He continued, “They’re so busy buzzing around you, I’m just a spectator. It’s kinda nice.”

“Thanks for the imagery,” she said, carrying her chair back to the breakfast room. “It’s nice to know I’ll have them touching me while I sleep.”

“Scared?”

She huffed. “Hardly. I just hope they let me get a few hours in before doing anything to wake me up.”

For most people, those words would have been a complete bluff. Despite having experienced the paranormal at its worst and most dangerous, she was still more afraid of the living than the dead.

“Good,” Eddie said. “As much as I like the softer Jessica, I still need the old one with nerves of tempered steel.”

“Ha ha. Come on, we can really get cranking tomorrow, maybe find some names so I can help these child EBs on their way off this place.”

They crept up the stairs as best they could, still making a racket. Eddie retreated to the Yellow Room, saying goodnight and closing the door softly.

The tall bed in the Blue Room was too inviting to ignore. She quickly changed into a long Ozzy T-shirt over a Dokken shirt—layers were a necessity here—and tied her hair into a ponytail.

Looking at herself in the mirror, she said, “Blond? What were you thinking, Jess?”

It was funny how she’d spent years running from this kind of stuff. Now that she was back in the thick of things, she finally felt like herself.

She was tired but not enough to sleep yet. She’d listen to her playlist of The Cult and hope it would serenade her to La-La Land.

First, she had to unpack her clothes. She turned to the bed, eyeing her luggage. Lifting a bag with a grunt, she spotted her silver digital recorder resting against her pillow. The bag slipped from her fingers, hitting the floor with a loud thud. She tensed, listening for the sounds of the kids stirring. When enough seconds had passed to reassure her they were still snug in their beds, she walked around the bed and picked up the recorder.

It was ice cold.

“Is there something here you want me to hear?” she said to the empty room.

She knew she’d left it in the kitchen earlier. In fact, after turning it off, she’d intentionally kept it on the windowsill. She had a couple of spares and had decided to leave that one on the first floor.

Jessica rummaged through her knapsack until she found her noise canceling headphones. Sitting on the bed, she plugged the headphones into the recorder and checked the files. There was just the one audio file from her recording hours earlier.

I know you didn’t bring this all the way up here just to be tidy. Actually, maybe you did. A hard lesson she’d learned was that you could never know the intentions of an EB. In that way, they were very much like they’d been when they were alive. People and the EBs they became were unpredictable.

The light metal and plastic of the recorder was icy to the touch. In fact, it was so cold, she worried that it wouldn’t work.

Her thumb pressed Play.

The sound was so crisp, she could hear birds chirping outside and the muted rumble of a motorboat passing through the harbor. She and Eddie’s footsteps walked away from the kitchen.

Eddie had told her to turn the recorder on before they headed upstairs to look for the attic. He had a reason for it, even if it wasn’t apparent to him at the time.

The kitchen was relatively quiet, aside from them walking about the floor above. After a while, even that stopped.

The recorder rolled on, capturing the silence with HD clarity.

To help her concentrate, Jessica shut out the lights. She’d found it helped sharpen her sense of hearing when her other senses were deprived of other stimuli.

As the recording moved forward, the static noise that filled silent gaps became deafening. She should have been catching more audio bleed from outside the house, but it was as if the room had been placed in a vacuum-sealed bubble. She checked the time of the recording and estimated she and Eddie would have been in the house walking around. There was no trace of them.

Maybe it malfunctioned.

Her audio recorders were top of the line and could even capture the sound of a moth’s wings as it flew through a room. She’d never reviewed audio this long without capturing some ambient noise.

Could it be the Ormsby kids? EBs generating a kind of sound repression was a rare thing, but Ormsby Island was a rare place.

Hunched over the recording on the bed, she closed her eyes tight, as if the mere act of concentration could force something to make itself heard on the recording. Eddie had said the Last Kids were quiet. Could this preternatural silence be their way of communicating with them?

Jessica was startled when the recording came to the end with a computerized beep that sounded like a shriek in the night over her headphones.

As much as she hated not having answers, that was part of the process. Sometimes, EBs had to get comfortable with you before they would interact. She contemplated listening to the recording again, opting instead to download it to her computer so she could run it through a unique program Swedey had designed for her to detect, enhance and analyze electronic voice recordings.

Settling back into bed, she thought about the Last Kids gathered around her bed, even now watching her as she gathered the covers to her neck. Without a fire, the room was ice cold.

I wonder if they’re touching me now.

“I’ll see you all in the morning,” she said, turning onto her side.

A voice whispered in her ear.

“Help them.”

It was not a child’s. It sounded very much like a woman’s voice. Or more accurately, several women speaking at once.

She bolted up in bed, flipping the bedside light on and scanning the room. Suddenly, the weight of the disembodied words and the ethereal hands pressed down on her, making it difficult to draw a breath.

How could she help so many?

Clasping her hands together, she prayed, asking for divine guidance to show her the way. She wasn’t going to leave Ormsby Island until all of the children, alive and dead, were safe and where they needed to be.

Chapter Seventeen

The moment Eddie saw Jessica’s pale face when she entered the breakfast room, he knew she hadn’t slept much, if at all. She barely grunted a reply when he said good morning.

“The Harpers make it home yet?” she asked, grabbing a slice of buttered toast off his plate.

“Not as far as I know.” She was back to wearing black band T-shirts. He could tell there were other shirts underneath. This one had a drawing of a writhing snake with other crazy imagery that made his eyes hurt to look at. “Who are Motionless in White?”

“Metal band. Relatively new. I’m expanding my horizons.”

She also wore black jeans and sneakers. She looked like an anarchist cat burglar.

“Paul and the kids?” she asked.

“Keeping warm outside.” He noted the mist that billowed from his mouth when he spoke.

“Don’t you think it’s kind of strange that Tobe and Daphne took off the first night we’re here?”

He swallowed his toast down with orange juice. Fresh squeezed too. “I find most things about the Harpers strange.”

“I listened to the recoding you asked me to make in the kitchen last night.”

“Catch anything?”

“Just the loudest silence I’ve ever heard,” she said. A bowl of granola bars had been left on the table. She ripped open a wrapper and devoured one in three bites. “But I did have an EB whisper in my ear to help them.”

Now he knew why he could sleep and she couldn’t. For once, EBs had let him be, congregating around Jessica. While he slept like a baby, she was in direct communication with them.

“Did they say anything else?” he asked.

She shook her head. “That was it. One of the strongest disembodied voices I’ve ever heard, though. It sounded like a bunch of voices, all talking at the same time, in the same rhythm, you know?”