Page 71 of All Her Ghosts

“I know. But they were camped halfway down the river, nothere.Not until we landed. So there’s gotta be another hole in the ghost fence somewhere, another way through the dome. Across the river maybe? Is there another bridge?”

“I don’t know.”

Bas’s face contorts. He shoots a sharp glance sideways, the movement almost ripping the earbud out of my ear. “What do you mean you don’t know?”

“I mean my intel is seventeen years out of date,” Cain snaps. “And there didn’t used to be ariverhere.”

“How could a river just appear?” Bas demands but I don’t need to ask; I know.

My mother broke the world. And when she clawed it open, cracking reality to suck its marrow and God knows what else, it bled. Of course it did. How could it do anything else after sustaining that perverse and gaping wound?

The tree line breaks, spilling us out at the bottom of another hill and into the back of a small cul-de-sac. Just a single street, really, lined with battered houses, moldy roofs caving in. Asphodel coats every yard; climbs rusty play sets; bursts from the open, dangling jaws ofmailboxes. It collects like snowdrift piles, higher than my shoulder, that must obscure abandoned cars.

Hand in hand—two teenagers and a ghost—we creep across a backyard, toward the street. In the neighboring lot, my eye catches on a small, decrepit doghouse with a stakeout chain and a little ghost light wandering the base of a tree. Sick to my churning stomach, eyes burning, I turn away. I don’t want to look, can’t face this last straw in the wreckage of my mother’s selfishness—the devastation of weather-bleached bones waiting on a back porch for a door that will never open.

Out on the main street, Cain holds up a hand. He beckons us into the shadow of a house, but I freeze, staring at a driveway two houses down. Every other car in this cul-de-sac rots under a foot of asphodel, and yet right there sits a single white Prius, parking tag hanging in the rearview mirror, and I don’t need to cross the street to read what it says.

“That’s my mom’s car,” I whisper. “She’shere.”

But before I can point—before we can hide—a different car door opens farther up the road. Boots hit the pavement.

A woman’s voice calls out, “Hello again, Persephone,” pleasant, fake-friendly. “I was hoping I’d be the one to find you. We have a lot to talk about.”

Hand in hand in the shadow of the house, we peer around its corner. Bully boys spill into the mouth of the cul-de-sac from a black SUV hidden behind a rickety sign. But weirdly, they hang back, letting the woman walk ahead, clearing corners as she passes with a casual ease that reminds me of Cain standing on my mother’s porch with his lighthouse gaze perpetually scanning.

She stops just short of my mother’s car. The picture of patience, she pastes on a smile, gentle, despite the gun in her hand.

Out of context, in a crisp black suit instead of funky scrubs and plastic clogs, my tired brain struggles to place her. Bas beats me to it. His lip curls into a sneer.

“What’s the school nurse doing here?”

CHAPTER 21

Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting

“Big God” by Florence and the Machine

The nurse smiles, all sweetness and light, like we’re having a tea party in the middle of this ghost-wrecked street instead of some kind of Wild West showdown.

“What can I say? I’m a woman of many talents.” Her eyes never leave my face. “As are you, apparently.”

Why is she so damn happy? She wants us to believe she came here to talk? Does she think we’re stupid? She has agunin her hand.

“Yeah, I bet,” I snap, voice hard. “And I bet the only reason we’re having a civil conversation right now is because you’re not sure what we can do but you know you don’t want us to do it toyou.”

Tension cords down Bas’s arm, every muscle in his body locked and ready for a fight. He inches forward, sneakers hissing in the gravel, ever so slightly in front of me. Wiggles his fingers in my hand, a silent plea to let him go. I squeeze tight, a silentno.

Something’s wrong here. I can’t think straight. My head feels filled with bees, a dull and screaming drone wheedling in through the cracks, despite the music pounding in my ears. A kind of… whispering seepsfrom the asphalt—from the nurse—and when I glance at Cain, I slap a hand out quick to hold him back too. I don’t like the way he’s watching her, head cocked as if he can hear someone calling his name, his eyes hazy and indistinct.

“Oh, you don’t need to worry,” the nurse says. “I know we had a little misunderstanding earlier, but that’s all cleared up now—”

“Misunderstanding?” Bas snarls, lurching, my fingers aching tight around his, the only thing keeping him from leaping across the heat-sick, broken pavement the barrel of the nurse’s gun still pointed at the pavement. “You killed my dad!”

The word eviscerates him. Sunlight blisters the asphalt at his feet. Paint and rust crisp away from the vehicles abandoned in every driveway, sending up an acrid stink. Fists balled, trembling with the effort of remaining inside his mortal body. Bas stays at my side, but barely, tethered only by my sweaty grip, the red earbuds binding us together. My own palms burn. Teeth clenched, determined, I hold on. I can’t risk letting him go. Not for a second. Straining at the very end of his leash, Bas keeps eyeing the nurse’s gun like a runner at his mark, gauging the distance.

At least she notices. Her face changes, that awful smile melting into something sad.

“Yes, I did see that. I’m so sorry, honey. I know it doesn’t make it feel any better, but I want you to know it was a rogue team, disobeying orders. Weneverintended for that to happen. You have my deepest condolences.” A nice apology. It’d be a better one if she actually looked sincere. But every time she tries to fold her face in lines of sincerity, it breaks on a sick eagerness she can’t quite keep from twitching up thecorners of her mouth. “We’d love to offer you a more comprehensive apology, if you’d be willing to come with us.”