It was thin as spider’s silk, glowing against her skin like blue-white moonlight. She was leaning closer to inspect it further when drops of warm water began dripping on her palm around it. Tears, she realized belatedly. Her tears, from her eyes, which made no sense at all. Marci didn’t remember crying, but her eyes were wet and puffy, and her chest hurt as if she’d been heaving. Clearly, something had happened, but she couldn’t remember what. All she knew was that she’d lost something, something very important, but before Marci could figure out what it was, the freezing thread across her palm began to twitch.
“What does that mean?” Amelia asked, skittering down Marci’s arm to get a better look.
“I don’t know,” Marci said, wiping her eyes before reaching down to lift the thread away from her aching hand. It really was terrifyingly cold. Cold as the grave. As cold as—
Her whole body jerked. Even stranger, Amelia’s did the same, the little dragon jumping like a startled lizard before scrambling back up Marci’s arm to the shelter of her short hair behind her ear.
“Did you feel that?!”
Marci nodded, craning her head in all directions. Since she’d first woken up in her death, she and Amelia had been the only things that had moved. Now, though, a wind was picking up, blowing the dust off the gravel drive in the otherwise perfect stillness.
“Hoo boy,” Amelia said, hooking her tail tight around the back of Marci’s neck. “So what happens now?”
“How shouldIknow?” Marci said, pushing up to her feet. “You’re the expert!”
“An expert intheory,” the tiny dragon corrected her. “I’ve never been dead in practice.”
Marci rolled her eyes, but criticizing her friend’s recklessness would have to wait. In the brief time they’d been talking, the wind had gone from a breeze to a hurricane. On the ground, dust was being swept up into cyclones, and the lights inside the house were swaying wildly where they’d left the door open. Even the parked car was starting to slide sideways, blown across the gravel drive inch by inch. How many inches, though, Marci couldn’t see because she was now flat on her stomach, clinging to the asphalt roofing for dear life. But when she looked to make sure Amelia hadn’t been blown away, the little red dragon was staring at the ceiling, her amber eyes wide.
At the peak of the cavern, in the middle of the terrifying black hole that led to the outside, a hand was reaching down. At least, itlookedlike a hand. It was hard to tell since it hadn’t yet broken through the obsidian surface. Instead, the magic had stretched like rubber, leaving whatever it was grasping desperately through a wall of wetly shimmering black. That would have been terrifying enough on its own, but the whole thing was made a million times worse by the fact that it was all happening directly above Marci’s head, the grasping hand following her unerringly no matter which way she moved. She was wondering if she should make a break for the house’s storm cellar when she saw something glittering in the center of the blackness. A thread, she realized with a start, glowing in the dark like moonlight directly in the middle of the hand’s grasping palm.
And just like that, Marci knew what to do.
“Hold on tight,” she told the dragon on her shoulder as she dropped into a crouch. “I’m going to jump.”
“Jump?” Amelia said, her voice panicked as she looked back and forth between the grasping hand above their heads and the three-story drop below. “No, no, no. Jumping off a roof is averybad idea when you don’t have wings.”
No argument there, but the way the hole was positioned, there was no chance Marci could reach the grasping hand with just her legs. It was just too far, the roof too steep. She had to jump to make it, and the wind encouraged her, blasting up the side of the house in front of her. If she jumped, Marci was sure it would carry her up, and since the gale was already starting to lift the roof off the house, she saw no reason to hesitate. It was jump or be tossed, so Marci grabbed the burning-cold thread in her hand and went for it, leaping off the roof just as the nails gave way.
The moment her feet left the ground, she saw Amelia’s point. It might have looked close, but the hand reaching through the darkness must have been much bigger than she’d realized, because now that she was moving toward it, Marci could see that hole she was jumping toward was actually several feet farther up than she’d realized, which meant she was now sailing out over nothing. But just as Marci was wondering if it was possible to die inside of your own death, the wind blowing up the side of the house caught her like a net, blasting her straight up toward the hand reaching down.
The second she was in range, Marci reached out to grab one of the giant fingers. And immediately regretted it.
When she touched the blackness, magic like nothing she’d ever felt exploded through her. It reminded her of the first time she’d pulled off Julius, only a million times more. That had felt like plugging into the sun. This was being caught in a supernova. The shock was so great, she couldn’t make herself let go, not even when her hand began to dissolve in front of her eyes, her fingers vanishing like shadows in sunlight. She was still staring in horror when the giant hand clenched down, grabbing her body like a closing trap.
At this point, Marci was certain she was going to die. Again. The intense magic was all around her, dissolving her body like sugar in water. But then, just when she was sure she was dust, a shock of cold washed away everything else as the hand yanked her through the hole into darkness, and then into a freezing embrace.
“I’ve got you.”
The voice was so loud and relieved, she barely recognized it, but the cold that followed the words felt like home.
“I’ve got you,” Ghost said again, hugging her so tight, all the dissolved bits came back together. “I found you, Marci.”
“I knew you would,” she whispered back, opening her eyes against the freezing wind as she raised her head to look up at her spirit…
And saw his face.
Chapter 3
Julius woke with a start.
He was still in Bob’s chair, curled in a ball around Marci’s bag. He didn’t smell any threat, but his heart was pounding in his chest. That usually happened after a bad dream, but he didn’t remember having one. He was writing it off as stress, pulling up his blanket again to go back to sleep, when he remembered he hadn’thada blanket when he’d fallen asleep. He was groggily trying to make sense of how one had magically appeared on top of him when he heard the soft clink of china directly beside his ear.
This time, Julius jumped out of the chair completely. He landed on his feet in a crouch with Marci’s bag under one arm, Amelia’s ashes in the other, and both hands raised to defend himself from whatever was in the room with him. When he looked frantically for the threat, though, all he saw was a familiar tall dragon in an impeccably neat black suit attempting to fit a large breakfast tray onto Bob’s crowded desk.
“Good morning, sir,” Fredrick said without looking up from the loaded tray he was balancing on the table’s corner. “Did you sleep well?”
Julius stared at him blankly for a good thirty seconds, and then he collapsed back into the chair. “Don’tdothat,” he gasped, clutching his chest, which his poor heart was currently trying to pound its way through. “What are you doing here?”
