Kady Cross - Sisters Of Salt And Iron

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.”