Shade
Jeri Smith-Ready
Shade
Also by Jeri Smith-Ready
Wicked Game
Bad to the Bone
Shade
JERI SMITH-READY
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SIMON PULSE
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First Simon Pulse hardcover edition May 2010
Copyright © 2010 by Jeri Smith-Ready
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith-Ready, Jeri.
Shade / Jeri Smith-Ready.— 1st Simon Pulse hardcover ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Sixteen-year-old Aura of Baltimore, Maryland, reluctantly works at her aunt’s law firm helping ghosts with wrongful death cases file suits in hopes of moving on, but it becomes personal when her boyfriend, a promising musician, dies and persistently haunts her.
ISBN 978-1-4169-9406-0
[1. Ghosts—Fiction. 2. Trials—Fiction. 3. Musicians—Fiction. 4. Supernatural—Fiction. 5. Baltimore (Md.)—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.S6634Sh 2010 [Fic]—dc22 2009039487
ISBN 978-1-4424-0640-7 (eBook)
To Jimmy, whose future shines as bright as ghosts in the dark
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my loving family, who have always let me be myself and make my own mistakes. Not that they had much choice.
To my “first readers”: Lauren Becker, Patrice Michelle, Jana Oliver, Cecilia Ready, Tricia Schwaab, Jimmy Smith, Rob Staeger, Marcia Tannian, and Elizabeth Wein. Especially Jana and Patrice, who braved that heinous first draft and weeks of insane babbling—I mean, brainstorming.
To my dearest author friends: Adrian Phoenix, who held my virtual hand through that nail-biting day; Stephanie Kuehnert, who inspires me to dig deep even if it hurts; Ann Aguirre, who inspires me to shut up and write; and Victoria Dahl, who just plain cracks me up. Special thanks to P. C. Cast, for every XOXO, OMG, and exclamation point—in e-mails and in person.
To the amazing folks at Simon Pulse—Bethany Buck, Mara Anastas, Lucille Rettino, Paul Crichton, Bess Braswell, Anna McKean, Cara Petrus, Katherine Devendorf, Jennifer Klonsky, Valerie Shea—for turning the dream of Shade into a reality. I’m still pinching myself. Ow.
To my indescribably awesome agent, Ginger Clark, for her faith that I could do this, and for finding Shade a perfect home. Her humor and enthusiasm keep my crazies at bay. To my phenomenal editor, Annette Pollert, who cheered me on at every step and made me justify every word. I’m a better writer because of her.
Thanks most of all to my husband, Christian, for his love and patience and for giving me forever.
The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?
—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Premature Burial”
Chapter One
You can hear me, can’t you?”
I punched the green print button on the copier to drown out the disembodied voice. Sometimes if I ignored them long enough, they went away—confused, discouraged, and lonelier than ever. Sometimes.
Okay, almost never. Usually they got louder.
No time to deal with it that day. Only one more set of legal briefs to unstaple, copy, and restaple, and then I could go home, trade this straitjacket and stockings for a T-shirt and jeans, and make it to Logan’s before practice. To tell him I’m sorry, that I’ve changed my mind, and this time I mean it. Really.
“I know you can hear me.” The old woman’s voice strengthened as it came closer. “You’re one of them.”
I didn’t flinch as I grabbed the top brief from the stack on the conference room table. I couldn’t see her under the office’s bright fluorescent lights, which made it about one percent easier to pretend she wasn’t there.
Someday, if I had my way, none of them would be there.
“What an intolerably rude child,” she said.
I yanked the staple out of the last brief and let it zing off in an unknown direction, trying to hurry without looking like I was hurrying. If the ghost knew I was getting ready to leave, she’d spit out her story, no invitation. I carefully laid the pages in the sheet feeder and hit print again.
“You can’t be more than sixteen.” The lady’s voice was close, almost at my elbow. “So you were born hearing us.”
I didn’t need her to remind me how ghosts’ ramblings had drowned out my mother’s New Agey lullabies. (According to Aunt Gina, Mom thought the old-fashioned ones were too disturbing—“down will come baby, cradle and all.” But when dead people are bitching and moaning around your crib at all hours, the thought of falling out of a tree is so not a source of angst.)
Worst part was, those lullabies were all I remembered of her.
“Come on,” I nagged the copier under my breath, resisting the urge to kick it.
The piece of crap picked that moment to jam.
“Shit.” I clenched my fist, driving the staple remover tooth into the pad of my thumb. “Ow! Damn it.” I sucked the pinpoint of blood.
“Language.” The ghost sniffed. “When I was your age, young ladies wouldn’t have heard such words, much less murdered the mother tongue with …” Blah blah … kids these days … blah blah … parents’ fault… blah.
I jerked open the front of the copier and searched for the stuck paper, humming a Keeley Brothers song to cover the ghost’s yakking.
“They cut me,” she said quietly.
I stopped humming, then blew out a sigh that fluttered my dark bangs. Sometimes there’s no ignoring these people.
