“Will you go to him?” Christopher didn’t seem to approve or disapprove; he just watched, like he was taking my measure.
Could I face my father again? Face the risk that he would reject me forever, or turn against me?
Then the thunder rumbled one more time, and I felt the fear in my father’s heart more strongly than the fear in my own. Something terrible was happening, something much more important than the answers I needed. If Christopher turned against me now — if he tried to trap me in this place — I had to find Dad if I could.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m going.”
Christopher wasn’t angry; that was the first moment I felt that perhaps I could trust him. “Then I shall hope for your return.”
‘Til come back,” I promised Christopher. “I want to know more.”
“And I want to tell you.”
“How do I reach my father?”
“When the person you love wishes for you so desperately,” Christopher said, “you will find it impossible to be anywhere else.”
His face looked sorrowful as he said it, so much so that I wondered who had wished for him. But I couldn’t worry about Christopher for very long, not with Dad in danger or despair or whatever it was that clouded the skies above. I couldn’t worry about myself, either. My fears had been only a kind of selfishness; I saw that now. This land of lost things gave everything. whether seen or unseen, a brilliant clarity.
I closed my eyes and thought of my father. For the first time in months — since I’d died —!didn’t just think of the idea of him. I let myself remember so fully that it filled my heart. Tucking me into bed when I was a baby. Slow — dancing with Mom while Dinah Washington played on his old hi — fi. Making small talk with our neighbors in Arrowwood in an effort to fit in. Taking me to the beach because I loved it, though he hated sunlight. Griping about having to get up early in the morning, with his hair sticking out all over the place. Acting out his resurrection from the dead m with one of my old Ken dolls, to an audience of one very interested little girl and some highly surprised Barbies. Everything that made him Dad.
When I opened my eyes. he was there.
Or rather, I was back with him, at Evernight. Night had fallen — no telling how long it had been since I’d left. It had felt like minutes but could have been hours or days. My father stood in the center of the school library — The library! I thought, terrified, remembering the trap that had been here. But Lucas had taken it away, and perhaps it hadn’t been replaced. I felt fine. My father, on the other hand, seemed to be bracing himself against high winds. No, not “seemed to” — a gale — force wind had whipped up inside the room itself, each gust ice cold. I realized he was trapped; ice had formed between the bookshelves, creating a ten — foot — high frozen maze with my father in the center and no way out. A blue — gray shimmering form could just be made out in the far corner, someone skinny to the point of boniness, very old, almost bald. It could’ve been male or female. It was certainly a wraith.
“It tries,” the thing wheezed, in a voice that sounded like cracking ice. I recognized it: one of the Plotters. “It tries, but it’s too stupid to know what it’s doing wrong.”
Dad said, “You’ll be pulled in. You can’t hold out forever.” But he didn’t sound like he believed it. His eyes didn’t look angry or scared, just sad — the way they had when I’d seen him on the couch when I first retumed to Evernight. The way Lucas had looked when he went into his fatal battle with Charity. I realized why Dad had been thinking about me, calling to me; my father believed he was about to die his final death.
He’d been trying to lure this ghost into a trap, I realized — I could see one of the coppery seashell boxes at his feet, cracked in two and now apparently powerless. Why was Dad helping Mrs. Bethany?
The wheeze turned into a cackle. “Freeze it cold. Break it in two. No more head, no more noise.”
Dad’s face didn’t change, because he probably didn’t know what the wraith was talking about. But I knew. I’d used the power myself — the ability to reach inside a vampire and turn its body to ice. I’d seen how powerfully it could hurt vampires, and I didn’t doubt it could kill them.
The wraith swooped down, the malevolent spirit from my worst nightmares, the embodiment of everything that still terrified me about ghosts. I didn’t know what to do; I didn’t know if I had any power over other wraiths. Could it destroy me as well as my father? What could I do?
Instantly, I thought of my coral bracelet and the records room, and my spirit rematerialized tl1ere. Vic, who was sitting on a beanbag and reading a comic book, half snorted, half choked on a mouthful of soda when I appeared. “Whoa! Bianca, you gotta warn a guy.”
I’d hoped for Lucas or Balthazar. but I’d take whatever help I could get; even a simple interruption might make the wraith leave. “My dad’s in trouble — get to the library! Quick!”
just as fast, I thought of the gargoyle outside my old window — and I was there, hovering outside my old room. It was worth scaring the crap out of my mother if that got her down to the library to help Dad, but she Wasn’t there. Frustrated, I zipped down along the stones, seeking a familiar face; luckily, Patrice was there, alone, putting the fmishing touches on her manicure. I realized she was the one I’d needed all along. I frosted the window so fast it shook, and she opened it to thrust her head outside. “Bianca?”
“The library! Bring your mirror, now!”
I have to get back to Dad. But the tether I’d traveled along before had snapped; that kind of connection didn’t seem to work here in the mortal world. I’d have to take the long way. The only way to avoid leaving ice in my wake was to calm down and slow down, but this was no time for that.
I zoomed through Patrice’s room and down the hallways, ignoring the frost and the eerie blue lights that rippled around me, eve n when the other students began to scream. Skye, emerging from the shower, nearly dropped her towel, and I could see the wet strands of her hair freezing into icy points. Sony, I thought absently. I couldn’t worry about anyone right now besides my father.
My journey to the library probably took no more than a couple of minutes, but it seemed like eternity. When I went through the doors, a quick swipe of wood through my whole body, I cotuld see flickering blue light reflecting on and within what was now an enormous cage of ice. Somewhere in the middle of that crackling, sparkling prison was my dad. I pushed through the ice to the center.
There, to my horror, I saw Dad — swaying on his feet, leaning back at an impossible angle, pushing desperately against the fist of ice that was buried within his chest.
The wraith cackled. “Stupid it. Stupid it.”
“Get away from him!” I screamed. Not knowing what else to do, I threw myself into it from the side, as hard as I could. It simply went filmy and let me topple thr — ough. But I at least provided a distraction; the wraith pulled its icy hand from my father and turned toward me.
It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. At first I’d thought it was only old, but old people didn’t look like this. The “flesh” that it manifested didn’t seem to fit any longer — its lower eyelids sagged so far that I could see the full eye socket, and its lips drooped over its jaws, down by its chin. I backed away untilI touched the ice; I could’ve gone through it, but that would have meant abandoning Dad.
I heard a soft voice say, disbelieving, “Bianca?”
Dad! But I couldn’t look at him right now; this wraith needed to stay focused on me and not him.
The wraith’s round, eerie eyes lit up — literally, as though they were gas flames. I had no idea we could do that and seriously did not want to start. ··A baby,” it said.
“I might be new to this, but I promise you, I can — ” What could I do? “I can out — haunt you any day if you don’t leave him alone.”
“You can take us there,” it said, shuffling forward with an eagerness that was slightly childlike, and tl1erefore more disturbing.
Was this what Christopher had meant? That I was supposed to help creepy things like this?
Then I felt bad. If I hadn’t been able to create a body, and interact once more with the people who loved me, maybe I would have turned creepy, too. If it could go to that land of lost things. maybe it would stop being so scary and start to look like itself again. If I’d thought working with dead people was going to be pretty all the time — especially given some of the dead people I’d already known — then that was stupid of me.
Til take you,” I promised. I didn’t exactly know how to do that yet, but already I understood that if I couldn’t pick it up quickly, Christopher could help me. “Just let this man go, okay? We can go there right now.”
The wraith hesitated. Maybe it couldn’t believe its good luck.
But then its flaming eyes narrowed, slits of unearthly ftre blue. “It doesn’t get to run away,” it hissed. “Not after what it did.”
