“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t be obsessed with my appearance if I were her, either,” Alona said, not as quietly as I would have liked.
“This way,” Mrs. Ruiz said when we were close enough. She gave Alona another dark look and then slung her spade over her shoulder and started toward the house, ignoring Dopey and his car like they weren’t even there.
“Cut it out,” I said to Alona under my breath once we’d passed the security guard and Mrs. Ruiz was far enough ahead on the worn walkway to the front door.
“Oh, come on,” she said. “Even you can’t blame me for this one.”
“I mean it.”
She stayed quiet for a second. Then she looked thoughtful. “Ten bucks says she’s got a tattoo of an anchor somewhere on her body.”
“Alona!” I whispered as loudly as I dared.
“What, you’ve seen it?”
I glared at her.
“She has a ’stache that would put a porn star to shame—hello, it’s called waxing?—and you’re lecturing me about—”
I pointed to her feet, which were beginning to flicker in and out of existence, as though a faulty movie projector were involved.
She sighed. “Damn.”
A being of mostly energy, she was dependent on keeping the energy flowing by remaining positive, i.e., nice. Which annoyed her to no end, unfortunately. Made for some highly entertaining moments on my end, though.
“She looks very strong and was probably very…capable at her job,” Alona said carefully. I could see she was dying to make some further remark, like how it was hard to keep a good man down. Or, how handy it was that she could carry the cows around while she milked them, or whatever. “You suck the fun out of everything,” she said to me.
It wasn’t my rule, just a rule of existence here, but I knewshe hated being reminded of it. “Everything?” I asked, takingin her rumpled hair and the way her lips still looked puffier than usual, thanks to our kissing session.
Her cheeks turned pink, but she rolled her eyes and stalked past me to where Mrs. Ruiz was waiting on the front porch.
Nice. I was taking that as a compliment.
I hung back, using one of the huge old pine trees that dominated the front yard to block me from the view of any passing cars, until I saw Alona pass through the heavy wooden door as easily as if it were mist. Once I was sure she was in, I hurried to the porch, where my presence gave her the physicality she would need to unlock and open the door for me.
Except she didn’t. Five seconds passed. Then ten. And I was feeling mighty exposed, standing there on the front porch in full view of the road, until the door finally groaned and opened about two feet.
Alona stuck her head out. “Welcome to Craphole Manor,” she said with a grimace, stepping back to let me squeeze in.
The front hall was dim and smelled of mold and neglect. The scarred wooden floor seemed pretty solid, at least, but the wall was down to the studs in several places, whether due to predemolition work or decay, I didn’t know. I tried to shove the door shut again, but only got it to move a few inches. It had obviously swollen in the last few days of heat and humidity to a point where it no longer truly fit inside the frame. Great.
It would be good to have the fresh air and the extra light beyond the small flashlight I’d jammed in my pocket at the last minute. But anyone looking closely enough at the front of the house would see that the door was open.
“We need to move quickly,” I said.
“You don’t need to tell me,” Alona said with disgust, stepping back and brushing her hand down the sides of her shorts, creating grayish streaks of dust visible even in the limited light.
“Where’d she go?” I asked. “Did you say something?”
“Why are you always so quick to blame me?” she demanded.
“Because it’s usually you?” I offered.
“This way.” Mrs. Ruiz emerged from the shadows behind us, making both of us jump.
She pushed past us, still carrying her garden shovel, toward what had once been a grand and sweeping staircase. Now, with most of the spindles missing out of the railing and some of the stairs rotted through, it looked more like an eerie smile of broken teeth.
I started to follow her.
“Wait,” Alona said from behind me.
I tensed, expecting that she’d heard something from outside, but when I turned, I found her staring into the dark gloominess of the first room to the right of the front door. “What’s wrong?”
“Give me the flashlight.” I could hear the frown in her voice.
I turned it on and handed it to her.
She swept the beam over the remains of the room. It appeared to have been a study or a parlor of some kind. At the back of the room, a dark doorway to the kitchen or whatever room was next door was a solid patch of inky blackness. Huge rectangular holes dominated the walls where it looked like the built-in bookshelves had been removed. A few scattered, moldering books still lay on the floor along with…I frowned and moved closer for a better look.
