B00AO57VOY EBOK (6 page)

“Got it,” I whispered,
rolling my eyes.  “Now can we get on with it?”

“Your wish, my command,” he
muttered.  “Did you at least bring a flashlight?”

“Nope, I brought something
better,” I told him, smiling and waving my phone at him.

“Great, at least we’ll be
able to call a lawyer,” he grumbled.

Shaking his head at me
again, he turned around and grabbed hold of the industrial-looking doorknob and
wrenched it around, breaking the lock and pretty much crushing the thing in the
process.  Holding the door open, he waved me in with a sarcastic little bow. 
Unwilling to let him know just how scared I was of walking into the darkness
beyond, I lifted my chin and hurried inside.  My fear more than doubled,
though, when he slipped in and closed the door behind us, plunging us into
complete darkness save for the red glow of the exit sign over the door.

My hands were shaking so bad
that I nearly dropped my phone before I could get it out of sleep mode.  The
electronic glow of my home screen was the most beautiful sight in the world to
me as it came to life, and I quickly scrolled through until I found the
flashlight app I’d downloaded for the occasion—cursing myself for being an
idiot and not putting a shortcut on my home screen the whole time.  I breathed
a sigh of relief when I finally found it.  I hit the little flashlight icon
with my thumb and the screen lit up bright enough to illuminate the darkness around
us.  Holding up my phone, I shone it down the hallway to get my bearings.  The
walls on either side of us were lined with doors, and I waited with bated
breath for them to all open at once to release some kind of genetically
engineered monsters—who, of course, would be starving for a little human flesh.

Yeah, way too many horror
movies for me.

“The morgue is at the end of
the hall,” Nathan breathed in my ear, nearly giving me a heart attack.  “We
need to hurry.  One of our five minutes is already gone.”

Nodding stiffly, I let him
pull me down the hall, shining my phone back and forth to make sure we weren’t
taken by surprise.  Nathan only paused for a second to look at me over his
shoulder when we reached the double doors leading to the morgue.  As much as I
wanted to run screaming from the building, I nodded to let him know I was
ready.  That seemed to be the only permission he needed.  He threw the door
open and pulled me inside after him.  My heart thudded an uneven tune as the
door closed behind us.  It nearly stopped altogether, though, when Nathan let
go of my hand.  A second later, a bright fluorescent glow suddenly blinded me
as the overhead lights flickered to life.

You know those morgues you
see on TV?  Well, this one looked just like that.  It was a long, narrow room. 
The walls were painted a soothing blue that wasn’t doing a lot for me
personally.  There was a long counter running an entire length of the room on
one side with a stainless steel sink at one end.  Shelves of neatly folded
sheets lined the far wall, capped off at both ends with big red biohazard trash
cans.  It was ice cold in the room, but the shivers racing down my spine had
more to do with the fact that I was in the
morgue
than the temperature.

“There’re no windows in
here,” Nathan said in response to my ‘Are you
crazy
?’ look.  Turning
around, he studied the oversized drawers across from us and then turned back to
look at me with a frown.  “She’s not here.”

“Yes she is,” I whispered,
staring past him at the long stainless steel autopsy table in the center of the
room.  Well, more specifically at the sheet-draped
body
on that table. 
A body with bright red curls.

Though I knew I didn’t have
a lot of time, I moved toward that table like I was in a film permanently stuck
in slow motion.  For a long moment, I just stood there looking down at the girl
who’d taken my place.  Casey Carson.  She’d only been seventeen, a junior at
Moonlight High.  The kids from OA and MHS attended all the same parties and
bonfires, so I’d seen her around.  She’d always seemed nice.  Then, so had the
two girls who’d died before her.

“What now, baby?” Nathan
asked quietly, cupping my face in his hands when he saw the tears in my eyes. 
“We can mourn for her later, Em.  Right now, we have to hurry okay?”

“I-I don’t know what to do,”
I admitted, looking away from the sympathy in his eyes.

“Touch her,
ma petit
.” 

