heel, which slid open to reveal a mouthpiece.
“Bennett Stern,” he answered in a spylike voice. “We’re on the train now. We’ll arrive at six o’clock.”
He flipped the heel closed and turned to me, grinning.
“You were talking on your shoe phone,” I said. “To headquarters! Where’d you get that?”
“Off a dead KAOS agent in East Germany.”
I couldn’t help myself: I hugged him, then buried my face in his neck. I breathed in the scent of him, savoring every second. Then pressed my lips to his skin and he gasped.
“I’m sorry,” I said, pulling away.
“I’m not.”
He leaned closer and kissed me. The train trembled and my heart beat faster. My eyes closed and I lost myself in the sweetness of it. We kept our hands to ourselves, like if only our lips touched, then maybe everything would be okay. A false hope, but it made it the sexiest kiss ever, feeling nothing except his lips on mine.
When I regained my sanity, I turned my head to end the kiss, but that just gave him access to my ear. He nibbled. I melted. Eons later, when I rediscovered my bones, I stood shakily.
“I, um, I’m gonna …” I fumbled for my bag. “I think I should sit somewhere else.”
With his hands gripping the chair rails, he nodded.
I stumbled over him and found an empty seat, four rows back, next to the window. I leaned my head against the glass and watched the world outside blurring into grayness. The hours passed, and I wondered how much longer we could go on like this. This wasn’t some unrequited crush where you didn’t know how the boy felt, where if you threw yourself at him, he might recoil. I knew exactly how Bennett felt, and he knew exactly how I felt. We wanted each other, plain and simple.
Okay, maybe not so simple. But I couldn’t allow myself to think that there wasn’t some solution, and I spent the rest of the train ride trying to figure it out.
As we pulled into Penn Station, Bennett slid into the seat beside me. “Tell me it’s worth it,” he said. “Tell me this is going to be over soon, and we can be together.”
He’d never asked me for reassurance before, not like that. I wanted to comfort him, tell him that everything would definitely be okay. But I owed him the truth.
“It’s not just your sister, Bennett,” I said. “It’s not just finding Neos and killing him.”
“What is it, then?” he asked.
As the train squealed to a halt, I looked into his eyes. “It’s you. The you I fell in love with is a ghostkeeper. That’s the only you there is. How can I ask you to give that up?”
“I want to,” he said. “For you.”
But I just shook my head, and we gathered our bags as the other passengers started to exit. I followed Bennett through the station and onto the street. The air was cold and a grim sky peeked between the looming buildings.
Moments later we were in a taxi, heading downtown.
The avenues of Midtown started to narrow, and the taxi turned into a cramped neighborhood of brick buildings and little quaint shop fronts filled with antiques and cool clothing. I tried not to look like a tourist while gawking at everything. Even jaded urbanites gawked sometimes, right?
Bennett told the cabdriver to stop at the corner, and we grabbed our bags and stood on the sidewalk in the powdery snow. My senses flared at the sights and sounds, and I almost staggered under the impact of all the spirits lingering along the streets.
Two male ghosts in navy uniforms passed a flapper from the twenties, who winked gaily at a young ghost who looked like he’d died in some kind of disco accident. The ghosts roamed in packs of two and three, greeting each other and commenting on the snow, and generally acting as though they weren’t dead.
“Pretty intense, huh?” Bennett said.
“Wait—is that Elvis?”
“What would Elvis be doing here?” he scoffed. “That’s just a chubby guy with muttonchops and a white jumpsuit.”
He led me down the cobblestoned street, past narrow brownstones with ornate wrought-iron fences and with ancient trees growing between the sidewalks.
“So, is this whole block ghostkeepers?” I said.
“Yeah, mostly people involved with the Knell.”
As dusk crept over the rooftops, I watched a ghost boy who looked like Nicholas climb a streetlamp, light a long match, and fiddle with the glass. The lamp lit instantly—but from electricity, not his flame.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “They’re not