Queen of the Dead

5 Will

I couldn’t fall asleep right away. Not for the obvious reason, either.

Well, okay, maybe that was part of it. I could still smell the flowery scent of Alona’s shampoo on my pillow and imagined I could still feel the heat of her against me.

But there was more.

Not five minutes after Alona had vanished through the far wall of my bedroom, my mom had poked her head in my room to say good night, and let’s face it, probably check up on me.

Her face was glowing with happiness. She must have had a good time with Sam at the movies. Where I was absolutely sure they did nothing but actually watch the movie, and refused to believe any evidence to the contrary. It was too…weird.

“Just wanted to say I’m home,” she said, beaming at me. My God, was that red patch on her chin stubble-burn? No, no, I wasn’t looking.

“Right on time for curfew,” I said instead, even though I actually had no idea what time it was.

“Ha, very funny. Good night.” She reached for my door to pull it shut again.

“Wait.” I hesitated. I didn’t want to destroy her good mood, but I had to know.

Of all the crazy stuff Alona had spouted earlier about the other ghost-talker, one part of it had actually made sense.

If there was one ghost-talker around here, maybe there were more.

“Did Dad ever say anything about anyone else? Like us, I mean?”

Her smile faded a bit. “Honey, I didn’t even know what was…special about him until you told me about your…gift.”

Nice avoidance of the words “wrong” and “problem,” Mom.“No, I know, but did he ever have any visitors or talk about people who weren’t from work or whatever?”

She was quiet for a long moment. “Your father was a complicated man, dealing with many…troubles.”

Like allowing himself to be misdiagnosed as schizophrenic instead of just a guy who could see and hear the dead.

“When he was having a tough day, I didn’t want to make it worse by asking questions,” she said.

I remembered that — Dad coming home from work early, and my mom hushing me as soon as I walked in the door from school. On those days, the house had to be as quiet, dark, and still as possible. I never really put it together until recently that he needed the peace and quiet because he’d probably spent the whole day trying to tune out all the ghosts he encountered through coworkers and the various locations he had to go to for work. It would have been miserable. At least when I was in school I’d had a rough idea of which ghosts were around, what they might do, and how aware they were or were not of the living, and in particular, me. For him, working as he did, on assignment from the railroad company, he’d have always been encountering new spirits and new problems.

“When he was having a good day,” my mom continued, “I…I didn’t want to ruin it. I’m sorry. That must seem horribly selfish to you now.” She gave me a rueful smile, and her eyes were watering.

I winced. “Mom…” I started to get up.

But she stopped me, holding her hand up. “I’m fine.” She cleared her throat and blinked back her tears. “He wasn’t always like that, though. He used to be happier, more social. In fact, when you were much, much younger, he was forever taking off for a weekend ‘with the guys.’” She laughed. “He called it book club, though what kind of book club involves coming back exhausted and all banged up, I have no idea. They were probably off paintballing or some other roughhousing nonsense they didn’t want the wives to know about.” She gave a laugh tinged with sadness and stared off in the distance at a memory I couldn’t see. “I used to get so mad at him.”

Then she edged closer to squeeze my foot through the covers. “Just because you’re different doesn’t mean you have to be alone, sweetie.”

Oh. That’s what she thought I was worried about. Better than the truth.

“I know,” I said.

It was her turn to hesitate. “That’s why I think it might be a good idea for you to branch out, spend some more time with your other friends.” She smiled a little too brightly.

In other words, not Alona.

I could have explained that my other friends were a bit scarce these days, never having been plentiful in the first place. Joonie was still adjusting to living at the group home, not to mention keeping up with the summer classes that would let her earn her high school diploma. Erickson was in California with his cousins for one last summer of surf and smoke, and Lily…well, Lily was exactly where she’d been for the last ten months. In a coma at St. Catherine’s.

Her soul was gone, having moved on to the light immediately after the car accident that landed her in the hospital in the first place, but her body was still basically functional. A couple months ago, Alona had saved my life by making it seem as though Lily were communicating from beyond (long story). She’d spelled out a message on a Ouija board, and even managed to put her hand inside Lily’s for a moment to move it. Since then, her parents had backed way off from the idea of removing her feeding tube and letting her fade. At least, her mom had. I wasn’t sure her dad was convinced. I’d visited a few times since that incident, and the tension between them was enough to keep those visits very short. If Lily had been aware and able to, she’d have walked out herself, I was sure of it. Her mother had hovered, always making sure a Ouija board was right at Lily’s lax fingertips. Her dad had looked ready to burst a blood vessel every time her mother even mentioned “communicating.”

