TARA HUDSON
DEDICATION
To my new son, Wyatt—
you are my greatest challenge, and my biggest reward.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
Back Ad
About the Publisher
Chapter
ONE
The entire world had gone dark, and I had no idea why.
No matter how widely I opened my eyes, no matter how many times I craned my neck or spun around in search of even one speck of light, I found none. There was nothing but thick, impenetrable darkness.
Before I’d opened my eyes to all this pitch-black, I had the vague impression that I’d just been someplace warm, familiar. Someplace safe.
But wherever I was now, I didn’t feel safe at all. I felt sightless and trapped. Like I was on the verge of being consumed by the darkness … like it was trying to eat me whole.
Although I couldn’t see, I could still hear things: the swish of my long dress as I whirled in useless, searching circles; the hiss of my increasingly panicked breath.
I heard something else, too—some sound I couldn’t quite identify. Not at first.
It started softly, almost muffled. A strange noise echoing out from beneath layers and layers of cotton. But as the sound grew in volume, it also deepened. Slowly, it transformed into something stronger. Something that more closely resembled a continuous thudding.
When the thudding gained a certain steadiness—a rhythm—I sucked in one sharp breath.
I recognized the sound now, and it made me want to scream.
If I were anyone else—anything else—I probably wouldn’t have reacted that way. After all, the rhythmic thudding of a heartbeat usually meant something positive. It meant life.
But for me, an audible heartbeat meant only one thing: someone nearby was dying.
It wouldn’t be me, of course. I hadn’t felt a genuine heartbeat in my chest since the day I drowned, on the night of my eighteenth birthday more than ten years ago.
The sound I heard now was definitely made by a living heart. And I couldn’t fight the horrible suspicion that it belonged to someone I loved.
Joshua Mayhew, for instance. Or even his little sister, Jillian. Both very much alive, and both of whose heartbeats I monitored carefully after I’d worked so hard to protect them.
Hearing that terrible thudding now, I forced myself to calm down and focus more intently on the darkness. I strained and squinted, peering into the dark until, blessedly, weak light began to shimmer along the edges of my vision. I watched each new sliver closely, silently praying that it would reveal the owner of that heart. Selfishly praying that it wouldn’t be Joshua. As I waited impatiently, another realization struck me: I could rely on senses other than sight and hearing. This was strange, considering the fact that ghosts can’t smell, taste, or feel anything outside themselves. At least not very often.
Yet I could smell a sweet, musty decay all around me. It overlay the scent of damp air. Combined, the scents had an almost disorienting effect. The smells, the heartbeat, the shifting darkness—all of it made me dizzy and uncomfortable.
Thankfully, the light grew brighter, and I could finally see that I stood in a dim room. Across from me, heavily slatted shutters ran from a wood-planked floor up to a beamed ceiling. The shutters blocked most of the light from what could only be the sun, shining outside a wall of windows.
Furniture filled the room: randomly placed chairs and end tables, as well as a low coffee table that flanked a couch. Flung across the couch, in some sort of makeshift slipcover, was a white bedsheet. And flung across the sheet was a person.
At first I thought she might be a child. On closer inspection, I realized the tiny figure was actually closer to my own age. She had curled into a protective ball on the couch, spine pressed to the back cushions and sharp hip bone jutting up in the air. Her head lolled sideways onto one of the couch’s arms, and her dark brown hair cascaded in a tangle to the floor.
Even in the darkness of the room I could see the unhealthy sheen of her skin. Sweat glistened upon her sunken cheeks, and her eyes fluttered behind their closed lids.
Something about the girl’s face gave me an actual chill. Something about her features …
I leaned closer for a better look, and, at that moment, the girl opened her eyes to stare blankly into the room. Her eyes were red rimmed and unfocused, addled by either sleep or some kind of chemical. Probably the latter, judging by the overturned prescription bottle that had spilled a rainbow of pills across the table in front of her.
Under normal circumstances—if anything about this scene could be classified as normal—I would have been worried about this girl. However ineffectively, I would have tried to find someone to help her. I would have grasped at her with my dead, incapable hands.
But these were not normal circumstances.
Because just one sight of the girl’s eyes rooted me to the floor. Those eyes, though bloodshot and bleary, were still a luminous green, shining out from a face I knew very well.
My own.
Chapter
TWO
Death, a voice rasped in my head. It always starts with death.
I bolted upright with a shriek.
Immediately, I felt the press of a hand upon mine. My adrenaline surged at the unexpected touch, and I moved to jerk away from it. Whoever had pressed against my hand grabbed it more tightly and held me firmly in place. It took a few more seconds of struggling before I calmed down enough to look at the face of my captor.
