Pao’s hands shook with rage. “It wasn’t a ghost!” she said, trying to keep her tone even. “It was a—”
But the officer was already turning around. “Have her guardian come in tomorrow morning if your friend hasn’t shown up yet,” he said over his shoulder. “And leave the spooky stuff at home. We have enough going on without being asked to chase ghosts. Now get on out of here.”
“We never mentioned a ghost!” Pao called after him, but it was too late.
They had only been in the station for a few minutes, but Pao felt like it had been a year. She walked out into the heat of the night with a thousand thoughts crowding her head. She was worried about Emma. She was frustrated that the cop hadn’t listened to her. But bubbling underneath it all was something worse than the anger she felt toward that police officer:
Shame.
Pao stormed toward home, and Dante followed.
“What about the Lockwoods?” he asked.
“What are we supposed to do?” Pao asked. “Lurk outside until the cops accuse us of loitering or trespassing? The Lockwoods know everything we know, and nobody cares what we have to say.”
“But what about that person we—”
“Dante!” Pao said, her worry colliding with her anger like the ice crystals inside two thunderheads. “Drop it!”
And he did.
Once they reached Riverside Palace, she barely said good night to him, ignoring his concerned looks and declining his offer to wait with her until her mom got back from work.
Inside, she couldn’t settle down, the apartment seeming too small and too large all at once. She paced, calculating the time since Emma’s disappearance and the distance she could have traveled by now. If someone had taken her into his car somewhere between her house and the river, and driven off at thirty-five miles an hour, Emma could be anywhere from…
“Is there a map around here?” Pao asked no one, heading into the kitchen to tear through the drawers. Clogging them were boxes of incense, empty candle glasses, and matches of all shapes and sizes, but of course, no map. Just superstitious garbage that didn’t work, getting in the way, offering no solutions.
Pao felt powerless. The cop had made a fanciful ghost story out of her straightforward information. He had assumed she was superstitious because of how she looked, who she was.
And here was all the evidence of her mom’s beliefs. The stories and ghosts and folktales that had given Pao nightmares and made the police officer dismiss her at a critical time.
The tension that had been simmering between Pao and her mom lately overflowed in her brain now, roiling and boiling and bursting into flame. Pao paced again, glaring at every tall glass veladora—the saint candles her mom broke out when things were really going sideways. Pao resented every string of beads that wasn’t just a necklace, every corner where her mom claimed a spirit had sat while she communed with the tarot cards or tea leaves.
On the smallest altar stood a glass jar with a white candle inside that was often lit for Pao’s protection. As a little kid, Pao had loved striking the match herself, holding it up to the wick, and imagining a bubble of white light around her, shielding her from anything that could cause harm.
Pao glared at the offending object, totally devoid of magical properties. It was only a hunk of wax with a string wick. Lighting it was just another way her mom pretended to control the chaos of their lives, and Pao was tired of being the one who didn’t play make-believe.
Barely breathing, she picked up the jar, the candle’s hopeful wick just waiting for her mom to get home and give it meaning. But there was no meaning in stories, and magic wasn’t any more real than ghosts. What had any of it ever done for them?
Pao took the candle into the kitchen, where the linoleum floor was scuffed and in need of mopping. She raised her arm, which seemed like it belonged to someone else, and let every heated thought about her mom’s beliefs buzz through her blood before she dropped the jar, watching it shatter satisfyingly at her feet.
But breaking the candleholder seemed to have broken something in Pao, too, and she was suddenly more exhausted than she’d ever been. She lay down on the couch without sweeping up the pieces of glass.
In moments, the dark water of her subconscious overtook her, her last dream continuing like she’d never left it behind.
The river glowed green again, but this time, Pao knew better than to go closer. There was the hand sticking out of the surface, tension in every reaching finger, the ruby ring glinting in the moonlight. Pao’s fear felt so real—a flip-flopping in her stomach—and yet part of her realized it was just a dream as she watched from the shore.
A silhouette approached—the guy they’d seen at the riverbank, she somehow understood. His face was obscured, blurry even at close range, and when he knelt at the water’s edge, all the bioluminescence seemed to gather in his hands.
He laughed, an unearthly sound that made the hair rise on the back of Pao’s neck, and though she felt invisible, he turned toward her, his hair dark and pixels where his facial features should have been.
Just like the Mesa kidnapper. On the news, his hazy, indefinite features had been a result of poor picture quality, but in the dream, it was something else.
Something…supernatural.
He held up his palms, and the green glow flared from them, coming toward her in a wave.
Pao screamed just before the light engulfed everything.
She woke with a start to the sound of a key in the door. Pao’s heart was pounding, and the green still seemed to radiate all around her. Was she in the living room or at the river?
Then she remembered everything—Emma, the police officer, the smashed candle, the anger she’d finally let loose.
Her mom looked exhausted in the cool light of the streetlamp shining through the open door, and, for a moment, Pao’s familiar guilt came back. The feeling that she should love her mom for who she was and not constantly wish she were someone else. But the frustration was there, too, now tinged with fear.
The desire for her mom to be the grown-up for once was stronger than ever.
“What are you doing up, mijita? And what—” She stopped as her gaze traveled to the kitchen. “Are you okay?” Panic replaced the exhaustion on her mom’s face, and Pao saw what she must be seeing: her daughter, groggy and laid out on the couch; the glass on the floor. “What happened in here? Did someone break in?”
“No,” Pao said, sitting up and trying to gather her thoughts, to turn them into something her mom could handle. But she was too tired, and too scared for Emma, so everything she tried to grab just scattered.
“Paola,” her mom said, her voice going from concerned to stern alarmingly fast. “Tell me what’s going on right now.”
“First I gotta check the answering machine,” Pao said, waking up fully. She’d been asleep for hours. Maybe Emma had been found by now.
Pao darted into the kitchen, carefully avoiding the shards of glass. Her mom shouted behind her, “Young lady, you better start explaining yourself right this—”
But Pao was already returning to the living room, dejected. The light on the answering machine was disappointingly green, not blinking red like it would have been if the Lockwoods had called to say Emma was safe.
“Paola! Start talking!”