Afterlife

I couldn’t take the uncertainty between us another second. Instead I darted after Mrs. Bethany and Lucas, eager to hear what I could.

Mrs. Bethany lived in a carriage house at the edge of the school grounds, a place I knew well. But I forgot one very basic thing about it until I swept down toward the roof, ready to sink inside—and felt myself shoved back violently. Of course, I realized. The roof.

Metals and minerals found in the human body, such as copper and iron, repelled wraiths strongly. This was why Mrs. Bethany had chosen a copper roof: to keep us out. The impact reminded me of the “blocked” areas of Evernight, except that in this case, the entire place was shut off to me.

Well, if I couldn’t follow Lucas inside, I could try the same thing I’d done back when I was a student—eavesdrop.

I curled into a soft cloud at the edge of one window, where the branches of the nearest elm almost scraped the glass and would disguise me in their shadows. This gave me a view of Mrs. Bethany’s desk—so neat and tidy that everything was at right angles, with only a framed nineteenth-century gentleman’s silhouette as decoration. As I watched, she strode into the room, as much in command as ever. Lucas followed her, shoulders tense and gaze wary, the look he wore when he expected a fight.

“There is one question we must address before any other, Mr. Ross,” Mrs. Bethany said as she took a seat behind her desk. “Where is Bianca Olivier?”

Startled, I jumped, and the leaves around me rustled. She glanced my way for only a second; no doubt she thought I was merely the wind.

Lucas sat heavily in the chair opposite her, gripping the arm-rests hard. “Bianca’s dead.”

Mrs. Bethany said nothing. Her dark eyes remained fixed on him in a silent demand for the whole truth.

He continued, “About six weeks ago, her health just . . . failed. She didn’t want food. Didn’t want blood. I tried taking her to the doctor, but she’d started to, well, to change, so they didn’t know what to make of her anymore.”

“It must have been clear to you what needed to be done.”

Slowly, Lucas nodded. “Bianca needed to turn into a vampire to stay alive. I asked her to kill me. I would’ve let her turn me into a vampire, to save herself. But she wouldn’t do it.” His voice broke on the last word, and he turned his head away from Mrs. Bethany.

My resurrection as a ghost might have lessened Lucas’s grief, but I realized in that moment that the wounds he’d suffered when he watched me die would scar him forever.

“You could not have prevented it,” Mrs. Bethany said. She didn’t sound sympathetic, exactly, but her voice was slightly softer. “If Miss Olivier didn’t transform you into a vampire, who did?”

“That would be Charity.” Lucas’s jaw tightened. A shudder of pure hate passed through me. “We had a run-in right after Bianca died, back in Philadelphia. I don’t know why she did it.”

“With Charity More, reason rarely enters into the equation.” That was as close to a joke as I’d ever heard from Mrs. Bethany.

“I didn’t know what to do at first. It’s— I guess you know how it is, when you change. Balthazar was around, trying to deal with his sister, and he helped me out. I tried to talk to my mother, but she—she’s Black Cross.”

Mrs. Bethany straightened, her eyes flashing. “You mean that she attacked you.”

“Yeah.”

“Your own mother.” To my astonishment, I realized Mrs. Bethany was feeling righteous outrage—on Lucas’s behalf. “Indecent. Shocking. Hateful. The sort of behavior I would have expected from most members of Black Cross, to be sure, but one would think that at least a mother’s love would prove more powerful than their anti-vampire dogma.”

“Guess not,” he muttered.

Mrs. Bethany rose to her feet, walked around the desk to Lucas’s side, and put her hand on his shoulder. If his wide eyes were any indication, he was as surprised as I was. “It is unfortunate that you had to learn the error of your ways in such a painful fashion. But you should know that my sympathies are entirely with those who have suffered persecution by Black Cross. Your past as a living man, and the mistakes you made then, have now been wiped away. The sanctuary of Evernight Academy is yours. We will protect you. We will teach you. You need not be alone any longer.”

For one half second, I actually liked Mrs. Bethany.

