Authors: Rachel Caine
“Maybe…a cat?” she guessed. It could have been a cat. But she didn’t see anything as she glanced over the ruins of Shane’s childhood. The only things still recognizable about it having been a home was the foundation—cracked in places, but still there where it wasn’t hidden by weeds—and the jumbled outline of what must have once been a brick fireplace.
Shane didn’t look toward the lot at all. He kept looking at
her, and she saw his eyes widen just as she, too, heard what he was hearing.
A voice. A clear girl’s voice, very, very soft, saying,
Shane
.
His face drained completely of color, and Claire thought for a second he was going to hit the pavement, but he managed to hold on, somehow, and turned toward the lot to say, “Lyss?” He took a tentative step toward it, but stopped at the edge of the sidewalk. “Alyssa?”
Shane.
It was very clear, and it did
not
sound like a real person’s voice—there was something eerie and cold and distant about it. Claire remembered the draug, the vampires’ enemies who lurked in water and lured with song; this held something of that quality to it—something just not right.
She grabbed Shane’s sleeve as he started to step onto the lot’s dirt. “No,” she said. “Don’t.”
He stared at the tumbled wreckage of his house, and said, “I have to. She’s here, Claire. It’s Alyssa.”
His sister, Claire knew, had died in the fire that had wrecked this house—and he hadn’t been able to save her. It was the first, and maybe the biggest, trauma in a life that had since had way too many.
She didn’t even try to argue that it was impossible for his sister to be here, talking to him. There were far crazier things in Morganville than that. Ghosts? Those were no more unusual than drunken frat boys on a Friday night.
But she was scared. Very scared. Because there was a vast difference between ghosts who manifested themselves in the Founder Houses—like the Glass House, in which they lived—and one who could talk from thin air, powered by nothing at all. The first kind she could explain, theoretically at least. This?
Not so much.
“I have to do this,” Shane said again, and pulled free of her. He stepped into the weeds, into what had once been the carefully tended front lawn of a relatively stable family, and walked steadily forward. The broken remains of a sidewalk were hidden under those weeds, Claire realized; it was buckled and broken into raw chunks, but it was recognizable when she looked for it. Shane kept going forward, then stopped and said, “This used to be the front door.”
Claire devoutly did
not
want to do it, but she couldn’t leave him alone, not here, not like this. So she stepped forward, and instantly felt a chill close in over her—something that didn’t want her here. The pins-and-needles feeling swept over her again, and she almost stopped and backed up…but she wasn’t going to let it stop her.
Shane needed her.
She slipped her hand into his, and he squeezed it hard. His face was set, jawline tight, and whatever he was looking at, it was not the rubble in front of them. “She died upstairs,” Shane said. “Lyss? Can you hear me?”
“I really don’t know if this is a good—” Claire caught her breath as the pins and needles poked again, deeply. Painfully. She could almost see the tiny little stab marks on her arms, the beads of blood, though she knew there was no physical damage at all.
“Lyss?” Shane stepped forward, over the nonexistent threshold, into what would have been the house. “Alyssa—”
He got an answer.
Shane.
It was a sigh, full of something Claire couldn’t really comprehend—maybe a sadness, maybe longing, maybe something darker.
You came back.
He sucked in a deep, shaking breath, and let go of Claire’s hand to reach forward, into empty air. “Oh God, Lyss, I thought—how can you still be—”
Always here,
the whisper said. So much sadness; Claire could hear it now. The resentment she felt was that of a baby sister hating that someone else had taken her brother from her; it might be dangerous, but it was understandable, and the sadness brought a lump into Claire’s throat.
Can’t go. Help.
“I can’t,” Shane whispered. “I can’t help you. I couldn’t then and I can’t now, Lyss…. I don’t know how, okay? I don’t know what you need!”
Home.
There were tears shining in his eyes now, and he was shaking. “I can’t,” he said again. “Home’s gone, Lyss. You have to—you have to move on. I have.”
No.
There was a wisp of movement at the edge of Claire’s vision, and then she felt a shove, a distinct shove, that made her take a step back toward the sidewalk. When she tried to move toward Shane again, the pins and needles came back, but it felt more like a pinch now, sudden and vicious. She hissed and grabbed her arm, and this time when she looked down, she saw she had a red mark, just as if someone had physically hurt her.
