Spirits of Ash and Foam Read online

  Mrs. Sawyer confirmed as much, and Rain passed through the swinging doors into the kitchen.

  Instantly, she was hit by the wonderful smells of her mother’s cooking. Iris Cacique had three skillets going on the burners. In one, she was sautéing onions, mushrooms and tomatoes in salted butter, while flipping a half-cooked omelet in a second and frying a few links of La Géante sausage in the third. There was a large bowl of mixed berries on the big wooden table where the family ate their own meals, alongside carafes of fresh orange and pineapple juice chilling in the ice bucket.

  A cheerful Rain hung her backpack on the hook by the back door. “Morning!”

  “Morning, baby,” her mother said tenderly, glancing briefly at Rain, who could instantly tell Iris had been crying—and not because of the onions. For a second or two Rain searched her brain for an explanation, and then it hit her: ’Bastian! Her mother was still mourning her own father, who had only died three days ago. The funeral and the wake had followed rapidly, a Ghost Keys tradition, as it’s not wise to let a body linger on a tropical island. Now life was supposed to go back to normal, but what was the new normal? Most days when Rain came down for breakfast, Papa ’Bastian was already sitting at the table, reading the paper and eating his Lucky Charms. Not today, and not ever again. Of course, Rain knew that tonight—at sunset—’Bastian would emerge from the zemi, a bit pale, transparent and ethereal but otherwise none the worse for being dead. Iris, however, didn’t know that and grieved still. Rain felt an irresistible longing to ease her mother’s pain by telling her everything, the whole adventure—even the parts she knew would get her grounded for life. It was all so exciting, and she wanted to share it. But how can I? She’ll only think I’m nuts—or worse, on drugs or something.

  Rain settled for kissing her mom on the cheek and then setting up plates and spooning berries into a bowl, as Iris Cacique finished preparing Mrs. Sawyer’s order.

  “Anyone else out there?” Iris asked.

  “Just Rebecca.”

  “That’s a relief. I thought the Chungs or the DeLancys might want something before hitting the road.”

  “They might’ve. But Timo rushed ’em out the door before they could think. Oh, but the Kims checked in early.”

  Iris growled under her breath. Rain smiled. That growl was very normal.

  Two pieces of whole-wheat toast popped into view. A well-oiled machine, the Cacique women were on the job. Rain used two fingers to pluck the hot toast from the Inn’s industrial toaster, dropping both pieces on the breadboard. She sliced them in half diagonally and arranged the two sets of triangles on a plate. Iris wheeled about with her saucepans, and soon the toast was joined by an onion-mushroom-tomato-and-jack omelet and sausage links. Rain was quickly through the swinging doors with the meal, serving Rebecca Sawyer with a smile. Seconds later, back in the kitchen, Rain was being asked what she wanted for breakfast.

  “Actually, that looked really good.”

  Her mother’s eyebrows raised a good half inch in surprise. Iris Cacique’s only child wasn’t generally one for a big breakfast. But Rain was still flush with all the changes in her life. A new day. A new way. Besides, she had burned a lot of calories the night before, you know, fighting for her life and everything.

  Iris started cooking again, and Rain poured herself half a glass of orange juice, topping it off with the same amount of pineapple. Iris asked, “You looking forward to eighth grade?”

  Rain groaned, not so much because she dreaded school but mostly because it seemed expected. Not that she was looking forward to it. Eighth grade would just get in the way of her new quest. After all, she was the Searcher and the Healer. I should totally be exempt! Suddenly, she remembered the form. She hopped up from the table and removed it from under the magnet on the fridge. “Mom, you still have to sign this.”

  Iris glanced back over her shoulder at Rain’s Eighth Period Exemption Form. “I’ll sign it if you want. But wouldn’t you like to take an elective this semester? Photography, maybe?”

  “Noooo. We talked about this. Work. Homework. It’s enough. I need some free time—at least until volleyball starts.”

  “Right, because we wouldn’t want you all stressed out from taking pictures of seashells and breakers, now, would we?”

  “Mommmm.”

  “I said I’ll sign it.” She did too, after serving Rain’s breakfast. Rain ate quickly, despite multiple pleas to slow down.

