Betrayal - By Lee Nichols Page 0,37

said. “There’s that junker Focus.”

“That doesn’t count,” I said.

“It belongs to that kid who wears that green tracksuit over his uniform,” Natalie explained.

I shifted in my seat, trying to get comfortable. “You ought to flirt with him. He’s some kind of computer geek. He’ll probably end up one of those tech billionaires.”

“Oh, that guy,” Lukas said, nodding. “What about the blue Su—”

“Quiet!” Simon snapped. “Don’t you children realize where we’re going? We’re not off to the candy store. We’re headed to a cemetery where one of our own was killed. You should use this time to focus your powers. And if not, have a little reverence for a ghostkeeper who was killed in the line of duty. Get your heads on!”

We were quiet for three miles as we all contemplated Simon’s outburst. Then Natalie broke the silence. “You still didn’t say why you chose this car.”

“It gets good mileage,” Simon ground out.

It was four o’clock when we arrived at the cemetery, and shadows were lengthening over the gravestones. The snow that fell on the day of Coby’s funeral had melted, but patches of ice lurked in potholes and under drifts of brown leaves. Simon parked, and we crossed the street and stood at the wooden gates. A stone wall surrounded the graveyard, the smallest and oldest in Salem.

“There’s a lot of …” Natalie didn’t finish her sentence. She didn’t have to; we all felt the lingering ghosts vying for our attention. Old ghosts were powerful, and some of these had been around for three hundred years.

“Yeah,” Lukas said.

“Why are there so many?” I asked Simon.

“It’s a nexus, concentrated in this cemetery. That’s no doubt why Neos lured the other ghostkeeper here with the amulet. He has a lot of power in a place like this.”

“But he doesn’t know we’re here, right?” Natalie asked, anxiously.

“Of course not,” Simon said. “Nobody knew we were coming here until just now. We’re perfectly safe.”

I almost mentioned that Yoshiro had thought the same about the Knell, but the words stuck in my throat. I tried to comfort Natalie instead. “If it’s a nexus, then we’re more powerful here, too.”

“Right. So this is the plan,” Simon said. “I’ve hit a dead end with my research into Neos’s final resting place, and I’m hoping to find a new lead. We’re going to question the ghosts. I have a list and a map of the graves. We’ll start here and loop around.”

“We’re going to ask if they know where Neos is buried?” Natalie asked.

Simon nodded. “They probably won’t, but they may know about the amulet. Items such as that sometimes leave ripples in the Beyond. Maybe it’ll provide a way we can track him.”

“They’re ghosts,” Lukas said. “You really think they’ll rat out one of their own?”

“They’re not all like that,” I said. “You’re living with some of the good ones.”

Simon led us down the gravel path along the fence. I glanced up at the fading light. “Just once, I’d like to do this at noon.”

“Here,” Simon said.

Natalie examined the grave. “ ‘Tobias Smith, loving husband and father.’ ” Then she summoned him. Tobias was a young, stooped man who’d been balding before he died. I relayed Simon’s questions to him, and repeated back the unhelpful answers. Then we moved on to the next grave.

An hour and ten summonings later, exhausted and shivering, we’d circled all the way back to the wooden gates without learning anything useful.

“There’s one more place to check,” Simon said, looking up from his list. “The tomb where the ghostkeeper was murdered.”

My mind flashed on a memory of my dream, the poor, pudgy ghostkeeper whose skin had been licked away by wraiths. I glanced toward the tomb in the corner of the cemetery. Made from granite with black iron gates and gargoyle statues, it looked like the place you’d find a vampire.

The others crunched down the path toward the tomb, as I trailed behind. The evening gloom fell around us, and the cemetery felt increasingly wrong, the background murmuring of ghosts reaching a high, dissonant pitch.

No one else seemed to notice, but when I stopped to listen, I heard strained whispers though the rustling of the leaves: Run, hide, they’re coming.

I watched Natalie draw upon her power; I felt the call of her summoning. She closed her eyes and I heard three voices, stronger than the rest, beating in a steady rhythm: Feed, feed, feed.

Wraiths.

“Natalie, wait! Stop!”

But I was too late. Natalie unleashed her power, and three wraiths seeped into our world through cracks