He stared back at me, his eyebrows furrowed above dark blue eyes. With one of his hands grasping mine, he ran the other through his black hair and then rested his palm upon the back of his neck—a nervous, worried gesture.
Without warning, I threw my free arm around my captor’s neck and pressed my lips to his.
At that moment I didn’t care that I was dead and shouldn’t have been sleeping, much less dreaming; I didn’t care that I’d dreamed about myself in some unfamiliar, near-death state; nor did I care that I should behave more carefully around the boy I now kissed since I was invisible and he wasn’t.
All I cared was that Joshua kissed me back.
Wherever his hands clutched at my bare skin—my arms, my shoulders, my exposed thigh—they ignited a shower of fiery sparks. Even my lips burned from their contact with his.
This minor miracle happened every time we touched. At each press of my ghostly flesh to his living, Joshua and I both experienced waves of sensation that, with prolonged contact, turned into the actual feel of each other’s skin.
Maybe this was unique to me and Joshua, maybe not. For all I knew,
every ghost-to-spiritually-aware-human interaction happened this way. Whatever the case, I knew one thing for sure: I never grew tired of it.
I sighed quietly when Joshua pulled his lips from mine. Although I sighed in disappointment that our kiss had ended, I also sighed in relief. As Joshua leaned away from me, I could see we were alone in his bedroom, lying on his bed. No one had seen us kiss.
But my relief turned into embarrassment when I realized that, during our kiss, I must have rolled on top of him. Joshua was now beneath me, with my thighs pressed against either side of his hips. My filmy white dress—the one in which I’d died and was now cursed to wear forever—had crept up to a seriously inappropriate height on my thighs.
Gape mouthed, I stared down at Joshua. His mussed hair and his lack of a T-shirt told me that my post-nightmare shriek had woken him up, too. And his broad grin told me he wasn’t even slightly embarrassed by our current position.
“Yikes,” I murmured. I moved to roll myself off, but he pinned me to him by wrapping one arm around my waist.
“Aw,” Joshua protested. “No ‘yikes,’ Amelia. Why don’t you make yourself comfortable up there?” His grin turned wolfish as he secured his other arm around me.
I scowled. “Joshua Mayhew, even if I’m in your bed every night, I’m not … cheap.”
Although his bedside clock read 3 a.m., Joshua laughed so loudly his entire family could have heard him, if they were awake.
“Amelia Ashley,” Joshua teased. “The fact that you’re in my bed every night means I don’t think you’re cheap. And, for the record, I think it’s adorable that you used the word ‘cheap.’ You are aware it’s the twenty-first century, right?”
“What can I say? I’m a twentieth-century kind of girl,” I grumbled; but I let him tug me closer, until I had to drop my arms on either side of him to keep myself upright.
Hovering there, I studied Joshua’s face for a moment: his midnight-sky colored eyes, his full mouth, his high cheekbones. Then I peeked at the nearly bare body extending beneath that face. And beneath me.
“Well,” I murmured, “since I’m already here …”
Then I dipped down and pressed my lips to his again.
Beneath my kiss, I felt Joshua smile triumphantly. As he moved his mouth against mine, he placed his fingertips on the delicate skin beneath my jaw. Then he ran them down my throat to my collarbone, where he traced them lightly back and forth.
I moaned quietly, and, in an instant, Joshua rolled us over so that he stretched out above me. I closed my eyes and placed my hands on his bare back, anticipating the moment I would feel his skin, smooth and warm and real. In my excitement, I hitched one leg up and wrapped it around Joshua’s hip.
And with that gesture, I stopped feeling anything at all.
I opened my eyes and sighed, not really surprised by what I now saw above me. Instead of the ceiling of Joshua’s bedroom, a maze of trees branches—bare except for a heavy layer of frost—tangled together. A mix of rain and sleet now fell noisily around me. Luckily, I couldn’t feel the sting of ice as it battered my shoulders.
As I pushed myself into a seated position and took in the rest of my surroundings, however, I didn’t feel very lucky. To my right, a squat brick structure—a chimney, I think—rose up toward the sky. Beneath me, row upon row of shingles sloped precariously down toward a very familiar backyard.
Excellent. I always wanted to know what the Mayhews’ roof looked like.
At that dry thought, I pulled my legs into my chest, wrapped my arms around them, and lay my head on my knees. Then I puffed out a big, angry sigh.
I guess I should have been grateful, considering how short a distance I materialized tonight. The last time this happened, I’d opened my eyes to what I’m pretty sure was an entirely different county.
Before materializations like this one started occurring, I honestly thought I’d learned to control them—learned how to prevent the ghostly vanishings that transported me, unwilling, to someplace else, sometime else.
I was wrong, obviously.