  Iris cleared Rain’s dishes while Rain cleared Rebecca’s—just as Alonso escorted the five Kims into the dining room. “Why don’t you sit here, relax, have some breakfast—on the house—and we’ll have your rooms ready by the time you’re done eating.”

  Fred Kim grunted his acquiescence as Esther Kim attempted to pour her seemingly liquid children into three chairs at one of the larger tables.

  “I’m not even hungry.”

  “I want cereal.”

  “Mommy. Mommy. Mommy. Mommy. Mommy.”

  With a sigh of relief, Alonso followed Rain into the kitchen, only to be greeted by his wife’s glare. “Tell me I did not hear the words ‘on the house.’”

  Rain watched her father stick his tongue into his cheek and take a deep breath to maintain his cool. “I’ve just spent twenty-plus minutes arguing with Mr. Kim about his rooms not being ready. Hell, I could’ve gotten ’em ready in that time. I had to do something.”

  “Offering them breakfast, I understand. But they weren’t supposed to check in until this afternoon. Breakfast is only served until ten.”

  “I know that.”

  “So why are they getting it for free? How are we supposed to earn a living if you keep giving away free food? Especially when I’m the one who has to do the cooking.”

  Scooping up her form, Rain glided back from the tête-à-tête and quietly lifted her backpack off its hook—but not before her father shot a look her way. “Hold it, young lady. I need you to go strip the beds in Rooms Four and Five before you leave.”

  “Gee, Dad. I’d love to. But you took away my master key.”

  And with that, she slipped out the back door before her exasperated father could formulate a reply.

  CHAPTER THREE

  AND LIFE ENDS

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8

  Of course, the reason Alonso Cacique had taken away his daughter’s master key to the Inn was that Rain had used it to ransack Callahan’s room in a failed attempt to take back the zemi he had stolen. Since her parents didn’t believe their guest had stolen anything, Rain had just seemed crazed—or at best, extremely immature and irresponsible. So her key was confiscated. Fortunately, the zemi was later recovered aboard Callahan’s boat. All things considered, Rain had no complaints about either outcome.

  She walked—practically skipped—through Old Town under an ascending sun as the island of San Próspero rapidly warmed past 79° with relatively low humidity, meaning her clothes weren’t yet sticking to her skin. (September was a pleasant month, generally. Frankly, most months were pretty darn pleasant, generally.) Rain checked her tip envelope from the Chungs. Ten bucks. Not bad. (Not bad at all, I say. Maq and I could feast off that for a couple weeks, easy.) She threw the envelope away in the wrought-iron refuse can as she turned the corner of Goodfellow Lane onto Rue de Lafitte and stuffed the bill in the right front pocket of her shorts.

  She made her way inland, away from any tourist draw, toward the island’s large ten-year-old combined campus, which housed San Próspero Elementary School (kindergarten through fifth grade), San Próspero Junior High School (sixth grade through eighth) and San Próspero Senior High School (ninth through twelfth), each in its own building with shared facilities (cafeteria, gymnasium, etc.). As she drew closer, the kids began to amass, approaching from every direction: individuals, groups of two or more, entire cliques even. There was the occasional parent escorting his or her youngest, but that was to be expected on the first day of school. Within a month, even the kindergartners would be walking to school with only their older sibl
ings or friends as chaperones. Mainland parenting and mainland paranoia hadn’t yet found a toehold among the locals. To most, San Próspero was still an island paradise where everyone knew and watched out for each other. (Dead bodies in caves notwithstanding.)

  Rain spotted Charlie Dauphin, who was standing in front of his locker on the west wall of the junior high building. He was wearing shorts and a gray shirt that read LOCAL COLOR in gold letters. She snuck up behind him and put her hands over his eyes. “Guess who?”

  Charlie didn’t have to guess. He recognized her voice—and he recognized the electric rush that came every time she touched him. He tried desperately not to do anything that might reveal these … feelings. It was still deeply humiliating to Charlie that he had fallen in love/lust with his best friend. They had been babies together, had grown up side by side, spent practically every waking moment in each other’s presence. It was neither right nor fair that he was afflicted—yes, afflicted—with these disastrous longings. “Hi, Rain,” he squeaked.

