I inhaled, in and out, fast.
“Calm down, Chloe. Just calm down. ”
There was nothing calming about his tone, just an impatient snap, telling me to stop freaking out and get to work. I pulled from his grasp.
“You need to—” he began.
“I know what I need to do,” I snapped back.
“What is that thing?” Tori gibbered. “Why is it moving?”
“Get her out of here,” Derek said.
As Simon hauled Tori away, I tried to relax, but my heart was racing too fast for me to focus. I shut my eyes, only to feel something on my foot. My eyes opened to see fingers reaching for my leg.
I scuttled back. A filthy rag-covered arm reached out, finger bones scratching the newspaper on the floor as it tried to propel itself forward, too broken to lift itself. How could it even move? But it did. Just like the bats, inch by inch, coming toward me—
“You called it,” Derek said. “It’s trying—”
“I didn’t call anything. ”
“Somehow you summoned it, and now it’s trying to find you. ”
I concentrated, but at the first touch on my leg, I skittered to the side. The thing paused, skull wobbling, then those empty eye sockets locked on me as it turned in my new direction.
“You have to release it,” Derek said.
“I’m trying. ”
“Try harder. ”
I squeezed my eyes shut and formed a mental image of the corpse. I pictured the ghost trapped inside and imagined drawing it out—
“Concentrate,” Derek whispered.
“I am. If you’d shut up—”
The corpse stopped, like it could hear me. Then it reached out, blindly, searching. It found my leg and its finger started feeling its way toward my knee. I steeled myself against the urge to pull away. It needed to find me, so I let it. Ignore that and focus on—
“What did you do the last time?” Derek asked.
I glared over at him.
“I’m trying to help,” he said.
“You’d help a lot more if you’d shut—”
His glare matched mine. “You need to release it, Chloe. With all that screaming, someone’s bound to have heard us, and you’ve got about five minutes before they burst through that door and see a corpse crawling—”
“Is that supposed to help me?”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Out. ”
“I just—”
“Out!”
He retreated. I closed my eyes and envisioned the skeleton, the trapped spirit—
A bony finger touched the bare skin where my shirt had twisted away from my jeans and I jumped, eyes flying open to see it right there, the skull a few inches from my face, bobbing and weaving.
The coarse scraggly hair brushed my throat and I whimpered. It went still. Then the skull moved closer still. I could smell it now, the faint stench of death I hadn’t noticed earlier, churning my stomach, the thought of someone in there, trapped in that rotting—
It moved closer.
“Stop. P-please stop. ”
It went still. We hung there, eyeball to eye socket as I took short quick breaths, calming myself without inhaling its stink too deeply.
I waited for its next move, but it didn’t make one.
I’d told it to stop, and it had.
I remembered those gruesome old pictures on the Internet of necromancers leading armies of the dead. I remembered the book Dr. Davidoff had given me about the powers of necromancers.
The power to communicate with the dead. The power to raise the dead. The power to control the dead.
“M-move back,” I said. “P-please. ”
It did, slowly, teeth clacking. A guttural sound rose from its chest. A growl.
I knelt. “Lie down, please. ”
As it did, it lifted its face to me, skull moving from side to side like a snake, its growl a rattling hiss. I heard that hiss and I looked into those empty eye sockets and I felt hate. Waves of loathing rolled off the corpse. It wasn’t obeying me because it wanted to, but because it had to. It was an enslaved spirit, summoned by a necromancer, slammed back into little more than a skeleton, forced to make it move to obey the will of its master.
I swallowed hard. “I-I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to call you back. I wasn’t trying to. ”
It hissed, head still moving, as if it would love nothing more than to show me what death felt like.
“I’m so sor—”
I swallowed my words. The ghost trapped in there didn’t want apologies. It wanted freedom. So I closed my eyes and concentrated on making that happen, which was a lot easier when I didn’t have to worry about it creeping up my legs.
As I visualized tugging the spirit out, the chattering stopped so fast I peeked, thinking I’d accidentally commanded it to be silent. But the skeleton had collapsed in a motionless heap by my feet. The ghost was gone.
Twenty-two
I TOOK A DEEP, shaky breath, rubbed my face, and looked up to see Derek’s figure filling the doorway.
“If you think someone might have heard, we should grab our things and go,” I said, my voice remarkably steady. “We’ll leave him where he is, so he’ll be found and buried. ”
As I spoke, I had this crazy idea that Derek might actually be impressed by how I’d finally handled it. But he just stood there, fingering the scratch on his cheek.
“I’m sorry about that,” I said. “I panicked when you—”
“I gave you the option of leaving earlier. I said if that”—he gestured at the corpse—“was a problem, we’d find another place. ”
“And I thought it wasn’t a problem, as long as I didn’t summon any ghosts. ”
“But you did. ”
“I was asleep, Derek. ”
“What were you dreaming?”
I remembered and went still.
“You dreamed that you summoned him, didn’t you?”
“I—I didn’t mean—” I rubbed my face. “Normal people can’t control their dreams, Derek. If you can, then I guess you really are smarter than the rest of us. ”
“Of course, I can’t. But it was a bad situation—you being close to a dead body. You should have known that from the crawl space. ”
I did know that, especially after the incident with the bats. My gut had told me to leave, but I hadn’t had the nerve to admit my fear. I was afraid of being weak. Afraid of being mocked by Tori, of pissing off Derek, of disappointing Simon. In trying to be strong, I’d been stupid.