Dust to Dust by Melissa Walker Page A

possession or anything close to that.”
    â€œThen what just happened to me?”
    â€œI’m not sure. All we know is that they’re desperate to gather energy—they’ll do almost anything, and you’re an obvious target. You were the one they hoped to use all along.”
    â€œAnd you can’t stop them?” I say, my voice trembling a bit.
    â€œNo, we will, Callie,” he says. “It’s just that . . . we haven’t been able to find them.”
    â€œ I’ll find them ,” I whisper, remembering what I scrawled in my journal, in a dream state.
    â€œI’ve been searching since they disappeared, but I will track them down,” says Thatcher, sounding more angry than sure. It’s amazing what I can hear in his voice when I can’t see his face. “It’sjust that they haven’t been back to the Prism since—” He stops.
    â€œSince what?”
    â€œMaybe, in dreams, you’ve seen what happened?” I open my eyes again, and I notice a ripple in the air, his hand casting about this barren little room. “How your prism was destroyed.”
    I flash to the double exposure I keep seeing in my own bedroom—the window smashed, the bed torn apart, my things lying broken on the floor. It’s not my actual room I’m seeing in that nightmare . . . it’s my prism room.
    â€œI’ve seen a vision in my sleep,” I whisper.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI thought it was a nightmare.”
    â€œNo. It’s real, what they’ve done to your prism.”
    â€œHow did they do it?”
    â€œYou invited them in.”
    In the Prism, Thatcher told me never to let anyone into my private room, but I was tired of his unexplained rules and there was a moment when I thought Reena was my friend. I’d invited her in. . . . I’d invited them all in.
    I feel a rush of shame.
    â€œBut when could they have done it?”
    â€œJust before you woke up from the coma.”
    I think back to that moment, the one right before my eyes opened. When Thatcher drove my soul into my body. I remember his face—tortured, regretful, full of hurt. Despite his own pain, he chose my life. He said it was the only way to save me; he said the poltergeists would keep trying to use me to claim the lives of others as their own.
    But he never said what I wanted to hear most. What I still want to hear. He never said that he loved me.
    I shake my head and look around the nurse’s office, hating the gray walls and sterile paper sheets, and for a minute, myself, for suddenly making this all about me. Yes, I want to know, more than anything, what I really mean to Thatcher.
    But doesn’t the fact that he’s here with me now show that? Sure, there’s a bigger crisis at hand here, but couldn’t he have sent another Guide to contact me? Now that I’m aware the Prism is real and I’m off the meds, I would have been able to get the message.
    He came here himself. He came here to be with me.
    â€œWe think the poltergeists have extra energy; that’s what they took from your personal prism and why they haven’t returned from Earth to regain strength. They can stay here. But not forever. Still, we can’t track them until they come back to the Prism.”
    â€œHow long?” I ask.
    â€œWe’re not sure, but it’s a matter of days—a week at most,” he says.
    â€œThey’ll try to take bodies again.” Carson, Eli .
    â€œYes,” he says. “In a way, they just did. But they failed.”
    When he says the word failed , I suddenly remember the rule of three—Carson has already been possessed once, and if it happens twice more, Reena will take her over completely. Everything that makes my best friend—her beautiful, wacky soul—would cease to exist and Reena would have what she’s always wanted.
    The chance to be alive again.
    â€œCarson. Is she