Shift (27 page)

I wish I didn’t know who.

What in the world is growing inside me?

My spine froze. “She called me a ‘what.’” My voice almost squeaked.

Zachary took the page and read it. “Christ …”

“Why didn’t she call me a ‘who’? Why was I a ‘what’ to her?”

“Aura.” Zachary’s voice was urgent. “She said the cancer treatments should’ve kept her from getting pregnant.”

I nodded, making my head pitch even worse.

He shook the page. “The cancer she had
before
she went to Newgrange.”

I tried to listen to what he was saying and understand how it fit with my tumbling thoughts. The pregnancy, the cancer, the timing of it all…

“Oh my God!” I sat up straight. “The disease must have gone into remission and come back after I was born.” I scoured my memory,
trying to recall the course of Mom’s disease. All Gina’d ever told me was that Mom had had cancer that killed her when I was three.

“Aura.” Zachary started to reach for me, then pulled his hand back. “If it’s true, then it means that what happened at Newgrange didn’t make her sick. It didn’t make my dad sick, either.”

“It made us possible.” I raised my gaze to meet his. “We shouldn’t exist.”

“But we do exist. We’re here.” His whisper shook. “Do you know what this means?”

I couldn’t say it out loud, but my mind shouted the truth I’d wished for all these weeks. If the Shine didn’t hurt his father and my mother, then maybe the Shift couldn’t hurt us, either. Crossing that boundary—with a kiss, or maybe more—couldn’t hurt anyone.

We could be together.

I broke our gaze, the intensity in his eyes more than I could bear.

I turned over the previous day’s entry.

April 18

Off to the chemist for a pregnancy test. That way I can prove it’s a stomach virus.

Or stress. Why wouldn’t I be stressed?

I passed the page on to Zachary and flipped the next.

April 11

I’m a week late. Probably because I’m not eating enough. The money’s running out, and I have this room to pay for.

I can’t leave. He might come back.

My lips formed the word
Who?
even as the name painted itself across my mind.

March 23

He’s really gone.

March 22

He’s gone.

Her words were a desert. My chest felt like it would collapse. The next page seemed to weigh a hundred pounds as I slowly turned it over to see…

March 21

If anyone finds this … who would believe it? I can’t.

We were sitting. Talking. His hand around mine as if he held it.

Her scrawl grew shakier.

(No. If I write this, even if no one reads it, it will be real. So I can’t write it. I can’t, can’t, CAN’T.)

The pen tore the paper, the end of the last word shooting off to the right.

The entry began again, blue ink replacing the black.

Something happened. Not something amazing. Not something incredible, stupendous, or any other word ever invented.

I was touching him. He was touching me. Anthony was alive.

A vortex opened inside my head. My hand dropped to my lap, crumpling the paper.

“Aura, are you—”

“Not okay.” My head and stomach lurched in opposite directions. “I feel sick.”

“Put the seat down.”

I grabbed the handle and sank backward when the seat released. “Here, read it out loud. I can’t finish.” I shoved the paper at him.

He started from the beginning of the March 21 entry, his voice faltering at “I was touching him,” as the meaning sank in.

“My God …,” he whispered.

“Keep going.”

He read on out loud: “‘We didn’t wait. We had no idea how long it would last. A minute? An hour? Forever?’”

Hearing my mother’s words in Zachary’s deep, lilting voice made it all too real.

My father was a ghost.

“‘About fifteen minutes was what it turned out to be. Long enough to’—Aura, are you sure you want me to read this?”

I gripped the sides of the leather seat. “I need you to do this for me.”

Zachary cleared his throat and continued.

“‘Long enough to make love, barely, breathlessly. He tasted like’—‘like a living man. He was real. I know it wasn’t a dream or a hallucination, because someone pounded on the other side of the wall, saying, “You two hush!” so I knew I wasn’t alone having a delusion.’”

Please no more details.
I wanted to cover my ears at any hint of my parents having sex, but I had to hear it all.

