Afterlife (24 page)

“Not like we had much choice in the matter after we’ d fired
at Kate,” Raquel said. For the first time, she met my eyes without flinching.
“But we’d do it again in a heartbeat.” Then she winced, obviously afraid that
was a tactless thing to say to a dead person.

Dana sighed. “We started having doubts after what they did
to you two in New York. Then, when they turned on Lucas in Philadelphia — that
was the breaking point. We lit out a couple weeks ago. Holed up here, but we’ll
find a real place sometime. We’re making minimum wage and feeling fine.”

“We might be eating ramen,” Raquel added, “but we’re
eating.”

A weird silence fell in the room. I began, “Raquel, I
actually came here to talk to you.”

“I’m sorry.” Raquel was trembling, but she got out of bed.
She wore a beat — up old T — shirt and sweatpants — and of course the leather
bracelet, the one I remembered so well it had possessed the power to draw me
here. “Bianca, I’m so, so sorry. You’ll never know
how …
forget it, how I feel doesn’t matter. You were a good friend to me, and I
should’ve protected you, and I didn’t. I suck. If you want to haunt me or — or
whatever, I know I deserve it.”

I hadn’t realized how much I needed to hear that. But there
were also things I needed to say. “I lied to you. I had my reasons, but still.
If I’d told you the truth in the right way, maybe it wouldn’t have been so
bad.”

“That doesn’t excuse what I did,” Raquel said, her voice
shaky. She kept balling her hands into fists, so worked up that it startled me.
“You could’ve been killed. I mean, killed killed. You know what I mean. When I
realized what they were going to do — if I had known that, I would never have
told. Not ever.”

“I know. I always knew that, I think. Besides, you guys came
through for Lucas when it mattered the most. That’s the main thing.”

As I smiled unevenly at Raquel, she tried to smile back. The
weight of her old betrayal hung between us, but lighter somehow than it had
been before. It was going to take more time to heal, but at least now it was
all out in the open. We were back on the same side. Everything else, I decided,
could heal over time.

“I didn’t come here to talk to you about that, actually,” I
said.

That caught Raquel up short. After glancing at an equally
bewildered Dana, she said, “Then why are you here?”

“The wraith who haunted your old house,” I said, bracing
myself for what was to come. “The one who hurt you.” Raquel’s dark eyes
searched mine, as if pleading with me not to bring up anything that painful.
“What about it?”

“We’re going to take care of him — for good.”

As it happened, Dana and Raquel were living in a suburb of
Boston, not terribly far from where Raquel had grown up. Also, when they’d
left, they’d taken one of the Black Cross vans with them.

“Some might call it stealing,” Dana said cheerfully as we
piled into the old van, which smelled like gunpowder and Fritos. “But seeing as
how Black Cross stole it from a dead vampire in the first place, I think of it
as repurposing the vehicle. Sounds nicer, don’t you think?”

“Looks like you repurposed some weapons, too.” I glanced
over the armory in the back. “Stakes, holy water,
and …
is that a flamethrower?”

“You never know when one will come in handy,” Raquel said,
and I had to smile.

Our joking around didn’t last for long, though. The closer
we got to the house, the tenser Raquel became. She had shotgun in front; I was
the phantom in the backseat. “How is this going to work?” she asked.

“It’s pretty simple: I sort of didn’t mention I hadn’t done
this before. No need to add to her nervousness, right? “We just need a mirror.
Does 156 one of you guys have a compact? You know, for powder, makeup?”

We were at a stoplight, which was why both Dana and Raquel
were able to turn around and stare at me. After a second, Dana said, “Hi, have
we met?”

“Okay, no makeup in the car,” I said. “But we have to get a
mirror.”

A quick stop at an all — night drugstore yielded one powder
compact. Although I had more substance than not, getting through the packaging
was difficult for me, so I let Raquel handle it. She tore at the paper and
plastic, hands shaky, making way more of a mess than necessary.

“I haven’t talked to them in a long time,” she said, prying
the compact out. “And now I’m just going to show up at two a.m. and be all, hey,
remember that ghost you said doesn’t exist?”

“Maybe we don’t have to wake them,” Dana said. A fine rain
began to fall, and she hit the windshield wipers, with their soft slap — slap
sound.

