looking, and Angel climbed up onto her lap. Angel’s sandals didn’t mark the sheets, her body made no impression on the bed covers. Isis wrapped her arms around her little sister.
“You’ve still got me,” Isis whispered, “always and forever.”
“Always and forever,” answered Angel. But the words sounded mournful the way she said them.
After a few minutes the ward doors re-opened and Cally walked back in. She sat down by Isis’s bed, her face serious.
“Please don’t say things like that,” she said quietly. “Not about Angel.” Her voice quavered to a halt, and she took a deep breath. “I know I’ve talked a lot about the spirits, and made you go to seances, and… all the things I’ve done. But those two hours, when they said you were dead… I realised I’d been making you live in the shadow of Angel’s death. Everything I did, all the plans I made, I was always looking back to her, even though you were right there with me. It was only when I thought you were gone, that I understood how much…” She shut her eyes, and a tear dropped through her lashes, but when she opened her eyes again she was smiling. “It felt like a miracle, getting you back.”
“But Angel…”
Cally shook her head. “Every day of my life I wish she were still here, but I’ve got you, Isis.” She reached out, and put her hand to Isis’s cheek. “Oh! You’re freezing!”
Cally started fussing with the blankets, pulling them around Isis. Angel pushed up with her arms, fingers splayed, and poked her head and shoulders straight through the covers.
“I here!” Angel shouted, scowling furiously at Cally. “I here!”
But the blankets settled without a hint of the little girl’s presence. And although Isis desperately wanted to explain to her mum, she didn’t know how to, or which words to use. Instead, her five-year habit of silence settled back in.
Angel stood up on Isis’s lap, her chubby face level with her older sister’s. “I are here?”
Isis gave the tiniest of nods. “Yes,” she whispered.
“You tell Mummy?”
Isis wanted to say yes, she’d tell Cally and somehow make things right for her sister-ghost. But Cally seemed so sure she hadn’t seen anything in the mortuary. Isis had held their hands together and when she’d done that with Gray he’d been able to see what she could, Angel linking their sight. Maybe it just didn’t work with Cally.
“I’ll try,” Isis whispered to Angel.
“I’ll try too,” answered Cally, fiddling with a pillow. “You’ll see. Things will be different now.”
And that was that. Isis couldn’t talk about Angel, which meant she could hardly talk to her mum about all the other things that had happened out in the fields with Gray and the ghost Devourer. She’d been forced to hold it in, every word, waiting until she could see Gray again. He was the only other person who’d seen what really happened.
And now he was walking away across the playground. Isis stared at his back, the swing of his arms. Suddenly he looked like a stranger.
Isis didn’t manage to talk to Gray later that day either. They didn’t share any lessons, and at lunchtime he’d been with his other friends. She had worried that the other boys might start asking questions or make fun of her if she approached him then, so she went to another table instead, eating quietly by herself while around her everyone chatted and laughed.
In assembly that afternoon Isis watched Gray file into the main hall with the rest of his form. Isis was with her own class, which meant there was no opportunity to sit together. Isis let her thoughts drift as Mrs Dewson, the head of year, began her start-of-term speech. She welcomed the pupils back to school, and told them to be nice to the new starters. Just behind Mrs Dewson a tall thin man was wearing a navy blue suit and black-rimmed glasses. His hair was combed across his head, slicked down like it had been painted on.
“… this year you’ll be making choices about what subjects to study,” said Mrs Dewson.
The tall thin man darted in front of her.
“Every child will be properly dressed at all times!” he shouted, jabbing his finger in the air. “Any boy not wearing a tie will be punished, as will any girl with her hair incorrectly pinned back. I have a fresh cane this year, ready and waiting.”
No one paid him the slightest attention, and Isis made no sign of seeing him either. She