Hourglass

In the mist, a face began to take shape. A girl, perhaps my age, with short, fair hair—whom I’d seen many times before.

“The wraith.” My words sounded real to me now, although I didn’t think any living person could hear me. “You’re the wraith. I didn’t recognize you before.”

“I’m hardly the only wraith,” she said. Her smile was thin and sort of smug; right now, I wanted nothing more than to slap it off her face. “And, yeah, we sound different on the other side, don’t we? Like ourselves.”

“What’s happening to me?” I demanded. “Am I really dead? If so, are you keeping me from—from going to heaven or into the light or just going to sleep, whatever it is people are supposed to do after they die?”

She stroked the mist around us with a wide sweep of her arms, clearing the swirling fog. “There are plenty of choices, you know. And I’m not holding you back from any of them.”

Now that the fog had cleared, I realized I could see beneath us. We seemed to be suspended above the trees outside the house. Movement below caught my attention—Lucas and Balthazar, driving their shovels into the earth, hard at work digging my grave.

“This was my dream.” If only I could have wept. I needed to cry so badly. “One of the dreams I had about you—Do you remember them?”

“Of course not.” She looked almost offended. “They were your dreams. Your visions of the future. I wouldn’t have anything to do with them. If you saw me, it’s the same way you saw them—as part of what’s to come.”

“You said I didn’t want to know what they were doing. Because if I’d looked that hard—I would have foreseen my own death.”

The wraith cocked her head, and her fair hair ruffled in some unseen breeze. “It’s time for you to forget about the life you lost. It’s time to embrace your future.”

“Forget? You think I could forget Lucas? And what kind of future am I supposed to have when I’m dead?” The mist thickened around us, blotting her out. “Leave me alone.”

Then I thought of Lucas and willed myself to his side. I’m coming back to you, I promise. I’m here!

The mist vanished. I found myself in the clearing behind the Woodsons’ property, looking down at a small mound of earth. Balthazar patted the surface of the dirt down with the back of his shovel while Lucas knelt by the grave. I could smell the sweat from their skin, the loamy scents of the soil and summer grass. The sky had lightened to a soft pink. A new day had started, without me.

Lucas bowed his head, weighed down by misery. Witnessing him like that was more than I could endure.

Please see me, I thought. I concentrated on all the sights and smells around me, on everything that was real and solid. I made myself part of the world. Lucas, please see me, please, please—“Lucas!”

Both of them jumped backward. Lucas said, “Did you hear that?”

Balthazar nodded. “It—it sounded like—It can’t be.”

Yes! I had it. Focusing even harder on the here and now, I put every ounce of my will into the memory of how my body had felt. How I had looked. For a moment, I could feel myself again—phantom limbs, phantom hair—and both Lucas and Balthazar gasped. They’d seen me!

But my elation distracted me, and I knew I’d faded from their sight almost instantly. Could I do it again? I wasn’t entirely sure how I’d managed it the first time. Being dead was hard.

“Balthazar,” Lucas said, “have I gone crazy?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So you saw her, too?”

“Yeah.” Comprehension swept over Balthazar’s face, but whatever revelation he’d had didn’t look like a good one. “Oh, my God.”

“What? What do you know?” Lucas said.

Balthazar started pacing beside the grave “If Bianca was born because some wraith helped out two vampires—”

“Right,” Lucas said.

“And one of the options for her future was becoming a full vampire—”

“Yeah,” Lucas said. His eyes widened.

“Then the other option must have been for her—not simply to die but to become a wraith. That’s why the Oliviers were so frantic for her to change. The alternative to being a vampire was never for Bianca to live as a human being. It was always for her to become a wraith.” Balthazar blinked at the spot where they’d briefly glimpsed me. “And now she has.”

I really wanted Balthazar to be wrong, but unfortunately, every word he’d said made sense.

“See?” The wraith—the other wraith, I should say—seemed to drift beside me. “It’s like we always tried to tell you.”

I said, “What do you mean, ‘always tried to tell me’?”

“You remember.” She smiled triumphantly, and in that smile I saw the message I’d been given at Evernight Academy, in letters engraved in frost. “Ours.”

Chapter Twenty-one

SO, THE WRAITHS THOUGHT THEY COULD CLAIM me for their own? Well, they were wrong, and I intended to prove it.

“I’m not yours,” I said to the wraith who floated in front of me. She wore a white, filmy sort of dress, maybe an old-fashioned nightgown; I wondered if it was what she’d died in. If so, I was stuck in a white camisole and blue cotton pajama bottoms with little clouds on them for all eternity. I looked down and saw the pajama bottoms, slightly translucent like the rest of me but definitely the same. Great. “I belong to myself. That’s it.”