It wasn’t that I wanted to materialize away from Joshua tonight. Far from it. But over the past few months, I’d come to the sad realization that we couldn’t go much further than we already had, physically, without me disappearing into thin air. Every time we kissed too long, or held each other too closely, I’d vanish. If Joshua’s fingers strayed too far below my collarbone—zap, to a deserted car lot. If I loosened just one of his buttons—poof, to the top of a picnic table at some rest stop on the side of the highway.
Each time I vanished, I could materialize back instantly, free from ice or any other kind of harm. But the mood was always dampened, to say the least.
And each time I vanished, I slowly learned my lesson: unless I kept a tighter guard on my emotions, and my actions with Joshua, I had no control over what happened to my body.
I guess I hadn’t learned the lesson well enough. Not yet.
I couldn’t help but sigh loudly. This situation was so unfair I could almost taste it, tart and bitter on my tongue. After all, my desire wasn’t so crazy, so outrageous, that it needed to be denied in such a harsh way. What I wanted—what Joshua and I both wanted—was simple, and normal, and genuine.
And obviously impossible.
I lifted my head from my knees and sighed again. There was nothing I could do about the problem now except get back to Joshua and try to make things right. As right as they could be anyway.
I closed my eyes and focused on the house beneath me. I heard a soft whoosh of air, and when I opened my eyes, I found myself sitting on a bed, staring into the familiar glow of Joshua’s bedside lamp.
If only all my materializations could be this controlled.
Behind me I heard the shifting sound of bedsprings. I threw a wary glance over my shoulder and saw Joshua. He’d propped himself against his headboard and faced forward, frowning in deep thought.
I’d expected to find him frustrated, or angry, or maybe even a little sad. Instead, Joshua simply looked … intent. Like he was trying to solve some difficult problem.
Sensing my presence, he stirred and caught my eye. Without leaning away from the headboard, he stretched his arm across the bed to me.
“Hey, stranger,” he said with a slight smile.
I groaned, turning more fully toward him before I took his offered hand. “How long was I gone this time?”
“Not too long—only a few minutes. Getting better, I think.”
I snorted. “Better? Seriously? It’s hardly getting better if it just keeps happening.”
Joshua shook his head and smiled wider, undeterred. “You’re wrong, Amelia. The disappearances are getting shorter and shorter. I bet they stop happening altogether soon. It’s going to get easier—I promise.”
In the face of his perpetual optimism, I bit my lip to keep my mouth shut. Or to keep my response locked inside, more like it.
How could I tell Joshua the truth about what I’d really been thinking lately: that our relationship would never get easier? That if things were this difficult now, when we were both young, they would grow insurmountable as Joshua aged.
Because, inevitably, Joshua would age. Very soon he would graduate from Wilburton High School and move away to college. At some point he would probably want a girl he could introduce to his family, one whom all of them could see and half of them wouldn’t want to exorcise. A girl he could make out with for more than ten minutes. A girl with whom, maybe someday, he’d start a family.
A girl I could never be.
Still biting my lip, I looked at Joshua more closely. The soft, hopeful look in his eyes told me that he didn’t share my troubled thoughts. At least, not at the moment.
“So, where’d you go this time?” he asked, taking his hand from mine and brushing a strand of hair off my face.
I pulled my lip from my teeth and tilted my head to one side. “Your roof, actually.”
Joshua’s eyes widened. After a long, stunned pause, he cle
ared his throat. In an intentionally calm voice, he asked, “Oh? And how was it up there?”
“Icy. Probably freezing.”
Joshua grimaced, from either the idea of the storm outside or the thought of me sitting in it. “This one wasn’t like any of your old nightmares, was it?”
“No, thank God for that,” I said, shuddering.
I hadn’t had a real nightmare in several months, at least not in the way I defined the word “nightmare.”
Before I’d met Joshua, before I’d saved him from drowning in the same river I had, a series of waking nightmares controlled my afterlife. In daylight as well as darkness, I would sometimes lose consciousness and then relive part of my death. Upon waking, I would find myself someplace other than where I’d been just before the nightmare occurred. I’d learned these nightmares were involuntary materializations, much like the ones I experienced now, but worse.
I still wasn’t entirely sure why the nightmares had ended. I suspected it had something to do with the fact that I now remembered the details of my death. Or maybe because I’d fought back against the dark spirits who had engineered that death.
Whichever the case, the end of the nightmares meant the beginning of an entirely new set of troubles. These new—but still unwanted—materializations, for example. And then there were the weird dreams, like the one I’d had tonight.
I didn’t like thinking about the dreams, but after one occurred, I just couldn’t stop. I obsessed over their details, trying—without much success—to find a pattern in them, or a reason for them.