Lucas wasn’t won over quite so easily. “Thanks. I mean that. But it’s not going to be so simple. Those guys are about ready to stake me already.”

“They’ll obey the rules.” Mrs. Bethany’s smile held a hint of chill. “Leave that to me.”

“The human students—” His voice sounded strangled. “I’ve never killed.”

“The urge is strong.” She spoke as though this were only to be expected. “In your case, perhaps, stronger than most—I see the signs. But here you will have many guardians over your conduct; I daresay you are in less danger of harming a human here than you would be in the outside world. In time, you will discover how to be a part of the vampire world. You will become one of us.”

Lucas shut his eyes for a moment, and I wondered if it was in relief or despair.

Chapter Six

LUCAS WALKED TO THE WROUGHT-IRON GAZEBO, staring after Mrs. Bethany as she went inside to give the annual welcoming speech to the student body. Finally sure that nobody else was watching, I dared to materialize at his side.

“Hey,” he said. He half turned to see me and managed to smile for my sake. “Right back where we first kissed.”

“The more things change.” As the breeze ruffled his dark gold hair and the ivy leaves around us, I could imagine that we’d gone back to the beginning. The sunlight seemed to pass through me, warming me throughout. Despite the wind, my own red hair hung long and motionless, untouched, unreal. “Why aren’t you in there?”

“Mrs. Bethany gave me an exemption this go-round. Said she’d try to find a way to explain to the vampire students and teachers to leave me the hell alone without tipping off the humans. Me walking into a pack of vampires before she gives the hands-off speech—no way am I doing that unarmed.”

“She handled it better than I would’ve thought,” I said. “I guess Mrs. Bethany takes the sanctuary thing here seriously.”

Lucas shrugged. “She claims she’s got my back, but all the same, I’m glad Ranulf sneaked our weapons up here in his trunk.”

“Why not yours?”

“If Mrs. Bethany doesn’t search mine, she’s a fool. And that lady’s no fool.”

I studied his face, reading the emotions he was trying to hide. “You’re not frightened of the vampires. You never have been. It’s being around the human students that gets to you.”

He grimaced. “I can’t look at Vic without thinking— Bianca, I would’ve killed him. Vic. One of the best friends I’ve ever had. I’d have slaughtered him just to eat.”

“Is that why you won’t be alone with him?” When he shot me a look, I added, “Yeah, I noticed.”

“No, you didn’t,” Lucas said quietly. “It’s not just me. It’s Vic, too. He finds ways to avoid being alone with me.” I could hear the pain in his voice.

I put my arms around him; maybe it wasn’t a real embrace, but I could feel him next to me and knew he’d take some comfort from it. “He’ll trust you again. It’s just going to take some time.”

“How long will it be before I trust myself?”

There was no answer to that. I said the only thing I could: “I love you.”

“And I love you. That’s why I’m going to make this work. I have to.”

* * *

Just like Lucas was learning to be a vampire for my sake, I was learning to be a ghost for his. This meant I had to get the hang of this haunting thing.

I had the basics down: going invisible, appearing in my mist form and, when I had my bracelet or my brooch, becoming solid and lifelike once more. Moving from place to place required some concentration, but it could be done.

Haunting Evernight Academy, though—that was going to be a lot tougher. I’d need to figure out where I could travel in the hallways and where I couldn’t. Leaving trails of frost around wherever I went would tip off the other students and teachers about a ghost, and while I wasn’t sure they could do anything about it but scream, I didn’t intend to find out.

It was scary, to think about the myriad ways this could go wrong. But holding back meant leaving Lucas alone, and that was something I couldn’t do.

As he walked into the school, I followed. The heavy wooden doors were simple enough to slip through, maybe because they, like me, had once been alive. Once again, I entered the Ever-night Academy great hall. Dozens of students milled around, each wearing the uniform sweater with the school crest: a shield emblazoned with two ravens on either side of a sword. To my surprise, a wave of nostalgia swept through me. Maybe I hadn’t often been happy at Evernight—but sometimes I had. This was where I’d fallen in love and made so many good friends. This was where I’d lived.

