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“Don’t move.”
The stranger said it like he had any right.
I was on my knees beside Micah’s bed, one hand hovering over the bloody silver ring on the carpet. The whole apartment had gone dark except for the weak red glow leaking out of the black stone set into it.
The man in my doorway took one step forward.
“Take your hand away from that,” he said.
“Where’s my brother?”
His jaw tightened. He looked wrecked. Blood soaked through the left side of his shirt, dark enough to be almost black in the emergency light from the hall. His hair was wet with sweat, and one sleeve had been torn nearly off at the shoulder.
Still, he stood there like he was the one giving orders.
“I asked you a question,” I snapped.
“So did I.”
“Yeah, well, yours sucks.”
Behind him, somewhere in the building, someone whispered my name.
Then someone else did.
Then ten more voices joined in.
Nora.
Nora Vane.
The dead never sounded like that when they talked to me. Usually it was one voice. One trapped person. A last complaint about a cheating husband or a kid who never came home or a key hidden under a fake plant.
This was the whole damn building.
Every dead person behind every sealed apartment door, breathing my name through walls.
The stranger heard it too. I saw it in his face.
Not surprise.
Fear.
“You touched it,” he said.
“I said where is Micah?”
“He took the key.”
My stomach dropped so hard it hurt.
“The ring?”
“The ring is not a key.” He looked down at it, then back at me. “It’s a lock. A bad one. And now it knows you.”
I grabbed the lamp from Micah’s nightstand and threw it at him.
He ducked. The lamp smashed against the hallway wall. Ceramic pieces scattered across the floor.
“Okay,” he said, breathing hard. “Fair.”
“You came into my apartment, my brother vanished, and you expect me to listen because you’ve got a dramatic injury and a stupid face?”
“My face is not the issue.”
“It’s definitely an issue.”
He almost smiled.
That made me hate him more.
I pushed to my feet, keeping the bed between us. My knees shook, but I wasn’t about to let him see that. Micah’s room smelled wrong. Iron. Burned plastic. That cold, wet smell old apartments got after a pipe burst, except there was no water anywhere.
There was blood on Micah’s pillow.
Not a lot.
Enough.
My eyes kept dragging back to it.
The stranger noticed.
“He was alive when they took him,” he said.
“Who?”
His silence lasted maybe two seconds.
Too long.
“Who took him?” I asked again.
“We need to leave.”
I laughed once. It came out ugly. “You don’t get to say that. Not until you tell me where Micah is.”
The red light in the ring pulsed.
The stranger flinched.
Then the bedroom door slammed shut behind me.
I jumped and spun around.
The knob rattled under my hand, hot enough to burn. A voice came through the wood.
Not Micah.
A woman.
“Let him bleed,” she sang softly.
The stranger crossed the room fast. Too fast. He caught my wrist before I could yank the door open.
His grip was ice cold.
“Don’t,” he said.
“Get off me.”
“Nora.”
I froze.
He knew my name.
Of course he knew my name. The dead had been chanting it five seconds ago. Still, hearing it from him did something sharp and stupid to my chest.
“What are you?” I asked.
His fingers loosened, but he didn’t let go.
“Elias.”
The name hit harder than it should have.
Elias Morrow.
Mrs. Dalloway’s dry old whisper behind that locked door. Elias Morrow. Elias Morrow. Like she’d been trying to spit a curse through the deadbolt.
I stared at him.
“You’re him.”
“Yeah.”
“The guy the dead lady warned me about.”
“I doubt she was warning you about me.”
“Then what was she doing?”
His eyes moved toward the ring.
“Trying to warn you about that.”
A laugh came from inside the closet.
Micah’s closet.
My brother’s door was shut. I knew it was shut. I’d shoved it closed myself that morning because he kept leaving clothes all over the floor.
Now it creaked open an inch.
A little hand slid through the gap.
Gray fingers. Tiny. Wet at the knuckles.
I stopped breathing.
Elias shoved me behind him.
“Back up,” he said.
“That’s not—”
“I know.”
The closet door opened wider.
Something crouched in the dark. I could only see the shine of its teeth and two pale eyes set too far apart.
It wore a child’s yellow raincoat.
