Sisters of Blood and Spirit

“I’m a fairly private person.”

“That’s just a pretty way of saying you’re antisocial.”

I grinned as my sister laughed. “That, too.” I liked this girl. I really hoped she wasn’t playing me.

“I like this girl,” Wren commented. “I really hope she isn’t playing us.”

That thing they say about twins being on the same wavelength, feeling the same thing, thinking the same thing? It was true, and the whole dead-vs-living thing just cranked it up to eleven. The only reason I was alive was because Wren had felt something was wrong and had come looking for me the night I’d partied with a bottle of vodka and a razor blade. Good times. And I felt her anguish the entire time I was locked up and she couldn’t do anything to help me.

She’d done more than anyone else. More than our parents or any sanctimonious doctor. And I had been so pissed that she’d played a part in saving me, because I had thought death would finally put us in the same world.

It wasn’t my time to die, she’d said—as if she had any way of knowing.

We walked in silence for a bit, my grandmother’s house coming steadily closer. I’d only lived there a few days—since Dad had dropped me off with a guilty look and my own credit card—but it already felt more like home than my old house had in a long time. We’d lived in this town since I was three, but after my...accident, my parents had moved to Natick up in Mass. Mom needed to run away, while they decided I needed to endure daily torture at the hands of my peers. Whatever. I wasn’t bitter. Much. And at least here I didn’t have to see the look on her face when my mother looked at me. Not that she looked at me very often.

“So,” Roxi began, ending my pity party, “want to hang out later?”

My inner alarm went off, screeching “abort!” over and over. “Uh...”

“I’m going over to ’Nother Cup at eight. It’s open-mike night. Kevin McCrae’s playing. You know him, don’t you?”

Oh, yeah. I knew him.

“Yes!” Wren screeched in my ear. “Say yes! Say yes or I’ll bring Mr. Havers over to visit.”

Mr. Havers was the old dude who liked to haunt for the hell of it. He had few teeth and was as bat-shit crazy as a dead guy could be. And he smelled like a horse. “Yes,” I said through clenched teeth. “I know him. That sounds great. I’ll meet you there?”

“Sure.” Roxi grinned. “It will be fun.”

“Yeah. Big fun.” Could I sound any less sincere? An evening spent around more staring people with my sister rhapsodizing about Kevin McCrae—the one person other than me who could hear her. And the one person I wanted to see less than Mace. Woot. And I was such a fan of coffeehouses with blatantly unclever names.

But when was the last time I’d been out? When was the last time I’d spent time with people my own age who weren’t dead or mentally unstable? Or the last time I had to worry about curfew? Did I even have a curfew?

We stopped at the foot of my grandmother’s driveway. The smooth pavement led to a large slate-gray Victorian with eggplant trim. Large maple trees grew along both sides of the drive, forming a canopy that was just starting to show a hint of color.

“Your grandmother drives a Volkswagen Beetle?”

There was no missing the little car—it was purple. “Yes.”

Roxi squinted. “Are the taillights shaped like flowers?”

“They are.” I didn’t mention that the interior was green. Chartreuse. Nan had it custom done.

The dark-haired girl nodded. “Pretty.” She glanced down at her feet. “Listen, I know you don’t want to talk about it, but I’m really glad Mace found you.”

She forgot to add “lying in a pool of your own blood with your wrists sliced open.”

“Thanks.”

Roxi nodded as she lifted her head. “Okay, so I’ll see you at eight.”

“Sure.”

She grinned. “Great. See you then.” She turned to walk away, then stopped. She glanced over her shoulder with a lingering smile and looked somewhere over my right shoulder. “’Bye, Wren.”

My sister stood at my left, but the effect was the same. Wren’s eyes widened, and I wondered if Roxi would ever know how much those two words meant to her. How much the thought meant. Wren lifted her hand and waved, even though Roxi had already set off down the street.

We walked up the lane, finally alone.

“What did you do to Andrew?” I asked.

Wren shrugged. Her blouse slid down on her shoulder. “Scared him a little, that’s all. I told you, nothing permanent.”

“Then why wasn’t he in class?”

“He had to go home.”

“Why? And please don’t say he was bleeding from the eyes.”

She shot me an indignant glance. “He peed his pants.” Yes, the scariest person I knew said “peed.”

“That’s it?”

“Isn’t that enough?” she shot back.

I held up my hands. “Just making sure.”

My sleeves had fallen down my arms when I raised them, and Wren grabbed my left forearm before I could lower both. Her thumb was like velvet against the satin of the scar that ran down the throat of my wrist. Tears filled her bright blue eyes.

“It’s all right,” I told her.

“Did it hurt?” she asked. Wren didn’t have much of a concept of physical pain, having never experienced it. She had no scars and she never would—not unless there was something in the afterlife that neither of us knew about. She’d never asked me about them before.

“Not as much as I thought they would.”

“I’d take them if I could.”

“But you can’t.” I gently pulled my arm away. “They’re mine.” And the only thing other than our hair that set us apart as two separate people instead of two halves of one.

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WREN

Sometimes I watched Lark sleep, just to make certain nothing happened to her. She didn’t know that I did it or she wouldn’t have closed her eyes. She said I “creeped” her out when I did things like that. What else was I supposed to do? I didn’t sleep—I didn’t need to. I had tried to once, but I got bored. As a child I’d figured out—with Lark’s help—how to pass through books so that I could actually read them. Thankfully our grandmother had a fabulous library—not as good as the one in the Shadow Lands, but it was more than adequate.

When we were little, Lark asked me if I lived in Heaven. I told her I didn’t know. I still didn’t. It was an untruth that the dead had all the answers. We just had different questions.

The truth of where I “lived” was that it was big and peaceful and muted. No bright colors—except for my hair—no loud noises, no strong smells. Certainly nothing like the wave of deliciousness that greeted me when I phased through the door of our grandmother’s kitchen. My sense of smell wasn’t that developed, but spending time in this world had helped strengthen it, and what I smelled was good.