Hourglass

I ignored that comment. “You don’t talk like somebody who lived ninety years ago.”

“I’ve spent the past seventeen years hanging out with Vic.”

“That would explain it,” I muttered.

She continued, “Well, the guys downstairs—you can appear to them because you seem to be powerfully emotionally connected to them both. That usually helps. Even then, it’s usually not a sure thing. With Vic—” Maxie hesitated, and I realized that this subject was delicate for her, though she evidently didn’t want me to see it. “I didn’t meet him until years and years after I died. He grew up in this house.”

“And he used to read stories to you, when he was little,” I said.

“He told you that?” She didn’t quite know how to keep talking, after that. If ghosts could blush, I suspected she’d be brilliant pink. “Well. Yeah. So, maybe I could materialize for him now. But at this point, I think it would scare Vic.” More quietly, she added, “I don’t want him scared of me.”

“You didn’t worry about scaring me,” I said angrily. “You appeared to me at Evernight—a lot of you did—and you frightened me out of my wits every time. You nearly killed me twice, and one of those times was definitely on purpose. So forgive me if I don’t think you’re actually that softhearted.”

She looked angry. “But you were ours! You were always ours!”

“Stop saying that!” I wished I could’ve hit her, but I suspected my hand would whoosh right through her incorporeal body, which would both be unsatisfying and deeply creepy.

“It’s true!” Her blue eyes blazed. Maxie was obviously somebody who could not be pushed. “You were born to be a wraith! And not just any wraith but one of the pure ones. Okay? You’ve got it good. You’re strong. Your power can help the others. The wraiths need you, and your parents wanted to go back on their word and steal you from us.”

“First of all, giving a person another choice isn’t stealing.”

Maxie cocked her head. “But your parents didn’t give you that choice, did they?”

“Neither did you, so stop acting high and mighty about it.” My mind whirled from all the new facts I had to process. “One of the—pure ones? You mean, one of the children born to vampires, one the wraiths created, right?”

“About time you caught on.”

Maxie could tell me a lot, I realized; she offered the answers I’d waited for my whole life. But she wasn’t ever going to be a friend. For her, I suspected, I was a means to an end.

To what end?

“Other ghosts need—ghosts like me,” I said. When Maxie nodded, I continued, “To help them do what exactly?”

“You make us stronger. You help us materialize, so we can connect with the world again.” Maxie drifted along the length of the attic. Her feet didn’t touch the floor, which startled me, although I couldn’t have said why. “Stop with the self-pity and imagine what it would be like, months and years and centuries of only that blue mist. That’s how it is for some of us. The ones who get lost like that—they’ll do anything, anything to take form again. Sometimes they can only do it by attaching themselves to people’s fear and making it worse. But most wraiths want another choice. Another way. You can give them that.”

I remembered the ghost who had tormented Raquel for so much of her life. Had hurting her been his only way to escape from a prison of mist? Was he one of the wraiths who had made the wrong choice?

Maxie added, “When we’re around you, a lot of us, we can do many things we wouldn’t be able to do alone. Like, all of us were able to appear to you at Evernight, even though we had to push through the barriers. You weren’t a full wraith yet, but that power was still inside you.”

“So, basically, I was born and died so you guys could have some extra batteries.” How was that news supposed to make me feel better? “I don’t have to help any of you. I’m going back to Lucas.”

“Will you just wait? Please?”

Maxie faded almost to transparency, and in the few shadows of her face that I could still discern, I could see how hurt she looked. After almost a century in Vic’s attic, she was probably lonely. And maybe she’d been dead so long that she’d forgotten how terrible it was. My pity didn’t outweigh my caution, though.

“If you need a friend,” I said slowly, “you have to act like one.”

The attic, and Maxie, disappeared. This time, the fog hardly seemed to close around me before I found myself back where I wanted to be—with Lucas.

In the blink of an eye, I had returned to the wine cellar, where Lucas and Balthazar sat at the small table. They looked even more exhausted than they had before. Lucas leaned against the green wall, stubble shading his angled jaw. The dark circles beneath his eyes made it look as if he’d been beaten up. Next to him, Balthazar leaned his forearms on the table, and his head drooped forward.

Neither of them could see me, apparently. I was so happy to see them that I couldn’t even be upset about my invisibility.

My hearing kicked in mid-sentence, as Balthazar said, “—phone call, maybe, or a letter. That might be a smarter move.”

Lucas shook his head. “The cells move around too much to be sure of a letter, and she lost her cell phone during Mrs. Bethany’s attack. Four hundred years old, and you never bothered learning anything about the guys who hunt you?”