My happiness lasted only a moment, though, as I focused once more on Lucas. Nobody attacked him, or said anything to him, which had to count as a positive sign; apparently Mrs. Bethany’s speech had done the trick. But if nobody planned on killing Lucas, nobody planned on forgiving and forgetting either. Every vampire student stared at him with undisguised loathing. Lucas didn’t slow down—he wasn’t a guy to crumple because of a little glaring—but that didn’t mean he liked it.

We encouraged him to come here because we wanted him to feel comfortable being a vampire, I thought. How can that happen if everybody else rejects him?

Every time he walked past a human student, his whole body went tense; I could see it in the set of his shoulders and the lines of his face. But he determinedly didn’t look directly at them, and his steps never slowed. His resolve was as strong as his hunger, at least for now.

Lucas kept going, heading toward the north tower where the guys roomed. I stayed with him. A few flakes of ice crystallized on the windowsill nearest me, and hurriedly I floated higher, closer to the ceiling. Until I learned how to avoid creating frost, it might be better for me to stay up high, where at least nobody was likely to see it.

The crowd began murmuring, as though there were some commotion. I glanced back and saw that the students were parting—that someone was shoving them aside to get closer to Lucas. Apparently Mrs. Bethany hadn’t managed to calm everybody down.

I folded myself tightly in a corner. Lucas cocked his head, hearing the danger before he saw it, and turned to face his would-be attacker. Probably it was some younger vampire guy, only at Evernight for a few laughs, ready to turn into a killer again the first time he felt like it—like Erich, that jerk who’d stalked Raquel during our first year here. Lucas would be able to handle somebody like that easily, I knew.

But when the attacker appeared, it was somebody Lucas couldn’t handle. Somebody I couldn’t handle.

It was my mother.

Mom stood in front of him, fists at her sides, eyes wild. “Is it true? Tell me.” Her voice shook. “I want you to look me in the face and tell me it’s true.”

Lucas looked like he’d been punched in the gut. As he opened his mouth to answer, though, Balthazar pushed his way to their side and grabbed Mom’s arm. “Not here,” he said quietly.

Mom didn’t even turn her head, like she couldn’t see or hear Balthazar, but after a moment she nodded and stalked toward one of the staircases. It was like she was daring Lucas not to follow her, but he did. Balthazar started to come, too, but Mom shot him a look that froze him in place on the stairs.

She led him into a small office on the second floor. I went along, although I desperately didn’t want to hear what I knew had to come next.

As soon as he’d shut the door behind them, Mom said again, “Tell me it’s true, Lucas.”

“It’s true,” Lucas said. He looked deader than he had the night after he’d been killed. “Bianca died.”

My mother stumbled backward, like she’d been spun so hard she was dizzy. Her face crumpled into tears. “She was supposed to live forever,” she whispered. “Bianca was going to be our little girl forever.”

“Mrs. Olivier, I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry? Sorry? You convince our daughter to leave her home and her parents and forsake the immortality that’s rightfully hers—her birthright—and she dies, she’s gone forever, and the only thing you can say is sorry?”

“That’s all I can say!” Lucas shouted. “There aren’t words for this! I would’ve died for her. I tried to. I failed. I hate myself for it, and if I could take it back I would, but . . . but . . .” His voice choked on a sob. He steeled himself and managed to say, “If you want to kill me, I won’t stop you. I won’t even blame you.”

My mother shook her head. Tears streaked her face, and a few caramel-colored strands of hair stuck to her flushed cheeks. “If you hate yourself as much as you say—if you loved her a tenth as much as we loved her—then you deserve immortality. You deserve to live forever, so you can suffer forever.”

Lucas was crying, too, but he never turned his head away, steeling himself to keep meeting my mother’s eyes. It was more than I could do.

This wasn’t Lucas’s fault. It was mine.

For one second I considered appearing in the room. If Mom saw that something of me lived on, maybe she wouldn’t hurt so badly. But at that moment, I was too ashamed of having hurt her to show my face.

