Cross My Heart, Hope to Die (29 page)

When it passed, the medium opened her eyes. “Something else is here,” she said, her tone afraid. A low moan came from somewhere to the left, then seemed to move around them as if they were being circled. Celeste’s head snapped up, her lips parted.

“Grandmama?” she whispered.

Multicolored lights began flashing from the underbrush, and the sound of footsteps reverberated all around the clearing. The fake cactus writhed as if it was possessed. For a moment Emma almost forgot that it was one of their props, controlled by Nisha in the darkness.

“No,” Madame Darkling said, her voice dropping low, a strange, half-mad grimace on her face. “Grandmama isn’t here anymore, Celeste. This is a malevolent being. Everyone, remain strong in your minds and intentions and we can banish it together. Forces of evil, leave us be. Forces of evil, leave us be …,” she began to chant.

A scream echoed from somewhere, and then another answered it on the other side of the clearing. Celeste gasped, one hand flying to her lips, the other pointing upward at the leering green faces swooping overhead. She whimpered and scrambled backward, scuffing the circle of salt with her sandals.

“You have broken the sacred circle!” Madame Darkling cried, raising a trembling finger to point at Celeste. Celeste opened and closed her mouth like a fish. She glanced wildly around, her face pale under her mask. Emma watched something move in the shadows behind her. It was Nisha, reaching out from behind a rock with a peacock feather in her outstretched hand. She tickled Celeste on the back of the neck and vanished before the other girl turned.

“Celeste …,” a strange voice crooned from the bushes. Nisha had cued up the best of their sound bites, a superdistorted recording of Charlotte calling Celeste’s name in a creepy singsong. Nisha had warped it and added reverb until it was scarcely recognizable. The same call came from the other side of the clearing, and then from a third angle. Soon they were surrounded on all sides by the voice.

Goose pimples sprang up along the back of Emma’s neck. Even
I
shuddered, and I knew perfectly well that I was the only ghost in the canyon tonight.

“The spirits have come to claim you!” Madame Darkling screamed.

Celeste was huddled over, her hands covering her head, trembling. The chorus of voices overlapped and grew to a fever pitch, an insane babble. But just when Emma didn’t think she could take any more, the sounds stopped at once.

“Gotcha!” the other girls screamed on cue, all except Emma.

Light flooded the clearing. The girls whipped off their masks, clutching their sides with laughter. Madeline had tears pouring down her cheeks. Laurel could barely breathe, crouched over her knees in hysterics. Nisha sauntered out of the bushes smirking.

Celeste blinked into the bright lights, a dazed and blank expression on her face. She didn’t remove her mask but stayed crouched in the leaves and dirt.

Charlotte tossed her hair to fluff it after having it crushed under the mask. “How’s Sutton’s aura looking now?” she sneered.

“Did you get it on tape, Nisha?” Madeline asked. Nisha held up her iPhone.

“It’s uploading to YouTube as we speak.”

“On it!” the twins exclaimed, whipping out their phones to retweet the link.

Celeste stood up slowly. Dirt and leaves stuck to her cloak. One of her braids had flopped over the top of her head and jutted outward.

“We really got you, didn’t we?” Madeline asked. “I mean, shouldn’t you have seen it coming, in the stars or the tea leaves or whatever?”

“Hilarious,” Celeste snapped. Her voice was substantially less dreamy than usual. “You’re hilarious.”

“We know,” said the Twitter Twins in perfect unison. They were dancing around each other in a taunting do-si-do.

Celeste walked slowly to the side of the clearing and picked up her hemp knapsack. It was covered in patches and buttons that said things like
FREE TIBET
and
VEGANS TASTE BETTER
. Then she turned on her heel to face them.

“You shouldn’t play with forces you don’t understand,” she spat. She locked eyes with Emma. “It can be dangerous. You can accidentally call all kinds of problems down on yourself.”

