Hourglass

Noise from the ground below made me look down. To my surprise, several trucks were parked on the driveway, and at least a dozen people seemed to be milling around. The other summers I’d spent at Evernight Academy had been almost unbearably quiet. Nobody came to visit, save a few deliveries and the laundry service. So who were these people?

I realized the truth as soon as I recognized that they were all wearing coveralls. These were the workmen rebuilding Evernight.

Before that moment, I hadn’t heard much of anything—mostly, I thought, because I hadn’t been listening. How weird, to have to choose to hear. Now I could make out the growling of buzz saws and the thumping of hammers. Most of that seemed to be coming from the roof, but probably people were hard at work on the inside, too. Despite the fact that I loathed Evernight Academy, I hated Black Cross even more, so it gave me grim satisfaction to think that the damage done by Black Cross’s fire was being undone. Mrs. Bethany wouldn’t stand for anything else.

Then I heard a voice from inside my bedroom. “Adrian?”

That was Mom, calling my father.

I turned back to the window, eager to catch a glimpse of her, but frost still covered the pane of glass. That had to be what Mom was looking at. Rub the glass! I thought. If you clear the glass, you can see me!

Footsteps echoed inside the apartment, coming closer. Then I heard Dad say, “Oh, my God.”

I pressed my hands against the glass eagerly. Too eagerly—the frost thickened, Now it would be even harder for them to see me. But they would, wouldn’t they?

“We knew the wraith would return.” Dad’s words were hard, even cold. “Mrs. Bethany warned us.”

“But here—in Bianca’s room—” Mom sounded like she was crying.

“I know,” Dad said quietly. “They’re still looking for her. At least we know they haven’t found her yet—that she’s still alive.”

Oh, Dad. I covered my mouth with my hand, as though I could still cry and had to hold back the tears.

“And this time we can cast them out,” my mother said, voice shaking but determined.

What does she mean by that? I tried to imagine what she could be referring to—some trick Mrs. Bethany had figured out, perhaps—

It hit me like a wall: a terrible rush of force pushed me away from the window, the gargoyle, Evernight Academy, and anything else that was real. The physical form I’d inhabited dissolved like a sand castle beneath a wave. I was too overwhelmed to know anything save that I was lost in the mist again, nothing and no one, a dead thing.

“Why did you go there?” Maxie demanded. Her presence, annoying though it was, served as my only touchstone in the swirling unreality of it all. “Do you want to be destroyed?”

“I’ve already been destroyed.”

“That’s what you think.” I could hear a sort of smug smile in her words. “It can be much, much worse than this.”

“How, exactly, does it get worse than dead? I can’t be with my parents ever again. I can’t be with Lucas ever again.”

“True. Well, mostly true.”

“What do you mean, mostly true?”

“There’s one way you can say hello to your precious Lucas. It’s going to hurt both of you more than if you just did the decent thing and moved on—but you never know when to leave well enough alone, do you? Here—try this.”

I felt as though I were being thrown forward, and then I saw Lucas. He was still in the wine cellar, but now he was alone, lying on the floor, fully clothed but with a pillow beneath his head and a sheet pulled over him. I had the sense that it hadn’t been too long since I’d last seen him—it was probably afternoon at the latest—but I realized exhaustion must have demanded that he get some sleep. Balthazar was nowhere to be seen.

Lucas stirred fitfully beneath the sheet. For a moment, I wondered why he was asleep on the floor—before I remembered that I’d died in our bed. Probably Lucas didn’t even want to lie down on that bed alone.

“You said you wanted to be with him, right?” Maxie said.

“So, do it.”

Just like that, Lucas and I were in the bookstore in Amherst, alone in the basement room where the textbooks were kept. He was kneeling on the floor, holding an astronomy textbook in his hands. A comet trailed fire on the page.

“Lucas?” I said.

He looked up, and his eyes were instantly alight with relief and wonder. “Bianca? You’re here?”

“Yeah, but—where’s here?”

Lucas dropped the book and clutched me in his embrace. The shock of feeling his arms around my back, of the welcome pressure of his body against mine, made me cry out in surprise and delight.

“You’re alive,” he whispered into my ear. “I thought you were dead. I was so sure you were dead.”

But I am dead. “Lucas, where are we?”

“I was going to find you in the stars. See?” Instead of gesturing at the astronomy book he’d dropped on the floor, Lucas pointed upward. To my bewilderment, I saw not the ceiling of the bookstore but the night sky, sparkling and bright. Lucas said, “I knew I could find you there. Remember the part of Romeo and Juliet you quoted to me that time, when you were trying to convince me Juliet was an astronomer, too?”

I whispered, “‘Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars. And he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night, and pay no worship to the garish sun.’”