I lurched across the car to grab her, but she slipped away. Then she surprised me, ducking her head back in and mashing her mouth against mine in a rough parody of a kiss.

I jerked back, hard enough that my elbow banged into the steering wheel.

“I would have expected better from you,” she said in mock disappointment before slamming the door shut.

The light turned green, and someone behind me honked and held it, loud and obnoxious. But I refused to move. “Get back in the car, Erin,” I shouted. I felt my face burning, imagining what this must look like to the other drivers. No, I’m not some jerk threatening his girlfriend. I’m trying to keep a ghost from kidnapping a body that doesn’t belong to her.

“Stalking is illegal, Will,” she warned loudly, her voice muffled through the closed door but clear to anyone who had their windows rolled down. Her gaze darted to the cars behind me, a tiny smirk playing on her lips as someone else added his horn to the mix.

“Erin!” I shouted again, as a truck from somewhere behind me whipped into the turn lane and zoomed around me. A squad car coming from the other direction slowed down, the officer staring at me through his window.

Shit.“Get back in the car. Please!” I tried one more time.

Watching me through narrowed eyes, Erin took a deep breath and started to scream.

Out of choices, and expecting the sound of sirens any second, I straightened up behind the wheel and hit the gas.

Hating myself and Erin, I watched her become a smaller and smaller figure in the rearview mirror, like I might never see her again, and feeling half relieved and half freaked at the idea.

I doubled back around the block as soon as I could, but the neighborhood had streets that curved oddly, and unexpected culs-de-sac.

By the time I got back to the intersection, she was gone, of course. Either she was hiding somewhere, or she’d hitched a ride with a stranger.

God, she was going to end up dead in a ditch somewhere, and it would be all my fault.

The light was red (again), and while waiting for it to change, I rested my head on the steering wheel, wishing for things to be different, wishing for Alona, wishing I could go back to the days when my biggest problems were Principal Brewster and getting through class without any ghosts noticing me. That had been a vacation compared to all of this. A really, really sucky vacation, but a vacation, nonetheless. I didn’t need Alona to tell me I was in over my head with this body and soul stuff and sinking fast. But I wanted her here, more than anything.

I shook my head. I had to get her back. I had an idea about how to do that, thanks to something Erin had said. But just one. And if it didn’t work…

I clenched the wheel. No, it hadto work. That was all there was to it. Because I didn’t know how to live with any other outcome. And if it didn’t work, Alona wouldn’t live at all.

I broke speed limits retracing familiar streets and flying past landmarks on my way toward Groundsboro High.

This was my one and only brilliant idea: if Alona was still my guide, as Erin had said, and she was back in spirit form, I might be able to “call” her to me. Theoretically, I could call her from anywhere, but the dead who meet their ends violently/unnaturally are always drawn to the places of their death. Calling her from that location might provide enough added pull to drag her back from wherever she’d vanished. It might have even been better to try it at the time of her death, but there was no way I could make myself wait almost a whole day for 7:03 a.m. to roll around again.

Despite my best efforts to focus on the positive, my mind created images of me sitting on the curb next to the spot of pavement where she’d died and calling her…only to have nothing happen.

I shook my head, pushing that thought away. No, she was strong. She had to be okay. She’d survived this long. She’d been sent back from the light, for God’s sake. That couldn’t have happened only for things to end this way. That couldn’t be right. It didn’t make sense.

A tiny voice in my head reminded me that in addition to being unfair, life could also be nonsensical. Messed up. Like my dad killing himself without first giving us the slightest hint that that day would be different than any other. In some ways, I’d thought it would have been better if he’d tried to warn us, even if we’d missed it initially. Then at least maybe it would have seemed more logical. Or maybe it would have simply made my mom and me feel worse for not understanding what he was trying to say.

Either way, one day he was just gone. So quickly it seemed like the air should have rushed in to fill the vacuum where he’d once stood, brushed his teeth, slept.…

I couldn’t lose somebody else like that, without even the chance to say good-bye. Not again. Not her.

“Come on, Alona, don’t do this to me, please,” I muttered, and then stopped, clamping my mouth shut in the fear that those words somehow counted as a call.

But if they had, the passenger seat next to me remained empty. And my heart sank a little further.

I made myself focus on the road ahead of me, dimly aware of the refrain— please, please, please, please—pulsing through me and ticking off the seconds.

The school finally rose up in the distance, and I pulled to a hard stop by the fenced-off tennis courts, the Dodge’s tires screeching on the overheated asphalt.

I jammed the gearshift into park and flung the door open, stumbling out in my hurry. The kids on the tennis court—a couple of boys, too young even to be freshmen, it seemed—stopped hitting the ball around to watch me run.

The trouble was, it had been four months since Alona had died. There was no longer any sign of the violence that had occurred, the life that had ended somewhere here on the double yellow lines.

Was it here, closer to the corner, or farther down the street? Suddenly I wasn’t sure, and I found myself pacing back and forth in the middle of the road, desperate to get this right.

A passing car honked at me.

“Hey, are you okay?” one of the kids shouted.

I ignored it all, aware that my eyes were stinging with tears only when a drop rolled off my chin and splattered on the yellow painted line that I was studying so intently.

I swiped a hand over my face. Stay calm. She’s fine. Erin took over Lily’s body, so she’s the one caught in the cycle now. Alona should be fine.The ache in my chest told me even I didn’t believe this.

The Order had said the two of them would become dependent on each other. After a month in Lily’s body, did Alona have enough energy to survive on her own anymore?

That was the question, and there was truly only one way to find out. I took a deep breath, forcing it past the lump in my throat. I had nothing to lose by trying, except all hope of her ever coming back. If she didn’t answer now, I’d keep calling her; but the odds that her energy level in this situation would improve with time were slim to none.

Another car swerved around me, with the driver honking and shouting through his rolled-down window.

All right, enough delaying, I told myself. Time to try this before someone actually stops and tries to pull me out of the way. Or calls the police.

But I felt like I was ripping away a bandage long before the wound was healed.

I finally picked a place as close to exact as I remembered it and shut my eyes.

I pictured Alona as I’d seen her that first time after her death. Stalking the grounds in the red gym shorts and white shirt she’d died in, her face flushed with fury and hurt at the people she’d once called her friends turning on her, only days after her death. The way she pushed me to deal with Principal Brewster, helping me until I could manage him on my own, more or less. The silk of her hair catching on my fingertips when we were behind the bushes at the Gibley Mansion. How she refused to accept pity or help unless she had no choice. Just this morning when she’d stood in front of me in her new clothes with the new look she’d created, tilting her head up toward me with that vulnerable smile.