Sisters of Blood and Spirit

Wren Noble is dead—

she was born that way. Vibrant, unlike other dead things, she craves those rare moments when her twin sister allows her to step inside her body and experience the world of the living.

Lark Noble is alive

but often feels she belongs in the muted Shadow Lands—the realm of the dead. Known as the crazy girl who talks to her dead sister, she doesn’t exactly fit in with the living, though a recent suicide attempt and time in a psych ward have proved to her she’s not ready to join her sister in the afterlife.

Now the guy who saved

Lark’s life needs her to repay the favor. He and his friends have been marked for death by the malevolent spirit of a vicious and long-dead serial killer, and the twins—who should know better than to mess with the dead—may be their only hope of staying alive.

I stepped into my sister and took over her body for the time being. People called it possession, but I didn’t like to use that term in regards to Lark. Thankfully, she was just asleep. I opened my eyes—Lark’s eyes.

Mason looked down at me. He frowned. “You’re not her,” he whispered.

I managed a small smile, impressed that he could tell the difference between us—most people couldn’t. “You can let her…me, go now. Thanks.”

He dropped his arms like I was on fire. I stumbled, but managed to catch myself. Wearing Lark was fairly comfortable, but I wasn’t used to having substance in this realm. Limbs were heavy, clumsy. I braced my hand against the roof of Nan’s car.

This was different from when Lark was awake and I shared her body. Despite the heavy limbs and awkwardness of them, they felt like mine. I was in control, not my sister, and it…it was wonderful. And strange. So strange.

Praise for The Girl with the Iron Touch:

“A well-calculated blend of paranormal romance and genuinely innovative story.”

—Kirkus Reviews

Praise for The Girl in the Clockwork Collar:

“Surprising, vivid and cohesive—the work of a pro.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Teens will enjoy the fast-paced action.”

—VOYA

Praise for The Girl in the Steel Corset:

“A steampunk mystery with a delicious love triangle and entertaining Jekyll and Hyde element.”

—RT Book Reviews

Sisters of Blood and Spirit

Kady Cross

www.miraink.co.uk

This book is for Mom, who instilled in me

a love of things that go bump in the night. Thanks, and I miss you.

It’s also for my sisters—I’d fight a ghost for each of you!

And last, but not least, this book is for Steve, who supported me

from the very beginning. I couldn’t do it without you.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Praise

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Copyright

“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

—Dante

LARK

The scars on my wrists itched. I curled my fingers and tugged on my cuffs as I rubbed my arms against my jeans. Everyone stared at me as I walked down the hall. Maybe not everyone, but enough to make me lift my chin and straighten my shoulders. I glared back. Most of them looked away. Don’t provoke the crazy girl. At Bell Hill, no one had looked at me.

I’d thought my second day of high school would be easier than the first, but it was worse. Gossip had spread, and now everyone knew who I was and what I’d done.

I scared them—it was obvious. Even the ones who smirked at me or made remarks were afraid. They wanted to look tough to their friends. Hey, if making fun of me made them feel strong, then they obviously had their own problems.

I’d known some of them for most of my life. New Devon wasn’t a very big town, and at one time I’d been a popular kid. In day care and elementary school everyone had wanted to play with me and my sister the ghost. I wish I could have seen my own face the first time someone told me I was too old to have an imaginary friend anymore.

Imaginary? The word echoed in my head. People applied terms like overly imaginative when I was still young. Eventually they began to say things like, “dissociative,” “delusional” and my personal favorite, “troubled.” No shit. There had never been a teenager in the history of the world that wasn’t troubled by something. It was kind of our thing.

I walked past a small group of girls clustered in front of a section of lockers painted in the school colors of purple and gray. They drew back, as though I was contagious. They didn’t say anything—didn’t even giggle. If they’d been mean I would have been more comfortable.

I didn’t hang my head. I had nothing to be ashamed of. Maybe I’d made a couple of bad choices, but they had been mine.

I wasn’t crazy. I might be a freak, but I wasn’t crazy, and I never had been. I had proof of that, and other people knew it, too—not many, but enough.

As luck would have it, my locker was just a few down from where the girls stood watching me warily. I stopped and opened it, placing my bag inside so I could take out what I needed for my first class.

