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My one hope at that moment was not to get freeze-dried by a wraith. Silently thanking my parents for the pendant, I watched as Vic opened the door to the attic stairs and started to climb. I took a couple of deep breaths before I followed him.
The Woodsons’ attic was the only messy part of the house. The clutter was nicer than in most attics, I suspected. A blue-and-white Chinese vase sat on a dusty desk as wide as a bed and probably almost a hundred years old. A dressmaker’s dummy wore a jacket of yellowing lace and an old Edwardian ladies’ hat still jaunty with plumes. The Persian rug underfoot looked genuine, at least to my uneducated eye. Although the air smelled musty, it was a nice sort of musty, like old books.
“I like it up here,” Vic said. His face was more serious than usual. “This is probably my favorite place in the whole house.”
“This is where you feel comfortable.”
“You get it, huh?”
I smiled at him. “Yeah, I get it.”
“Okay, let’s just sit down here and see if she shows.”
We sat cross-legged on the Persian rug and waited. My nerves reacted to every creak of the wood, and I kept looking nervously at the one small window behind the dressmaker’s dummy. The panes hadn’t frosted over.
“I’m going to give you the cash, instead of Lucas,” Vic said as he played with the shoelaces of his Chucks. “I’ve got about six hundred dollars on hand—and you’re taking it all. Usually I’d have more, but I just bought a new Stratocaster.” He hung his head. “I feel stupid, blowing that much money on a guitar I can hardly play. If I’d known you guys were going to need it—”
“You couldn’t have known. Besides, it’s your money to spend however you want. It’s good of you to share it with us.” I frowned, momentarily distracted from the suspense of waiting for the ghost. “Why give it to me instead of Lucas?”
“Because Lucas would probably refuse to take more than a hundred or so. Sometimes he’s too proud to admit he needs help.”
“We’re not proud.” I remembered jumping the subway turnstile with some embarrassment. “We’re way too screwed for that.”
“Lucas is always going to have a pride thing going on. Always. You’re the reasonable one.”
My lips twitched. “I wish I could tell him you said that.”
“He knows,” Vic said. “The two of you make a good team.”
I remembered the night before and felt my cheeks turn pink. “Yeah,” I said softly. “We do.”
A grin spread across Vic’s face, and for one horrified second I thought he’d somehow been able to tell what I was thinking. But that wasn’t why he was smiling. “Do you feel it?”
The chill in the air swept around me. I hugged myself. “Yeah. I do.”
No ice crystals formed. No frost carved out faces against the window. Nothing visible appeared. I simply knew that a second ago, Vic and I had been alone. Now something was with us. Someone.
At first, I was confused. Why wasn’t this as violent and scary as the other ghostly manifestations I’d seen? Wraiths didn’t gently creep into the corners of rooms; they stabbed their way in with blades of ice. That was the way it had always happened at Evernight Academy—
Wait. The school had been specially built to repel ghosts; the iron and copper the wraiths despised were built into the school’s walls and beams. Although the wraiths had been able to force their way in, that had been difficult for them. Were the bizarre manifestations of ghostly power I’d seen before—the frozen stalactites and rippling blue-green light—evidence of that struggle? Maybe in a place like this, an ordinary house, the wraiths didn’t create effects so dramatic.
“Hey there,” Vic said cheerfully. “This is my friend Bianca. She’s going to hang out in the wine cellar for a while with Lucas, also a friend. They’re fantastic; you’re going to love them.” He could have been introducing us at a party. “They were just kind of nervous, because Binks here has had some ghost issues before. But nothing personal, okay? I wanted to make sure you guys would be cool.”
There was no reply, of course. It seemed to me that the light was a little brighter in that corner of the room, maybe a little bluer, but the difference was almost too subtle to discern.
Then I saw her.
Not with my eyes—not that kind of sight. It was more like when a memory comes back to you so powerfully that you can’t even see what’s in front of you any longer, because the images in your head are so vivid. The wraith was in my mind, the same one from my dreams—one of those I had seen at Evernight Academy last year. Was that Vic’s ghost? Another? Her short, pale hair seemed almost white, and her face was sharp.
You might as well stay, she said. Not like it matters.
Then the vision was over. Startled, I blinked my eyes a few times, trying to center myself. “Whoa.”
“What happened?” Vic looked around the room, like he might be able to see something. “You went all spacey for a few seconds there. Is everything okay?”
What had the wraith meant by that message? I already knew that I didn’t understand her very well.
Yet I didn’t feel the same kind of fright I’d known after every other encounter with a wraith. This one had shown no signs of hostility, hadn’t made any demands like stop or ours or anything like that. Either she liked Vic as much as he liked her and would leave us alone for his sake, or my obsidian pendant was a definite safeguard.
