Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions (Wicked Lovely 5.50)

“No need to be nervous.” I felt bold enough to tease him. “No dead bodies in there anymore.”

“Nothing but dust, now.” Giovanni’s mournful expression reminded me what this place used to be. Now it had become a stop on the standard tourist routes, with school bus trips tromping through every day and a souvenir shop nearby. Once, though, it was a secret cemetery where people came to hide their martyrs and hope for miracles. I looked up into the dark chambers above us and felt a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold. What I felt was wonder—the emotion I’d been waiting to feel in Rome, but that had evaded me. Until Giovanni.

I smiled at him and whispered, “Thank you.”

“Thank you,” he said. “For finding me. I have waited so long.”

“Waited?”

“No one sees me. Only you see me.”

“Giovanni, we only just met—” I edged through the archway, with a glance over my shoulder. I expected him to follow me, and he did.

What I didn’t expect was for him to walk through the wall.

Straight through the stone wall.

I didn’t imagine it. It wasn’t a trick of the light. Giovanni really walked through the stone. “How did you do that?” My voice was too loud; I could hear the echoes in the stone chambers, and several people turned back toward me in irritation.

Audrey, in particular, looked put out. “Who are you talking to?” she muttered. “You’ve been ranting to yourself all morning. Did Cairo, like, infect you with weirdness?”

I pointed at Giovanni, who stood right in front of her, where she couldn’t possibly miss him. He had an apologetic look on his face. Then I realized that our shadows were all outlined sharply against the stone wall—everyone but Giovanni’s. The light shone right through him.

When our eyes met again, Giovanni nodded. “You are the only one who has seen me since I died.”

I screamed because I couldn’t do anything else, louder and louder, until someone turned out the lights.

What happened next—I couldn’t say. To me it was only confusion. I must have fainted, because the next thing I knew, I was lying on the sun-heated grass outside, Rome’s summer light nearly blinding me, Mrs. Weaver almost panicking, Marvin trying to get me to drink water out of his squeeze bottle. None of it made any sense until I saw my brother.

Cairo knelt by my side and took my hand. None of the instability I’d seen last night, or the insecurity I’d seen this morning, was visible now. Even when my brother had trouble being strong enough to take care of himself, he could be strong for me. “She needs to rest; that’s all. Just put us in a taxi back to the hotel,” he said. “I’ll see that she gets some sleep.”

Mrs. Weaver looked around, as if she wanted someone else to tell her what to do. But there weren’t enough adults on this trip, and she had about another twenty minutes to get the rest of the group back on the tour bus for the afternoon trip to the Castel Sant’Angelo. That, plus Cairo’s steadiness—his apparent recovery from last night’s upset—must have convinced her. “Don’t set one foot outside the hotel,” she said. “When we get back at six, I expect to see both of you waiting for us.”

“We will.” I would have said anything to get out of there.

Only when Cairo and I were truly alone—me flopped in exhaustion across my hotel bed, and him sitting yoga-style on Audrey’s—did we speak to each other. “What happened?” he said.

“I was talking to this guy, Giovanni, but . . . he wasn’t real.”

“What do you mean, not real?”

“He didn’t have a shadow. Nobody else could see him. And he said—he said I was the only person who’d seen him since he died.” I clutched the cover on my bed into a knot between my fingers. “That can’t be real, right?”

Only after I said the words did I realize—I didn’t have to tell Cairo the truth. I could’ve pled sunstroke or dizziness or something else and denied what had happened to me. But I never lied to him; it hadn’t occurred to me to start now.

Instead of calling the nearest psychiatrist, Cairo remained by my side. He even smiled. “It all makes sense now.”

“What makes sense?”

“Don’t you get it? I wondered about this before, but . . . when it was just me, I couldn’t be sure. Now I am. We’re psychic.”

“Psychic?”

“Or . . . talented, somehow. I don’t know the right word for it. But I have moments when I can hear people’s thoughts, and you can see the dead. We’re twins; I guess it makes sense that if it was happening to me, eventually it would happen to you too. Maybe it’s the . . . family inheritance. Something like that.”

I wanted to tell Cairo to stop talking about hearing people’s thoughts, just like I had the night before, but I couldn’t, and not just because I had begun experiencing something even stranger. I wanted to go back in time to the night before and not be such a bitch to Cairo, to come through for him the way he came through for me.

Most of all I wanted to go back to the life I’d had just this morning, where fitting in seemed possible. If Cairo was right, then I would never fit in. My brother and I really were freaks, and we’d be freaks forever.