“This isn’t over,” Mom said. She pushed blindly past Lucas into the hallway. He slumped into the nearest chair. I wanted to take form and comfort him, but I had the feeling that seeing me as a ghost wouldn’t be that comforting for Lucas right now.

And there was something else I had to do.

I followed my mother along the corridors. She wiped at her cheeks but otherwise didn’t try to disguise the fact that she’d been sobbing. Several of the students, both vampire and human, gave her curious glances, but she didn’t seem to care.

We went up the winding stone stairs of the south tower, all the way to my family’s apartment. My father lay on the sofa, his arms wrapped around himself and his eyes dull. He didn’t look at my mother as she walked in. Dad had put on one of his old records—one I recognized, one with Henry Mancini songs that I had liked a lot when I was a child. Audrey Hepburn was singing “Moon River.”

“It’s true,” Mom said in a small voice.

“I know. I think—I think I knew a long time ago. Just didn’t want to . . .” Dad shut his eyes tightly, like he was closing out Mom and memory and the whole rest of the world.

My mother stretched on the sofa beside him, taking him into her arms. As she bowed her cheek against his dark red hair, his shoulders began to shake with heavy sobs.

I couldn’t take it anymore. No matter how ashamed I felt, no matter how hard it would be, it couldn’t be worse than hearing them suffer. It was time for me to appear to them, to reveal what had happened.

But as I gathered myself together to take form, even as I struggled to find the right words to say first, my mother choked out, “May God damn the wraiths.”

I froze.

“It’s their fault,” she continued. “What happened to her is their fault.”

Dad cuddled her closer. “I know, sweetheart. I know.”

“I hate them. I hate them all. As long as I’m on this earth, I’ll never stop hating them…” Her voice ebbed into sobs again.

They hated the wraiths, for having had a hold on me, for haunting Evernight, for merely existing. If I appeared, they wouldn’t think of me as their little girl anymore. I would just be a monster. The way Lucas had been nothing but a monster to Kate.

I’d never known how much I needed their love for me until I’d lost it.

So I didn’t appear to them. How could I? I would only have made it worse for them and for me, as impossible as it seemed that anything, ever, could be worse than that moment. Compared to this, dying had been easy. But I remained there for a long time, watching them weep. I deserved to see it.

They cried themselves to sleep, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave. For a while I drifted through my old room. Apparently most of my family’s stuff had made it through the fire, because many of my things remained there. Klimt’s The Kiss still hung on one wall, shining, ideal lovers that, in my mind, symbolized Lucas and me.

We’ll get back to that place, I thought. We’ll find a way.

I flowed through the window, not bothering about the frost, until I sat beside my old friend the gargoyle again. His stone wings were the same color as the gray autumn nightfall.

“Remember that time we talked here?”

Startled, I turned to see Maxie sitting next to me—actually a few inches off the windowsill, but once you were a ghost, gravity didn’t matter so much. She was smiling like this was the greatest day ever.

“Maxie, what are you doing here?”

“Uh, saying hello? Like the last time we met here. You figured out how to fog up the glass so I could write on it. That was when I decided maybe you weren’t terminally stupid.”

I’d fogged the glass with my breath—a trick I’d never be able to perform again. “Don’t take this personally, but honestly, I can’t do the banter thing right now.”

“Stop sulking, living dead girl.”

“Maxie. No.” I couldn’t feel good about being a wraith, about being dead, after seeing what my death had done to my parents.

“You’re not alone, you know.” Maxie tried to make it sound casual, but I knew she was reaching out as best she could. After decades of being isolated from the living world, except for visits from Vic, she wasn’t very good at the social-interaction thing. “You don’t have to be afraid of us.”

But I was. Going to “talk to Christopher” sounded the same as accepting my death, and at that moment, I couldn’t. “Not tonight, okay?”

She hesitated, clearly disappointed, but then she vanished.

After a second, I realized that Maxie was right about one thing: It was time for me to quit brooding and go to Lucas. By now, perhaps, he’d be ready to see me again, ghost or not.

