Shadow Kiss Page 0,78

massacre. These children had the same washed-out look Mason had, but their necks were covered in blood, just as they'd been at the house. Its scarlet hue stood out in stark contrast to their shadowy, luminescent bodies.

Thicker and thicker the faces grew. While none of them actually spoke, there seemed to be a buzzing in my ears that grew louder as more and more of them came. Three new figures joined the crowd. They should have blended into the rest, but they stood out almost as sharply as the blood on the children's necks had.

It was Lissa's family.

Her mother, her father, and her brother Andre. They looked exactly as they had the last time I'd seen them, just before the car accident. Blond. Beautiful. Regal. Like Mason, they wore no marks of their deaths, even though I knew the crash had done horrible things to them. And like Mason, they just stared at me with sad eyes, not speaking but clearly wanting to say something. Only, unlike with Mason, I understood the message.

There was a large patch of blackness behind Andre that was steadily growing bigger. He pointed at me, and then he pointed at it. I knew, without understanding how I knew, that it was the entrance to the world of death, the world I had come back from. Andre - who'd been my age when he died - pointed again. His parents joined him. They didn't have to speak for me to know what they were saying: You shouldn't have lived. You need to come back with us....

I started screaming. And screaming.

I thought someone on the plane was talking to me, but I couldn't be sure, not when I couldn't see anything but those faces, hands, and the blackness behind Andre. Every so often, Mason's face materialized nearby, solemn and sad. I appealed to him for help.

"Make them go away!" I yelled. "Make them go away!"

But there was nothing he would - or could - do. Frantically, I undid my seat belt and tried to stand up. The ghosts didn't touch me, but they were all too close, still reaching and pointing with skeletal hands. I waved my arms to fend them off, screaming for someone to help me and make this all stop.

There was no help for me, though. No help for all those hands and hollow eyes or the pain that consumed me. It grew so bad that glittering black spots began to dance across my field of vision. I had a feeling I was going to pass out, and I welcomed that. It would make the pain go away and save me from the faces. The spots grew bigger and bigger, and soon I could no longer see anything. The faces disappeared, and so did the pain as sweet black waters dragged me under.

Chapter 18

Eighteen

EVERYTHING BECAME FUZZY after that. I had vague impressions of moving in and out of consciousness, of people saying my name, and of being in the air again. Eventually, I woke up in the school's infirmary and found Dr. Olendzki looking down at me.

"Hello, Rose," she said. She was a middle-aged Moroi and often joked that I was her number one patient. "How are you feeling?"

The details of what had happened came back. The faces. Mason. The other ghosts. The terrible pain in my head. All of it was gone.

"Fine," I said, half-surprised to be saying those words. For a moment, I wondered if maybe it had all been a dream. Then I looked beyond her and saw Dimitri and Alberta looming nearby. The looks on their faces told me the events on the plane had indeed been real.

Alberta cleared her throat, and Dr. Olendzki glanced back. "May we?" Alberta asked. The doctor nodded, and the other two stepped forward.

Dimitri, as always, was a balm to me. No matter what happened, I always felt a little safer in his presence. Yet even he hadn't been able to stop what had happened at the airport. When he looked at me like he was now, with an expression of such tenderness and concern, it triggered mixed feelings. Part of me loved that he cared so much. The other part wanted to be strong for him and didn't want to make him worry.

"Rose..." began Alberta uncertainly. I could tell she had no clue how to go about this. What had happened was beyond her realm of experience. Dimitri took over.

"Rose, what happened back there?" Before I could utter a word, he cut