Chapter 15
Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting
“Born to Die” by Lana Del Rey
Ah, perfect, here we go,” Bas says before I can figure out how to catch one of the thousand questions wheeling through my head. He pulls the RV over against the curb in the shadowy pocket of a dead streetlamp, throwing open the door. “Get in, old man.”
Something peels away from the lumpen base of the streetlamp. Bas wriggles into the back. His body blocks my line of sight for less than a second, but by the time he drops into the second passenger seat behind mine, the RV’s already moving, this time with his babynapper behind the wheel.
Knees practically knocking against the dash, Cain swings us out into the street, grappling under his seat with a grimace to make room for his long legs.
He ratchets the chair back as far as it’ll go, smashing it against the back of the dinette booth.
But even fighting for those couple extra inches, Cain still sits forward, a gap between his back and the seat big enough to wedge my whole arm through.
Like he’s afraid the old velveteen might give him cooties.
Or, I realize, eyeing the way his charcoal hoodie bulges ever so slightly at his waistband, like he’ll need to reach for his gun.
“Give Sebastian your phone,” he says, gruff.
“Absolutely not.” I unbuckle my seat belt, folding back against the door. Keeping a steady glare on him, eyeing his hands, I stomp back into my boots. “If this is a kidnapping, try harder.”
And this man—this Criminal Minds reject committing several simultaneous crimes—has the actual audacity to sigh at me. In the unsteady glow of passing gas lamps, I swear he rolls his eyes.
Flat and tired, he says, “Bas.”
I whip around to glare between the seats, find Bas leaning forward, offering me a smile.
“Hey, I promised you three felonies,” he says gently, holding out a hand. “It’s okay. You can trust him.”
I don’t move. “He has a gun.”
“Listen, I tried to get one for us, too, but he wouldn’t let me.”
“You’re dangerous enough without one,” Cain says with the tired cadence of an old argument.
Bas throws up a hand. “See?”
“You both are,” he adds, glancing at me. “I’d shake your hand, but I like my soul where it is.”
My wounded pride flares before my aching brain has time to catch up.
“You think I’d kill you?” I snap. “Then why are you kidnapping me?”
Belatedly, his words sink in. He likes his soul where it is—and I could change that, couldn’t I?
I wonder what would happen, if I dipped my fingers beneath his skin as easily as I gathered up the ghosts inside Mr. Snider.
Even now, firmly in my body, if I close my eyes I can feel the fire under his skin, the light of his life, and it would be so easy—so devastatingly simple—to pluck out that bright little spark and crush it in my palm.
I could kill him.
And he knew that. He knew it and he still came.
What kind of trouble are we in that he would risk that?
Swallowing hard, I tug my cellphone from my bra. I pass it back between the seats. Immediately, Bas shoves a paper clip into its seam, popping out my SIM card.
“What is the Demeter Project?” I ask. “What is going on?”
“You want the short version? The stunt you two just pulled blew up seventeen years of painstakingly tedious effort keeping you both off the government’s radar.
Now it’s time for Plan B. Lucky for you, Plan B’s simple,” Cain says.
“Step one: get out of town ASAP—” He cuts off.
His head snaps sideways, eyes fixed on the big black SUV blowing the stop sign on a side street.
It screams past, windows tinted so dark we can’t see the driver, and Cain watches it the entire time, the rigid line of his body at odds with his idle driving, plodding along not one tick higher than the posted speed.
“There’s a plan?” I whisper, the tension of the passing SUV trapping my voice. “You planned for this?”
Cain shrugs. He takes a second at the stop sign to check his mirrors, stare down every road for a long three seconds. I glance into the back seat. Bas makes a wiggly gesture with his hand.
“Always have a plan for shit hitting the fan,” he says.
“And the shit hit?”
Bas cocks his head. “Well, yeah. What’s that one quote—ten impossible things before breakfast?
” He ticks off on his fingers. “A human ghost swarm formed, it showed intent, it traveled, it spoke, it possessed a guy—there’s not a single record of that occurring,” he says, glancing at Cain for confirmation.
“And then you and me sent the ghosts home and picked a guy back up from what should have been irreversible ghost drain. That’s downright impossible. ”
“Whatever the two of you did with that teacher, you opened a door,” Cain says. “A lot of ghosts took advantage.”
