Shift (4 page)

I knew who he meant. “Actually,” I whispered, unable to look at him, “Logan’s back.”

Zachary’s breath caught, and he leaned closer. “As a shade or a ghost?”

“A ghost.”

He went completely still and silent. I imagined the scientist in him thinking,
This is bloody incredible / it’s never been done before / must theorize and investigate and solve this mystery.

Meanwhile, the guy in him was thinking,
That fucking bastard.

“Why now?” he said with a mix of amazement and annoyance.

“I don’t know. Logan said that last night was the first time he could hear my voice.” I picked at a loose slate chip on the wall beside my knee. “He said it was torture.”

“Who knows about this?”

“Aunt Gina. I don’t trust anyone else yet.”

His voice softened. “But you trust me?”

I wanted to tell him the rest, but definitely not while we sat here in front of our friends and enemies.

“I thought together we could figure this out. Any ghost weirdness might have something to do with the Shift.”

“Especially if you’re involved.” He nudged my knee with the toe of his sneaker. “And if you’re involved, I’m involved.”

A grateful smile warmed my face. I couldn’t tell if he meant we were linked because of our births, our research project, or something much more. Whatever the connection, he was on my side, despite Logan’s reappearance.

But would he still feel that way after he knew the whole, impossible truth? I hoped I had the guts to find out.

Z
achary came to my house at 5:59.

Peeking through the blinds of my bedroom window, I watched him stride down the sidewalk, his steps swift and fluid with athletic grace. He twirled his key ring around his fingers, consciously unselfconscious. Maybe he knew I was watching him. I turned to Logan.

“I gotta go.”

He was sitting on my bed, arms crossed tight over his chest, as if he were literally trying to contain himself. “Thanks for not asking me to zip you up.”

This was a whole new realm of awkward. I clicked on my MP3 player, nestled in its docking station. “My pre-exam playlist. Four hours of de-stress songs.” A haunting acoustic tune trickled out of the speakers.

Logan breathed in deep through his nose—not that he needed to breathe, but the simulation seemed to calm him.

I tucked my phone into my tiny black silk purse. “Aunt Gina says she’ll come up and say the rosary a few times.”

“That’s nice of her.”

Gina and Logan were a lot more Catholic than I was. I didn’t know any post-Shifters who followed organized religion faithfully. We knew too much about death and the afterlife to fit into any set of unchanging, centuries-old belief systems.

From the living room below, I heard Gina exclaim, “Well, look at you!” I couldn’t hear Zachary’s response, since unlike my aunt, he was using his inside voice.

I quickly put on my necklace, a garnet pendant my grandmom had given me that once belonged to my mother. As the silver chain slithered over my neck, I realized I had worn it for Homecoming—my last big date with Logan before he died.

I opened the bedroom door, then paused. “I’ll be home by midnight.”

“Whatever. I’m not your dad.” Logan cringed a little. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—you know what I mean.”

“It’s okay.” I wasn’t sensitive about losing my father, since I’d never known him. Only my mother knew who he was, and she’d taken that knowledge to the grave when I was three.

As I crossed the threshold, Logan said, “Who is this playing?”

“Great Lake Swimmers. You like it?”

“It’s pretty.” He smiled at me. “Have a good time.”

“Thank you.” The music was definitely working, I thought as I started to shut the door.

“Don’t get laid,” he added.

I pretended not to hear.

When I arrived downstairs, Zachary was standing in the living room, sporting an ivory dress shirt and a dark green tie with light green flecks that brought out his eyes.

Eyes that devoured my approach like I was a Popsicle on a hot summer day. Damn.

“Special occasion?” Aunt Gina asked him, smiling so hard I thought her jaw would cramp. “You two are awfully dressed up for a trip to the museum.”

“Aura agreed to a date,” Zachary said, “so that makes it special. Unusual, at least.”

“Well, with any luck, it won’t be special for long.” She cleared her throat and swept aside her blond bangs. “Unusual, I mean. It won’t be unusual for long.” She grabbed my wrap off the dining room chair. “Maybe you should go before I make more of an idiot of myself.”

“Oh, you couldn’t do that.” I kissed her cheek. “Bye!”

