Sisters Of Salt And Iron

LARK

We met at the local Goodwill later that day to shop for Halloween stuff. The dance the night before had just been the beginning of what Roxi was calling “The Halloween Season.” There was a party tonight at Kevin’s because his parents were on a cruise—his parents were away a lot—and then there were a couple of ghost walks through the week that I’d probably bow out of, leading up to thte Dead Babies concert at Haven Crest on Halloween.

I’d already let everyone know what a bad idea attending the concert was, and we had all agreed to go anyway, despite the fact that ghosts from the hospital had tried to kill us. Were we mentally deranged? Probably, but Dead Babies were awesome. One of my favorite bands. Yes, enough that I’d risk going to see them at the most haunted place I’d ever visited, on the night the barrier between the realms of the living and dead was at its thinnest.

I justified it like so: I had to be there in case anything happened. It was my duty as someone who could combat ghosts to protect the concertgoers—and the band—from spectral harm. I had told my friends—and myself—so many times I almost believed it.

Bottom line—I wanted to go more than I was afraid of the ghosts. And that was stupid. No getting around it. I was the chick who went into the dark basement to find out what had made that scraping sound, armed with nothing but a pair of nail scissors. The idiot who decided to help the creepy little bare-footed, black-eyed kid who wore a tattered nightgown and stank of stale well water.

Hey, at least I owned it.

So, we were at Goodwill getting last-minute items for tonight, and also for Halloween night.

“I think you should go as Daenerys Targaryen,” Roxi remarked, holding up a pink stuffed dragon.

“Ugh,” I said, digging through a rack of dresses. “Do you know how many times I’ve been called ‘Khaleesi’ since that show started? Too many.”

“But your hair is perfect for it.” She looked genuinely upset that I didn’t jump on the idea. “And I found a dragon.”

I sighed as she wagged the toy. “Throw it over.”

She grinned and tossed it over the racks. I caught it with one hand. “It smells like puke.”

“It will wash,” she chirped.

Roxi was one of those people who were almost always happy. I could hate her for it, but I think she kept me from being too emo. She was a little shorter than me, with long dark hair, a tan complexion and big brown eyes. She said her mother was Romanian and her dad was half-black. It didn’t matter much to me, but she was gorgeous all the same. My mother was a bitch, and my father was a half-ball-less wonder. I was jealous that her parents even liked her, let alone loved her.

“I think I’m going to go as Cleopatra on actual Halloween night,” she announced, holding up a long white dress that might have been fashionable in the late ’70s. It was hideous by way of fabulous.

Her boyfriend, Gage—cute, dark-eyed, needed a haircut—bounded up beside her. “Does that mean I can be a gladiator?”

The way they smiled at each other made me turn away. PDAs were not a spectator sport as far as I was concerned.

Ben walked over. We’d been dating for almost two months, and I saw him almost every day, but I still smiled whenever I saw his face. Call me biased, but he’s one of the hottest guys in school. Funny, smart—and he knows how to kick ghost-butt. His grandmother was Korean, and she’d taught me how to make pujok—basically a protection sigil against ghosts and evil spirits. I thought she liked me, but sometimes she looked at me like she wasn’t quite sure what I was.

I got that a lot. I’m a teenage girl with stark-white hair whose mental state had been seriously questioned, and who could interact with ghosts the same as the living. I probably wouldn’t like Ben’s granny nearly as much if she just welcomed me with open arms.

“What are you wearing?” I asked, trying not to laugh.

Ben grinned and did a little twirl in front of me. “Do you like it? I might get it.”

“It” was a full-length silver fur coat that was too big for him and too short in the arms. My guy was tall and lanky, and for a former chubby kid, he seemed to have no issues with self-confidence. One of the things I liked about him was that he was comfortable in his own skin and rarely worried about what other people thought of him.

“It’s a little big,” I said. “But it’s a good look.”

“I feel sexy.”

“You smell like mothballs.”

He sniffed his shoulder and made a face. “Yeah. Who even uses those things anymore?”