I whirled around with a gasp
of surprise to find a ghost I’d never seen before standing across the table
from me.   She was stunning.  She was wearing a gown with a long-waisted bodice
that showed more than a hint of cleavage.  The bodice flowed into a narrow
skirt that was draped and pinned up artfully in the back in contrasting shades
of lavender.  Kim and I had seen something very like it at a fashion museum she
had dragged me to a couple of years back.  Her dark hair was swept up on the
sides and cascaded down her back in a waterfall of curls. 

She was very different from
the ghosts I’d known before.  There was no blast of cold air, no creepy-crawly
feeling.  In fact, I felt almost…peaceful in her presence.  To my surprise, I
actually found myself smiling at her.

 “She has gone on, but there
is still much to be learned from her.  You must look with more than just your
eyes to see the message she has left for us,” she continued her instruction,
giving me a gentle smile in return.  “Come,
ma
petite
.  I will show
you the way.
 
Lay your hands just so.”

She placed her transparent
hands on the dead girl between us, one over her forehead and one over her
heart.  Without thinking, I copied her actions.  Our fingers brushed as she
pulled her hands back, and I felt like I’d just stuck my finger in a light
socket.  I nearly jumped backwards as a jolt of electricity shot all the way up
my arm to my shoulder.  I swear I felt my hair stand on end at the contact.

“Em, what are you staring
at?” Nathan asked, sounding even more uneasy than when he was telling me about
being locked in a coffin as a prank. 

“Hush,” I whispered, still
staring at my ghostly tutor.  “I’ll explain later.”

“Close your eyes,” my ghost
said softly, smiling over at Nathan.  When I balked, she turned that gentle
smile back toward me.  “It will be all right, Ember.  Close your eyes and focus
on nothing but the child whom you touch.  I will see that no harm comes to you;
have no fear.”

Without so much as blinking
an eye, I did as I was instructed, trusting her to keep both Nathan and I
safe.  Given my inability to trust even the love of my life, that instant faith
in her should have worried me, but it didn’t.  I simply felt safe, the way I
did with my friend Tyler.  It wasn’t something I could explain; it was simply
there.

“Center yourself,
ma
petit
,” the ghost across from me said softly, her voice so mesmerizing that
I immediately felt myself sinking into a more tranquil state.  “Now see what
she has seen.”

I jerked like I was having a
convulsion when the world seemed to disappear around me, leaving me in a
terrifying kind of darkness, but I didn’t pull away.  I instinctively knew that
darkness, the way we all know it on some level.  It was the darkness of death, the
pitch black of the void between this life and the next.  The experience of
seeing it through Casey’s eyes left me feeling cold and sick.  Knowing that
darkness was the last thing she’d experienced in this life made the guilt in my
stomach boil up like acid.  It poured through my veins and I felt tears filling
my eyes behind my closed lids.

Just when I started to fear
that the darkness was the only memory left for me to see, I saw a brilliant
pinpoint of light flicker to life.  I walked toward it, watching it grow larger
as I approached until it was the size of a doorway. 

I had to force myself to
take the last step I would have to take, knowing I wasn’t going to enjoy what I
found.  Finally, though, I stepped out of the darkness and into the light and found
myself standing in a cell of some sort.  The walls were made of stone.  They
were slick with moisture and the whole place smelled like a septic system gone
bad.  The only light came from a battery-operated lantern hanging from a hook
on the wall.  It looked almost like a dungeon, complete with steel bars and
locked doors.

And on the other side of those
bars stood Jack, his lips turned up in a twisted smile so sinister I had to
really fight the urge to run back into the darkness that, compared with the demon
facing me, suddenly didn’t look so bad.

“You’ve made it longer than
your friends,” Jack said in a low, menacing voice.  “The others barely made it
three days.  You are a strong one, aren’t you?”

“Please,” a weak voice
whispered behind me.  “If you’re going to kill me, do it.  Just stop playing
with me.”

With a feeling of dread, I
turned to see Casey slumped against the wall in the corner, her face ghostly
pale in stark contrast to her freshly-dyed red curls.  She was covered in blood
and there were bruises and cuts on every inch of visible skin.  My heart ached
like someone had punched me in the chest when I saw the defeated look in her
dead blue eyes.  She knew she was going to die.  She knew it and had accepted
it.  She just wanted it to be over. 

