Loe raamatut: «Sisters Of Salt And Iron»

LARK

Ghosts are such douche bags.

My sister, Wren, was the exception to this rule, but other than her I’d never met a ghost that wasn’t a colossal pain in the ass. And this one was starting to seriously piss me off.

I hit the wall of the girls’ locker room hard, my head cracking the plaster. Fortunately, I had a hard head, and a high tolerance for wraith-inflicted pain. I dropped to the floor on my feet, and came at her swinging as the DJ in the gym played a bass-thumping dance song that shook my joints. My fist connected with her face hard enough to knock her off her feet—which was funny, because it wasn’t as though her boots actually touched the floor.

Truth be told, I wasn’t much for school dances, and I wasn’t a huge fan of Halloween, given that it was the one time of the year that the worlds of the dead and living merged. The veil weakened in the spring as well, but human celebrations and lore had given All Hallows’ Eve even more strength. Still, I would rather be dancing with my friends than getting the snot beat out of me by an angry grunge girl who had been dead longer than I’d been alive.

I was covered in salt dust, ghost-juice and plaster, and bleeding from a cut above my eye where she’d rammed me headfirst into a locker. I was dressed like Harley Quinn from Batman, so it only added to the costume.

“Listen, Courtney Love, you can’t be here. Why don’t you just move on? Whatever’s waiting for you has to be better than this.”

Really, who haunted a high school Halloween dance? No, wait—who haunted a high school at all? Seriously, you had to have lived a pretty lame life if the place that held the most pull for your spirit was Samuel Clemens High.

The ghost—her name was Daria Wilson, and she’d died when she crashed her car into a tree after the Halloween dance in ’91—rose up. “Says who?” she demanded. “You?”

I smiled, trying to ignore that I could see her brain glistening through the crater in her skull. Her hair was almost as white as mine beneath the blood and gore, but mine was natural. “That’s right.”

She glared at me, her eyes nothing but bottomless black pits. She opened her mouth, unhinging her jaw a good twelve inches. In the dank, yawning cavern of her mouth, her teeth were jagged razors, and her tongue rippled and writhed like a worm. She roared.

The scream of a vengeful spirit was like having your eardrums punctured while being tossed around in a tornado of rot. Her rancid breath burned my skin, and I could feel something warm and wet trickle from my left ear. My nose, too. I staggered forward as my left knee began to buckle.

She was not going to take me down.

The scream stopped abruptly. I almost fell down anyway from the release of it. I grabbed at the wall to steady myself.

“You can’t make me go, bitch,” she snarled, moving toward me. “If you could, you would have already.”

I lifted my gaze, swiping my hand under my nose to wipe the blood away. “I’m working on it, skank.”

Where the hell was my sister? Wren and our friends had gone off in search of the item that was so important it kept Daria here rather than where she was supposed to be.

Don’t ask me where we go when we’re dead. I’d only died once, and I didn’t get any farther than the halfway mark between this world and the next before getting pulled back. But I knew how to banish ghosts from this plane, and that was good enough for me.

Daria grabbed me by the throat, her fingers like steel clamps. I wheezed for air as my toes left the chipped tile floor. She lifted me like she wanted to hold me up to the light and get a better look.

I seized her wrist with my left hand, holding myself up to ease the strain on my neck. Then, I shoved my right hand into the hole in her head. Wet tissue and sharp bone filled my palm as I closed my fingers into a fist.

Daria cried out.

I fell to the floor, this time landing on my knees. Hard. I was too busy sucking in air to cry or even swear.

My hand burned, ectoplasm sizzling as it met the salt residue on my skin. Ghosts didn’t like salt.

My phone made a noise—like a groan. I took it out of my boot and risked taking a look while Daria was keening in the corner. The text screen came up. It was from Wren—we’d been working on her communicating through electronics since we couldn’t actually project words at each other.

On my weight. I hoped that was a typo. I shoved the phone back into my boot.

If my knees had been capable of sound, they would have sobbed as I pushed myself to my feet. I limped to the sink and turned on the faucet, shoving my hand into the cold water. The pain rinsed away with the salt—thank God.

Something grabbed at the back of my neck. I looked up into the mirror and saw Daria behind me. I twisted, just in time to avoid having my head smashed into the glass, and threw a wide punch into the side of her head—the gooey side again.

