“Will you shut up, please?”

“I feel kind of dead. Maria, you used to always look so happy, but now your eyes, they look dead.”

They were almost back to campus. Maria wouldn’t have to put up with this much longer. When the test results came back she wouldn’t have to put up with Delilah at all.

“Do you have a knife, Maria?” Delilah said. “Does someone have a knife?”

“Nope, no knife.”

“Okay. Wait. Maria. Maria, the air, it’s important.”

Maria didn’t like how Delilah kept saying her name. It reminded her of the Ouija board. “Super important,” she echoed.

“Also, Maria, can I ask you?”

“What now?” Maria snapped.

“How did you get that scar?”

Maria shook her head. “I don’t have any scars.”

“It’s dark, dark red. Like a flower. A flower made of fire. It’s all over you. You’re beautiful, Maria.”

“God, shut up.”

Maria shoved Delilah through the gap in the fence. Delilah went, stumbling. She was standing frozen on the other side in the middle of a honeysuckle bush when Maria climbed through.

Delilah was staring at the reflection of the moon off the glassy black surface of the lake. Fog poured off the water, the way it always did.

“Do you see them, Maria?” Delilah said. Maria pulled her out of the bush. The way Delilah was acting they were liable to get caught, even if the security guards didn’t watch the perimeter very closely at this time of night.

“Come on,” Maria said. “We’ve got to get inside.”

“I can see them,” Delilah said. “The kids on the lake. I can see their souls, Maria.”

Maria stopped pulling.

She’d only been at Acheron a few days when she’d seen the kids on the lake. It had been a month after Altagracia died. Maria had gone out for a walk in the afternoon and looked into the mist coming off the lake, and she’d seen them there.

Four shapes. Three teenagers and one skinny little girl in a long dress.

They were hovering a foot over the lake’s glassy surface. Half-transparent, half in shadows. Outlined in light. Four sets of shiny black eyes.

Maria had tried to tell herself it was La Llorona looking out for her. But La Llorona was one spirit, not four.

Maria tried not to look at the lake now, but it was too vast to avoid completely. The “Staff and Students Shall Not Enter the Lake at Any Time” sign on the far edge. The ribbons of mist in the air above the water. The way the moonlight glistened too brightly on the surface.

She didn’t see any figures, not this time. Delilah was still staring, though, her jaw agape.