Unnatural Souls (4 page)

I stared, wide eyed and openmouthed,
as my stuff finally scattered across the floor. Great. Just great.
One would think I’d get used to it, but it never stopped being
horrible and shocking.

So much for a normal freaking day. I
narrowed my eyes at the now-bare shelves, dropped to the ground,
and reached out for my belongings with shaky hands. I could hear
the humming of blood in my ears, my heart thumping in my chest. But
at least I didn’t have an audience of witnesses.

Then a boy with wavy blonde hair
appeared out of nowhere next to me and shot a question in my
direction. “You used to be a cheerleader, right?”

I nearly fell over, barely biting back
a scream. Where the hell had he come from? Did he see what
happened? I scowled upwards, cursing in my head. Just when I
thought my day would go by without incident, my locker had decided
it was time for a freaking spring cleaning. And then, as I was
feeling thankful I’d been alone in the hall, a boy appeared. Had I
done something to piss someone off up there? Because this so-called
power had never been anything but negative.

I tried thinking about a million
dollars once, just to see if it would drop out of thin air onto my
bed. It hadn’t worked. Now I thought it again—just in case—but
nothing happened. As I suspected—powers that only brought bad
things. I let out a heavy sigh.

Glancing back to the boy, I studied
his face. He stared directly at me with a soft but curious
expression, and didn’t even look at my possessions littering the
hallway. I was fairly confident that he hadn’t seen it happen, but
I still kept a wary eye on him. He watched me pick up my books with
a smile on his face and raised eyebrows, and I decided to focus my
own eyes on the ground, where my hands were moving across the
floor, gathering my things. He might not have seen what just
happened, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t see the next bizarre
event.

I needed to get out of there, and if I
ignored him long enough, maybe he’d leave me alone. I never got
what I wished for, though.

“
Your name is Grace,
right?”

I so didn’t have time for this boy or
his questions. “Please just leave me alone,” I snapped.

Three girls suddenly turned the corner
and stopped, looking around at the hallway and then at us. I stared
at them, hoping they weren’t going to get involved. I already had
enough on my plate, and the fact that this boy might have seen the
situation with my locker…

Then I did a double take.
The girls were staring at
me
. Despite the fact that this guy
was standing between me and them. Their eyes drifted right through
him. Like … they couldn’t see him at all. One of the girls
whispered to the other two, then all three shrugged and continued
walking, even picking up their stride.

I glanced at the boy again and let out
a bitter laugh. He was way too hot for girls like that to just
ignore.

That explained why I hadn’t seen him
coming. He hadn’t walked up to me at all. He’d appeared.

Which meant, well, ghost. And though
the hall was empty, it was never a good time to start talking to
one of them. Still, I didn’t know how else to get rid of him. And
it wasn’t like people could think I was any crazier than they
already did.

“
Let me guess,” I
whispered so no one else would hear me this time. “You’re dead,
right?”

The boy grinned widely and
winked.
Great, spirit.
I rolled my eyes, finished picking up my things, stuffed the
last book in my backpack, and zipped it up while glaring at him,
hoping he would leave me be. Without saying anything else, I rose,
turned, and walked toward the exit, gripping my backpack tightly
and keeping my head down. Each step I took was one step closer to
being out of there, closer to home, and back to my room, where I
was sure I would endure yet another night of freaky powers mixed
with spells to summon demons I had no way of controlling. But at
least I’d be alone.

Unless I managed to summon a demon.
Then I’d only be alone once it killed me.

“
Please don’t go!” the
ghost pleaded, appearing in front of me just as I got to the doors
leading outside. He was stomping his foot and blowing his hair out
of his face, and I paused for a moment, struck by how much—for some
reason I couldn’t place—he reminded me of Ash. I quickly shook it
off.

“
Please,” he
repeated.

“
I don’t have time for
this, or you,” I whispered harshly, checking to make sure there was
no one around. I couldn’t take pity on every spirit that crossed my
path, and I had to get home. I had to save my brother, and talking
to this boy wasn’t going to accomplish that.

I swung the doors open and darted
through them, and then across the entire parking lot, not stopping
until I made it to the street corner. There, I cast a look back at
the boy, who appeared to be stuck at the exit. One thing that
seemed true for all ghosts—they were attached to one place. If I
could get away from that place, I could get away from
them.

I’d used this trick more times than I
cared to count. And the worst part was that it always left me
feeling slightly guilty, like I’d abandoned them.

The boy took a tentative step out the
doors … and instantly began to fade. I felt bad for him, felt
horrible over the look of pure sorrow that crossed his face, and
started back toward him, but he glared at me—a tortured expression
that I recognized in myself—and disappeared.

I stared at the building for a moment,
flooded with shame. Then the sun hit the horizon and I got moving.
I wanted to go back, but that boy—whoever he was—wasn’t going to
talk anymore. Spirits didn’t like when you turned your back on
them. He was going to be staying away from me for a while, now that
I’d disappointed him. Or whatever.

As I walked home I thought about him,
though, and the look on his face. That was why I hated spirits—they
always wanted something. Attention, help, passing on of a message.
They made you feel terrible if you didn’t do it, but giving in was
just asking for trouble. I had helped one once—the first one I ever
saw. And I’d learned my lesson after that. Long story short, a very
angry dad called the cops on me for talking to his daughter about
her dead mommy. The daughter might have had tears of joy, but the
father had a very different reaction.