I was at the door before realizing Zachary wasn’t right behind me. I turned, then followed his incredulous gaze into the dining room.

On the end of the buffet, in a bud vase, sat a dried rose, one of six red roses Zachary had given me in December. The only one I hadn’t given back. Evidence of how much he meant to me, even after all these weeks of waiting for Logan.

I hoped the feeling was still mutual. Now that my vigil was over, I was ready to think about moving on. Slowly.

Outside on my row home’s covered porch, I tried to put on my wrap against the chilly breeze, but it got tangled around my arm and the strap of my purse.

“Here.” Zachary rescued the wrap, then, facing me straight on, draped it over my shoulders. His fingers brushed my upper arms as he drew it forward. “Is this right?”

I gazed up at his face, golden on one side from the porch light, and silver on the other from the fading dusk. “Uh-huh,” I stammered, then remembered to close my mouth.

“You, er …” Zachary let go of the wrap and took half a step back. “You look pure gorgeous.” Then he leaned in and softly kissed my cheek.

Before I could mumble a feeble, “Thanks, you too,” he offered me his arm. As we descended the porch stairs, I held the railing with my other hand to steady myself.
Maybe it’s too cold—and my head’s too swimmy—for these strappy heels.
But the shoes were a perfect match for my black-and-white knee-length crinkle dress, the one I’d been saving for—well, this.

As we moved toward the low iron gate separating our front path from the sidewalk, I resisted the urge to look back at my bedroom window. Just imagining Logan’s violet glow behind the closed blinds was bad enough.

Zachary had found a primo spot on my street only half a block up, and his parallel parking job wasn’t too tragic. Not that parking a Mini Cooper took a lot of finesse.

“Cute car,” I said.

“It’s no’ cute, it’s cool.” He opened the hunter green door. “My dad says it makes him feel like James Bond.”

“It does kind of look like—oh!” I yelped when the front seat turned out to be lower than I’d expected. Hiding my grimace of embarrassment, I pulled my wrap out of the way so Zachary could close the door.
As he rounded the front, I fastened my seat belt, noting the oversize speedometer and backlit armrests.

To my surprise, Zachary’s long legs had no trouble fitting under the dash. He flashed me a quick smile as he put on his own seat belt.

“Definitely cute,” I said under my breath.

“Sorry?”

“Nothing. Just admiring the”—I flailed my hand in his general direction—“the dials.”

“Don’t look.” He shielded the screen of the GPS with his right hand as he thumbed in the address. “It’s a surprise.”

A female computerized voice came from the GPS speaker.
“Empiece al sur en St. Paul Street.”

“You realize it’s set on Spanish,” I told him.

“Sí.”
He checked his side-view mirror, then the rearview, then the side-view again, before pulling onto the street.

“Isn’t it hard enough to drive without translating?”

“It works opposite sides of my brain.”

I slammed my hand on the dash. “Red means stop!”

“Right.” He stomped on the brake pedal, barely halting before the intersection. “That’s universal.”

Since he seemed to have trouble simultaneously speaking and driving, I kept quiet until the GPS voice told him to
“Vire a la izquierda.”

At the next stoplight I said, “Megan uses the English guy’s voice for her GPS. She says it has more authority.”

Zachary snorted. “The last thing this Scotsman wants is some stuffy old Sassenach telling him where to go. You Yanks have too much love for your former oppressors.”

“It’s because of Monty Python. And probably the world wars.”

His only response was a grunt, so I shut up again. He seemed nervous enough for both of us, so I felt calm as a sleeping cat.

Until we reached our destination in Little Italy.

“Chiapparelli’s?” I ran my fingers over the chain of my garnet necklace and looked at the blue awnings flapping in the breeze.

“You were supposed to have your birthday dinner here, remember?” He put the car in park and waited for the valet. “Before the DMP ruined everything.”

“It’s my favorite restaurant.” Which was why Logan brought me here before the Homecoming dance. Not that Zachary would know that.

He examined my face, his eyes dark and serious in the amber dashboard light. “Would you rather go somewhere else?”

The young valet was jogging toward the car. I had to decide in the next few seconds: Would I let the past keep screwing up my present and my future?

