"Suze," Michael moaned, beneath me. "Make it stop."

As if I could. As if I had anything like control over what was happening to me. If I lived through this – which didn't seem likely – some big changes were going to be made. First and foremost, I was going to practice my kick-boxing a lot more faithfully.

And then something happened. I can't tell you what it was because, like I said, I couldn't see.

But I could hear. And what I heard was perhaps the sweetest sound I'd ever heard in my life.

It was a siren. Police or firetruck, ambulance or paramedic, I couldn't tell. But it was coming closer, and closer, and closer still, until suddenly, I could hear the vehicle's tires crunching on the gravel in front of me. The blows that had been raining down on me abruptly ceased, and I sagged against Michael, who was pushing at me feebly, saying, "The cops. Get off me. It's the cops. I gotta go."

A second later, hands were touching me. Warm hands. Not ghost hands. Human hands.

Then a man's voice was saying, "Don't worry, miss. We've got you. We've got you. Can you stand up?"

I could, but standing caused waves of pain to go shooting through me. I recognized that pain. It was the kind of pain that was so intense, it seemed ridiculous … so ridiculous, I started to giggle. Really. Because it was just funny that anything could hurt that much. It meant, pain like that, that something, somewhere, was broken.

Then something soft was pressed beneath me, and I was told to lie down. More pain – burning, searing pain that left me chuckling weakly. More hands touched me.

Then I heard a familiar voice calling my name as if from somewhere very far away.

"Susannah. Susannah, it's me, Father Dominic. Can you hear me, Susannah?"

I opened my eyes. Someone had wiped the blood from them. I could see again.

I was lying on an ambulance gurney. Red and white lights were flashing all around me. Two emergency medical technicians were messing with the wound in my scalp.

But that wasn't what hurt. My chest. Ribs. I'd cracked a few. I could tell.

Father Dominic's face loomed over my gurney. I tried to smile – tried to speak – but I couldn't. My lip was too sore to move it.

"Gina called me," Father Dominic said, I suppose in answer to the questioning look I'd given him. "She told me you were going to meet Michael. I guessed – after she told me what you'd said about the accident today – that this was where you'd bring him. Oh, Susannah, how I wish you hadn't."

"Yeah," one of the EMTs said. "Looks like he worked her over pretty good."

"Hey." His partner was grinning. "Who you kidding? She gave as good as she got. Kid's a mess."

Michael. They were talking about Michael. Who else could they be talking about? None of them – except Father Dominic – could see Jesse, or the RLS Angels. They could see only the two of us, Michael and me, both beaten, apparently, almost to death. Of course they assumed we'd done it to each other. Who else was there to blame?

Jesse. Reminded of him, my heart began to hammer in my broken chest. Where was Jesse? I lifted my head, looking around for him frantically in what had become a sea of uniformed police officers. Was Jesse all right?

Father Dominic misread my panic. He said, soothingly, "Michael's going to be all right. A severely bruised larynx, and some cuts and bruises. That's all."

"Hey." The EMT straightened. They were getting ready to load me into the ambulance. "Don't sell yourself short, kid." He was talking to me. "You got him real good. He won't be forgetting this little escapade for a long time to come, believe me."

"Not with all the time he's going to be spending behind bars for this," his partner said with a wink.

And sure enough, as they lifted me into the ambulance, I could see that Michael was sitting not, as I'd expected, in an ambulance of his own, but in the back of a squad car. His hands appeared to be cuffed behind his back. His throat may have been hurting him, but he was speaking. He was speaking rapidly and, if the expression on his face was any indication, urgently to a man in a suit I could only assume was a police detective of some kind. Occasionally, the man in the suit jotted something down on a clipboard in front of him.

"See?" The first EMT grinned down at me. "Singing like a canary. You're not going to have to worry about running into him in school on Monday. Not for a real long time."

Was Michael confessing? I wondered. And if so, what about? About the Angels? About what he'd done to the Rambler?

Or was he merely explaining to the detective what had happened to him? That he'd been attacked by some unseen, unmanageable force – the same force that had broken my ribs, split open my head, and busted my lip?

The detective didn't look as if anything Michael was telling him was all that extraordinary. But I happen to know from experience that this is the way detectives always look.

Just as they were closing the ambulance doors, Father Dominic cried, "Don't worry, Susannah. I'll tell your mother where to find you."

Can I just tell you that if this was supposed to comfort me, it totally didn't.

But right after that the morphine kicked in. And I found that, happily, I didn't care anymore.

C H A P T E R

19

"This," Gina said, "is so not how I pictured spending my spring break."

"Hey." I looked up from the copy of Cosmo she'd brought me. "I said I was sorry. What more do you want?"

Gina seemed surprised by the vehemence in my tone.

"I'm not saying I haven't had fun," she said. "I'm just saying it's not how I pictured it."

"Oh, right." I tossed the magazine aside. "Yeah, it's been real fun, visiting me in the hospital."

I couldn't talk very fast with the stitches in my lip. Nor could I enunciate too well, either. I had no idea how I looked – my mother had instructed everyone, including the hospital staff, not to allow me access to mirrors, which of course led me to believe that I looked hideous; it had probably been a wise move, however, considering how I get when all I've got is a zit. Still, one thing for sure, I certainly sounded stupid.

"It's just for a few more hours," Gina said. "Until they get the results of your second MRI. If it comes out normal, you're free to go. And you and I can hit the beach again. And this time" – she glanced at the door to my private room to make sure it was all the way closed and no one could overhear her – "there won't be any pesky ghosts to ruin everything."