Читать книгу Sisters of Blood and Spirit - Kady Cross - Страница 10

WREN

Lark slumped against Mason at exactly the same moment a police officer got out of his car on the other side of the parking lot.

“Crap,” Ben muttered. “Is that Olgilvie?”

Someone else swore.

I barely glanced at the tall, heavyset man in uniform walking toward us. I was more concerned about my sister. What had happened when she’d touched Mason’s wounds? “Lark?”

Mason held her up. He couldn’t see me, however. To his friends he said, “Stay calm. Let me do the talking.”

Sarah looked panicked. “How are we going to explain her?” She gestured at Lark. “She looks drunk.”

It was obvious that everyone thought we were in trouble, so I did the only thing I could think of. I stepped into my sister and took over her body for the time being. People called it possession, but I didn’t like to use that term in regards to Lark. Thankfully, she was just asleep. I opened my eyes—Lark’s eyes.

Mason looked down at me. He frowned. “You’re not her,” he whispered.

I managed a small smile, impressed that he could tell the difference between us—most people couldn’t. “You can let her...me, go now. Thanks.”

He dropped his arms like I was on fire. I stumbled, but managed to catch myself. Wearing Lark was fairly comfortable, but I wasn’t used to having substance in this realm. Limbs were heavy, clumsy. I braced my hand against the roof of Nan’s car.

By that time the police officer—Olgilvie—had reached us. “Evening, kids. Had a report of a girl accosting another with a cup of hot tea. Then I heard a scream. Everything all right up here?”

“Yeah,” Mason replied. “Just messing around.”

Olgilvie ignored him and came straight toward me. Did I know him? He looked familiar. Had he been there the night Lark had hurt herself?

He peered at me with narrow dark eyes. “You’re that Noble girl, aren’t you? Charlotte’s granddaughter.”

I nodded. God, even Lark’s head was heavy. How did the living walk around like this all day?

His shoulders straightened, like a rooster trying to make itself taller. He tucked his thumbs into his belt. “Are we going to have trouble again, Miss Noble?”

Again. I wanted to explain to him that we had never had any trouble, but that we certainly could if he wanted. I wanted to make the little hairs on the back of his neck stand up on end. I wanted to make his bladder quiver. A girl screams and he shows up talking like she’d done something wrong? Shouldn’t he be asking if she—I—was all right?

A skinny young man with a lot of hair and jeans that were too tight stood beside the officer. It was obvious he was one of my kind—not just because he looked out of place, but because he looked right at me and winked.

“No,” I said, looking away from the ghost. “We’re not going to have trouble.”

The policeman nodded, rocked back on his heels. “That’s good, because I have friends at Bell Hill. If I think for a minute that you’re a danger to anyone in this town I won’t hesitate to give them a call.”

Lark would say something snarky—my sister got defiant when threatened—but I couldn’t think of anything. I was too angry. How dare he bring up that awful place. Lark hadn’t done anything and this man talked about sending her back there? He looked at her as though he thought she was a criminal. Trouble. Just what did he think she was going to do? She’d hurt herself, not anyone else.

“She didn’t do anything,” Mason said, with a frown. “Why don’t you back off?”

The officer obviously didn’t like his tone. “You watch your tone, Mace.”

“No.” The boy who had rescued my sister, and earned my eternal gratitude, folded his arms over his chest. “There’s nothing going on here, so maybe you should go find some real trouble, because I won’t hesitate to call my father—you know, your boss—and let him know that one of his officers is bullying a teenage girl for no reason.”

The older man stared at Mason, who stared back. Oh, I wished Lark could have seen it! If I liked Mason Ryan before, I adored him now for standing up for my sister.

“Someday, you’re not going to be able to hide behind your daddy the chief anymore.” Olgilvie pointed a thick finger at him. “I’m going to be there when that happens.”

Mason shrugged. “Then I guess you and I will have trouble. Someday.”

The officer stepped forward, jaw tight. That was when I put myself, or rather Lark, between the two of them. I probably shouldn’t have done anything, but it was the only way I could think of to end this situation before it became any more out of control.

And the only way to get the ghost to go away.

“You hid behind your father when he was chief, Opie.”

The color drained from Olgilvie’s face. “What did you call me?”

“That was what they called you, wasn’t it? The kids who liked to tease you?” Sometimes I knew things about the living, but in this case, the name had come from the ghost with him.

I smiled a little, moved closer to him, so only he could hear what I said next—the secret his companion shared. He staggered backward after I spoke to him, looking at me like I was something unnatural, which I was, of course. I was glad Lark wasn’t awake to see it, because too many people had given her that same look over the course of her life.

The officer turned and walked away. He looked unsteady. The younger man’s ghost walked beside him.