After that, more spirits appeared, all
wanting me to help them like I had helped their friend. I had to
ignore every ghost that crossed paths with me for a month before
they started fading away.

How they found me, I didn’t know. It
was like I was wearing some sort of GPS for spirits with unresolved
issues. My only guess was that they could sense me because I had,
for a short time, been a spirit myself, having been legally dead
for just a few minutes—the minutes when Ash made a deal for my
soul. And that was all it had been—a few minutes. I’d seen Ash
shaking hands with that man, then felt the paddles as they sent
wave upon wave of electricity through my body.

Could it be that I’d somehow crossed
over into the spirit world, and brought these ghosts … back with
me?

In the end, I’d come to
realize that they were of no use to me. They were just as lost as I
was, and didn’t have any answers. They wouldn’t help me save my
brother, or help me control the powers I’d somehow grown. Instead,
they wanted me to help
them
. So I ignored them. When I
could.

Suddenly something dark fluttered to
my right and I stopped dead in my tracks. Another spirit? I didn’t
think I could take another one. I glanced around at the empty
streets, the darkened houses. But there was nothing there, and
spirits didn’t usually hide from me. They wanted
attention.

As that thought grasped hold of me, I
felt a knot tighten in my chest. What else could it be? I took in
every tree, every bush. I could hear a car in the distance, but
aside from that it was quiet. There was no breeze to rustle the
leaves. A fox, perhaps? I held my breath and listened for a moment,
struggling to hear any movement from the shadow I saw, but there
was nothing. Deafening silence, actually. I had prayed for quiet
all day, every day, and now that I had it, it gave me a chill.
Odd.

I turned, picking up my pace. The sun
was disappearing quickly, now.

I only managed another ten feet before
I saw it again. I didn’t stop this time. It wasn’t a spirit, and as
far as I could tell there were no animals around, which was weird
and only made my heart beat faster.

Then I heard footsteps behind me. They
were quick … but definitely real. And I hesitated, coming up short
on my next step. Those weren’t the sound of ghosts walking—their
footsteps were always faint, and sounded more like shuffling, as if
their feet weren’t quite attached to the ground … to
reality.

These were definitely very solid
footsteps. Someone was following me.

NOW A NORMAL
person would just think,
Hey, someone’s walking behind me
.
But I wasn’t normal anymore. Nearly a year of paranoia kicked in,
my heart rate spiked, and I took off running. I didn’t understand
it, but something inside me knew I should run from the unknown
person following me.

Paranoia was right. The footsteps
quickened with mine, closing in on me, and then I saw another
flutter to my right—just as the last rays of the sun disappeared.
The shadow picked up speed, then disappeared into the darkness of
nightfall. It was gone.

I let out a yelp when the
mystery person dashed directly into my path and cut me off.
He—it?—came to a sudden stop, but I kept running toward it at full
speed, my brain not realizing what had happened. I was about to
collide with it.
It
, because it definitely wasn’t human. This wasn’t a person.
People didn’t blend into the night, and they didn’t move this
quickly either. Fear gripped me, and my breath froze in my lungs as
I screeched to a halt, catching the toe of my shoe on a crack. I
fell to my knees, hitting the ground hard, and the force of it
rocketed through me. My hands shot out and scraped across the
cement, my left wrist twisting painfully.

But I kept my eyes down, knowing that
I didn’t want to see what was in front of me. I had a bad feeling
in my stomach that I couldn’t explain … but then I realized that
staring at the ground wouldn’t make it go away. So I lifted my
head. And when I looked up, I swear my heart stopped.

No.

A scream caught in my lungs. Red
eyes.

Not a ghost. A woman with
bright crimson eyes and a mouth full of razor sharp teeth was
standing in front of me, grinning horribly.
Oh, Grace, please don’t pass out.
Because I wanted to. I could feel the numbness, the lightness
in my head as it began to grow heavy. A demon. I could live
millions of years, and I would never be able to wipe the red eyes
from my mind. Because they were the same eyes that had stared my
brother down nearly a year before.

What horrific irony. Ash had sold his
soul to a demon to save me, and here I was, about to be killed by a
demon myself.

I scrambled awkwardly backwards, but
that just seemed to amuse the demon. Its smile widened, making it
all the more terrifying. I had to get away—no doubt about it. I
didn’t know what had drawn it, but I wasn’t about to ask. Maybe it
had seen my Google search history at the library and thought it
would save me the trouble of hunting it down. Maybe attracting evil
things was a fun new power to add to my collection. Wouldn’t that
be fan-freaking-tastic? How had I ever thought I could deal with
summoning one of these things? This monster wasn’t like the guy Ash
had encountered, who had seemed almost human. This demon looked
more like a human and a wolf morphed together.

And the way it was staring at me, I
knew there would be no reasoning with it. There would be no
conversation about breaking a deal with another demon. “Sorry,
miss, I’m afraid you can’t kill me, as another demon actually gave
me my life.”

No. It was just going to end me and
move on with its day. And I was going to die the same way I had
lived the last year—alone.