But rather than getting into all that with my mom, who knew pieces of it, but not everything, it was just easier to agree. “Sure,” I said. “No problem.”

She smiled, pleased at having helped, I’m sure. “I’ve got an early shift tomorrow. You’ll come by for lunch? I think Sam’s got you scheduled for the afternoon.”

Now that school was out, I was picking up a few hours at the diner as a busboy. The work was not glamorous, but the gas money was good. On days that my mom and I both worked, I usually went in early to eat so I didn’t have to worry about fending for myself around here.

“Yeah,” I said. Alona would not be pleased. She hated hanging out at the diner. Claimed she could smell the grease in her hair for hours afterward. Again, highly unlikely, but who was I to say?

My mom nodded and started to leave.

“Hey, Mom? The book club guys…they were from Dad’s work?” I asked. It was probably nothing, but I had to ask.

“What? Oh. Actually, I don’t know.” She frowned. “I don’t remember. I think so. It was so long ago, I’m not sure.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “Why? You don’t think they were…like that, do you?”

Like the girl from the Gibley Mansion? Like me, Mom?“ No,” I said. Because if so, why hadn’t my dad ever mentioned them to me? It was one thing to refuse to talk much about the gift/curse we both shared. A whole other thing to let me think we were alone in it when he knew otherwise. “Definitely not.”

She nodded again, seemingly reassured, a spark of her Sam-induced happiness returning. “Good night, hon.” She snapped the light off and shut my door on her way out. After a few seconds, I heard her running water in the bathroom and the sound of her footsteps heading down the hall to her bedroom. A few minutes after that, nothing but that heavy silence that comes with someone sleeping.

I wished it could be that easy for me. But my mindwould not slow down, playing back the evening over andover again, in fast-forward, rewind, slow motion, and every possible combination. No additional answers emerged, though.

I was finally starting to doze off when a funny scrabbling noise sounded at the window behind my headboard.

My first completely illogical thought, half-asleep and fuzzy-brained as I was, was that Mrs. Ruiz had managed to pull herself back together, and she was pissed and coming after me. I knew for sure it wasn’t Alona. She always managed to slip in and out of the room without a sound.

I bolted up and off the bed, swallowing back the instinctive and childhood urge to call for help, fumbling and flailingto reach the light on my desk.

The window squeaked upward, and I cursed myself for always leaving it unlocked.

I snapped the desk lamp on and hoisted it above my head as a makeshift weapon, just as a familiar face, surrounded by mass amounts of wild dark hair, appeared in the opening. “Thank God,” the girl from the Gibley Mansion said, bracing herself in the window frame.

I didn’t move, couldn’t move. I wasn’t entirely sure I was awake.

“You know just about every spook in town knows your name, but not where you live?” Without waiting for a response, she clambered in and stepped down on my bed and then the floor. “What are you doing?” she asked with a frown, taking in the lamp with her gaze.

Like I was the one where I wasn’t supposed to be. I couldn’t have been more surprised if Jessica Alba had suddenly appeared in my bedroom. Thankfully, I’d thrown a T-shirt on after Alona had left, and getting caught in boxers wasn’t that big of a deal.

“What do you want?” I asked, when I recovered the ability to speak. Alona’s dire warnings of a vast conspiracy rang in my ears, sounding less and less crazy by the second. Feeling a little foolish suddenly with the lamp above my head, I set it down carefully.

“So suspicious,” she said, still frowning.

Now I was getting pissed. “Were you or were you not the person accusing me of ruining your life just a few hours ago?”

She sighed. “You’re going to make this difficult, aren’t you?” Without waiting for an answer, she reached forward, and I stepped back, the sharp edge of my desk biting into my back, before I realized she was just grabbing for my desk chair.

She rolled the chair toward herself with a smirk that said she’d seen my retreat and found it amusing. She twisted the chair around backward and sat down, her arms resting across the back.

“Where’s the queen?” she asked.

It took me a second to realize she meant Alona. “Not here,” I said warily. “Why?”

“Good.” She nodded.

“What do you want?” I repeated, still not sure how I felt about her being here now. Yes, I was curious. Not sure I was curious enough for a stranger to be in my bedroom late at night when I hadn’t invited her.