“What did you say to him?” Mason asked when it was just the group of us again.

“Something only he and a dead man knew,” I answered. And that was all I was going to say. Things taken to the grave were taken there for a reason. By revealing it, and scaring the officer away, I’d basically indebted myself to the ghost haunting him. If the ghost ever needed a favor, I was obliged to reciprocate. No need to bring anyone else into that bargain.

I had bigger things to worry about. “Can someone help me? I need to wake up Lark.”

With the exception of Mason, they all looked at me in...well, it wasn’t quite horror. Surprise? That was when I finally let myself look at Kevin. My heart skipped a beat.

“Wren?” His voice was hoarse.

I nodded. His eyes were so blue, even in the dark parking lot. The breeze blew dark curls around his face. Such wild hair. It didn’t occur to me to speak. I just wanted to look at him. God, I could touch him if I wanted.

After that first connection when Lark had hurt herself, I didn’t expect to talk to Kevin again, but he reached out to me a day or two later. And when my sister had shut me out, he was the one person I could talk to about it. It took some time, and it wasn’t easy, but we got so that we could communicate fairly easily. He couldn’t see me, couldn’t touch me, but he could hear me.

“Oh, shit,” Gage said, staring at me. “That’s a ghost in there? Dude, that’s...fucked up.”

I blinked. There were other people with us. I hadn’t exactly forgotten them, they just hadn’t mattered all that much to me. Sometimes the living faded into the background, there were just so many of them.

“Where do you need to go?” Mace asked.

“Someplace private. Quiet. Not here,” I replied.

Kevin came forward. “My place. My parents are away for a long weekend.”

His house! Oh, no. Lark was going to kill me when she woke up. I didn’t care. I wanted to see his house. I wanted to touch the light switches he touched. Walk the floors he walked. I wanted to smell his toothbrush. Maybe try on his clothes. I didn’t care if it was weird—I spent 99.9 percent of my time incorporeal, damn it.

“I need someone to drive,” I said with a wince, gesturing to my grandmother’s hideous car. “I can’t.”

“I’ll drive you,” Kevin offered.

Oh, Lark, please stay asleep. Just for a little while longer. Please, please.

“Are you sure? It’s an ugly car.”

He smiled, and it was like watching the moon rise from behind the veil. So bright. “I don’t mind.”

Mason clapped him on the shoulder. “We’ll meet you there, man.”

The keys were already in the...thing. What was that called? The ignition? I managed to clomp around the back to the passenger side. Kevin opened the door for me. I smiled. “Thanks.”

I pulled the seat belt across Lark’s body and buckled it. No need for both of us to be ghosts. Kevin climbed in, fastened his belt and then started the engine. He glanced around at the interior.

“Wow,” he said. “It really is hideous.”

I laughed. “Isn’t it?”

He grinned, adjusted the stick thing and then made the vehicle move. “It’s weird, being able to actually talk to you, and have you be more than a voice in my head.”

“I know.” I sneaked a glance at him. “It’s nice.” There were so many things I wanted to say to him, but they all seemed so foolish now that I had the chance. We’d talked a few times over the past year and a bit, but this seemed much more...intimate. I could touch him if I wanted. Smell him. Feel his warmth.

I never realized just how cold I was all the time.

“Do you think Lark will help them?”

“Yes.” It wasn’t a lie. “She’ll do what’s right.” It just took a little prodding to get her there sometimes.

“Good.” He turned his head toward me just for a second before looking back at the road. “I can’t believe it’s you in there. Earlier that face looked like it wanted to kill me.”

“She felt ambushed. The song...”

“Did you like it?”

“I did. Lark felt like it was an accusation.”

“It kind of was. She put you through something terrible.”

“She thought she was insane, Kevin. Living with me made her feel that way.” I couldn’t have expected him to understand.

His jaw tightened. “No. She let people make her feel that way. I know what that’s like, and it’s not your fault.”

He was sweet, but he really didn’t understand. “We can’t be friends if you hate her.” It hurt to say the words.

“I don’t hate her. I just think she made some bad choices.”

It sounded like something Lark would have said. As much as I liked him, this was my sister we were discussing. He had to be an only child, because he obviously didn’t know that the only person who could say anything bad about Lark was me. “She didn’t do it to hurt me. She did it so we could be together.” I had never told anyone that. In fact, Lark and I had only ever talked about it once—shortly after she cut herself. There had been that brief moment when we had actually been together behind the veil. She’d been dead for a few seconds.

It had been wonderful. I never had and never would tell her just how much. Lark and I could touch, but there was always this invisible barrier between us. We were in different worlds, even if they overlapped. To have her with me finally was incredible—and wrong. She didn’t belong in my world, and I couldn’t have let her stay.