I stood, slamming the copier door. “One condition. I get to see you.”
“Absolutely not,” she huffed.
“Wrong answer.” I rounded the table and headed for the switches by the conference room door.
“Please, you don’t want to do that. The way they left me—”
I flipped off the light and turned on the BlackBox.
“No!” The ghost streaked toward me in a blaze of violet. She stopped two inches from my face and let out a shriek that scraped against all the little bones in my ears.
Cringing? Not an option. I crossed my arms, then calmly and slowly extended my middle finger.
“This is your last warning.” Her voice crackled around the edges as she tried to frighten me. “Turn on the light.”
“You wanted to talk. I don’t talk to ghosts I can’t see.” I touched the BlackBox switch. “Sucks to be trapped, huh? That’s how I feel, listening to you people all day.”
“How dare you?” The woman slapped my face, her fingers curled into claws. Her hand passed through my head without so much as a breeze. “After all I’ve bee
n through. Look at me.”
I tried to check her out, but she was trembling so hard with anger, her violet lines kept shifting into one another. It was like trying to watch TV without my contacts.
“Those shoes are beyond last year,” I said, “but other than that, you look fine.”
The ghost glanced down at herself and froze in astonishment. Her pale hair—gray in life, I assumed—was tied in a bun, and she wore what looked like a ruffle-lapelled suit and low-heeled pumps. Your basic country-club queen. Probably found her own death positively scandalous.
“I haven’t seen myself in the dark.” She spoke with awe. “I assumed I would be …” Her hand passed over her stomach.
“What, fat?”
“Disemboweled.”
I felt my eyes soften. “You were murdered?” With old people it was usually a heart attack or stroke. But it explained her rage.
She scowled at me. “Well, it certainly wasn’t suicide.”
“I know.” My voice turned gentle as I remembered to be patient. Sometimes these poor souls didn’t know what to expect, despite all the public awareness campaigns since the Shift. The least I could do was clarify. “If you’d killed yourself, you wouldn’t be a ghost, because you would’ve been prepared to die. And you’re not all carved up because you get frozen in the happiest moment of your life.”
She examined her clothes with something close to a smile, maybe remembering the day she wore them, then looked up at me with a sudden ferocity. “But why?”
I ditched the patience. “How the hell should I know?” I flapped my arms. “I don’t know why we see you at all. No one knows, okay?”
“Listen to me, young lady.” She pointed her violet finger in my face. “When I was your age—”
“When you were my age, the Shift hadn’t happened yet. Everything’s different now. You should be grateful someone can hear you.”
“I shouldn’t be—this way—at all.” She clearly couldn’t say the word “dead.” “I need someone to make it right.”
“So you want to sue.” One of my aunt Gina’s specialties: wrongful death litigation. Gina believes in “peace through justice.” She thinks it helps people move past ghosthood to whatever’s beyond. Heaven, I guess, or at least someplace better than Baltimore.
Weird thing is, it usually works, though no one knows exactly why. But unfortunately, Gina—my aunt, guardian, and godmother—can’t hear or see ghosts. Neither can anyone else born before the Shift, which happened sixteen and three-quarters years ago. So when Gina’s firm gets one of these cases, guess who gets to translate? All for a file clerk’s paycheck.
“My name is Hazel Cavendish,” the lady said. “I was one of this firm’s most loyal clients.”
Ah, that explained how she got here. Ghosts can only appear in the places they went during their lives. No one knows why that is, either, but it makes things a lot easier on people like me.
She continued without prompting. “I was slaughtered this morning outside my home in—”
“Can you come back Monday?” I checked my watch in ex-Hazel’s violet glow. “I have to be somewhere.”
“But it’s only Thursday. I need to speak to someone now.” Her fingers flitted over the string of pearls around her neck. “Aura, please.”
I stepped back. “How do you know my name?”
“Your aunt talked about you all the time, showed me your picture. Your name is hard to forget.” She moved toward me, her footsteps silent. “So beautiful.”
My head started to swim. Uh-oh.
Vertigo in a post-Shifter like me usually means a ghost is turning shade. They go down that one-way path when they let bitterness warp their souls. It has its advantages—shades are dark, powerful spirits who can hide in the shadows and go anywhere they want.
Anywhere, that is, but out of this world. Unlike ghosts, shades can’t pass on or find peace, as far as we know. And since they can single-handedly debilitate any nearby post-Shifters, “detainment” is the only option.
“I really have to go,” I whispered, like I’d hurt ex-Hazel less if I lowered the volume. “A few days won’t matter.”
“Time always matters.”
“Not for you.” I kept my voice firm but kind. “Not anymore.”
She moved so close, I could see every wrinkle on her violet face.
“Your eyes are old,” she hissed. “You think you’ve seen everything, but you don’t know what it’s like.” She touched my heart with a hand I couldn’t feel. “One day you’ll lose something important, and then you’ll know.”
