"Help. Help."

My throat went dry. The voice was right behind me. I opened my eyes.

Derek let out an oath and his hands tightened around my forearms.

"Keep your eyes closed, Chloe. Just remember, they won't hurt you."

A bony fingertip touched my elbow. I jumped.

"It's okay, Chloe. I'm right here. Keep going."

As I held myself still, the fingertips poked my arm, then slid along it, stroking, testing, feeling, like the blind man with the elephant. Bone scraped over my skin. A rustling clatter as the corpse pulled itself closer. The smell of it —

Visualize.

I am!

Not like that!

I closed my eyes —meaningless since I could see nothing with them open, but it made me feel better. The fingers crept and poked over my back, plucking my shirt, the corpse making gah-gah-gah noises as if trying to talk.

I gritted my teeth and blocked it out. Not easy, knowing what was touching me, pressing up against my side —

Enough already!

I concentrated instead on Derek's breathing. Slow, deep breaths through his mouth, as he struggled to stay calm.

Deep breaths. Deep breaths. Find a quiet spot. The creative place.

Slowly the sounds and touches and smells of the real world faded. I squeezed my eyes shut, and let myself free-fall into my imagination. I focused on the bodies, imagining myself tugging out their spirits, setting them free, like caged doves, winging their way into the sunlight.

I repeated the images —freeing the spirits, wishing them well, apologizing as I sent them on their way. Dimly I heard Derek's voice, telling me I was doing fine, but it seemed to float, dreamlike on the edge of consciousness. The real world was here, where I was undoing my mistake, reversing the—

'They're gone, Chloe," he whispered.

I stopped. I could still feel bony fingers, now on my leg, a body resting against mine, but it wasn't moving. When I twisted sideways, the corpse fell, an empty shell, collapsing at my feet.

Derek let out a long, deep breath, running his hands through his hair. After a moment, he asked, as if in afterthought, whether I was okay.

"I'll live."

Another shuddering deep breath. Then he looked at the body.

"Guess we've got some work to do."

Twenty-nine

BY "WORK," HE MEANT cleanup. As in, reburying the bodies. All I'll say about that is that I was glad even with the door open it was still too dark to see those corpses very well.

The graves were shallow, barely more than a few inches of dirt over the bodies, enough for them to claw through when their spirits were slammed back into their corpses. But I didn't want to think about that.

I could tell the bodies had been buried quite a while, probably before Lyle House had become a group home. And they were adults. For now, that was all I needed to know.

As we worked, I asked Derek how he'd found me. He said that when he realized Tori had stayed behind, he knew she was up to something, so he went to check on me. How exactly he found me, he didn't say, only shrugged and mum bled something about checking "the obvious places" when I seemed to be missing.

The question now was: What to do about Tori?

"Nothing," I said, wiping my trembling hands after smoothing over the second grave.

"Huh?"

Nice to hear him say that for a change.

"I'm going to act like nothing happened."

He considered it, then nodded. "Yeah. If you blame her, things will only escalate. Better to ignore her and hope she gives up."

"Pray she gives up," I muttered as I crawled for the door.

"Is there still clean clothing down here?" Derek asked.

"One load in the dryer. That's it. Why —? Oh, right. Better not to go upstairs covered in dirt." I climbed down the ladder. "Most of what's in the dryer was yours so—"

"Chloe? Derek?" Mrs. Talbot stood in the laundry room. "What are you two doing together? Derek, you know you're not supposed to —" Her gaze traveled over my filthy clothing. "Dear Lord, what happened to you?"

There was no sense denying we'd been in the crawl space, since she caught us stepping from the closet, me caked in dirt. I moved my legs together, hoping it hid the wet mark. The blow to the back of my skull throbbed and I struggled to speak, praying Derek would jump in. He didn't. One rescue a day must have been his limit.

"I was doing laundry, and D-Derek came down, looking for —"

Dr. Gill stepped into the room. My gaze shot to her. "Go on, Chloe."

"H-he wanted his shirt. I —I asked about stain stud, because I couldn't find any and I opened the closet to look, and Derek said it was usually l-locked. We f-found the ladder and the crawl sp-space and we were curious."

"Oh, I bet you were curious," Dr. Gill said, crossing her arms. "Kids your age are very curious, aren't they?"

"I —I guess so. We were exploring—"

"I bet you were," Dr. Gill cut in.

I realized what she thought Derek and I had been doing.

Even as I denied it, 1 saw she'd given us the perfect out. If I just dropped my gaze sheepishly and said "Yep, you caught us," they'd have their explanation, with no reason to go into the crawl space and discover those hastily reburied corpses.

If it had been Simon, I'd have done it in a second. But Derek? I wasn't that good a liar.

It didn't matter. The more I denied it, the more certain they were that we'd been fooling around. Dr. Gill had already made up her mind. If you find a teenage boy and girl in a dark, private place, was there really any question what they'd been up to?

Even Mrs. Talbot seemed convinced, her mouth tight with disapproval as I blathered.

And Derek? He didn't say a word.

Once we were released, I hurried upstairs to change my jeans before anyone noticed the pee mark. When I checked my head, I had two goose eggs, one from Tori and one from hitting that pillar.

Back downstairs, I showed the smaller one to Dr. Gill, hoping it would support my story that we'd been exploring —see, I even bopped my head. She just took a cursory look, handed me Tylenol, and told me to lie down in the media room. Aunt Lauren was on the way.

"I don't know what to say, Chloe."

Aunt Lauren's voice was barely above a whisper. These were the first words she'd said to me since arriving at Lyle House. I'd heard her arguing with Dr. Gill and the nurses earlier, demanding to know why they weren't making sure Derek stayed away from me, as she'd been promised. But now, with me, that anger had disappeared.

We were alone in Dr. Gill's office. Just like Tori and her mother had been. While I knew this meeting wouldn't end in threats and bruises, I imagined I'd leave feeling no better than Tori had.

Aunt Lauren sat ramrod straight, her hands cupped in her lap, fingers twisting her emerald ring.

I know you're fifteen. Even if you haven't really dated yet, you're curious. In a place like this, isolated from your friends and family, living with boys, the temptation to experiment —"

"It wasn't like that. It wasn't anything like that." I twisted to face her. "We found the crawl space and Derek wanted to check it out and I thought that'd be cool."

"So you followed him in there? After what he'd done to you?" She'd gone still, the disappointment in her eyes changing to horror. "Oh, Chloe, I can't believe — Did you think harassing and hurting you the other day meant he liked you?"

"What? No, of course not. Derek isn't — He made a mistake. He didn't really hurt me and he didn't mean to do it. It was a misunderstanding."

She reached forward and gripped my hand. "Oh, Chloe. Sweetheart, no. You can't fall for that. You can't make excuses for him."