“I think it’s time you stop with the lame aura warnings,” Charlotte said. “You’re the one who called down all kinds of problems on
yourself
when you messed with us. Remember that the next time you try to get in Sutton’s head.”

“You’ve been warned,” Celeste insisted, shaking her head slowly. “The spirits will not be mocked.” She tossed her bag on her shoulder and started up the path away from them. A moment later they heard a car start and drive away.

“That was brilliant,” Madeline told Madame Darkling. The medium had already lit a cigarette and stood to the side, examining their props. Charlotte handed the woman an envelope bulging with cash, and she opened it and began counting the bills.

“I’m going to have to remember some of this stuff,” she said. “Glow paint and balloons. Nice touch.”

Emma stood back, mask still on, not joining in the celebration of the rest of the group. She watched as the woman shoved the envelope somewhere inside her robes, then took off down the same path Celeste had, toward the parking lot. Laurel wheeled a cooler out of the underbrush while Gabby and Lili built a teetering pyramid of kindling. Nisha cued up a Black Eyed Peas album on the surround sound. Soon they had a fire crackling, marshmallows speared on sticks and browning in the heat. The clearing, which just minutes before had been spookier than a graveyard, became bright and cheerful.

“That could
not
have gone better,” Madeline said, reclining in a camp chair. The Twitter Twins were reading aloud tweets hashtagged “séance.” They had gotten the prank trending locally within the past few minutes.

Emma pulled Sutton’s wool jacket closer around her torso. “You guys, I feel a little bad,” she said.

If there had been a DJ playing in the bushes, his record would have scratched and gone silent. The girls turned to gawk at her. Sutton rarely felt bad about anything, and she wasn’t big on regret. But Emma couldn’t help but think of how desperately she’d wanted to believe that her sister could still speak, and how lonely she’d felt in the split second after she’d realized the medium was a fraud. It had felt almost as awful as those moments after she’d found the murderer’s first note—almost as if she’d lost Sutton all over again.

“I just mean, you know … her grandma recently died. Maybe we shouldn’t have gone there,” she said softly.

Surprisingly, it was Nisha who spoke first, her voice tense.

“If she was stupid enough to think her grandma would talk to her through some cheesy lamé-wearing hack, she deserved to be punked,” Nisha said. “The dead don’t come back. No matter how much you want them to.”

Emma bit her lip. Of course solid, sensible Nisha would have no patience for the desperate, delusional hopes of the grieving. Her voice was harsh with bitterness. She sounded as if she was mocking her own grief as much as anyone else’s.

The song ended on the stereo system. In the silence before the next started, they heard the distant bark of a dog down in Nisha’s subdivision. Then they heard a low, mournful cry.

“Did you leave the sound effects on?” Laurel asked Nisha. Nisha shook her head. Something crashed in the bushes nearby. Emma strained her ears.

“Seriously, guys?” Madeline said. “Who counter-pranked? I thought we agreed not to pull those anymore. That stopped being clever in middle school. I think whoever did it should have to sit out the next prank as punishment.”

“I didn’t do it!” Laurel quickly protested. “Cross my heart and hope to die!”

Everyone quickly repeated the safe word. They looked uncertainly at one another.

“Okay,” said Charlotte, rolling her eyes. Her robe hung open, revealing a pink sequined camisole. “It’s obviously just Celeste.”

Madeline slapped her forehead. “Oh my God, you’re right.”

“But we heard her leave.” Emma frowned.

Charlotte raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me, are you new to this? She circled around somehow. There are trails all through here—it wouldn’t be hard. She’s just trying to make us think there’s some evil spirit on the loose.”

“I can’t believe she’s asking for seconds,” Laurel said.

“Just ignore her,” Charlotte said. “I’m so over that weirdo.”

The explanation seemed to be enough for the other girls. Nisha turned the music back up. The Twitter Twins replayed the whole séance on their new iPad, reading the comments that had already popped up on YouTube. “Spaceman77 says, ‘Who’s the babe in the satyr horns, she’s hawt!!’” Gabby turned to Emma, but Emma hardly noticed.

