Queen of the Dead

11 Will

“Where is she?” A loud female voice demanded, and for a second, I thought Alona had somehow found out about Mina already and was preparing to do some damage to one or both of us.

But when I forced my sleep-gritty eyes open, it wasn’t Alona, but Liesel standing in my bedroom just in front of my door. My closed door. You’d think she’d have taken that as a hint, but I’d long ago learned ghosts weren’t much on subtlety.

I groaned. It was early — the sky outside my windows still a predawn gray — and two nights of little or no sleep was beginning to wear on me and my patience. “What do you want, Liesel?”

She folded her arms over her chest and stalked to the foot of my bed, her dress rustling loudly. “She didn’t even talk to you about us, did she?”

I struggled to focus and sit up. “Who?”

“Alona!”

Something about this was ringing a bell, dimly. Alona had mentioned something about Liesel yesterday morning, but nothing specific. I shook my head.

“I knew it,” she spat. “She’s always sabotaging me. I bet she didn’t even tell you about Claire and Todd.”

Todd? Who was Todd? No, I did not care. I wasn’t awake enough yet to care. I rubbed my hands over my face. “Where’s Eric?” I asked, realizing suddenly that he wasn’t with her. No one has ever accused me of being my best in the morning.

She looked away with a sniff. “He couldn’t be bothered. I don’t know why; it’s only our whole afterlife at stake.”

Or maybe he knew something she didn’t, which I suspected to be the case. Eric and I had had a couple of conversations over the last few weeks — usually while Liesel and Alona were sniping at each other — which had led me to believe that Mrs. Pederson and her love life (or lack thereof) might not be Liesel and Eric’s biggest obstacle.

“You need to talk to Eric,” I said wearily, “and you need to not be here when Alona shows up.” Because I seriously did not want to witness the inevitable fallout when Alona discovered Liesel had come here without permission.

I glanced at my clock to see how much time was left, and stopped dead. It was 7:58 a.m.

I felt a surge of alarm and leaned closer to make sure I was reading it correctly. I was. Another check of the window revealed rain on the glass. What I’d taken for early morning was, in fact, just the start to an overcast day.

“What’s wrong with you?” Liesel asked with great disdain.

“Did you see Alona?” I demanded. “Was she here?”

“This morning?” she asked.

I nodded, feeling like my head might bobble off in my anxiousness to answer and get her response.

“I just walked in a few minutes ago. Nobody was here but you,” she said, staring at me as if I was crazy.

But I wasn’t. Alona was late, fifty-five minutes to be exact, and that never happened. It couldn’t. She showed up here every morning at precisely 7:03 a.m., the time ofher death. It was a function of our ghost-talker/spirit guide bond.

Something was wrong. Fighting a feeling of panic, I stood up, snatched my jeans from the floor, pulled them on, and started tearing through the laundry on the floor, looking for my shoes. They seemed to have disappeared into one pile or another last night when I’d kicked them off.

“What is going on?” Liesel asked.

“Alona’s missing,” I said grimly. She’d left here yesterday all full of fire and some kind of plan for vengeance (against me, of course). Something must have happened. I envisioned her seeking out Mina to tell her exactly what she thought about Mina’s hair, among other things.

Oh, God. That would probably get her boxed for sure. But Mina would have mentioned an event like that last night, wouldn’t she have? Or maybe not — considering all that had happened. I could easily see Mina waiting to drop that little tidbit of information at exactly the time that would benefit her the most.

“How do you know she didn’t just quit?” Liesel asked.

I stopped my frantic search for footwear and looked up at her. “What do you mean?”

She shrugged. “Alona shows up here every morning because she’s your spirit guide, right?

“Yeah, so?”

“So, maybe she’s not here because she quit.” Liesel sounded a little too self-satisfied.

“And why would she do that?” I asked through gritted teeth.

“Because I told her one day you were going to toss her over for someone who was alive, that she was just convenient for now,” Liesel said.

“Damn it, Liesel!” I couldn’t believe this.

“What? That’s not true?” She eyed me shrewdly. “You know it is. You aren’t going to spend the rest of your life—”

“My life is none of your business,” I snapped. “When did this happen?

“Two nights ago.”

No wonder she’d reacted so badly yesterday morning, with Liesel filling her head with all this crap. Not that Alona ever would have been happy that I’d been out with Mina or that I was turning down her request about her parents, but she might not have been quite as apoplectic about it.

“This is your fault,” I said to Liesel, pointing the one Chuck I’d managed to find, so far, at her.

