Or anywhere.

Finally I was grasping what I should have understood much earlier—we brought danger to Eastlake, not the other way around.

Sabine nodded. “You don’t have to talk me into skipping school.”

I started to blink out of the hall, then turned to her again at the last second. “Oh, how do you feel?” In all the commotion, I almost forgot that she’d been poisoned only twelve hours earlier.

“Tired. But fine other than that,” she said, and I spared a moment to wonder if she’d actually admit to a weakness if she had one. Other than an unwavering devotion to Nash.

“Good. And thanks for finding me. I’ll see you as soon as I can get Emma out of there.”

“Okay.” Sabine frowned at my cardigan. “Did you change clothes?”

“Yeah. Long story. Gotta go.” I blinked out of school and into the hospital before she could ask any more questions.

The E.R. was nearly deserted, as it was most school days—Tod said the peak hours were always nights and weekends.

Invisible to all human eyes, I ran past rows of empty waiting room chairs, the lady at the check-in desk, and three different triage rooms, where nurses and techs took patients’ vital signs and typed their symptoms into computers. I jogged right through the electronic-assist door into the main part of the E.R., past the nurses’ station—a large square countertop with several work areas spaced out inside it—and made a quick round of the E.R. patient rooms, looking for Emma.

Four of the rooms were occupied, but Em wasn’t in any of them. Had she already been admitted or released? Could they possibly have done the paperwork that quickly?

When I couldn’t find her in the bathrooms or at the vending machines, I stopped in the center of the E.R. again, studying the nurses’ station. They would have the information I needed, either stored on computers I didn’t know how to access or printed in files I couldn’t pick up without freaking out people who couldn’t see me.

I’d have to look without touching anything. Or wait until no one was looking to go through the charts stacked in a vertical organizer. But someone seemed to be looking in nearly every direction. That’s the problem with a room full of people.

I entered the nurses’ station and turned in a full circle, watching the doctors and nurses all around me typing, chatting, and jotting things on forms clipped to clipboards. Because I was faking life, I’d only done the invisible-in-a-crowd thing a couple of times before—most of the time, my incorporeity was a precaution, in case someone walked in on me—and watching people talk and act like I wasn’t there felt more like a colossal prank perpetrated by the in-crowd than a supernatural ability.

I was visually scanning some random form over a nurse’s shoulder when anothernurse—Anne, according to her name tag—sat next to her. “You missed all the excitement,” the first nurse—Gina—said.

“Another eighty-year-old nudist?”

Gina laughed as I moved to the right, wishing I could open a folder on the desk in front of her. “No. Remember the girl who came in right before you went to lunch? Ambulance brought her from Eastlake?”

I froze. They were talking about Emma.

“The mumbler? Yeah. Dr. Cohen ordered a psych evaluation right before I left. Did she get it?”

“She got more than that. You know Claudia transferred here from Lakeside, right?” Gina said, and Anne nodded. “Well, she recognized the girl from this morning as a psych patient. Get this—the girl was admitted to Lakeside  under another name nearly two years ago. She hardly said a word the whole time she was there, then, several weeks ago she just disappeared from a locked ward. They have no idea how she got out. All the exits were locked and video-monitored, and no one saw her leave. Just poof, like Houdini.”

“Weird. They take her back?”

“Yeah. The psych ward took her off our hands fifteen minutes ago. Her parents are on the way.”

Crap! Em was at Lakeside. Next to the Netherworld, the mental health ward was my least favorite place in either world. Yet somehow, it had become my afterlife’s version of Rome.

All roads led to Lakeside.

Chapter Eighteen

My skin began to crawl the moment I blinked into the dayroom on the adolescent floor of the Lakeside mental health unit. The psychiatric unit was associated with the hospital but was a separate building. A beast all its own.

I’d been there as a visitor—an invisible, unauthorized visitor—twice and made it out just fine both times, but on this third visit, as on the other two, memories of my involuntary residence at Lakeside overshadowed everything else. I was only a resident for a week, but that was one of the worst weeks of my life.

After a quick glance around to make sure no one could see me, I headed into the nurses’ station, an enclosed, locked room with windows set into the top half of the walls—very different from nurses’ stations in the main hospital. A room chart hung on the rear wall, the only part that didn’t overlook the rest of the floor, but Em’s name wasn’t on it yet. Neither was Lydia’s. She evidently hadn’t been there long enough to be penciled in. But the chart showed two empty rooms on the girls’ wing—surely she was in one of those.

I headed out of the nurses’ station, through the dayroom, past the dining room, and into the girls’ hall, trying my best to ignore the residents. And not to notice the familiar faces of several girls who’d been there when I was a resident almost two years earlier.