As I watched curiously, Bea tugged her backpack around to the front of her body, unzipped it, and pulled out one of her sketchbooks. She thumbed through the pages until she found what she was looking for.
A serious face with big dark eyes and masses of dark hair stared back at me. I recognized the mysterious half-smile at once.
“That’s Jess Ballard!” I cried.
Bea looked relieved. “So you know her?”
“Yeah. Well, I mean, not really, but I know her name. She was the… she just died. Her body was down by the Playhouse,” I said, shuddering. “Why are you drawing her?”
“She came to me. She said she needed help,” Bea said. “Well, actually, she said she neededyourhelp.”
“My help?” I asked, frowning. “But she’s… she’s dead. How could I possibly be of any help to her now?”
Bea shrugged. “I’m not sure. But she’s debating the whole dead thing.”
“I… I mean, I get the denial, but I don’t really think that’s debatable. I mean, I saw her body. It was carried away in a body bag.”
“I know, but this is what she keeps telling me,” Bea said, and flipped to the next page in her sketchbook, which was filled with words and strange symbols instead of likenesses. I bent my head low over them, examining them. I saw the words, “back to my body” and “running out of time” andthen a strange symbol over and over again, along with the words, “on her wrist,” and then my own name: “Wren Vesper.”
“I don’t understand,” I muttered to myself.
“I don’t either, but she won’t go away, Wren,” Bea says. “It’s like she’s stalking me or something. I didn’t know what else to do.”
Bea’s bottom lip began to tremble, the sight of which made my heart contract, like a giant fist was squeezing it. I hated to see Bea scared, and it was happening more and more now that she had confided her abilities to her grandmother.
“It’s okay, Bea,” I said, reaching out and patting her bony little shoulder. “You did the right thing. I just… I wish I understood this better.” Even as I said the words, I felt an icy breeze on the back of my neck that raised violent goosebumps on my arms. “Is she… is she here right now?”
Bea nodded, gnawing at her bottom lip again. “She’s following me around. She feels…”
Bea paused, searching for the right word, but the icy breath on my neck was causing more than just goosebumps. I could feel an alien feeling flooding through me, a feeling that I knew hadn’t originated in me, and yet was coursing through me all the same, causing my heart to race, my muscles to tense.
“Afraid,” I said, completing Bea’s thought. “Afraid and… desperate.”
Bea nodded, and her eyes shone with unspent tears.
“Did you tell Xiomara?” I asked.
“No.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“She doesn’t want Xiomara. She wants you,” Bea said.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “We just need to… to find a better way to communicate. I’ll be right back. Stay here, okay?”
I waited just long enough to see Bea nod before turning and running back into the house. I didn’t go back upstairs, but instead darted through the living room to the library. Once there, I scanned the top rows of the shelves until I found what I was looking for.
“Bingo.”
I grabbed the little stepstool and dragged it over to the shelves over thedoorway. I stepped carefully up onto it, and retrieved a velvet bag tied closed with a length of gold cord that ended in tassels. It was the Vesper family spirit board. I clutched it to my chest, and ran back outside again.
I’d never used the spirit board before, but I’d seen my mother and her sisters use it. Asteria had left it with her friend Lydian, who had been responsible for discharging Asteria’s will after she died. My mom and my aunts had used it to communicate with Asteria after she had passed away. She’d had a message for them, an important one, and the spirit board was the only way they had been able to communicate clearly enough to receive that message. I didn’t know much about spirit boards, but after months of lessons with Xiomara to hone my spirit affinity, I knew the basics.
“Let’s take this down to my mother’s garden,” I said to Bea when I had arrived, somewhat breathlessly, back outside. “I don’t want to wake anyone up.”
Bea agreed, and together we hurried through the garden gate, across the expanse of yard until we reached the door in the stone wall that led to my mother’s garden. It had been locked up for years since we had fled, and so it had grown wild and feral in our absence. But in the months since we’d returned, my mother had been patiently and tenderly restoring it to its former glory, pruning and trimming and weeding and tending, by hand as well as by magic. Now, as we stepped through into the splendor beyond, it was hard to imagine that it had ever been neglected. Lush blooms glistened with dew all around us in the moonlight as we walked down the path to the little gazebo at the center, where I placed the spirit board on one of the stone benches.
“Have you ever used one of these before?” I asked Bea.