Kevin glanced at me again. “Okay.” He only said that one word, but it seemed to mean so much more than that. I smiled.

“Can I...?” I swallowed. “Can I touch you?”

The car swerved as he jerked his head toward me, then back again. “Now?” His voice was strained.

“I just want...” I leaned over and wrapped one of his curls around my finger. His hair was silky, springy—exactly like I’d hoped it would be. I laughed. “I’ve never felt hair other than Lark’s before.”

And this was different from when Lark was awake and I shared her body. Despite the heavy limbs and awkwardness of them, they felt like mine. I was in control, not my sister, and it...it was wonderful. And strange. So strange.

I pulled my hand away, but he caught it and twined his fingers with mine. His hand was warm. Strong. My heart slammed hard against my ribs. Was I going to vomit, or burst into song? I couldn’t tell.

And it wasn’t my heart, not really. It was Lark’s heart. I had to remember that. This wasn’t my body. In this realm I didn’t have a body. I wasn’t real.

But I let Kevin hold Lark’s hand all the way to his house anyway.

LARK

My eyes opened. The first face I saw other than my sister’s belonged to Mace. Funny, but his face was the last thing I remembered seeing before I passed out. God, that vision of Wren eating eyeballs had been gross. Not something I ever wanted to see again.

“Where am I?” I demanded. “Whose bed is this? And why do I smell toothpaste?” I swear on her grave my sister blushed.

Kevin’s freakishly curly head appeared over Mace’s shoulder. “You’re at my house. My bed.”

Well, ew.

“You fainted,” my sister informed me. “I had to wear you for a bit—there was a police officer.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it again.

“It’s okay,” Wren continued, strangely giddy. “They know about me. We’re friends.”

At the same time, I heard Roxi say, “Your sister possessed you when the cop showed up. It was awesome.”

Oh, great. Okay, so Wren possessing me seemed to convince everyone that I’d be on board with helping them, but what the hell had my sister done while running around in my body? I glanced at Kevin, my gaze narrow. She better not have made out with him. I sat up. My head swam a little. I reached out to steady myself, my hand clamping on to something warm and hard.

It was Mace’s shoulder. As soon as my brain settled I jerked my hand away.

“You okay?” he asked.

I nodded, avoiding his gaze. He needed to go away. He was too much of a distraction for me. I couldn’t seem to think around him. All I could think about was that he’d seen me at my weakest, and I could never change that. I owed him my life, and I couldn’t change that, either. That meant that regardless of what I thought of the others, I had to help him. I had to do everything in my power to save him. I might be a living, breathing girl, but I knew ghosts—I could fight them and hurt them—and I had one on my side.

So, I was going to walk into an asylum. A haunted one. I wanted to mention—just in case there was any confusion on the subject—that asylums and hospitals and jails didn’t have one ghost, or even half a dozen ghosts. Most of them, especially the old ones, could have hundreds of ghosts. When I was thirteen my parents took me—and Wren—to London. The Tower of London freaked me out. Wren had to return to the Shadow Lands—where she lived when she wasn’t with me—because the ghosts wouldn’t leave her alone.

There was a different energy to ghosts when they were in this world. The ones that stayed here had issues, and they were agitated, while Shadow Land ghosts were generally more calm. At least that was what Wren told me. I wasn’t there long enough to find out for myself, not really. But the Shadow Lands was like a stepping-stone between dimensions—a place between earth and Heaven, reincarnation...whatever.

“What happened to you earlier?” Roxi asked. She was perched on the dresser near the foot of the bed. Mace and Sarah were on the edge of the bed and Gage and Ben stood against the far wall. My sister was with Kevin. I didn’t like that very much, but at least he wasn’t looking at me like I was Hitler. In fact, he seemed really confused when he looked at me.

Oh, God. She’d made out with him. Didn’t she? She was so lucky she was already dead.

“I don’t know,” I told her honestly. “I had some kind of vision.”

“Of what?” It was Kevin who asked.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“It could help us.”

I scowled. “I said I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But it could help,” he insisted.

I clenched my jaw. “It won’t.” I gave him a look that said if he pushed it I’d punch him in the face.

Instead of continuing the argument, he tilted his head. “That bad?”

I resisted the urge to snort. “I passed out.” Was that bad enough for him? And why was he suddenly being all understanding? I thought he hated me.

“Sorry ’bout that,” Mace apologized. “I didn’t know that would happen.”

I shrugged. “Didn’t think you would have.”

He looked down—at my hand, the one he’d shoved under his shirt. My fingers twitched. I closed them into a fist. “I need to see where you were attacked.”

He didn’t even blink. “Okay. Let’s go.”

“Now?” His girlfriend blinked enough for both of us. “You’re going now? She just woke up.”