I shrugged. “People against moths, I guess. I have no idea what to wear to the party.”

“You could go as Elsa,” he suggested, slipping the coat off his shoulders. “You’ve got the hair for it.”

I rolled my eyes. “Me and my damn hair.”

He hung the fur up and stepped closer. He took a piece of my hair and wrapped it around his finger. “I like your damn hair.”

Oh. When he lowered his voice like that and smiled that little smile...

“Get a room,” Mace growled.

I turned around and shot him a grin. Mace was tall with light brown hair and hazel eyes. He was gorgeous, and someone I never thought I’d be friends with, especially after he found me bleeding to death and called 911. But we were friends. In fact, he was one of my best friends, though I doubted he knew it.

He had a fedora on his head. It actually didn’t look too bad. “Who are you supposed to be?” I asked.

He made a face—like he’d bit into something sour. “Sarah wants us to be Bonnie and Clyde.”

“We’ll look fabulicious,” his girlfriend called from four aisles away. “Stop making that face.”

Mace made the face again and went back to pawing through the racks.

Suddenly, Wren popped out from between two dresses in front of me. It was so weird seeing her do that and the clothing not move. She was so real to me that it was easy to forget she was no more substantial than breath in this world.

“Haven’t you figured out what you’re going to be yet?” she demanded. “I’ve had my costume sorted out for weeks.”

I wasn’t feeling quite snarky enough to inform her that no one but me—and possibly Kevin—would be able to see it. “Yay, you.”

Ben glanced at me. “You talking to me?”

I shook my head, glancing around to make sure no one else was paying attention.

He smiled. “Hey, Wren.”

She waved, even though he couldn’t see her. “Hi!”

“You could help me look for a costume,” I told her.

Her eyes lit up. If she clapped her hands I was going to slap her. Instead, she turned around and whipped down the aisle toward evening wear. Mace shivered as she flew by. He turned to me. “Was that...?”

I nodded. “Yup.”

He grinned. “I knew it.”

My chest tightened. I looked from Mace to Ben, to Roxi and Gage, and even to Sarah. Kevin hadn’t come because he was prepping for the party, which was just as well. Each of these living, breathing people made an effort to acknowledge or be kind to Wren. They were thoughtful of her, and that meant more to me than any of them could ever know. After years of being told my sister wasn’t real, that she was only in my mind, it was so freaking good to know that not only were they wrong, but that Wren had become real—in her own way—to others.

I blinked back tears.

“Lark!” Wren cried a few seconds later. “I found it!”

Had she ever. It was a vintage pink slip-dress from the ’70s. Normally such a piece would be fairly expensive, but this one had slight stains on the front and was only five bucks.

I knew exactly what to do with it.

Half an hour later we left the store. Everyone but Ben had a plastic bag full of items. He’d bought a pair of sunglasses and that was it. He still hadn’t told me what he was going as that night, so I decided to keep my costume secret, as well.

I crossed the parking lot, swinging my plastic bag, as I laughed at a joke Gage had made. I turned to say something to him, but he was gone. They were all gone. The cars and the parking lot—the box stores that made up the rest of the plaza—everything was gone, and I was standing on cobblestones in a world where everything was muted and soft. The street I stood on seemed taken right from the pages of a BBC historical production, with gas lamps and horse-drawn carriages rattling along.

A woman in Edwardian clothing stopped on the opposite side of the street and stared at me. She looked scared. I glanced up and saw another woman peeking out a window from behind a curtain. Her mouth was open.

“Lark?”

I turned toward the familiar voice. It was Wren. She stood right beside me. “You’re not supposed to be here,” she said, taking my hand. “Come with me. Now.”

I entwined my fingers with hers and stepped toward her. My ears popped, and suddenly the other world was gone, and I was back in the Goodwill parking lot, with my sister and all of my friends staring at me in concern.

“What happened?” Ben asked, pulling me in for a hug.

“I don’t know,” I replied. I was shaking, and there was no hiding it. “It felt like I stepped into another world.”

