Kady Cross - Sisters Of Salt And Iron

“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.”

WREN

There really wasn’t any reason for me to stay at the dance once Daria moved on, but I knew it bothered Lark sometimes when I manifested, and that had been happening a fair bit lately. I couldn’t help it—Halloween was coming, and my ties to the world of the living were already abnormally strong. I knew Lark was having a difficult time with the number of ghosts she had to deal with, but I don’t think she realized how hard it was for me to try to remain hidden when All Hallows’ Eve demanded I come out and show myself.

Anyway, I stayed at the dance so that Lark and I could have a little fun together—not that she paid that much attention to me. She had her boyfriend, Ben. And now that she had real, loyal friends, she didn’t need me so much. I was happy for her, and I knew I could hang out with her group anytime I wanted. But being in a room with people who couldn’t see or hear you seemed more like punishment than fun.

I danced a little with Lark and our friends—she insisted they were mine, too—to a few faster songs. Even though Lark and Kevin—who I was trying to avoid—were the only ones who could actually see me, I still enjoyed myself—laughing as they took silly selfies and made what Sarah called “duck lips.”

“Oh, my God,” Roxi said, as she looked at the screen of her phone. “There’s Wren!”

Everyone crowded around to look. I drifted between Sarah and Kevin, knowing they’d feel the chill of my presence. Kevin looked right at me. I ignored him. He’d hurt my feelings and proven that he wasn’t the person I thought he was. I was having a hard time forgiving him for it.

“That’s so weird,” Gage, Roxi’s boyfriend, remarked. “She looks so real.”

I glanced at him at the same time Lark said, “She is real.”

He rolled his dark eyes. “Realer, then.”

Roxi kissed his cheek. “I think you mean tangible.”

Gage shrugged. “Whatever. It’s just cool to see her, that’s all.”

Everyone else agreed, and I smiled. Lark smiled, too.

But then everyone broke into couples for the slow dance, and Kevin looked at me. “It is good to see you,” he said. No one else would ever hear him above the music, his voice was so low, but I could hear it, and he knew it. It took all my strength not to stick my tongue out at him—or rip his eyes out.

I left instead. I couldn’t trust myself to be around him, not when that dark and angry part of myself was so close to the surface. I might hurt him, and I didn’t want to do that, no matter how much he’d hurt me.

I let myself drift through town, wandering aimlessly along the dark streets. My kind were everywhere—strolling along the sidewalks, peeking in windows, sitting on benches. Tomorrow there would be even more of them as even the weaker ones gathered strength.

Halloween was still days away, but that time of year has always been hard for me. This year it seemed even rougher. The veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead grows thinner as the calendar counts down to the end of October. It’s our holiday—when we can cross between dimensions and interact with the living if we wish. We can be our true selves. Those who have become violent or despondent remember who they were, and decide if they want to try moving on, or give themselves over to the darkness.

A lot give up, but there are an equal number who move on.

But not me. I stayed exactly where I was. I don’t think I had a choice.

Halloween’s approach had to be hard on Kevin, as well. He was a medium, and his abilities had only gotten stronger since our encounter with the ghost of madman Josiah Bent at Haven Crest Hospital.

I liked Kevin, and I thought he liked me, but then he told me we shouldn’t spend so much time together since we could never really have a relationship. Then I caught him kissing Sarah—Mace’s girlfriend. Mace, his best friend. That had stung, but the disappointment I’d felt was worse.

I kept drifting. The town of New Devon wasn’t very big, and there wasn’t much more for a ghost to do there than there was for a living sixteen-year-old. I didn’t feel like going home, but I wasn’t going back to that dance.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to find myself at Haven Crest. The abandoned asylum was incredibly haunted from years of treating those who were considered insane or were locked up by their families. The graveyard on the property contained hundreds of cremated remains—and those were just the ones the families hadn’t claimed.

Haven Crest was full of, as Lark would put it, her people. Though, unlike Lark, most of the residents really were insane. If they hadn’t been when they went in, they had been by the time they died. It made for a lot of spectral energy in one spot, and like any ghost, I was drawn to it, because no one lived at Haven Crest anymore—they were all ghosts, and that made them my people.

I stood on the lawn facing the main building—a large, redbrick building with a wing on either side of the central block and a large white domed-roof tower. It had staging and construction materials piled up in front of it. The town was in the process of reclaiming as much land and buildings as they could, turning them into offices and public spaces.

Because what could possibly go wrong when disturbing the ghosts of more than a century’s worth of mental patients?

On the light post near my head someone had recently stapled a poster: One Night Only—Dead Babies!

I frowned. Why would anyone in their right minds want to see deceased infants? In my experience that kind of thing was very disturbing to the living. As a ghost, a baby was just another ghost. I hadn’t seen one myself—they tended to move on quickly.

Oh. Wait. Dead Babies. Yes, this was a musical band that Lark enjoyed listening to. I remembered dancing around our bedroom one night pretending to play a guitar while she sang into a hairbrush. I smiled at the memory. We didn’t do things like that anymore. Lark was always with Ben, or there were other people around. The times we were alone were rare and usually when she had homework to do, or needed to sleep. I would never actually say it to Lark, but sometimes I wished we could go back to a time when she didn’t have friends, and people stayed away because they thought she was crazy.

Dead Babies was going to be holding a concert here at Haven Crest on Halloween night. I’d heard Lark and Ben talk about a concert that Lark proclaimed was “a farking bad idea.” This had to be it. All that music and energy at a place like Haven Crest? The dead wouldn’t be able to resist, and there would be so many living to interact with—who wouldn’t think anything of a peculiarly dressed stranger dancing next to them. It would be Halloween, after all.

I would have to attend this concert. It might be fun. Or dangerous. If I was lucky, maybe both. All those warm, breathing bodies, ripe with fear, practically begging to be terrified. Delicious.

“Hello.”

I didn’t jump. It’s a well-known fact that ghosts don’t scare easily. I turned my head. Standing there beneath the lamp across the drive from me was a boy who looked to be a little older than I was. From the way he was dressed, I’d say he was actually a century older than I was. Young men didn’t wear suits much anymore, especially not jackets with tails.