She stumbled back, giving me room to come at her again. This time, I hit her as hard and fast as I could before drawing back and landing a solid kick to her chest that sent her crashing into the same wall she’d knocked me into just minutes before.

She recovered quickly, shaking it off. When she stared at me, her blacked-out eyes sparked with rage. She looked murderous.

And scared. I got that a lot from ghosts. Ones that had been around for a while usually figured out how to mess with humans in one way or another, but they were always surprised to meet one who could mess back. I didn’t know why I could do these things, no more than I understood why I could interact with my dead twin. It didn’t matter—I could.

The parts of Daria’s bleached hair that weren’t matted with blood started to lift off her shoulders—like the static electricity experiment I’d done as a kid by rubbing a balloon against my head. I’d been lucky up until now—she was just having fun. If she manifested, I was going to be in trouble.

Ghosts in their natural form were one thing—I could interact with them, and we were on fairly even footing, but when they gathered enough power to take form in the real world—to gather mass—that’s when things got serious. I would still be able to fight her, but I was going to get hurt, and the locker room was going to take some damage—not to mention what might happen to all the people out in the gym if Daria decided to get her party on.

The hair on my arms lifted. The back of my neck tingled. Oh, hell. This wasn’t good.

I punched her in the face. A little reminder—to both of us—that I was the one in charge. Unfortunately, my heart didn’t get the message. Damn thing hammered against my ribs like it was trying to get out.

Daria lifted her hand to her nose. I’d drawn blood, a little payback for the coppery taste in the back of my throat.

“What are you?” she demanded. Surprise laced her raspy voice. She probably hadn’t felt pain since the night she died.

“I’m Lark Noble,” I informed her as I hit her again. It was the best explanation I had.

I’d knocked her jaw off center. She pushed it back into place as her eyes—still filled with wisps of black—widened. “Sister of the Dead Born?”

Okay, so I hadn’t been expecting that. “I think of her as my sister—I came out first.”

She stared at me. “The Living-dead.”

“Uh, no. Just living, thanks.”

She drifted closer. The smell of her filled my nose and throat, coating them like oil. “You shared a womb with death. You died, but you live.”

I wasn’t comfortable discussing my suicide attempt with a stranger. “I shared a womb with my sister, not death.”

She smiled. I’d seen a similar expression on Wren’s face before. It usually meant something really, really bad was about to happen. “I wonder what would happen if I ripped your throat out?”

“You want to kill me?” I challenged. I was afraid, but not like I should have been. Death wasn’t scary. The act of dying was, but if you were lucky, that didn’t take too long. “Go for it. I could hang out here for eternity. With you.”

Obviously she didn’t like the idea of a roommate, judging from the way she screwed up her face. Her hair fanned out from her face as she drew back. I could see the spot where the vertebrae in her neck had splintered and shattered. One of her shoulders hung lower than the other, limp and disjointed.

“There won’t be enough of you left to haunt anything.” Her voice had deepened, the words coming to me on air that had dropped several degrees. My nose was cold, and my fingertips tingled. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the mirror on the wall frost over.

I stepped to the right, keeping my eye on Daria as she grew as dark and ominous as a thunder cloud. That gaping crater in her head glistened with black ooze—the same black that filled her eyes. I reached into the shower stall nearest me and felt along the wall until I found what I wanted.

It was a wrought-iron rod. Nothing too fancy, though it had a bit of a twisting pattern along its length. My boyfriend Ben had given it to me a while ago, and it was still my favorite ghost-beatin’ stick.

Normally I avoided salt and iron because of Wren—all ghosts have a sort of allergic reaction to both. Maybe because they were of the earth, where the dead were generally buried? I didn’t know. Didn’t care.

I stood facing the ghost, the iron rod in my hand. This was normally the time I’d make some kind of snarky or smart-ass remark. To be honest, I was biting my tongue. I wasn’t supposed to bait her—just keep her busy and distracted.

She was going to pop any second. Then I was going to have to fight her and hope that everyone at the dance continued on in blissful ignorance. I’d been warned when I came back to school after my time in Bell Hill Psychiatric Hospital that I was only there because of my grandmother, and that I’d better not make trouble.

Wrecking the girls’ locker room counted as “trouble.” The ghost didn’t matter. It never did. People always found a way to explain the supernatural, and in my experience the favorite explanation was that I was a troublemaking, attention-starved emotionally unstable delinquent.

Which, actually, wasn’t too far from the truth.

