Back when Acheron was a real plantation, the lake had been toward the back of the main complex. Hardly anything was left now of the original plantation—just the house, the cemetery up on the hill beside it, and a tiny, boarded-up clapboard church that was supposed to be somewhere in the woods.

The main campus buildings, the “state-of-the-art facilities” the school’s brochures bragged about, were all on the other side of the house. They weren’t state-of-the-art enough to keep the rest of the place from feeling ancient, though. The plantation dated back to before the American Revolution. There were stories about a secret passage under the church the Siward family had used to escape from Indian attacks. During their campus tours, the student ambassadors always said in spooky voices that archaeologists used to poke around in the woods and the cellars, looking for more information on the plantation’s history, but the expeditions stopped when the archaeologists started disappearing.

Those stories seemed a million miles away, but now that she was standing here with a girl who was out of her mind, seeing things that might or might not have been there in the dark, the stories felt like they were closing in on Maria—Acheron’s stories, and her own. The boy with the black eyes at the edge of her bed. The faraway shapes in her grandmother’s mirror.

She told herself to ignore it. She got a grip on Delilah’s shoulders, turned her around, and pushed her toward the house, where the nighttime spotlights made the already unnaturally white walls gleam even whiter. Delilah stumbled, but she twisted her head to look back at the lake while Maria shoved her on.

“They’re dead,” Delilah said. “All of them. Did you see? That girl, I think she was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t hear.”

Maria shivered again. She wished Delilah’s hallucinations weren’t quite so specific.

“Do you ever get afraid, Maria?” Delilah went on. “About the future? About being away from all this? It’s so perfect here. I don’t want to ever leave.”

“Sure.” Maria kept pushing. Ahead, the spotlights went out, plunging the house into darkness. The power had gone again.

“We should stay here forever,” Delilah said.

Delilah kept twisting her head around as Maria pulled her the rest of the way to the house. When they finally reached the door to the service entrance, the one that never latched all the way, Maria was so relieved she could’ve kissed the painted white bricks. Now they just had to get down the hall and up to Delilah’s room on the fourth floor.

“You have to be quiet, all right?” Maria whispered.

Delilah didn’t react. She hadn’t said anything since they’d left the lake.