Mace rose to his feet and so did I. “He wants to make sure I don’t change my mind,” I remarked with less humor than I intended.

He shot me an unamused look. “Maybe I just want to make sure my friends and I are back to normal as soon as possible. I have to think that spectral wounds aren’t good.”

He was right, they weren’t. In fact, they could be life threatening. It was weird, but he didn’t seem to doubt for a moment that I could fix this, even though I had no freaking idea of how to do just that. “Let’s go, then.”

Wren came toward me. God, there were a lot of people in the room. So many of them depending on me to help them. I didn’t do well with responsibility. “I’m coming with you.”

I shook my head. “You’re not going anywhere near that place until I’ve checked it out.” I turned to Kevin. “Do you have a can of salt I can take with me?”

“Sure,” he said. I had to admit that I liked not having to explain myself. I followed him to the kitchen—everyone else tagging along behind. He took a large can of salt from the pantry and handed it to me. It was full, the seal not even broken. It was a cheap but effective weapon against spirits. I wasn’t sure why, but I didn’t care so long as it worked.

“If you’re not back in an hour we’re going to come looking for you,” Ben said. He’d been pretty quiet up until now. Then again, he and Wren could have chatted up a storm and braided each other’s hair while I was out of it, for all I knew.

I shot him a grim smile. “If we’re not back in an hour we’re dead.”

That brought the mood down.

“Why would you say that?” Sarah demanded. She turned to Mace. “Why would she say something like that?”

“Because it’s true,” I retorted.

My sister looked embarrassed. “Lark...”

I held up my hand. “We’ll be fine. I’ll have your friend back in one piece, I promise.”

“You’re our friend, too,” Roxi said softly.

I snorted.

“If you want to be,” Ben added.

There was something in his gaze that freaked me out. He freaked me out—almost as much as Mace, but for different reasons. “Morbid curiosity?” Why else would he seem to be so interested in me? He was probably one of those guys who secretly crushed on goth girls. “Let’s go.”

I pivoted on my heel, toward what I hoped was the back door. Outside I stomped toward Nan’s car.

“We’re taking my car,” came Mace’s voice from behind me.

I swerved toward the Jaguar. It was old and black—cool without screaming, “I have a huge wang!” Good thing he was driving, because I had no idea where the keys to the Beetle were. Whoever drove it here must have still had them.

I tried the passenger door. It was locked. Great. The thing predated auto lock, so I had to wait for him to come around and unlock it for me. I stood there feeling like a loser.

When Mace reached me he didn’t immediately unlock the door. He stood there watching me. Finally, I lifted my chin and met his gaze with a belligerent one of my own. “What?” I wished I’d worn heels so I could be more at his eye level. I found him...intimidating.

“Just so we’re clear, my interest in being your friend isn’t morbid curiosity.” His tone smarted with indignation. “This is morbid curiosity.” He grabbed my right arm and yanked my sleeve up.

“Hey!” I cried, pulling against his grip. He was way stronger than me and held my arm tight, turning it so that the scar there was fully visible—a long, smooth ridge against my pale skin. He touched it with his other hand—a gentle stroke. It was a violation.

“Don’t,” I choked out. I was tempted to hit him with the can of salt.

His gaze lifted and locked with mine. “That was the scariest day of my life, finding you like that.”

“Oh.” A genius with words was I. Being the center of my own little world, I’d thought only of my own shame, my own feelings. It never occurred to me how finding me must have affected him beyond his opinion of me.

He continued, still staring into my eyes, still holding my arm. He didn’t touch my scar again, though. “Nobody has ever scared me more than you have—that day, and then tonight when you passed out.”

My throat was tight—probably because my heart had jumped into it. A smart-ass retort came to mind, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it. “What do you want from me, Mace? An apology? Fine, I’m sorry.”

The muscle in his jaw twitched. “What I want is for you not to treat me like I’m one of those assholes who doesn’t understand you or treats you like you’re crazy.”

I yanked on my arm again, but he held tight. I knew that if I pretended it hurt he’d let me go. Here was the twisted part—I didn’t want him to let me go. It had been so long since someone, especially a guy, had touched me. “What are you, then?” Did he really expect me to believe that he, of all people, didn’t think I was nuts?

His nostrils flared slightly. “I’m the guy who kicked in a window to get to you. The guy who found you in a pool of your own blood and wrapped your arms in pillowcases to try to stop the bleeding. I’m the guy who prayed for you to live while you begged me to let you die. I don’t want your apology.”

“What the hell do you want? Gratitude? A freaking medal?” I wasn’t yelling, but I was close.

“What do I want?” His fingers tightened on my arm. “Jesus, Lark. I want you to forgive me!”