Cross My Heart, Hope To Die

I could have hugged the woman, gold lamé and all. She could hear me. She could communicate with Emma for me, and we could work together to solve my murder.

“Tell her I’m worried for her,” I said. “She’s in danger. I only wish we’d had a chance to meet. We would have been an unstoppable team. Tell her I’m grateful for everything she’s done. Tell her I love her.”

Madame Darkling’s sonorous voice came across the circle. “He’s a handsome young man—one you have loved in a distant past life, and lost. He stands at the edge of an abyss and reaches to you … reaches … but the chasm between life and death is too wide, and he turns away again.” Madame Darkling touched a hand to her brow. “He says … he says he will see you one day. On the other side.”

Next to Emma, Madeline snorted softly. “Sutton Mercer, breaking hearts on both sides of the grave,” she whispered.

I groaned with frustration. It had felt so real for a moment, but it was just part of the medium’s performance. No matter how strong I felt here, I was still stuck in this limbo, alone and powerless.

Emma’s shoulders slumped. It’d been so easy for her to believe her sister was still out there, watching over her. But that was how con artists worked, right? They figured out what you wanted to believe and served it up on a silver platter. She couldn’t afford that kind of denial. Sutton was dead and gone.

“Dead,” I whispered sadly, “but not gone. I’m here, Emma.”

Tendrils of mist blew across the clearing, and the music shifted to a quiet murmur. Madame Darkling turned her turbaned head toward Celeste. The Venetian mask glittered in the ambient light.

“You, dear,” said the medium. “Someone’s arrived for you. An older lady. She only crossed over very recently. A woman of letters, perhaps?”

Through the holes in her mask, Celeste’s eyes became very round. “Grandmama?” she squeaked. “Is that you?”

Emma felt a pang of guilt. It was obvious Celeste had been close with her grandmother. Maybe that was where all her otherworldly nonsense had come from—the desperate desire to believe her grandmother was still there. It felt cruel to aim for such a vulnerable spot, especially since Emma had just found it so easy to believe that her dead sister was still with her.

“She’s trying to tell me something,” Madame Darkling intoned, touching her hands to her temples. She looked like she was straining to hear. “She says she does not approve of the boy you are seeing. Gareth, I believe?”

“G-g-g-garrett, Grandmama,” Celeste said, her voice so soft Emma could barely make it out. Madame Darkling nodded.

“She says … that he uses more hair product than you do.” Charlotte broke into a fit of coughing next to Emma. “And that he doesn’t truly care for you. She says that he’s using you to get revenge on his true love, a devastatingly beautiful girl who broke his heart.”

Emma couldn’t believe Charlotte had told Madame Darkling all this. Celeste’s lips pressed together tightly.

“I knew it,” she growled. “Don’t worry, Grandmama. We’re through. I won’t waste any more time on him.”

Madame Darkling clutched her head. “Silence!” she snapped. The girls went still. From the underbrush the music built, a violin’s tense tremolo joining the low drums. A gust of wind blasted through the clearing.

When it passed, the medium opened her eyes. “Something else is here,” she said, her tone afraid. A low moan came from somewhere to the left, then seemed to move around them as if they were being circled. Celeste’s head snapped up, her lips parted.

“Grandmama?” she whispered.

Multicolored lights began flashing from the underbrush, and the sound of footsteps reverberated all around the clearing. The fake cactus writhed as if it was possessed. For a moment Emma almost forgot that it was one of their props, controlled by Nisha in the darkness.

“No,” Madame Darkling said, her voice dropping low, a strange, half-mad grimace on her face. “Grandmama isn’t here anymore, Celeste. This is a malevolent being. Everyone, remain strong in your minds and intentions and we can banish it together. Forces of evil, leave us be. Forces of evil, leave us be …,” she began to chant.

A scream echoed from somewhere, and then another answered it on the other side of the clearing. Celeste gasped, one hand flying to her lips, the other pointing upward at the leering green faces swooping overhead. She whimpered and scrambled backward, scuffing the circle of salt with her sandals.

“You have broken the sacred circle!” Madame Darkling cried, raising a trembling finger to point at Celeste. Celeste opened and closed her mouth like a fish. She glanced wildly around, her face pale under her mask. Emma watched something move in the shadows behind her. It was Nisha, reaching out from behind a rock with a peacock feather in her outstretched hand. She tickled Celeste on the back of the neck and vanished before the other girl turned.

“Celeste …,” a strange voice crooned from the bushes. Nisha had cued up the best of their sound bites, a superdistorted recording of Charlotte calling Celeste’s name in a creepy singsong. Nisha had warped it and added reverb until it was scarcely recognizable. The same call came from the other side of the clearing, and then from a third angle. Soon they were surrounded on all sides by the voice.

Goose pimples sprang up along the back of Emma’s neck. Even I shuddered, and I knew perfectly well that I was the only ghost in the canyon tonight.