they had to go through me to get to him. That would shut them up and make them go away…or at least freeze them in place.

Before I could say anything, though, I heard Will.

“You heard her. Out, now!” He stepped away from the basement door and pointed to the nearest exterior wall.

Shock rippled through me. I stared at him, but he refused to look in my direction, splotches of red rising in his pale cheeks. He focused instead on the spirits in front of him, some of whom were already starting to protest.

He shook his head and spoke over them. “Who else do you have to help you? No one. So don’t piss me off!”

I gaped at him. This was exactly what I’d been after him to do from the beginning. Take control, own his power. It’s what I would have done. If you can’t get rid of a feature in your life that is less than desirable, make it work for you. But I’d never expected he’d actually follow through on it.

It took a few moments for his words to take full effect. But then some of the ghosts started drifting out the back door. Others moved through the wall that Will had indicated.

“We will be back to help you,” he said to those who lingered. “Just not today. We’re already on task for someone else. You wouldn’t want us to stop if we were working on your behalf.”

Points to him for not framing that as a question.

With a few more reassurances and warnings from Will, the rest of the crowd slowly dissipated.

“You did it,” I said, when the kitchen was empty except for the two of us. I couldn’t quite keep the note of disbelief from my voice.

He shrugged, but he looked pleased, if a little stunned by his own accomplishment. “I wasn’t sure what would happen to you if you tried to stop them. I didn’t want to risk it.” He turned and walked down the hall to his room.

I stayed put. He didn’t want to risk it, but why? Because he didn’t want me to be gone? Or because he still needed me to try to stop Erin? Both? It shouldn’t have bothered me that I wasn’t sure which his answer would have been had I been brave enough to ask. But it did.

Especially because he’d just proved, in no uncertain terms, that he no longer needed me as much as he used to, if at all.

This was a good thing, I told myself. Will needed to be able to take care of himself. That’s what I wanted for him.

Except…what about what I wanted for me?

Honestly, I wasn’t sure what I wanted. I didn’t want to disappear for forever, that was for sure. But I didn’t know if I had a choice in the matter. If I was lucky, the light might come for me before that happened. That would be okay, except I’d sort of gotten invested in what was happening here. I couldn’t imagine being happy or at peace, not knowing what happened to Will or the Turners. And returning to life as Ally Turner…was that even an option? Did I want it to be?

I rubbed my forehead, pushing at the dull ache starting there. God. Who said being dead was easy? Dying had only been the start of my troubles.

With the details about Edmund that we had now, thanks to Will’s questionable landlord performance, it didn’t take long to find the information that we needed online. We tracked down his parents’ names from his sister’s obituary and then their address from a white-pages search. Easy peasy.

Ted and Althea Harris lived on the outskirts of Peoria. A couple of hours away at most. And Will was convinced from the conversation he’d had with Edmund that that was where he was headed.

“He only left because of Erin,” he said, once we were back in the car. “If he thinks she’s gone, even temporarily, he’ll go back. At least to let them know he’s okay. Trust me.” He signaled to turn on to the highway.

I made a face. “Maybe.” I wasn’t convinced that we knew Edmund half as well as Will thought we did. But then again, not much of this situation made sense to me, so what did I know?

I flipped through the pages we’d printed, looking for the article on Erin’s death again. “How weird is it that he can only see one ghost?” I asked, more to myself than to Will, but he answered anyway.

“On a scale of one to ten? Fifteen.” He shook his head. The Dodge started to tremble as he pushed it to its maximum speed, which was still less than the legal limit on the highway. “I think it has to do with the twin thing.”

“What, some kind of psychic twin connection or something?” I asked, trying not to scoff. I was, after all, a spirit communicating with him based on a similar sort of premise.

“Maybe.” Will hesitated. “I don’t think he’s really a ghost-talker, at least not in the way we understand it. He said that Erin doesn’t have physicality around him. She can’t touch him.”

“That is so weird.” I shivered. I didn’t like her. And not only because she was hella powerful and a bully. She was operating outside the principles that I knew guided our little shared space between the living and the dead. Did. Not. Like. It made me feel unsettled. “The Order never mentioned anything like this?” Will’s near conversion was still a bit of a sore spot with me.