“Then, just as we were saying, ‘I love you,’ for the tenth or eleventh time, his body became air again. I could put my hand through him and not touch his beautiful skin.

Anthony’s gaze turned distant, and he smiled in
a way I’d never seen before. I spoke his name and reached to touch the air that framed his face, wanting to capture that smile in my memory.

But his form turned golden-white, then disappeared.”

I closed my eyes and heard Zachary flip the page, the paper rustling in his hand.

“‘All day I lay in bed, wondering. Why he died. Why he came to me. Why he left. Now I no longer wonder. Now I just feel numb.’

“That’s all,” Zachary said softly.

“My father was a ghost.” I sucked in my breath, as if I could pull back the words. “What does that make me?”

“It makes you, you. There’s nought you can do about who or what your parents are.”

I opened my eyes to the car’s gray ceiling. “But if my father was dead when he—when they—Zach, am I even alive?”

“How can you doubt it?” He leaned over and squeezed my hand between his. “You feel this, aye?”

“Am I half-ghost? Is that why I could help Logan turn back from shade? Is that why—” My heart thumped to a halt. “Oh God.”

“What?” he whispered.

“I shouldn’t be here.” I pulled my hand from his and rubbed my arms against the sudden half-dead feeling. “When I came into the world, I caused the Shift. It’s wrong, and it needs to unhappen.”

“How?”

My throat turned cold, but I forced out the words. “When I die.”

“No.” It wasn’t a plea or denial, just a statement of fact. As if his stubborn self could stand between me and death. “Aura, you belong in this world.”

I stared up into his green eyes, fixed in fear and determination. It was the only place I could look without feeling like I was falling. But how could I hold on to him when he’d be gone in four days, maybe forever?

A knock came at my car door. I let out a yip of surprise.

Nicola Hughes bent down to my open window, an almost garish smile on her red-painted lips. “Hi, Aura! Funny, I happened to be in the neighborhood at the coffee shop and caught a glimpse of you.”

Zachary’s window started rolling up. He was watching a man in a suit who stood on the curb using a cell phone. Another DMP agent working with Nicola?

She put her hand over the edge of my window. “I thought maybe we could go over some last-minute details for Friday’s show, hmm?”

I pulled my seat up and shoved the papers onto the floor, out of her sight. “Maybe tomorrow at lunch? We can meet with Logan and his brother.”

“I think now would be better.”

“Put on your safety belt,” Zachary whispered.

I didn’t question. The moment felt balanced on a knife’s edge. The coffee shop on the corner was closed, its windows dark.

“Sorry,” I told Nicola, checking that my door was locked. “We’re on our way to a movie, and we already bought the tickets online, so—”

“I’ll pay for your tickets. Maybe you can catch a later show. Or tomorrow.”

Or never,
I thought as the agent on the sidewalk moved toward Zachary, motioning for him to get out.

Zachary turned the ignition and slammed the car into gear. The tires squealed as the Mini Cooper shot forward, through the empty parking spaces in front of us.

A white van pulled out of an alley, blocking our path. Zachary stomped on the brake pedal and jerked the steering wheel to the right. We skidded, so fast I couldn’t scream.

The Mini Cooper screeched sideways to a stop, leaving Zachary’s door only inches from the van.

He let out a harsh Gaelic curse, then stared at me with wide, dark eyes. “Are you all right?” he asked, breathless.

“I think.” My cold, shaky fingers slipped on the seat belt latch twice before I clicked it off. “Glad you warned me. Are you okay?”

Zachary nodded jerkily. His fingers looked glued to the steering wheel. “So much for our big getaway.”

“At least we didn’t crash. That was amazing dri—”

He pointed past me. “Look out!”

A hand was reaching through my open window. It unlocked my door and swung it open, revealing a hulking DMP agent. Not the one who had been with Nicola. This one wore a bright white uniform. A dumper.

“Are you injured?” he asked.

“No, we didn’t—”

“Step out of the car, miss. Your friend, too.”

I tried to kick my mother’s journal pages under the seat with my
heels, but the agent leaned in and offered his arm to help me out.