Alona’s voice whispered in my head. Invasion of your territory; it’s a power play. Damn. Maybe my mom was right. I was spending way too much time with her.

The girl didn’t answer right away. She just stared up at me in that cold, evaluating way that made me feel like I was back in Principal Brewster’s office. I took the opportunity to get a better look at her, and though I tried to make it as intimidating and hard a stare as hers, I doubted I succeeded.

She was still wearing her worn-out cargo pants and combat boots. Silver duct tape was wrapped around the toe of one boot, seemingly holding it together. Her dark hair, which I had thought was going to give Alona fits earlier, still stood around her head in a halo, but now it seemed less a result of poor hygiene and more the product of wildly curly hair and possibly being jammed in the hood I could now see at the back of her shirt.

“You know, I had you all wrong,” she said finally, using her toes to spin my chair a few inches in one direction and then back, over and over again.

“What does that mean?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know.

She settled herself more comfortably in my chair, as though it were her own. “At first, I thought you were just a curiosity seeker, or some no-talent local out to see what he could see.”

Um, ouch?

“Then I thought you were maybe a Casper lover trying to interfere.” Her mouth twisted in distaste.

There was that term again. I understood the meaning from the context — and clearly it was meant as an insult — but it was the way she said it, like it was a real thing. Some acknowledged piece of vocabulary I’d somehow missed during SAT prep.

“But”—she leaned closer—“then I had some time to think about it, and you’re not any of those things, are you? You don’t even know what I’m talking about.”

“Well, the no-talent thing was pretty clear,” I said.

She grinned and something dangerous gleamed in her eyes, which, I noted with a bit of shock, appeared to be two different colors, blue and green.

“Funny. I like that,” she said.

And third time’s a charm.…“So what do you—”

“I’m proposing an arrangement,” she said, choosing her words carefully.

“Uh-huh.” Even I could hear the suspicion in my voice.

“You help me out with a little something, and I give you information.”

“Information about what?”

She grinned again. “Everything you don’t know.”

“What makes you think I don’t—”

She pulled something small, shiny, and silver from one of her pockets, holding it up and waggling it at me. It was, I was fairly certain, the device that had saved my life by vanquishing Mrs. Ruiz right before my eyes. I could see it had buttons on the top and wires sticking out of one end, details I’d missed before. “Standard issue,” she said.

“For who?” I couldn’t help myself from asking.

She smirked. She knew she had me then.

Then her expression grew more guarded. “First things first. You can see them, can’t you? I mean, better than I can.” Her mouth tightened as if admitting that last fact had actually pained her.

I assumed she was talking about ghosts. “I don’t know. I can—”

“You knew when my aim was off,” she said sharply.

Boy, she was not fond of letting me finish a thought. “Yeah, but it wasn’t off by that much.…”

“When they move, I lose them,” she said bitterly. “I can see them just fine while they’re still, but when they start moving around, I can’t get a bead on them.” She shook her head. “It’s like my eyes can’t keep up with my brain.”

That was, oddly enough, something I’d never considered before, when I’d been thinking of the possibility that there would be other ghost-talkers out there. That there would be disparities in level of ability. Though it kind of made sense. Just because a bunch of people could play the trumpet didn’t mean they could all play it equally well, with equal aptitude for the high and low notes or whatever.

She looked up at me with a glare, as though daring me to feel sorry for her. “I can hear them better than anyone, though. I heard the princess whining long before I ever saw her.” She scowled at me. “How on earth did you end up with that tagalong?”

Somehow I sensed that explaining the whole spirit guide thing might not be a great move right now. “We’re friends.” Which was more or less the truth.

She raised an eyebrow. “Friends or friends friends?”

I wasn’t even sure what that meant, but her tone suggested that “friends friends” was something more, and not an area I particularly wished to discuss right at this moment because I really didn’t know the answer anyway. Alona and I were…well, we were just us. That was all.

“What do you want me to do in exchange for this information you’re supposedly going to give me?” I asked instead.

She shrugged, looking a little more self-conscious than I’d seen before. “This is my last chance at a containment if I want full membership. I might need a little help getting Mrs. Ruiz in the box.” Her voice held a defensive note.

