Sisters of Salt and Iron

  So it was time to stop dwelling on all the things I couldn’t do and turn to what I could do instead.

  I texted my friends and asked them all to come over after school. And I asked Nan if we could order pizza.

  “Of course,” she replied. “But only if I can help you.”

  Did Wren and I win the grandmother lottery or what?

  I started getting replies a few minutes later. Within half an hour—during which I was at the kitchen table, drinking tea, eating waaay too many cookies as I went through the books and photos Nan and I had found.

  One of the books was a family Bible. In itself it wasn’t going to give me any information on how to fight Noah, but the family tree at the beginning of it did. It had belonged to my great-grandmother, and it went back several generations—even before Emily and Alys.

  I started way back with the first of the family listed, and came forward. Twins popped up a fair bit, but in the line that led directly to me, there was a set of twins every other generation in which one was stillborn.

  Including my grandmother’s sister.

  “Nan,” I began. “You had a twin.”

  She was at the counter, making herself a cup of tea. She went very still for a moment. “Yes.”

  “But you’re not... There’s a set every other generation, and in the photos I found they had white hair.” Not that there were that many photos of earlier generations, because photography had only started in the Victorian era. But there were descriptions, and tiny paintings that Nan called miniatures.

  My grandmother brought her tea to the table and sat down across the butcher-block top from me. “When I was born, my mother said my hair was unnaturally red, and my sister’s was white. She was stillborn, but I lived. And as I got older, my hair became lighter, until it was a more natural red.”

  I stared at her. “So you—”

  “The wrong one lived.” She took a sip of tea as I sat there, staring at her. “I didn’t really figure it out until you girls came to live with me, and I accepted what you are. I believe I was supposed to be the one that died. I don’t know why I didn’t, and she did. I don’t know where it went wrong.” Her eyes looked wet. “I should have died, and she should have lived. We should have been here to help you and Wren, but it went wrong, and Emily and Alys weren’t able to pass on their knowledge.”

  “They should have anyway,” I retorted a little angrily. “It wasn’t your fault. None of this is your fault.”

  “Oh, I know that, dear.” She dabbed at her eyes with her fingers, wiping away all traces of tears. “Thank you for saying it. I know it was all out of my control, but I wish I had known her. I’ve always felt like I was missing an important part of myself.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about her before?”

  Nan shrugged. “I didn’t think it was important, and when I realized what it meant, and what I’d lost...well, I suppose it felt just a little too personal.”

  I sat there for a moment, feeling like an ass for bringing it up. “I’m sorry.”

  She smiled, but there was a sadness to it. “Well, it’s hard to miss what you never had. Did you find anything of use?”

  “No.” I closed the Bible and reached for another cookie. “I’m hoping I’ll have better luck tomorrow in the Shadow Lands.”

  Nan dunked her cookie in her tea and shook her head. “There are times when I wish you weren’t so honest with me as you are.”

  “Would you rather I just tell you I’m going to the library?”

  “No. I want to know. Otherwise I can’t figure out how to fix it.”

  Well, at least I knew where I got it. “I’ll continue on with being my usual honest and open self.”

  She shot me a wry look that made me laugh.

  After I finished my tea, I did some kickboxing to work off the cookies and all the angry energy knotting up my neck and shoulders. Plus, I had to practice if I was going to kick Noah’s ass.

  A few minutes after I got out of the shower, Kevin arrived.

  “You’re early,” I said when I came downstairs. He was in the kitchen, eating cookies, talking to Nan.

  “I only had two classes today,” he explained. “I brought you a present. It’s in my trunk.”

  “Is it a bag of douche-bag bones?”

  “Lan-guage,” Nan sing-songed from where she stood making yet more cookies. I was going to gain fifteen pounds by the time we put Noah down.

  “It’s his head.” My grandmother made a small sound of distress as Kevin took another bite of cookie. “That’s what was in the park. I haven’t found the rest yet.”