“Why are we here?” my twin sister, Wren, asked. She stood by the locker next to mine, arms crossed over her chest. Her vivid red hair fell over her shoulders in a straight curtain that required absolutely no work—no style she wanted ever did, because it was of her making. There weren’t any hair styling tools in the Shadow Lands.

I didn’t respond. Talking out loud to someone no one else could see would make them all think they were right, that I was still crazy. I was supposed to be cured. That was the only way the school would take me back. Although, at that moment, I had to wonder as well what the hell I was doing there.

Oh, right. My parents didn’t want me, so I’d had no choice but to move in with my grandmother in my old hometown while Mom and Dad had a fresh and shiny new life in Massachusetts. My mother just couldn’t deal with the fact that I could see and interact with Wren. Not because she thought I was lying, but because she was mad Wren didn’t talk to her.

I wasn’t cured. I wasn’t crazy, either. But there was just no easy way to explain why Wren was there with me—she’d been dead since the day we were born. I came out breathing and she...didn’t. I think someone made a mistake somewhere along the way, because my hair was stark white and hers was deep, vivid red. I should be the ghost, not her. God—if there was one who even cared—knew I liked the dead a lot more than the living most days. Other than our hair and style, we were identical, to the point that if I dyed my hair her color even we’d get confused over who was who.

For years my relationship with Wren was seen as cute if not sad—a little girl playing with her “imaginary” dead twin. As I got older, my knowing things about how people died because “Wren told me” made me look weird, guilty even. People would ask me to communicate with their dead relatives, but it was Wren who did all the legwork.

People called me a liar. Called me crazy. Called me a freak. Eventually, I began to believe them. That was when I got desperate and made the scars on my wrists.

I closed my locker and walked down the hall, pushing my way through the crowd of teeming hormones. People stared. Some said things. I ignored them, staring straight ahead. I just wanted to get this day over with. These people didn’t matter; I knew who and what I was.

I just didn’t know why.

“I suppose you have to ignore me while you’re here, don’t you?” My sister sighed—rather dramatically I thought. She knew the drill. The time I’d spent locked up made her a little...needy. Other than me she didn’t have anyone to talk to except an old woman who stuck around to watch over her family and a crazy man from the 1700s who liked to haunt his old house just for the hell of it. Although, I think she’d have more friends if she wasn’t with me all the time. Unfortunately, the few other “nice” ghosts we’d had contact with had moved on once we did what they asked of us, and hanging out with the scary ones wasn’t an option.

“Mmm.” It was the only response I could make without anyone noticing.

“Fine. I’m going to the library. I’ll find you later.” With that, she walked through a wall and was gone. I hated when she did that—mostly because I couldn’t.

I followed the swarm, rounding a corner toward what would be my homeroom for the rest of this year. A small group of kids were gathered against the wall just a few feet away. A few guys—mostly girls. Seniors. I could tell just by looking at them—they had that faint smug superiority of knowing they had to make it only until June and then they were free, done with the insane asylum that was high school. I might have sneered at them as I walked by if one of the guys hadn’t raised his head and looked right at me.

I froze. It was just a second, but I froze like he was a speeding car and I was a raccoon out for an evening stroll on the center line. Mason Ryan was even more gorgeous than he had been the last time I’d seen him, a fact for which I resolved then and there to despise him. Gold-streaked brown hair, hazel eyes—and lips no guy deserved to have. Black button-down and jeans. He was one of those guys who was so beautiful it hurt to look at him.

But it hurt for other reasons. I needed to avoid him if I could—and not just because his father was chief of police. Mace and I had a secret. Well, not really a secret. A few people in town knew that he had been the one to find me bleeding out on the floor, but knowing and understanding were two different things. Nobody but he and I knew exactly what we’d shared, and it would always be there, lingering between us like a breath.

One of the girls with him turned to look at me, as well. She had a nasty-looking scratch on the side of her face that kept her from being model-gorgeous. I barely glanced at her; my attention was solely on Mace. The sight of him made me want to puke, tied my gut up in knots and shoved bile into the back of my throat.

Funny how much sick tasted like shame.

