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have wanted to stand on the receiving end of the look Joshua now gave his friend.
    “And who,” Joshua seethed, “appointed you safety inspector for my girlfriend and my baby sister?”
    While Scott floundered to explain himself, I shot Jillian a similar glare. She’d betrayed my confidence, in more ways than one. At least she had the decency to look somewhat contrite, but that didn’t stop her.
    “Okay, enough ,” she ordered. “So I told Scott. So we’ve secretly been dating. So what? None of this is going to help us destroy High Bridge.”
    I threw my hands up in the air. “And what exactly would the destruction of High Bridge accomplish, Jillian? Except maybe a little therapy for some of us.”
    “Oh, I don’t know, Amelia,” she drawled. “Only close the gate into the netherworld forever. No big deal.”
    “That’s . . . that’s not possible.”
    Jillian crossed her arms and flashed me a smug smile. “Well, we think it’s possible.”
    She signaled to Scott, who turned and opened the back door of the sedan. He rummaged around before pulling out a small, unmarked book.
    “My gran’s journal,” Scott said, closing the car door. “It has all these Seer spells in it, and notes about how the afterworlds might work.”
    Jillian plucked the book from his hands, rewarding him with a small kiss that made him blush and Joshua wince. Unbothered by the obvious conflict she’d created between her brother and his friend, she thumbed through the notebook until she found the appropriate page. Then she pressed the book flat and carried it over for me to read.
    Beneath Jillian’s thumb, I saw the spidery scrawl of handwriting. But other than a few key words—“gate,” “darkness,” “dust”—I couldn’t make out the rest of it. I shook my head, blinking awkwardly from the concentration.
    “I can’t read it, Jill—either it’s too dark out here, or she was too old when she wrote it. Maybe both.”
    Jillian uttered an exasperated curse. “Well, I can read it. And it says that demons seem to link their gateways to certain structures—particularly those associated with rivers; these structures not only function as lures, but also as sources of the demons’ earthly powers. The journal says if we lace one of these haunted structures with Seer dust and then destroy it, we should be able to stop any harmful spirits from escaping.”
    I paused, still studying the page in front of me. Then, softly, I asked, “What about nonharmful spirits, Jill?”
    Beside me, Joshua stirred. Probably because he’d already followed my question to its logical answer. I hadn’t intended any harm to Ruth, yet her Seer dust—or Voodoo dust, according to Kade—had limited my movements. Kept me from entering or exiting wherever the dust had been poured.
    The same rules applied to all ghosts, “harmful” or not. Intentions meant nothing to a line of gray powder. I couldn’t use something so pitiless, so final, to bar the doorway to and from the netherworld. Especially when a certain few ghosts still resided there.
    Gaby, for one, and possibly my father. Even Eli, dark as he could sometimes be. Not to mention all the other souls that Eli and his predecessors had unfairly imprisoned there.
    I couldn’t trap them in the darkness, just to save myself from it.
    “No dust,” I said, shaking my head. “I’ll agree to do the rest, but no dust. We can’t risk the afterlives of all those trapped souls. Even if it means that the demons themselves might break loose.”
    Jillian started to protest, but Joshua waved her silent.
    “Amelia’s right—we can’t condemn the other ghosts like that. We’ll just have to do what we planned to do tonight, without the dust. And if anything bad happens later . . . then we’ll deal with it later .”
    When he finished, Joshua gave me a small, reassuring smile. I knew what he was doing: asserting a compromise between Jillian’s plan and my own. Between the total destruction of the