“You did,” Wren informed me. She had a strange expression on her face. My sister wasn’t easily frightened, but she looked worried. Not just that, but she was looking at me like she didn’t quite know me. “Lark, you were in the Shadow Lands.”

I frowned at her. “I couldn’t have been.”

“Couldn’t have been what?” Roxi asked, looking from me to the empty space occupied by my sister.

“In the Shadow Lands,” I replied. “It’s impossible. Only the dead can go there.”

“You were dead,” Mace reminded me softly. “Once.”

I shook my head. “It had to have been my imagination.”

My sister stomped up to me, so close our noses were almost touching. Of course, no one else could see it. “It was real. You were between both worlds.”

Like her. Our gazes locked. I didn’t have to say it for her to understand. This was weird. And it was big.

“Are you okay?” Ben asked, giving me a squeeze.

I nodded, looking away from my sister. “It’s probably because Halloween’s so close.”

“Maybe,” Wren allowed. “Or it might be something else.”

I ignored her. “We’d better get going.”

In my pocket my cell buzzed. I had a text. I pulled the phone out of my pocket and glanced at the message.

We’re going to talk about this whether you like it or not.

I shot Wren a snotty look. She didn’t look impressed, but I didn’t care. I’d been to the Shadow Lands when I died for, like, two seconds. It felt like a lot more time there. And with the veil thinning it made sense that I’d be sensitive. Last year I was still in Bell Hill, so the meds might have kept me from experiencing the same thing then.

“Want to grab some lunch?” Mace asked us. “Mexican?”

A big plate of cheesy nachos was exactly what I needed. “Sure,” I said. And then to Ben, “Unless you need to go home.”

“No. Lunch sounds good.”

Everyone else left ahead of us. Wren said she’d meet us there. I didn’t know where she was off to, but I suspected it was the Shadow Lands. I got into the car.

Ben opened the driver-side door and slid in. He put the key into the ignition, but instead of turning it, he turned to me. “Be honest. Are you okay?”

I leaned my head back against the seat and smiled. “Yeah, I’m good.” It was mostly true. I mean, yeah, it was weird, but my whole life was weird. If I freaked out every time something strange happened, I’d spend 99 percent of my time a basket case.

He leaned over and kissed me. For those few seconds I didn’t think. I didn’t worry about anything.

Like what those two women in the Shadow Lands saw when they looked at me. Or why my sister had been afraid.

WREN

“She just didn’t look right,” the woman with the cockney accent explained. “There were something dreadful odd about her, for such a pretty girl.”

She looked odd because she was alive, but I didn’t say that. I only asked this woman—and the one who had been on the street when Lark had popped into the Shadow Lands—about what she’d seen because I didn’t want it getting around that my sister had slipped past the barrier.

It made sense that if the dead could easily cross at this time of year, then the living could, as well. It felt strange, though. I’d never heard of it happening before, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t. I wished our ancestor Emily—who had reached out to both Lark and me before—would decide to show up and give us some advice on how this living/dead twin thing worked, but we hadn’t seen her since the night she helped Lark tap into her ghost-fighting abilities.

I hadn’t had any glimpses of her sister, Alys, either—who had occasionally shown herself to me at my grandmother’s house. It was frustrating, because I felt like their appearances meant something. Shouldn’t they have moved on?

I wanted to find Emily and Alys. I wanted them to tell Lark and me why we existed. What was the reason? What was our destiny? I wanted answers. But it seemed that Lark and I were destined to wind up with nothing but an endless list of questions.

The one thing that struck me as I left the woman to wander the streets of shadow-Edwardian London, was that neither of Lark’s witnesses had remarked that she looked like me. That meant that she looked different here—maybe like how I looked when I manifested in the living world? No wonder the women had been afraid of her.

What would happen if Lark manifested here for any length of time? We spent so much time trying to make sure I didn’t cause harm in the living world with my abilities, but we’d never considered whether she could be a danger to the dead.

