She shook her head. Her forehead furrowed as she concentrated. “Julie, please come back. I’m sorry I ran before. Are you still here?”
I swear the room grew a few degrees colder. The fine hair on my arms rose.
The pointer slid across the Ouija board to YES.
A shiver went down my spine.
Jordan’s gaze shot to mine.
“Why is she still here?” I asked, my chest tight.
“Why are you still here?” Jordan repeated shakily.
The pointer moved toward the alphabet, picking out a letter at a time.
TRAPPED
“How many are there?” I whispered. “That are like you?”
Jordan didn’t need to translate this to the spirit world before I had my answer.
HUNDREDS
Horror slid through me. Hundreds of ghosts were in this house.
“What’s trapping you?”
BARRIER
“Oh, my God.” I inhaled sharply. “The barrier that’s around the city? The one that keeps supernaturals inside?”
YES
“What barrier?” Jordan asked, looking directly at me, her brows tight together.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Don’t worry about it?” Her voice turned sharp. “It’s trapping my best friend’s spirit inside so she can’t go to Heaven. I’m going to worry about it.”
She made a good point. Besides, Jordan already knew way too much about what was going on in the city. She may as well know about the barrier, too.
“Why did you pick this house to be in?” I asked.
NEAR BORDER
And then...
THIN BARRIER HERE
I racked my mind to figure out what Julie meant, then it suddenly came to me. This house was very close to the city limits. It was only a block away. Therefore it was close to the edge of the protective barrier that trapped all supernaturals inside. Here, the barrier must be thinner than anywhere else. The ghosts—everyone who’d died since the barrier was created—had been drawn here collectively. “What happens when you try to go through the barrier?”
PAIN
A violent shiver raced through me. “I’m sorry.”
HELP US
“I wish I could.”
HELP US
My chest tightened. “I don’t know how.”
ONLY YOU CAN
Jordan gave me another dark look. “Why aren’t you helping them? I mean, you’ve taken the crown as Miss Supernatural right now. Can’t you do anything?”
The pointer moved again, picking out letters almost faster than I could follow.
IT’S HERE
Jordan looked down as Julie answered a question we hadn’t even asked.
“What’s here?” she asked breathlessly.
DEATH ANGEL
“Do you mean the one that made you...” I didn’t want to say it out loud. Julie didn’t need a reminder that she’d been driven to kill herself. “Can you see it?”
SO SAD
That would be it. It was here. Panic gripped me. “What does it want?”
PEACE
“How can I stop it without hurting anyone?”
CAN’T
“But what if...” I’d tried to work it out in my head. If the angel was a bodiless thing that could possess people, that meant it was basically like a soul. Grays consumed souls. Could a gray, one who hadn’t gone through stasis yet, consume this angel and leave the human body it inhabited intact?
Jordan took her hands off the pointer for a moment to adjust her black Cleopatra wig. The point began to move all by itself.
We watched in stunned silence as it pointed to a letter at a time.
RUN
It was only one word spelled out on a board, but it held an urgency that couldn’t be ignored. I got to my feet so fast I got a head rush.
Jordan grabbed my arm. “Do you feel that?”
A familiar tingling sensation moved down my arms.
I swallowed hard. “Yes.”
I couldn’t feel the ghosts, the souls that were trapped here—not anymore. But I could still feel the presence of the angel.
Jordan grabbed my arm as the door pushed open. I steeled myself for what would greet us on the other side.
It was Bishop.
Relief swept through me immediately at the sight of him, but Jordan’s fingers dug painfully into my skin.
“His eyes,” she hissed.
My gaze shot to Bishop again to realize that she was right. I didn’t automatically notice it in the shadows, but there was an opaque glaze to Bishop’s eyes.
Terror clutched my throat. “No.”
“He was looking for me, wasn’t he?” he said in a flat monotone. “That’s why you’re all here. You want to stop me.”
“Don’t do this,” I managed. “Let him go right now!”
“Fallen. Soul is jagged, pained, so very damaged. Mind filled with disappointment, sadness, endless regret. He does not make me feel better. But he holds tight onto me and I can’t be free again to feed here on all these lovely girls and boys filled with joy and light. There is very little light left within this angel.”
Bishop’s face became strained, as if he was fighting against this possession. His teeth clenched. “Stay away, Samantha. Don’t get close to me like this.”
With that he turned and began moving rapidly away from the room and down the stairs.
“Stay away?” Jordan repeated. “He’s the one who came up here. I mean, was that rude or what?”
I grabbed her arm. “Call the police. Report this party so everyone will get out of here safely. Nobody else has to get hurt tonight. And whatever you do, don’t come near us again. Okay?”