Queen of the Dead (20 page)

T
hree days later, and still, they wouldn’t let me see her. I knew the Turners had taken her home from the hospital yesterday afternoon, thanks to a brief and guarded update from Father Hayes, the hospital chaplain. I’d called and begged him for information.

She was continuing to recover was all he’d say, which told me absolutely nothing of what I needed to know. Was Alona still there? If she was, was she okay? Could she communicate? Or was she now trapped inside the girl she’d tried to save?

I’d tried to call their house twice yesterday. The first time, Mrs. Turner had simply hung up on me. The second time, she’d threatened to call the police. She still held me responsible for what had happened to Lily in the hospital. I couldn’t exactly blame her. The story I’d given—that I’d been looking for a vending machine and happened to stumble across Lily, unconscious in her chair—was weak at best. But since telling the truth was out of the question, I was sort of stuck with the lies I’d told on the fly that day.

Those same lies, though, were now keeping me from Alona—
if
she was still here.

The not-knowing was killing me.

“You’re pacing again,” my mother said, looking up at me with exasperation from where she was mixing batter in a bowl on the kitchen counter.

“Sorry,” I said, but I didn’t stop. Eight steps to the back door, eight steps to the doorway to the hall, back and forth. It was kind of soothing, in an annoying, repetitive kind of way.

“Will, you need to give them a little bit of time to adjust. Dealing with a sick child is very stressful,” she said. “I’m sure Mrs. Turner doesn’t really blame you for anything.” She expertly scraped the bowl into the brownie pan without so much as a single drop of batter hitting the counter. She was making a batch of brownies this afternoon to drop off at the Turners’ house tomorrow, assuming they even let her reach the front door. I wasn’t sure if Mrs. Turner’s anger with me would spill over to my mom or not. I hoped not.

Unfortunately, I’d had to give my mom the same weak-ass story as everyone else. Because explaining about the Order was kind of tied up in explaining about my dad, and I didn’t think it was my place to do so. Knowing he’d kept even more stuff from her than she’d originally thought would only make her feel worse. And telling her about Alona potentially inhabiting Lily’s body was definitely out of the question.

I raked my hands through my hair. “But if I could just talk to her, then I’d know for sure that she’s okay.”
She
, of course, meant Lily to my mom and Alona to me.

What troubled me most was that Alona had made no attempt to contact me. Which meant what? I had no idea, but I could think of endless bad news scenarios. Like maybe she’d vanished after all, or maybe Lily had slipped back into a coma and buried Alona down under all those of layers of unconsciousness. Maybe Alona was angry with me for all the things I’d said to her earlier that day, when we were alone in Lily’s hospital room. Or maybe she thought I was angry with her, as I had been in those last few minutes before I realized she was trying to save Lily, not just herself.

God, thinking of all the possible ways this could be messed up made my stomach hurt.

“Just relax. Let things cool off for a bit. Concentrate on your other friends and work, and eventually things will calm down.” She bent down, opened the oven door, and slid the pan of brownies in.

Eventually? Like I could just, what, forget about the fact that I had no idea whether this girl I cared so much about still existed or not?

“Oh, that reminds me. Sam thought one of your tires looked a little low, so I gave him your keys in case he needed to put on the spare,” she said, closing the oven and setting the timer.

I nodded, my mind still focused on Alona and Lily.

“He says you have three full garbage bags in the trunk,” she continued. “Why on earth are you driving around with garbage in your trunk?”

Garbage?
It took a second for the memory to drop into place. The bags I’d swiped from the foot of Alona’s driveway before everything had gotten so complicated. Bags that would hopefully contain one or more treasured items from her life.

I stopped pacing. If Alona was still present inside Lily, and if I could find something meaningful in those bags of trash, that would be a better present than any brownies, no matter how good my mom’s recipe was. It might even convince her, if need be, to take a stand against Mrs. Turner and insist on seeing me. Of course, that was assuming I could get close enough to Alona/Lily to show her what I’d found.

No. I shook my head. I’d worry about that part after I’d figured out if I’d grabbed anything worth saving.

I stalked to the back door, my steps now filled with purpose.

“Where are you going?” my mom asked.

“To clean up a mess,” I said.

“A
re you sure you’re ready for this?” Mrs. Turner asked, as we stood at the top of the stairs.

I nodded.

