Maxie nodded.

Ugh—a wraith. I’d learned to hate and fear the wraiths during my last year at Evernight Academy. As far as I could tell, all they did was frighten and torment people. The one in Raquel’s house had been a true monster. Now I was one of them. The revulsion I felt cut me deeply; it was like it would’ve been better to be nothing at all. For the first time, I truly understood Lucas’s resistance to becoming a vampire. Turning into something I’d never meant to be—never wanted to be—meant losing something important about myself, maybe losing myself entirely. He’d seen that all along.

Despite my dying hopes, I had to ask: “And there’s—there’s no way back? To being alive, I mean.”

“Oh, yeah, it’s easy as pie.” Maxie smirked. “You just snap your fingers. That’s how come I didn’t change back to being human years ago.”

“You don’t have to be sarcastic.”

“True. I don’t have to. I threw that in at no extra charge.”

Maxie had been the wraith who had attempted to kill me at school. I now realized that might have been the high point of our relationship. Then I thought about that for a second. “Wait—I saw you at Evernight Academy. Repeatedly. How could you be there when you were haunting this house?”

Like it was the most obvious thing in the world, Maxie said, “Vic, of course. I’m connected to him, and he traveled to Evernight. From there, I was able to contact you.”

“You’re Vic’s ghost.” I remembered how fond he’d been of Maxie. Obviously he hadn’t interacted with her very much.

“Why don’t you just appear to him outright?”

“It’s difficult to appear to the living. Those two guys downstairs—”

“Lucas and Balthazar.”

“Lucas I knew, but not the vampire. They’re hot, by the way. And you had them both on the string? Nice job.”

I ignored that comment. “You don’t talk like somebody who lived ninety years ago.”

“I’ve spent the past seventeen years hanging out with Vic.”

“That would explain it,” I muttered.

She continued, “Well, the guys downstairs—you can appear to them because you seem to be powerfully emotionally connected to them both. That usually helps. Even then, it’s usually not a sure thing. With Vic—” Maxie hesitated, and I realized that this subject was delicate for her, though she evidently didn’t want me to see it. “I didn’t meet him until years and years after I died. He grew up in this house.”

“And he used to read stories to you, when he was little,” I said.

“He told you that?” She didn’t quite know how to keep talking, after that. If ghosts could blush, I suspected she’d be brilliant pink. “Well. Yeah. So, maybe I could materialize for him now. But at this point, I think it would scare Vic.” More quietly, she added, “I don’t want him scared of me.”

“You didn’t worry about scaring me,” I said angrily. “You appeared to me at Evernight—a lot of you did—and you frightened me out of my wits every time. You nearly killed me twice, and one of those times was definitely on purpose. So forgive me if I don’t think you’re actually that softhearted.”

She looked angry. “But you were ours! You were always ours!”

“Stop saying that!” I wished I could’ve hit her, but I suspected my hand would whoosh right through her incorporeal body, which would both be unsatisfying and deeply creepy.

“It’s true!” Her blue eyes blazed. Maxie was obviously somebody who could not be pushed. “You were born to be a wraith! And not just any wraith but one of the pure ones. Okay? You’ve got it good. You’re strong. Your power can help the others. The wraiths need you, and your parents wanted to go back on their word and steal you from us.”

“First of all, giving a person another choice isn’t stealing.”

Maxie cocked her head. “But your parents didn’t give you that choice, did they?”

“Neither did you, so stop acting high and mighty about it.” My mind whirled from all the new facts I had to process. “One of the—pure ones? You mean, one of the children born to vampires, one the wraiths created, right?”

“About time you caught on.”

Maxie could tell me a lot, I realized; she offered the answers I’d waited for my whole life. But she wasn’t ever going to be a friend. For her, I suspected, I was a means to an end.

To what end?

“Other ghosts need—ghosts like me,” I said. When Maxie nodded, I continued, “To help them do what exactly?”

“You make us stronger. You help us materialize, so we can connect with the world again.” Maxie drifted along the length of the attic. Her feet didn’t touch the floor, which startled me, although I couldn’t have said why. “Stop with the self-pity and imagine what it would be like, months and years and centuries of only that blue mist. That’s how it is for some of us. The ones who get lost like that—they’ll do anything, anything to take form again. Sometimes they can only do it by attaching themselves to people’s fear and making it worse. But most wraiths want another choice. Another way. You can give them that.”

I remembered the ghost who had tormented Raquel for so much of her life. Had hurting her been his only way to escape from a prison of mist? Was he one of the wraiths who had made the wrong choice?

Maxie added, “When we’re around you, a lot of us, we can do many things we wouldn’t be able to do alone. Like, all of us were able to appear to you at Evernight, even though we had to push through the barriers. You weren’t a full wraith yet, but that power was still inside you.”

“So, basically, I was born and died so you guys could have some extra batteries.” How was that news supposed to make me feel better? “I don’t have to help any of you. I’m going back to Lucas.”

“Will you just wait? Please?”

Maxie faded almost to transparency, and in the few shadows of her face that I could still discern, I could see how hurt she looked. After almost a century in Vic’s attic, she was probably lonely. And maybe she’d been dead so long that she’d forgotten how terrible it was. My pity didn’t outweigh my caution, though.

“If you need a friend,” I said slowly, “you have to act like one.”

The attic, and Maxie, disappeared. This time, the fog hardly seemed to close around me before I found myself back where I wanted to be—with Lucas.

In the blink of an eye, I had returned to the wine cellar, where Lucas and Balthazar sat at the small table. They looked even more exhausted than they had before. Lucas leaned against the green wall, stubble shading his angled jaw. The dark circles beneath his eyes made it look as if he’d been beaten up. Next to him, Balthazar leaned his forearms on the table, and his head drooped forward.

Neither of them could see me, apparently. I was so happy to see them that I couldn’t even be upset about my invisibility.

My hearing kicked in mid-sentence, as Balthazar said, “—phone call, maybe, or a letter. That might be a smarter move.”

Lucas shook his head. “The cells move around too much to be sure of a letter, and she lost her cell phone during Mrs. Bethany’s attack. Four hundred years old, and you never bothered learning anything about the guys who hunt you?”

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.