Sisters of Salt and Iron

  “Yes?”

  She looked about, as though worried that she might have been followed, then rushed toward me like a hawk on a mouse. I held my ground. She was the one who ought to be frightened, not me.

  She stopped directly in front of me, eyes darting about in a nervous flutter. Whom was she so afraid of overhearing us?

  “I need to talk to you,” she whispered. “I have a message.”

  “A message?” I asked, rolling my prize between my fingers behind my back. “From who?”

  “Emily,” she replied. It took me a moment to realize who she meant.

  “Emily Murray?” I asked. My ancestor?

  The girl nodded. “I knew her once. A long time ago. We were friends. She would often come to visit me after I was committed. Even after I died she came a few times to say hello, but the others didn’t like her coming by so much. She made them nervous. Your sister makes them nervous, as well.”

  If they knew I was holding Robert’s eyeball in my palm, they’d be nervous around me, too.

  “What’s the message?” I asked. I didn’t mean to be rude or to rush her, but I needed to get the blood off me before Lark returned.

  Her wide blue gaze locked with mine. In it, I saw fear, but not of me. “She says you and your sister are in danger. She said that he’s coming for you.”

  “‘He’?” I made a face. “He who?”

  The girl shook her head. “I don’t know. That’s all she told me before saying that she didn’t want to put me in danger. She disappeared, and I haven’t seen her since.”

  “When was this?”

  “Two days ago.”

  When I’d first met Noah. Emily must have seen me here that night. Maybe she kept tabs on Lark and me all the time. I was really starting to feel conspicuous with this eye in my clutch. “Why are you just telling me this now?”

  She drew back. What a little mouse. “This was the first moment I had alone with you. She told me not to trust anyone except you and your sister.” Her gaze darted to the smudge on the wall. “Is he really gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” She shivered. “He was an awful man.”

  I didn’t ask what he’d done to her. It wasn’t like I could hurt him for it again. “He can’t hurt you anymore. Did Emily say anything else?”

  “No. She only begged me to tell you and your sister to be careful.” Her face lit up. “Wait, she also said that you needed to look for Alys. Does that make sense to you?”

  I nodded. I’d seen Alys in Nan’s house before, but she hadn’t been around lately. Had something happened to her? “Thank you for giving me the message. I have to find my sister.”

  The girl smiled and then flitted away in a rustle of skirts. I left as well, but I didn’t immediately go to Lark. I went to my private little place in the Shadow Lands, where I retreated when I wanted time alone, or felt the need to simply be dead. There, I opened the small box I kept my treasures in and deposited Robert’s eye with my other keepsakes. I paused just a moment to admire my collection before putting the box away. Then I cleaned myself up—easy to do in the Shadow Lands, when all you had to do was wish it—and phased back into the realm of the living.

  I met Lark and Noah in front of the building. My sister was dirty and smelled of smoke, but she was otherwise fine.

  “Are you all right?” Noah asked.

  I nodded. “I am. I’m sorry you had to be a part of this.”

  “Don’t be. Anyone who would threaten a woman is no friend of mine. Are you leaving?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will I see you tomorrow?” he asked. I couldn’t judge his emotions from his voice. His tone was polite, as it always was around others.

  “Would you like to see me tomorrow?”

  He smiled, and Lark rolled her eyes. “Get a room,” she said. And then, “Security’s coming. I’ve got to run. Thanks for your help, Noah.”

  I watched as she slipped into the darkness. I’d catch up with her in a moment.

  Noah held out his arms, and I walked into his embrace, wrapping my own arms around him. “I don’t want you to leave,” he whispered.

  “I don’t want to, either, but I need to talk to Lark. Do you really want me to come back later?”

  He nodded. And then he kissed me, and I knew then that everything was good between us. He wasn’t angry at me for Robert’s destruction. And he didn’t know about my trophy.

  After I left him, I caught up with Lark just as she climbed into Nan’s car in the graveyard.

