Body & Soul полностью

Spring Break Girl tilted her head to one side, giving Alona a shrewd look. “Who are you?”

“No one you need to know,” Alona said in a snotty tone that was a bit jarring to hear in Lily's voice. She reached back toward me with her left hand, flapping it until I realized she wanted me to take it. I stepped up and slipped my hand into hers. Her fingers closed over mine and squeezed almost to the point of pain, and as I drew even with her, she leaned into me the slightest bit, and I could hear her uneven breathing. She needed the help, I realized belatedly. That quick moving she'd done had come at a cost.

“We'll be going now,” Alona said. “Give our regards to Malachi.”

She started forward, and to my surprise, Severed Arm Dude and Spring Break Girl moved out of her way, though the latter watched us with more suspicion than was probably healthy.

I adjusted my stride to match Alona's shorter one so she could lean on me without it being as noticeable. But the slow walk across the room to the door felt interminable with the ghosts staring holes through us.

I held my breath, waiting for their rallying cry and the inevitable rush to block the door.…

But they let us walk out without another word.

So, maybe there was something to be said for being a bitch… or at least, knowing one. We'd coasted out of there on nothing but attitude and Alona's spirit-guide reputation. Problem was, that was not going to last forever.

“That was fun,” I said through gritted teeth, collapsing into the passenger seat of Will's battered Dodge. My heart was pounding way too hard from the adrenaline rush, and pain shot up my leg in uneven bolts of agony.

“Hands in,” Will warned before slamming my door shut and scrambling around the car and into the driver's seat. Once he was inside, he cranked the engine and peeled out of the parking space in reverse. “Are they coming?” His gaze was fixed behind us as he backed out.

“How should I know? Unless they're talking about following us, they could be in the freaking car for all I know.” Which wasn't quite true, but I was feeling a tad irritable because once more I didn't have answers, and did have — hello? — intense pain. God, I'd forgotten how much it could hurt to be alive. And to be scared. Really and truly scared.

I squeezed my hands together to stop them from shaking. There'd been a moment when I wasn't sure, when I thought the spirits might try to stop us, and we would have been screwed. Will's abilities gave spirits physicality around him. They were as real and as capable of violence against him as any living person. I'd seen it happen before. Crowds of the dead pushing and shoving at him to get his attention. It wouldn't take much to turn it into a tug-of-war with Will as the rope.

And me, too, most likely. I shuddered at the idea. We hadn't tested whether ghosts could touch me and vice versa. I'd taken a leave of absence, sort of, from my spirit-guide duties. Since my “transformation,” I'd been doing my best to stay away from disembodied voices, including those belonging to the spirits waiting for Will's help. If it turned out they could touch me — and there was a decent chance that would be the case — I would be utterly defenseless against them, just as Will was. His theory was that it was better to risk only one of us until we figured all of this out. So he was doing his best to manage them without me, relatively unsuccessfully, from what I'd heard.

“You were seeing something, though, I could tell.” He spared me a glance as he shifted into drive, and I crossed my arms over my chest, hiding my hands so he couldn't see the trembling.

“Distortions, like shimmery spots in the air.” I shook my head, and he accelerated toward the exit, the tires spewing gravel behind us. “I don't know. It's—”

The car hit a pothole, jarring my leg, and I sucked a breath in through my teeth.

He slowed down and looked over at me. “Are you okay?”

I shifted in the seat, putting more weight on my right hip, trying to alleviate the pressure on my left leg, which, at the moment, felt like it was going to explode into a thousand pieces. “I'll be fine,” I said, trying to sound like I meant it. “Just go, get us out of here.”

He complied, but I couldn't help but notice that he also took care to avoid the worst of the holes until we reached the smoother pavement of the street. “What you did back there…” He hesitated.

No, no, not getting into this. “I was saving my ass as much as yours,” I pointed out quickly, trying to stop this topic in its tracks.

He shook his head. “No, you weren't.” He sounded almost stunned, which, frankly, stung a bit. “Until you said something, they didn't know you were different, that you were anything other than a regular living person.”