“Me?” she asked, laying an offended hand on her chest. “What did I do?”

A knock sounded at the door. “Will, is everything okay in there?” my mom asked. “I heard shouting.”

I grimaced. Of course; the one morning she didn’t have the early shift at the diner. “I’m fine. I’ll be right out,” I called, and then stepped closer to Liesel. “You haven’t seen Alona since?” I asked in a quieter voice.

“Would I be here looking for her if I had?” she asked in a rather snotty tone.

Fine. Whatever. I sat down to jam my shoe on, and by virtue of sheer luck, discovered my missing one by sitting on it. Excellent.

I needed to find Alona to make sure she was all right, at least. If, after that, she still didn’t want to be my spirit guide…well, then, I’d have to deal with that when the time came. Just the idea, though, of her not being in my life was hard to imagine, and I didn’t want to imagine it. I would miss her.

Ask me if I’d ever thought that would be possible a year ago. Hell, two months ago.

The trouble was, I had no idea where to begin searching for her. In theory, if she’d resigned as my spirit guide — could she even do that without me being aware of it? — then she’d probably woken up back on Henderson Street where she’d died. But that had been almost an hour ago. She could be anywhere by now.

My mom knocked again.

“Mom, I said I’m okay,” I said, struggling to keep the irritation out of my voice.

“It’s not that,” she said, opening the door. She looked pale, standing there in a tattered plaid flannel robe with the house phone clutched to her chest. I hadn’t even heard it ring.

“Is everything all right?” I asked, with the sudden sick assurance that it wasn’t.

She nodded, her eyes bright with tears. “It’s the hospital. St. Catherine’s.”

Oh. Oh, no. Lily. It felt like all the air had knocked out of me suddenly, even though I’d been expecting this call for months now. I nodded numbly. “When did she die? Last night or—”

“No, no, sweetie.” My mother swept into the room and knelt to give me a one-armed hug. “It’s not that. She’s awake! Lily’s awake.”

I stared at her. “Lily Turner?”

My mother laughed. Her tears had clearly been of the happy variety. “Of course. How many other Lilys do you know?” She held the receiver out to me. “Her mother’s on the phone. She says Lily has been asking for you.”

But that was just not possible. I’d looked everywhere for her spirit after that accident. Lily was gone. Not dead, but certainly not alive and definitely not capable of waking up and asking for me.

And yet, I doubted that her mother, Mrs. Turner, would ever in a million years make something like that up.

So…what did that leave? I had no idea.

My head swimming, I stood up and took the phone.

“You.” I pointed at Liesel. “Don’t go anywhere.” She’d helped cause this problem with Alona; she would help me solve it, by God.

My mom raised her eyebrows at me but said nothing.

Liesel flung herself, sulking, down at the foot of my bed, “Whatever. You better be ready to help Eric and me after this. This thing with Todd isn’t going to last forever.”

Todd again, whoever the hell he was. I ignored her and put the phone to my ear.

“Hello?”

“Will, it’s Mrs. Turner. Lily would like to—”

In the background, I could hear a ruckus, a familiar voice, one I hadn’t heard in almost a year and thought I’d never hear again, saying something in a demanding tone. It sent a chill over my skin. If I’d been wrong about Lily’s spirit being gone, God, what else had I been wrong about? I’d been so sure.…

“In a minute, Lily,” Mrs. Turner said, sounding slightly muffled.

“She’s still a little hard to understand sometimes,” Mrs. Turner said to me. “But we’re working on it. She’s been asking for you, pretty much since the moment she woke up. I made her wait until it was a decent hour, and as you can hear, she’s not happy with me.” And yet the joy in Mrs. Turner’s voice, that her daughter was awake and annoyed with her, was evident.

“I’ll put her on now,” she said. The phone rattled a little, and I heard Mrs. Turner say, “Here you go, honey,” in the distance.

“Will?”

Even though I’d been expecting it, hearing Lily say my name sucked the air out of my lungs and made my eyes sting with tears.

“Yeah,” I managed.

“I need to see you.” She was enunciating carefully, but other than that she sounded almost, well, normal. “Can you come to St. Catherine’s, please? Now?”

I heard her mother admonishing her in the background for the demand. But Lily persisted. “Now?”

“I’m on my way,” I said.

Lily Turner had moved to Groundsboro about a year and half ago from a small town in Indiana. With her conservative clothes and heavy, almost southern accent, she hadn’t fit in at our school, which worked out well, since neither had I. Most people had assumed I was goth. In truth, I was just trying to be as invisible as possible. Dark clothes, earbuds in all the time, quiet in class — it was my way of disappearing. I’d been trying to avoid attracting the attention of all the ghosts wandering the halls, but it had worked equally well at repelling most of the living as well.

