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not deliberatelybe available to people I know?
Isn’t that what I did for Auntie? For Charles’s spirit?
My duty extended to my friends. “I do. I actually do.” But what if telling two more people backfired? How was I supposed to know who to tell and who to shield from us? I scanned the faces around me and knew they wanted this too.
    Relief chased the shadows from Nelli’s face. “Good, I’ll go call them. I’m sure they can be here in time for dessert.” She leapt to her feet.
    “Now?” I gaped at the dizzying speed.
    “We can’t wait.” Nelli paused, shredding tissues in her hands. “I don’t think we can wait.”
    I hugged Tens’s arms. He knew how hard it was for me to trust. Anyone. Even him. In a few short months, I’d gone from feeling alone and adrift with only conditional, judgmental anchors to being here with people who not only knew me, but also loved me. All of me. Even the hard parts. The parts that piled animal carcasses at our doors and windows.
    I followed Juliet into the kitchen. “Are you okay telling Faye?”
    She shrugged as she whipped fluffy clouds of cream in a bowl with a whisk.
Aren’t there gadgets for that?
    I tried again. “You have a say.”
    “I don’t.” Her voice quivered.
    “What do you mean?”
    “It’s you and Tens and your Auntie’s words. Who am I?” Defeat saturated her words.
    Surprised, I reached out. “Hey, where is this comingfrom? You’re my friend, my sister. You are important and I want to know what you think.”
    Her expression tortured and tired, she lifted her eyes. “Have you been around the dying? Not those ready to die, but those whose bodies are being eaten, ravished, by disease? People who can’t let go?”
    I swallowed. The pain in her eyes slashed at my heart. “No,” I answered in a tremulous voice.
    “It’s the most powerless place in the world.” Tears glistened in her eyes. “I would do anything, anything at all, to keep my family from that.”
    “Should we not tell her?”
    “I’m not saying that.”
    “Then what are you saying?”
    “I—” She broke off, shaking her head as Nelli walked into the kitchen and peered out the window.

CHAPTER 5
    “J uliet …” I didn’t want to end the conversation.
Talk to me!
    Gus drove the car into the alley as close to Rumi’s glass doors as possible. I watched Tony and Tens help unload a wheelchair from the trunk.
    “Is there hope?” Nelli asked me, standing at Rumi’s back window, watching them unload and get situated. Gus lifted Faye out of the car and into the chair.
    “I’m not clairvoyant, Nelli. I don’t know,” I said, trying to sound gentle and patient.
    “But you see things.”
    “Only when the soul leaves the body. Only when ittugs me toward the curtain between this and the next world.” What I didn’t say aloud was that my very human eyes saw a sallow, yellowing skin tone, white roots at the base of Faye’s very fake red hair, and a stooped, crushed frame.
I don’t need to see the future to predict this one
.
    Rumi was our connection to Faye and Gus. We’d met them at a dinner party Rumi had held last February, partly to help us find Juliet and partly because that was what Rumi did—connecting the dots of the people around him.
    This past year, Faye’s headaches had kept Gus at her side and well away from the Nocti bombardment of the Feast of the Fireflies. The terrorist attack took many lives and sent ripples of fear through Carmel. I shuddered, remembering the carnage and chaos of that night.
    We all exchanged embraces. I’d learned this group was demonstrative. I no longer flinched and even tried to awkwardly initiate the affection.
    “Rumi, be a love and turn down the lights. I can’t hardly make out the girls it’s so bright.” Faye’s voice trembled over the words.
    We stopped midmotion, deliberately avoiding eye contact. If she was seeing light instead of, or around, me, she was dying. It wasn’t the sun or a lamp.
And it isn’t her eyes