Mace didn’t look as though he felt much better. I didn’t want to think of the state I’d been in that day when he’d held me in his arms and begged me not to die on him because he’d have to live with that. He straightened away from the wall he’d been leaning against, and took a step forward—toward me. Ohhh, no. Not today. Not ever, if I could help it.

I broke into a sprint, straight into the classroom where I found a seat at the back of the room and dropped into it, trying to keep my heart in my chest. A few heads turned to look at me. Whispers and coy glances exchanged. Let them talk. I didn’t care. My heart hammered and my stomach twitched, but I was safe for the time being. As safe as I could be in a small Connecticut town where everyone knew practically everyone else, and even if they didn’t they still talked about them.

“Lark?”

Now what? I looked up, turned my head. Sitting right across from me was a familiar face—tanned skin, dark eyes and even darker hair. She smiled at me. I almost smiled back. Almost. “Rox.”

Roxi Taylor was a month or two younger than me and was always very friendly—like crazy-ass friendly. It would be easy to dismiss her as fake, but she really was just a good, sweet person.

I didn’t get it.

People like me, who could see things other people couldn’t, didn’t get to be ignorant of human nature for long—not when people either wanted to use you or hurt you. I’d tried to hate Roxi for years, but it just wouldn’t take, and that part of me that distrusted everyone wanted very badly to distrust her, but could never quite manage it, even though I was sure that no one could be that nice all the time. But Roxi had never asked me for anything—ever. Never made me feel like there was something wrong with me. I always wondered what was wrong with her that she wanted to be my friend.

She grinned—she’d gotten her braces off since the last time I’d seen her—and threw her arms around me. “It’s so good to see you!”

Shit. I did not want this attention, but it would be a lie if I said it wasn’t nice to find someone who was happy to see me, that part of me didn’t want to hug her back. It didn’t matter that a little voice inside screamed for me not to trust her. I let myself have that moment.

“Dykes,” someone muttered.

A few laughs followed. Then someone else said, “Don’t, man. She’s like, the angel of death or something.”

I pulled away from Roxi and turned to face our audience. What annoyed me more than the smirks were the few expressions of genuine fear. I mean, sometimes being thought of as scary was a good thing, but having people be scared of you was different, especially when I hadn’t given them any reason to be afraid.

Yet.

“If I was the angel of death, you think I’d be here?”

They seemed to consider this, their shared brain struggling to make the connection.

“Why are you here?” A blond guy with a big zit on his chin asked. From his voice I knew he was the same one who’d made the “dyke” remark. His name was Aaron or Albert or something. I remembered him from last year. “Shouldn’t you be locked up with the rest of the retards?”

Heat rushed to my cheeks as people laughed, but I didn’t look away. Homeschooling was the only way I’d been able to return to my correct year. I’d busted my ass to not get left behind. Wren had been right there with me.

“They kicked me out because they needed room for your mother.” Lame, but it was the first thing that came to mind. “And I’m not retarded, asshole. I’m crazy—there’s a difference. Which you’d know if your parents weren’t brother and sister.” More laughter, but this time it was for me, not against me.

Andrew—that was his name—turned red, which only made that ugly zit stand out more. I wanted to smack it with the heel of my shoe while my foot was still inside, bust it wide-open. Gross, right? “Bitch.”

I raised a brow. “Seriously? That’s the best you can do?”

A hand settled on my arm. I looked down, expecting it to be Roxi. It wasn’t. It was Wren. Damn.

“Who are you looking at?” Andrew demanded. Then his expression turned mean—happily mean. “Is your sister here? Your dead sister?”

In books, the hero’s blood sometimes “turns to ice” in his or her veins, but that’s not right. It’s not the blood that freezes, it’s everything around it, so that your blood actually feels like hot razor blades ripping through your entire body. I lifted my head. What laughter there was gave way to uneasy, half-assed giggles. “Don’t talk about my sister.”

I shouldn’t have said anything.

“How did she die anyway?” Andrew asked with a mocking grin. “I bet your mother saw that there was two of you and lost her shit. Did she know that she killed the wrong one? It should have been you she killed.”

No one had killed Wren, she had been stillborn, and our mother had never gotten over her loss. And yeah, I wondered if the wrong one had died all the damn time.

