Sisters Of Salt And Iron. Kady Cross

your eardrums punctured while being tossed around in a tornado of rot. Her rancid breath burned my skin, and I could feel something warm and wet trickle from my left ear. My nose, too. I staggered forward as my left knee began to buckle.

      She was not going to take me down.

      The scream stopped abruptly. I almost fell down anyway from the release of it. I grabbed at the wall to steady myself.

      “You can’t make me go, bitch,” she snarled, moving toward me. “If you could, you would have already.”

      I lifted my gaze, swiping my hand under my nose to wipe the blood away. “I’m working on it, skank.”

      Where the hell was my sister? Wren and our friends had gone off in search of the item that was so important it kept Daria here rather than where she was supposed to be.

      Don’t ask me where we go when we’re dead. I’d only died once, and I didn’t get any farther than the halfway mark between this world and the next before getting pulled back. But I knew how to banish ghosts from this plane, and that was good enough for me.

      Daria grabbed me by the throat, her fingers like steel clamps. I wheezed for air as my toes left the chipped tile floor. She lifted me like she wanted to hold me up to the light and get a better look.

      I seized her wrist with my left hand, holding myself up to ease the strain on my neck. Then, I shoved my right hand into the hole in her head. Wet tissue and sharp bone filled my palm as I closed my fingers into a fist.

      Daria cried out.

      I fell to the floor, this time landing on my knees. Hard. I was too busy sucking in air to cry or even swear.

      My hand burned, ectoplasm sizzling as it met the salt residue on my skin. Ghosts didn’t like salt.

      My phone made a noise—like a groan. I took it out of my boot and risked taking a look while Daria was keening in the corner. The text screen came up. It was from Wren—we’d been working on her communicating through electronics since we couldn’t actually project words at each other.

      On my weight. I hoped that was a typo. I shoved the phone back into my boot.

      If my knees had been capable of sound, they would have sobbed as I pushed myself to my feet. I limped to the sink and turned on the faucet, shoving my hand into the cold water. The pain rinsed away with the salt—thank God.

      Something grabbed at the back of my neck. I looked up into the mirror and saw Daria behind me. I twisted, just in time to avoid having my head smashed into the glass, and threw a wide punch into the side of her head—the gooey side again.

      She stumbled back, giving me room to come at her again. This time, I hit her as hard and fast as I could before drawing back and landing a solid kick to her chest that sent her crashing into the same wall she’d knocked me into just minutes before.

      She recovered quickly, shaking it off. When she stared at me, her blacked-out eyes sparked with rage. She looked murderous.

      And scared. I got that a lot from ghosts. Ones that had been around for a while usually figured out how to mess with humans in one way or another, but they were always surprised to meet one who could mess back. I didn’t know why I could do these things, no more than I understood why I could interact with my dead twin. It didn’t matter—I could.

      The parts of Daria’s bleached hair that weren’t matted with blood started to lift off her shoulders—like the static electricity experiment I’d done as a kid by rubbing a balloon against my head. I’d been lucky up until now—she was just having fun. If she manifested, I was going to be in trouble.

      Ghosts in their natural form were one thing—I could interact with them, and we were on fairly even footing, but when they gathered enough power to take form in the real world—to gather mass—that’s when things got serious. I would still be able to fight her, but I was going to get hurt, and the locker room was going to take some damage—not to mention what might happen to all the people out in the gym if Daria decided to get her party on.

      The hair on my arms lifted. The back of my neck tingled. Oh, hell. This wasn’t good.

      I punched her in the face. A little reminder—to both of us—that I was the one in charge. Unfortunately, my heart didn’t get the message. Damn thing hammered against my ribs like it was trying to get out.

      Daria lifted her hand to her nose. I’d drawn blood, a little payback for the coppery taste in the back of my throat.

      “What are you?” she demanded. Surprise laced her raspy voice. She probably hadn’t felt pain since the night she died.

      “I’m Lark Noble,” I informed her as I hit her again. It was the best explanation I had.

      I’d knocked her jaw off center. She pushed it back into place as her eyes—still filled with wisps of black—widened. “Sister of the Dead Born?”

      Okay, so I hadn’t been expecting that. “I think of her as my sister—I came out first.”

      She stared at me. “The Living-dead.”

      “Uh, no. Just living, thanks.”

      She drifted closer. The smell of her filled my nose and throat, coating them like oil. “You shared a womb with death. You died, but you live.”

      I wasn’t comfortable discussing my suicide attempt with a stranger. “I shared a womb with my sister, not death.”

      She smiled. I’d seen a similar expression on Wren’s face before. It usually meant something really, really bad was about to happen. “I wonder what would happen if I ripped your throat out?”

      “You want to kill me?” I challenged. I was afraid, but not like I should have been. Death wasn’t scary. The act of dying was, but if you were lucky, that didn’t take too long. “Go for it. I could hang out here for eternity. With you.”

      Obviously she didn’t like the idea of a roommate, judging from the way she screwed up her face. Her hair fanned out from her face as she drew back. I could see the spot where the vertebrae in her neck had splintered and shattered. One of her shoulders hung lower than the other, limp and disjointed.

      “There won’t be enough of you left to haunt anything.” Her voice had deepened, the words coming to me on air that had dropped several degrees. My nose was cold, and my fingertips tingled. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the mirror on the wall frost over.

      I stepped to the right, keeping my eye on Daria as she grew as dark and ominous as a thunder cloud. That gaping crater in her head glistened with black ooze—the same black that filled her eyes. I reached into the shower stall nearest me and felt along the wall until I found what I wanted.

      It was a wrought-iron rod. Nothing too fancy, though it had a bit of a twisting pattern along its length. My boyfriend Ben had given it to me a while ago, and it was still my favorite ghost-beatin’ stick.

      Normally I avoided salt and iron because of Wren—all ghosts have a sort of allergic reaction to both. Maybe because they were of the earth, where the dead were generally buried? I didn’t know. Didn’t care.

      I stood facing the ghost, the iron rod in my hand. This was normally the time I’d make some kind of snarky or smart-ass remark. To be honest, I was biting my tongue. I wasn’t supposed to bait her—just keep her busy and distracted.

      She was going to pop any second. Then I was going to have to fight her and hope that everyone at the dance continued on in blissful ignorance. I’d been warned when I came back to school after my time in Bell Hill Psychiatric Hospital that I was only there because of my grandmother, and that I’d better not make trouble.

      Wrecking the girls’ locker room counted as “trouble.” The ghost didn’t matter. It never did. People always found a way to explain the supernatural, and in my experience the favorite explanation was that I was a troublemaking, attention-starved emotionally unstable delinquent.

      Which, actually, wasn’t too far from