Queen of the Dead

  “Did it fade out?” Mina asked.

  John stepped forward around both of us to unplug the main box cord from the wall. “It’s possible. But there’s only one way to know for sure. We’ll wait.” He nodded at Lily. “The girl is dying anyway.”

  I froze. “What?”

  “The entity was in place for so long, she won’t survive without it,” he said. “But even if the entity managed to repossess her, it’s severely depleted. Removing it won’t be an issue, especially once the girl dies.”

  Thoughts whirled around in my head, making it difficult for me to catch hold of one.

  Lily was dying? Had Alona known that? Had she figured out that Lily would not survive without her? That would have explained the expression on her face right before she disappeared.

  Had Alona just attempted to save Lily’s life?

  The very idea stirred up more thoughts I couldn’t quitepin down.

  Granted, trying to save Lily by reclaiming her would have benefits for Alona, too, like not being boxed, but she had to have known that being permanently stuck in Lily was a possibility. And yet she’d tried anyway.

  “We should relocate. Someone may have heard the ruckus.” John reached for the handles of Lily’s wheelchair.

  I moved to block him. “No.”

  He looked at me, startled.

  “You say you’re concerned about the living, but the dead were the living once. You don’t get to ignore that just because it’s more convenient for your philosophy and helps you sleep better at night,” I said.

  John blanched.

  “Yeah, listen to the new recruit,” Mina said softly. “The one you’re all fighting over.”

  I ignored her. “If the spirit even survived, if Alona survived,” I deliberately used her name, watching John’s eyebrows shoot skyward, “I’m sure as hell not going to just sit here and watch Lily die so you can get to Alona that much faster.” I reached down and carefully peeled the gag away from her mouth. Lily’s mouth was red and raw on the edges from where Alona had been screaming.

  “A Killian rides to the rescue again. All the poor dead people who need your help.” A weary bitterness settled across John’s face. “It’s supposed to be about the greater good, Will. Your father never understood that, either.”

  “He did,” I snapped. “His definition of good was just a little broader than yours, I think.”

  I grabbed Lily’s wheelchair and started to pull it away, pausing only to open the door behind me.

  “She’s possessed,” John spat at me.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “It’s an abomination,” he continued.

  “And you don’t get to decide that.” The light had sent Alona back, and if one held with the belief that the light was representative of some all-knowing, all-powerful force, then the light had been aware of this outcome all along and done nothing to stop it. In fact, by sending her back, it might have very well created the events leading to this moment. I didn’t know, and I couldn’t judge. And I wouldn’t allow John and the Order to judge, either.

  “You’ll be calling us, begging for help before you know it,” he said with disgust.

  Maybe, but at least I’d know the price for their help next time, and it was far too high.

  “Don’t.” Mina stepped forward, her hand closing around my wrist tightly. “If she’s still possessed, I need this, Will.” Her eyes pleaded with me, showing her desperation more plainly than words ever could.

  “You are never going to be good enough,” I said to her, andshe flinched. “No one is ever good enough for him because he doesn’t feel good enough himself, always comparing you to other people, just like he compared himself to my dad.”

  John made a disgusted noise. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I didn’t, not for sure, but based on what Mina had said and his reaction to my words just now, I felt it was a fairly good guess. “So you have to be who you are, whoever that is,” I said to Mina. “Call Lucy and tell her the truth.”

  She jerked back, her gaze skating immediately to her father for his reaction. It wasn’t good. His face reddened, and he glared at her, before turning his attention to me.

  “If you’re implying that anything in my division is not running as it should—” he blustered.

  “Not your division, your family. And you know it’s not,” I said. “Call Lucy,” I said to Mina again.

  This time, she nodded, a tiny motion, almost imperceptible, but still there.

  I pulled Lily’s chair out into the hall. To my surprise, the priest followed us. I watched him warily as I turned the chair around and aimed it for the elevators, but he made no attempt to stop me.

  “I was trying to save the girl,” he said quietly.

  “I know, Father.” Me, too. Both of them.

  “I didn’t know that they would hurt her and—”

  The wheelchair jerked in my hands.

  I looked down. Lily’s whole body was shaking so hard the chair rattled, and her face had turned an ominous shade of blue.

  Fear froze me in place. Whatever Alona had done, it was not enough. Lily was dying, and now she would take Alona with her. I would lose both of them.

  “Help, someone! We need help!” The priest took offdown the hall shouting.

  I followed, one hand on Lily’s slumped shoulder andthe other on the chair, moving as fast as I dared. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.” I just kept repeating the words, praying I wouldn’t hear a final gasp from her. I’d grown used to the idea of life without Lily. But Alona? What would I do without her? No matter how much she drove me crazy sometimes, I needed that—I needed her—in my life.

  Several people in scrubs came running toward us. The priest had done his job.

  “What happened?”

  “What did you see?”

  “What is she being treated for?”

  They were all calling questions to me in calm but urgent voices that unnerved me. “I just found her this way,” I said in answer to all of them. The truth, but lame. I was pretty sure they didn’t believe me, especially when they saw the gag down around her neck.

  They shoved me away from her and lowered her to the floor.

  Two of them started CPR, while a third ran for a phone farther down the hall.

  In what seemed like seconds, the entire hall was filled with medical personnel, a crash cart…and Mrs. Turner.

  She took one look at Lily on the floor and launched herself at me. “What did you do? What did you do to my baby?” Each word came with a punch.

  I tried to avoid most of them, but some landed, each one with the fury born of a mother protecting her child.

  “You stay away! Stay away from her!” Mrs. Turnershoved at me, and I let her.

  They loaded Lily up on a gurney and raced away. Mrs. Turner followed them at a run.

  And I…I could do nothing but watch and wait.

  Three 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.
r />   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.

  “Are 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?