Elegy (24 page)

“Um . . . ours?”

Joshua laughed loudly. Then he jerked his head toward the dance floor. “How about trying those moves on your feet instead?”

I bit my lower lip and peeked over his shoulder at the dance floor. “You think we have time?”

He gave me that sad smile again. “No,” he replied softly.

But then, despite his answer, he suddenly pulled me up from my chair and tugged me toward the dance floor, where a shifting, noisy group of his classmates was jumping around like lunatics. When we reached them, Joshua spun me out into the middle of the dance floor.

At first I hesitated, uncertain about whether this was the wisest thing to do. But it didn’t take long for me to think,
Why not? And why not
now
?

The current song was fast and wild, a frenetic mix of synth and drums. I didn’t recognize it, but that didn’t matter: the song pounded too insistently for me to ignore. The sound of it thrummed through my body, matching the race of my pulse. I began to dance to its beat, letting myself forget about everything that had haunted me since the day I died. Dark, light, love, hate—I let them go. And for a few, ecstatic moments, I was purely happy. Completely free.

Joshua must have sensed the change in me, because he moved in to dance with me. In the brief glimpses I caught of his face, I could see that we both needed this moment of abandon—we needed it desperately.

Of course, those kinds of moments don’t last forever. Soon the music shifted into a slower, sweeter song. The new song was pretty enough, but I still felt a twinge of melancholy—of loss, even. I wanted to be free, for just a minute or two longer.

When Joshua drew me closer to him, however, I knew that the moment of freedom hadn’t really ended. It had just changed into something softer and more intimate. I slipped one hand around the nape of his neck and then tilted my head back so that I could look into his eyes.

“Thank you,” I said, still needing to talk loudly over the music so that he could hear me.

“For what?”

“Bringing me inside tonight.”

“I don’t think I had much of a choice: Jillian and you kind of demanded it.” Despite the teasing words, Joshua’s smile was tender.

“Well, thank you for dancing with me, then.”

“Always,” he replied, so quietly that I read the word on his lips, rather than heard it. And with that one word, my mood darkened. We didn’t have “always” to dance together. We had
right now
; I knew that, as well as I knew any other certainty in my bleak future.

But I had to shut those thoughts out, before they ruined what little time I had left. So I laid my head on Joshua’s chest and clenched my eyes tightly shut. Although I’d never heard this song before, I hummed along until its melody had anesthetized me enough to meet Joshua’s eyes.

When I lifted my head again, however, Joshua was ready. He swooped in before I had a chance to speak and planted a firm kiss on my mouth. I made a small noise of surprise, but then melted into him gratefully.

He knew. He
always
knew.

We stayed like that for a very long time, kissing and dancing slowly no matter what the tempo of the current song. Occasionally, I would catch a glimpse of Kaylen and O’Reilly dancing beside us, or Jillian and Scott holding each other tight. But I couldn’t seem to focus on anything except this moment. This kiss. This boy.

Finally, during one of the slow dances, Joshua broke away from my lips to whisper, “Do you realize that we’re almost the only people out here right now?”

He was right: the dance floor was starting to clear out as people returned to their seats for the dinner portion of the evening. Back at our table, Jillian and Scott were already waiting, glancing impatiently between us, the tableful of potential recruits, and the doors.

“Crap, Joshua, we’ve got to go,” I cried, taking his hand from my waist and using it to drag him off the dance floor.

Joshua and I were both breathless with urgency when we reached the table. Seeing me collide with my former chair while practically panting, Kaylen smirked.

“Have a good time out there?” she asked, flicking her gaze from me to Joshua. Clearly, I wasn’t forgiven for the slumber-party incident. I was about to respond with something extra snarky, but I just didn’t have another moment to spare.

“We had a
great
time,” I gushed, glancing back at Joshua, who stood a foot behind me with his hand on my hip. Although I truly meant what I’d said, Joshua also knew that that was his cue.

“Such a great time,” he added, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial murmur, “that we’ve decided to share something with all of you guys. I was just going to save it for us, but . . . you all remember that I used to make the beer runs for our parties, right?”

Kaylen looked intrigued, as did everyone who’d heard him. A few of them even leaned forward over the confetti-strewn tablecloth.

“And?” Chelsea prompted as she smoothed down a stray tuft of her princess skirt in annoyance. “You don’t just say ‘beer’ on prom night, and then leave us hanging.”

“And . . . I may or may not have come through tonight. Just like the old times.”

“Dude!” O’Reilly cheered, already sold on whatever plan we were going to propose. “That’s badass.”

“Totally,” Scott chimed in, right on schedule.

