Erin laughed, and I shuddered.
“What do I want?” she repeated. “Nothing more than I’ve got right here, baby,” she said, slapping her thighs. “It’s a little beat up, sure, but nothing I can’t work around.” She sounded delighted. “I’m going to live it up.” She winked at me like this was all no big deal. Like she hadn’t potentially sentenced Alona to a more permanent form of death. “Now, are we going to get burgers or what?” she demanded.
I drove on autopilot, steering the car toward Krekel’s, Alona’s favorite burger place, and thinking furiously. I needed a plan. One thing was for sure: I couldn’t let her out into the world like this. God only knew what Erin would get up to if left to her own devices, and she was, for all intents and purposes, Lily. Around here, someone would eventually recognize her, and that would be bad. Not to mention her parents, who would be worried sick about her. And what if Alona wasn’t gone and she needed Lily’s body back? The Order had said the two of them had become dependent on each other. Lily seemed to be doing okay with Erin in Alona’s place, but Alona didn’t have that same option.
Locking Erin up, at least until I had a better grasp of the situation, seemed to be the only logical solution, as much as I hated the idea. But where? Maybe Edmund/Malachi would have an idea.
I looked over at Erin, her arm on the rest between us. She was weakened by her transition into Lily’s body; I could probably drag her along pretty easily. But some of what I was thinking must have shown on my face.
“Oh, no.” She snatched her arm back and scooted away from me. “I’ve already wasted too many years watching and not living. You’re not going to do that to me again. You try to lock me up somewhere and I’ll scream until someone calls the cops.” Her chin jutted out in determination, pushing aside any doubts I might have had that she would do less than she claimed. And the Turners, when they got wind of it, as they surely would, would probably press charges against me, thus eliminating any chance I had of fixing this mess.
“In fact,” she said, “I think you can let me out here.” She nodded at the red stoplight we were approaching.
“Here?” I asked, incredulous. “We’re not even close to anything, and she can’t…you can’t walk—”
“We’ll manage,” she said, already tugging at her seat belt.
“Erin, wait,” I said, fighting desperation. “What about Edmund? I know he’ll want to see you and—”
“Right,” she scoffed. “Like I’m going to waste any of my time on him.”
“He’s your brother,” I argued.
“Fat lot of good that did either of us,” she muttered. She yanked at the handle and shoved the door open as soon as we reached a stop.
I lurched across the car to grab her, but she slipped away. Then she surprised me, ducking her head back in and mashing her mouth against mine in a rough parody of a kiss.
I jerked back, hard enough that my elbow banged into the steering wheel.
“I would have expected better from you,” she said in mock disappointment before slamming the door shut.
The light turned green, and someone behind me honked and held it, loud and obnoxious. But I refused to move. “Get back in the car, Erin,” I shouted. I felt my face burning, imagining what this must look like to the other drivers. No, I’m not some jerk threatening his girlfriend. I’m trying to keep a ghost from kidnapping a body that doesn’t belong to her.
“Stalking is illegal, Will,” she warned loudly, her voice muffled through the closed door but clear to anyone who had their windows rolled down. Her gaze darted to the cars behind me, a tiny smirk playing on her lips as someone else added his horn to the mix.
“Erin!” I shouted again, as a truck from somewhere behind me whipped into the turn lane and zoomed around me. A squad car coming from the other direction slowed down, the officer staring at me through his window.
Shit.“Get back in the car. Please!” I tried one more time.
Watching me through narrowed eyes, Erin took a deep breath and started to scream.
Out of choices, and expecting the sound of sirens any second, I straightened up behind the wheel and hit the gas.
Hating myself and Erin, I watched her become a smaller and smaller figure in the rearview mirror, like I might never see her again, and feeling half relieved and half freaked at the idea.
I doubled back around the block as soon as I could, but the neighborhood had streets that curved oddly, and unexpected culs-de-sac.
By the time I got back to the intersection, she was gone, of course. Either she was hiding somewhere, or she’d hitched a ride with a stranger.
God, she was going to end up dead in a ditch somewhere, and it would be all my fault.
The light was red (again), and while waiting for it to change, I rested my head on the steering wheel, wishing for things to be different, wishing for Alona, wishing I could go back to the days when my biggest problems were Principal Brewster and getting through class without any ghosts noticing me. That had been a vacation compared to all of this. A really, really sucky vacation, but a vacation, nonetheless. I didn’t need Alona to tell me I was in over my head with this body and soul stuff and sinking fast. But I wanted her here, more than anything.
I shook my head. I had to get her back. I had an idea about how to do that, thanks to something Erin had said. But just one. And if it didn’t work…
I clenched the wheel. No, it hadto work. That was all there was to it. Because I didn’t know how to live with any other outcome. And if it didn’t work, Alona wouldn’t live at all.
I broke speed limits retracing familiar streets and flying past landmarks on my way toward Groundsboro High.
This was my one and only brilliant idea: if Alona was still my guide, as Erin had said, and she was back in spirit form, I might be able to “call” her to me. Theoretically, I could call her from anywhere, but the dead who meet their ends violently/unnaturally are always drawn to the places of their death. Calling her from that location might provide enough added pull to drag her back from wherever she’d vanished. It might have even been better to try it at the time of her death, but there was no way I could make myself wait almost a whole day for 7:03 a.m. to roll around again.
Despite my best efforts to focus on the positive, my mind created images of me sitting on the curb next to the spot of pavement where she’d died and calling her…only to have nothing happen.
I shook my head, pushing that thought away. No, she was strong. She had to be okay. She’d survived this long. She’d been sent back from the light, for God’s sake. That couldn’t have happened only for things to end this way. That couldn’t be right. It didn’t make sense.
A tiny voice in my head reminded me that in addition to being unfair, life could also be nonsensical. Messed up. Like my dad killing himself without first giving us the slightest hint that that day would be different than any other. In some ways, I’d thought it would have been better if he’d tried to warn us, even if we’d missed it initially. Then at least maybe it would have seemed more logical. Or maybe it would have simply made my mom and me feel worse for not understanding what he was trying to say.
Either way, one day he was just gone. So quickly it seemed like the air should have rushed in to fill the vacuum where he’d once stood, brushed his teeth, slept.…
I couldn’t lose somebody else like that, without even the chance to say good-bye. Not again. Not her.
“Come on, Alona, don’t do this to me, please,” I muttered, and then stopped, clamping my mouth shut in the fear that those words somehow counted as a call.