is real.”
He rolled his dark eyes. “Realer, then.”
Roxi kissed his cheek. “I think you mean tangible.”
Gage shrugged. “Whatever. It’s just cool to see her, that’s all.”
Everyone else agreed, and I smiled. Lark smiled, too.
But then everyone broke into couples for the slow dance, and Kevin looked at me. “It is good to see you,” he said. No one else would ever hear him above the music, his voice was so low, but I could hear it, and he knew it. It took all my strength not to stick my tongue out at him—or rip his eyes out.
I left instead. I couldn’t trust myself to be around him, not when that dark and angry part of myself was so close to the surface. I might hurt him, and I didn’t want to do that, no matter how much he’d hurt me.
I let myself drift through town, wandering aimlessly along the dark streets. My kind were everywhere—strolling along the sidewalks, peeking in windows, sitting on benches. Tomorrow there would be even more of them as even the weaker ones gathered strength.
Halloween was still days away, but that time of year has always been hard for me. This year it seemed even rougher. The veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead grows thinner as the calendar counts down to the end of October. It’s our holiday—when we can cross between dimensions and interact with the living if we wish. We can be our true selves. Those who have become violent or despondent remember who they were, and decide if they want to try moving on, or give themselves over to the darkness.
A lot give up, but there are an equal number who move on.
But not me. I stayed exactly where I was. I don’t think I had a choice.
Halloween’s approach had to be hard on Kevin, as well. He was a medium, and his abilities had only gotten stronger since our encounter with the ghost of madman Josiah Bent at Haven Crest Hospital.
I liked Kevin, and I thought he liked me, but then he told me we shouldn’t spend so much time together since we could never really have a relationship. Then I caught him kissing Sarah—Mace’s girlfriend. Mace, his best friend. That had stung, but the disappointment I’d felt was worse.
I kept drifting. The town of New Devon wasn’t very big, and there wasn’t much more for a ghost to do there than there was for a living sixteen-year-old. I didn’t feel like going home, but I wasn’t going back to that dance.
I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to find myself at Haven Crest. The abandoned asylum was incredibly haunted from years of treating those who were considered insane or were locked up by their families. The graveyard on the property contained hundreds of cremated remains—and those were just the ones the families hadn’t claimed.
Haven Crest was full of, as Lark would put it, her people. Though, unlike Lark, most of the residents really were insane. If they hadn’t been when they went in, they had been by the time they died. It made for a lot of spectral energy in one spot, and like any ghost, I was drawn to it, because no one lived at Haven Crest anymore—they were all ghosts, and that made them my people.
I stood on the lawn facing the main building—a large, redbrick building with a wing on either side of the central block and a large white domed-roof tower. It had staging and construction materials piled up in front of it. The town was in the process of reclaiming as much land and buildings as they could, turning them into offices and public spaces.
Because what could possibly go wrong when disturbing the ghosts of more than a century’s worth of mental patients?
On the light post near my head someone had recently stapled a poster: One Night Only—Dead Babies!
I frowned. Why would anyone in their right minds want to see deceased infants? In my experience that kind of thing was very disturbing to the living. As a ghost, a baby was just another ghost. I hadn’t seen one myself—they tended to move on quickly.
Oh. Wait. Dead Babies. Yes, this was a musical band that Lark enjoyed listening to. I remembered dancing around our bedroom one night pretending to play a guitar while she sang into a hairbrush. I smiled at the memory. We didn’t do things like that anymore. Lark was always with Ben, or there were other people around. The times we were alone were rare and usually when she had homework to do, or needed to sleep. I would never actually say it to Lark, but sometimes I wished we could go back to a time when she didn’t have friends, and people stayed away because they thought she was crazy.
Dead Babies was going to be holding a concert here at Haven Crest on Halloween night. I’d heard Lark and Ben talk about a concert that Lark proclaimed was “a farking bad idea.” This had to be it. All that music and energy at a place like Haven Crest? The dead wouldn’t be able to resist, and there would be so many living to interact with—who wouldn’t think anything of a peculiarly dressed stranger dancing next to them. It would be Halloween, after all.
I would have to attend this concert. It might be fun. Or dangerous. If I was lucky, maybe both. All those warm, breathing bodies, ripe with fear, practically begging to be terrified. Delicious.
“Hello.”
I didn’t jump. It’s a well-known fact that ghosts don’t scare easily. I turned my head. Standing there beneath the lamp across the drive from me was a boy who looked to be a little older than I was. From the way he was dressed, I’d say he was actually a century older than I was. Young men didn’t wear suits much anymore, especially not jackets with tails.
“Hi,” I said.
Hands in his pockets, he crossed the pavement toward me. He was tall and pale with thick black hair and bright blue eyes. He had a nice smile—the sort that made my heart flutter. I might not actually be alive in this dimension, but I was fully intact in my own. Even if my heart didn’t actually beat, I was still capable of the sensation of physical response.
“I haven’t seen you around here before,” he remarked.
I folded my arms over my chest like my sister did whenever she felt defensive. “I haven’t seen you, either.”
He stopped right in front of me, still smiling. “I’m Noah.”
“Wren.”
His left eyebrow lifted. “An unusual name. One I’ve heard before. You wouldn’t be the ghost who helped destroy Josiah Bent?”
I stiffened. Bent had been a terrible creature, and he’d hurt Lark’s—our—friends. Because of that, and because I believed he needed to be destroyed, it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone at Haven Crest might harbor resentment for us getting rid of him.
But I wasn’t afraid, and I wasn’t going to lie. “Yes.”
His grin widened—he had nice teeth. “I have to thank you for that. Bent was a first-class bas—uh, scoundrel.”
“You can say bastard in front of me. Women aren’t considered delicate creatures anymore.”
His smile turned rueful. “That is a pity. Still, I’m happy to see that the loss doesn’t extend to beauty nor grace.”
Was that a compliment? “Are you flirting with me?”
Noah leaned a little