She took my one hand and locked it around the wooden stair railing and then wrapped my other hand inside her own.

“Just take it slowly,” she cautioned. “If you get too tired, we can stop.”

But I knew I wouldn’t stop. I’d slept on the couch last night in their living room and it had been miserable for multiple reasons.

First, the Turners might have love, but they didn’t have money. Or at least not enough for a new couch that didn’t sag toward the back, threatening to swallow me up. Second, no privacy. I didn’t mind Mrs. Turner getting up to check on me in the night. However, waking up to find Tyler two inches from my face, where he was apparently making sure I was still breathing, was another experience all together. Third, the voices.

The doctors had mentioned all kinds of possible side effects, most of them still from the original car accident injuries but some from that brief period when Lily’s…my heart had stopped. Dizziness, frequent headaches, disorientation, muscle aches, etc.

Nobody had said anything about hearing voices, though. It had started in the hospital. But honestly, I hadn’t paid much attention to it. In the hospital, there’s a constant low level of noise, including voices from down the hall, next door, and so on.

At the Turner house, though, it was unavoidable. I’d heard them yesterday for the first time. Voices whispering, sometimes barely audible, other times as clear as if someone were right next to my ear. But no one ever was.

And at one point yesterday, when I’d sat down in the fat and faded recliner in the corner of the living room, an old lady voice, cracked with age, had shrieked at me to get up.

When I’d jumped up—or as close as I could come to it with my ugly metal hospital-issue cane and my still damaged legs, which was more like a slow and ugly lurch forward—Mrs. Turner had asked me what was wrong.

Too tired and shaken to make something up, I’d just said that I didn’t feel like I should sit there, that the chair seemed to belong to someone else.

Instead of being freaked out, though, as I’d expected, Mrs. Turner had beamed at me. The chair had apparently belonged to Granny Simmy—Grandma Simone—and it had been one of the few pieces of furniture she’d ever bought new, and she’d treasured it for years while she was still alive, never letting any of the grandchildren sit in it.

Mrs. Turner thought I was just remembering. I wasn’t sure what was happening to me.

I was hoping that downstairs might provide a little more peace and quiet, or at least fewer people to stare at me when I was listening to something they couldn’t hear.

We inched our way down the stairs to the basement, where Lily’s room was. Tyler and the Turners had bedrooms upstairs, but they’d set up Lily in the basement to give her “space.”

At the bottom, I found myself in a small family room with a big, boxy television on a stand, another saggy couch—this one even worse than the one upstairs—and lots and lots of shag carpeting. Gag.

Mrs. Turner led me through the family room and down a narrow hall that held two doors directly across from one another.

“Here we are,” she said, opening the left-hand door.

The room itself was painted a bright and simple white. A good thing, too, because the carpeting was an eye-blinding pink. Any kind of pattern or paint color on the wall probably would have caused heads to spontaneously combust. As it was, the torn-out magazine pictures of celebrities spread out all over in various mini collages on the wall were bad enough. A worn and battered twin bed stood to my right. The pale pink comforter with carriages, castles, and fairies was a match to the sheet I remembered from the hospital room.

A mismatched desk and dresser dominated the opposite wall, and then two big closets took up the far end. Three large windows ran along the length of the wall with the desk and dresser. The house was built into a hill, so the windows were almost like the ones upstairs instead of the cramped tiny basement windows set high in the walls, like at my house.

“See? We didn’t change anything,” Mrs. Turner said proudly.

I nodded. Of course, it didn’t look the least bit familiar to me, except for glimpses of what I’d seen a couple of months ago in a photograph of Will, Lily, and Joonie in this room last year some time.

“It’s great,” I said. Couldn’t help but notice there was no phone in the room, though. I wondered if it had always been that way or if she’d removed it specifically because of my arrival.

Mrs. Turner had refused to give me back my cell phone after “the incident” at the hospital. That’s what we were calling it. The incident. She blamed Will for what had happened, even though it was obvious she wasn’t entirely sure
what
had happened. Only that he’d been there, somehow involved, and it must therefore be his fault, mainly because she didn’t have anyone else to blame it on.

I’d have pushed harder to talk with him, but he’d made no effort to reach me, as far as I knew, and I figured he might still be mad. I hadn’t had a chance to explain to him what I was doing in taking over Lily’s body. He probably thought I’d done it just because I could. And if that was the case, he might never talk to me again. My heart ached at the idea that I was in this alone now. I missed him.

