In a run-down old house where mold crawled up walls and floorboards creaked, Kristy Clark shook her daughter's lifeless body. No amount of screaming or tears could wake her back to life. Without wasting another second, Kristy wiped her swollen eyes with the collar of her stained t-shirt and frantically dialed 911. “Please help, I think my daughter is dead!” She tried to catch her breath as she went to pace the dusty hallway, piled with boxes and laundry baskets. “7782 Oracle rd, Caldron. Her name is Zoe Clark.” She gripped the phone tighter. “I don’t understand,’ she continued between uncontrollable sobs in the dark. “This isn’t the first time this happened.”

She glanced at Zoe’s body again, waiting for a rise of her chest, a flare of the nose, anything.

Although Zoe’s heart had stopped, she could hear her mother’s voice from light-years away, lost in a black vastness she instantly associated with death for the second time in her entire life. The eternal black, a living being of its own, brought images of early childhood memories in bits and pieces; A thin woman with pale hair, crying on a rocking chair, the red dust of a barren desert, a rusty Ferris wheel turning in a bright blue sky.

A presence was felt somewhere close.

She looked around, her clouded vision useless. “Why am I here? Where am I?”

A voice, like broken static, replied, “You must meet me on Earth.”

“What? What’s going on?”

“You are the lost soul of magic blood.”

A jolt of lightning seared through her.

“You will not die unless you give away your soul,” the voice said. “Let him find you.”

“Who?”

“The ghost you met last summer.”

In one second she was shrinking into a swirling vortex, the next, she was gasping for oxygen on her bed. Her ebony eyes widened, looking up to the starry sky from her cracked bedroom window.

Lost soul? Magic blood?

Radios went on and off. Footsteps ran up and down creaky stairs. Red and blue lights flashed on the trees. Caw, caw, went the pesky conspiracy of crows, crouched in the bare branches. How she wished she was out there on a small piece of the roof where she liked to sit and gaze at the sky.

“Take deep breaths,” said a man she did not know at the foot of her bed.

Zoe sat up with her legs to her chest. Her shaky, goosebump covered arms shielding by her cascading ash brown hair that stuck up every which way.

Kristy returned to the room, relieved to see the life brought to her bronze face. “Zoe, you’re okay.”

The paramedic pressed a stethoscope to Zoe's chest. “Heart rate normal,” he said after a good minute. “How are you feeling, miss?”

Zoe felt the heat return to her cheeks. “Fine, I guess.”

“Miss, it is very important you answer this question," the paramedic said. "Are there any substances you’ve taken tonight that we need to be aware of?”

She glanced at his buzz-cut hair and blue eyes, then looked back out the window, away from him entirely.

The cop in the room stepped out.

“We can take your mother out of the room," he said. "It’s okay, miss."

She stared blankly at the twinkling stars as a tear rolled down her cheek. “It wasn’t drugs.”

“I’m not saying it was, but we need to be sure if we're going to help you. This could be very serious, do you understand?”

“I don’t care, Zoe," Kristy said. "All that matters is you’re okay.”

Zoe closed her eyes to stop the tears. She wished she was back in heaven or space, wherever it was. “It won’t happen again,” she mumbled. “Not unless I find him.”

Kristy’s cheeks turned solid red. "Find who?"

The paramedic took out a syringe and a rubber cuff. "Hold still."

Zoe didn’t struggle this time. She let him grab her limp arm and feel for a vein. She didn’t dare speak another word about what happened - How she died so that her confined soul could travel to another dimension - That is unless she wanted to spend another few months in the loony bin. She was never fond of that place.

Tears swarmed her eyes as another paramedic burst into the room and asked about a gurney. “Don’t let them take me, Mom,” she said. “I’m fine!”

After some protesting with the paramedics and EMT’s, the ambulance left without her. The cop stuck around, questioning Kristy longer than he should have. She could hear their low voices mumbling in the hallway, unable to make out the words. He’d been here before, that cop. Officer John Bertrand was his name, the father of one of her classmates. He was divorced, and the only reason she knew was because he asked Kristy out on a date. That would be so weird, but thankfully it never worked out, and she hoped it never would.

It was a relief to hear his heavy steps down the stairs and out the front door. Kristy returned to the room with a glass of water and aspirin. Afterward, she helped her down to the bathroom and ran a hot bubble bath. “That should warm you right up.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Let me know if you need anything else. I’ll be right outside the door."

Zoe knew if her mother wasn't such an excellent nurse before she quit, the night might've turned out much different. She had worked at the only hospital in town for years and still knew most of the staff. They were always asking her to come back, but she insisted on starting her greeting card business that barely got anywhere and took up half the house.

Zoe took a deep breath and sank into the warm water, inhaling the earthy scent of lavender that filled the small room, dimmed by candlelight. She closed her eyes, falling, falling, deeper into the water, deeper into the black void.

The glass clock chimed in the hallway, striking midnight.

Her eyes sprang back open.

You will not die...give your soul to me...let him find you.

