Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions (Wicked Lovely 5.50)

“So they change into ghosts, just like that?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘ just like that.’ I gave you the simplified version,” Trip said, attaching another wire to his tricked-out calculator.

“What is that thing?” she asked.

“This—” Trip held it up proudly, “is an EMF meter. It picks up electromagnetic fields and frequencies, movement we can’t detect. The kind created by ghosts.”

“That’s how we find them,” Wes said, taking a swig from an old can of Mountain Dew. “Then we kill them.”

Edie was still thinking about that day in the garage when she smelled something horrible coming from outside. It was suffocating—heavy and chemical, like burning plastic. She rolled up her window, even though the air inside the Jeep immediately became stifling.

“Don’t you want to let some air in?” the blue-eyed boy ventured.

“I’m more concerned about letting something out.”

He waited for Edie to explain, but she didn’t. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot,” she said.

“If you believe there’s a ghost on this road, why are you driving out here all alone at night?”

Edie took a deep breath and spoke the words she had rehearsed in her mind since the moment he climbed into the car. “The ghost that haunts Red Run killed my brother, and I’m going to destroy it.”

Edie watched as the fear swept over him.

The realization.

“What are you talking about? How do you kill a ghost?”

He didn’t know.

Edie took her time answering. She had waited a long time for this. “Ghosts are made of energy like everything else. Scatter the energy, you destroy the ghost.”

“How do you plan to do that?”

Edie knocked on the black plastic paneling on her door. It was the same paneling that covered every inch of the Jeep’s interior. “Ghosts absorb the electrical impulses around them— from power lines, machines, cars—even people. I have these two friends who are pretty smart. They made this stuff. Some compounds conduct electricity.” She ran her palm over the paneling. “Others block it.”

“So you’re going to trap a ghost in the car with you and— what? Wait till it shorts out like a lightbulb?”

“It’s not that simple,” Edie said, without taking her eyes off the road. “Energy can’t be destroyed. You have to disperse it, sort of like blowing up a bomb. My friends know how to do it. I just have to keep the ghost contained until I get to their place. They’ll do the rest.”

Tommy glanced at the black paneling. “You’re crazy, you know that?” His arm wasn’t draped casually over the seat anymore, and his hands were balled up in his lap.

“Maybe,” she answered. “Maybe not.”

He reached for the handle to roll down his window, but it wouldn’t turn. “Your window’s—” He paused, working it out in his mind. “It isn’t broken, is it?”

Edie took her foot off the gas and let the car roll to a stop. “You didn’t really think I’d pick up a hitchhiker, on a deserted road in the middle of nowhere?” She turned toward the blue-eyed boy, a boy she knew was a ghost. “Did you, Tommy?”

His eyes widened at the sound of his name.

Edie’s heart felt like it was trying to punch its way out of her chest. There was no way to predict how Tommy’s ghost was going to react. Wes had warned her that ghosts could psychically attack the living by moving objects or causing hallucinations, even madness. His mom had walked off the second-story balcony of their house when Wes was in fourth grade. It was only a few weeks after she had started hearing strange noises and seeing shadows in the house. Wes’ father wanted to move, but his mom said she wasn’t going to be driven out of her house by swamp-water superstition. She didn’t believe in ghosts. Not until one killed her.

Now Edie was sitting only inches away from a ghost that had already murdered six people.

But he didn’t look murderous. There was something else lingering in his blue eyes. Panic. “You can’t stop here.”

“What?”