I glanced in the direction of the door. The line of salt I’d poured a few feet away from it was still whole, as were the lines in front of the opaque windows. They weren’t infallible—Daria could possibly create enough energy to break the lines, and then she could get out—but for now it was just me and a drunk ghost.

C’mon, Wren.

Then I sensed it—the subtle shift that might have been just in my head but felt like it was outside of me. My sister was there, and everything clicked into its rightful place.

“About freaking time,” I told her.

“The others are coming,” she replied, coming to stand beside me. Wren and I were identical except for two things—my superior fashion sense, and the fact that my hair was almost snow-white while hers was a comic-book shade of red.

She had her hair in pigtails and was wearing a blood-soaked pinafore and blouse, tights and Mary Janes. She looked like a demented rag doll.

Daria looked impressed—or as impressed as someone with only part of a head and drunk out of her mind could look. “Dead Born.”

My sister frowned at her. “I don’t like that name.”

The two of them watched each other with the same amount of hostile wariness. Wren’s anger wavered around her like heat off pavement. She wasn’t immune to the approach of Halloween either, and that made me wonder, just what the hell did I intend to do if both of them manifested?

“Did you find what’s keeping her here?” I asked.

Wren glanced at me. “Yes, but it’s not what I expected.”

Daria chose that moment—when Wren’s attention was distracted—to attack. She hit my sister square in the chest. Wren barely moved. Daria’s surprise would have been funny in any other situation.

“You are so stupid,” I said. Now she’d gone and pissed off Wren. If I made it out of the locker room unsuspended and alive, it was going to be a miracle.

My sister is usually a gentle soul, but she’s a ghost and ghosts have notoriously short fuses. Wren’s eyes had already gone black, and I could feel her spectral energy reverberating in my bones along with the new song playing in the gym.

I put my hand on her arm. “Don’t.”

Her head whipped around. My heart jumped into my throat. There was nothing so terrifying as Death wearing your face. I held her gaze and her arm, watching as the darkness slowly left her eyes.

The door to the locker room opened—the music from the dance increased in volume for a few seconds, then faded back to its muted thumping.

Three familiar faces came into view—my friends, Roxi and Sarah. Well, I wasn’t completely sure if Sarah was a friend or not, but whatever. They had the history teacher, Mr. Fisher, with them.

Fan-freaking-tastic. Busted.

“That’s why she’s still here,” Wren whispered.

“Him?” I looked at Mr. Fisher. He wasn’t a bad-looking guy. Fairly young.

She nodded.

Mr. Fisher turned to me. “Who are you talking to?”

“Her.” I pointed at Roxi. “Did you tell him?”

Roxi’s big brown eyes widened. “That he was needed in the girls’ locker room.”

“That’s it?” I demanded. She nodded. Great.

“What’s going on here?” Mr. Fisher demanded.

Daria stood up and walked toward him with a stupefied look on her face. “Danny?”

“Your name’s Daniel, right?” I asked.

He nodded. “One of you girls had better tell me what’s going on. Why did you bring me here?”

“You wouldn’t happen to know a girl named Daria, would you? Smashed into a tree a few years back on the night of the Halloween dance?”

He went white. “What do you know about Daria?”

I could try to lie—make it sound less crazy than what it was—but I was pissed off at having to be doing this instead of having fun with my friends. “You believe in ghosts, Mr. F.?”

He looked at me—saw the salt dust on my clothes—and the lines of salt on the floor. He looked at Roxi and Sarah, both of whom shrugged. A lot of help they were.

“He’s gotten so old,” Daria remarked, walking around him.

Mr. Fisher shuddered. “It’s cold in here,” he said. “You girls are in a lot of trouble.”

I glanced at the ghost. The way she looked at him froze my blood. She reached out and tapped him on the shoulder. Frowning, he turned around.

Daria shoved her hand into his chest.

He looked so surprised. He looked down at his chest, then up again. “Dee?” His voice was little more than a gasp.

“You’re the reason I’m dead,” she snarled. “It’s all your fault.”

She was so close to taking form I was terrified I was going to end up with a dead teacher to explain. Never mind suspension; they’d lock me up and throw away the key.

There was no doubt that Mr. Fisher could hear her. “I tried to stop you,” he protested, as his dead girlfriend held his heart in her icy fingers. “You ran away.”

Daria actually growled. “Because I found you screwing my best friend!”

