The Mediator #1: Shadowland Read online

  I gasped and spun around. Jesse stood there on the asphalt of the parking lot, the moon at his back, casting his face into shadow.

  "Oh my God." My heart was beating so fast, I thought it was going to explode. I had never been so scared in all my life. Never.

  Maybe that's why I did what I did next, which was reach out and grab the front of Jesse's shirt in both my hands. "Oh my God," I said, again. "Jesse, are you all right?"

  "Of course I'm all right." He sounded surprised I'd even bother to ask. And I guess it was stupid. What could Heather do to Jesse, after all? She couldn't exactly kill him. "Are you all right?"

  "Me? I'm fine." I turned my head to search the darkened windows of Mr. Walden's classroom. "Do you think she's … done?"

  "For now," Jesse said.

  "How do you know?" I was shocked to find that I was shaking – really shaking – all over. "How do you know she won't come bursting through that wall there and start uprooting all those trees and hurling them at us?"

  Jesse shook his head, and I could see that he was smiling. You know, for a guy who died before they invented orthodontia, he had pretty nice teeth. Almost as nice as Bryce's. "She won't."

  "How do you know?"

  "Because she won't. She doesn't know she can. She's too new at all this, Susannah. She doesn't know yet all that she can do."

  If that was supposed to make me feel better, it didn't work. The fact that he admitted she could uproot trees and start hurling them at me – she was that powerful – and only hadn't due to lack of experience, was enough to stop my shaking cold, and drop the handfuls of shirt I held. Not that I didn't think Heather could have followed me if she wanted to. She could, the same way Jesse had followed me down to the Mission. But the thing of it was, Jesse knew he could. He'd been a ghost a lot longer than Heather. She was only just beginning to explore her new powers.

  That was the scariest part. She was so new at all of this … and already that powerful.

  I started pacing around the parking lot like a crazy woman.

  "We've got to do something," I said. "We've got to warn Father Dominic – and Bryce. My God, we've got to warn Bryce not to come to school tomorrow. She'll kill him. She'll kill him the minute he sets foot on campus – "

  "Susannah," Jesse said.

  "I guess we could call him. It's one in the morning, but we could call him, and tell him – I don't know what we could tell him. We could tell him there's been a death threat on him, or something. That might work. Or – we could leave a death threat. Yeah, that's what we could do! We could call his house and I could disguise my voice, and I could be like 'Don't come to school tomorrow, or you'll die.' Maybe he'd listen. Maybe he'd – "

  "Susannah," Jesse said again.

  "Or we could have Father Dom do it! We could have Father Dom call Bryce and tell him not to come to school, that there's been some kind of accident, or something – "

  "Susannah." Jesse stepped in front of me just as I turned around to retread the same five feet I'd been pacing for the past few minutes. I came up short, startled by his sudden proximity, my nose practically banging into the place where his shirt collar was open. Jesse seized both my arms quickly, to steady me.

  This was not a good thing. I mean, I know a minute ago I had grabbed him – well, not really him, but his shirt. But I don't like being touched under normal circumstances, and I especially don't like being touched by ghosts. And I especially don't like being touched by ghosts who have hands as big and as tendony and strong-looking as Jesse's.

  "Susannah," he said again, before I could tell him to get his big tendony hands off me. "It's all right. It's not your fault. There was nothing you could do."

  I sort of forgot about being mad about his hands. "Nothing I could do? Are you kidding me? I should have kicked that girl back into her grave!"

  "No." Jesse shook his head. "She'd have killed you."

  "Bull! I totally could have taken her. If she hadn't done that thing with that guy's head – "

  "Susannah."

  "I mean it, Jesse, I could totally have handled her if she hadn't gotten so mad. I bet if I just wait a little while until she's calmed down and go back in there, I can talk her into – "

  "No." He let go of my arms, but only so he could wrap one of his own around my shoulders and start steering me away from the school and toward the dumpster where I'd parked my bike. "Come on. Let's go home."

  "But what about – "

  The grip on my shoulders tightened. "No."

