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  He looked exhausted, which made Cooper pause. Ryan acted so much older then the rest of them, but it occurred to Cooper that he was probably young enough to still be in college. He had the type of responsibility Cooper hoped to avoid for a long time.

  Delilah and Brent both hesitated, Delilah visibly bristling at the scorn in Ryan’s voice.

  Cooper faced Samantha. “Brent and Delilah think they’ve figured out who you are.”

  “You mean what,” she said bitterly.

  He shook his head. “No, I mean who. I mean, yes, I guess we’ve all figured out that you’re not human, and that you never really were. That you used to be some kind of massive, formless power. But you’re more than that. You’re …” He looked from Samantha to the figure on the bed. “I know you don’t have a lot of memories, but I also know you sometimes do remember things once you see them. Look at her, Samantha. Do you recognize her at all?”

  Samantha stared at Margaret’s body. Brent’s hazel eyes widened, and then flashed silver, but then Samantha shook her head. “Not … really. It’s like I almost remember.”

  “I don’t understand it all,” Cooper admitted, “but she created you in the image of someone she cared about a great deal. She’s the one who made you Samantha.”

  “If you’re willing,” Delilah said cautiously, “the rest of her memories, and the memories she would have given you, are still locked in her flesh. I know you’re probably very angry with her. You probably don’t even really understand why. But if you give Brent back his body, and use Margaret’s instead, then it will help you be—”

  “Excuse me?” Ryan protested. “It was bad enough when Cooper suggested it, but did I just hear you offer up someone else’s body to—”

  “To Samantha!” Delilah interrupted, shouting over Ryan. “I was only in her memories for a short while, but I can tell you, Margaret would have given everything to save her sister. If you worked with her, you must know how close they were.”

  “This isn’t Samantha,” Ryan insisted. “It looks like Samantha, but it’s—”

  “And this isn’t Margaret. It’s a shell. It’s a body. And Samantha is all that’s left of either sister.”

  “What if I don’t want to go anywhere?” Samantha argued. “I like this body. It’s loud, but if Brent could learn to control that, so can I.”

  “Samantha.” Cooper stepped toward her, and took her hands, trying to get his mind past who she looked like and remember who she was. “We’ve spent most of the past few months together. You’ve gotten me through hard times. And no matter what anyone says, I know you’re a good person. You’re giddy to have a body at all right now, but you have to remember that this one isn’t yours. You’ve stolen it from someone else. Someone who was doing everything he could to help us.”

  Samantha chewed on her lower lip. “What if I don’t want Margaret’s memories?”

  “Remember how scared I was?” Cooper asked, still holding Samantha’s hands. “You helped me get through everything that happened to me. We’ll get you through this now.”

  “Can’t I just keep this body for a little while?” Samantha asked. “So I can, I don’t know, get used to having a body before I need to deal with her? I want to go out dancing. I want to … God, I want to run away. I’ve never been as scared as I am when I look at her, and I don’t even know why.”

  “The longer you’re in Brent’s body, the more of a permanent effect you might have on it,” Delilah said. “You don’t realize how much power you possess, Samantha. You limit yourself by claiming flesh at all.” Ryan cleared his throat, and Delilah snapped, “What? It’s true!”

  “I don’t want power,” Samantha said flatly. “I know Ryan’s afraid of what I might do if I actually decide to be what I am, but I don’t want to be some kind of immortal thing. I just want to be … alive, a person.” She drew a breath. “Isn’t there another choice?”

  “You’re not powerful enough to create your own body,” Ryan said with a sigh. “And your consciousness as Samantha is too restricted to allow it to survive long without a mortal form.”

  “Then … then I guess there’s no choice.” With a lopsided smile, Samantha said, “Brent, I guess we’re swapping. And … I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you.”

  “I’ll leave you crazy kids to your games,” Ryan said, turning away.

  “You’re not going to help?” Delilah asked.

  “I’m going to cast a secondary circle outside this room, to keep the hospital staff and scavengers out, and any other power inside. If you screw up, I won’t let it hurt anyone else in the building. That’s my role in this. You’re all too old for me to hold your hands. Delilah …” Ryan paused, and shook his head. “Be careful.”

  He closed the door softly behind him.

  Cooper could taste his anxiety as Delilah, Brent and Samantha looked at him hopefully.

  “This is all you, Coop,” Delilah said. “The only thing I can do is try to temper Samantha’s power so it doesn’t go crazy again.”

  “I got scared before,” Samantha said. “In the woods. I got so scared.”

  “I guess you’ve got an excuse for it,” Delilah said grudgingly. “The last time anyone around you tried to work with an elemental, you kind of died in a raging inferno. I’m going to have to ask you to try very hard to stay calm this time.”