“Wren?” I glanced at my sister. “Little help?” This was going to hell fast.

Daria turned her attention to me. “This is between me and him. One step and I’ll crush his heart.”

“Isn’t that what you plan to do regardless?” I asked.

She smiled. “Yeah, but if you make me do it quickly I won’t enjoy it as much.” The smile faded, morphing into something that was going to wake me up at night for weeks to come. “Now, back off, bitch.”

Everything happened in a blink. One moment my sister was beside me, and the next she was on Daria, shoving the teacher aside as she threw herself onto the other ghost.

Sarah gasped. Roxi stared. Mr. Fisher made a small mewling sound in the back of his throat as he sank to the floor, clutching his chest. I ran to him.

“What do you have of hers?” I demanded. When he gave me a blank look, I added, “Of Daria’s!” Who else could I possibly mean?

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a key ring. There was an aged brass D hanging from it. D for Daria, not Daniel.

I fumbled with the keys, trying to pull the large letter off the ring. Freaking hell! Who invented key rings, anyway? Couldn’t they have thought of a more user-friendly setup?

Wren and Daria smashed into the row of shower stalls, buckling the metal frames.

Finally, the letter came free. I pulled a plastic baggy partially filled with salt from my pocket and opened the seal, dropping the letter charm inside.

A few sparks, but other than that, nothing. Shit. If it wasn’t the letter anchoring Daria to the world of the living, then what was it?

Anger. Vengeance. I didn’t know how to break that, and Mr. Fisher wasn’t going to fit into a sandwich bag of salt. If I didn’t do something fast, Daria and my sister were going to wreck the locker room.

Mr. Fisher, Roxi and Sarah were on the floor near the wall of lockers, huddled together. They looked terrified, and I didn’t blame them. I dropped to my knees in front of them as Daria flew toward me, crashing into the lockers above my head.

“Get out,” I ordered. “Get out now!”

I didn’t have to tell them twice. They scrabbled across the floor, keeping low until it was safe to stagger to their feet and run for the door. Mr. Fisher paused and looked back at me.

“Dee, no!” he shouted.

My brain froze, but my body didn’t. I dropped to the floor, twisting so that I landed on my back. Daria leaped onto me like a cat on a mouse, all darkness and stink and sharp teeth.

“Hold her!” I cried.

Wren seized her, fingers like talons as they restrained Daria’s arms. I tried not to look at her. I didn’t want to see my sister looking like something out of a horror movie. I ripped open the bag of salt and shoved my hand inside, scooping up the sharp grains and the charm. I looked up into the ghost’s fathomless eyes; there was no shred of humanity left.

“Do it,” my sister growled. Her voice was like the drag of a shovel across a gravestone, and it was all the encouragement I needed to end this shit storm fast.

I bolted upright, slamming my fist into the gaping side of Daria’s skull, burrowing my hand deep into the ectoplasm of her brain. I gagged.

It’s not really her brain. She’s dead. A ghost—she has no brain, not physically. Telling myself that was the only thing that got me to open my fingers and release the salt and charm inside her. She reared up, screaming.

I fell back on the floor, hands over my ears. It felt like my head was going to explode. I gasped for breath as tears streamed down my cheeks.

And then, it was quiet. No other sound but the muffled music from the dance, reverberating through the floor.

Daria was gone, and my sister sat beside me, her back to me, legs splayed and shoulders slumped.

“Wren?” My voice sounded small.

She held up her hand—it still looked like claws. I knew not to say another word. Instead, I sat up and took that hand in my own. Once we made contact it didn’t take long for it to morph back into its usual state. I didn’t understand my effect on my sister any more than I understood any part of our existence, but it didn’t matter. I was the one thing that could bring her back from a manifestation.

“You okay?” I asked.

She nodded. “Yes. You?”

“I’m covered in salt and ghost-goo, but, yeah, I’m okay.” I was sore, but that would be gone by morning—another side effect of this whacked-out life.

“This room’s a mess.”

I glanced around at the damage. It was too much for me to undo. “We need to get out of here. Is she gone?”

Wren nodded. “She’s gone. How did that even work?”

I shrugged. “Don’t know. Don’t care.”

“We need to start figuring these things out.”

“Yeah, but not tonight.” I pushed myself to my feet. She followed—much more gracefully, of course. “There’s one thing we need to do before we go home.”

“What’s that?”

I grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the door. “Let’s dance.”