“Is this ghostbusting business loud, Bianca?”

“Urn, it can be. But it doesn’t have to be.” I hoped that
was true. “We’ll try.”

Raquel had always been very clear about the fact that she Wasn’t
wealthy, like most of the living and dead students at Evernight. Her
neighborhood Wasn’t as bad as I’d always imagined it, though. Maybe I was just
naive and thought being poor meant living in a slum like one they showed on bad
TV shows, with burning cars and gang members everywhere. It was just a quiet
neighborhood with small houses that didn’t have much in the way of yards. Instead
of squalor and violence, everything wasjust kind of gray and run — down, with
some half — hearted, sloppy graffiti on the trash cans.

“We’re lucky it’s raining,” Raquel said. “Everybody would be
out on the corners if it weren ‘t.”

The house in the middle of the block belonged to Raquel’s
family. We realized as soon as we got out of the car that no one was home.
“Where would they be?” Dana asked, as we peered through the windows at packed —
up boxes. “The furniture’s in place, so they haven’t moved.”

“With Frida, maybe?” Raquel squinted. “It looks like they’ve
pulled up part of the kitchen floor. Maybe that water pipe burst again, and
they’re fixing the damage.”

“They’re not home,” I said. “That’s the important thing. We
can do this now.”

Raquel went very still. “I’m not sure I can.”

Dana put an arm around her shoulders. “It’s okay. If you
want to stay out here, that works, too. Right, Bianca?”

I started to agree with her, then stopped myself. “You can
stay out here if you want to,” I said. “But I think you should face this
thing.” Her white lips pressed together, Raquel shook her head.

“Come on, Raquel
!
Since when do you
run away from a fight?” She wouldn’t look at me any longer, but I kept going.
“If you don’t see this happen, then You’ll always be scared of it. Always. But
if you see us defeat it, then that’s the last way you’ll remember it. Beaten.
Isn’t that what you’d rather see?”

“Back off, okay?” Dana got betvveen us. “Don’t push her.”

“No,” Raquel said. She touched Dana’s shoulder, gently
edging her aside. “Bianca’s right. I’ll go in.”

As the rain fell softly around us, pattering on the metal
awning overhead, Dana jimmied the front — door lock as swiftly as Lucas could’ve
done.

Too bad I wasn’t in Black Cross long enough to Jearn that trick,
I thought.

The door swung open with a creak. Dana tiptoed in, trying
not to make a sound; Raquel, face pale, followed. I allowed myself to become
mostly vapor, a soft blue mist right behind them.

“Whoa,” Raquel said, clearly taken aback. “That’s — spooky.”

“Shhh! We’re trying to be quiet here!” Dana held the compact
in front of her, like she hoped to use it as a shield. I would need to take the
compact from her, but that would come once I could take form again.

“That’s okay, “I said. “Sooner or later, we want it to know
we’re here.”

I stretched my consciousness throughout the house,
discovering that I could sense the layout of the rooms without seeing them,
that I knew which one had belonged to Raquel — part of her essence lingered
there.

So did something else.

The voice resonated on a frequency that Wasn’t quite sound,
merely vibration, in the ether we shared. Little girl. Little girl. You’ve come
back to play.

Raquel started to shake. “It’s here,” she whispered. “I can
tell.”

She hadn
‘ t
heard the voice, I
realized, nor had Dana; they were both looking around wildly, as if expecting
the wraith to appear from any 158 direction, at any second. And yet Raquel knew
the presence of this thing on a deeper level than I could comprehend. I wondered
how deep a link had been formed — how deeply this wraith had sunk its claws
into her.

Did you bring playmates for me
?

Suddenly I could see a room, not this one — a different,
false reality surrounding me, slightly transparent but enclosing, too, like a
cell made of glass. It looked like a small child’s bedroom. At first I thought
this must have been what Raquel’s room looked like when she was a child, but
then I corrected myself; she would never have spent so much as one night in a
room this pink and frilly, with a canopy bed and dolls stacked in row after
row. I’d never seen so many dolls — And I’d never seen any dolls who were
watching me right back. Somehow they were looking at me, their glassy black
eyes all too alive. I heard a soft rustling among their fluffy petticoats, and
one of the dolls leaned sharply to the side, as if it had fallen. They were
alive but not alive, watching but not watching, and just completely creepy. It
was enough to scare the crap out of me, and I was a ghost.

