Jericho crossed the room and poured himself a cup of coffee he didn’t want or need. The truth was that Jericho wanted Evie but wasn’t sure that he could have her. He could have Mabel but wasn’t sure that he wanted her. Neither scenario made him feel very good about himself. More than ever, he wished he had someone to explain his emotions and girls to him, to help him figure out how you knew when it was right.
“I kissed you because I wanted to,” Jericho answered after a while.
“Are you just being kind?”
“No. That’s the truth.”
“If you want to kiss me again, you can,” Mabel said. “But only if you really want to. I’m not Evie. I never will be.”
Jericho reached over and took her hand, and her stomach knotted. What did that mean? Was it brotherly affection, or some deeper passion? It was not a kiss; that much was clear. It’s over, her mind whispered. There’s still hope, her heart insisted. What was it Jericho had called it—the opiate futility of hope? Well, right now, Mabel wanted to be drunk on it.
On the couch, Ling sucked in a thin thread of air. Her fingers stiffened, then softened again.
“Is she all right?” Mabel asked mechanically.
“I think so. We should probably keep close watch,” Jericho said, breaking away.
“Of course,” Mabel said, hating that he was right, hating that she was all wrong.
In the ruin of Beach’s pneumatic train station, the growling whine was everywhere. The strange, bright things uncoiled and dropped to the dusty tracks. The way they moved—twitching and lurching, followed by lightning-quick bursts of adrenaline—was like watching wounded animals determined to survive.
“Dreamdreamhungryhungrydream…” they chorused.
They seeped out of the cracks in the walls like cockroaches. Memphis counted five, ten, a dozen at least. It was ten feet to the gate. Memphis held tightly to Wai-Mae’s bones. With the other hand, he laced his fingers through Theta’s.
“Run,” he said, and the four of them bolted across the dusty platform and burst through the gate. Behind them, the wraiths growled their displeasure.
“Which way back to the station?” Theta screamed.
“This way.” Memphis swung his light to the left and stopped short. He thrust his arm out to hold back the others, then carefully shone the beam forward again. A ghostly woman in a blue dress was caught in the hazy light. Her head whipped in their direction. She sniffed. Her upper lip curled, revealing jagged teeth.
“Don’t move,” Memphis whispered. “Be… perfectly… still.”
The girl in the blue dress took one stumbling step forward, sniffing again. She swayed unsteadily. And then her mouth opened with a shriek. Other shrieks answered, the roar of an unholy army.
Sam flicked his flashlight to the right. The long corridor appeared empty. “Other way,” he yelled, and they ran deeper into the underground.
“I don’t want to say I told you so,” Evie said, her voice bumping with the movement. “But I did, in point of fact, tell you so.”
“Save your breath,” Sam panted. “You’re gonna need it.”
Memphis glanced over his shoulder at the greenish wisps flickering between the underground arches. A pack of them was weaving toward them, jerking and twisting. Their terrible barking grunts rang down the tracks. A warning. Or a call for reinforcements.
“Watch it!” Memphis called, yanking Sam back just before his boot went under the wooden covering of the third rail.
“Thanks, pal,” a shaky Sam managed. “I coulda been cooked.”
“Don’t thank me yet. There’s miles of tunnels down here. Plenty of places for those things to hide.”
“Keep moving,” Theta insisted. “I can see a station up ahead. Gotta be Brooklyn Bridge.”
The bright lights of the station bounced before their eyes as they ran. They were close. A sound like claws clicking across a tile floor made the hair on Sam’s neck tickle. He looked up. Nothing. But just to his right, about three steps ahead, some movement caught his eye. He flashed his beam to the space between arches. Up high, a wraith hissed and scurried down the subway wall in a backbend, like a giant spider, its fingernails clacking against the tile, loud as tap shoes. It hissed again as it dropped to the tracks in front of them. A stuffed rabbit dangled from its ghostly hand.
“What. Is. That?” Theta said, stopping completely.
“It’s a kid,” Memphis said. “It’s just a kid.”
“Was a kid,” Sam corrected, backing away. “Some kind of… demon now.”