  "Jesse, you don't understand. This is my job. I have to – "

  "It's Father Dominic's job, too, no? Let him take it from here. There's no reason why you have to be burdened with all the responsibility yourself."

  "Well, yes, there is. I'm the one who screwed up."

  "You put the gun to her head and pulled the trigger?"

  "Of course not. But I'm the one who got her so mad. Father Dom didn't. I can't ask Father Dom to clean up my messes. That is totally unfair."

  "What is totally unfair," Jesse explained – patiently, I guess, for him, "is for anyone to expect a young girl like yourself to do battle with a demon from hell like – "

  "She isn't a demon from hell. She's just mad. She's mad because the one guy she thought she could trust turned out to be a – "

  "Susannah." Jesse stopped walking suddenly. The only reason I didn't lurch forward and fall flat on my face was that he still kept hold of my shoulder.

  For a minute – just a minute – I really thought … well, I thought he was going to kiss me. I'd never been kissed before, but it seemed as if all the necessities for a kiss to happen were there: you know, his arm was around me, there was moonlight, our hearts were racing – oh, yeah, and we'd both just narrowly escaped being killed by a really pissed off ghost.

  Of course, I didn't know how I felt about my first kiss coming from one of the undead, but hey, beggars can't be choosers, and let me tell you something, Jesse was way cuter than any live guy I'd met lately. I'd never seen such a nice-looking ghost. He couldn't, I thought, have been more than twenty when he died. I wondered what had killed him. It's usually hard to tell with ghosts, since their spirits tend to take on the shape their body was in just before they stopped functioning. My dad, for instance, doesn't look any different when he appears to me now than he did the day before he went out for that fatal jog around Prospect Park ten years ago.

  I could only assume Jesse had died at someone else's hands since he looked pretty damned healthy to me. Chances were he'd been a victim of one of those bullet holes downstairs. Nice of Andy to frame it for posterity's sake.

  And now this extremely nice-looking ghost looked as if he were going to kiss me. Well, who was I to stop him?

  So I sort of leaned my head back and looked out at him from underneath my eyelids, and sort of let my mouth get all relaxed, you know? And that's when I noticed his attention wasn't focused anywhere near my lips, but way below them. And not my chest, either, which would have been an okay second.

  "You're bleeding," he said.

  Well, that pretty much spoiled the moment. My eyes popped wide open at that remark.

  "I am not," I said automatically since I didn't feel any pain. Then I looked down. There were smallish stains flowering on the pavement below my feet. You couldn't tell what color they were because it was so dark. In the moonlight, they looked black. There were similar dark stains, I saw with horror, on the front of Jesse's shirt.

  But they were definitely coming from me. I checked myself out, and found that I'd managed to open what was probably one of the smaller, but still fairly important, veins in my wrist. I'd peeled off my gloves and stuffed them in my pockets while I'd been talking to Heather, and in my haste to escape during her fit of rage, I'd forgotten to put them back on. I'd probably sliced myself on the broken glass still littering the windowsill in Mr. Walden's classroom when I'd vaulted up onto it during my escape. Which just proved my theory that it's always on the way out that you get stuck.
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br />   "Oh," I said, watching the blood ooze out. I couldn't think of anything else to say but, "What a mess. I'm sorry about your shirt."

  "It's nothing." Jesse reached into one of the pockets of his dark, narrow-fitting trousers and pulled out something white and soft that he wrapped around my wrist a few times, then tied into place like a tourniquet, only not as tight. He didn't say anything as he did this, concentrating on what he was doing. I have to say this was the first time a ghost had ever performed first aid on me. Not quite as interesting as a kiss would have been, but not entirely boring, either.

  "There," he said when he was finished. "Does that hurt?"

  "No," I said, since it didn't. It wouldn't start hurting, I knew from experience, for a few hours. I cleared my throat. "Thanks."

  "It's nothing," he said.

  "No," I said. Suddenly, ridiculously, I felt like crying. Really. And I never cry. "I mean it. Thanks. Thanks for coming out here to help me. You shouldn't have done it. I mean, I'm glad you did. And … well, thanks. That's all."