Beside me Wren’s shape shimmered, like the edges of her were fraying. It was what happened when she got mad. Really mad. She picked up on my emotions like I’d dropped them on the floor in front of her. It meant I had to be really careful when I lied to her.

Her anger picked up my hair like a breeze.

“Don’t,” I whispered.

“Oh, are you going to cry?” Andrew pressed in a whiny voice. “Did I upset you?”

I met his gaze with a hard glare as warmth spread through me—a dry summer breeze on a hot beach. Oh, hell. I’d promised myself this wouldn’t happen. It was only the second freaking day! Wren settled in, her spirit fitting me perfectly, like a glove tailor-made for a hand. She smiled, using my lips. “She wasn’t talking to you.” It wasn’t my voice—it was lower, softer.

Andrew frowned. “What...?”

I hated when Wren possessed me without asking, but she was so powerful—like nothing I’d ever felt before. I felt strong—invincible—when we were joined together like this.

The lights flickered. Concerned murmurs rose up. People glanced at me. I shrugged—crazy didn’t affect the electricity. The lights flickered again—then the fire alarm went off, shrieking like a banshee. Hoots and cheers filled the air. Fire alarm on the second day—a lovely way to start the year. Everyone tore from the room, and Roxi didn’t wait for me—smart girl. Andrew rose from his seat, but I stopped him by grabbing his wrist.

My sister was strong. Inhumanly strong. Under my fingers, Andrew’s wrist felt as fragile as dry twigs. He tried to tug free. “Let me go, freak!”

“Sit down,” Wren commanded through my mouth. He wasn’t as stupid as he looked, because he did what he was told.

“Good boy,” I said, rising to my feet. Wren slipped out of me as easily as she’d entered. I felt her loss like someone had taken my eye or a limb. It never got any easier. She had physical contact now, sorta, and it was better if I didn’t stick around. “You just sit there a minute. There’s someone who wants to meet you.”

Andrew lifted his gaze to mine as I gathered my things. He didn’t look so smug now. “Wh-who?”

“My sister,” I told him, smiling just a little when he looked down at his wrist, still in Wren’s ghostly grip. He had to feel the cold fingers biting into his skin even though he couldn’t see them. “You know—my dead sister?”

I walked to the door, Wren’s low voice following my every step as she whispered words I couldn’t make out. I hesitated when I heard Andrew whimper.

“Go,” my sister told me.

I didn’t look, I just kept walking.

* * *

A few minutes before the end of first class I got summoned to the principal’s office. I was surprised they waited that long. Andrew was absent, and people had been looking from his empty seat to me since we were let back into the school after the alarm.

Not like they could blame me for anything. After all, I’d been outside with everyone else. If not for Roxi I would have been standing alone, with an invisible boundary around me that no one dared cross. Seriously, no one had come closer than two or three feet. It was like I had pink eye or something.

With a sigh, I packed up my books and left the classroom. Even though I’d been gone since almost the beginning of the previous year, I knew exactly how to get to the office. I’d spent a lot of time there before what my mother called the “incident.”

Incident. Somehow it didn’t have the same punch as “attempted suicide.”

I was one of those teenagers categorized as a problem or “troubled.” I got it. Last year I was troubled, and I had lots of problems. The biggest one of which was that I let myself believe the people who called me crazy, and I stopped believing in Wren.

So, yeah. I was messed up and I did some things that I really regret doing. Things that I refused to think about as I made my way down the hallway to the main staircase near the office.

I had to check in with the guy at the desk and tell him who I was. I could tell from the way he looked at me that he already knew. He pointed at the waiting area and told me to have a seat. Principal Grant would be with me in a minute.

A few seconds later a guy sat down in an empty chair across from mine. He was tall and lean, wearing jeans and a gray shirt. He had a young Keanu/Ezra Miller thing going on. Very cute, despite having a bit of a black eye.

“Rough morning?” I asked.

He grinned as he slouched in his chair. Yeah, he was really cute, even though he seemed surprised that I had spoken to him. “This?” He pointed to his eye. “This was yesterday. You should see the other guy.”

Corny, too. I smiled back. “If it happened yesterday why are you here?”

