Meg Cabot - Darkest Hour

Now his lower lip was trembling. So was his whole chin, actually. And his eyes had filled up with tears.

"I'm sorry, Suze," he said. His voice had gone about three pitches higher than usual. "Suze, I'm so sorry!"

He was trying really hard not to cry. He wasn't succeeding, though. Tears were spilling out of his eyes and rolling down his chubby cheeks . . . the only part of him that was chubby, except maybe for his Albert Einstein hair.

And even though I didn't want to, I found myself wrapping my arms around him and patting him on the back as he sobbed into my neck, telling him everything was going to be all right.

Just like, I realized, with something akin to horror, Father Dominic had done to me!

And just like him, I was completely lying. Because everything was not going to be all right. Not for me, at least. Not ever again. Unless I did something about it, and fast.

"Look," I said, after a few minutes of letting Jack wail. "Stop crying. We have work to do."

Jack lifted his head from my shoulder - which he had, by the way, gotten all wet with snot and tears and stuff, since my dress was sleeveless.

"What ... what do you mean?" His eyes were red and squinty from crying. I was lucky nobody walked in right then. I definitely would have been convicted of child abuse or something.

"I'm going to try to get Jesse back," I explained, swinging Jack down from the bed. "And you're going to help me."

Jack went, "Who's Jesse?"

I explained. At least, I tried to. I told him that Jesse was the guy he had exorcised, and that he had been my friend, and that exorcising people was wrong, unless they'd done something very very bad, such as tried to kill you, which was, Jack explained, what Maria had told him Jesse'd tried to do to me.

So then I told Jack that ghosts are just like people, some of them are okay, but some of them are liars. If he had ever met Jesse, I assured him, he'd have known right away he was no killer.

Maria de Silva, on the other hand ...

"But she seemed so nice," Jack said. "I mean, she's so pretty and everything."

Men. I'm serious. Even at the age of eight. It's pathetic.

"Jack," I said to him. "Have you ever heard the expression, Don't judge a book by its cover?"

Jack wrinkled his nose. "I don't like to read much."

"Well," I said. We had gone out into the living room, and now I picked up my purse and opened it. "You're going to have to do some reading if we're going to get Jesse back. I'm going to need you to read this."

And I passed him an index card on which I'd scrawled some words. Jack squinted down at it.

"What is this?" he demanded. "This isn't English."

"No," I said. I started taking other things out of my purse. "It's Portuguese."

"What's that?" Jack asked.

"It's a language," I explained, "that they speak in Portugal. Also in Brazil, and a few other places."

"Oh," Jack said, then pointed at a small Tapperware container I'd taken from my purse. "What's that ?"

"Oh," I said. "Chicken blood."

Jack made a face. "Eew!"

"Look," I said. "If we're going to do this exorcism, we're going to do it right. And to do it right, you need chicken blood."

Jack said, "I didn't use chicken blood when Maria was here."

"Yeah," I said. "Well, Maria does things her way, and I do things my way. Now let's go into the bathroom to do this. I have to paint stuff on the floor with the chicken blood, and I highly doubt the housekeeping staff will appreciate it if we do it here on the carpet."

Jack followed me into the bathroom that joined his room to his brother's. In the part of my brain that wasn't concentrating on what I was doing, I kind of wondered where Paul was. It was strange he hadn't called after that whole thing where he'd dropped me off at my house and there'd been all those cop cars and stuff in front of it. I mean, you'd have thought he'd wonder, at least, what that had been all about.

But I hadn't heard a peep out of him.

Not that I cared. I had way more important things to worry about. But it was still kind of odd.

"There," I said, when we had everything set up. It took an hour, but when we were done, we had a fairly decent example of how an exorcism - the Brazilian voodoo variety, anyway - is supposed to look. At least according to a book I'd read on the subject once.

With the chicken blood I'd procured from the meat counter of one of the gourmet shops downtown, I'd made these special symbols in the middle of the bathroom floor, and around them I'd stuck assorted candles (the votive kind, the only ones I could get at short notice, between the offices of the Carmel Pine Cone and the hotel; they were cinnamon scented, too, so the bathroom smelled sort of like Christmas . . . well, except for the not-so-festive fragrance of chicken blood).

In spite of the amateurishness with which it had been thrown together, it was, in fact, a working portal to the afterlife - or at least it would be, once Jack did his part with the notecard. I'd gone over the pronunciation of each word, and he seemed to have it down pretty well. The only thing he couldn't seem to get around was the fact that the person we were exorcising was, well, me.

"But you're alive ," he kept saying. "If I exorcise your spirit from you, won't you be dead?"

Actually, this was a thought that had not really occurred to me. What would happen to my body after my spirit had left it? Would I be dead?

No, that was impossible. My heart and lungs wouldn't stop working just because my soul was gone. Probably I'd just lie there, like someone in a coma.

This was not, however, very comforting to Jack.

"But what if you don't come back?" he wanted to know.

"I'm going to come back," I said. "I told you. The only reason I can come back is that I do have a living body to return to. I just want to have a look around out there and see if Jesse's okay. If he is, fine. If not . . . well, I'll try to bring him back with me."

"But you just said the only reason you can come back is because you have a living body to return to. Jesse doesn't. So how can he come back?"

This was, of course, a good question. That was probably why it put me in such a bad mood.

"Look," I said, finally. "Nobody has ever tried this before, so far as I know. Maybe you don't have to have a body to come back. I don't know, okay? But I can't not try just because I don't know the answer. Where would we be if Christopher Columbus hadn't tried? Huh?"

Jack looked thoughtful. "Living in Spain right now?"

"Very funny," I said. It was at this point that I took the last thing from my bag and tied one end around my waist. I tied the other end to Jack's wrist.

"What's the rope for?" he asked, looking down at it.

"So I can find my way back to you," I said.

Jack looked confused. "But if just your spirit's going, what's the point of tying a rope around your body? You said your body wasn't going anywhere."

"Jack," I said from between gritted teeth. "Just reel me back in if I'm gone more than half an hour, all right?" I figured half an hour was about as long as anybody's soul could be separated from their body. On TV I was always seeing stuff about little kids who'd slipped into icy water and drowned and been technically dead for up to forty minutes, yet recovered without any brain damage or anything. So I figured half an hour was cutting it as close as I could.

"But how - "

"Oh my God," I snapped at him. "Just do it, okay?"

Jack glowered at me. Hey, just because we're both mediators doesn't mean we get along all the time.

"Okay," he said. Under his breath, I heard him mutter, "You don't have to be such a witch about it."

Only he didn't say witch. Really, it is shocking, the words kids are using these days.