“He knows,” Vic said. “The two of you make a good team.”

I remembered the night before and felt my cheeks turn pink. “Yeah,” I said softly. “We do.”

A grin spread across Vic’s face, and for one horrified second I thought he’d somehow been able to tell what I was thinking. But that wasn’t why he was smiling. “Do you feel it?”

The chill in the air swept around me. I hugged myself. “Yeah. I do.”

No ice crystals formed. No frost carved out faces against the window. Nothing visible appeared. I simply knew that a second ago, Vic and I had been alone. Now something was with us. Someone.

At first, I was confused. Why wasn’t this as violent and scary as the other ghostly manifestations I’d seen? Wraiths didn’t gently creep into the corners of rooms; they stabbed their way in with blades of ice. That was the way it had always happened at Evernight Academy—

Wait. The school had been specially built to repel ghosts; the iron and copper the wraiths despised were built into the school’s walls and beams. Although the wraiths had been able to force their way in, that had been difficult for them. Were the bizarre manifestations of ghostly power I’d seen before—the frozen stalactites and rippling blue-green light—evidence of that struggle? Maybe in a place like this, an ordinary house, the wraiths didn’t create effects so dramatic.

“Hey there,” Vic said cheerfully. “This is my friend Bianca. She’s going to hang out in the wine cellar for a while with Lucas, also a friend. They’re fantastic; you’re going to love them.” He could have been introducing us at a party. “They were just kind of nervous, because Binks here has had some ghost issues before. But nothing personal, okay? I wanted to make sure you guys would be cool.”

There was no reply, of course. It seemed to me that the light was a little brighter in that corner of the room, maybe a little bluer, but the difference was almost too subtle to discern.

Then I saw her.

Not with my eyes—not that kind of sight. It was more like when a memory comes back to you so powerfully that you can’t even see what’s in front of you any longer, because the images in your head are so vivid. The wraith was in my mind, the same one from my dreams—one of those I had seen at Evernight Academy last year. Was that Vic’s ghost? Another? Her short, pale hair seemed almost white, and her face was sharp.

You might as well stay, she said. Not like it matters.

Then the vision was over. Startled, I blinked my eyes a few times, trying to center myself. “Whoa.”

“What happened?” Vic looked around the room, like he might be able to see something. “You went all spacey for a few seconds there. Is everything okay?”

What had the wraith meant by that message? I already knew that I didn’t understand her very well.

Yet I didn’t feel the same kind of fright I’d known after every other encounter with a wraith. This one had shown no signs of hostility, hadn’t made any demands like stop or ours or anything like that. Either she liked Vic as much as he liked her and would leave us alone for his sake, or my obsidian pendant was a definite safeguard.

As Vic carefully studied my face, he said, “Well?”

I smiled. “We can stay.”

For a little while, at least, Lucas and I had a home.

Vic drove us back to our hotel. Before he and Ranulf left, Vic made a discreet trip to the ATM and gave me the six hundred dollars he’d promised, a wad of bills I stuffed inside my purse. We had the keys and code to turn off the security system in the wine cellar, and once we had jobs, Lucas and I would be able to save money. Before they left, I hugged Vic tighter than I had hugged almost anybody else in my life.

Then it was time for me to face the music.

Lucas hadn’t smiled once on the way home. He talked some with Vic and Ranulf, thanking Vic for giving us a place to stay, but it was like I was invisible. He’d held on to his temper while we took care of business, but now his mood was darkening.

We rode up the hotel elevator in silence, the tension around us weighing heavier by the moment. In my mind, I kept seeing Eduardo’s death at Mrs. Bethany’s hands over and over again, and hearing that sickening crack.

When we entered our room, I expected Lucas to begin shouting at me right away, but he didn’t. Instead he went into the bathroom and washed his face and hands, scrubbing hard, as though he felt dirty.

As he dried off with a towel, the suspense got to me. “Say something,” I said. “Anything. Scream at me if you have to. Just—don’t stay quiet like that.”

“What do you want me to say? I told you not to use e-mail? We both know that, and we both know you ignored me.”

“You didn’t say why.” He glared at me then, and I realized how weak I had to sound. “That’s not an excuse. I realize that—”

“I told you months ago that we had to watch out for e-mail being traced! Did you think I didn’t e-mail you last year just because I didn’t feel like it? Why wasn’t that alone enough to tell you that was a good reason?”

“You’re shouting at me!”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I wouldn’t want to overreact to something as insignificant as people getting killed.”

It hit me then, the full weight of what I’d done, in a way it hadn’t since the night of Mrs. Bethany’s attack. I smelled the smoke and remembered the screams. In my mind’s eye, I saw Mrs. Bethany viciously twist Eduardo’s neck and the light fade from his eyes as he fell down dead.