Racing down the steps, I tried not to look at them, but some stepped out, whispering too low and fast for me to catch what they were saying. Others reached for me.

Halfway down, I recognized one of the ghosts. It was the woman in the dark service uniform, but she looked...different. Color had leached from her skin, the shadows on her face making her eyes seem like black empty sockets. Her jaw extended, gaping opening into something inhuman and twisted.

She howled.

Roth whipped around. “What the Hell?”

“You heard that?” I eased around the woman, whose face was stretched beyond human possibility.

“Pretty sure everyone in a one-mile radius heard that,” Cayman commented. “And I got to say, I am feeling some wicked bad vibes.”

“I don’t understand. They’re all... I don’t know. They’re all bad.” My heart thumped. “Sam said they were trapped, but...”

“Shadow People.” Roth jerked his hand around his face like he’d walked into a cobweb. It wasn’t. It was the hair from a young woman hanging upside down from the ceiling. “Could’ve got to them. Corrupted them.”

That... God, that was terrible, and we should’ve gotten in here earlier, taken the risk, because these people...

We came to the end of the staircase, and the smell of rust and rot increased as we walked into a room. Flickering fluorescent light cast shadows along rows of wide lockers. Doors were ripped off, benches toppled over. I looked around, realizing we must be in the old locker rooms, where the Nightcrawlers had been...incubating.

There were no ghosts in here.

Cayman walked through an archway into another opening while Roth stood near me.

Something occurred to me. I reached out and pressed a hand against the bare brick wall.

The wall vibrated under my palm, and a heartbeat later, a golden glow washed over the walls and ceiling and then disappeared, revealing what Roth had suspected we’d find that day in the tunnel.

The entire school was full of angelic wards. “This trapped them here.” I pulled my hand away. The wards remained. “Those people could’ve been good. Just needed help crossing over. They could’ve even been spirits, because some of them weren’t in their death states, but they all looked wrong.”

I had no idea if Shadow People could do that, but as I looked back at the stairwell, I accepted what I’d known the moment I saw the ghosts and spirits. “They’ll all about to become wraiths, and...”

“It’s too late.” Roth said what I didn’t want to. “Ghosts and spirits are the soul exposed. It’s more vulnerable in death, when decisions and actions become permanent. It’s like they’re all infected, and it’s incurable.”

Heaviness settled in my heart as I tore my gaze from the stairwell. There was no one left here to save.