“What about my dinner?” Mya groaned, leaning around one side of Chelsea’s enormous skirt.

“You can just move the keg into O’Reilly’s truck,” Joshua offered. “And then come back in to finish dinner.”

When Mya made a petulant noise, Kaylen immediately silenced her.

“Oh, shut it, Mya. All you could come up with for tonight’s party was half a bottle of your mom’s old peach schnapps. That’s hardly going to cut it for all of us.”

I released a silent cheer. When we’d been planning this recruitment, Jillian had told the Seers that Kaylen was our linchpin; wherever she went, the mob followed. Clearly, Jillian knew her audience: the other girls quickly agreed with Kaylen, nodding their assent when each of their dates moved to join Joshua and Scott on the keg-moving expedition.

I hung back as Joshua’s friends filtered out of the gym in small clusters so that they wouldn’t arouse the faculty chaperones’ suspicions. While I waited, I allowed myself precisely one minute of utter fear and apprehension. Then I followed the last small group out of the prom, praying that I wouldn’t screw this up.

Chapter
THIRTY

T
hank God Joshua had parked his truck in a secluded corner of the school lot, where an overgrown blackjack oak tree threw the truck and the surrounding cars into shadows. Otherwise, every faculty member on parking-lot patrol would notice the crowd of teenagers gathered suspiciously in one place.

As planned, I waited on the ground level, watching a few of the boys struggle to position the keg so that they could roll it off the back of the truck. I said a silent prayer of thanks that the Wilburton High students were so excited—and so blinded by the darkness of the night—that they didn’t notice the addition of a few unfamiliar prom goers to their ranks. Annabel, Drew, Hayley, and Felix had joined the crowd quietly, and they now stared up at the truck as though they’d been there all along.

“It’s so damn dark, I can’t see what we’re doing up here,” one of the boys in the truck bed muttered—possibly Scott, following his preset cues. When a few people murmured in agreement, I cleared my throat.

“I’ll help.”

Even in the dark, I could feel the derision rolling off of the spectators on the ground as well as the non-Seer boys in the truck bed. But instead of contradicting me, Joshua moved to the edge of the tailgate and took my hand. Jillian and Hayley flanked my sides and, with a few tugs and pushes, I climbed into the bed of the truck.

“Thanks, Amelia,” O’Reilly said as I steadied myself. “But I think everything’s all—”

“Good?” I finished for him. “Well, let me make it better.”

Then, before anyone else could protest, I linked hands with Joshua, closed my eyes, and pictured the worst possible thing I could think of: a swarm of shrieking, birdlike demons, diving toward Joshua with murder in their cold black eyes.

Apparently he’d thought of something similar, because I heard the soft whoosh that often preceded my glow, coming from his direction. I opened my eyes to find that we’d both ignited—our fires connected and lapped at each other through our clasped hands. As I’d hoped, he could still glow, days after taking the Transfer Powder.

I’d expected gasps from the crowd, or maybe even some screams. But no one around us made a single noise. I guessed that the first sight of spontaneous combustion just had that effect on people.

“We’re okay,” I whispered to them, taking advantage of their silence and keeping my voice low. “Joshua and I are okay, even though it doesn’t look like it. But you all need to listen to me right now.”

Since Joshua and I could maintain our respective glows by ourselves, I let go of his hand and positioned myself so that everyone could see me more fully.

“Watch again,” I whispered to the crowd. Then I allowed the current of invisibility to run over my skin. I’d never done that while glowing, and the sensation reminded me of Joshua’s and my old electricity—warm and tingling, but not unpleasant.

This time, my actions shocked the audience. A few of them cried out, and someone whimpered—perhaps Chelsea. O’Reilly dropped so many f-bombs that I couldn’t even keep count. The reaction only got worse when I made myself reappear.

O’Reilly let out another expletive, and I had to give him credit for it: this one was a creative, almost Germanic combination of several curse words into one giant superswear.

Realizing that we’d terrified them into listening, I willed my glow to extinguish itself, and Joshua did the same. He stepped back, symbolically giving me the floor.

“I’m not the bad guy,” I said, loud enough so that everyone could hear me. “There are far worse things than me that go bump in the night. And I’m sorry that you all have to see this—to learn all of this. But everyone here is in danger. Some of you more than others. If we don’t do something about it—if you all don’t help us do something—then the creatures that are chasing us will go after you, too. And you
really
don’t want that to happen.”

“What . . . what
are
you two?” someone breathed. Kaylen, I thought. I looked down, searching for her in the darkened crowd. But Joshua answered her before I got the chance.