And why hadn’t we discussed it? I’d seen her punch a ghost. Seen her hurt a spirit. Those ones had deserved it, but what if she went after someone who didn’t? She might hurt someone, just like there was the danger of me doing harm when I manifested among the living.

I was getting ahead of myself. There was no need to get anxious. This might have been an All Hallows’ Eve aberration. Yes, that was the best way to think of it for now. If it happened again, I’d consult the Shadow Lands library.

I drifted back into the earthly realm. I spent more time among the living than I did the dead. It wasn’t completely because of Lark and our friends, but because I found the living more interesting.

The Shadow Lands was made up of bits and pieces the dead had assembled—not quite Heaven, but a more idyllic version of what their lives had been. There wasn’t the amount of emotion and drama going on that there was in the living world. Lark turned her nose up at many of the reality shows on the television, but she didn’t seem to realize that, to me, her life was a reality show! Even the simple act of shopping was interesting to someone who only had to “think” her appearance and make it so.

I ended up at Haven Crest. I didn’t wonder why—I wasn’t totally vacuous. It was obvious that some part of my mind had been thinking about Noah. Other than Lark’s realm-jumping, I hadn’t thought about much other than him all day.

It was late afternoon, and while the daylight hours had shortened considerably in New England, there was still an hour or more of daylight left. Noah wasn’t a young ghost, so there was a chance he might be about, especially if I could find the spot he haunted.

Finding another ghost wasn’t easy in a place like this. The dead recognized each other’s energy, so if I was in a house with one or two ghosts I could probably seek them out without much trouble. A place like Haven Crest, though... Well, there were so many ghosts that trying to find just one was like that old saying about needles and haystacks.

Maybe not quite that hard. I had interacted with Noah. Our spirits had brushed together. That would make it a little easier to find him once I found the right spot—just like Lark knew the scent of Ben’s soap, I would recognize Noah’s energy.

Based on the way he’d been dressed I knew he had to have died in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. There had been fewer buildings back then, and of those only the main residence and one other had been used to house patients. I knew this because, after Josiah Bent, Lark and I both wanted to make sure we knew as much about this place as we could. Haven Crest was so haunted it was practically a spiritual entity itself. That was something that needed to be watched.

I moved toward the main building, where there had been a wing for male patients and another for female. A building to the left of that, some distance away—closer to the forest and former garden—had been segregated in a similar manner, but with one difference. It had been for the wealthy patients. The wealthy white patients. I’d learned that the “colored” inmates had been divided by gender and affluence and were housed in a separate building.

Lark had tried explaining racism to me in the past, and while I understood the concept, I couldn’t wrap my mind around the sentiment behind it. People ought to be judged by their character, not their color.

Based on the fact that Noah had fair skin and had been well dressed, it was probably a valid assumption that he haunted the upper-class residence, so that’s where I went. Thankfully, this was not where Josiah Bent and his followers had haunted, because I probably wouldn’t be welcomed there by many of them. As an outsider, Dead Born and free to go wherever I wanted, I was going to be resented, regardless.

That knowledge didn’t keep me from entering the old building. Its once beautiful windows were mostly broken and boarded up. The large, double doors were locked but hung loose on rusted hinges, dirty white paint peeling. It reminded me of photos I’d seen one time Lark was browsing some internet site—photos of celebrities who had ruined their looks with drugs and alcohol. This building had been beautiful once, but it had been abandoned to the ravages of time and neglect.

I walked through those sad doors and stood in the middle of a reception area with a high, vaulted ceiling. It looked as though there had been some plasterwork on the walls at one time, but it had been pried off. Broken pieces lay scattered on the dirty hardwood floor. Not just neglected, this building had been pillaged, as well.

Vandals. Their kind had no respect for anything. How terrible it must be for those who haunted this place to see it slowly stolen away. It hurt me—offended the deepest part of me.

In response to my anger, the building cried out. To living ears it would have sounded like a low groan—creaking floors or old pipes. To me, it was an anguished wail.

Yes, Haven Crest was more than just a collection of old wood and stone.

“Wren?”

