Dust to Dust (10 page)

I want to be as excited as she is; I do. It's all so black-and-white
in Carson's mind, and she makes it sound easy. She believes in the good, all the beautiful things about haunting and the Prism and Solus—and I love that she appreciates that side. But there are things she doesn't know—about the energy pull I felt, about the possessions that happened when I was still in the Prism, about the poltergeists and what they were capable of.

Just then, Nick peeks his head around the corner.

“Are we going to lunch?” he asks with a grin.

“Yes!” I say, glad to be able to exit this discussion.

We round the corner and I notice Holly waiting by the entrance for us. She's always been a peripheral member of our group of friends, but for some reason, I never noticed the longing in her eyes when she looked at Nick, which is hard to miss right now. Maybe it was never there before I had my accident, or maybe it was and I was just blind to it. I look at Nick and see his face light up for her. He tries to hide it by focusing on me again, but I saw it. He really does like her. When we sit down at our regular table she's far enough away that I can ignore her, but I watch her stealing more lingering glances at Nick.

It's really strange and awkward, being here and knowing something was happening between them, something that I apparently interrupted when I recovered. I feel sort of invisible and lost, and suddenly I realize this is what it must be like for Thatcher when he's hovering over me and watching me with Nick.

Thankfully, some of Nick's soccer teammates are sitting at the other end of our table, being loud and carrying on. It's a nice distraction to have. I haven't felt the need to say hi to them since I sat
down, because they're so preoccupied with each other, but then Eli Winston says my name, and my ears prick up.

“Callie hasn't heard about it!”

“Yeah, but the rest of us have heard it a hundred times,” says Hunter Black, whose blond hair is shaved into a fauxhawk this year for some reason. I wonder briefly if it was a soccer team dare.

“Hey, Callie!” Eli calls to me, and I meet his dark-brown eyes. “Want me to tell you about my incredible train dodge?”

I have the urge to tell him I already know about his “dodge,” and that I saved his ass, in fact.

But instead I say, “Sure, Eli.”

It's hard to listen as Eli recounts the hours after Tim McCann's summer party, when he was down by Lyndon's Crossing, drinking with a bunch of people. What he remembers is that he stood on the tracks and jumped out of the way of the train just in time—“literally, like, a split second before the train hit me,” he says. “Not even a split, like half a split second.”

But here's what I remember:

I was hiding across the way while the poltergeists—Leo and Reena, and their friends Norris and Delia—gathered around the Living, waiting for a chance to mess with them. When Eli stepped on the tracks, Leo shadowed him, moving slowly into his body and pulling energy from me against my will until possession was achieved. Eli couldn't move—Leo stood his ground, having fully taken over Eli's body. And the train might have hit him—hit
them
—if I hadn't come out of my hiding spot and rushed at Eli with the
speed of a bullet from a gun and thrown him to safety, forcing Leo out of his body.

No one here knows that version of the story, and I have to fight off chills when I think of it as Eli tells his own tall tale. Thatcher says I'm not in danger and that being fully alive makes me safe from the poltergeists.

But what if Leo, Reena, and the others are stronger than he realizes? The more I think about what they could do with my energy, the more I worry about what they might do to access it again, even though my being out of the Prism would make it really difficult.
What if they find a way to possess Eli again? What if they're able to get inside Carson's head?

I force myself to smile and nod as Eli winds up the story. “Impressive,” I say.

One thing's for sure: Having been possessed by Leo hasn't changed Eli one bit. He's still a bragging fool.

By the time I'm sitting in last period, I cannot possibly listen to another “introduction to my class” speech. I'm considering using my “sick” status to leave early, but I decide to save that card because the afternoon is almost done. I tune in and out as Mr. Hawes, who's been a physics teacher for close to one hundred years, as far as I can tell, is talking about mathematical models and abstractions, but when he says we're going to study “high energy theory,” I perk up. If I'm getting more nervous thinking about the poltergeists, maybe I should try to figure out if I still have high levels of energy—some
way to protect myself, and my friends, in case Reena and Leo ever come back.

I frown at my brand-new physics textbook and let my eyes go fuzzy at the glowing purple fiber-optic-looking image on the cover. If there's one thing Thatcher would not approve of, it would be me trying to tap into the abilities I had in the Prism now that I'm back in my regular life. I can almost hear him inside my mind.
Callie, I want you to live now, as normally as you can.

I shake my head. That's impossible.

As Mr. Hawes continues to talk, I turn my focus inward, almost like I'm meditating or something, trying to call on enough energy to make something in this room
move
.

Ping.
I feel someone tap the back of my head with a pencil.

“Ouch!” When I turn around, Morgan Jackson points her eraser toward Mr. Hawes, who's looking at me expectantly.

“I'm sorry,” I say, biting my lip to look contrite. “I must have zoned out.”

“I was just saying that we might benefit from having you in our class, Callie,” says Mr. Hawes. “After your experience this summer, you must know more about energy at rest than most of us.”

I nod dumbly, still unsure what the context of this attention is and embarrassed that the class may have seen me trying to call on energy—so weird. My nod seems to satisfy Mr. Hawes, though, and he returns to the board to write down the page numbers we are supposed to read tonight in our gigantic book.

Mercifully, the bell rings a minute later. I walk out into the hall and head toward my locker to meet my best friend, feeling uneasy.
I see a display across the way from my classroom, a glass case filled with sports trophies from years past and ribbons from state math tournaments. In the center is a photo of a girl from my class, Ella Hartley. She died last spring. . . .

And then, I'm hit by a rush of heat—a powerful surge coursing through my body. I double over, dropping my physics book and putting my hands on my knees.