He lifted his chin toward Principal Grant’s office. “Waiting.”

I was saved from trying to figure out something witty to say by the opening of the principal’s door. A girl a year or so younger than me walked out. She took one look at Keanu and her brown eyes narrowed. The resemblance was obvious. She tossed her long, straight hair. “What are you doing here?”

He stood up, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I’m supposed to take you home.”

The girl glanced at me, and for a second her eyes widened. Then she smirked at her brother. “I can go back in if you want to wait a little longer.”

What was that supposed to mean? Keanu’s cheeks flushed, but he didn’t look away from her. And he didn’t look impressed. “Let’s go.”

She flashed that smirk at me before flouncing past. Her brother gave me an apologetic look. “Sorry you have to follow that.”

I laughed. “And here I was feeling bad for you.”

He smiled. “See you around, I guess.”

I nodded, and he was gone.

The door to the principal’s office opened again. “Miss Noble, please come in.”

Principal Grant was about six feet tall and imposing. I wouldn’t call her pretty, but she had an interesting face and curly dark hair. I was nervous as I crossed the threshold into her office.

“It’s only your second day back, Miss Noble,” she said as she closed the door behind me. “It’s not good that you’re in my office already.”

“I didn’t do anything,” I told her.

She gestured to a stiff-backed chair in front of her desk. “Sit, please.”

I did.

She sat down behind the desk and folded her hands on the top. She looked like a judge with her black suit and severe expression. I tried to keep my attention focused solely on her. “You were allowed to return to this school because of your grandmother’s ties to the community and her promise that you wouldn’t be any trouble. Are you going to make her break that promise?”

The mention of Nan yanked on my temper. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Then why did a young man have to leave school after an altercation with you?”

My eyebrows shot up. “What?”

She wasn’t buying it. “Do not play coy with me, young lady. What did you say to Andrew?”

“He was the one doing all the talking,” I replied hotly. “He insinuated that I was a lesbian, and then he made every joke he could at my expense. I told him to shut up. Then the fire alarm went off and we all left the room. Ask Roxi Taylor. I was with her the whole time.” Except for those few minutes with Wren...

“I will,” Principal Grant promised. And then she surprised me. “He called you lesbian?”

I shrugged. Again, I tried to keep my gaze focused on her, and not what was behind her. “A dyke. He was just being a jerk.”

“I take that sort of harassment very seriously, Miss Noble. This school has zero tolerance for bullying.”

“When did that happen?” I asked before I could stop myself. “Because it certainly didn’t the last time I was here.”

She looked embarrassed. “That was before I took over as principal.” Yeah, she’d been the vice principal then. “Things are different now, I promise you. If Andrew returns to school, he won’t speak to you in that manner again.”

If? Huh. “You kicking him out for picking on me won’t make my life any easier. I don’t care if he comes back, so long as he leaves me alone.”

Ms. Grant stared at me for a few seconds—enough to make me nervous. “I’ll take that under advisement. You’d better get back to class.”

That was it? “Okay.” I stood up and made for the door.

“Oh, Miss Noble?”

I stopped, hand on the doorknob, and turned. “Yeah?” Don’t look. Don’t look.

“Victim or instigator, I don’t want to see you in my office again. Am I understood?”

I nodded. “No offense, Principal Grant, but I don’t want to see you again, either.”

Or the ghost of the former principal standing behind her, his brains blown all over the wall.

* * *

“What did you do to Andrew?”

I glanced up as Roxi fell into step beside me on the walk home that day. My heart gave a little skip. After my “talk” with Principal Grant I was paranoid that everyone was out to lynch me.

“Nothing.”

“Okay, what did your sister do to Andrew?”

Huh. Grant hadn’t thought to ask me that.

“Nothing permanent,” Wren answered from her place beside me. She had changed clothes since this morning and was wearing a long boho skirt, peasant blouse and a floppy hat. Her feet were bare. Who needed shoes when your feet didn’t actually touch anything?

I was going to miss shoes when I died.

I barely looked at the living girl walking beside me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t seen him since the fire alarm this morning.” When we’d come back to class he was gone. I hadn’t asked Wren what happened and I didn’t want to know. My sister was normally quite gentle, but she was dead, and the dead took offense easily. Andrew had screwed himself when he’d suggested I should have been the one who died.

