Betrayal - By Lee Nichols Page 0,53

told him the story, from when Neos attacked me as a child, to Coby’s death at Redd’s Pond. “And here’s the thing, Harry. I summoned Coby back. He’s a ghost, sitting right next to you.”

There was a gasp behind us, and I turned to see Sara. From the look on her face, she’d heard most of what I’d said.

“What did you do?” she said. “You just disappeared. And now you’re saying Coby’s a ghost—”

“He’s right here, Sara,” Harry said sarcastically, waving his arm through the air beside him, where it went right through Coby. “You just have to believe.”

“No, you don’t,” I said, removing my gloves and standing behind Coby.

You ready? I asked him.

For what? Are you going to hurt me?

Not you, I said, and pushed my hands into his chest.

Back at the mausoleum, when he’d dived through me to break the siren’s spell, Coby had shimmered into visibility for a moment. Simon thought that because I summoned Coby—and because I’m me—we were linked. Just as Neos and I were linked through my blood, Coby was part of me, part of my energy.

And unlike any other ghost—the house ghosts or Edmund—when Coby’s spectral form intersected with my real one, we established an interference pattern. Which made him visible.

For a few seconds, my fingers felt no worse than freezing—then the pain started. It was like holding my palms on a hot stove. Waves of agony passed from my hands into my arms. I clenched my jaw and didn’t move. I used just enough compelling energy to prevent Coby from slipping away to save me the pain.

“What the hell?” Sara said.

“Is that …” Harry dropped the bottle of vodka to the ground. “Is that … what is that?”

Coby began to glow, his skin and clothing taking a solid presence, his melancholy expression appearing to Harry and Sara.

Harry suddenly looked from my trembling hands directly into Coby’s eyes. A look of wonder and joy crossed his face. He opened his mouth, then closed it again without saying anything.

“I can’t,” I said, between gritted teeth, “stand this much longer.”

Sara stepped toward Coby, her arms open for an embrace, but Coby raised a hand to stop her.

Say something, I told Coby. See if they can hear you.

“Everything Emma says is true.” His voice reverberated across the roof. “I love you both. Stop hurting yourselves. Live your lives the way I’d want you t—”

The pain overcame me, and I released my compulsion on him and jerked my hands away. Except unbinding myself from Coby wasn’t so simple: a backlash of power blasted from the spot where we touched, knocked me on my butt, and made Coby fizzle into nothingness.

“Emma!” Sara bent next to me. “My God, your hands!”

I looked at my hands, then quickly away. They were a livid red, puffy and swollen, with blisters already forming.

Sara clasped me by the wrists and helped me to my feet. “We have to get you to the hospital.”

“But Coby—did you see? Do you believe me?”

Harry patted the place where Coby had been. “ ‘There are more things in heaven and earth …’ ”

“Harry!” Sara scolded. “Now’s not the time for Shakespeare. Help me with Emma. Look at her hands.”

He looked, then blinked. “Good Lord! That’s one nasty case of phantasmagorical squirrel pox.”

“Did you see him?” Sara said, suddenly smiling again. “Did you see him?”

“Figures he’d make such an offensively good-looking ghost,” Harry said, in mock disgust. “But we have to take care of the living.”

And to underscore the point, he burped vodka in my face.

Sara peeled out of the school parking lot in her BMW. I looked outside instead of at my throbbing hands as she sped along the narrow village streets to the hospital on the outskirts of town. My breath left steam on the inside of the car window.

“This is insane! How can Coby be a ghost?” Sara glanced in the backseat where Harry was sprawled. “Is he here now?”

“No,” I said. “Can you turn off the heat? The hot air hurts the burns.”

“Oh God, I’m sorry. What happened to your hands?”

“I get burned if I touch ghosts for too long.”

She let out a puff of air. “I just, I can’t … he’s been watching us, hasn’t he? I felt him. I thought I was fooling myself.”

“He’s been messing with my playlists,” Harry slurred. “I keep finding his favorite songs cued.”

“One day, I came home and found a whole stack of books on my bed,” Sara said. “Stuff he gave me over the years.”

I smiled. “He