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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2022 by Helene Dunbar

  Cover and internal design © 2022 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design by Erin Fitzsimmons

  Internal design by Danielle McNaughton/Sourcebooks

  Cover images © Patricia Turner/Arcangel Images, Sam Gmuer/EyeEm/Getty Images

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters, events, and places portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Quote from Robert Montgomery used by permission.

  Published by Sourcebooks Fire, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  sourcebooks.com

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress.

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  To Keira,

  who wanted to see her name at the front of a book.

  Six books later and I STILL love you more

  than hippopotamuses.

  The people you love become ghosts inside of you, and like this you keep them alive.

  —The Artist Robert Montgomery

  RULES OF CONDUCT FOR MEDIUMS

  NEVER CHANGE THE COURSE OF THE FUTURE

  through the sharing of information.

  This includes scenarios of life and death.

  MEDIUMS PASS ALONG MESSAGES FROM THE DEPARTED.

  We do not read minds and any attempt to insinuate otherwise will be met with censure by the Guild.

  NEVER READ A FELLOW MEDIUM OR SUMMON A SPIRIT

  to that end without their permission. Mediums who have passed on may only be contacted with explicit Guild approval.

  NEVER USE YOUR GIFTS FOR SELFISH GAIN.

  NEVER MISLEAD THOSE YOU COULD HELP.

  ALL WISHING TO MOVE TO ST. HILAIRE WILL BE TESTED.

  A full half of any family must be able to pass tests as certified mediums and be able to support themselves as such.

  ALL HIGH SCHOOL SENIORS WILL SERVE IN THE GUILD’S YOUTH CORPS DURING

  that school year. In the likelihood that a student shows special promise, there exists the option for a one-year position as Student Leader within the Corps, leading naturally to a permanent Guild position upon completion.

  HAVE A NICE DAY.

  The Guild, governing body of St. Hilaire,

  New York, established 1870.

  Chapter One

  Russ

  In St. Hilaire, New York, everyone talked to the dead.

  If you were lucky or talented, or both, the dead might listen. Sometimes they talked back. Sometimes they made sense. Sometimes they were just a pain in the ass.

  I knew it was odd to live in a town filled with mediums whose primary business involved séances, healing sessions, and ghost walks. It was odd to live behind a gate that only opened to visitors—for a price—during the summer when they’d converge on our town seeking answers, comfort, and forgiveness from those who had passed on.

  And perhaps it was equally odd to embrace the idea that death wasn’t an end point. Even though, maybe, in most cases it should be.

  But, odd as it was, I loved it. I loved the history of our town, which was founded by a group of talented mediums over a hundred-and-fifty years ago. I loved the weirdness of séances and fairy trails and people coming to walk the huge labyrinth on the other end of town. I loved feeling like I was part of something big, something that mattered, as well as the fact that I could bring hope and closure to the people who came here. And I really loved being chosen as leader of the Youth Corps, made up of all the high school seniors. The role put me on the path to an actual job with the town’s governing body, the Guild, assuming I survived high school and some extra training courses, first.

  Today’s lesson started the way most spirit-related activities did, with a voice in my ear and a feeling I was being watched, a slight vibration under my chair and a chill in the air.

  I shivered in my wool coat. The chill, which seemed to settle somewhere in my spine and radiate through my body like a spiderweb, was a reaction to ghosts that most mediums outgrew, but one I guess I was stuck with. I tightened the muscles in my shoulders, locked my knees in an effort to stay still, and hoped Willow Rogers didn’t notice, which was ridiculous because Willow Rogers noticed everything.

  “Tell me, Russ,” she commanded. She sounded bored as if she’d rather be manning an off-season phone line or working the research desk at the town archives than mentoring me in conjuring the dead. More than that, she looked bored, her green eyes dismissive and clouded as if her thoughts were far away.

  I tilted my head and searched the air around her. “There’s a woman,” I said. “Standing over your left shoulder.” I examined the ghost’s clothing: over a hundred years out of date. Her hair: a messy blond ponytail. This lesson was so easy; it was no wonder Willow was bored. The spirit could have walked out of my freshman-year textbook. “Melody Thorne,” I said, identifying one of our town’s founders and most frequent ghostly visitors.

  Willow stared at me, perfectly still and unblinking, her lips red against her skin as she said, “Continue.”

