Kady Cross - Sisters Of Salt And Iron

Lark Noble is finally happy. She’s trying to move on and put the events of the past behind her: the people who avoided her because she talked to the ghost of her dead twin sister, the parents who couldn’t be around her anymore and even the attempt she made on her own life. She finally has friends—people who know her secrets and still care about her—and she has Ben, the cute guy she never saw coming.

Wren Noble is lonely. Unable to interact with the living, she wants to be happy for her sister’s newfound happiness, but she feels like she’s losing her. It doesn’t help that Kevin, the very not-dead guy she was starting to fall for, seems to be moving on.

Then Wren meets Noah, the spirit of a young man who died a century ago. Noah is cute, he’s charming and he makes Wren feel something she’s never felt before. But Noah has a dark influence on Wren, and Lark’s distrust of him drives the sisters apart for the first time in their lives. As Halloween approaches and the veil between the worlds thins, bringing the dead closer to the world of the living, Lark must find a way to stop whatever deadly act Noah is planning, even if it means going through her sister to do so.

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This book is for Kenzie and Zoe.

I hope you grow up to be best friends as well as sisters.

And for Steve, because I couldn’t do this without you.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text Lark Noble is finally happy. She’s trying to move on and put the events of the past behind her: the people who avoided her because she talked to the ghost of her dead twin sister, the parents who couldn’t be around her anymore and even the attempt she made on her own life. She finally has friends—people who know her secrets and still care about her—and she has Ben, the cute guy she never saw coming. Wren Noble is lonely. Unable to interact with the living, she wants to be happy for her sister’s newfound happiness, but she feels like she’s losing her. It doesn’t help that Kevin, the very not-dead guy she was starting to fall for, seems to be moving on. Then Wren meets Noah, the spirit of a young man who died a century ago. Noah is cute, he’s charming and he makes Wren feel something she’s never felt before. But Noah has a dark influence on Wren, and Lark’s distrust of him drives the sisters apart for the first time in their lives. As Halloween approaches and the veil between the worlds thins, bringing the dead closer to the world of the living, Lark must find a way to stop whatever deadly act Noah is planning, even if it means going through her sister to do so.

Title Page Sisters of Salt and Iron Kady Cross www.miraink.co.uk

Dedication This book is for Kenzie and Zoe. I hope you grow up to be best friends as well as sisters. And for Steve, because I couldn’t do this without you.

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Copyright

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.