“No, it’s sweet.” I let go of my necklace and gave Zachary a quick kiss on the cheek. He beamed like a little boy with a carnival prize.

The valet opened my door, and I stepped onto the sidewalk. A ghost stood in the middle of the street, about fifty feet away, but before I could see whether it was a man or a woman, its violet glow winked out.

Because Zachary was out of the car. Something about him made ghosts flee on sight. Logan used to call him “Mr. Red” because to him, Zachary looked like he was wearing clothes of that color. Ghosts hate red, maybe because it’s the color of life, or maybe because it’s at the opposite end of the light spectrum from their own violet hue. Red isn’t a foolproof repellent like the BlackBox technology’s obsidian, but it helps.

No one knew about Zachary’s power besides him and me, and some friend of his back in Scotland who’d been the first to notice. It’s why he hung out almost exclusively with members of our school’s senior class, who couldn’t see ghosts and therefore wouldn’t notice he was scaring them off.

The hostess showed us to a candlelit table for two by the window. When she left us, I told Zachary in a low voice, “At least with you I don’t have to sit in the back room where it’s all bright and non-ghosty.”

He leaned in closer. “I hope someday you realize, that’s no’ the best part of being around me.”

The memory of the best part stole my speech as my gaze lingered on his lips. If I were his girlfriend, I could kiss him right now. Brush his mouth with mine and make him sigh my name, make our fingertips tingle in anticipation of being alone together.

But how could what happened with Logan last night not change how I felt with Zachary?

Megan might say it was because what I had with Zachary was real, not just a lost dream. I couldn’t deny that something lived between us. Something that had been simmering for months.

Zachary cleared his throat. “So Logan’s back.”

I opened my mouth to explain, then shut it again. After thinking about it all day, I still didn’t know where to start.

“Aura, I’m your friend first, so you can tell me everything.” He drummed his fingertips on the menu. “But hurry up and get it over with, aye?”

“I’ll try.” I slowly unrolled the cloth napkin from around my silverware. “I’d been calling for him every night since he shaded. I
played all the mix CDs and playlists he made. Last night I ran out of music, so I just called. That’s when he came.”

“As a ghost?”

“No. He zorched through the window as a shade.” I rubbed my forehead, remembering how my brain seemed to slosh out my ears. “Then I guess I talked him down, and there he was, all violet again.”

“Amazing.” Zachary was listening close, chin on his hand. For now, the fascinated scientist was in charge. “So you think it was the music keeping him away?”

“I don’t know what made last night different. Except—I told Logan to give me a sign if he wanted to stay that way. I thought maybe he was happier being a shade, and if he was, I was ready to let go. Maybe he was trying to prove me wrong.”

Zachary’s brows lowered. “Or maybe he knew you were slipping away from him. I mean, if you were.”

“I was.”
Maybe I still am.
Being with Zachary, even just as friends and research partners, made me feel at home in the world. Like I might not be crazy for wanting to dig deeper, find bigger truths. About the Shift, about life and death. About us.

“Where is he now?”

I swiped my hand over my neck, adjusting the garnet pendant. “At my house.”

Zachary sat up straight. “Was he—when I came in—”

“He was upstairs. Sulking.”

“In your room.” When I nodded, he added, “And he’ll be there when you get home.”

“Our house was the only safe place for him to hide while Gina got
his order of protection. Out in the world someone might recognize him. He can’t go to his family, because they moved somewhere he’s never been, and besides, their house is totally BlackBoxed.” They’d needed it, since shades can go anywhere, and they could afford it, after winning the lawsuit against Warrant Records. “It’s just for one more day. Tomorrow we’re going public, and then he’ll be safe from the DMP.”

“So where will he sleep tonight?”

“Ghosts don’t sleep. You know that.”

“Where will he be while
you
sleep?”

“Downstairs again. Zach, you said I could tell you anything.”

“Right. Right.” He rubbed the side of his face, as if to wipe away evidence of his feelings. “Maybe we should eat first. Dole out the truth in wee digestible bits.” He lifted the menu. “So what’s good here?”

Zachary ordered one of the homemade pasta dishes I recommended, something Logan never did. Not that I was comparing them. Even when Zachary spent most of the dinner conversation asking about me instead of talking about himself, I didn’t compare them.