  “I feel better about this already,” Brent said dryly.

  “Remind me what I’m supposed to be doing again?” Cooper asked. “You know I’ve only ever done this body-swap thing accidentally, right?”

  “Yes?” Delilah said slowly, and looked at Brent. “I know with my kind of power, a lot of it is just thinking through what I want to happen, and kind of willing it.”

  “‘Focused attention’ is what Ryan calls it,” Brent said. Despite the barbs Delilah and Brent kept throwing at each other, it was obvious they worked well together when they had to. Cooper could see for the first time how they might once have been involved.

  “Think about … okay, here, Coop,” Delilah said. “Think about what it feels like when you tackle someone twice as big as you are. You’ve certainly done that before, successfully. Only you’re doing it in your head instead of with your body.”

  “Touch can help focus, too,” Brent offered. “At least, that’s the way your ability seemed to be triggered in the past.”

  Cooper put a hand on Brent’s arm … or Margaret’s arm, more accurately, even though Samantha was the one they were giving it to.

  Thinking too hard about those details was too much for him, so he just set his hand on the slender arm and shut his eyes. Much as he hadn’t enjoyed it, he tried to remember what it had felt like when Brent had hijacked his so-called power to try to stop Samantha earlier. Then he tried to recall how he pushed Brent when they first met in the library.

  He had been panicked at the time, overwhelmed by those dark memories of the accident that he had tried so hard to keep from surfacing. … Memories which, strangely, he had started to be more at peace with since facing them.

  Focus, Cooper. The worst you can do is make an ass out of yourself, and it would hardly be the first time you had done that.

  He realized he had tightened his grip when Brent let out a small pained sound.

  “Sorry,” he said, but it was too late. A single, horrid moment came to mind: a car grill meeting a human body. Human flesh on hot pavement, Cooper recalled vividly, despite his best efforts not to, smells like barbecue.

  He heard Samantha let out a sob, and realized that Brent’s telepathy must have passed the image on to her.

  He pushed.

  Samantha shouted, “Wait!”

  He could feel something tearing and struggling. Something cold and dark seemed to lash back at him. Cooper’s head reeled and he fell to his knees, retching, beside the bed. Delilah had caught Brent’s body, and Cooper heard him moan, then whisper, “Thank God.”

  From the hospital bed came a choked sob.

  Holding on to the rail of
the bed, Cooper struggled to his feet. He knew instantly that Brent was no longer behind Margaret’s brown eyes. Even with her dark brown hair, this was unmistakably Samantha.

  “It’ll be okay,” Cooper told her. “We’ll take care of you, and—”

  “I remember,” she whispered. Then her eyes widened. “Oh, my God, I … I remember it all. What I used to be. What happened.” She began narrating the tale with the same horrified expression, as she nervously twisted her short hair between shaking fingertips.

  I was a creature of raindrops and mist and power. I was selfless, in that I had never had a “self” to ascribe to myself—no name, no sense of the boundaries of “me” versus the rest of the world, no sense of the passage of time or my passage through it.

  I was disturbed by the weeping of a human. Her tears pierced me, though I did not understand why she cried. I did not understand family, much less the loss of such a thing.

  I did understand fire, which was the creature that had left her in such a situation, devoid of kin and torn by this pain.

  This girl, however, did not just cry. She did not just beckon. She shouted, screamed, and commanded. She used her sorcerer’s power, and cast out a net with the intention of snaring another human soul. She did not know the one she called to could not hear her.

  I did hear, and though the sorcerer’s words meant nothing to me, I could not resist her summons. I might have simply lingered nearby, but I pitied her, and so I accepted the name she called. I think I wanted to speak to her and comfort her.

  I was not the only one who responded to her desperate summons. She had not kept enough power to protect herself when the scavengers came.

  She screamed, and the sound hurt me. I had allowed her to name me, and so had become aware of “I” and then for the first time I understood pain.

  I couldn’t let the shadows have her. I fought them, and I yelled at her to go, to run into the forest where I could keep her safe in the mists.

  She ran, but she didn’t stop. Panicked, she passed beyond the refuge I had offered her, and leaped into danger.

  As the first vehicle struck her, the shadows converged. I struggled with them, pulling power from anywhere I could—but so did they. Around us mortals suffered, and every collision of metal and flesh shot through me like the pain was my own.

  “I didn’t really understand that the body mattered,” Samantha said, her gaze focused on a distant memory, her voice hollow. “Margaret’s body held on to enough power that even when it should have been torn apart it kept going … trying to flee. It crept back into the woods to die, like an animal does, and I tried to pick up the pieces she left behind. Bits of who she was. Bits the shadows didn’t get. But I couldn’t hold on to it all. I never had memories before. I was overwhelmed. Someone else helped me fight the shadows away, and I held on to him as tightly as I could.