The words were locked behind her skull and wouldn't go away. Were they worth repeating to anyone else? Was the voice who said them even real or just a part of the vast wilderness of her imagination?

But there was no imagining him. He was real. That much was certain.

“The ghost,” she said under her breath. "The ghost I met last summer."

Kristy paced around the dark house, no less nervous than earlier. Why had this happened again? Zoe’s been CAT scanned, X-rayed, you name it, but there was nothing ever to suggest that she was sick with anything.

Not drugs, huh?

She snuck back up to Zoe’s room. It was still cold and stiff and horrible just to be in. There on the floor by her bed was her journal, glittery blue with a crescent moon and stars. Never once did she open it. She was a cool mom like that. But now she wondered if there was something in it she needed to know, an answer she wasn't getting.

She picked up the journal and flipped to a random page.

You know that house in crab apple village? The one deep into the woods? That one that looked like it could’ve come right out of a Christmas catalog?

Kristy’s heart sank to her stomach. She sat on the bed and continued reading.

My mom used to live there when she was a little girl. Back when the villagers lit candles in the windows at night and in the winters they ice skated on the hollow that used to be a pond where waterfalls spilled into. I know because she used to tell me the stories and for forever I dreamed about a place like that.

Her father was the mayor of the town and was killed by an unknown thing that eventually drove them all out. There’s rumors it was witchcraft, but to this day no one knows. Me? Personally? I don’t know if I believe in all that but I’m definitely into it. Just last summer I had a small birthday party for my 14th and my best friends Gwen and Luca showed up. Luca so got me an ouija board because he knows I like that stuff. He was forbidden to play it but we decided to give it a try that day and we got some crazy activity, thing is, I don’t know if it ever left.

I feel like I’m being watched sometimes, like there’s someone there wanting my attention. It’s so creepy. I guess that’s what I get for messing with that thing.

But yeah, I stopped going in the woods a long time ago because who knows if what killed my grandfather is still out there. And I don’t like running into the old village, seeing a new graffiti mark, a new broken window and the pond just as hollow and empty. But it’s always there and sometimes in the winter, I can see it from my bedroom window, the rooftops on some of the houses, the white of my mother’s. I never lived there, but it always gives me this weird empty feeling I can’t explain. Sometimes it makes me want to cry. I think it just reminds me of how fragile life is and one day we’ll all die just the same.

Kristy shut the diary and went back downstairs. She felt bad for even picking it up. She knew her daughter, and she knew their unordinary situation. Admitting that was the hardest part.

And the old village, gone to the wind. It surprised her Zoe must've still thought about it so much. She swore she thought she'd be reading anything else - boys, drugs, the usual teenage angst.

She knocked on the bathroom door. “Zoe, you okay in there?”

“Fine.”

“Think you’ll go to school tomorrow? You already missed so much this year.”

“Maybe...Yeah, I’ll go.”

Meanwhile, Kristy boiled like a cauldron on Halloween.

Ouija board?! I told her never to use one of those things! And Luca? Of all people to give her one?! She shook her head. Luca, the sweetest boy any mother would hope her daughter would one day marry. Guess it's a good thing they aren't dating yet. Maybe I should just ban him from this house if he's going to be bringing in a lousy piece of cardboard to make her think there's something watching her when there's not!

“Mew!” It was Pumpkin, rubbing up against her leg. The mangy orange tabby must’ve been hiding while all the commotion was going on. She kneeled down and scratched under his chin. “Thanks, Pumpkin,” she said. It wasn’t for him scratching and yowling at her bedroom door, alerting the world something was wrong, she might’ve never bothered to check.

She pulled back her blonde curls and let the thoughts of the ouija board simmer over. There was no use starting a fight over something that happened months ago.

Not unless I find him, Zoe had said. Now that was another question entirely. It sounded like she was talking out of a dream. She used to sleeptalk all the time, especially the first year she and her dad brought her home. Not unusual. Then again she died before, and just because something happened before doesn’t make it usual.

The first time was no stranger than the last. It happened a few months ago on a hot, humid, unrelenting Pennsylvania summer day. Then they swore it was a bad case of mono or the flu, but she tested negative for both and it wasn't like it was the season for catching colds. Zoe was just lying in the field in the backyard, trying to catch some sun when she ran into the house crying that her eyes felt like they were burning out of her head and dropped to the floor.

Kristy hated to think what would’ve happened if she weren't there. The ambulance came and revived her. Then they believed it was a neurological or heart disorder, but they never figured it out.

“Think it might have anything to do with her past?” Officer Bertrand had asked when she ran into him at the gas station later that week.

“I don’t know,” was all Kristy could say, but there has to be some sort of explanation because if there wasn't, the world would start to draw eyes on her.

The worst part about living in a small town was how everyone had to know everyone else’s business. Rumors spread like wildfire, not that there hadn’t been talk on the Clark’s before. And there was plenty to talk about.

A heavy silence filled the house. Kristy stood by the door, her lips parted. There were things she wanted to say, wanted to ask, but didn’t dare. Just then, in the corner of her eye, she saw a shadow with bright eyes the color green.