Ignoring, for the moment, that most of what she’d justsaid sounded like gibberish—“in the box” was a little ominous, and full membership in what? — I had a larger concern. “Mrs. Ruiz? But…she’s gone. I saw you fire that thing and—”

The girl grinned again, clearly enjoying my ignorance. “Nah, the disruptor just disperses their energy enough to break them up temporarily. It takes multiple hits if you want it to be permanent, and even then, sometimes it doesn’t work. On one like her? No way. Did you see the way she was closing those doors on you?”

“I thought she was going to trap me in there with her,” I said with a grimace.

She laughed. “She might have. It’s been known to happen to a few of us who’ve fallen asleep at the wheel, so to speak. Not with her, obviously, but other green-levels.”

“Green-levels?” I asked.

She just gave me a knowing smile. No more info, not until I agreed to help. Got it.

“So…you want my help to get Mrs. Ruiz in the box, whatever that means, and you’ll tell me about—”

“Everything,” she finished. “Or as much of it as I can. Like I said, I’m not a full member yet.”

Of what? I wanted to ask, but I knew better than to try, at least right now. “And then what?”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, you get Mrs. Ruiz and I get all this information, and then what?” I couldn’t help but think of Alona’s theory that this was some kind of complicated recruiting scheme. “I meet the others or—”

“No,” she said sharply. “This has to stay between us.”

Oh. “Okay,” I said, drawing it out. What was the point, then?

She made an impatient noise and stood, shoving the chair out of the way. “Look, we can help each other here. That’s it.”

I just looked at her.

She sighed heavily. “If, in a month or two, you want to make contact, I’ll show you how to do that. But you and I have never met each other before, get it?”

I nodded.

She stepped closer, grabbing the front of my shirt in her fist. “I’m serious. I know where we keep all the green-levelsand worse. Wouldn’t keep me up at night to set a few of themloose in your living room, if you can’t keep your mouth shut.”

I nodded hastily. She was hard-core. I kind of liked that.

She shoved the chair toward me and started for the window, clearly expecting me to follow.

Not without jeans, thanks. “And…one more thing,” I said. “Your name. Your real name.”

She faced me and hesitated.

I lifted my hands. I wasn’t going anywhere without it. She already knew mine and where to find me. I wasn’t completely sure I liked that idea.

“Mina,” she said finally. “Mina Blackwell.”

I waited.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said in a huff. She reached into the back pocket of her pants, pulled free a battered card, and handed it to me.

It was a driver’s license with a picture that showed a slightly younger and much happier Mina Blackwell. She had braces in the photo, which made her look so much more vulnerable. According to the info, she had one blue eye and one green, just as I’d thought, and she was older than me by about six months. “St. Louis?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I go where I’m sent.”

“That’s a long drive.” I handed her back her license.

She tucked it away in her pocket again. “Not nearly as long as if I have to go back without what I came for,” she said pointedly.

Okay, got it. Down to business.

For the second time in twenty-four hours, I ended up hunched in prickly rosebushes at the Gibley Mansion. This time, though, just for a little variety, we were on the opposite side of the former garden.

Most of the cops who’d come roaring in earlier had left by now. Only a couple of squad cars remained at the front of the house. Dopey and a couple of the officers took turns patrolling the inside and the perimeter immediately around the mansion. The rest of the time they stayed out front, making sure their presence was noticeable.

Mina and I were only about five feet from where Alona and I had seen Mrs. Ruiz materialize before. Only this time, instead of facing her, we would be behind her. If she showed up. It felt as if I’d spent days waiting on this ghost already.

Mina’s mysterious boxes were back in place, surrounding the exact spot, or close, to where Mrs. Ruiz would appear, the cords trailing directly back to our hiding place and the portable generator, which Mina would leave off until the last second. We were counting on the shadows to hide them well enough until it was time for them to do whatever it was they did. Plus, none of the officers on duty seemed all that interested in the surrounding yard, just keeping people out of and away from the house.

“So, how did you even know about this? About Mrs. Ruiz, I mean?” I whispered to Mina. As long as we kept it down, the officers couldn’t hear us all the way at the front, especially over the radios and their own bored gossip. By now, we’d heard enough to learn they figured what had happened earlier was, most likely, a combination of a wild animal trapped in the house and Dopey/Ralph’s nerves.

She shrugged, her shoulder rubbing against mine with the movement, and her hair brushing the side of my face. She smelled spicy, like cinnamon and tea or something. Not a bad scent, just different. “Someone on the Decatur Governance and Development Committee called us. Wanted a sweep before the house was destroyed to prevent any future issues. Leadership thought it would be a good opportunity for me to finish up my training.” I could hear the sarcasm in her voice in that last part, but I wasn’t sure why.