  I tried to tune out the sound of my heart beating in my ear. Narrowed my eyes to focus on the syllables formed by the ghost’s barely there mouth. “You have a”—I leaned forward to listen more closely to what the spirit of Melody Thorne was saying—“a class. No, a meeting. You have a meeting at four o’clock and she’s worried you’ll be late.”

  There were no clocks in the room, so Willow glanced at her phone. Her face flashed with annoyance and then cleared before she stood and smoothed down her straight black skirt. “That’s all for today,” she said, which meant I hadn’t done anything she could find fault with. Willow was notoriously generous with her criticism.

  I stood and stretched. The muscles in my neck were taut and sore. These weekly lessons were required to help me strengthen my skills as a medium, but they were dull, exhausting, and it was clear both of us were only here out of obligation. I could do this sort of thing in my sleep.

  Willow walked to the door of the classroom, her high heels echoing on the parquet floor. Then she turned back abruptly, as if she were trying to catch me off guard. “I overheard Father talking…” she started, her face animated for the first time since she’d walked into the room. “Is it true that Ian Mackenzie speaks to you?”

  I inhaled sharply. Willow and I never spoke directly about our lives. We’d talk about school or the Guild or general current events: the museum got a new c
ollection of dowsing rods from the early 1920s, or did you hear Miranda had something strange happen during a reading she was conducting? But never anything more personal and for me, it didn’t get any more personal than Ian Mackenzie.

  I didn’t talk about Ian with anyone. I hadn’t talked about him when he was alive and considered St. Hilaire’s hottest, young medium, even though we were friends with benefits. Or enemies with benefits. Or whatever you call it when you kind-of-sort-of like someone and kind-of-sort-of hate them at the same time and yet can’t seem to stay away.

  I really didn’t talk about him now that he was dead and haunting me (and only me) and now that we actually did like each other. Maybe more than liked each other. When it came to Ian, the specifics were always hard to pin down.

  I answered her question with a tentative nod and waited while she looked me up and down. She had a piercing stare, one I’d often emulated with some success. I knew she had to be irritated that Ian would talk to me and not her. After all, she and Ian had gone to school together and served on the Youth Corps together. And even though she was only a few years older than me, she was already a member of the Guild. More than that, she’d actually been raised by them as a type of collective adopted daughter. She even called Guild President Clive Rice “Father.”

  And Ian? He was a Guild legend. That hadn’t changed just because he was dead.

  I was only a high school senior. A senior who was currently student leader of the Guild’s Youth Corps, but still, that was nothing in comparison to either of them. She had to be pissed I had a line to St. Hilaire’s most elusive ghost.

  “I suppose it makes sense,” she said, narrowing her eyes and letting contempt bleed into her voice. “Ian was always motivated more by what was in his pants than what was in his head.”

  I winced. She wasn’t wrong, and despite my determination to stay in control, I felt myself flush. But it was one thing for everyone to know that the ghost of Ian Mackenzie, one of the best mediums St. Hilaire had ever seen, spoke to me. It was another for them to know…assume… Hell, I couldn’t define what my relationship with Ian had been when he was alive—much less what it was now—so there was certainly no way Willow and the rest of St. Hilaire could have a clue.

  But Ian and Willow were more alike than either would have admitted, and the number one rule for dealing with both of them was the same: Don’t show fear.

  I coughed, regrouped, and said, “I’m sure he’d want to send his best to Colin. How is your boyfriend, anyhow?” I had to restrain myself from putting air quotes around the word boyfriend. Colin was Ian’s younger brother. He and Ian had hated each other when Ian was alive, and Ian’s death hadn’t changed those feelings. Rumors about Colin and Willow had been swirling around for ages, though “boyfriend” was probably putting a pretty spin on it.

  Willow’s eyes flashed, but when she turned back to the door, she didn’t answer. All she said was, “Be here the same time on Wednesday to continue your training.” Then she walked out.

  ***

  When I got home, I booted up the brick of a laptop I’d been using for over five years despite numerous crashes, stuck keys, and burned-out pixels on the screen. My browser opened to the Buchanan Sentinel. Buchanan was the town that sat just outside St. Hilaire, and their big news usually involved some sort of high school sportsball or a debate on mailbox colors, but sometimes I needed to see what was going on in the rest of the world.

