An Ivy League university library was surprisingly easy to break into, even without employing CIA-level tactics. The door was unlocked, which struck Ellory as strange until she remembered she was here for a séance. Like going to a cemetery at night or sayingBloody Maryinto a mirror, this activity was already on the list of things a person should do only if they were tired of being alive. The Graves Ghost had probably unlocked the door in anticipation of a new friend to skip through the stacks with. Ellory imagined the ghost as one of those sisters fromThe Shining, standing beneath the skylight and waiting for her to take his hand.
She shivered as she took the elevator underground. Thedingof the closing doors sounded like a cry for help.
Ellory emerged into the fourth floor, her sneakers whispering across the carpet. Tai and Cody had beat her here; they sat side by side at one of the tables, watching a video with the volume low. Ellory had chosen this floor on a whim, because it was exactlyhalfway from the surface and halfway from the basement, a liminal space for a liminal act. There was a wrongness to the way the shadows stirred when she expected them to be static, filling the hollows of the empty stacks. The circular skylight that lit the center of the room was like the open mouth of a howling wolf.
She set her bag on the table, the items clattering inside. “What are you watching?”
“Witchcraft explainers, which are an actual thing,” said Tai. “And I’m starting to regret every choice that led me here.”
“It’s not too late to leave,” Ellory told her, even though her stomach tightened at the thought. “Both of you. I can do this alone.”
“It’s like you’ve never seen a single horror movie.” Tai rolled her eyes. “If you’re going to summon a ghost, you don’t do italone. You also don’t do it if you’ve got some melanin to your skin, but we’ll ignore that.”
Cody shut off the video. “So, what’s the plan?”
Ellory’s pulse quivered at her throat. This was the part that made her wish she had invited Hudson instead of her friends. She was sure they could handle themselves, but she didn’t worry about Hudson the way she worried about Tai and Cody. Hudson knew what he was getting into. His skepticism was like armor against the supernatural, without being offensive enough to provoke a duppy. At the very least, he would check her work whether she asked him to or not, driven by the same compulsive need to bebetter thanthat inevitably pushed them to outdo each other.
“Lor?” Tai blinked at her from across the table, her night-dark eyes made darker by the hazy lighting. “What are we doing?”
Ellory infused her voice with the confidence she needed to feel. “I cross-referenced the most common details of the Graves Ghost legend with news articles about dead young adults from thelast century, and I think I found a match.” She placed the printed pages between them. “Malcolm Mayhew. He was a junior crushed between two fallen shelves during finals week in 1983. They found him at dawn, dead from blunt force trauma and internal bleeding. The earliest mention of the Graves Ghost that I could find is from 1987, so the timeline fits.”
There was a loaded silence.
“You know, I spent fall break at my family’s lake house,” Tai murmured. “Some people do that.”
“Some people don’t have a family lake house.”
“I wish that were your problem.”
Ellory elected to ignore this, rolling up the sleeves of her forest-green hoodie instead. From her bag she pulled a used video game, a pack of Twizzlers, and a bottle of Cîroc Snap Frost Vodka—offerings to Malcolm Mayhew, based on her research of things he’d liked while alive. This was followed by a vial of graveyard dirt to form a circle to contain his spirit. Finally, there was a candle to be placed in the center of this makeshift altar, to light the Graves Ghost’s way to the realm of the living.
All she needed now was magic.
The hair on the back of Ellory’s neck prickled with warning. She ran a hand over the still-smooth, still-bare skin, and let her next breath out slowly in a futile effort to slow thethaDUM thaDUMof her telltale heart. Ignoring the two sets of eyes on her, she constructed an altar as best she could. Her circle was lopsided. The candle was off-center. Every horror movie she had ever watched about summoning ghosts flipped through her mind like the world’s worst silent film, monochrome reminders that she was going to die.
“All right,” she said, too loud, too earnest. “We have to stand atthe points of the circle.”
“A circle doesn’t have points,” Tai whispered.
“Shut up,” Cody whispered back.
Ellory stood with her back to the door as Cody and Tai took their positions. Together, the three of them formed an invisible right triangle outside the graveyard dirt. At her instruction, they closed their eyes, and Ellory took one last deep breath before joining them. Darkness pressed upon darkness, blocking out everything but their breathing and the occasional crackle of the candle.
Sometimes the answers for the living rested with the dead. Part of her had always known that. Now she was ready to stop running.
With her eyes closed, Ellory stared into the abyss and waited for something to stare back.
A low buzzing overtook the silence—not bees, like she’d thought before, but the trill of a hummingbird’s wings. Her skin warmed despite the cold that made her hands tremble. Images flashed across her lids, like flipping through a deck of playing cards: memories from her childhood, from high school, from the last few months. They began to slow from a blur of color and feeling, and the closer she came to focusing on one, the more fear tightened her chest, warning her about what she was about to see…
Then something hit the floor.
Ellory’s eyes shot open, her body unmoving in that absolute silence between two heartbeats. Across the circle, Tai’s hands twitched over an upturned chair, like she might still be able to catch it if she tried hard enough. Cody had covered their mouth with a hand, which lowered when they realized the only danger in the library was Tai’s ill-timed clumsiness. Ellory stared at her friends, and they stared back, and the candlelight made shadows dance across hollows of their faces but did little to summon anyone oranything from the void.
Her shoulders slumped. “Maybe I did something wrong.”
“I don’t know that there’s arightway to talk to spirits,” Tai said, bending to fix the chair. Its sharp wooden legs dug into the carpet, leaving divots when she pushed it back toward the table behind her. “Do you want to try again?”
From the corner of her eye, Ellory saw Cody smother a yawn. Seconds ticked by. Ellory dragged a hand over her clammy face. “No. The longer we stay, the more we risk getting caught.”