I liked Lily, though. She was different. I’d been going toschool with the same people since kindergarten, and most ofthe time it was like they’d all been brainwashed by the samecult leader. Any sparks of real personality were snuffed out by the need for conformity within all the little individual cliques. Jocks wore their letter jackets on certain days. The band kids created goofy T-shirts with sayings nobody else understood. Alona’s crowd rose to the top by shoving everyone else down.

But Lily was an outsider. She asked smart questions and really listened to the answers, offering opinions that might not have been the “right” ones. She didn’t know the right ones, not for our school. Not in the beginning, at least.

She was pretty, too, though not in the same fantasy crush way Alona was. She was more like the girl you’d want as your lab partner and your date for Homecoming, even if all you were going to do was sit at a table in the back and watch with amusement as the popular girls wept and raged over their loss in the race for queen.

At one point, I’d thought there might be something between us, a chance for it to be more than friends.

In the end, though, things had changed, the way they always do. Lily had harbored a secret obsession with the first-tier (a.k.a. popular people) — seeing them like Hollywood royalty. In the beginning, I think it was just because she’d never seen anything like them before, except in television and movies. Her high school had consisted of a hundred kids total, and they’d known one another since birth. So, pretty much all the mystery and intrigue was gone. But not here at Groundsboro High: here we had mystery, intrigue, and drama — oh, the never-ending drama — to spare. It was like watching a soap opera play out before your very eyes…or living in one.

Unbeknownst to me, our mutual friend Joonie, one of Lily’s only other friends, had had a crush on Lily from day one. She took a chance one afternoon and confessed her feelings to Lily with a kiss. Though Lily tried to handle it the right way and let Joonie down kindly, Joonie’s home life (nothing was ever good enough for her controlling and conservative minister father) was such shit that she kind of freaked, afraid her dad would find out what had happened.

Accusations and threats were made, and the two of them stopped speaking without ever telling me what had happened. Lily left us and started hanging about the edges of the popular crowd, seeking scraps of their begrudging acceptance. And then Ben Rogers, dickhead extraordinaire, had plucked her out of obscurity. He “dated” her for about a month, and then he dumped her publicly at a first-tier party.

Lily had been devastated, realizing finally that Ben and his crowd weren’t as wonderful as everyone seemed to think. She’d left that party in tears and tried to call both Joonie and me on her way home. Then she’d missed a turn on her drive and slammed into a tree. She’d never woken up from that night.

Until today, apparently.

On the way to the hospital, I pushed the Dodge wellover the speed limit, risking a ticket. I couldn’t shake the irrational fear that somehow she would be unconscious againif I took too long to arrive.

Calm down. If she’s awake now, she’ll be awake in fifteen minutes.

Except maybe not. After Lily’s accident, I’d done a ton of reading about comas and people coming out of them (or not). Sometimes the person woke up for a day or even just a few minutes, seemingly coherent, only to lapse back into that unnatural sleep…or worse yet, to die. I’d read of that happening — the person waking up only to die shortly afterward — at least a couple of times. The articles had interpreted the occurrence each time as a gift from God for that person to have a chance to say good-bye.

I hoped like hell that wasn’t what was happening here. Though, honestly, I wasn’t sure what to think about any of this. Until this morning, Lily waking up even to say goodbye and then die had been far from the realm of possibility in my mind.

It was a relief, finally, to see the hospital in the distance, and then to turn into the entrance. Almost there.

Of course, it seemed like everyone in the world must have been at the hospital on this particular Wednesday, because the parking garage was full, and the lots were jammed with cars.

After ten minutes of prowling for a space in the visitor section, I finally gave up and pulled into the vast empty expanse that was reserved for outpatient parking. Mine was the only car in the entire row. Far more visitors today than patients, I guess. Whatever. Let them tow me. It would be worth it just to get inside.

I got out of the car and jogged to the main entrance, keys jangling in my hand. I didn’t even want to take the time to stuff them in my pocket.

The overwhelming stench of antiseptic and hospital filled my nose as soon as I pushed through the revolving door into the lobby. I hauled ass past the visitor information center in the middle of the lobby. I’d been here more than enough times to know where I was going, and though I probably technically should have registered as a visitor, I didn’t have patience for that this morning.

In accordance with everything else, the elevator took forever to descend, and then once I was on it, another eternity to reach the fifth floor.