  Today’s headline read: GHOST KILLERS TEAM TO RE-FORM AND AIR 2-HOUR SPECIAL ON ST. HILAIRE.

  I vaguely remembered the show and its mission to visit supposedly haunted places and debunk them. It had been a hit for a while and had changed casts multiple times before it just seemed to stop, but I’d never watched it when it was on and hadn’t paid much attention to it ending.

  I skimmed the article, most of which discussed St. Hilaire’s founding as a home for spiritualists and described how we opened for business to the public in the summer, offering to contact the dead relatives, lovers, friends, and coworkers of the often-desperate customers who came through the gates for a mere fifteen dollars a head. Stock photos showed the painted Victorians and the old-growth forests, the wishing rock and the bronzed statues of our founders.

  A paragraph at the bottom touched on the always-contentious topic of how, since spiritualism was classified as a religion, St. Hilaire received tax breaks not offered to adjacent towns and how that had pissed people off in neighboring Buchanan who felt as if they were picking up our slack.

  My father and I had never had enough money to worry about tax breaks. And it was hard to get worked up about Buchanan residents being irritated, since they always seemed bothered by something we were or weren’t doing.

  There was little concrete information in the piece about the show. No air date or cast list or rationale other than that St. Hilaire was Ghost Killers’ next target and that it was a “breaking story.”

  “Welcome to small-town America,” I muttered to myself. “But it didn’t even mention the Guild. How can you write an article about St. Hilaire without mentioning the Guild?”

  “You know what they say about people who talk to themselves, right?” a voice behind me asked.

  “That they have a captive audience?” I tossed back.

  Ian Mackenzie choked out a laugh. No. The ghost of Ian Mackenzie choked out a laugh, but really, there was little difference between the two. Even as a ghost, Ian was bigger than…well, life.

  He leaned over my shoulder to read, and I could feel a cold whisper of something like breath land deliberately on my neck. I shivered.

  “Need I remind you they didn’t mention the Guild because the Guild is obsolete?” he asked. “Or at least it will be once we get through with them.” Then he pulled back and said, “Although they could have interviewed me. And maybe you, I guess.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh at Ian’s indignation. Aside from one conversation I’d facilitated with his youngest brother, Alex, Ian hadn’t spoken to a single living person aside from me since he’d died, and here he was, wondering why the press wasn’t calling and asking him to do the late-night talk-show circuit. Typical. “Good thing you don’t have an agenda.”

  “No,” Ian corrected me. “We have an agenda.”

  “Okay, fine.” I admitted. “Technically, he wasn’t wrong. The Guild had always been secretive and controlling. But Ian had told me about rumors of them actually killing people during the time he’d run the Corps. Plus, lately, they’d been doing ridiculous things like making all the houses put up Guild flags and running people out of town for refusing to follow some arbitrary rules. Something had to give, and we were going to make sure it did. We just didn’t know how we would do that yet.

  “I thought my being chosen to lead the Youth Corps would give us inside information we could use against them, but so far most of my time has been sucked up with these.” I gestured to the piles of reports that threatened to take over the room.

  And it was true. All high school seniors had to serve in the Guild’s Youth Corps. And most years, one student was chosen to lead the Corps and possibly jump straight into a Guild-shaped career. When I’d originally dreamed of being chosen student leader, I’d assumed the role would include many things: the chance to learn everything I could from the town’s most esteemed mediums, an opportunity to hone my talents, and a chance to prove I was Guild material.

  I didn’t think it was going include trying to take down a corrupt organization.

  Or communing with Ian who, through sheer willpower, was keeping himself tethered here instead of doing…well, whatever those who have passed on beyond the ghost state normally did.

  Unfortunately, neither of us were getting very far. Not with that goal, anyhow. Aside from my weekly lessons with Willow, my three months as student leader had included one thing: paperwork. Stacks and stacks of reports the Guild expected me to read, verify, catalog, and input into their databases. My entire position was turning into nothing more than a hellish internship.

  Ian picked up the top half of a mountain of séance reports, riffled through them, and then before I could stop him, he tossed them dramatically across the room. “Why not make them go away,” he said.

  I watched the papers fall like snow, one after the other, the staples making tiny clicks as they hit the worn wooden floor.