  I grabbed a cookie off the plate beside him. I had no willpower. “If we only have one piece of him, the head’s a good one to have.”

  “I can’t believe how matter-of-fact the two of you are.” Nan popped a tray of cookies into the oven. “I’d be scared out of my mind to be carrying around a skull. What if the police stopped you?” She looked at Kevin when she asked this.

  He shrugged. “I’d tell them it’s a prop for a Halloween party.”

  Nan gave him a soft smile. “Did you think of that before you came here, or just now?”

  Kevin returned the smile. “Before I even took it out of the ground.”

  She patted his shoulder. “Good boy.”

  “This conversation is just so wrong.” I grabbed a soda from the fridge and tossed it to Kevin before getting one for myself.

  “Hey, my parents don’t even believe in ghosts.” He popped the tab on the can. “They’d think I was nuts if I told them I could communicate with the dead. I’d take a ‘wrong’ conversation over their ‘right’ any day.”

  “Nan is unbelievably cool,” I allowed, grinning at my grandmother. “Life would be a lot more difficult if I didn’t live here. It was a lot more difficult.”

  A wooden spoon was shaken in my direction. “Your mother never recovered from losing Wren. It’s not her fault she’s frail.”

  Kevin and I shared a glance. I rolled my eyes.

  “Don’t roll your eyes at me, young lady.”

  Kevin laughed. I stole another cookie. “C’mon, Sixth Sense, you can give me my present and help me set up.”

  “Set up for what?” he asked as we went outside.

  I cast him a sideways glance. “A séance.”

  He stopped. “Have you forgotten what happened last time we had a séance?”

  No, I hadn’t. “It will go better this time.”

  “You can’t possibly know that.”

  I gave him a shove out the door. “Well, you can’t possibly know that it won’t.”

  A sharp burst of laughter shot from his mouth. “I can’t believe I let you talk me into these things.”

  I made a face at him. “I don’t talk you into anything. You jump right in. You’re a freaking ghost magnet just like I am, and you like it.”

  “Maybe I do, but that still doesn’t mean I understand it.”

  We’d reached his car. He unlocked the trunk and took out a small tied garbage bag. He held it out to me. “Here you go. The head, I believe, of Noah McCrae.”

  I took it, my fingers wrapping around the knot in the plastic. I wasn’t about to let my hands get any closer to it than they had to, just in case I got some sort of weird vibe or a shock or something. It wasn’t like I handled a lot of bones. Normally I just doused everything with something flammable and tossed in a match. Easy.

  How much would burning his head weaken Noah? It would have to, wouldn’t it? It was worth a shot.

  I went to the garage and got what I needed. The salt Nan put on snow and ice to melt it in the winter worked just as well as any other. Kevin followed me to the backyard where I built a small mound of paper, wood scraps and a couple pieces of wood in the stone-encircled fire pit. I put the pl
astic bag on top of the pile, dumped salt and a bit of lighter fluid on it, then struck a match and let it fall.

  There was a whoosh of flame as the liquid ignited. The paper and kindling went up next. The bag melted so quickly I barely smelled it. The skull was another story. It was old, so there wasn’t any flesh to “barbecue.” When I first found out about burning bones, I did a lot of reading on cremation, and it’s not the same thing. It can take about two and a half hours for a body to burn when cremated, but when you had bones, and old ones at that, it didn’t take as long. Skulls are pretty brittle and can come apart during burning, especially if debris—like the top of an old coffin—falls on it.

  In my experience, the bones didn’t have to burn for long to send a ghost on its way. I had no idea what this would do to Noah, but I hoped it hurt.

  I hoped it hurt a lot.

  WREN

  I’d just left the cellar when I heard the screams.

  Everyone was in the dining room. I had to push my way past those clustered in the door.

  It was terrible.

  There in the middle of the dirty, dingy floor was the girl who had given me Emily’s message. I couldn’t even remember her name, and the fact that she was on fire didn’t help to jog my memory.

