“Excuse me?” A girl’s voice broke in over the droning music. A figure emerged from the mist, looking around uncertainly. “Is this the Conference of the Dead?”
The girl’s face was hidden by a Venetian Carnevale mask in gold and white, but her hair was unmistakably Celeste’s, her braids jutting in every direction. Her robe was deep velvet and embroidered all over with esoteric symbols in gold thread.
“I bet you she just happened to have that robe hanging around in her closet,” Laurel whispered. Emma grinned behind her mask.
The girls nodded slowly. Madeline, now transformed into some kind of glowing mystical creature, gestured to the empty space in the circle. Celeste stepped hesitantly down the path to join them, the whites of her eyes clearly visible behind her mask as her gaze darted around the clearing.
Despite Emma’s skepticism about Madame Darkling’s authenticity—when the curtain came up she was all pro. A theatrical intensity infused every gesture she made. She walked around behind them counterclockwise, sprinkling salt to mark out a circle. “Within this circle we invite all benevolent spirits who would communicate with us. All those who would do us ill are banished to the outer darkness.” Her voice seemed to have mysteriously acquired a strange, choppy accent. Emma locked eyes with Charlotte across the circle and had to bite her lip to keep from laughing out loud.
The medium rejoined the circle, waving her hands over a small cauldron that Emma recognized as a fancy potpourri diffuser. She reached into a little leather pouch around her neck and drew out a pinch of some kind of dried herb. When she sprinkled it into the fire the flame grew brighter. The smell that came off it was something like mint tea mixed with a locker room.
And then, suddenly, her eyes snapped up and locked right onto Emma.
“You,” she said, her voice throaty. “Someone is here for you, dear.”
Emma was glad that the mask on her face was covering her confusion. Had Madame Darkling forgotten who was who? Maybe this was just an opening act, her way of building up to the final reveal.
The music from the underbrush was low and ominous, a soft rumble of chanting monks. “I sense loneliness. Pain,” said the medium. The cauldron’s low flame played across her face. In that moment she looked like a witch, eyes alight with unearthly knowledge. “Someone who died too young.”
And then, somehow, I detached myself from Emma’s senses for the first time since I’d died.
I drifted away from her, around the circle toward Madame Darkling. I could smell the herbs, feel the heat of the fire and the coolness of the breeze, all on my own—not just through Emma. It wasn’t like having a body again so much as connecting with this place. The moonlight on the clearing, the wind, the soil, the quiet chorus of crickets, the mesquite branches gnarled against the sky like skeletal fingers—it was as if all of those things were connected and I was one of them.
Had this faux medium managed to inadvertently tap into something real? Or maybe my body was close, and being near it made me feel a little more alive again.
“Can you hear me?” I asked the medium. Her eyes flickered in answer. She didn’t seem to see me, but maybe she felt me.
“Tell her,” I said, speaking as clearly as I could. Madame Darkling’s pupils were wide in the darkness. “Tell her I wish I could have met her.”
“I wish I could have met you,” Madame Darkling said, her voice flat and distant. Emma gasped softly.
Emma closed her eyes. This couldn’t be real. She didn’t believe in ghosts. But more than ever, she wanted to believe. She tried to quiet her thoughts, to empty her mind and wait for another message to come. I’m listening, she thought desperately. Sutton, are you here? Is that you?
I could have hugged the woman, gold lamé and all. She could hear me. She could communicate with Emma for me, and we could work together to solve my murder.
“Tell her I’m worried for her,” I said. “She’s in danger. I only wish we’d had a chance to meet. We would have been an unstoppable team. Tell her I’m grateful for everything she’s done. Tell her I love her.”
Madame Darkling’s sonorous voice came across the circle. “He’s a handsome young man—one you have loved in a distant past life, and lost. He stands at the edge of an abyss and reaches to you … reaches … but the chasm between life and death is too wide, and he turns away again.” Madame Darkling touched a hand to her brow. “He says … he says he will see you one day. On the other side.”
Next to Emma, Madeline snorted softly. “Sutton Mercer, breaking hearts on both sides of the grave,” she whispered.
I groaned with frustration. It had felt so real for a moment, but it was just part of the medium’s performance. No matter how strong I felt here, I was still stuck in this limbo, alone and powerless.
Emma’s shoulders slumped. It’d been so easy for her to believe her sister was still out there, watching over her. But that was how con artists worked, right? They figured out what you wanted to believe and served it up on a silver platter. She couldn’t afford that kind of denial. Sutton was dead and gone.
“Dead,” I whispered sadly, “but not gone. I’m here, Emma.”
Tendrils of mist blew across the clearing, and the music shifted to a quiet murmur. Madame Darkling turned her turbaned head toward Celeste. The Venetian mask glittered in the ambient light.
“You, dear,” said the medium. “Someone’s arrived for you. An older lady. She only crossed over very recently. A woman of letters, perhaps?”