This is somebody’s idea of a child’s room, I thought. Their
over — the — top imitation of where a little girl would sleep. Created by some
guy who’s spent way too much time thinking about little girls in bed.

“Show yourself,” I demanded. In the other reality — the
actual one — I could see RaqueR and Dana both jump. “Stop hiding behind the
dolls.

Come out.”

“The dolls,” Raquel whispered. She must have dreamed of them
before.

In the dream bedroom, the dolls rustled some more, toppling
into piles so that their gold and brown curls tangled together. In the center,
I saw him.

If I hadn’t been able to feel the depth of Raquel’s fear, I
might have laughed. This wraith didn’t look scary — just fat and kind of bald.
Not very tall, either. And yet, as he studied me, tilting his head from side to
side, there was something in the vacancy of his stare, and the greediness of
his smile, that unsettled me 0111 every level.

Pretty. Pretty red hair. Have you come to play with me
?

He shuffled out from the cloud of dolls. His body was naked,
and disgusting, and my fear turned quickly to revulsion, then to anger.

I said, “I’m not here to play.”

Resonate, Patrice had said. I didn’t know how to do that, so
I just concentrated on him, and thought of my own death. I remembered that
strange sinking feeling of my body giving in, giving way. I remembered Lucas’s
tears as he clutched my hand. It came back to me too vividly to bear — and yet
I could feel the wraith being brought closer by the memories. I found my mind
shaping words as though they were an incantation: By all that divides us from
the living, I divide you from this place. By all the dm*ness that dwells within
us, I consign you to darkness. By all the death that gives me power, I take
your power from you.

The wraith began to shriek, an unearthly wail that
reverberated throughout the house. Dana grabbed both of her ears, perhaps in
pain, and dropped the compact to the floor. Raquel didn’t flinch. She grabbed
the mirror and tossed it toward me, and I materialized just enough to catch it
in my hand.

The moment I did, the force of the magic began drawing the
wraith into the mirror. As I angled the mirror, the way Patrice had said, the
wraith came apart before my eyes, not in a pretty mist like I was used to, but
as though it were a physical thing being dismembered, blood and sinew, shrieks
of pain. Yet it turned into so much dust as it flew into the mirror, howling
the whole way — Until there was silence. The dream world had vanished. We stood
in the living room, staring at the ice — caked mirror I held high above my
head. “Is
that …
did we get him?” Dana asked
breathlessly, her hands still at her ears.

“Oh, my God.” Raquel took a shuddering breath. “We caught
it.”

“And as long as we don’t break the mirror, it can never get
out again.” I’d fought it. I’d won. I knew how to stand up for myself against a
wraith now; did that mean I was finally free?

“It’s trapped in a mirror?” Raquel blinked. “It’s not in the
phantom zon e or something?”

I shrugged. “Wherever it is, it can’t get out again.”

Raquel started to laugh, a sound of pure joy, and then she
flung her arms around me. With all my strength, I kept myself as solid as I
could, because the hug felt way too good to miss.

“You did it,” she gasped. “You did it. That horrible thing
— ”

“It’s okay.” I patted her back as I realized her laughter
was turning into tears. “It can’t get you again.”

“You did that for me after what I did to you.”

“I did it for me, too
— ”

“just shut up, okay?” Raquel hugged me tighter, and I took
her advice and just held her while she cried. Over her shoulder, I could see
Dana smiling at me beatifically, like I was her new favorite person in the
whole world.

Once Raquel had settled down again, I handed her off to Dana
for more hugging and returned my attention to the mirror. It was thickly iced,
yet it seemed to me that I could glimpse something moving in the reflection.

“What are we going to do with that thing?” Raquel said. “Encase
it in cement?”

“That’s not a bad idea.”

Then I felt the pull — almost physical, like I was being
dragged.

“Bianca?” Raquel took a step forward. “You’re turning
invisible.”

“Riverton! Don’t forget!” I called, before I lost the
ability to make sound. ““ll make sure Lucas is there!”