  Her screams. Oh, her screams.

  “Help her!” I shouted to those gathered. They were all older than I was. Surely they knew what to do?

  No one moved. They just stood there, staring in horror as her head was engulfed in flames.

  Except for Noah. He didn’t look horrified at all. In fact, he looked smug—actually pleased.

  “This is because of you!” I hissed at him.

  He raised a brow. “Me? It’s your sister behind this, my dear. Oh, how I would love to see her face when she discovers that it wasn’t my skull she lit up.”

  Lark would be horrified. Or, at least I hoped she would be. I, on the other hand, could listen to those screams no more.

  I shouted in my head, focusing on the little electronic miracle my sister carried around with her at all times. I shouted for her to put out the fire as I threw myself at the burning girl and wrapped my energy around her. I didn’t know what I was doing, but when Lark took fire safety in school years ago they’d said to “Stop, drop and roll,” and that’s what I did.

  Oh, it hurt! The flames—pure spectral energy—seared me. It was like being destroyed layer by tiny layer.

  Greenish black smoke rose above me in angry tendrils, just like the smudge on my aura, and those awful veins.

  Someone grabbed me, swearing. Their grip was tight and strong. They tried to pull me away from the girl, but the fire was dying, I could feel it.

  Then, suddenly, it was gone. The hands pulling at me stopped, and I released the girl.

  She looked awful—her hair mostly gone and her face blistered. Her nose had been totally destroyed. Burning her skull hadn’t been enough to send her on, only to maim her in a terribly cruel way.

  I looked down at my hands. They were pink and tender, but otherwise I was surprisingly unhurt. Underneath the burn I looked fine. Normal.

  No black veins.

  I turned my head to look at Noah. He’d done this to her on purpose. He had to know she was a friend of Emily’s—they’d been here at the same time. And he’d only tried to pull me off her because he knew the fire—the very same spectral cleansing fire that forced us on to the next stage of our journeys—would burn the infection out of me.

  I lunged at him, slamming him into the wall. Halloween was so close that he smashed into the plaster, leaving an imprint that his form then dissolved through.

  He grabbed my hand and used me to pull himself out. As he did, the black veins reappeared on my arm, ugly and tar-like. The fire might have taken some of his infection from me, but whatever he’d done to me responded to his touch. I’d need more than just a little spectral fire to fix it.

  Plaster dust clung to Noah’s dark coat and hair. He brushed off his sleeves with a sneer. The ghosts gathered around us were silent—including the girl whose head had been on fire.

  “You still haven’t learned who is in charge here, have you, Wren?”

  “I know the residents of this house deserve a better leader than you.”

  “Are you interested in the job?” he asked, stepping closer. “Because they’d rather have me.”

  There were a few murmurs of agreement behind me.

  “You allowed that girl to be hurt.”

  “I allowed a traitor to be punished for her betrayal. So I buried someone else’s bones in places for my boy Kevin to recover and hand over to your sister. It’s not my fault she’s so full of hate for our kind that she immediately sets our remains ablaze.”

  More murmurs. He had them all brainwashed. He’d had about a century to perfect it. I’d only known them a few days—not long enough to make a difference. The dead could be so stubborn.

  “I wish I could see Lark’s face right now,” he went on, smiling. “She’s probably so proud of herself, thinking that she might have caused me pain or slowed me down.”

  Maybe, but I doubted it. The fire had gone out pretty quickly after I “texted” Lark. She would have felt my pain and panic, as well. I didn’t mention any of this, of course. I might have been terribly naive, but I wasn’t stupid.

  Instead, I said, “She’ll only be that much more angry when she finds out the truth. Is that what you want?”

  “The angrier she is when she comes here on All Hallows’ Eve, the better it will be. If I didn’t need you, I would have destroyed you by now, just so she’d know what it’s like to lose the most important person in the world.”