  “You okay?” she asked. “Truthfully?”

  I nodded. “I’m good. We need to talk. Emily’s in trouble.”

  She swore as she stuck the keys in the ignition. Her expression was grim when she looked at me.

  “Great.” But she didn’t sound the least bit happy. “I think Alys is, too.”

  LARK

  The moment we arrived home we went straight up to our bedroom. On the drive, Wren had told me about what the ghost at Haven Crest had told her, and I filled her in on seeing Alys in the bathroom.

  “There’s something going on,” I muttered as I yanked open the top drawer of the desk. “Anytime we’ve seen Emily she’s seemed on edge—like she’s doing something wrong. And Alys has popped in and out like a newbie ghost. She should be stronger than that.”

  “They shouldn’t even be here. Should they?” Wren paced the length of the room—or rather, she floated along the top of the carpet. “They were different, like us, but they ought to have moved on. The girl said that Emily had a warning for us.”

  “Yeah, that ‘he’ was coming for us.” I dug through the papers in the drawer. “Whoever ‘he’ is.”

  “How did you know?”

  I barely glanced at her. “I’ve been having dreams. I think they’re of Alys. Everything’s black, and there’s danger all around me.”

  “If Emily wants us to find her, Alys must be in some sort of danger.”

  “Of course she is.” I dug deeper in the drawer. God, I was such a slob! “Would you expect anything less from our ancestors?”

  “What are you looking for?”

  I pulled the spirit board that had belonged to Emily and Alys out of the drawer and held it up like it was a prize. “This.”

  Wren made a scoffing noise. “A spirit board? What can that do that I can’t?”

  I shot her a narrow glance. “Ego much?” I wanted to chalk it up to Halloween, but she was different—I could feel it. Was it Noah? Or was the bigotry Wren claimed I had toward ghosts clouding my judgment? Regardless of the fact that he’d taken me to Woodstock’s grave, I had the feeling that he would have been just as happy to turn his back on the whole thing.

  “You know what I mean.” She drifted toward me. “It doesn’t even have a planchette.”

  I looked at the board, my fingers tracing the image on the wood. It was old, but heavily lacquered, preserving the image on it. Twins—one with white hair, the other with red, standing so that they faced each other from opposite sides of the wood. Their clasped hands were in the center of the board. The way they were linked made me think of a planchette. Maybe that was because of what Wren had just said, or maybe it was a message from Emily and Alys for those of us who came after them.

  And maybe it was time for me to do some more digging into the family history.

  “I don’t think we need a planchette,” I told Wren. “I think we are the planchette.”

  She looked at the board where my hand rested in the center. A moment later, her fingers settled on—in—mine.

  Bam! It was like a punch to the face that left me seeing stars. I blinked, and then realized we were someplace else. Someplace...dark.

  Not just dark. This place was black.

  I clung to Wren’s hand. Where the he
ll were we? A light wind ruffled my hair, bringing the smell of dirt and wood. Was that scratching I heard? And crying? The back of my neck tingled, as though invisible fingers had brushed against my skin.

  “Where are we?” I whispered.

  “I think it’s the void,” Wren replied, her voice shaking. “Lark, we’re in the damn void!”

  Wren rarely swore, and it was even more rare for her to show fear. It was important that I calm her down, even though I was freaking out myself. “We don’t know that’s what this is.” But it fit the description.

  The void was a place we’d first heard about as kids. A ghost we’d encountered at a bed-and-breakfast in Maine while on vacation with our parents had explained that it was a dark, endless kind of place, where souls could be trapped or imprisoned. Solitary confinement for ghosts. It was said that ghosts that lingered too long, who became so corrupt they couldn’t move on, were sent to the void for eternal torment. I didn’t believe that any more than I believed in hell, but this place was scary—like the dark cellar of a house that hadn’t been lived in for a hundred years.

  Like a grave.

  “Why would the board bring us here?” I wondered.

  “Who cares? Let’s just get out of here. Now!”