I turned my head. Standing on the stairs to my left was Noah. He looked concerned. “Is something wrong? I felt...a disturbance.”

I shook my head, but my heart was full of sorrow. “This place must have been beautiful once.”

“It was.” He continued down the stairs. He was wearing different clothes today—a white shirt and gray vest with black trousers and boots. His thick hair was tousled as though he’d been running his hands through it. He was beautiful. I just stood there and watched as he approached me.

“Would you like to see it as it once was?” he asked.

I didn’t know if seeing its former glory would make what I felt better or worse, but I knew that I wanted to see it. “Yes.”

“Take my hand.”

I slipped my hand in his, feeling the warmth of his fingers around mine. Slowly, the faded wallpaper gave way to a beautiful pale blue damask. The plasterwork reappeared as frames on the walls and bouquets of flowers in the corners of the ceiling. The wood floor gleamed, the stairs, as well, and they were covered by a strip of cream carpet with roses printed on it. Above our heads a sparkling chandelier hung, its brass chain shining. Even the reception desk was a thing of beauty. And the windows! They were flanked by pale gold velvet curtains, pulled back to let in the sunlight.

“It’s prettier than I thought,” I said, my voice a little hoarse.

“This is how I choose to see it,” Noah told me. “Rationally, I know that it’s a ruin now, and that soon it will either collapse or they’ll tear it down, but in my heart, it will always be a grand old girl to me.”

“What will you do if they tear it down?” I asked.

“I suppose I’ll have to learn to like whatever they build in its spot, or find someplace new.” He smiled, but I could tell it was forced. “Perhaps I’ll move on. Whatever happens, I suppose it shall be an adventure.”

I think I fell in love with him at that moment, watching him trying to be brave when faced with losing everything he had left in the world. Someday, everything I held dear would be in ruins, as well.

I squeezed his hand in mine, and in that moment I made a decision. I looked him in the eye and smiled. “Would you like to go to a party with me tonight?”

LARK

“Oh, my gawwwwd!” Roxi squealed. She was dressed in a Day of the Dead costume complete with elaborate face makeup and roses in her hair. “Your costume is amazeballs!”

I did a little twirl on the back step of my grandmother’s house. I was wearing the long pink slip dress I’d bought earlier that day. It was covered in fake blood—fabric paint, so I didn’t have to worry about getting red on everything. I was also wearing a “blood”-splattered long strawberry-blond wig, a tiara and a sash that said Prom Queen.

“Did you do the makeup yourself?” I asked as we climbed into Nan’s car—a purple Volkswagen Beetle with flower-shaped brake lights.

The wreath in her hair brushed the ceiling of the car. “Yeah. I watched a couple videos online first.”

I fastened my seat belt and started the engine. “What’s Gage going as?”

“Baron Samedi,” she replied. “I know it’s hokey to do the matching thing, but it was his idea.”

“I think it’s cute.” And it was, which suited the two of them.

“What’s Wren’s costume?” she asked as we pulled out onto the street.

“I’m not sure,” I replied. “She said she’d meet us there.” To be honest I thought it was really weird that she wasn’t with me now. She’d been acting a little off lately.

“Oh, hey. I meant to tell you that she showed up in a few more photos from the dance. Like, fully visible.”

“Really?” My mother used to accuse me of doing “something” to make it look like there was someone beside me in photos when we were kids. She never believed me about Wren. She thought I talked about my sister to upset her.

“Yeah, she totally photo-bombed a couple of shots. Want to see?” She started digging through her purse for her phone. The purse wasn’t much bigger than a tablet—how hard could it be to find a phone in it?

I pulled into the local middle-school parking lot. I wanted to study what Roxi had to show me, and I couldn’t do that and make sure I didn’t drive into a tree.

I turned on the dome light just as Roxi found her phone. It took her a few seconds to get into the photo album and find what she was looking for, but finally she handed me the phone.

The image on the screen was of me, Sarah, Gage and Ben dancing. Mace was out of frame. And there, just behind me, was Wren dancing with wild abandon.