The hood was up.
Its face was gone.
Just smooth gray skin where a face should have been, stretching tight over a bump of bone.
“Nora,” it whispered.
Every light in the apartment flashed red.
Elias lifted his right hand. There was another ring on his finger, plain silver, no stone. He twisted it once.
A thin line of white fire cut across the room.
The thing in the closet shrieked.
Not loud.
Worse than loud. It got inside my teeth. Inside my skull. I dropped to one knee and pressed my palms over my ears.
The closet slammed shut.
The apartment went dark again.
For one second, nobody moved.
Then Elias stumbled into the wall.
His hand went to his side.
Blood slid between his fingers.
“Jesus,” I said.
“Not him.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” He pushed off the wall. “We really need to go.”
“You’re bleeding all over Micah’s floor.”
“I’m aware.”
“Sit down.”
He stared at me.
“Sit. Down.”
“I don’t have time for this.”
“You’re about to pass out in my apartment, and I am not explaining your corpse to the cops.”
“The cops won’t help.”
“Cool. Then I’ll explain it to your ghost friends.”
His expression went flat.
That one landed.
Good.
He sat on the edge of Micah’s bed with the stiff, careful movement of someone trying not to make a wound worse. I grabbed the first-aid kit from under the desk. It was old, half-empty, and Micah had stolen the good gauze last month after cutting his thumb on a soup can.
“Lift your shirt,” I said.
“No.”
“Are you twelve?”
“Nora.”
“Elias.”
He looked like he wanted to argue. Then another whisper moved through the air vent.
Nora.
His face changed.
Not much. Just his eyes cutting toward the ceiling.
He lifted his shirt.
The wound wasn’t a knife cut.
It was a black mark running from his ribs to his hip, like somebody had pressed a burning hand against him and dragged it down. The skin around it was split open in narrow lines. Blood seeped out of every one.
I swallowed hard.
“What did that?”
“Family.”
“That clears up nothing.”
“It’s all you get right now.”
I cleaned the blood as best I could. He didn’t make a sound, but his fingers crushed the mattress edge. The tendons stood out in his hand.
“You said Micah was alive,” I said.
“He is.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
I stopped.
Elias looked at me.
“You don’t know.”
“I know who has him.”
“Which is?”
“My family.”
I gave him a slow nod.
“Okay.”
“Nora—”
“No, okay. Great. That’s great.” My hands were shaking now. I kept wrapping gauze around his middle because if I stopped, I might pick up the broken lamp base and hit him with it. “Your family took my brother. Your family did this to you. Your family apparently keeps faceless raincoat children in closets. Very normal. Very healthy family stuff.”
“They don’t keep them.”
“That was your correction?”
“They use them.”
I looked up.
His mouth tightened like he regretted saying it.
Too late.
“Use them for what?”
“To find people who can hear the dead.”
The room went quiet.
Even the whispering outside seemed to pull back for a second.
My hands stopped moving.
Elias watched my face.
“You hear them,” he said.
“I hear things sometimes.”
“You heard Mrs. Dalloway.”
My throat closed.
“You know about her?”
“She died six days ago in apartment 4B.”
“How?”
His eyes dropped.
That was answer enough.
I shoved away from him.
“You people killed her?”
“No.”
“That pause was not comforting.”
“We didn’t kill her.” His voice turned rough. “But she died because she helped my brother hide something from my family.”
“Your brother.”
“Forget I said that.”
“Sure. I’ll put it on my list.”
The ring on the floor gave another pulse.
This one was stronger.
Pain shot through my palm, right where I’d touched it before. I looked down.
A thin red line had opened across my skin.
I hadn’t cut myself.
But there it was.
Blood welled up, bright in the dark.
Elias saw it and went completely still.
“Don’t let it touch the ring,” he said.
I stared at my hand.
“Why?”
“Because if your blood hits that stone, it binds.”
“Binds what?”
He stood so fast the bed frame scraped the floor.
“Me to you.”
I blinked.
“That sounds like your problem.”
“It becomes your problem too.”
The floor trembled.
A deep knock sounded from somewhere under the building.
Not downstairs.
Under downstairs.
