Chapter 14 #2
Snapping out of my party trick, I ease open the bedroom door.
When a tense moment of listening brooks no movement down below, I scooch forward, bag clamped under my elbow, until I reach the top of the stairs.
Wrapping an arm around the railing so my body won’t tumble down after me like a forgotten doll, I stand up without it and wisp silently into the kitchen.
I find Mom standing in the kitchen, a plate of food gone cold at the table but a second spinning in the microwave.
Over her shoulder, I watch her reload the same series of web pages over and over, checking every local ghost tracker, one after another.
A bubble of green sits over our local area, marked an impossible 0 in a sea of orange 3s.
I’ve never seen a 0 in my life. It has to be a mistake.
Except… the outlines of that green hollow sit down the road from us, directly over the high school. And after what we did…
Is this what has Bas worried, what brought him here early, with the half-joking promise of a felony? Mom’s face darkens with every refresh, her hand clawing through her hair hard enough to dislodge the alligator clip, graying blonde strands tumbling in a mess around her furrowed brow.
The microwave beeps. With a sigh, still refreshing her screen, she drops a fork onto the plate, and pulls the plate out of the microwave, then turns toward the stairs.
Toward me. Oh my God, is she actually bringing me dinner? For the literal first time ever? Of course, it’s only the worst possible time for her to grow this particular motherly impulse, so that tracks!
I don’t have time for another mother-daughter heart-to-heart right now. I can’t risk it with my soul outside my meat, my bag packed, and my—oh, I don’t even know what he is waiting in the weeds outside. I need to distract her, quick.
Shaking out my hands, bouncing on my toes, I surge forward, slamming my hand through her cellphone before I can stop to think. Electricity surges up my arm, thin and thready, the battery a tiny juice box I instantly suck dry. Her screen fizzes out, ghost maps falling dark.
Swearing, Mom drops the plate on the counter. She punches the power button a couple times, even bangs her phone on the counter in frustration. When that doesn’t work, she assaults the kitchen drawers instead, rapid-fire slamming through them, searching for a spare charger.
Oh shit—I realize my miscalculation too late. We haven’t been in this house a week—no time for a junk drawer and who knows what box we even packed it in. The only other charger Mom has is in her bedroom.
Upstairs.
Grumbling, she turns, crossing through the archway into the living room.
Double shit. Fingers fizzing, I scan the room in a panic.
My gaze lands on the blender, unpacked but unplugged.
It’ll have to be good enough. Lunging, I grab it in both hands, and shove, flooding the motor with the stolen cellphone juice.
It screams to life, blade whirring, jumping across the counter entirely untethered.
Mom yelps, startled, and snatches it before the pitcher can shatter to the floor. I push harder, drive the motor louder—but fold in an exhausted wheeze. The blender cuts off. Her cellphone didn’t give me enough.
“What in the hell?” she breathes, lifting the dangling cord. Hands shaking, she sets it down and backs away, headed again for the hall.
Not good enough—okay, shit, what do I do now? The poltergeist routine worked a little, but I need something bigger, something she can’t ignore.
My gaze seizes on the basement door, brand-new lock already installed and shining fresh-battery green.
My lip curls. Of course she did. Of course she couldn’t leave that bastardized ghost trap unlocked for more than five minutes.
Well, I can fix that. This time I don’t bother shoving my whole body through at once—instead I punch my fist into the keypad, my arm through the door.
Gripping the lock from both sides, I pull the energy from its entrails with one hand and shove it back in with the other.
The electronics howl in mechanized agony. A thread of smoke coils from the dead bolt. The metal cracks. The door sways open.
Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I have Mom’s undivided attention.
Except, no—the invaded basement does. She runs forward, hand pressed to the door with a look of concern in her eyes I’ve never seen—and is this what it feels like to be her priority?
The thing worth loving? The thing a parent can be proud of?
The ocean in my chest roars. My ribs crack.
I’ll give her something to be proud of.
Launching myself down the stairs, I barrel faster than the mirrors can scramble, down into her secret den.
As soon as my feet hit the ground, I stop short.
The ghost trap still lays sprawled out across the floor, an unholy carpet of half-assembled prisms. Even disconnected from power, broken apart, it still glows an unearthly blue, and I could almost swear ghostly faces press against its gilt and mirrors from inside.
The timer in my head ticks down, screaming at me to move. I can’t. I stare, transfixed by the device’s wrongness, frozen by a deep and rotten kind of fear. I can feel it lying there, pulsing like a broken bone, pained and jarring and out of place. Hungry for more of me.
I want to shatter it. I need to shatter it. But I know if I touch it, it will wring me out until there’s nothing left but the husk upstairs.
Swallowing hard, I skirt around it, striding to the computer bay instead.
Gripping the smallest screen, still demanding its password, I concentrate on draining rather than unlocking it.
Power floods into me but too slowly. I’m running out of time for careful and precise.
Climbing over the table, knees searing on its iron surface, I reach a hand between railroad spikes, plunge up to my shoulder in the wall.
The familiar power line burns so close, power thrumming up and down the street—
Behind it, the ley line wakes, hot blue in my ghostly eye. Sour blue-raspberry blue. Swollen as a creek with rain, it sleeps closer than it did yesterday, like the storm’s rerouted it. Like it’s reaching for me. Trying to find me.
Seeking me the way my ghosts did.
Fingers outstretched, shoulder burning on railroad ties, I reach back.
I don’t know what it wants—don’t know what I expect to achieve—but in that moment, I don’t care.
A strange instinct washes every thought away, the un-heart in my rib cage pounding home, home, home.
I forget my waiting body. Forget my ghostly shape.
All that matters is my glittering fingers in the dirt, the river reaching for me—
In the basement behind me, the computer screens flare bright and pop, circuits smoking. Footsteps pound down the stairs.
Horrified, hard, my mother snarls, “What are you?”
Her voice cuts through my head like a hot knife. I remember myself all at once, skitter back from the wall, from the ley line, and spin to find her looking straight at me.
How is it that only now she sees me?
In the many spinning mirrors dangling from the rafters, I catch sight of my reflection. My un-body carves a frozen mist in the air, winter come early, a human figure sketched in gauze.
“Don’t you know?” I snarl, but this far from my body, my voice doesn’t work. It rips through the air, awful and discordant, like the last bubbles from a drowned man’s throat.