“Are you all right, honey?” Mrs. Turner asked. “You look pale.”

“Just tired, I guess.” In truth, I was bone-weary exhausted. This being alive was much more work than I remembered it being. Of course, seeing as I was in a damaged body, one that wasn’t my own, maybe it wasn’t all that surprising that it took more effort than I remembered.

“Why don’t you lie down for a couple of hours? Dinner won’t be ready until about six anyway,” Mrs. Turner said.

Planting face first into the pillow and shutting out the world for a while sounded like a wonderful idea.

I let Mrs. Turner pull back the covers and help me into bed. I could probably have managed it myself, but it was kind of nice to have the assistance.

She pulled the sheet up to my shoulder and tucked it around me. “And Blankie’s under your pillow again,” she whispered before kissing my forehead and backing away.

She left the room and closed the door partially behind her. With an effort, I rolled onto my side and slid my hand under the pillow, locating the ragged bit of satin that was Lily’s Blankie with my fingertips. Even the idea of how many germs it might hold didn’t stop me from touching it. How many nights had she laid here, just like this, thinking and wondering about tomorrow? How long would I be here doing that in her stead?

Thinking of all this, I started to doze off, and that’s when the voices started…again.

“This is her?” The first one asked. The speaker sounded female and young. I kept my eyes squinched shut.
There’s no one there. No one. No one. No one…

“I guess,” the second voice, male, this time, said.

“I don’t get what the big deal is,” the female said, sounding impatient. “So, she’s awake. I don’t understand why he can’t help us because of
her
.”

What was worse, this time these voices sounded somehow familiar. Great. I was making friends with these figments of my brain-damaged imagination.

“I mean, first Alona disappears without so much as a word,” she continued.

My eyes snapped open. I still couldn’t see anything, but the voices sounded like they were coming from the foot of my bed.

“Then Will gets in his head that this girl is more important than helping us move on to the light. This thing with Claire and Todd is not going to last forever. I hope he knows that.”

“Liesel?” I asked incredulously, pushing myself up into a sitting position.

A shocked silence filled the room and held for a full second.

“She can see us? Wait, you can see us?” Her voice moved closer, and I instinctively moved back.

“No,” I admitted. “But I can hear you.”

“You’re another ghost-talker?” She asked in disbelief. “Just like Will?”

I opened my mouth to explain who I was, but then stopped. If I told them I was Alona and I’d managed to take over a body, word would spread and quickly. Would there be hundreds of ghosts lined up at the hospital to try this out on the next poor, unsuspecting coma patient? I wasn’t sure it would work since I didn’t entirely understand why it had worked for me. But neither did I like the idea of them trying.

“Yeah, I guess,” I managed to say.

“How did you know my name?” Liesel demanded.

“Why can’t you see us?” Eric asked.

I answered the easier question, Eric’s, first, hoping they might take my answer for both. “I have no idea,” I admitted. In theory, I shouldn’t have been able to see or hear them, but as a ghost, I’d been able to do both easily. Maybe being able to hear them was just some kind of side effect from the merging of Lily and me.

“Okay, so listen, I have this friend Claire,” Liesel began.

I groaned inwardly, imagining yet another recitation of the sordid tale of Liesel, Eric, and Claire.

A light tapping sounded at the far window.

I looked over to see Will, his hands cupped to the glass to peer inside. My heart did somersaults in my chest. He was here! He couldn’t be too angry at me, then, could he?

“Quick, move!” Liesel ordered Eric. “If he sees us here, he’ll kill us all over again.”

I didn’t hear anything more, and then the faint sound of whispering came from the hall beyond my room. Clearly, they’d fled for the moment.

I pulled the covers off myself, fumbling with them a little and grateful I’d stayed dressed in Lily’s best jeans and T-shirt, which wasn’t saying much, and started for the window. The moment Will saw me, his face relaxed and he smiled, an event so rare that it stopped me in my tracks and made my pulse accelerate.

No, he wasn’t angry at all, it seemed. Of course, that might end up being the least of our problems. How did we go about this? We were friends still? More? And were we friends as Alona and Will? Or as Lily and Will? Would he ever be able to see me for who I was, when I looked like someone else?

Just thinking about it made my head, and heart, hurt.