The easiest way down proved to be sort of melting along the tower wall, feeling the stones ripple past me. As soon as I reached the new roof, I could feel that it was far more resistant to ghosts than before, but I could go in through the front door or most of the windows. I darted in and out, finding my way, memorizing paths in case I needed to use them later.

Occasionally I felt a small ripple of energy behind me, or in an opposite corner, and figured Maxie was trailing along after me. But then I realized that it wasn’t her.

It—they—were other ghosts.

Christopher? I thought, with a shiver of fear. He was the only other wraith I’d encountered at Evernight. But his was a powerful, unmistakable presence, one I didn’t detect here. And there were several of them: two, three, five, ten, maybe more. They were just slivers of fog, zephyrs of sensation, probably invisible to anyone who wasn’t a ghost, too. It reminded me of when I’d been a vampire, the way I’d started to be able to just sense when another vampire was nearby, whether or not I ever saw them. I wasn’t exactly seeing these ghosts—more the trails they left behind—but I knew they were there.

Mrs. Bethany’s plan to draw them here through the human students had obviously worked.

We always wanted to know why she was hunting the wraiths, I thought. I guess soon we’ll find out.

I rose through the north tower, searching as I went. Mostly I saw a lot of vampire guys hanging out in their rooms, chugging blood, and bragging about how much sex they’d had during summer vacation, and a few other rooms with human guys who were hanging out, eating potato chips, and bragging—less credibly—about the sex they’d had during summer vacation. If I’d had a body, I would’ve rolled my eyes.

Then I reached a room where the two inhabitants sat on opposite sides of a chess board, and I smiled.

“That pawn is now a queen, baby,” Vic said. “Booya.”

“Your soul is as devious as your stratagems.” Ranulf frowned as he considered what to do next.

I unfolded, willing myself into a visible form. Both Vic and Ranulf jumped, but then they each smiled. “Hey, ghostly lady.” Vic rose from his chair, like an old-fashioned gentleman. “How’s it going?”

“Not so hot,” I admitted. “How are you guys?”

“We compete now for the desirable bunk farther from the windows, which will be less drafty in winter,” Ranulf said. “Later, Vic’s iPad will be used to watch a film of the winner’s choosing. Much is at stake.”

“In other words, it’s all good.” Vic paused. “At least, in this room. On the sixth floor, you’re gonna find two guys who are having a suckier time of it.”

“So Mrs. Bethany let them room together?” Balthazar had said he would suggest it, and given the attitudes of the other vampires toward Lucas, it made sense for Mrs. Bethany to agree. But I felt better knowing for sure. “Well, that’s something, anyway.”

Vic was uncharacteristically quiet for a couple seconds. He avoided my eyes, instead studying the kitschy old Elvis Presley movie poster that he’d tacked onto his wall. Then he said, “I should’ve volunteered. To room with Lucas, I mean. He needs his friends with him—I know that—but I just—”

“No, Vic, it’s okay. Lucas should be with Balthazar, because he’s going to have a lot of questions that only a more experienced vampire could handle.” There were other reasons Vic didn’t need to room with Lucas right now, but reminding him of them wouldn’t do anybody any good.

“That’s not what I meant. I want Lucas to know I believe in him. You know?”

“I know. But . . . give it time. Don’t rush it.”

Vic nodded and said nothing else. The moment was threatening to become awkward when Ranulf triumphantly slid his queen across several squares. “I believe the superior bunk will be mine.”

“Oh, man.” Vic made a face, and I had to smile despite myself. Waving good-bye, I dematerialized again and went farther up, to the sixth floor. After searching through a few rooms, I found Lucas and Balthazar. They were already asleep.

No wonder they’d already gone to bed—this day had to have been exhausting and traumatic for both of them. I didn’t think they’d unpacked. Lucas’s half of the room was as spartan as ever, and Balthazar appeared to have stopped moving in as soon as he laid a pack of cigarettes and a lighter on the window-sill. Balthazar, almost too broad and tall to fit in his bunk, was curled in facing the wall. Ever the fighter, Lucas slept on his back, large, scarred hands above the covers, the better to grab a weapon within moments if necessary. The only time he’d ever deviated from that was when he held me throughout the night.

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