  He looked embarrassed. Well, I suppose that was natural, me going all mushy on him the way I had just then. But I couldn't help it. I mean, I still couldn't really believe it. No ghost had ever been so nice to me. Oh, my dad tried, I guess. But he wasn't exactly what you'd call reliable about it. I could never really count on him, especially in a crisis.

  But Jesse. Jesse had come through for me. And I hadn't even asked him to. In fact, I'd been pretty unpleasant to him, overall.

  "Never mind," was all he said, though. And then he added, "Let's go home."

  C H A P T E R

  12

  Let's go home.

  It had a very cozy feel to it, that "Let's go home."

  Except, of course, that the house we shared didn't quite feel like home to me yet. How could it? I'd only lived there a few days.

  And, of course, he shouldn't have been living there at all.

  Still, ghost or not, he'd saved my life. There was no denying that. He'd probably only done it to get on my good side so I wouldn't kick him out of the house entirely.

  But regardless of why he'd done it, it had still been pretty nice of him. Nobody had ever volunteered to help me before – mostly because, of course, nobody knew I needed help. Even Gina, who'd been there when Madame Zara had first pronounced me a mediator, never knew why it was I would show up to school so groggy-eyed, or where it was I went when I cut class – which I did all too frequently. And I couldn't exactly explain. Not that Gina would have thought I was crazy or anything, but she'd have told someone – you can't keep something like this secret unless it's happening to you – who'd have told someone else, and eventually, somewhere along the line, I knew someone would have told my mother.

  And my mother would have freaked. That is, naturally, what mothers do, and mine is no exception. She'd already stuck me in therapy where I was forced to sit and invent elaborate lies in the hopes of explaining my anti-social behavior. I did not need to spend any time in a mental institution, which was undoubtedly where I'd have ended up if my mother had ever found out the truth.

  So, yeah, I was grateful to have Jesse along, even though he sort of made me nervous. After the debacle at the Mission, he walked me home, which was gentlemanly and all. He even, in deference to my injury, insisted on pushing the bike. I suppose if anybody had looked out the window of any of the houses we were passing, they would have thought their eyes were playing tricks on them: they'd have seen me plodding along with this bike rolling effortlessly beside me – only my hands weren't touching the bike.

  Good thing people on the West Coast go to bed so early.

  The whole way home, I obsessed over what I'd done wrong in my dealings with Heather. I didn't do it out loud – I figured I'd done enough of that; I didn't want to sound like a broken record or player piano, or whatever it was they had back in Jesse's day. But it was all I could think about. Never, not in all my years of mediating, had I ever encountered such a violent, irrational spirit. I simply did not know what to do. And I knew I had to figure it out, and quick; I only had a few hours before school started and Bryce walked straight into what was, for him, a deathtrap.

  I don't know if Jesse figured out why I was so quiet, or if he was thinking about Heather, too, or what. All I know was that suddenly, he broke the silence we'd been walking in and went, " 'Heav'n has no rage like love to hatred turn'd, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.' "

  I looked at him. "Are you speaking from experience?"

  I saw him smile a little in the moonlight. "Actually," he said, "I am quoting William Congreve."

  "Oh." I thought about that. "But you know, sometimes the woman scorned has every right to be mad."

  "Are you speaking from experience?" he wanted to know.

  I snorted. "Not hardly." A guy has to like you before he can scorn you. But I didn't say that out loud. No way would I ever say something like that out loud. I mean, not that I cared what Jesse thought about me. Why should I care what some dead cowboy thought of me?

  But I wasn't about to admit to him that I'd never had a boyfriend. You just don't go around saying things like that to totally hot guys, even if they're dead.

  "But we don't know what went on between Heather and Bryce – not really. I mean, she could have every right to feel resentful."

  "Toward him, I suppose she does," Jesse said, though he sounded grudging about admitting it. "But not toward you. She had no right to try to hurt you."