“I’m exactly who you think I am,” he said. “I’m the same guy you’ve known since kindergarten. I’m just a little more . . . enhanced, lately. But Amelia . . . Amelia is . . .”

“I’m dead,” I concluded, when he trailed off. “A ghost, to be specific. Because of that fact, I have the ability to glow like that, and the ability to go invisible. I gave some of those powers to Joshua, so that he could help me fight the things that are coming after all of us.”

“Nothing’s coming after us,” O’Reilly scoffed, suddenly capable of saying more than a handful of vulgar words. “Y’all are crazy, and we’re all just hallucinating.”

I turned back to him again and shook my head. “I wish that were true, O’Reilly. But I think you know, deep in your heart, that it isn’t.”

“Don’t you
wonder
?” another voice added softly, from one corner of the truck bed. “Don’t you all wonder why so many people die at High Bridge? Why some of your family members, even, have died there?”

Scott’s tone was so sincere, so heartfelt, that it struck me how much all these goings-on must have affected him, too. His gran’s superstitions notwithstanding, Scott had been just like these people only a few weeks ago. He’d been a laid-back, baseball-playing, college-bound guy, and now he was dating a possible target of hell. And that meant he might also become a target.

I smiled sadly at him—at all of them. But I shivered at what he said next.

“Some of us have talked about this,” Scott went on, more quietly than before. “About the night we can’t really remember, when Jillian fell off the bridge. Some of you pretend like it doesn’t bother you—like you don’t have dreams about shadows that try to kill you—but I know the truth: we didn’t imagine them; we didn’t hallucinate them. So don’t you want to find out what really happened? Don’t you want to stop whatever it was that
did
that to you?”

I tried to keep my mouth from falling open and then took a good look into that crowd, which contained so many of the people who’d been there the night that Eli had tried to claim Jillian’s soul. Some people didn’t register what Scott had just said. But some of them did, staring up at me with frightened, guilty eyes. I knew I had to strike then, before they allowed themselves to forget again.

“Whether or not you remember,” I said, “whether or not you believe us, that doesn’t make what we’re saying any less true. High Bridge is an epicenter of evil in this town. There are demonic forces that live beneath it—forces that sometimes lure, and sometimes outright drag, people to their deaths. The demons have been after me all year. Soon, they’ll come after you.”

“Why us?” Kaylen asked in a small voice.

“Because the demons know that I care about you—that Joshua cares about you, and that Jillian does, too. That’s just how the demons operate. As far as we can tell, it’s an ancient cycle . . . and we intend to stop it.”

As I finished, Jillian stepped forward and faced her friends squarely. She did so with more conviction than I’d ever seen her show in front of them and, in that moment, I was pretty proud of her.

“So here’s how it’s going to go down,” she announced, placing her hands on the hips of her cocktail dress. “You guys are going to take this keg, move it into another truck, and go back inside to prom. Some of you will try to forget about what you’ve seen here tonight and probably use what’s inside the keg to do so; I’m guessing that those people will be the ones who stop talking to us in the halls at school. But some of you are going to think about what we’ve shown you. About what we’ve said.
Those
people will be the ones who show up tonight, after prom, to help us. Eleven p.m., near the southern entrance of High Bridge. So . . . think about which side you really want to be on.”

After that, there wasn’t anything else to say. The choice now lay in the hands of the non-Seers. This fact did not bring me much comfort, though, when I considered what happened next.

Acting as though they’d all heard some unspoken cue, the non-Seers began to move. Not to embrace us or attack us, but to leave. Without speaking, the boys in the truck bed went back to work on the keg, tipping it out of its ice-filled trash can so that they could roll it off the edge of the tailgate. I stepped aside for them, feeling defeated when none of them—not one—spared me a second glance.

The non-Seers climbed out of the truck and waited expectantly below the tailgate. After some hesitation, Joshua and Scott lowered the keg down to them. The other boys hefted it over to O’Reilly’s truck, which he’d moved over here before my little performance. They loaded the keg quickly, letting it roll noisily to the back of the bed.

With that task completed, everyone seemed to scurry like rats back into the gym. They did so just as silently as before: no good-byes; no screw-yous; no comments of any kind.

Only O’Reilly and Kaylen remained, although she stood with her arms folded across her chest, staunchly refusing to look back at us. O’Reilly just rocked awkwardly on his heels. Like his friends, he didn’t say anything for a few long minutes. Finally, with his hands shoved firmly in his pockets, he glanced up at Joshua.

“Sorry, dude,” he murmured. Then he jerked his head at Kaylen and the two of them spun around, moving back toward the gym as fast as they could.