Page 57 of All Her Ghosts

Slowly, Bas relaxes. He slumps into his seat, tips his head toward the window so no one will see, glancing at me from the corner of his eye.

“You’ve got a plan?”

In the back of the diner, beside a kitschy arrow pointing out the bathrooms, glows a green emergency exit sign. Swallowing hard, I nod.

“It’s not agreatplan,” I admit. “But it worked last time.”

CHAPTER 17

Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting

“The Flood” by Katie Melua

I would have preferred something more complicated. Heck, I’d settle for somethingnew. But we don’t have time for complicated or new—only something that works—so what the hell, here we go, Skipping School Part 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Bas slides out of the booth, heading toward the back of the diner. He passes the emergency exit for the men’s bathroom with his head down, half his face hidden behind his gray curls, nose in his phone and pretending to text. I aggress my poor pancakes, smashing strawberries into bloody smears, cutting patterns with the edge of my fork. I eat as much as I can, shoveling sawdust mouthfuls I can’t taste past the salty drone of panic welling in my mouth, the ocean shoving at my ribs. After a while, counting off the minutes in my head, I push my plate away, lean my head against the cool glass of the window like I’ve got a headache.

Closing my eyes, I slip into my party trick. Without meat to muffle the sound, my ocean roars, dogging my silent footsteps across the diner. Sound bombards me from all corners—people laughing, cars pulling in,a train rumbling in the distance. I force myself to focus, concentrating on my goal.

The alarm box sits above the door, higher than I can reach, but wires run through the wall under a covering of PVC. Shaking out my hands, I bounce on my toes, psyching myself up. Waiting.

To my right, Bas shoves the bathroom door open as far as it will go, handle clacking against the white tile wall.Now.

Lunging forward, I grab the wires. The alarm barks a single startled yelp before its electricity floods away, down my arm, straight into my brain, a blue raspberry migraine. My outline hazes, swelling, billowing up and into the hallway. My vision sparks; still I hold on. The power line surges, lights flickering in the diner, but more energy floods the line, replacing it faster than I can drink it. It’s not enough. Our plan won’t work if I can’t short the system. Biting down panic, I wedge my whole arm deeper into the wall, following the circuit down, flowing into the cement foundation, the ground beneath. I become massive. Vast and strange, I bloom from my abandoned body, swelling through the roof, and I can seeeverything.

There in the distance, cradling the massive flea market field, intersecting ley lines stir far beneath the sleeping soil. Their awareness pulses under the dirt, a massive, ancient eye blinking awake.

Looking at me.

Hell is where we are, Bas said and he’s not wrong—the dead, the asphodel, hell creeping in our footprints. Hell is empty and all her ghosts are here. And that knowledge—thatresponsibility, an overwhelming surge of grief-loss-fear, drives me forward. The ley line stirs, reaching back.

Distantly, I taste copper. My faraway nerve endings scream, fingernails gouging the table in a quickly failing attempt to keep myself upright. I glance down at my body, propped against the window and slumping fast. A worsening tremor climbs its—myspine, forehead shuddering off the glass, and I realize—Ican’t. Somehow, I know my body won’t survive a brush with the ley line. And I don’t know if I should still care about that, if I have a right to, but it scares me enough I find my humanity again.

Seizing on that bright shard of panic, that glimmer of my small teenage self, I jerk backward. My god body screams in protest, melting like a wicked witch, every fiber of my un-being aflame. Straining, I drag myself out of the ground, haul myself out of the sky, and slap one burning palm to the alarm box. With a push, a surge, I fry its circuits.

Just as the lights wink out, Bas leans sideways into the emergency exit, hoodie muffling theclickof the bar depressing, and slips outside without even an electronic cough to betray him. In the door’s closing gap, his back flickers between an auction house and a staff building and disappears.

The bathroom door completes its arc, settling shut with a rattle that muffles the final sound of Bas’s escape. But before I can drag myself back into my body, figure out how to shave myself down into something small and mortal-shaped again, a waitress swings around the corner, way too close to my party trick for comfort.

“Oh, it got cold in here,” she says, shivering. “Let me check the heat.”

She aims herself at the tiny back corridor my soul is standing in and my eyes snap down her trajectory, the furnace controls smack between the emergency exit and the men’s restroom. Oh no, oh shit, I can’t let her touch me—I don’t know what would happen. But time warps around meand I’m stuck, staring stricken at the finite spark of her soul shivering against the bonfire bulk of my distorted divinity. I can’t stop remembering the way Mr. Snider’s soul burned against the back of my fingers as I peeled ghosts away.

My hands tremble. In that moment, I’m wildly grateful to remember I have hands at all.

It would be so easy,too easy, to break something—someone—irreparably.

Lightning crashes into my ocean, a bright-sharp current of fear. I close myself, snap off the projector, and back into my skin.

Hands clenched to stop the tremors, fingers tingling and numb, I take a breath before haltingly pulling two twenties from Cain’s wallet. Still swollen with electricity, wedged crooked inside my skin, it takes me a long minute to figure out the trick of havingfeetagain. I work myself standing by increments, fussing with my bag to hide the fact I can’t be sure my burnt-out knees will hold me. At last, I wander over to the counter, schooling my face carefully flat.

I ask the hostess, “Can I pay here?”

My breath snags in my chest. I grip my carpetbag hard against my side, cross my fingers around the strap.

Don’t notice me, I whisper in my head.I’m a completely different girl. Look, I’m not even smiling.

“Sure, honey, let me just get your table number.” She glances over my shoulder at our abandoned plates, long fingernails clacking on the computer screen.