  He sounded so mad about it that I thought it was probably better to change the subject. I mean, I guess I should have been mad about Heather trying to kill me, but you know, I'm sort of used to dealing with irrational people. Well, okay, not quite as irrational as Heather, but you know what I mean. And one thing I've learned is, you can't take it personally. Yeah, she'd tried to kill me, but I wasn't really sure she knew any better. Who knew what kind of parents she had, after all? Maybe they went around murdering anybody who made them mad....

  Although somehow, after having seen that add-a-pearl necklace, I sort of doubted that.

  Thinking about murder made me wonder what had gotten Jesse so hot under the collar about it. Then I realized that he'd probably been murdered. Either that or he'd killed himself. But I didn't think he was really the suicide type. I supposed he could have died of some sort of wasting disease....

  It probably wasn't very tactful of me – but then, nobody's ever accused me of tact – but I went ahead and just asked him as we were climbing the long gravel driveway to the house, "Hey. How'd you die, anyway?"

  Jesse didn't say anything right away. I'd probably offended him. Ghosts don't really like talking about how they died, I've noticed. Sometimes they can't even remember. Car crash victims usually haven't the slightest clue what happened to them. That's why I always see them wandering around looking for the other people who were in the car with them. I have to go up and explain to them what happened, and then try to figure out where the people are that they're looking for. This is a major pain, too, let me tell you. I have to go all the way to the precinct that took the accident report and pretend I'm doing a school report or whatever and record the names of the victims, then follow up on what happened to them.

  I tell you, sometimes I feel like my work never ends.

  Anyway, Jesse was quiet for a while, and I figured he wasn't going to tell me. He was looking straight ahead, up at the house – the house where he'd died, the house he was destined to haunt until … well, until he resolved whatever it was that was holding him to this world.

  The moon was still out, pretty high in the sky now, and I could see Jesse's face almost as if it were day. He didn't look a whole lot different than usual. His mouth, which was on the thin-but-wide side, was kind of frowning, which, as near as I could tell, was what it usually did. And underneath those glossy black eyebrows, his thickly-lashed eyes revealed about as much as a mirror – that is, I could probably have seen my reflection in them, but I could read nothing about what he might be thinki
ng.

  "Um," I said. "You know what? Never mind. If you don't want to tell me, you don't have to – "

  "No," he said. "It's all right."

  "I was just kinda curious, that's all," I said. "But if it's too personal…"

  "It isn't too personal." We had reached the house by then. He wheeled the bike to where it was supposed to go, and leaned it up against the carport wall. He was deep in the shadows when he said, "You know this house wasn't always a family home."

  I went, "Oh, really?" Like this was the first I'd heard of it.

  "Yes. It was once a hotel. Well, more like a boarding house, really, than a hotel."

  I asked, brightly, "And you were staying here as a guest?"

  "Yes." He came out from the shade of the carport, but he wasn't looking at me when he spoke next. He was squinting out toward the sea.

  "And …" I tried to prompt him. "Something happened while you were staying here?"

  "Yes." He looked at me then. He looked at me for a long time. Then he said, "But it's a long story, and you must be very tired. Go to bed. In the morning we will decide what to do about Heather."

  Talk about unfair!

  "Wait a minute," I said. "I am not going anywhere until you finish that story."

  He shook his head. "No. It's too late. I'll tell you some other time."

  "Jeez!" I sounded like a little kid whose mom had told him to go to bed early, but I didn't care. I was mad. "You can't just start a story and then not finish it. You have to – "

  Jesse was laughing at me now. "Go to bed, Susannah," he said, coming up and giving me a gentle push toward the front steps. "You have had enough scaring for one night."

  "But you – "

  "Some other time," he said. He had steered me in the direction of the porch, and now I stood on the lowest step, looking back at him as he laughed at me.

  "Do you promise?"

  I saw his teeth flash white in the moonlight. "I promise. Good night, querida."

  "I told you," I grumbled, stomping up the steps, "not to call me that."

  It was nearly three o'clock in the morning, though, and I could only summon up token indignation. I was still on New York time, remember, three hours ahead. It had been hard enough getting up in time for school when I'd had a full eight hours of sleep. How hard was it going to be after only having had four?