According to what Mina had told me in the car on the way over here, “Leadership” was the ruling body for the Order of the Guardians, a cross between a secret society and a small business, made up entirely of people like us. I’d never even heard of them before, though, and believe me when I say I’ve done my share of Googling on this topic. In that way, they were more secret society than business, I guess. This thing with Mrs. Ruiz was part of Mina’s initiation into full membership. Or full-time work, depending on how you looked at it.

“We do this kind of thing all the time. Clean up after something bad happens in a location, sweep a house before someone new moves in.” She shrugged. “Most of the time it’s not a green-level, though.”

They ranked spirits based on an estimation of their potential to do harm to humans. Like Mrs. Ruiz’s ability to slam doors shut. If she could do that, it wouldn’t have taken much more to shove someone down the stairs. And based on the history of the house, it seemed she might well have done that, probably more than once.

I couldn’t quite resolve this new information with what I believed — to maintain a presence here, a spirit had to focus on the positive rather than the negative. But if that were true without exception, Mrs. Ruiz would have been gone years ago.

Apparently, the system wasn’t quite as simple as I’d always assumed it to be. The principle held true, yes, but additional factors figured in, like initial energy level, something I’d never considered. It made sense, though, or else there would be no angry and vengeful ghosts, and I’d met plenty of those over the years.

Evidently, there were also different classifications for the variety of spirits who hung around. Some had no idea that they were dead and frequently relived moments leading up to their own demise. Others, like Alona and Mrs. Ruiz, were fully aware that they were gone…and in Mrs. Ruiz’s case, less than happy about it.

I hadn’t managed to get a complete breakdown from Mina, but I knew that, on a scale, green-levels were closer to the top than the bottom. Hence why she’d been sent here to prove herself.

Knowing that now, I was maybe a little uncomfortable with my role in this test. I was, essentially, helping Mina cheat. Aside from the ethics of it, which I didn’t particularly care for, I was also kind of worried that if she “passed,” she might end up in a situation she couldn’t see well enough to handle on her own.

Trying to bring that up, though, had proven dangerous. She’d said nothing, but glared at me and refused to speak to me, other than to issue more threats if I backed out.

Okay, so I’d learned that lesson. Whatever she gained by full membership, Mina thought it was worth the risk. “How do people even know to ask you guys?” I asked now.

She shrugged. “The people who need to know know. We have a network of contacts among the clergy in all the major religions; state, local, and federal government; hospitals; funeral homes; even some police and fire departments. I think they’ve even got somebody on one of those paranormal investigation shows.”

“Really?”

She snorted. “Just in case one of the ‘investigators’ actually stumbles into something real, I think.”

“And you box all of them? All the ghosts, I mean.” Boxing, as I understood it, was what she meant by containment. Another part of this I was less than comfortable with. The technology in those boxes — whatever it was, and Mina didn’t know other than to say, “Who cares? It works”—would divide up a spirit’s energy and prevent it from re-forming. She could then cart the boxes away, and no more haunting. What happened to the ghost after that, she was less clear about. Some of them were studied by the Order’s scientists, the same ones who’d created all the hardware she was hauling around. Others…she didn’t know or wouldn’t say.

She looked at me pityingly. “We’ve been over this. They’re not souls. Souls can’t be measured or captured. They’re shadows, energy echoes, imitations. Whatever.”

I wasn’t so sure. I understood her point, to an extent. Souls don’t register on an electromagnetic scale. But that didn’t mean they weren’t more than the mindless echoes she was implying.

“If they don’t bother the living, we don’t bother them,” she said. “There are too many of them anyway.”

Like they were ants or some other kind of household pest.

“But”—she elbowed me—“we serve the living, not the dead. Remember that.”

That certainly explained her attitude toward Alona. I mean, the part that went beyond the attitude almost everyone had toward Alona. She wasn’t always easy to like. But that didn’t mean I was willing to relegate her to being some kind of…nonentity.

Doubt must have shown on my face. “Let me guess. You got into this to help the poor dead people make peace with their unfinished business.” Mina sounded amused.

“You don’t do that?” I was guessing not. I’d described the white light to her, and she’d readily acknowledged it as a phenomenon she was familiar with. To her understanding, however, it was simply a side effect of an echo willingly surrendering what was left of its energy. What that might mean for Alona, someone who’d been into the light and come back, I had no idea.

