Page 47 of School Spirits
He broke off, staring somewhere beyond my shoulder. “What the hell?”
I turned, catching a sudden movement out of the corner of my eye. A car down at the far end of the parking lot was driving toward us. And it was going…fast. Way too fast considering the fact that kids were walking out to their cars. One of those kids passed me, and I realized it was Beth.
She froze, staring down the parking lot at the car. “Oh my God,” I heard her mutter. And then the car was moving faster, and it seemed to dawn on me and Beth at the same time that it was headed for her.
And that no one was behind the wheel.
I didn’t think. I launched myself toward Beth, shoving someone out of my way. I heard a pained cry, but by then I was already to Beth. The two of us went stumbling into a parked car, my elbow smacking the side-view mirror so hard I bit my lip. Beth crumpled to the ground between two cars as I fell nearly on top of her.
Just behind us, I could hear the squeal of rubber, the sick crunch of metal on metal. And shrieking. There was a lot of shrieking.
“Are you okay?” I asked Beth, which was probably a stupid question seeing as how she was pale and sobbing.
“What happened?” she kept asking. “What was that?”
It was a really good question.
I stood up and took in the chaos raging around me. The car had plowed right into one of the parked buses. Luckily, no one had been on it, and all the kids waiting to board seemed to have gotten out of the way.
A flash of movement caught my eye, and I turned back to Beth’s car. There, sitting in driver’s seat, was the spirit of Mary Evans. She was a lot fainter than she’d been the night of the basketball game, and no one else seemed to see the ghost, but there was no doubt in my mind that’s who she was.
In a flash, she was gone, and I could almost convince myself that it had been a trick of the light.
I had laid salt all over that grave. It wasn’t possible for her to be out and wreaking havoc.
Unless I’d screwed up somehow. But it was spreading salt. How hard was that?
But Dex had been there that night. Could he have done something that made the banishing not take? I scanned the crowd for Romy and Dex, finally finding them back on the sidewalk, near the school. I made my way toward them, stepping over Ben McCrary. He was lying on the grass, clutching his shoulder. Apparently he was who I’d shoved. Oops. “Um…sorry,” I said, but he made a shrieky sound and scuttled farther away from me.
“Are you guys okay?” I asked once I’d reached Romy and Dex.
“Us?” Romy asked, pushing her hair out of her face. “You’re the one who just leapt on Beth Tanner like a ninja.”
“Yeah,” Dex added. “That was…if I say hot, does that make me a perv?”
In spite of all the adrenaline coursing through me—or maybe because of it—I started laughing. And once I’d started, Dex joined in, and then Romy was laughing, too. The three of us stood there for a long time, cracking up while everyone around us looked horrified.
But when I turned back to the bus, my laughter died in my throat. Two teachers were helping Beth up from the ground. Coach Lewis was there, too, gesturing at the crowd. “Back up, back up!” By now, a siren was wailing in the distance, and a group was starting to form around the wrecked car.
“Wow,” Dex said softly, as though the seriousness of what had happened was just starting to sink in. “She really could have been hurt.”
I watched him carefully. None of this made sense. If Dex had screwed up the banishing on purpose, he was the best actor in the world. He looked genuinely freaked out right now.
“She could havedied,” Romy said, and then she closed a hand around my wrist. “But you saved her.”
I tried to smile back and not think that if I’d done my job right, she wouldn’t have needed saving at all.
CHAPTER 22
“Iused enough salt,” I told Torin later that evening. We’d just watched three episodes ofIvy Springs, but I hadn’t concentrated on any of them. I’d been too busy going over everything that had happened that afternoon. “I know I did. But it didn’t lock Mary in.”
Torin scratched his chin. “That’s exceedingly unusual.”
I know Mom had said to stop going to Torin for advice, but, well, he was here and she wasn’t. And this was definitely a day that required advice. Lots of it.
“It’s more than just that; it’s impossible,” I replied, flipping onto my back to gaze at the ceiling. Whoever had lived here before us had put up a bunch of those plastic stars. “Ghosts can’t fight the salt thing. It’s part of why they’re so un-fun to hunt.”
Torin was quiet for a moment before saying, “You said both the teacher and the student received little…gifts. Warnings of their impending fate.”
