I’d been bugged by the whole “medium” thing for as long as I could remember, but the last straw came two years ago when my parents and I had been driving home from a movie one night and our car rolled into a ditch.
Why, in a town full of people who claimed to talk to ghosts—ghosts who often predicted people’s futures—had no one warned Mom and Dad they were going to die that night? Why didn’t they know what would happen for themselves? Why was I found bloodied and disoriented, but alive, a block from the accident, while my parents had died? Why didn’t I remember the damned accident?
In school, we were taught that everyone was on Earth to learn their own lessons, so you didn’t warn another medium about anything, even in a life-or-death situation. But that seemed like a particularly senseless rule now that my parents were dead.
On top of it, Guild law said no one could contact a dead medium without official approval. Kind of like getting a warrant. Lately, they were hammering the old laws home more, slipping reminders in people’s mailboxes and such. And though I had questions for my parents, so many questions, I couldn’t bring myself to try to reach them. Not because of the rules, really, but because ghosts were never the same as the people they’d been when they were alive.
Someday, I’d look at photos of my parents, miss them, and maybe laugh. But seeing their faces still made my stomach knot with the idea that no one had tried to save their lives.
So I had no answers. I only knew I had to get the hell out of St. Hilaire. And I had to do it before school started and I got stuck as a Guild puppet in the Corps.
“I hate this place,” I said, although there was no one else in the room to hear.
Indulgently, I allowed myself a glance at the other photo. The edges of the printer paper were fraying, and the Blu Tack I’d used to stick it to the door was starting to bleed through, making tiny sky-colored circles in each of the corners.
NOW APPEARING it said in large letters. CARNEGIE HALL, it said below that. Then a photo of Anastasia Krylova, piano prodigy.
I’d found her first CD in the consignment shop in Buchanan, the town next to St. Hilaire, right after my parents died. For a year, hers was the only music I could listen to. The sharps and flats hadn’t taken away my pain, but it had made it more manageable. And despite the fact that I’d memorized every note on every single one of her albums, my interest in her was something I didn’t quite have a name for, couldn’t ever put my finger on.
While I was trapped in a ridiculous upstate New York town that preyed on grief and guilt and greed, she was traveling the world, playing music with symphonies and accepting standing ovations with her tightly wound dark curls bobbing up and down. No one expected her to spend senior year helping to plan the next summer’s community events, taking appointment requests, and serving as backup to the Guild members during their sessions.
My discarded clothes lurked in the back of the closet like a large, black dog, and I knew Harriet would be pissed if we had to scrape together the money to have them cleaned. Whatever. Since I wasn’t going to be here next year, I’d never need to look at, much less wear, them again.
As I closed the door, I caught the scent of lemons, and my skin prickled. It couldn’t be happening again, this sickness or hallucination that had plagued me most of my childhood. Aside from what happened at the park, I’d been free of it, free of him, for two years now. They’d been two depressing, lonely, boring years, but they’d been years when I hadn’t had to doubt my sanity.
“Tristan?” I called, my heart racing.
I waited in the silent room. But I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or annoyed when no answer came.
Chapter 2
Annie
“Dmitry Petrov.” “Dmitry Petrov.” “Dmitry Petrov.” The wheels of the lovely antique train chanted his name over and over against the tracks, as if there were any way I could have forgotten what I had lost. As if that could be possible when each syllable of his name stabbed so painfully at my heart.
My hands caressed the sheet music in my lap, and I imagined I could feel each note. Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 in B-flat Major. I should have been in New York practicing it for the Hull Competition, one of the most prestigious and lucrative for musicians under eighteen. I had come in second last year and gracefully accepted the statue—which lay buried in Dmitry’s storage unit—and the nominal check, which I had sent to my parents.
I had spent my entire year preparing to win it this time. Dmitry had wanted me to compete with my signature piece, the Prelude, but my manager Viktor put his foot down after the infuriating review in The Times that began: “Though a brilliant musician, it is almost impossible to believe that Anastasia Krylova could be awarded the Hull Prize with a piece its unknown composer never completed.”
“Hey, that was pretty hot.” The boy across the aisle wore a blue cotton T-shirt that was too tight in a “notice me” kind of way. He looked as though he was around my age, despite his nicotine-stained fingers, which he used to twist and untwist the cap of a dented silver flask.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
How could I possibly live without Dmitry? More than a teacher, he had been my best friend. My mentor. My family, given that I was only six when he took me on as a scared child who could play an instrument, and turned me into an internationally competitive pianist.
He had been the only one to talk to me as if I were more than a commodity, more than a marionette who could play music on command. And he had listened to me as if my words mattered as much as my music.
Now he was gone.
“You. You playing that piano.” The boy took a drink from the flask and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.
Ah. Right. He must have seen me play.
Had I been performing anywhere but in the atrium of Union Station in Washington, DC, when Viktor’s call came in, I would have done what was expected and flown to Montreal for Dmitry’s funeral. I would have arrived tired and sad, and been collected from the airport by someone hired to collect me. I would have tried to look pleasant for the photographers lined up behind their velvet ropes, and I would have hated every single second of it.
But Dmitry’s death had changed everything. And the sound of the trains had called to me.
“Thanks,” I mumbled to the boy, because it would be bad publicity to slap him, and I knew better than to court bad publicity. My headphones were in my bag. If I could find a way to put them on and block this boy out…
“So, do you do that a lot? I mean, for fun?” he asked.
I closed my eyes and said a silent prayer. When I opened them, the boy was, unfortunately, still there. “I am a concert pianist,” I said. “It is my…” What was it? My life? My passion? My reason for existing? The only thing I was good at? This boy was never going to understand any of those, so I settled on, “job.”