  “Ah, you guessed.” Rain stepped back, removing her hands, which was both a relief and a sudden horrible void to young Mr. Dauphin. Shutting his locker, he turned to face her, struggling to maintain a neutral expression, which Rain read as despair. She wasn’t that far off, though she had the cause all wrong. “I know,” she said. “School starts.”

  “And life ends,” he said automatically.

  “And life ends. Ten more minutes. The horror. The horror.” It was their routine.

  With a physical effort akin to me shaking off rainwater, Charlie snapped himself out of it. “It’s not all bad,” he said. “Eighth grade means we’re at the top of the food chain. The biggest fish in the middle school pond.” They looked around. From where they stood, the high schoolers were all out of view, and everyone around them was their age or younger. That didn’t suck.

  But Rain had much bigger—and much stranger—fish on her mind. She leaned in to whisper as her right hand wrapped itself around the armband on her left biceps. “We need to talk about finding the next zemi.”

  Charlie scowled. “Maybe first we should find out what a zemi is.” He had shared the weirdness of their inaugural adventure—and seen some truly mind-boggling stuff along the way—but he wasn’t quite as enthusiastic about the project as the Searcher-slash-Healer was. He hadn’t yet been granted a fancy title on this quest and was beginning to feel his only role was that of Rain’s sidekick. He couldn’t deny the accuracy of the term, but it didn’t particularly jazz him either.

  “Look,” she said, “as soon as school’s over, let’s head back up to the Cache, okay?”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean why?”

  “What are we going to see there that’s new?”

  Rain screwed up her face. She had no answer, but he didn’t seem to have caught the spirit of the whole venture, which was frustrating. “Okay, fine. Then come over to the Inn right before sunset, and we’ll talk it over with ’Bastian.”

  “You mean you’ll talk it over with ’Bastian. I can’t see or hear him, remember?”

  “I’ll translate, okay?”

  Just then a new voice interposed, “Translate what?”

  Charlie and Rain turned to see Miranda Guerrero standing a couple of feet away. Miranda had been born on the Ghost Keys but had spent most of her life in England, France and Spain, before returning to the Ghosts this past summer. It meant she was technically a local, but she was also the new kid. Rain and Charlie were the closest thing Miranda had to friends on the islands, and she wasn’t always sure about Rain, who was now eyeing her suspiciously. “Were you eavesdropping on us?”

  Miranda took a step back. “Um, no. I mean … Was I?”

  “How much did you hear?”

  “Something about translating something,” Miranda fumfered. She had the slightest hint of a Euro-Spanish accent. “That’s it, I swear.”

  As usual, Charlie intervened. He stepped forward and smiled at Miranda, welcoming her with his wide, kind, cocoa-brown face and dark brown eyes. “It’s all right,” he said. (And Miranda felt a certain rush of her own.) “We were just talking about watching a DVD of this Spanish movie.”

  Rain relaxed, liking the cover story. “Right. And Charlie doesn’t speak Spanish, so I offered to translate.”

  “What movie?” Miranda asked.

  “Some ghost story,” Charlie said. “I forget the title.”

  “Oh, I love ghost stories,” Miranda offered—and then immediately regretted it. Her attempt to generate an invitation was way too obvious.

  Fortunately, Rain changed the subject eagerly. “So, who do you have for homeroom?”

  Relieved, Miranda pulled out her schedule. “Um, I don’t know. It doesn’t list homeroom.”

  “Homeroom is the first ten minutes of whatever your first-period class is,” Charlie offered.

  “Oh, well, then, I have, um, Mrs. Beachum?”

  “Yeah, so do we,” Rain said, putting a hand on Miranda’s shoulder. “Consider yourself adopted.”