“What are those?” Alona asked, voicing my exact question.
In the center of the room, five black metal boxes had been placed on the floor in a precise five-point arrangement, each box equidistant from the others. A thick black cord trailed from all of them to what appeared to be a portable generator.
The boxes themselves looked well-worn. The sides were dented and dinged, and the black paint was chipping off in many places. The roughly soldered edges of the boxes looked like nothing that would come out of a factory. Someone had made them.
I shook my head. “Something to do with the demolition, maybe? Explosives or something. Don’t touch anything.”
She gave an exasperated sigh. “It’s not a Vegas high-rise. They’re going to tear it down, not blow it up.”
I shook my head. Something about this was just off.
“I don’t know. Let’s just get this done and get out of here before—”
“This way!” Mrs. Ruiz’s voice boomed from above, makingus both jump. The former housekeeper sounded annoyed, onthe edge of angry.
“Does she even know other words?” Alona asked.
“Come on,” I said. I took the flashlight back from her and headed for the stairs.
Aiming the light ahead of me, I found Mrs. Ruiz waiting for us at the first curve of the stairs. “This way,” she said yet again, sounding a little more relaxed.
“Cute
and
a great conversationalist,” Alona murmured behind me. “You really know how to pick them.”
“Watch your feet,” I muttered back.
“Shut up,” she snapped. But then I heard her muttering compliments about the house’s original architecture and style—“Real hardwood floors!”—so I knew I’d been right once again.
The staircase creaked and moaned under our weight, but it held, thankfully. At the top of the stairs, Mrs. Ruizled us down a long dark hallway with doors on both sides. The doors, which presumably led to the family’s bedrooms, were open, but only the faintest light seeped out under the boarded-up windows, and I really didn’t want to point the flashlight inside any of the rooms. I had no idea what I’d see, if anything, and honestly, even my creeped-out level wason the rise. If I happened to look in one and see some littleface staring back at me, I’d probably bolt. Two ghosts were more than enough for now, thanks.
Ahead of us, Mrs. Ruiz stopped at the last door on the right, the only one that was shut.
She looked back over her massive shoulder at me. “This way,” she said, at the same time Alona whispered it mockingly in my ear.
Mrs. Ruiz turned the knob and pushed the door open, the loud creak of the hinges echoing in the empty house. She stepped just across the threshold and stopped. The shovel slid off her shoulder, the metal end landing on the floor with a heavy and hollow thud, and her more-than-sturdy frame began to tremble.
Something was wrong.
I eased past her into the room, with Alona just behind me, and the reason for Mrs. Ruiz’s distress became immediately clear.
All over the room, random floorboards had been torn up with careless effort, splintering the ancient wood into dangerously sharp spikes. Plaster dust coated the floor from the dozens of recent holes punched or cut into the walls. Clearly, someone had been looking for something.
“Told you,” Alona muttered, referring to her plan to come in without Mrs. Ruiz.
I ignored her. “Mrs. Ruiz,” I said, approaching her cautiously.
She didn’t look up, fixated on the destruction, and I wondered if this had been her room. It would make sense that whatever she wanted would have been in the one room she thought of as her own.
“Mrs. Ruiz,” I tried again.
This time, she did meet my gaze, and her fury was enough to make me take a step back.
“You,” she said through gritted teeth.
“Hey, a new word!” Alona, who had moved past me to further inspect the damage and possibly the empty closet, piped up.
I kept my attention focused on Mrs. Ruiz. “No. I didn’t do this.”
But my words had little effect. “Told only you,” she said in that gravelly voice, further deepened by rage.
I held my hands out in a peacemaking gesture. “I’m sure it might seem that way, but surely someone else—”
She hoisted her heavy shovel back up to her shoulder, choking up on the wooden handle like it was a baseball bat.
Oh, crap.
Another downside of the giving-physicality-to-ghosts element of my gift was that the pissed off ones could use it to try to kill me.
I backed up slowly. “Alona?”
From the corner of my eye, I saw her look up sharply, registering the note of barely repressed panic in my voice.