“What part of Vivis servimus non mortuis do you not understand?” she asked.

“All of it?”

She shifted carefully on the ground next to me, making herself more comfortable, which reminded me viscerally of the last time I’d been in a similar situation with a girl. Suddenly I missed Alona. She would kill me if she found out I was here. And yet, I wasn’t ready to walk away. There were still too many things I didn’t know.

“Has it not occurred to you that every time you’re helping one of them, you might be hurting someone who is still alive?” Mina asked with some exasperation.

“How?” I demanded.

“Shhhh.” She elbowed me harder this time, and I grunted.

“First,” she said in a quieter voice, “because you’re taking one person’s — if you can even think of a ghost as anything fully actualized as a whole person — account as the truth.”

That danger I knew well enough. I could never know for certain that ghosts seeking closure to their unfinished business were going to be honest with me — or even them-selves — about what that business might be.

“Second, even if they are telling the truth, how does it help to let a man know that his dead wife is sorry for something she did thirty years ago that he might not even know about?”

That was, much as I hated to admit it, a good question.

Mina shrugged. “Maybe he’s been happier this wholetime thinking she’s at peace or whatever. And now you’re telling him that his wife, or some version of her energy, has been hanging around and miserable, watching him this whole time? No way.”

“So, if they’re not here because they have unfinished business, why are they here at all?” I felt like the world as I knew it was slipping away little by little.

She made an impatient noise. “You’re thinking about this way too much. Why are we here? Why is anyone here?” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. You just have to look for the greater good.”

That, too, made sense.

“Our job is to protect the living. We’re the heroes here, not the villains,” she added.

The villains in her mind were the Casper lovers. They weren’t an organization, at least not like the Order. They were the paranormal equivalent of rabid environmentalists, apparently — people who elevated spirits above the living, almost to the point of worshiping them as deities or emissaries of such, and refused to consider a spirit’s departure from this existence a good thing under any circumstances.

I wasn’t completely on that side either, obviously. Technically, the Order and I did the same work. I just did it by finding out what was keeping the spirit here and helping him or her move on.

“Speaking of which”—she grinned at me—“I think we have company.”

I looked through the tangle of branches and leaves in front of us at the configuration of boxes. I could barely see them in the dark. The moonlight was fading, and the sun would start coming up soon.

A faint glow had started to appear in the open space amid the five boxes, almost directly on top of the dirty pillowcase filled with most of the silverware. Mina had spread the rest of the spoons around inside the circle made by the boxes in an effort to distract Mrs. Ruiz. We were counting on Mrs. Ruiz’s obsession with her treasure — no way would she want to lose even one of those spoons — to keep her distracted. Hopefully, trying to pick them up again — for all I knew she might succeed, she was really strong — would keep her so occupied she didn’t notice the trap closing around her until it was too late.

This had apparently been Mina’s plan before. Lure Mrs. Ruiz into the living room — a location with multiple exits, unlike the bedroom where the silverware had been hidden — and contain her there. Except I’d needed saving first andshe’d stepped in. I owed her for that, at least.

Mina tensed next to me. “Ready?” she asked.

My role was simple. Flip the switch on the generator, guide Mina if Mrs. Ruiz tried to move outside the boxes, and then run like hell when it was all done because apparently there was no way the cops would miss seeing the light show that ensued.

No. “Yes,” I said.

She nodded, a motion I sensed more than saw in the dark. She rose into a crouching position. Though I couldn’t see it, I knew she’d have the control box in her hand. She’d showed it to me when we unloaded everything from her car. It was a simple device that would trigger the boxes on the ground to open and divide up the energy that was Mrs. Ruiz into five equal parts.

She couldn’t do it too soon, before Mrs. Ruiz had fully materialized, or it wouldn’t take.

I watched intently, feeling the intensity thrumming through Mina next to me. She was determined to make this work.

The pattern of Mrs. Ruiz’s housedress solidified into something resembling real fabric rather than a projection of the same, at about the same time she noticed the spoons on the ground. Or so I assumed. She bent down to try to pick them up, and Mina nudged me.

I snapped the switch on the generator, which started up with what felt like a deafening roar, though that was probably more because it was so close to us and I was dreading getting caught.

Mrs. Ruiz looked up sharply and spun around to face us and the source of the noise, moving quickly for a woman of her size.

