Maybe that’s why I did what I did next, which was reach out and grab the front of Jesse’s shirt in both my hands. ‘Oh my God,’ I said, again. ‘Jesse, are you all right?’

‘Of course I’m all right.’ He sounded surprised I’d even bother to ask. And I guess it was stupid. What could Heather do to Jesse, after all? She couldn’t exactly kill him. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Me? I’m fine.’ I turned my head to search the darkened windows of Mr Walden’s classroom. ‘Do you think she’s . . . done?’

‘For now,’ Jesse said.

‘How do you know?’ I was shocked to find that I was shaking – really shaking – all over. ‘How do you know she won’t come bursting through that wall there and start uprooting all those trees and hurling them at us?’

Jesse shook his head, and I could see that he was smiling. You know, for a guy who died before they invented orthodontia, he had pretty nice teeth. Almost as nice as Bryce’s. ‘She won’t.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because she won’t. She doesn’t know she can. She’s too new at all this, Susannah. She doesn’t know yet all that she can do.’

If that was supposed to make me feel better, it didn’t work. The fact that he admitted she could uproot trees and start hurling them at me – she was that powerful – and only hadn’t due to lack of experience, was enough to stop my shaking cold, and drop the handfuls of shirt I held. Not that I didn’t think Heather could have followed me if she wanted to. She could, the same way Jesse had followed me down to the Mission. But the thing of it was, Jesse knew he could. He’d been a ghost a lot longer than Heather. She was only just beginning to explore her new powers.

That was the scariest part. She was so new at all of this . . . and already that powerful.

I started pacing around the parking lot like a crazy woman.

‘We’ve got to do something,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to warn Father Dominic – and Bryce. My God, we’ve got to warn Bryce not to come to school tomorrow. She’ll kill him. She’ll kill him the minute he sets foot on campus—’

‘Susannah,’ Jesse said.

‘I guess we could call him. It’s one in the morning, but we could call him, and tell him – I don’t know what we could tell him. We could tell him there’s been a death threat on him, or something. That might work. Or – we could leave a death threat. Yeah, that’s what we could do! We could call his house and I could disguise my voice, and I could be like “Don’t come to school tomorrow, or you’ll die.” Maybe he’d listen. Maybe he’d—’

‘Susannah,’ Jesse said again.

‘Or we could have Father Dom do it! We could have Father Dom call Bryce and tell him not to come to school, that there’s been some kind of accident, or something—’