“Really?” The fact that he was truly surprised made me want to cry a little more.

“Kevin, you aren’t a normal live person, you know that?”

He smiled. “I’m eighteen years old. It’s the weekend, and my parents are out of town. What am I doing? Sitting in my room with a beautiful girl and we’re talking about ghosts. I know I’m not normal, Wren.”

“Would we be doing something different if I was alive?”

His smile faded. Had I said something wrong? “Yeah, we would.”

“Like what?”

He sat back down at his computer. “I wonder if the groundskeeper is familiar with the graves or has a plan of the cemetery? I think Roxi’s uncle owns the company that looks after Haven Crest. I should get her to check with him.”

I was confused. I must have said something. “Kevin...?”

“Don’t,” he said, not turning around. “Your sister was right.”

“About what?” I was going to kill her.

At least he glanced over his shoulder this time. “She said I was going to hurt you—that it was inevitable, and she’s right. I’m going to hurt myself, too.”

“She is not right. You won’t hurt me.”

“No?” Finally he turned around. “You’re dead, Wren. I’m alive. That’s probably not going to change for a long time. Maybe it would be better if we stopped hanging out, just the two of us.”

Pain blossomed deep inside me. “No. It wouldn’t.”

He removed his glasses and looked at me. His blue eyes were so sad. “I haven’t had a girlfriend since you came to me and asked me to help you save Lark. I spend more time at your grave than I do with any girl I know. I’m infatuated with you, and it’s no good for either one of us.”

“But—”

“I think you should go. Please.”

At that moment I understood the meaning of the term heartbreak. There was a pain inside me I couldn’t locate or identify. It was as though my chest was being squeezed by giant hands, thumbs digging deep inside. It was like the time Lark tried to push me away, but sharper, because I’d known that Lark loved me, and wanted me to be real. I’d known that I would have my sister back one day. This felt...final.

I immediately left the house—flashing back to the Shadow Lands instead of returning to Lark. I needed a few minutes alone because I wanted to blame her for this, and I knew it wasn’t her fault. She’d only said what Kevin and I both knew to be true. Our feelings had started to go beyond friendship, and there was no way that could ever work.

Maybe it was time for me to start spending more time with my own kind. As much as I loved my sister and wanted to be with her, the living brought me nothing but pain and aggravation.

I sat down on a park bench I’d never noticed before and wallowed in this new feeling. And then I tried very hard to let go of the blame, because it wasn’t anyone’s fault that I was dead, and it wasn’t Lark’s fault that I couldn’t be with the boy I liked.

I would start spending more time here in the Shadow Lands. I would be more social with my own kind. I would stop pining over a stupid human boy.

But I would not forsake my sister. Lark and I were two puzzle pieces that were meant to fit together. Like it or not, we had a purpose. At least, I thought we did.

The white-haired woman had shown up at Haven Crest. Lark had seen her. Who was she, and why was she helping us? Why now? Had she been a patient there? Was that why she could show up at the hospital and in the Shadow Lands? Or was she something else? And could she help us destroy Bent?

One thing was for certain, I wasn’t going to find any of these answers sitting on a bench in the dark.

Besides, in the end, my sister was the only person—living or dead—that I could rely on. In the end, all either of us had was the other.

LARK

There was something wrong with Wren, but she didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t have to be a freaking genius to figure out it had something to do with Kevin. Did it make me an awful sister that I hoped he let her know it couldn’t work between them? I didn’t like to see her upset, but I really didn’t want to see her get her heart broken.

Because let’s just think about how Wren might take that. Strong emotions in ghosts were what led to hauntings and other generally bad things. I had no idea what my sister was capable of—and neither did she.

She hovered over my shoulder as I flipped through the book she’d brought back from the Shadow Lands. There was some interesting information in there—stuff on patients and staff alike. I paused to look at a black-and-white photo of a kid from the ’90s.

Olgilvie? He’d been a patient at Haven Crest just a few years before it closed down. Maybe Wren was right to worry about me antagonizing him after all.

“I told you not to antagonize him,” she reminded me.

“Yeah, yeah. We’ll look at that later.” Sometimes when she said what I was thinking I didn’t know whether to punch her or laugh. I did neither, but I did keep flipping.

I found the records about the graves being moved around—and the new plans that Kevin had said were lost in a fire. I also found a few mentions of the mixed up graves—Bent’s number was mentioned.

Mentioned twice. As in Bent had two freaking graves. What had they done, sawed him in half? Obviously, it was a mistake, but why did it have to be Bent they got messed up?

Okay, so I was tempted at this point to set the whole cemetery ablaze and cleanse the whole damn place in one fell swoop. That wouldn’t do it, though, and I knew better. You had to get right down to the corpse—get the bones. If there wasn’t a corpse then you had to find whatever tethered the ghost to this world.