“Now,” I said to Mina.

She didn’t react for a second, and I realized even in the slight movement of Mrs. Ruiz turning around, Mina had lostsight of her. Damn. She really couldn’t see them very well.

“Mina…”

She pressed the button, and the split tops on the boxes cracked open, sending bolts of yellowish-white light toward the sky.

Oh, hell. There was no way we were getting out of here undetected.

As I watched, the five separate beams converged on Mrs. Ruiz, splitting her into pieces, like a photograph broken apart into sections. Her face was still frozen in that expression of fury.

Then the beams began to retract slowly, each pulling with it the blur of colors that had once been a part of Mrs. Ruiz.

Loud voices came from the front of the house, followed immediately by the sound of car doors opening and running steps.

“Mina,” I whispered urgently.

“Wait,” she said, her face aglow in the fading beams, intensity and concentration wrinkling her brow.

“Mina!”

She fumbled in her bag and came out with a handful of something. She snapped the something open, and our hiding place glowed green. Glow sticks, but the big professional kind, like for spelunking or whatever. Then she stood and chucked them as hard as she could away from us and our escape path. They spun and arced away from us like mini-UFOs. A couple of them smacked into the side of the house with a loud thwack.

The running footsteps slowed and then stopped. A flashlight passed over the bushes that hid us and then moved in the direction of the glow sticks.

“Now,” she whispered. She pressed another button, and the top of the boxes snapped shut, eliminating the last of glow of the beams.

I snapped off the generator and abandoned it, per plan, and she snagged the cords of the boxes, hauling them over her shoulder.

We bolted through the yard, heading for the street behind the house and the block beyond it, where we’d parked her car, a beat-up Malibu that could have been a twin to my Dodge in all its signs of having lived a rough life.

“Hey!” The first shout came from behind us, and I put on a burst of speed. I did not want to explain this to my mother.

I looked back to see how Mina was doing with the additional burden of her equipment and found her veering away from me.

What the hell?

She must have felt my gaze on her because she paused just long enough to look over her shoulder and give a jaunty salute that I could barely see in the faint light. I started to turn, to go after her, but doubling back would have put me on a direct collision course with all the nice officers chasing us with their flashlights and, likely, guns.

No, thanks.

Damn it. I knew I should have driven myself.

I stuck to the shadows, and instead of heading for the street, as we’d planned, I moved through side yards and backyards of the homes surrounding the Gibley Mansion. Mina, after all, had the keys to her car. Getting to the Malibuwould do me no good without those.

Dogs barked, and I tripped repeatedly over garden hoses, kids’ toys, and lawn chairs. But I stayed on my feet and kept moving. The historical society apparently forbade fences in this part of town, thank God.

After about six blocks, I had to stop. I bent in half in the side yard of a Victorian monstrosity that had boarded-up windows, trying to breathe without throwing up. The cuts on my back from my earlier encounter with Mrs. Ruiz throbbed and burned.

What was Mina doing?

Leaving you to fend for yourself now that she has what she needed. Duh. The Alona-like voice in my head was dismissive.

I tried to listen for the sound of anyone behind me, but I couldn’t hear anything over the pounding of my heart and my panicked panting for air.

Apparently, my arrangement with Mina, what there’d been of it, was now over.

Never trust a mysterious girl who shows up in your room in the middle of the night, no matter how much you may or may not have in common. It seemed a simple — and obvious—conclusion now, standing here, alone, in the dark, miles from home.

I waited another long few moments, still catching mybreath and trying to pull together my thoughts. The dogs in the neighborhood quieted down, and I didn’t hear sirens.

Not this time. Either they’d caught Mina or given up looking for me.

She’d lied about giving me a way to contact the Order. Which, now that I thought about it, only made sense.

The version of Alona in my head made another disdainful noise. Of course.

Mina had risked a lot to pass this test, and would she really chance it on me, a stranger, keeping his promise to keep his mouth shut?

Crap. Alona would have seen that coming a mile away. She schemed like this in her sleep…or whatever it was she did now.

Hell, for all I knew, Mina had lied about everything, including the existence of the Order. But she belonged, or wanted to belong, to something. That much was clear. And her conviction about serving the living and not the dead had certainly seemed genuine enough. Then again, maybe I wasn’t the best judge of sincerity at the moment.

Lucky for me, I had one very long walk back to my house to begin sorting out fiction from possible fact.