  Rain smiled, and Miranda beamed. Charlie watched them. They’re so different—but they’re both kinda hot. Rain was his height, tall and slim, her build still a little tomboyish. Miranda was shorter but definitely curvier. She had light skin, brown eyes and Kewpie doll lips, with maybe just the subtlest hint of lip gloss, eye shadow, and mascara as accents. That makeup and her clothes—a blouse and skirt, tennis shoes with Peds, small gold hoop earrings, and a crystal pendant around her neck—were all modest enough, but Charlie knew they would further mark her as an outsider at their school. It was all just a little too expensive and made her look more like a tourist than a local. Rain, of course, wore no makeup, ever, and—like Charlie and nearly everybody else they knew—bought all her clothes at the local Island Mart, often for ninety-nine cents per item. Functional, not fancy. But, whoa, they both have really great smiles.

  Charlie knew from personal experience that Rain could snap from foreboding to charming in an instant. And back again. So it was nice seeing her let Miranda at least a little of the way in. The truth was Rain liked Miranda well enough and certainly recognized that the poor kid was going to need all the help she could get. Still, Miranda couldn’t be allowed to interfere with the Search. That was Priority One.

  The bell—the first of the school year—rang. Charlie and Rain instantly turned toward the door, and Miranda scampered to catch up. Rain heard a slapping sound and looked down. Charlie was wearing deck shoes that were clearly three or more sizes too big, and he seemed to be favoring his left foot. “What’s with the clown shoes? And the limp?” she smirked.

  He narrowed his eyes at her. “Well,” he said, “I had to wear Lew’s old shoes, because for some reason I couldn’t find mine. And I’m limping because I dropped an air tank on my foot last night.”

  Rain gulped, realizing she had just asked a couple of very stupid questions. When they escaped from Callahan’s boat the night before, Charlie hadn’t quite made it out unscathed. “Sorry, sorry,” she said and touched his arm gently with her left hand. Suddenly, the Healer snake on her zemi glowed with a golden light, which flashed down her arm, crossed over to his, then raced down the length of his body, before disappearing into Lew Dauphin’s oversized shoe.

  Panicked, she stepped back and looked around. No one else seemed to have seen the light, and she had to consciously remind herself that such perceptions were a part of her new ghost-sight powers—and quite invisible to everybody else.

  Charlie’s expression did change, though. He looked perplexed as he trod gingerly on his right foot—and then stepped down on it with a sudden, unexpected confidence. Then he smiled, and Rain noticed his limp was gone. She wanted to shout, to tell the world, Did you see that? I healed him!! Instead, she sighed and smiled, glad that her friend’s pain had ceased—and still a little amused that the zemi couldn’t do anything about Charlie’s older brother’s big floppy shoes.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE HORROR

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nbsp; MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8

  Homeroom and first period.

  So, along with twenty-one other teens—together comprising exactly half of San Próspero Junior High’s eighth-grade class—Rain, Charlie and Miranda found seats in Mrs. Beachum’s classroom. Rain sat by the window in the second-to-last row, having learned long ago that the last row attracts too much attention from teachers accustomed to its occupation by their worst slackers. Charlie sat at a desk to Rain’s left. Miranda hesitated. She was definitely a front-of-the-class type of student, but she didn’t have the courage to leave her two friends, particularly now that they had officially “adopted” her. She sat next to Charlie, inadvertently cutting off Renée Jackson, who was about to take that very desk. Renée glared down at the new girl in her fancy clothes before taking the desk behind Miranda, who remained blissfully unaware she had already made a powerful enemy before the second bell had even sounded for homeroom.

  Rain, head angled down, glanced through her lashes up at Mrs. Claire Beachum, who was writing her full name on the board at the front of the classroom. The fact that the teacher had her back to her students hardly mattered, since Rain was quite convinced Mrs. B had eyes in the back of her head—probably hiding somewhere in that tight bun of dirty-blonde hair. She had been Rain’s history and English teacher in seventh grade and had not been charmed by Rain or Rain’s lack of effort in either subject.

  The bell rang. Mrs. Beachum turned to face the class. “Good morning. As most of you know, I’m Mrs. Beachum, and I have all of you for homeroom and history—and most of you for English at the end of the day.” She picked up an attendance sheet and scanned the faces of her students. Her eyes lit briefly on Rain and crinkled slightly. (Rain knew—just knew—Mrs. B had it in for her.) Finally, the teacher’s eyes rested on the only unfamiliar face in the room. “You’re Miranda Guerrero?”