  It wasn’t very often that I was the calm one and Wren was the one hanging on by a thread. “It brought us here for a reason.”

  “I don’t care!”

  “Just listen for a minute!”

  We fell silent. I listened—hard. Past the crying and the scratching and the wind, I heard a voice.

  And it was calling our names.

  “Do you hear that?” I asked.

  Wren tugged on my hand. “We have to get out of here.”

  I held tight to her fingers. “Do you hear it? There—it’s coming closer.”

  “Lark, we have to go. How do we get out?”

  It was coming closer. I could feel it. It wasn’t a constant cry. In fact, I wasn’t even sure it was actually a sound. Whatever it was, I understood it, and it was coming to meet me.

  “Oh, my God,” Wren whispered. She had to feel it, too. But unlike me, she was afraid of it. And I wasn’t.

  I saw it—a flicker of something in the dark. Just a flash. A face? I tried to take a step toward it, but Wren pulled me back. I whipped my head around to glare at her. Why could I see her so clearly in the dark? It was like the two of us were white shirts under a black light.

  Suddenly, Wren’s fear was understandable. We were lit up like a lighthouse. Beacons. All around us I saw other flickers, heard their voices.

  They were all coming.

  My heart seized. Oh, shit.

  A hand reached for me, disembodied as though the darkness was a lake, and I was the only thing between her and drowning.

  More flickers. Closer now.

  “Lark,” Wren whimpered.

  How did I know it was a she? Not just a she.

  Alys.

  Wren’s panic washed over me.

  I reached back. It was Alys, I knew it. My fingers brushed hers at the same time Wren let go of my other hand.

  It was like being tossed out of a speeding car. One second I was surrounded by blackness, reaching out to Alys, and the next I was on my back on my bedroom floor. Wren sat beside me, arms wrapped around her knees.

  “What the hell?” I demanded, pushing myself upright. My head spun. “It was Alys, Wren! I almost had her.”

  Wild eyes turned to me. She looked terrified. “They almost had us, Lark! Once they get you, there’s no getting away from them. And you almost let one take you!”

  “It was Alys! Don’t you understand? She’s trapped there!”

  Wren’s expression hardened. “If she’s there, then she did something to deserve it.”

  I watched her for a moment, taking in the slight tremor in her shoulders and how her hands were clenched into tight fists. “How do you know that?”

  She swiped at her eye with the back of her hand. Was she crying? “I’ve heard things in the Shadow Lands. The void is ghost hell. It’s torment and pain. And there are things there...things that like hurting ghosts. There were so many ghosts in the dark. I could feel their suffering, their pain. Couldn’t you?”

  “No,” I replied honestly. “I couldn’t. And just because Alys is there doesn’t mean she deserves to be. Didn’t you say the girl at Haven Crest told you to find Alys?”

  She held up her hand, palm out. “I’m not going back to that place.”

  Wow, she was really messed up. I didn’t argue with her, and I didn’t push it, but we weren’t done. If Alys was trapped, it was our job—our responsibility—to find and help her. And if I could walk into Haven Crest after all that had happened to me there and at Bell Hill, Wren could suck it up and brave the void.

  I watched as she stood up. I wasn’t going to be half so graceful, but I struggled to my feet regardless. I didn’t like it when we weren’t on equal footing.

  “I can’t believe Robert tried to kill Kevin,” she said.

  I shrugged. Fine, she didn’t want to talk about Alys. I wasn’t going to let her avoid it forever. “I can’t believe he was a follower of Bent’s.”

  My sister shot me a narrow glance. “What do you mean by that?”

  What did she mean by that? “Just what I said.”

  “If he wasn’t a follower of Bent, what reason would he have for coming after Kevin or threatening you?”

  “Well, he could be just a nut job, but he wouldn’t have a reason. Look, what the hell are you so twisted up about?” Then it dawned on me.

  Wren’s fists went to her hips. “You don’t trust the friends I’ve made at Haven Crest.”

