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of wraiths even
fit into any kind of morality I understood? The only thing I knew for sure was
that Christopher had power and influence among the wraiths. Now that I had
become one, our paths were certain to cross again.
    Thinking about this made me nervous. I managed to ask, “He’s
sort of the … wraith in charge, right?”
    “Nobody’s ‘in charge.’ But plenty of us listen to
Christopher. He has a lot of power, a lot of wisdom.”
    Maxie cocked an eyebrow, her saucy sense of humor already
returning. “I already told you. Vampires and wraiths? Not a good mix. A really,
really bad mix. We’re poison to them, and they’re no friends to us.”
    “I love Lucas. Our deaths don’t change that.”
    “Death changes everything. Haven’t you learned that much by
now?”
    “It didn’t change you haranguing me nonstop,” I snapped.
    Maxie ducked her head, her dark blond hair tumbling around
her face. If she’d had blood flow, I thought, she might have blushed. “Sorry. You’ve
had a rough couple of days. I don’t mean to — I’m just trying to tell you how
things are.”
    A rough couple of days. I’d died, found out I was a ghost,
seen Lucas get cut down and turned into a vampire, and fought off a Black Cross
attack. Yeah, that counted as a rough couple of days.
    “You used to play with Vic in this room, when he was a
little kid.” I glanced at the place he’d shown me, where he used to sit and
read his storybooks to her. “You didn’t separate yourself from the world after
you died.”
    “But I did. For the better part of a century, I just . .. I was stuck between here and there, and I didn’t
quite know what was going on. Sometimes I’d stab into people’s dreams and turn
them to nightmares, just to do it. just to prove that
I could affect the world around me.” I’d heard of wraiths doing worse things,
maybe for similar reasons.
    Maxie sat on the windowsill, her long white nightgown
seeming to glow as the moonlight filtered through the billowing sleeves. “As
you can probably imagine, people usually didn’t stay in this house long. It was
like a game for me, seeing how fast I could scare them out. But then the
Woodsons took the place. and Vic was so tiny, just a
couple of years old. When I showed myself to him, he Wasn’t scared. That was
the first time in so long that I remembered what it was like to — to be
accepted. To care about someone.”
    “So you understand,” I said. “You see why I can’t give up on
the world.”
    “Vic’s human. He’s alive. He anchors me to life and lets me
experience it through him, just a bit. Lucas can’t do that for you, not
anymore.”
    “He does. He can. I know it.” But I didn’t know any such
thing. There was so much about being a wraith that I didn’t understand yet.
    “You need to talk to Christopher,” she said encouragingly.
“He’ll make you understand.”
    I remembered Christopher. He had appeared to me, a
mysterious and foreboding figure, at Evernight; he had attacked me there with
intent to kill, so that my transformation into a wraith would be guaranteed.
Yet when he had appeared to me and Lucas this summer, he had rescued us from
Charity.
    Was he benevolent or evil? Did the actions of wraiths even
fit into any kind of morality I understood? The only thing I knew for sure was
that Christopher had power and influence among the wraiths. Now that I had
become one, our paths were certain to cross again.
    Thinking about this made me nervous. I managed to ask, “He’s
sort of the . . . wraith in charge, right?”
    “Nobody’s ‘in charge.’ But plenty of us listen to
Christopher. He has a lot of power, a lot of wisdom.”
    “How did he get so powerful? Is it because he’s especially
old?” That was how it worked for vampires. “Or is he, well, like me ? ” I’d already figured out that my status — as a child born
of two vampires, and therefore able to die a natural death and yet become a
ghost — gave me abilities most