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CHAPTER 12<br />
Still Here<br />
After we got back to our side of the Otherworld—Harlon Jameses and all—I didn’t go home. I left Aunt Prue at her house and walked the streets—<br />
more like the rows—of His Garden of Perpetual Peace.<br />
Peace wasn’t exactly what I was feeling.<br />
I stopped in front of Wate’s Landing. It looked every bit the same as when I left, and I knew my mom was inside. I wanted to talk to her. But there<br />
were other things I had to do first.<br />
I sat down on the front steps, closing my eyes.<br />
“Carry me home.”<br />
What was it?<br />
To remember. And be remembered.<br />
Ducite me domum.<br />
Ut meminissem.<br />
Ut in memoria tenear.<br />
I remember Lena.<br />
Not the water tower.<br />
What came before.<br />
I remember Ravenwood.<br />
Let Ravenwood remember me.<br />
Let Ravenwood—<br />
Carry me—<br />
I was lying in the dirt in front of Ravenwood, half-stuck beneath a rosebush and an overgrown camellia hedge. I had crossed again—and this time,<br />
all on my own.<br />
“I’ll be damned.” I laughed, relieved. I was getting pretty good at this whole being-dead thing.<br />
Then I practically ran up the old veranda steps. I had to see if Lena had gotten the message—my message. My only problem was that no one<br />
bothered to do the crossword in The Stars and Stripes, not even Amma. I had to find a way to get them to look at that paper, if they hadn’t already.<br />
Lena wasn’t in her room, and she wasn’t at my grave either. She wasn’t in any of the usual places we used to go.<br />
Not in the lemon grove or the crypt, where I’d died the first time.<br />
I even looked in Ridley’s old room, where Liv was asleep in Ridley’s creaking four-poster bed. I was hoping she’d be able to sense that I was<br />
there with her Ethan Wate–ometer. No such luck. That’s when I realized it was nighttime in Gatlin, the real Gatlin, and there was absolutely no<br />
correlation between time that passed in the Otherworld and Mortal time. I felt like I’d only been gone a few hours—and here it was, the middle of the<br />
night.<br />
I didn’t even know what day it was, come to think of it.<br />
Worse yet, when I leaned over Liv’s face in the moonlight, it looked like she had been crying. I felt guilty, since there was a strong possibility I was<br />
the reason for the tears, unless she and John had had a fight.<br />
But that was unlikely, because when I looked down, I was standing right in the middle of John Breed’s chest. He was curled up next to the bed, on<br />
the worn pink shag carpeting.<br />
Poor guy. As many times as he had screwed up in the past, he was good to Liv, and for a while he believed he was the One Who Is Two. It’s hard<br />
to hold a grudge against a guy who tried to give his life to save the world. If anyone understood that, it was me.<br />
It wasn’t his fault the world wouldn’t have him.<br />
So I stepped off his chest as quickly as I could, and vowed to be a little more careful where I put my feet in the future. Not that he’d ever know.<br />
As I moved through the rest of the house it seemed completely vacant. Then I heard the crackling of a fireplace and followed the sound. At the<br />
bottom of the stairs, straight off the front hall, I found Macon sitting in his cracked leather chair by the fire. True to form, where there was Macon,<br />
there was also Lena. She was sitting at his feet, leaning against the ottoman. I could smell the Sharpie she was writing with. Her notebook lay open<br />
on her lap, but she was barely looking at it. Drawing circles over and over, until the page looked like it was ripping apart.<br />
She wasn’t crying—far from it.<br />
She was plotting.<br />
“It was Ethan. It had to be. I could feel him there with us, like he was standing right next to his grave.”<br />
Had she seen the crossword? Maybe that was why she was so fired up. I looked around the study, but if she’d read the paper, there was no sign<br />
of it. A stack of old newspapers filled a brass bin next to the fireplace; Macon used them for kindling. I tried to lift a single page of newsprint, and I<br />
could barely make a corner flutter.<br />
I wondered if I would’ve been able to figure out the crossword without a more experienced Sheer like my mom helping me.<br />
Amma didn’t need to worry so much about the haint blue and the salt and the charms. This whole haunting thing wasn’t as easy as it was cracked<br />
up to be.<br />
Then I noticed how sad Macon looked, studying Lena’s face. I gave up on the newspaper and focused harder on their conversation.<br />
“You may have felt the essence of him, Lena. A burial site is a powerful place, no doubt.”<br />
“I don’t mean I felt something, Uncle Macon. I felt him. Ethan, the Sheer. I’m sure of it.”<br />
The smoke from the fire curled out from the grating. Boo lay with his head in Lena’s lap, the flames reflecting in his dark eyes.<br />
“Because a button fell onto his grave?” Macon’s voice didn’t change, but he sounded tired. I wondered how many of these conversations he’d