“Come on, Lark.” Roxi stopped on the cracked sidewalk. Weeds poked up through the concrete near my feet and I nudged them with the toe of my secondhand pink-and-red Fluevog shoes. “I’ve known you since we were five. I know you’re not crazy, and I know Wren is real. I’m not the only one, either.”

My eyes narrowed. “Could have used you when everyone else thought I was a liar...or nuts.”

Wren stood behind Roxi, studying her. “She seems sincere.” She didn’t care who I told about her. She only cared about me. But I cared about us.

“I told everyone who would listen that I didn’t think you were crazy.”

I looked her dead in the eye. “Gotta think that wasn’t too many people.”

Roxi blushed. She was even pretty with her face all red. “No.” She started walking again. I fell into step beside her. “Still, I wanted you to know I believed you.”

“A little late coming.” Wren walked on Roxi’s other side, still studying her as though the girl was a dress she’d like to try on. “Nice thought, though. I think she means it.”

“Thanks,” I said, looking straight ahead. My grandmother’s house was just down the block. I could feel relief loosening my shoulders. I’d only been out of some sort of care for the past few months, and being back to school had exhausted me with all the noise and bustle. All those bodies conditioned to respond to the sound of a bell reminded me a little too much of the “hospital” my mother had abandoned me to when I had refused to say that Wren was all in my head.

When I had tried to die to be with her.

I didn’t think Mom believed I was crazy, either, but it was easier than saying she hated me because Wren talked to me and not her.

“Is she with us now? Your sister?”

I cast a distrustful glance at her. Was she trying to trick me into saying something wrong? You give people messages from dead relatives, fight a few ghosts on school property, try to kill yourself and all of a sudden you’re Trouble. Huh.

“What do you think?”

I tried not to laugh as Wren jumped in front of her and shouted, “Boo!” My thoughts were getting too morose, and she knew it.

Roxi shot me a shrewd glance as she walked right through my sister—and shivered in the early September sunshine. “I think you’re not about to discuss her with someone you’re not sure you can trust.”

“I’m a fairly private person.”

“That’s just a pretty way of saying you’re antisocial.”

I grinned as my sister laughed. “That, too.” I liked this girl. I really hoped she wasn’t playing me.

“I like this girl,” Wren commented. “I really hope she isn’t playing us.”

That thing they say about twins being on the same wavelength, feeling the same thing, thinking the same thing? It was true, and the whole dead-vs-living thing just cranked it up to eleven. The only reason I was alive was because Wren had felt something was wrong and had come looking for me the night I’d partied with a bottle of vodka and a razor blade. Good times. And I felt her anguish the entire time I was locked up and she couldn’t do anything to help me.

She’d done more than anyone else. More than our parents or any sanctimonious doctor. And I had been so pissed that she’d played a part in saving me, because I had thought death would finally put us in the same world.

It wasn’t my time to die, she’d said—as if she had any way of knowing.

We walked in silence for a bit, my grandmother’s house coming steadily closer. I’d only lived there a few days—since Dad had dropped me off with a guilty look and my own credit card—but it already felt more like home than my old house had in a long time. We’d lived in this town since I was three, but after my...accident, my parents had moved to Natick up in Mass. Mom needed to run away, while they decided I needed to endure daily torture at the hands of my peers. Whatever. I wasn’t bitter. Much. And at least here I didn’t have to see the look on her face when my mother looked at me. Not that she looked at me very often.

“So,” Roxi began, ending my pity party, “want to hang out later?”

My inner alarm went off, screeching “abort!” over and over. “Uh...”

“I’m going over to ’Nother Cup at eight. It’s open-mike night. Kevin McCrae’s playing. You know him, don’t you?”

Oh, yeah. I knew him.

“Yes!” Wren screeched in my ear. “Say yes! Say yes or I’ll bring Mr. Havers over to visit.”

Mr. Havers was the old dude who liked to haunt for the hell of it. He had few teeth and was as bat-shit crazy as a dead guy could be. And he smelled like a horse. “Yes,” I said through clenched teeth. “I know him. That sounds great. I’ll meet you there?”