For a second, I really did think she was dead.

I lifted her wrist and felt a faint pulse, but when I gently patted her cheek, her eyes remained tightly shut.

I pulled out my phone and prepared to dial 911.

I was trying to look up my GPS coordinates when a filthy hand lifted off the ground and rested on my arm.

“Alexis…?”

“Kendra!” I said. “Are you okay?”

“I need water.” Her eyes fluttered from the effort of opening, and her mouth made a futile swallowing motion. “Please.”

I had a bottle in my backpack. I pulled the cap off and tipped it toward her cracked lips. “Just sip,” I said. “There’s plenty. Don’t try to drink too much at once.”

She took a couple of small swallows, then stared up at me. “I’m tired.”

“Don’t worry. You’re safe. I’m going to call the police,” I said. “They’ll come save you.”

She nodded stiffly, but I could tell by the glimmer in her eyes that she was still afraid.

“What happened? Why did you come out here? Was it—” I cut myself off before I could say Lydia.

“I was…trying to get away from something.” Her eyes grew hazier, more distant. “I was…trying to get away from…”

“From what?” I wanted to coax the name out of her. I didn’t want to say it myself, because if I was wrong—

Kendra’s eyes suddenly went wide with fright. “From you, Alexis.”

I blinked.

Trying to get away from me?

Then, before I knew what was happening, Kendra’s eyes rolled back in her head, and she was unconscious again.

I grabbed my phone, about to call for help. But suddenly I wondered how this would look. The police might believe I’d just gone out to hike, and take pictures…but would my parents?

Would Kasey?

Not a chance.

I backed a few steps away, trying not to slip on the mossy rocks. And a thread of fear wove up through my heart, like a snake being charmed.

I couldn’t face the police. I couldn’t spend another day trying to avoid my parents’ searching gazes, lying my way through the explanation everyone would demand.

Someone would save Kendra, I would make sure of that—but I didn’t plan to be there when it happened.

If I weren’t me (oh, to be some average girl living in an average place with average problems! The magic of it!), if I were some other person looking in on me and my messed-up life, I think the obvious questions would be—why did I bother trying to keep so many secrets?

And why didn’t I ask for help?

Like Carter said after the whole Sunshine Club disaster—why didn’t I turn to him, or my parents, or anyone? After all, there’s strength in numbers, right?

It’s more complicated than that.

This isn’t my first rodeo. I’ve dealt with ghosts before. And when you’re dealing with murderous spirits, more isn’t merrier. It’s not like Scooby-Doo. The amount of people you have on your side doesn’t matter. You can’t physically fight a ghost, so there’s no point in having an army of friends standing at the ready.

That just means there are more people who potentially could get hurt.

So I could go to my parents, yeah. But would they try to help me figure out what was going on? Would they help me get to the core of the situation?

No. They’d call Agent Hasan, the government agent who’d come in twice now to clean up our supernatural messes, and then they’d have Kasey and me packed into the car and on the road to some no-name town in North Dakota before lunch.

But that wouldn’t work.

I’ve learned something in my months spent inadvertently spying on ghosts: if you notice them, they notice you. If you’re aware of a ghost, it becomes aware of you.

And when a ghost is aware of you, you’re that much more likely to have ghost trouble. The kind you can’t drive away from. The kind that ends in pain and misery…or death.

Especially when the ghost hates you as much as Lydia hated me.

That night, while my family was sitting down to a festive Christmas dinner of delivered pizza, the local news report ran an update on the rescue effort. Kendra had been located and taken by helicopter to a nearby hospital. She hadn’t been able to say anything because she was in a coma.

Her whereabouts had been called in by an anonymous tipster from an old pay phone at an abandoned diner near the woods.

“It’s awfully strange,” my mother said. “But I’m so relieved they found her.”

I was relieved, too—

Relieved that they found her, relieved that she was alive…

And relieved that she couldn’t talk.

I’M PRETTY SURE TAGGING ALONG with your little sister to her popular-people New Year’s Eve party dumps you off the deep end of the loser scale, but there I was, anyway.

I tried to hold my head high as I followed Kasey through the immense front door of the equally immense Laird house. She was immediately swarmed by a pack of chattering girls who pulled her in the direction of the fittingly enormous couch. Dear devoted Keaton, spotting her from across the room, cut short his conversation and made a beeline for her.

I commandeered a chair in the corner next to the snack table, set down my unfashionable, un-party- appropriate bag, and went into Alexis Doesn’t Want to Be Here mode, talking to people only when they talked to me, nursing a cup of punch, and watching my fingers slowly grow oranger and oranger from all the cheese puffs I couldn’t seem to stop eating.

A shadow fell over me, and I looked up. The first thing I saw was the hair—dark brown, just past shoulder length. Then the skin, perfectly gold, even in winter. Then the eyes, dark and knowing—and maybe a little bit tired.

“Megan,” I said.

My best friend, whom I’d seen maybe four times since October, did a double take when she saw me. She took a halting step back, which made me notice how she still limped on her left knee.

The knee I’d destroyed.

“Wow—your hair,” she said. “I didn’t recognize you.”

I tried to smile. It didn’t really work.

“When did you do that?” she asked. “What does it mean?”

I reached up and touched it self-consciously. Megan, who’d never given my pink hair a second glance, seemed utterly horrified by my white hair. She was looking at me like I’d announced I had a bomb strapped to my chest or something.

“It doesn’t really mean anything,” I said. “Mom took me to the salon a couple of weeks ago, and I told the lady to stop when it looked like this.”

Megan pursed her lips, almost in disapproval.

“I just sort of…liked it.” I knew how lame that sounded. The truth was, the white hair looked blank and empty, which felt like a good reflection of my life at the moment. Going back to my pink hair would have felt like putting on a costume.

But I couldn’t say that to Megan. Not when she was looking at me almost like a stranger.

“So, uh…what have you been up to? Did you get my texts?”

She glanced around, as if people would be watching us. But no one was. “Yeah, sorry. I’ve been busy.”

“How’s your new school?”

“It’s not new,” she said. “I’ve been there for two months.”

Yeah, but she’d never returned my calls when I wanted to ask her about it. So it was new to me. Jared went there, too, which meant I knew a little about Sacred Heart Academy itself. But he was a senior and she was a junior; they didn’t have any classes together. Therefore I knew absolutely nothing about how Megan was doing.

And she wasn’t talking, so apparently that wasn’t going to change.

“I got a car for Christmas,” I said, grasping now, trying to provoke some kind of response.

It didn’t work. Megan’s eyes flickered to meet mine briefly, then flickered away. She gazed at the wall over my head, at the floor, at the front hallway—everywhere but at me.

“Great,” she said.

She didn’t even care what kind it was.