  “How is doing any of this getting revenge on Emily? She doesn’t know me or Lark. Do you really think hurting us will hurt her?”

  “It’s not about Emily,” he replied smoothly. “It’s about you and your kind, and putting an end to it entirely. Do you have any idea how difficult it was to convince Alys to kill your grandmother’s twin while the two of them were still in the womb? It was very difficult, but it worked out. I thought maybe that would be the end of you, but you’re like syphilis—you just keep coming back.”

  There was a little laughter at this.

  I held out my arms and tried to ignore that these people who I’d thought were my friends were the same ones laughing at me now. And I absolutely refused to let him see that I hadn’t known Nan was a twin, or that the other was dead—and not Dead Born.

  “What about this?” I asked, referring to the black veins. “How does this fit into your plan?”

  “You and I are linked now, my dear.” He leaned forward, plaster dust falling off him like snow. “I can’t tell you how honored I am to have been your first merge.” God, he made it sound...dirty.

  I met his gaze. “But you weren’t. Kevin was.”

  Hate flickered in his eyes. Good. If I could despise and mock him, then I couldn’t love him, and I had been well on my way to feeling that very emotion. The bastard.

  Noah straightened. “Regardless. I put some of my energy into you and took some of yours into me. We’re connected now. Always. If you’re away from me for too long, you’ll start to feel sick and aggressive. It won’t be long before you start to feel what I feel, want what I want. You see, turning you into my slave will be my final revenge on Emily Murray.”

  His slave? Now I was the one arching an eyebrow. “You know my sister will destroy me before she lets that happen.”

  An arrogant smile tilted the corners of his mouth. “She won’t live long enough. An old friend of mine is going to be calling on your sister a little later. He’ll take care of her.”

  I actually laughed. “If you think ‘taking care’ of my sister will be that easy, you’re in for a nasty shock.”

  “If he doesn’t get the job done, I kn
ow who will.”

  “Am I supposed to guess who you mean?”

  “I would think it’s obvious. By the time I’ve put my plans into motion on All Hallows’ Eve, I will have the perfect assassin under my full control. You.”

  LARK

  The fire pit was soaked and so was I.

  I wound the garden hose back into its spool and ran back to where Kevin stood, watching me like he couldn’t quite understand what I was doing.

  “That wasn’t Noah’s skull,” I told him.

  His face fell. It was a terrible, horrified expression that made my throat tight. “He got me to hide other bones, too? So someone else would suffer if we found them?”

  “Seems that way,” I said, picking up a pair of long-handled tongs used for making s’mores. I tried to keep all emotion from my voice. “The text from Wren said it was the wrong skull and to stop. She also said that what I was looking for was in the basement of the house. Since she sucks at being cryptic, I’m assuming that means Noah’s remains are in the cellar of the men’s residence at Haven Crest.”

  He ran a hand through his already effed-up hair. “How the hell are we supposed to get them if he’s practically sitting on them?” His brows came together in an anguished frown as he looked at the fire pit. “Why do that to another ghost?”

  “To punish them. To mess with me. Now he knows that I’d burn him, and he wants me to know he’s smarter than I am. I have to agree with him. I should never have assumed that skull was his just because he used you to dispose of it.”

  Kevin slumped into a nearby wooden chair as I bent over the charcoal soup that was the fire pit. “I don’t remember going to Haven Crest.”

  “You only remembered the park because he left you there.” I reached out with the tongs and snagged the skull by the jaw. “He’s a smart bastard.”

  His gaze was on our charred and gruesome companion. “Did we just commit ghost murder?”

  I shook my head. “More like aggravated assault, I think.” I carried the skull—in the tongs—to an empty planter and put it inside.

  We’d just started for the house when two cars pulled into the driveway—Ben’s and Mace’s. Ben had Gage and Roxi with him. Mace was alone. It was weird not to have Sarah as part of the group, but I can’t say I was too upset that she was gone.