“Now, please,” the dumper said with an unsettling calm.

“Can I get my bag?”

“We’ll take care of that. Just step out of the car.”

I did as he asked, hoping they would retrieve my bag and assume that the scattered journal pages were trash.

Unless that was what they were looking for. If they’d somehow followed us all the way from Eowyn’s office, they knew what we had. She’d said the DMP was closing in.

Behind me, Zachary climbed over the center console and out of the car, keeping a wary eye on the second dumper approaching. He was smaller than his partner, but had that I’m-in-charge look.

Nicola dashed up to us, shoes clicking on the street. “Are you hurt? For God’s sake, what were you thinking?”

“What were
we
thinking?” I pointed to the van, which bore a DMP logo on its side door. “They pulled in front of us, on purpose. We all could’ve been killed.”

Nicola frowned at the first uniformed agent, who was gathering up—
oh no
—my bag and journal pages.

“Let me handle this.” She strode toward Zachary’s car. “I’m Nicola Hughes, from the Office of Public Affairs. My partner and I have the situation under control, so if you’ll—”

“Hey, drop that!” The second agent pointed past Nicola at Zachary, who had his phone to his ear. Speed-dialing his dad, I hoped, since my own phone was in the bag the agent had grabbed.

The agent moved forward and grabbed the phone from Zachary’s
hand. “I’ll hold on to that for you.” He slipped the phone into his own pocket. “If you’ll come with us.”

“What are you doing?” Zachary looked up and down the street, then raised his voice, though there were no bystanders to hear him. “What’s going on here?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” Nicola said to the new agents. “This is an OPA operation. No need to bring in the heavies.”

The agent who’d taken Zachary’s phone flashed his badge at Nicola. “Agent Acker, Investigations Division. We’re taking over this case.” He motioned us toward the white van. “Let’s go.”

Nicola’s eyes narrowed. “I knew there was something about Aura. Headquarters never tells me anything.”

“Is that why you were following us?” I asked her.

She ignored me as she pulled out her phone. “I’m calling my boss. There’s nothing I hate more than interdepartmental pissing contests.”

“Please leave now.” Acker handed her a business card. “We’re transporting them to 3A.”

She stared at him, paling. “You can’t do that, they’re children. Let me at least call their families.”

“Make one phone call and you’re fired,” Acker said as he waved us toward the van. We stayed put.

“I don’t work for you.” Nicola turned to us. “Aura, you don’t have to go with them. Not without your parents.”

“I won’t ask again.” Acker put his hands on his hips, pushing back the jacket of his uniform to reveal a holstered gun and Taser. “You two need to come with us.”

Zachary stepped forward to shield me. “We’ll go, all right?”

“Are we under arrest?” I asked Acker.

“Of course not. And I assure you, you’ll come to no harm from us.”

As I stepped toward the waiting van, I saw Acker’s partner hand him my mother’s journal.
Too late.

T
he back of the DMP van was like a box of nothing. No surveillance electronics, no at-risk-ghost-capturing equipment, not even a speck of lint on the black carpet. Just one long vinyl seat on each side, like in those planes that soldiers jump out of. Sadly, Zachary and I had no parachutes.

I sat on the right-hand seat, facing Agent Acker, who stayed within arm’s reach—Taser’s reach, to be exact—of Zachary beside him.

He watched the agent with cold calculation. The longer we rode, the more I worried about Zachary going all action-hero on Acker and trying to wrest his weapons from him. Last year he’d used his fists twice to defend my reputation. And then there were those football hooligan stories.

But even as I scrambled for a clever escape so Zachary wouldn’t end up in jail or worse, my mind kept circling back to my mother’s journal.
The words “My father was a ghost” scrolled through my head like the marquee menu in our school’s cafeteria.

Was every bit of Shift weirdness connected to that one fact? Like Zachary being the ultimate red with the anti-ghost powers of the Last? Or me being the ultimate violet with the pro-ghost powers of the First?