  I blinked at her. It sounded to me like maybe she didn’t completely trust her new friends. I could understand that. “I don’t really trust anybody—except for you.” And sometimes... Well, I wasn’t going to go there. “And since Noah took me to Woodstock’s grave, I’ve got no reason to distrust him.”

  Not to mention that on our way to the grave the one thing he said to me—honestly, we hardly talked—was that he had “the highest regard” for Wren. I figured that meant that he liked her better than any other dead girl he’d ever met. That was a good thing. Anyone who saw Wren’s worth was all right by me.

  She was still silent. I sighed in frustration. “I don’t know what you want from me, and I’m too tired to figure it out. But the way I see it is that at this very moment everything is good. Okay? Now, I’m going to bed.” Tomorrow was a school day and after a weekend of parties, Halloween madness and ghosts a-go-go, I was exhausted. All I wanted was to go to bed, but I needed to shower off the grave dirt and soot first.

  “Are you sticking around?” I asked as I started for the bathroom. “Or going back to Haven Crest?”

  Wren shrugged a shoulder. She didn’t look at me. WTF? “No. They need some time to recover from losing Robert. I’d feel like an outsider, and after what he did to you, it’s not like I would mourn him.”

  I wanted to remind her that he’d wanted to hurt Kevin, too, but I didn’t. She was so weird lately I didn’t know what to say or do. Was Halloween the ghost equivalent of a period? Was my sister caught up in a tide of raging, spectral PMS?

  Whatever. I really didn’t have the energy to worry about it. I didn’t respond or ask any more questions. I walked into the bathroom, shut the door and turned the faucets in the tub. I undressed as the water heated up, so when I stepped into the tub I was hit by a pelting blast of hot water.

  My gawd, it felt good.

  I scrubbed myself pink, washed and conditioned my hair. I’d put it in a couple of braids before I went to bed and then finish drying it in the morning. The braids would give me some nice waves, and I wouldn’t need to do much in the way of styling, which meant I could sleep a
little later. Yay.

  After I rinsed the last of the conditioner out, I turned off the water and wrung my hair. I yanked the shower curtain to the side and reached for my towels. The bathroom was full of steam.

  I wrapped a towel around my head and dried off with the other. It wasn’t until I pulled on my robe and turned toward the mirror that I saw it. My stomach dropped.

  There, on the fogged glass, was a note. It was written backward—as though from the other side of the mirror.

  WREN

  “Who wrote it?” I asked, when I saw the words fading on the mirror.

  “Who do you think? Alys, obviously.”

  Beside me, Lark scowled in her bathrobe. But when did Lark not scowl? It seemed to me that she spent most of her time with that expression on her face. Sometimes I wanted to hit her. Other times I hoped her face froze like that.

  Once in a while—like now, since I’d been the one to make us leave the void, where my sister was certain Alys was trapped—I felt like it was my fault that Lark always seemed to be upset. I mean, if it wasn’t for me she’d probably have a normal life, right? Then again, if it hadn’t been for her being born alive, I could be the one with that normal life.

  What if I grabbed her by the back of the head and slammed her face into that mirror? She’d stop frowning then, wouldn’t she? I took a step toward her.

  Clarity knocked me back a step. What was I doing? Had I really been about to physically attack my sister? What was wrong with me?

  This wasn’t me. This wasn’t right. It had to be the approaching All Hallows’ Eve. I was too young for the madness that came from “lingering” too long in the world of the living. Wasn’t I?

  I had to do something—something right. I was not going back to the void—I didn’t even know if I could do that by myself—and I didn’t feel right going to Haven Crest and spending time with Noah when he’d had to destroy a friend. But there was something going on, and Lark had faced too much of it on her own already.

  Maybe I would be alive if not for her, but I don’t know if I’d want to live if she wasn’t with me. That was what was important. As much as I liked Noah and sometimes Lark upset me, she was my anchor. She and I were what mattered.