When the elevator doors started to open, I twisted sideways to fit through and hurried down the hall, my Chucks squeaking on the newly mopped floor.

I heard Lily before I saw her, her voice drifting out into the hall. “And I’m saying I don’t care. I’d be more comfortable in my own clothes.” She sounded kind of pissed.

Being in a coma had certainly made Lily more strident. If there’d ever been anything that bothered me about her, besides her obsession with that asshat Rogers and his crowd, it was that she tended to roll with things as they happened, assuming everyone else knew better than she did. Not anymore, apparently.

When I reached her open door, the sight inside was still a bit of a shock. Lily was sitting up in the bed without any visible means of support, though she was listing slightly to one side, and glaring daggers at a doctor whose hair stood up in all directions, like every strand was trying to escape his head at the same time. Mrs. Turner sat at her bedside, just like usual, only it seemed like she might float away with happiness. She seemed physically lighter, less beaten, now unburdened by the worry for her only daughter.

Lily looked…good. Different somehow, though. Maybeit was just the color in her cheeks and the furious glint in her eyes, or simply that it had been so long since I’d seen her in anything but a dull and insensate state. But it seemed more than that, like someone had lit a fire within her.

I knocked on the door frame and watched as heads turned in my direction.

Relief, as clear as I’d ever seen it, washed over Lily’s face. “Thank God,” she said, which was a little weird. If anything, shouldn’t that be my line? I wondered what she was thinking for her to have that reaction. What did she remember about that last night? Did she think I’d avoided her call, still angry at her as Joonie had been?

“Hi,” I said, feeling a bit awkward for the first time. It occurred to me right then that I hadn’t so much as brushed my teeth before leaving the house. I’d showered last night after coming home from the theater, so at least I was relatively clean. But my arms were visibly scraped up after my fall through the stage, and if I had to guess, I’d bet that myhair wasn’t in any better shape than the doctor’s. All in all, a fairly disreputable picture.

Mrs. Turner, dark circles under her eyes and looking alittle frazzled, performed introductions. “Dr. Highland, this is Will Killian, the friend Lily has been so anxiously awaiting.”

I nodded at the doctor, who seemed less than pleased at the interruption.

“Can we have a minute alone, please?” Lily asked.

“Don’t be rude,” Mrs. Turner scolded mildly. Then she turned her attention to me with a knowing smile. “I’m sure you have lots of catching up to do.”

Lily rolled her eyes.

Mrs. Turner stood and made her way to the door, followed by Dr. Highland. “Don’t be surprised if she doesn’t remember some things,” he said to me quietly as he passed. “She’s having a little trouble with details.”

“Just because I didn’t remember a few names,” Lily muttered.

“Including your own middle name?” Mrs. Turner inquired from the doorway.

Lily huffed.

“She’s also experiencing some personality shifts,” Dr. Highland said carefully. “Again, not uncommon in these types of head injuries.”

I nodded.

“I’ll give you a personality shift,” Lily said under her breath.

Whoa. Okay…

“Just try not to upset her,” the doctor said with one last exasperated look at Lily.

Then he and Mrs. Turner left, closing the door partially behind them.

Lily waved me closer, and I obeyed, moving to the side of her bed. “Listen,” she said in an urgent whisper. “I know you’re not going to like this, but I don’t have time to break you into this gently. I need you to get me out of here.”

“The hospital?” Who was this girl? The Lily I knew would never have dreamed of going against her mother and probably an entire team of doctors. “I don’t know if—”

“No, not the hospital,” she hissed impatiently. “Out of here.” She gestured to herself, hands on her chest.

I shook my head, confused. “I don’t understand.”

She grimaced. “I was afraid of this.”

She took my hand in hers and tugged me down to her until we were eye to eye.

“I’m not Lily, as you should damn well know,” she said evenly. “Lily’s gone. You’re the one that told me that, remember?”

Cold washed over me, and the world spun. Pieces of two separate puzzles I’d thought unrelated snapped together, forming a complete picture. Alona missing. Lily unexpectedly and unbelievably awake and in possession of a personality that seemed nothing like what I’d known of her.

With my heart pounding too hard, I stared at Lily’s familiar heart-shaped face — the sprinkle of freckles acrossher nose, the crinkles near the corner of her eyes that suggested her eagerness to laugh, the jagged but healing scarfrom her accident — and the equally familiar but definitely un-Lily-like determined glint in her light brown eyes, whichwere even now narrowing in that haughty yet almost sexyway that was the trademark look of disdain for only one girlI knew.…

“Alona?” I asked through numb lips.