She sighed and started toward Mrs. Ruiz, stepping over and around the missing floorboards with a grace that made it look like she did it every day. “Okay, look, I know he can be annoying, but he doesn’t steal stuff. Believe me.”
She gave me an exasperated look. Evidently, she was still irritated that I’d refused to take part in her elaborate plan to get her hands on an iPad. She’d been convinced the touch screen would be sensitive enough for her to use it even when I wasn’t around to give her the physicality to do so. Blogging, Twittering, and a Facebook page—all for a dead girl. I don’t think so.
“So, there’s no need to go crazy,” Alona continued. “He didn’t take your…whatever. Besides, you need to go through me—”
To get to him.
Those words had some kind of ritual-like effect, temporarily freezing ghosts who intended me harm. But before Alona could speak, Mrs. Ruiz lashed out with a meaty fist and connected solidly with Alona’s face.
Alona is not a tiny, fragile girl. She is athletic, toned, and muscled from years of tough cheerleading workouts and the relentless pursuit of cellulite extinction. But she was no match for Mrs. Ruiz and the power behind that blow.
She flew backward, striking the wall behind her before sliding down into an unconscious heap on the floor.
“Alona!” I lunged for her, Mrs. Ruiz temporarily forgotten. Yes, Alona was, in theory, already dead, but you don’t spend eighteen years as a ghost-talker without realizing there are all kinds of dead, and some kinds are preferable to others.
I dropped to my knees in front of her, but before I could touch her, she flickered and vanished.
I pulled back. She’d exhausted her energy on this plane of existence. Alona rarely disappeared completely anymore, having gotten the hang of the positive-energy thing. But every time it happened might be the last, meaning she might not be able to come back.
It would happen someday. It was unavoidable. Alona would be gone, either because she’d disappeared one too many times or the light had returned to get her. The question was, would it be today? I felt sick just thinking about it. I didn’t want it to happen like this, Alona sacrificing herself to save me.
The air whistled above my head in a split-second warning, and I threw myself backward as the shovel cracked down where I’d been kneeling. I landed hard on my back, and splinters gouged through my shirt and into my skin. The other immediate question was, without Alona, could I survive Mrs. Ruiz?
I gritted my teeth and forced myself up even as Mrs. Ruiz brought the shovel to her shoulder again. I scrambled for the door, my back protesting and trickles of blood rolling down my skin.
I fell more than stepped into the hallway, just grateful to be out. Then I heard Mrs. Ruiz’s heavy step behind me. I pushed myself up to my feet, expecting the crack of the shovel again at any second, this time maybe against my head.
Instead, the doors on either side of me slammed closed, followed by the next two, all the way down the hall.
She was closing me in. Damn, she had to have some serious energy to be shutting doors without touching them. Speed wasn’t her strength;
strength
was. If I didn’t make it to the front door fast, she might be able to slam that one shut on me, too, and then I’d be stuck. I might be able to kick out the plywood covering one of the windows, but I wasn’t sure I could do that before Mrs. Ruiz caught up to me with her shovel.
Panting and gritting my teeth against all my various aches and pains, I hobbled for the stairs as quickly as I could.
At the top of the stairs, the edge of my shoe caught on the rotting remains of the stair runner, and I slipped down the first few steps. I reached for the railing to pull myself up, and Mrs. Ruiz’s shovel slammed into the wood, just missing my fingers. Loose spindles rained down on the floor below.
I yanked my hand back with a yelp. “I was just trying to help you, okay? I didn’t take your stuff!” I shouted at her.
“I did.” A new voice spoke up from below.
I risked taking my gaze off Mrs. Ruiz to aim the flashlight, which I’d somehow managed to hang on to, past the curve in the staircase. A girl I’d never seen before stood at the foot of the stairs, her face pale in the light. Long, dark curly hair floated in a cloud around her head, like it had a life of its own. She was dressed all in black, which helped her blend into the surrounding dimness. Another ghost? Great.
But then I saw she held what appeared to be a flashlight, aimed at the stairs, but it wasn’t on, for some reason. In her other hand, she had a dirty old pillowcase, stuffed full of something with hard edges and with considerable weight. The case looked ready to split open.