“Yes, it is almost time,”
Jack said, still smiling, as he pulled something small out of his back pocket. 
I felt physically ill when he held it up for Casey’s perusal and I saw it was a
scalpel.  The razor-sharp blade gleamed in the low light of the cell and I
heard Casey whimper in fear.  “Though your suffering has been entertaining, you
have begun to bore me.  We shall have one more session together, you and I,
before I give you the release you long for.  You will be my final message to an
old friend.”

I forced myself to watch as
he unlocked the door of the cell and stalked toward the cowering creature in
the corner of the cell.  I wouldn’t allow myself to look away even when he
reached down and grabbed a handful of her curls to haul her to her feet.  I kept
my eyes on Casey’s face when he threw her onto the filthy cot next to me,
ignoring the tears I could feel streaming down my cheeks. 

Then, to my horror, as Jack
slit her shirt open down the front, she turned and looked right at me.  And for
that one second as our eyes met, I
knew
she saw me. 

“Run,” she whispered,
closing her eyes.  “Just run.”

I didn’t look away from that
suddenly peaceful face until Jack, with a vicious laugh, started to carve
something into her skin.  Only then did I close my eyes and turn away.  The
second I did, I felt the world shift again and I was back in the morgue. 
Opening my eyes, I looked down at the peaceful face of the girl lying on the
table, knowing I had just watched her die.

“Ember!”  I turned my
tear-streaked face toward Nathan and was surprised by the terror I saw on his
face.  Before I could say a word, he grabbed me up in crushing hold and buried
his face in my hair.  “God!  You scared the hell out of me!  What happened to
you?  I couldn’t get you to answer me!  I tried everything, but it was like you
were gone!”

“I was,” I choked out,
turning my head to look at Casey again.  It was only then that I realized the
ghost who’d led me into my trance was still there, watching me with a gleam of
pride in her eyes. 

“We need to get out of
here,” Nathan said tensely, looking toward the door.  “Someone’s coming.  I can
hear their radios from here.”

“Hold on, I need to see
something,” I told him, wiggling out of his grasp.  Stepping toward the corpse
on the table, I reached for the edge of the sheet before hesitating.  Looking
over my shoulder at Nathan, I whispered, “Could you turn around for just a
second?”

“She gone, Em,” Nathan said,
giving me a perplexed look.  “I honestly don’t think she’ll mind.”

“I do,” I told him, looking
at Casey again.  “I mind.”

I waited until Nathan,
grumbling about prison sentences, turned around.  Only then did I pull the
sheet back to reveal Jack’s last act of brutality.  I frowned at what was
revealed, not understanding what I was seeing.  Directly over Casey’s heart
were carved three arrows, one straight up and the other two crossing each other
over the first one’s shaft.  The question was, what did it mean?

“Em, you might want to
hurry,” Nathan said, suddenly blurring toward the door, “Our company just
arrived.”

“Forgive me,” I whispered to
Casey as I pulled my phone out again.  Feeling like the worst kind of sicko, I
snapped a picture of the macabre carvings and then shoved my phone back in the
pocket in the front of my shirt and pulled the sheet back over Casey’s body.

“Hurry,
ma cher,
” the
ghost across from me said.  “I fear Nathaniel is correct.  Your time has run
out.”

With one last glance at
Casey, I turned and ran toward Nathan who was holding the door open for me.  I
had just cleared the threshold with Nathan hot on my heels when all the lights
in the funeral home snapped on at once and we heard the sound of footsteps
coming down the hall to our right.

“This way,” Nathan said,
grabbing my hand and pulling me toward one of the doors down the hall.  We
slipped inside and closed the door behind us just as a voice I couldn’t stand
drifted down the hall toward us. 

“Who the hell breaks into a
funeral home?” Sheriff Martin’s voice was tight and angry and I had to bite
back a moan.  I mean, he was the Sheriff!  Shouldn’t he have been home spoiling
his overindulged skank of a daughter or something?  “All right, boys.  Fan out
and check these rooms just in case.  It was probably just kids, but given that
we have a serial killer on the loose, we can’t be too careful.”