Alyssa really didn’t care for the idea that her brother had found a girlfriend, and Claire found herself skipping backward, pushed and bullied back all the way to the sidewalk.
Shane stayed where he was. “Please, can I—can I see you?”
There was that faint hint of movement again, mists at the corners of her vision, and Claire thought that for a second she saw a ghostly shadow appear against the still-standing bricks of the fireplace…but it was gone in seconds, blown away.
Please help me,
Alyssa’s whisper said.
Shane, help me.
“I don’t know how!”
Don’t leave me alone.
Claire suddenly didn’t like where this was going. Maybe she’d seen too many Japanese horror movies, and maybe it was just a tingle of warning from generations of superstitious ancestors, but suddenly she
knew
that what Alyssa wanted was not to be saved, but for Shane to join her.
In death.
She didn’t know what Shane might have done, because just as she came to that breath-stopping conclusion, she caught sight of a shiny black van pulling around the corner. For a second she didn’t connect it to anything in particular, and then she recognized the logo on the van’s door.
Great
. “Shane—we’ve got company,” she said. “Ghost-hunting company.”
“What?” Shane turned and looked at her blankly, then at where she pointed. Not only had the ghost hunters arrived, but the two hosts—Angel and Jenna—were already out and walking toward them. Jenna had something in her hands that looked like an electronic metering device; it was making strange, weird noises like a frequency tuner. Angel had what looked like a tape recorder. And behind them, following with a bulky handheld camera on his shoulder, was Tyler.
“—Activity,” Jenna was saying in an intense voice. “Definitely some significant signs here. I got a huge spike from the van, and it’s even bigger now. Whatever’s out here, it’s definitely worth checking into.”
“Where?” Angel sounded tired and more than a little irritated. “We’ve had a lot of false alarms already. If I didn’t know better, I’d think the local residents were trying to screw us up—oh, hello. Look, it’s the kids from the courthouse. Where’s your pretty friend?”
Claire didn’t know which to take offense at more—the implication
that she wasn’t pretty, or that Monica might be considered a friend. She was saved from answering by Shane, who walked up to her and kept walking until he was blocking the path to the vacant lot completely. “Get lost,” he said flatly. “I’m not in the mood.”
“Excuse me?” Jenna said, and tried to move around him. He got in her way. “Hey! This isn’t private property. It’s a public sidewalk! We are fully within our rights to be here.”
While she and Shane were facing off, Claire heard Angel mutter to Tyler, “Make sure you’re getting all this. It’s great stuff. We can use it in the teasers. The town that didn’t want to know.”
“You,” Shane said, and pointed past Angel, at Tyler and the camera. “Turn it off. Now.”
“Can’t do that, bro. We’re working here,” Tyler said. “Relax. Just let us do our job.”
“Do it somewhere else. You don’t do it here.”
“Why?” Jenna was staring at him intently, and past him, at the empty lot. She held out her meter gadget, and Claire could hear the tones it gave off. She didn’t need to be an expert in ghostology to know it was pinging like mad. “Something you don’t want us to see, perhaps?”
“Just back the hell off, lady. I mean it—”
“We’ll see about this,” Angel said, and pulled out a cell phone. Theatrically, of course. “We
do
have a permit to film direct from the mayor’s office!”
“Let’s see it,” Shane said. “Go ahead; call somebody. I’ll wait.” He stared Angel down until the other man put the phone away. “Yeah. Thought so. Look, just do us all a favor, okay? Call it a day, get in your van, and head to some other town where they don’t mind your making fun of dead people, all right?”
“That’s not what we’re doing!” Jenna said sharply. “I’m very
committed to trying to locate those who are lost and stuck, and finding a way to bring them some peace. How dare you say—”
“I don’t know—because you arrange all this crap for ratings, advertisers, and money? Maybe that?” Shane stepped forward, and he was using all his size and attitude this time. “Just
go
. Get off this street.”
The device that Jenna was holding gave a sudden shrill alarm; she jerked in surprise and stared at it, then turned it to Angel. Tyler angled in to get a close-up of the meter.
“What?” Shane snapped.