There is a hammer pounding each and every inch of my veins into long, flat strands of agony. The pain slices through every nerve, every bit of skin, every cell—from my fingertips to the inner point of my gut.
Throbbing, beating, pummeling, thrashing.
It's the kind of pain that makes you black out, and when I start to lose my vision, I think that I might.

It's the kind of pain that makes you wish you were dead.

It is that horrible and all-consuming.

As the details of my surroundings start to fade away behind a veil of black, a pair of glowing eyes appears, floating right in front of me. Within seconds, there are hundreds more, piercing through me along with this unrelenting searing pain. A collection of voices seeps into my ears, singing to me sweetly, as though trying to comfort me.

We're coming for you, we're coming for you.

In an instant, they all merge together, forming a devilish roar that sends me to my knees.

And then it's over.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

I HEAR HIS VOICE before I open my eyes, and when I do, the room is dark. I try to get my bearings, but I just see plain gray walls around me. And then he speaks again.

“Callie.”

“Thatcher?”

I look around, letting my eyes adjust in the small, square room but I don't see him. And yet he's here. He came to see me. For a moment I think I died—for real this time. I don't feel devastated. I feel almost . . . hopeful. I'm in the morgue, on a slab.

But then I sit up and my hands touch the fabric underneath me. Slabs don't have sheets.

“What's wrong? What are you doing in the nurse's office?” His voice is a whisper, a dream.

That's when I notice the small window with slits of sunlight
poking through the drawn shades.
The nurse's office
. I flex my fingers and toes, then my arms and legs. I wrap myself in a hug, trying to see how my body feels, expecting to be sore all over from the incredible anguish I felt in the hallway. But there's nothing. I feel fine. Did the nurse give me a painkiller or something?

“When did you get here?” I ask quietly, and I can't tell if I hear his answers out loud or in my head.

“Just now. I didn't plan to linger, but you seemed hurt.”

“It happened in the hallway,” I say. And then I tell him about the searing, ripping, earth-shattering pain that I felt.

“Did you see or hear anything? Or anyone?”

The hairs on my arms stand up as I recognize fear in his tone.

“No,” I say. “I couldn't. Not until just now with you. There was only this terrible . . . it felt like every part of me was being crushed.”

“I'm so sorry,” he says. “I should have been closer. I might have been able to—”

“It's not your fault,” I tell him. “I went off the meds on my own and I knew there was a possibility that the pain might overwhelm me at first. I—”

“I don't think this has anything to do with your past injuries.”

“Then what was it? What caused the pain?”

“Not what.
Who
.”

“Who?”

I hear the regret in his voice, and I can almost picture his solemn face when he says, “Reena and Leo.”

“Oh no,” I say, my heart beginning to race.

I close my eyes, which helps me block out this bland room and
imagine that Thatcher and I are talking together in a better setting. One where the mist moves around us and the air sparkles with an ethereal glow. I picture us in the Prism, where we met. Where we . . . connected.

“You remember them, don't you? And the rest of the poltergeists?”

“Yes,” I say. “Everything has been coming back to me slowly.”

As I tell him about what I heard in my room, what I felt in the cemetery, and the memories that have been flooding back, a deep chord of dread starts to sound within me.

“Thatcher? Can they still use my energy?”

“The other Guides and I, we think they're still trying,” he says. “But now that you're back on Earth, alive, we don't believe there's any way they can draw the level of energy they'd need for another possession or anything close to that.”

“Then what just happened to me?”

“I'm not sure. All we know is that they're desperate to gather energy—they'll do almost anything, and you're an obvious target. You were the one they hoped to use all along.”

“And you can't stop them?” I say, my voice trembling a bit.

“No, we will, Callie,” he says. “It's just that . . . we haven't been able to find them.”

“
I'll find them
,” I whisper, remembering what I scrawled in my journal, in a dream state.

“I've been searching since they disappeared, but I will track them down,” says Thatcher, sounding more angry than sure. It's amazing what I can hear in his voice when I can't see his face. “It's
just that they haven't been back to the Prism since—” He stops.

“Since what?”

“Maybe, in dreams, you've seen what happened?” I open my eyes again, and I notice a ripple in the air, his hand casting about this barren little room. “How your prism was destroyed.”

I flash to the double exposure I keep seeing in my own bedroom—the window smashed, the bed torn apart, my things lying broken on the floor.
It's not my actual room I'm seeing in that nightmare . . . it's my prism room.

“I've seen a vision in my sleep,” I whisper.

“Yes.”

“I thought it was a nightmare.”

“No. It's real, what they've done to your prism.”

“How did they do it?”

“You invited them in.”

In the Prism, Thatcher told me never to let anyone into my private room, but I was tired of his unexplained rules and there was a moment when I thought Reena was my friend. I'd invited her in. . . . I'd invited them all in.

I feel a rush of shame.

“But when could they have done it?”

“Just before you woke up from the coma.”

I think back to that moment, the one right before my eyes opened. When Thatcher drove my soul into my body. I remember his face—tortured, regretful, full of hurt. Despite his own pain, he chose my life. He said it was the only way to save me; he said the poltergeists would keep trying to use me to claim the lives of others as their own.

But he never said what I wanted to hear most. What I still want to hear. He never said that he loved me.

I shake my head and look around the nurse's office, hating the gray walls and sterile paper sheets, and for a minute, myself, for suddenly making this all about me. Yes, I want to know, more than anything, what I really mean to Thatcher.

But doesn't the fact that he's here with me now show that? Sure, there's a bigger crisis at hand here, but couldn't he have sent another Guide to contact me? Now that I'm aware the Prism is real and I'm off the meds, I would have been able to get the message.

He came here himself. He came here to be with me.

“We think the poltergeists have extra energy; that's what they took from your personal prism and why they haven't returned from Earth to regain strength. They can stay here. But not forever. Still, we can't track them until they come back to the Prism.”