I can’t think. My body feels like a war zone, shots fired, nothing but panic and praying and senseless noise. I dig my fingernails into my arms, desperate to hold back the tide, something bigger than myself echoing in the hollow of my rib cage.
“What do you mean a door? I didn’t open anything, I just…”
“Just what?” Cain prompts calmly—like this is normal to him, eyes never even glancing off the road.
“It was just seven ghosts,” I blurt. But my protest sounds tinny in my own ears, diminishing into a desperate whisper. “We said we’d call it seven.”
But it wasn’t, was it? It wasn’t seven ghosts inside Mr. Snider, and I knew that, even at the time, reaching into his chest again and again, cradling every last pained and desperate soul to my chest, their little lights blurring together—so blisteringly happy, at last, to be held. To be seen.
Helplessly, I glance around at Bas.
“What did we do?” I whisper.
He flashes a tight smile, his dark eyes full of stars, a galaxy expanding in the watercolor gaslights flashing past our windows.
“We helped them,” he murmurs, but it doesn’t match the pained way his mouth crinkles or how his shoulders bow, tight and hard, his own hands clenched in useless fists against his stomach.
It feels like a lie. It feels like too little, too late, a wishing penny down an empty well and no one listening for the fall. My stomach twists. Anxiety batters at the backs of my teeth. My fingernails bite into my skin.
“I need more than that.”
“We don’t have more than that,” Cain says, shaking his head.
“No one knows what you did yet. Not the government nerds and sure as hell not me. Best I can figure, you found a way to briefly punch a hole through realities and in—oh, what do you figure, Bas? Four-and-a-half minutes?—funneled half a county of dead folks through.”
I don’t know what to say to that. Don’t know what I can say.
“Somehow, the ghosts all know it too,” Cain continues, before I can figure out how to work my mouth so words come out.
“Felt that door open or something. Ghost activity is increasing across the state—the shit in question, if you will—ghost swarms with intent and direction all headed straight to the center of an obvious, sudden dead zone, consistently demarcated across all government radars.”
Government radars—like the computers in Mom’s mad science dungeon, constantly tracking remnant activity.
Suddenly, awash with a terrible understanding, the world cracks under my feet. She wasn’t just tracking ghosts—she was keeping watch for swarms.
“Because of me,” I breathe. “I’m the fan.”
His mouth a grim line, Cain nods. My stomach plummets. I spin, hoping I’ll find Bas grinning, ready to tell me this is all a horrible joke, but he only stares at me, soft and sad.
“We are the fan,” he says. “Us, together.”
The ocean roars in my chest.
“This isn’t new,” I realize. “The ghosts have always watched me. I’ve noticed it for years. They can see me. They—the ones in the school, they said they were searching for me.”
“Well, yeah,” Bas agrees quietly. I barely hear him, every terrible realization in my head howling all at once, thoughts wheeling.
“Have they always been following me? Is that why Mom keeps uprooting us? She has computers in her basement, Bas, a whole wall of them tracking ghost activity. That’s what I found, what I needed to tell you about before the swarm hit.
She has a ghost-proof safe room—traps, even. To keep out things like—”
Me.
I choke on the word, swallow it back. Desperate, I lean forward, glancing between them, seeking out their eyes in the uneasy dark of the RV. “All this time, Mom’s six hundred new jobs, have we always just been running from ghosts?”
But Bas—
Bas stares at the floor. His face clouds. His hand, half reaching for me, falls in the gap between the seats.
“Bas,” I breathe, but he won’t look at me.
Cain flicks his eyes to him in the rearview mirror. When Bas doesn’t say anything, he answers me instead.
“And us,” he says. “The ghosts follow you. We follow the ghosts.”
My fingers flicker, party-trick threatening. I dig my fists into my thighs so hard I’ll have bruises tomorrow.
The ghosts follow me.
That’s why Mom rebuilds her lab in every basement, all that specialized government equipment, tracking ghost activity in real time. It’s to know when the ghosts sense me nearby, when they start to follow, when they get too close.
It’s to know when we need to run.
All those houses, all those schools, every move predicated by some small little inconvenience. Too many spirits on the sidewalk outside our house. A ghost day off from school. Birds caught in the EM current. A week of my mom picking fights in the rare moments she notices me at all until—