He was baiting Balthazar, like he always did, but the sting in the words was gone. Their old rivalry had become no more than a reflex for them.

Balthazar ran his finger along the wall of the wine cellar, tracing an irregular shape—movement without purpose. “You said Black Cross tracked e-mail, too.”

“Yeah, but I can at least be sure Mom will get the e-mail. If she knows something—maybe even if she doesn’t—she’ll come.”

Then Lucas shivered, and his eyes narrowed. “You feel that?”

He knows me! Lucas knows I’m here!

“Yes.” Balthazar turned to search the room, and I hoped against hope that he’d catch a glimpse of me. But his gaze traveled past the spot where I felt myself to be. “I think she’s back.”

“It’s definitely Bianca,” Lucas said, after a pause.

“I agree. It—it feels like Bianca. And that perfume she used to wear sometimes, the stuff with the gardenias—”

“Yeah.” Lucas glanced over at Balthazar, obviously not thrilled that somebody else could recognize the scent I’d worn. But he seemed more relieved than angry. Maybe the most important thing for Lucas now was having someone who could convince him that the haunting was real, and not evidence that he was going crazy.

“Is it any consolation?” Balthazar asked quietly. “Knowing that something of her lives on?”

“What do you think?”

Balthazar sighed. “No, of course not.”

“I want her here.” Lucas slumped forward onto the table. “I keep thinking, if I want it bad enough, if I just figure out how, I can undo everything that’s happened and go back to when she’s safe. Like this can’t possibly be for real.”

“I remember that feeling.” Balthazar lifted his head and stretched his shoulders, grimacing as though it hurt. “After Charity—after what I did to her—I wanted it not to have happened so badly that it seemed impossible I couldn’t make it right. I couldn’t make myself believe that the universe could work so differently from the way it should work. Obviously, I know better now.”

Lucas frowned. I realized what he was going to say. No, no, Lucas, don’t, you remember what this does to him, don’t!

“Charity’s in town,” Lucas said.

So much for telepathy.

Balthazar straightened in his chair. “You’ve heard rumors, found evidence of the tribe—”

“No, we got kidnapped by the tribe about a week before Bianca—about a week ago.” Lucas swallowed hard, then kept going. “Charity was hot to turn Bianca into a vampire. She had some stupid idea that it would make you and her and Bianca one big happy undead family.”

“She was going to kill Bianca?” Balthazar looked so wounded, so disappointed in her. Despite the ample evidence that Charity was a psychopath, he still believed in his sister and loved her as much as ever. His faith would have been touching, I decided, if it hadn’t been so willfully blind. “You rescued her, though.”

Lucas shook his head. “The ghosts did that.”

“The wraiths saved you?”

“That’s what it seemed like at the time.” Lucas’s gaze became more distant. “Now I see it, though. What they were really doing was making sure Bianca would die when they wanted, the way they wanted. So they’d get their prize. If Charity had done it, she’d have been doing us a big favor.”

“I told you before, being a vampire isn’t the same as being alive.”

“It beats being a ghost, though, doesn’t it?” Lucas pushed back from the table, too angry with himself to sit still. “If Bianca were a vampire, she’d still be here. She’d have her friends back, and she could go see her parents, and—nothing would have changed.”

Balthazar’s expression darkened, nearly to anger. “Everything would have changed for her. And you know that.”

“I could touch her,” Lucas whispered. “She would be here. I’m never going to touch Bianca again.”

Never? Really never? The sorrow of it overwhelmed me. Then the kitchen suddenly looked very misty, became very far away. No, not again!

The blue foggy nothingness swallowed me once more. I struggled against it, but I had no fists to fight with, no feet to plant firmly upon the ground. All my will seemed to count for nothing. In my misery and desperation, I felt as frightened and bewildered as a lost child crying for her parents.

And then I wasn’t in the mist any longer.

Instead, I had appeared at Evernight.

I glanced around, trying to understand what this could be. I knew it wasn’t a memory because I was sitting on top of the gargoyle outside my bedroom window—not something I’d ever done before. It didn’t feel like a dream, either, though I couldn’t guess what wraiths’ dreams felt like, if they even had them.

No, weird though it was, the most logical guess was that I’d somehow just transported myself back to Evernight Academy. Maybe my afterlife assignment was to haunt Mrs. Bethany or something.

Peering downward, I saw the gargoyle’s scowl. Had I bruised his dignity by perching on top of his head?

For the first time since Vic’s attic, I had a definite sense of physical form. I could even see my feet dangling past the gargoyle’s claws. So I pressed my hands against the window glass, mostly just to do something with my hands, but also in hopes of peering inside.

When my fingertips touched the glass, frost flickered across the surface. I watched the tendrils spread in featherlike patterns, completely covering the pane. So much for snooping about what was going on in my old bedroom, but the effect was kind of cool.