Meg Cabot - Shadowland

I jumped down into the parking lot. It was kind of funny how, outside the thick adobe walls of the Mission, you couldn't tell at all that there was a severe paranormal disturbance going on inside. The parking lot was still empty, and still quiet, except for the gentle, rhythmic sound of ocean waves. It's just amazing what can be going on beneath people's noses, and they have no idea...no idea at all.

"Jesse!" I hissed, through the window. "Come on!" I had no idea if Heather might decide to take out her rage with me on an innocent party – or, if she did, whether Jesse had any cool tricks, like the one she'd pulled with the statue's head, of his own. All I knew was that the sooner the both of us got out of her range, the better.

Okay, let me state right now that I am not a coward. I'm really not. But I'm not a fool, either. I think if you recognize that you are up against a force greater than your own, it is perfectly okay to run.

It's not okay to leave others behind, though.

" Jesse !" I screamed, through the window.

"I thought I told you," said a very irritated voice from behind me, "to run."

I gasped and spun around. Jesse stood there on the asphalt of the parking lot, the moon at his back, casting his face into shadow.

"Oh my God." My heart was beating so fast, I thought it was going to explode. I had never been so scared in all my life. Never.

Maybe that's why I did what I did next, which was reach out and grab the front of Jesse's shirt in both my hands. "Oh my God," I said, again. "Jesse, are you all right?"

"Of course I'm all right." He sounded surprised I'd even bother to ask. And I guess it was stupid. What could Heather do to Jesse, after all? She couldn't exactly kill him. "Are you all right?"

"Me? I'm fine." I turned my head to search the darkened windows of Mr. Walden's classroom. "Do you think she's ... done?"

"For now," Jesse said.

"How do you know?" I was shocked to find that I was shaking – really shaking – all over. "How do you know she won't come bursting through that wall there and start uprooting all those trees and hurling them at us?"

Jesse shook his head, and I could see that he was smiling. You know, for a guy who died before they invented orthodontia, he had pretty nice teeth. Almost as nice as Bryce's. "She won't."

"How do you know ?"

"Because she won't. She doesn't know she can. She's too new at all this, Susannah. She doesn't know yet all that she can do."

If that was supposed to make me feel better, it didn't work. The fact that he admitted she could uproot trees and start hurling them at me – she was that powerful – and only hadn't due to lack of experience, was enough to stop my shaking cold, and drop the handfuls of shirt I held. Not that I didn't think Heather could have followed me if she wanted to. She could, the same way Jesse had followed me down to the Mission. But the thing of it was, Jesse knew he could. He'd been a ghost a lot longer than Heather. She was only just beginning to explore her new powers.

That was the scariest part. She was so new at all of this ... and already that powerful.

I started pacing around the parking lot like a crazy woman.

"We've got to do something," I said. "We've got to warn Father Dominic – and Bryce. My God, we've got to warn Bryce not to come to school tomorrow. She'll kill him. She'll kill him the minute he sets foot on campus – "

"Susannah," Jesse said.

"I guess we could call him. It's one in the morning, but we could call him, and tell him – I don't know what we could tell him. We could tell him there's been a death threat on him, or something. That might work. Or – we could leave a death threat. Yeah, that's what we could do! We could call his house and I could disguise my voice, and I could be like 'Don't come to school tomorrow, or you'll die.' Maybe he'd listen. Maybe he'd – "

"Susannah," Jesse said again.

"Or we could have Father Dom do it! We could have Father Dom call Bryce and tell him not to come to school, that there's been some kind of accident, or something – "

"Susannah." Jesse stepped in front of me just as I turned around to retread the same five feet I'd been pacing for the past few minutes. I came up short, startled by his sudden proximity, my nose practically banging into the place where his shirt collar was open. Jesse seized both my arms quickly, to steady me.

This was not a good thing. I mean, I know a minute ago I had grabbed him – well, not really him, but his shirt. But I don't like being touched under normal circumstances, and I especially don't like being touched by ghosts. And I especially don't like being touched by ghosts who have hands as big and as tendony and strong-looking as Jesse's.

"Susannah," he said again, before I could tell him to get his big tendony hands off me. "It's all right. It's not your fault. There was nothing you could do."

I sort of forgot about being mad about his hands. "Nothing I could do? Are you kidding me? I should have kicked that girl back into her grave!"

"No." Jesse shook his head. "She'd have killed you."

"Bull! I totally could have taken her. If she hadn't done that thing with that guy's head – "

"Susannah."

"I mean it, Jesse, I could totally have handled her if she hadn't gotten so mad. I bet if I just wait a little while until she's calmed down and go back in there, I can talk her into – "

"No." He let go of my arms, but only so he could wrap one of his own around my shoulders and start steering me away from the school and toward the dumpster where I'd parked my bike. "Come on. Let's go home."

"But what about – "

The grip on my shoulders tightened. "No."

"Jesse, you don't understand. This is my job . I have to – "

"It's Father Dominic's job, too, no? Let him take it from here. There's no reason why you have to be burdened with all the responsibility yourself."

"Well, yes, there is. I'm the one who screwed up."

"You put the gun to her head and pulled the trigger?"

"Of course not. But I'm the one who got her so mad. Father Dom didn't. I can't ask Father Dom to clean up my messes. That is totally unfair."

"What is totally unfair," Jesse explained – patiently, I guess, for him, "is for anyone to expect a young girl like yourself to do battle with a demon from hell like – "

"She isn't a demon from hell. She's just mad. She's mad because the one guy she thought she could trust turned out to be a – "

"Susannah." Jesse stopped walking suddenly. The only reason I didn't lurch forward and fall flat on my face was that he still kept hold of my shoulder.

For a minute – just a minute – I really thought ... well, I thought he was going to kiss me. I'd never been kissed before, but it seemed as if all the necessities for a kiss to happen were there: you know, his arm was around me, there was moonlight, our hearts were racing – oh, yeah, and we'd both just narrowly escaped being killed by a really pissed off ghost.

Of course, I didn't know how I felt about my first kiss coming from one of the undead, but hey, beggars can't be choosers, and let me tell you something, Jesse was way cuter than any live guy I'd met lately. I'd never seen such a nice-looking ghost. He couldn't, I thought, have been more than twenty when he died. I wondered what had killed him. It's usually hard to tell with ghosts, since their spirits tend to take on the shape their body was in just before they stopped functioning. My dad, for instance, doesn't look any different when he appears to me now than he did the day before he went out for that fatal jog around Prospect Park ten years ago.

I could only assume Jesse had died at someone else's hands since he looked pretty damned healthy to me. Chances were he'd been a victim of one of those bullet holes downstairs. Nice of Andy to frame it for posterity's sake.