They were probably right—it must be Celeste, hoping to get back at them. But what if someone was hurt? The voice had sounded like it was crying. What if someone had gotten injured out in the woods?

Or … what if Becky had come back to the scene of the crime and taken another victim?

Emma imagined Sutton bleeding and running through the woods, trying to get away from Becky. What if someone had been in the clearing that night? What if someone could have helped her but had ignored her instead? Sutton could be alive now, at the fire with the rest of them. She couldn’t let Becky get away with it again.

She stood up and dusted off her butt. Out beyond the cheerful firelight the canyon was pitch-black. She peered up the trail in the direction she’d heard the crying.

“What are you doing?” Madeline asked, staring at her.

Emma glanced around at her friends. There was safety in numbers, in the clearing. But then she set her jaw in determination.

“I’m going to go prank Celeste back,” she said. “You guys stay here.”

“Wait, we want to come,” Gabby and Lili said, starting to stand up, but Emma held out a hand.

“I’m invoking Executive Diva privilege,” she announced, citing Sutton’s official Lying Game title. “You can hear about it later. I’ll give you an exclusive.” She tried to be lighthearted, but her heart was hammering. No matter how much she didn’t want to go out there alone, she would never be able to live with herself if she got one of her friends hurt.

“Okay, raise your hand if you don’t think it’s a brilliant idea for Sutton to go wandering in the woods by herself,” Laurel said, throwing her own hand in the air. Emma snorted.

“Whatever, guys,” she said, starting up the path with a flashlight.

“All right, but if you get murdered in the woods, I’m going to say I told you so,” Charlotte’s voice rang out behind her.

Touché
, I thought.

The pale beam of the flashlight swept over the brush on either side, small bushes and cacti casting deep shadows. Emma stopped and listened for the sounds again. From farther away than before came another whimper, a rustle of leaves. She started jogging along the trail, trying to land softly on her feet so she could hear where the sound was coming from. A human groan echoed off the desert rocks. The trail led her higher up the mountain. She moved in silence for several minutes, until the bonfire glittered far below her, a tiny pinprick of light shining through the sparse trees.

Emma arrived at an overlook, with a park bench facing the neighborhood where Ethan and Nisha lived. She thought she could just make out Ethan’s porch light. Was he looking at the stars? She wished she could run all the way down the mountain and into his arms.

While Emma stared out over the city, I saw a figure step quietly out from the shadows. It was a gaunt woman, mascara and tears trickling down her cheeks. She watched Emma for a moment, chewing her lip. An old hospital bracelet still stuck to her wrist, as if she’d forgotten to cut it off.

Becky.

Emma’s back was to her. I couldn’t believe how silently our mother could move when she wanted to—just a moment ago she’d been crashing around through the underbrush, but there was nothing here to trip her up. She stepped toward Emma, eyes glued to her back.

A few pebbles dribbled down the side of the mountain from where Emma’s feet displaced them. It was a sheer drop to the next overhang, forty feet or more. Becky kept advancing, her eyes glowing strangely in the darkness, like a mountain lion’s.

“Emma!” I screamed, as loudly as I could.

Emma cocked her head. “Hello?” she whispered. The voice that had called her was so tiny, so faint it was almost like a breeze.

My knuckles clenched. She’d heard me. I was right—I was stronger here, for some reason.

“It’s Becky!” I shrieked, focusing every fiber of my ghostly being on the words. “She’s right behind you!”

“Sutton?” Emma breathed. But before I could answer, before Emma could make another move, a hand clamped on her arm. Emma’s body spun forcefully around so she was looking into Becky’s face.

And just like that, something snapped into place at the back of my mind. That familiar feeling came over me, of something unknown finally making sense, and a memory tugged me backward in time …

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