I ran for the car, my work shoes clunking against the sidewalk and rubbing blisters on my ankles. No time to stop home to change before going to Logan’s. Should’ve brought my clothes with me, but how could I have known there’d be a new case?
I’d wussed out, of course, and let the old woman tell my aunt her nasty death story. The ghost was angry enough that I worried about what she’d do without immediate attention. “Shading” was still pretty rare, especially for a new ghost like ex-Hazel, but it wasn’t worth the risk.
The leafy trees lining the street made it dark enough to see ghosts even an hour before sunset. Half a dozen were loitering outside the day care center in the mansion across the street. Like most of the buildings in the Roland Park area, Little Creatures Kiddie Care was completely BlackBoxed—its walls lined with the same thin layer of charged obsidian that kept ghosts out of sensitive areas. Bathrooms, military base buildings, that sort of thing. I wish Gina and I could afford to live there—Roland Park, I mean, not a military base.
I stopped for a giant Coke Slurpee and guzzled it on my way toward I-83, wincing at the brain freeze. I usually prefer to use the spoon end of the straw, but after ex-Hazel’s intake session, I desperately needed the massive caffeine-sugar infusion that only pure, bottom-of-the-cup Slurpee syrup could provide.
The long shadows of trees cut across the road, and I kept my eyes forward so I wouldn’t see the ghosts on the sidewalks.
Lot of good it did. At the last stoplight before the expressway, a little violet kid waved from the backseat of the car in front of me. His lips were moving, forming words I couldn’t decipher. An older girl next to him clapped her hands over her ears, her blond pigtails wagging back and forth as she shook her head. The parents in the front seats kept talking, oblivious or maybe just unable to deal. They should trade in that car, I thought, while that poor girl still has her sanity.
The on-ramp sloped uphill into the sunshine, and I let out a groan of relief, gnawing the end of my straw.
After almost seventeen years of hearing about grisly murders and gruesome accidents, you’d think I’d be tough, jaded. You’d think that ghosts’ tendency to over-share would eventually annoy instead of sadden me.
And you’d be right. Mostly. By the time I was five, I’d stopped crying. I’d stopped having nightmares. I’d stopped sleeping with the lights on so I wouldn’t see their faces. And I’d stopped talking about it, because by that point the world believed us. Five hundred million toddlers can’t be wrong.
But I never forgot. Their stories are shelved in my mind, neat as a filing system. Probably because I’ve recited many of them on the witness stand.
Courts don’t just take my word for it, or any one person’s. Testimony only counts if two of us post-Shifters agree on a ghost’s statement. Since ghosts apparently can’t lie, they make great witnesses. Last year, me and this terrified freshman translated for the victims of a psycho serial killer. (Remember Tomcat? The one who liked to “play with his food”?)
Welcome to my life. It gets better.
I pulled into Logan’s driveway at 6:40. I loved going to the Keeleys’ house—it sat in a Hunt Valley development that had been farmland only a few years before. Newer neighborhoods had way fewer ghosts, and I’d never seen one at the Keeleys’. At the time, anyway.
I checked my hair in the rearview mirror. Hopelessly well-groomed. I pawed through my bag to find a few funky little silver
skull-and-crossbones barrettes, then pinned them into my straight dark brown hair to make it stick out in random places.
“Yeah, you look totally punk in your beige suit and sensible flats.” I made a face at myself in the mirror, then leaned closer.
Were my eyes really that old, like ex-Hazel said? Maybe it was the dark circles underneath. I licked my finger and wiped under my brown eyes to see if the mascara had smeared.
Nope. The gray shadows on my skin came from too little sleep and too much worrying. Too much rehearsing what I would say to Logan.
As I walked up the brick front path, I heard music blasting through the open basement window.
Late. I wanted to hurl my bag across the Keeleys’ lawn in frustration. Once Logan got lost in his guitar, he forgot I existed. And we really needed to talk.
I went in the front door without knocking, the way I had since we were six and the Keeleys lived around the block in a row home like ours. I hurried past the stairs, through the kitchen, and into the family room.
“Hey, Aura,” called Logan’s fifteen-year-old brother Dylan from his usual position, sprawled barefoot and bowlegged on the floor in front of the flat-screen TV. He glanced up from his video game, then did a double-take at the sight of my Slurpee cup. “Bad one?”
“Old lady, stabbed in a mugging. Semi-Shady.”
“Sucks.” He focused on his game, nodding in time to the metal soundtrack. “Protein drinks work better.”
“You bounce back your way, I’ll bounce my way.”
“Whatever.” His voice rose suddenly. “Noooo! Eat it! Eat it!” Dylan slammed his back against the ottoman and jerked the joystick almost hard enough to break it. As his avatar got torched by a flamethrower, he shrieked a stream of curses that told me his parents weren’t home. Mr. and Mrs. Keeley had apparently already left for their second honeymoon.
I opened the basement door, releasing a blast of guitar chords, then slipped off my shoes so I could walk downstairs without noise.