  “And then you woke up,” she said, looking at Cooper, “and I was Samantha, and that was all.” She shivered, and then said, “Ow.”

  “You might have been immortal, but Margaret’s body is still weak,” Delilah said. “Your power will probably help it heal and get stronger faster, but for now maybe you should rest a little while?”

  “Margaret remembers being hurt,” Samantha said. “She broke her ankle when she slipped on a frozen step once. And she sprained her wrist playing … oh my God.”

  “What?” Cooper asked, concerned.

  When she looked at him next, her wide-eyed expression was the same one the Samantha he had come to know often used.

  “I have friends,” she said. “Or, I mean, Margaret does, but she’s me now so I do. I have—oh.” The sudden elation turned to sorrow, and Cooper didn’t need her to say anything more to know she had just remembered that her family was gone.

  “Maybe we should leave her alone a while,” Delilah suggested. “It might take her some time to work through all of Margaret’s memories. She’s used to being something without history or emotion or sensation, and now—”

  “And now she’s human,” Cooper interrupted. “You can leave if you want. But if you don’t mind, I’ll stay with her.”

  “Yes, please,” Samantha said softly. Cooper took her hand, for real this time.

  “C’mon, Delilah,” Brent said. “I can give you a ride back.”

  After a moment of hesitation, she replied, “Thanks.”

  They left together with an uneasy silence hanging between them, which Cooper heard Brent break as they stepped into the hall. “You did good work back there.”

  “You’d better believe it.” Delilah tossed her hair with a laugh. “Though … you did, too.”

  They passed out of earshot, and Cooper’s attention returned to Samantha.

  A nurse came in to check on them once, and Ryan came in to let Samantha know that the le Coire family were legal guardians for Margaret and that any necessary medical bills or other expenses would be taken care of, but Samantha just nodded silently to the nurse, and said a quiet thank-you to Ryan.

  She spent the rest of the day talking, laughing, and crying. As the evening passed, she seemed to solidify into the girl he had come to know over the summer—just, with a memory of who “she” was.

  “I’ll have to call my … her …” She hesitated, and then settled on one. “My friends. I don’t have any other relatives, but there are some people besides Ryan who would like to know I’m … alive.” She shook her head. “That’s the right thing to do, right? Even if I’m not quite who they knew?”

  Cooper nodded. “I changed a lot because of the accident. But my friends still wanted to see me.”

  “I guess Ryan will let me stay with him, and help me figure out how to use this body. You’ll be around, right? I mean, you’ll stay in touch?”

  “Of course,” Cooper assured her. “I wouldn’t have gotten through this last summer without you. It’s my turn to be here for you now. And I guess I’ll still need Ryan’s help, too, so I’ll be over there a lot.”

  “Will you take me out to dinner?” Samantha asked, her expression brightening.

  “Sure, as soon as Ryan or the doctors say you’re up to it,” Cooper said.

  “No, I mean … will you take me out?” Samantha said, the emphasis clear this time, especially when she blushed, and mumbled, “Their mother would have said it’s improper for a girl to ask a boy on a date.”

  Startled, Cooper blurted out, “I guess you owe me dinner, since I’m pretty sure you’ve watched me shower.”

  She laughed—and then winced. Her physical recovery would doubtless take a long time.

  “Only the once,” she replied innocently. She smiled widely. “I’m not going to ask again, Cooper Blake, so as soon as I’m pronounced fit, I expect you to be a gentleman.”

  Yes, she had watched him shower, teased him mercilessly, hit on him while possessing the body of a friend of his, and was, if he understood it right, not even quite human. Then again, he was a little less than normal himself.

  He wasn’t an expert on magic or supernatural powers. He couldn’t begin to fully comprehend everything he had seen and done recently. But this much was simple. It didn’t matter what she was. She was Samantha.

  “It’s a date,” he promised.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Amelia Atwater-Rhodes grew up in Concord, Massachusetts. Born in 1984, she wrote her first novel, In the Forests of the Night, praised as “remarkable” (Voice of Youth Advocates) and “mature and polished” (Booklist), when she was thirteen. The other books in the Den of Shadows series are Demon in My View, Shattered Mirror, and Midnight Predator, all ALA-YALSA Quick Picks for Young Adults. She has also published the five-volume series The Kiesha’ra: Hawksong, a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year and a Voice of Youth Advocates Best Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Selection; Snakecharm; Falcondance; Wolfcry, an IRA-CBC Young Adults’ Choice; and Wyvernhail. Her most recent book was Persistence of Memory.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents ei
ther are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

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  www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89597-5

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