“I need to go back,” I said. “I’ll be careful. I need to—”
His arms tightened. “She’s okay. There must be a logical explanation.”
A logical explanation for why I could see and hear Tori, and he couldn’t? Of course there was. She was dead.
“And it’s not that,” he said, as if reading my thoughts.
He lifted me onto the table and leaned down until his face was right in front of mine. “Nothing could have happened to her. Not that fast.”
“No?” I looked up at him. “She couldn’t have been grabbed by someone following us? Dragged into a hall and shot?”
The flash of terror on his face made me regret the words. He knew it could happen—to any of us, at any time, and there was nothing he could do about it, no matter how hard he tried to protect us.
We tell ourselves we’re too valuable to kill. Then Liz pops around, and we’re all reminded that she’d been one of us. Another Lyle House resident. Another genetically modified supernatural. Our friend. Now a ghost. Murdered by the Edison Group.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just—” My heart thumped so hard I couldn’t breathe. “If anything happened to—”
“It didn’t. I . . .” I could tell he wanted to say, “I know it.” But he couldn’t. The fear flickered again. Then he straightened. “This isn’t going to help. Where did you see her last?”
“I—I’m not sure. I mean, there’s no way of knowing when it was her and when it was . . .”—I couldn’t say her ghost—“not her.”
“Did you see her open the door to get in here?”
Right. That’s how I could narrow it down—when was the last time I’d seen Tori move something or be noticed by someone?
“I didn’t see her open the door,” I said. “Kids were blocking the way. The grate was closed, too. And when she was walking through the mall, she was dodging people, but no one looked at her.”
“Okay. What else?”
“On the road, a car crossed over to give her room, but it was clearly her then, because she was in my sights all the way from the house to—”
I glanced up sharply. “The abandoned house. I thought she went inside. Then I saw her running across the backyard.” I slid off the table. “We have to get to that house.”
Outside the service room, there was a second door just past the bathrooms, an exit clearly marked emergency only. Derek ushered me through it. Someone shouted behind us, but we took off running.
As we jogged, Derek kept his fingers wrapped around my upper arm. At one time, I’d have thought he was pushing me along, telling me to hurry up. I knew better now. It was part protection and part reassurance. Every time I stumbled, he’d keep me upright. Every time my breath hitched, as I thought of what might lie ahead, he’d murmur, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” and stroke my arm with his thumb.
Had I seen Tori’s ghost? I knew if I asked Derek, he’d give me a bunch of other possibilities. We were supernaturals; there were always other possibilities. But I was a necromancer. When I saw and heard someone that no one else did, it was never anything but a ghost.
And there was no question of who I’d seen. She’d looked straight at me in that shaft. Looked at me and pretended she needed help, so I’d fall into some kind of hole. I wanted to say that meant it obviously wasn’t Tori, but who was I kidding? If she somehow died in that house and blamed me for chasing her into it, might she try to hurt me back? Absolutely.
We reached the house, and I ran to the open window. Derek caught my hands and pointed at the jagged bits of glass along the sill. There was dried blood on one.
“I-is that—?”
“It’s old.” He said it quickly, but not convincingly.
He led me to the back door. There, hidden by the shadows of a sagging porch roof, he snapped the lock. When I tried to push past, he grabbed my shoulder and started stepping in front of me. Then he stopped and moved aside.
“I’ll be careful,” I whispered.
He may have let me go first—a huge act of trust for Derek— but that only meant he settled for walking so close I could feel his breath on my hair.
I picked my way through the kitchen. There was debris everywhere, everything from broken dishes to ripped-off cupboard doors. There were empty boxes too, cereal and cookies that mice and rats had devoured, leaving their droppings dotting the floor.
“About what I said earlier,” Derek began as I headed for the hall door. “About Tori. It did sound cold. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I know.”