The pipes rattled. The windows bowed inward, then snapped back. Every dead voice in the building started talking at once.
Not whispering anymore.
Screaming.
My name.
Micah’s name.
Then one voice cut through all the rest.
Micah.
“Nora!”
I spun toward the bedroom window.
My brother stood on the fire escape outside.
He had one hand pressed against the glass. His face was pale, his hair stuck to his forehead, and blood ran from one nostril down to his mouth.
“Micah!”
I lunged for the window.
Elias caught me around the waist and dragged me back just as the glass exploded inward.
Not shattered.
Exploded.
Black smoke poured through the broken window, twisting around Micah’s shape.
His mouth opened.
“Nora, don’t let him—”
The smoke yanked him backward.
He vanished off the fire escape.
I screamed his name and fought Elias with everything I had.
“Let me go!”
“You can’t get to him!”
“I can try!”
“You’ll die trying!”
“Then move!”
The black smoke hit Elias before I could twist free.
It slammed into his chest.
He made a sound like somebody had punched the air out of him. His grip broke. He stumbled backward, hit the wall, and slid halfway down it.
The smoke wrapped around his throat.
I saw fingers in it.
Dozens of gray little hands.
Elias clawed at them, but his silver ring flashed once and went dark.
His face turned red.
Then purple.
I should have run.
I knew that. I knew it so clearly.
This guy had answers he wouldn’t give me. His family had Micah. He had dragged something horrible into my brother’s room, and he was bossy in a way that made me want to throw furniture.
But Micah had said someone was at the door with a ring.
He’d said they were trying to stop something from getting in.
And Elias had just stood between me and that thing in the closet.
“Damn it,” I muttered.
I grabbed the ring off the carpet.
Elias’s eyes went wide.
“No. Nora, don’t—”
The black stone burned against my palm.
The cut opened wider.
Blood ran over my fingers.
I tried to throw the ring away.
The smoke hands tightened around Elias’s throat.
His boots kicked against the floor.
“Tell me where Micah is,” I said.
He couldn’t answer.
“Tell me!”
His eyes locked on mine.
Not begging.
Warning me.
Like he’d rather choke to death than let me do this.
That was the moment I knew it was bad.
Really bad.
I pressed my bleeding palm over the black stone anyway.
The ring screamed.
Not out loud.
Inside me.
Pain ripped up my arm and punched straight through my chest. I dropped to the floor, but I couldn’t let go. Blood flooded under my hand, hot and slippery.
Elias shouted my name.
Then I wasn’t in Micah’s room anymore.
I saw a boy chained to a stone chair.
Not Micah.
Younger. Dark hair. Blood on his mouth. He was crying without making noise.
I saw Elias on his knees in front of him, both hands covered in blood.
I saw a woman in a white coat say, “One heir is enough.”
I saw Elias put a knife through a mirror.
Then I saw Micah.
He was in a room made of brick and iron. Barefoot. Terrified. His hands glowed red around the wrists like he was wearing burning bracelets.
He looked straight at me.
“Nora,” he whispered. “Don’t open it.”
The vision snapped.
I came back choking on air.
The smoke was gone.
Elias was on the floor across from me, one hand around his bruised throat. Blood ran from his nose. He looked at me like I had just set his house on fire.
The ring had changed.
A thin red line circled the black stone.
Then the same line appeared around my wrist.
It burned into my skin like a fresh tattoo.
Across the room, Elias grabbed his own wrist.
He looked down.
The mark was there too.
For a second, neither of us said anything.
The building groaned around us.
Somewhere far below, something heavy hit a door.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Elias looked up at me. His face had gone pale under the blood.
“You just blood-bound us,” he said.
I stared at the mark on my wrist.
“Can you undo it?”
“No.”
“Can you find Micah now?”
His expression got worse.
“Nora.”
“What?”
He pushed himself up, unsteady but moving. The red line on his wrist glowed once, matching mine.
Then every dead voice in the building went silent.
Elias listened to that silence like it was a gun being cocked.
“We’ve got three days,” he said.
“Three days until what?”
The thing under the building knocked again.
This time, the floor cracked open between us.
Elias grabbed my arm.
“Until the whole city comes through.”