Page 46 of Shadebound
Being dead was far more monotonous than people ever imagined. The living seemed to think it was all candle-whispering, sudden chills down the spine, and mysterious noises at midnight. Those things were possible, but they cost energy, and energy was something a ghost learned to spend carefully. Most of my existence was like pressing my hands against glass from the wrong side — seeing the world, hearing it, wanting to reach through, and knowing no one would feel my touch.
When I drifted into the carriage with Jinx and Draven the day before, I didn’t know what Mors Academy would look like. I had been bracing for the gothic blend of crumbling stone and dark glamour. What I hadn’t expected was the jolt in the air when we crossed the gates. It was subtle at first — a distortion, like heat shimmer — and then it sank into me. My form feltthinner, stretched, and beneath it all was a recognition I couldn’t mistake.
The killer.
Mykiller.
Their presence hummed in the air. The certainty made me cold in a way the dead weren’t supposed to feel. I didn’t understand how I knew, only that I had carried this knowledge since the night I died. The moment my body had fallen still, something had been planted in me — a warning, a tether — and it tightened now.
I would be able to feel their presence lingering in the air for the rest of my ghostly life.
When Hightower herded Jinx and Draven into the arena for the rest of their introduction, I let my awareness drift outward. Mors was a labyrinth of stone and iron, halls crawling with magic that prickled against me as I floated through them. I didn’t need to find a door or an open arch — walls meant nothing. I passed through them, weightless, until the air grew damp and the scent of churned earth reached me.
That was where I saw him.
He was slumped in the long grass, head twisted too far, throat cut clean through. The wound was fresh, the blood still soaking the soil beneath him. For a moment, he was only a body. Then the air above his chest rippled, as if heat were rising from him, and something began to peel itself away.
First came his outline, faint and trembling, then his features took shape. His neon blue eyes darted around, unmoored, until they landed on me.
“I know you,” he said, voice thin with disbelief as I tried not to feel anything at the sight of a siren near me. “From the news.”
There was a catch in the way he said it, like he was trying to fit me into a memory that hurt.
“Not my best headline,” I replied, my voice steady out of habit. “What with it being about my graphic murder.”
“Oh,” he breathed, and the sound trembled like the mist curling low over the graveyard. His gaze flicked from the trees, to the rocks, to the damp grass, to the broken body lying in it. As if searching for something that could make this scene mean anything other than what it was. When his eyes met mine again, there was no escaping it.
“I’m dead, aren’t I?”
“Yes. You are.” I kept my voice steady, anchoring it in the space between us. “Welcome to the club.”
He looked back at his body. The skin was already leeching to a pale grey, lips slack, the wound at his throat dark and wet against the white of his collar. A bead of blood had slipped into the hollow at his collarbone and dried there, black in the moonlight.
His voice snagged as he spoke. “Why am I—” His hands came up, staring at the faint silver edging his fingertips. “Why am I glowing?”
It started at his chest, a pulse of light so soft it might have been imagined, then spread outward in threads until it caught on every edge of him.
“That’s good news,” I said. Trying not to be disappointed that yet another ghost I’d met was not going to be a ghost for long.
His head turned sharply toward me, neon eyes flaring. “Good news? How the hell—how could this be good news?”
“It means you’re passing on,” I told him. “No getting stuck in between, no haunting the same corridors for the rest of time. You’ll leave this place. Whatever’s waiting for you, you’ll get there.”
He shifted his weight, though his feet no longer pressed the grass. “I don’t think I’m ready for that.”
“Most people aren’t.” I’d seen the fear often enough to know it didn’t matter how ready you thought you were. The leaving happened regardless.
He studied me then, his gaze dragging over my bubblegum hair, my tanned face, as if something in me didn’t quite match his memory. “I like the change of hair.”
My brow furrowed. “Change?”
“The black,” he said. “I remember the killer had a picture of you in a locket. You had black hair then. I don’t know why I remember that, but... but it feels important.”
For a moment, I thought I’d misheard him. Then the image landed in my own head — a hand covered in my blood. Laughing as they yanked something from around my neck. Their cursed fingertips opening a small silver clasp, and inside...
“That’s not possible,” I said, the words sharper than I meant. “That wasmylocket. The bastard tookmylocket.”
He blinked. “Yours?”
