Tunnel of Bones (City of Ghosts #2)(24)

But then—somehow—Jacob tears free.

He shudders, and squeezes his eyes shut, and disappears, a faint flutter of gray in the air around him the only hint as to where he’s gone.

The Veil.

People on the street are rushing forward, but before they reach me, I’m on my feet, grabbing for the thin gray curtain. I throw it aside, rushing through after Jacob. A brief second of falling, and then I’m on my feet. The Veil stretches, quiet and gray. It’s thin here, the details faded, an in-between in the in-between. A place that doesn’t belong to any one ghost.

There are places where the Veil is nothing, a stretch of blank paper. But Paris is too haunted for that, and even here, the Veil isn’t quite empty. A faint impression of the city, ghosted on the pale surface. And of course, there’s one thing in perfect detail.

Jacob.

He stands still, breathing heavily as he presses his palms against his eyes.

“Jacob?” I ask, trying to keep my voice light.

He doesn’t answer, but the pallor is gone from his skin, the traces of damp erased from his clothes and hair.

“Jacob,” I say again, and this time he lets out a shaky breath and straightens, hands falling away from his eyes.

“I’m fine,” he says.

“How did you do that?” I ask, and I honestly don’t know if I’m talking about the fact he pushed me or the fact he pulled himself free from his own reflection.

He just shakes his head.

“Jacob—”

“I said I’m fine.” The tremor is gone from his voice, replaced by something I almost never hear. Annoyance. Anger. His hair flutters slightly, as if caught in a breeze. I open my mouth, but before I can say anything else, I feel it.

Cold.

A chill, pressed between my shoulder blades. I turn, and so does Jacob. And there, half a block away, standing out like a drop of red ink on a blank page, is the poltergeist.

The boy stands there, scuffing one old-fashioned shoe on the sidewalk, his brown curls falling to one side as he tips his head. He is haloed with crimson light, his eyes wide and burning with the same eerie glow.

And when he looks up and sees that he has our attention, he smiles.

I swing my camera up, already hitting the flash, but he blocks his eyes, and then he turns and runs.

Not as if he’s frightened, no.

As if it really is a game.

Tag.

You’re it.

“Cass!” calls Jacob, but I’m already running.

The Veil ripples around me, details scrawling and erasing themselves across the paper of this place as I cut from one ghost’s world into the next, Jacob on my heels.

The poltergeist is fast, too fast—he moves less like a running kid and more like a series of photos, skipping forward in time. And then, just when I think he’s going to get away, the Veil flickers around us, re-forms, and suddenly, I know where we are. I’ve been here before.

The entrance to the Catacombs.

It looks different here, in the Veil. Older. There’s no fresh green paint, no wooden door, only an iron gate. The boy, small as he is, slips through a gap between the bar and the frame, casts a final red-eyed glance back at me, and then vanishes into the dark.

I slam into the gate seconds later, but it’s locked.

I pull on the bars. They rattle but don’t budge. There’s no way I can fit through the gap.

“We have to go after him,” I say, breathless.

“No,” says Jacob at my side. “That’s exactly what we don’t have to do.”

I push off the gate. “You’re a ghost!” I say to Jacob, waving my hand at the barricade. “Can’t you just—”

“Just what?” challenges Jacob. “We’re in the Veil. I’m as close to flesh and bone as I get. And we still don’t know who that poltergeist is!”

“He tried to kill me!”

“Which, as far as I see it, is all the more reason NOT to go after him until we know enough to beat him. Lara explicitly told us not to engage the creepy dead child.”

I glance back. “Since when do you agree with Lara?”

He holds up his hands. “I know. I’m just as surprised as you are. And you can never ever tell her I said so.” He gestures at the entrance to the Catacombs. “But hey, now we know something.”

I turn back to the gate.

Jacob’s right.

The poltergeist isn’t bound to a Veil, isn’t tied to any one moment or memory, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have one. He could have gone anywhere, but he came here. Why? It could be just another place to hide, but I think it’s something more.

I can feel the cold pouring out through the gate, see the faint shine of red on the bars. The strange light traces the entrance like a colored pencil, as if the poltergeist and the Catacombs are made of the same stuff, stained with it. And I remember the first time I saw that eerie red glow, down in the tunnels among the bones, and I wonder if this is where it happened.

If this is where he died.

“Come on, Cass,” says Jacob, reaching for my hand.

I let him take it, but not before aiming a solid kick at the iron bars. “I’m coming for you!” I shout.

You, you, you, my voice echoes into the dark. As if in reply, a shadow crosses the Veil, and a red mist reaches through the bars like fog.