Lark Noble is finally happy. Sheâs trying to move on and put the events of the past behind her: the people who avoided her because she talked to the ghost of her dead twin sister, the parents who couldnât be around her anymore and even the attempt she made on her own life. She finally has friendsâpeople who know her secrets and still care about herâand she has Ben, the cute guy she never saw coming.
Wren Noble is lonely. Unable to interact with the living, she wants to be happy for her sisterâs newfound happiness, but she feels like sheâs losing her. It doesnât help that Kevin, the very not-dead guy she was starting to fall for, seems to be moving on.
Then Wren meets Noah, the spirit of a young man who died a century ago. Noah is cute, heâs charming and he makes Wren feel something sheâs never felt before. But Noah has a dark influence on Wren, and Larkâs distrust of him drives the sisters apart for the first time in their lives. As Halloween approaches and the veil between the worlds thins, bringing the dead closer to the world of the living, Lark must find a way to stop whatever deadly act Noah is planning, even if it means going through her sister to do so.
LARK
Ghosts are such douche bags.
My sister, Wren, was the exception to this rule, but other than her Iâd never met a ghost that wasnât a colossal pain in the ass. And this one was starting to seriously piss me off.
I hit the wall of the girlsâ locker room hard, my head cracking the plaster. Fortunately, I had a hard head, and a high tolerance for wraith-inflicted pain. I dropped to the floor on my feet, and came at her swinging as the DJ in the gym played a bass-thumping dance song that shook my joints. My fist connected with her face hard enough to knock her off her feetâwhich was funny, because it wasnât as though her boots actually touched the floor.
Truth be told, I wasnât much for school dances, and I wasnât a huge fan of Halloween, given that it was the one time of the year that the worlds of the dead and living merged. The veil weakened in the spring as well, but human celebrations and lore had given All Hallowsâ Eve even more strength. Still, I would rather be dancing with my friends than getting the snot beat out of me by an angry grunge girl who had been dead longer than Iâd been alive.
I was covered in salt dust, ghost-juice and plaster, and bleeding from a cut above my eye where sheâd rammed me headfirst into a locker. I was dressed like Harley Quinn from Batman, so it only added to the costume.
âListen, Courtney Love, you canât be here. Why donât you just move on? Whateverâs waiting for you has to be better than this.â
Really, who haunted a high school Halloween dance? No, waitâwho haunted a high school at all? Seriously, you had to have lived a pretty lame life if the place that held the most pull for your spirit was Samuel Clemens High.
The ghostâher name was Daria Wilson, and sheâd died when she crashed her car into a tree after the Halloween dance in â91ârose up. âSays who?â she demanded. âYou?â
I smiled, trying to ignore that I could see her brain glistening through the crater in her skull. Her hair was almost as white as mine beneath the blood and gore, but mine was natural. âThatâs right.â
She glared at me, her eyes nothing but bottomless black pits. She opened her mouth, unhinging her jaw a good twelve inches. In the dank, yawning cavern of her mouth, her teeth were jagged razors, and her tongue rippled and writhed like a worm. She roared.
The scream of a vengeful spirit was like having your eardrums punctured while being tossed around in a tornado of rot. Her rancid breath burned my skin, and I could feel something warm and wet trickle from my left ear. My nose, too. I staggered forward as my left knee began to buckle.
She was not going to take me down.
The scream stopped abruptly. I almost fell down anyway from the release of it. I grabbed at the wall to steady myself.
âYou canât make me go, bitch,â she snarled, moving toward me. âIf you could, you would have already.â
I lifted my gaze, swiping my hand under my nose to wipe the blood away. âIâm working on it, skank.â
Where the hell was my sister? Wren and our friends had gone off in search of the item that was so important it kept Daria here rather than where she was supposed to be.
Donât ask me where we go when weâre dead. Iâd only died once, and I didnât get any farther than the halfway mark between this world and the next before getting pulled back. But I knew how to banish ghosts from this plane, and that was good enough for me.