“We got a huge electromagnetic spike,” Jenna said. “It’s coming from that vacant lot behind you. I’ve never seen anything like it—”
Shane.
It was a very clear, cold, longing whisper, and it came from right behind them. And it just froze everyone right in place. Claire had a vivid, clear snapshot of them: Tyler, mouth open behind his camera; Angel, stunned silent; Jenna, eyes wide.
And Shane.
Shane’s lips parted, but he didn’t speak. His face had gone blank and pale, and he actually took a long step backward, pulling Claire with him. She didn’t mind. That voice had a scary, otherworldly quality that didn’t sound human.
Angel almost dropped his recorder, but he gained his composure and moved in to the camera to get a close-up. “Did you hear that?” he asked Tyler, then turned to Jenna. “That was no EVP. That was a
voice.
”
“Someone’s messing with us,” Jenna said in annoyance. “Cut, Tyler.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Rolling. Keep going.”
“Tyler!”
“Rolling, Jenna, keep rolling!”
“I’m telling you, the locals are having us on. We’ll probably
find some kind of EM transmitter out here, and some giggling high schooler with a megaphone….”
“Rolling!”
“Okay, okay, it’s digital. At least you’re not wasting film….” She took in a deep breath and said, in her tense ghost-hunting voice, “We may have gotten an actual spirit contact! I can’t even begin to describe how incredibly rare this is!”
“Can you speak to us again?” Angel said, and if possible, he got even more pompous. “You said a name. Can you say it again?”
Nothing.
“I think it said
shame
,” Jenna said. “Is it a shame you’re gone? Are you ashamed of something?”
“Oh, for the love of—” Claire couldn’t bite back her exasperation. “Come on. We have to go, now.” She very deliberately didn’t use his name. They didn’t seem bright enough to make the connection, but even so…
“That’s Alyssa,” Shane said. “I’m telling you, it’s her. My sister is
right there
.”
Dammit.
Well, there went her entire
nothing to see here, move along
plan.
“No such thing as ghosts,” she said, and pointedly looked at the camera. Shane, recovering from the shock, finally got back on script enough to nod. “I think someone’s messing with you. Really. You need to just—chalk it up to locals being stupid.”
“Or,” Shane said, “you could poke around in the dark. That’s fun. There might be fewer annoying visitors if you tried it.”
“Excuse me?” Jenna said. “Are you threatening us?”
“No, just making an observation. I mean, wandering around in the dark isn’t a good idea, lady. Ask anybody.” He shrugged. “Meth. It’s a cancer around here. So I’ve heard, anyway.”
“Oh,” she said, and seemed to take it seriously for the first
time. “It is a problem in a lot of places. I should have thought of that. Guys, maybe we should pack it in until later.”
“But we
heard that
,” Angel protested. “We should at least do EVP in the vacant lot, just in case!”
Shane started to object, but Claire tugged at his arm, urgently.
Let them,
she mouthed, and he finally shrugged and stepped out of the way. “Knock yourself out,” he said. “Try not to get bitten by any rattlesnakes or anything.”
“Snakes?” Tyler suddenly sounded very, very nervous.
“Or, you know, scorpions,” Claire said cheerfully. “And tarantulas. We have those. Oh, and black widows and brown recluse spiders—they love it out here. You’ll find them all over the place. If you get bitten, just be sure to, you know, call 911. They can most always save you.”
“Most always,” Shane echoed.
They walked on, leaving the three visitors—no longer quite so eager to delve in—debating the risks. As they did, Shane pulled out his phone.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Texting Michael,” he said. “He needs to get to somebody in the vamp hierarchy and get these idiots off the street before this becomes really, really public and a big PR problem….” He paused and looked up. “Oh hell. Twice in one day? Who did I piss off upstairs to make that happen?”
He meant that Monica Morrell had just crossed their path, again. She was standing against the side of a big, trashy-looking van, tongue wrestling her current boy admirer, just around the corner from where Shane’s home had once been. Like most of Monica’s boyfriends, her current beau was a big side of beef, sporty, with an IQ of about room temperature, and she was climbing him like ivy up a tree.
“Excuse me, Dan,” Shane said as they got closer. “I think you got something on you—oh, hey, Monica. Didn’t see you there.”