Another car zipped by, heedless of the speed limit. In the rush of wind left in its wake, Liam turned to stare at the dark.
The dark stared back.
It took a moment for him to slot into place what he was seeing. A boy, or perhaps a man—broad shoulders slumped beneath a gray wool coat with the collar pulled high. He stood in an alcove, out of reach of the streetlamps, his face halved in shadow. He wasn’t smoking a cigarette, though he was standing the way one might when out for a smoke. He wasn’t, Liam noticed—with growing diffidence—doing anything at all. Just watching.
The moment grew. The boy in the dark said nothing. A car flew down the street, illuminating the night in lightning white, and for a moment Liam could see his face in stark relief. Dark eyes beset with purpling contusions, a mouth split bloody. Something familiar lanced through him, and then the car was gone and, with it, the light. The boy’s features sank back into obscurity.
He was left a little shaken.
It had been, he thought, like looking in a mirror.
No.
It had been like looking at a ghost.
Impossible, he thought, shaking himself free of the sudden and sticky feeling of cobwebs. His ghost was nine years old. His ghost was sleeping in a columbarium in Mount Auburn Cemetery.
“Hey,” Liam called, thinking of Allison at home in their living room. She’d been reading when he left, her legs propped up on the plush arms of their couch, her belly extended. He could still see the yellow square of light from their kitchen window from here. “Hey, buddy, you all right?”
“You’re having a kid,” the boy said.
Cold struck Liam’s heart. His fingers closed around his stick. He could reach for his phone—could call the cops—but something about the way the boy was standing, his shoulders slumped against the wall, made him hesitate.
“Who the fuck are you?”
Another car flew past, this time in the opposite direction. Light popped and flared, winnowing back into dark. He was met again with that face, dark eyes sharp and familiar beneath swollen lids.Impossible.This was a practical joke. This was a cosmic error. Several blocks away, police sirens warbled through the sky.
“I’m not kidding here,” Liam said, the Boston brogue of his youth creeping back into the edge of his voice. “Why the hell would you say that to me? Do you know my wife?”
The stranger slipped his hands into his pockets.
“No,” he said, too brusque to be believed. Then, “Sorry to have bothered you.” He pushed himself up from the wall. He walked away without a word. Liam was left gripping his hockey stick like a sword, watching the boy step down into the street and head across to the other side.
“Hey!” His shout cut through the quiet. “Hey, I’m talking to you!”
But the stranger didn’t stop. He’d rounded the corner by the time Liam’s senses caught up to him. By the time he started running. His sneakers hammered pavement, carrying him down the road, athletic bag slamming into his side.
But by the time he came through the intersection and out into the busy street beyond, the boy was gone. The night was dark and crowded. Buildings hemmed him in on both sides. Traffic barreled down the street in all directions. The wind drove between the bricks, chilling him to the bone. Overhead, the thousand stars winked down at him, unseen, their light swallowed up in the dazzling glow of the city.
He was alone, alone, the city moving and breathing all around him, unable to shake the tightening vise of fear around his heart, unable to forget the slow resurfacing memory of C.J. Price’s face sinking beneath ice.
Lying with her forehead pressed into the open spine of her book wasn’t going to help Delaney pass her Latin exam on Friday, but she was committed to doing it anyway. She’d been wholly engrossed in the act for an hour and counting—long enough for the motion lights in her corner of the campus library to click off. Long enough for her eyes to close. Long enough to dream.
The stacks hemmed her in, turning oblong. The spaces between the books became bottomless runnels of black. Somewhere unseen, something skittered across the floor. Something small. Something with claws. A mouse. A shadow.
I’m inside you now, hissed a voice.Mice in your walls. Mice in your floorboards. Mice in your head. If I wanted, I could chew your wires all to pieces.
She jolted back, hard enough to topple her chair. Pinned against the chuffing metal grates of the space heater, she peered into the gaps between books. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. And then. She drew up short at the sight of a face, wedged between two leather-bound tomes. He opened his eyes and she recoiled, slamming the shelving. Books toppled down without a sound, falling in slow motion. At her feet, water rushed in and in around her ankles.
A brother for a brother.
Something laughed, long and low.
Non omnis moriar, whispered the face in the shelf.Non omnis moriar.
Something tapped her on the shoulder. She let out a soundless shriek and whipped around. Nothing was there. Nothing but rows and rows and rows of books. Nothing but the slow-breathing dark.
We are searching for someone,sang a voice, now more familiar than it had any right to be.Someone among the living. Someone among the dead.
