School Spirits - By Rachel Hawkins Page 0,54

don’t. It’s such a satisfying feeling.”

“Well, now I do know it, so thanks for that.”

“Hmm,” Torin acknowledged with a nod. “That is the price for sharing my wisdom.”

With a huge sigh, Torin flopped down onto my bed in the mirror. Looking at the reflection, it was like we were lying side by side. “So the ghost is strong because of fear,” I said, dangling my legs off the bed. “But…ghosts are pretty much always scary. Why go the extra mile?”

“There’s a difference between fear and terror,” Torin said. “Terror is a much stronger emotion. It feeds all sorts of negative energy. Appearing in her ghostly form to these people would have, to use your vernacular, freaked them out. But leaving little gifts telling them how they’d be attacked? That builds a sort of anticipatory terror. Like fuel for a ghost. And when you have a ghost that’s already terribly strong due to being summoned by magic, well. You end up with a problem like this on your hands.”

I mulled that over. “But why summon a ghost?”

Torin was uncharacteristically silent, and when I tilted my head to look at him, he was fiddling with his cuff. “Torin?” I prompted.

“Spirits are not always summoned on purpose,” he said at last. “There are times, if one is doing a particularly advanced spell, for instance, that the magic can have… unintended consequences. If, for example, one was attempting to raise the dead—”

“You can’t do that. It’s not possible to bring somebody back to life.”

Sniffing prissily, Torin dropped his sleeve. “Of course. I’m sure your vast amounts of knowledge amassed over the past sixteen years greatly outweigh my own centuries-long existence and personal experiences.”

Torin tended to get extra-flowery when his feelings were hurt, and I sat up, moving a little closer to his mirror. “I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it. “It’s just… Wait, have you raised the dead?”

“I’m not saying that,” Torin replied, but he didn’t quite meet my eyes. “I’m only saying that if you have a ghost who is resistant to salt, you probably have a witch as well, and one attempting seriously dark magic at that.”

Chewing on my lower lip, I thought about Dex. He’d been there the night I’d tried to seal Mary into her grave, and it hadn’t worked.

“You have that expression on your face that speaks of incipient moral dubiousness,” Torin observed, making me glad I’d bought that thesaurus a few years back.

“Yeah, I’m about to get super morally dubious. Torin. Remember the other day, when you asked if I wanted you to go in Dex’s mirror?”

“I do,” he said, narrowing his eyes.

“And remember how I said I didn’t want you to?”

“Indeed.”

“I take it back.” It was awful, I knew that. No matter what Dex was, he was my friend, and using my magic mirror to spy on him was most definitely Not Okay. But people were getting hurt, so I couldn’t afford to be a good person right now. And somewhere deep inside, I must’ve know this was going to happen. Otherwise, why had I studied his mailbox number when he’d driven me past his house the other night?

I gave the address to Torin, telling myself that this was the only way. Being a Brannick meant making hard choices. Mom had once said it meant choosing what was right over what our hearts wanted. I thought she might have been talking about my dad, but I hadn’t had the courage to ask.

Still, when Torin gave me a flourishing salute and vanished, I had to swallow the urge to call him back, tell him to forget it. But it was too late.

Sighing, I turned to my laptop, hoping Everton and Leslie’s problems could distract me from my own. I was only about five minutes in when there was a soft knock at my door. Even though I knew Torin was long gone, I shot a glance at the mirror before calling, “Come in!”

Mom opened the door and leaned against the jamb. “There was a car accident at your school today,” she said without preamble. “Anything to do with you?”

“Kind of?”

Mom took that in. “Anything I need to know about?”

I glanced at my mirror. “No,” I said at last. “I got this.”

Mom took a deep breath through her nose, but in the end, she just nodded. “Okay. Anything more on that boy?”

I tried hard to keep my eyes off the mirror this time. “He invited me to his house to meet his grandmother. Figured I’d take him up on that,