I must look very contrite because Rei's voice softens. "I'm sorry," he says as he sits on his bed, "you must have been pretty shocked to come home and find someone else in your body."

I open my eyes wide to show him "shocked" doesn't even begin to cover it.

"So have you tried to get her out?"

Big emphatic nod.

"So ... what's the problem? It's your body. Can't you just pull her out?"

I shake my head. This lack of a voice is starting to drive me nuts. I look around for something I can use to communicate with him besides head shakes and nods. Rei's room is always immaculate, which sucks because a little dust would be handy to write in. There's a pencil on the desk, but even though I can pick it up, it flops around when I try to write, producing nothing more than a few illegible squiggles. I let it fall back onto the desk and look around in desperation.

"It's okay, Anna," he consoles me, "we'll figure this out. So you can lift the pencil, but you can't control it...."

Rei turns the power strip on with his foot, and while he waits for the computer to power up, he gives me menial tasks to perform. Can I move that book? No, I can't. Can I move this piece of paper? Yes, I can. He seems to be looking for a magical weight limit I can lift metaphysically, and I hate to burst his bubble, but I don't think it's consistent. I can manipulate these objects around him just because I'm fueling off his energy. Rei seems to vibrate at a much higher frequency than most people I know, probably because of all the meditation he does in his secret lair. At my house, my parents and Taylor have such a negative effect on me, it's like draining juice through a straw. I don't think I could lift that pen at my house.

The computer is up, and Rei selects the word processing icon. The screen comes up as a blank doc.u.ment. "Can you type?"

He starts wheeling his chair back to give me access to the keyboard, but then he stops and looks at me curiously. "Can you just move right through me?"

Who knows? I reach my hand toward his to see if he feels solid like Taylor, or if he's like an inanimate object I can slide right through if I choose to. He reaches out to meet me halfway, and when our hands touch, he feels solid and secure, like an anchor to keep me from drifting away.

"That is so cool! It's like you're vibrating." I watch him stare in childlike fascination at my hand resting in his. As his fingers curl naturally around mine, they sink right through my hand into a loose fist. "That's weird." He sounds disappointed. "But you can't put your hand through mine."

I shake my head.

"Weird. So," Rei leans back in his chair, "back to the big question. Can you type?"

I stoke myself up on Rei's energy before I move my fingers helter-skelter on the keyboard ... lkdjg oerufj Yes, I can type.

"Good! That'll make things easier. Now start at the beginning and tell me everything that happened from the time I dropped you off yesterday afternoon."

I tap into quite a bit of Rei's energy in order to type the entire story, but he doesn't seem to miss it. He leans forward, reading as I type, interrupting me with questions. When I'm done, he sits back with that worried look on his face.

"I should have been there with him. At least I could vouch he's innocent."

If I can just get back into my body, I can vouch for him.

"Yeah, well, that's the next topic up for discussion. How do you get her out?"

I have no idea. I keep trying to push her out, but as you can see, I can't travel through people. If I can't get into her, I can't push her out.

"Well, how'd she get in there, then?"

It must be because I wasn't in there. Maybe she saw me at the falls with Seth and figured she could sneak in while I wasn't there.

Rei is quiet, thinking. "So you're in some other dimension?" he finally asks.

I think so. It's the same place I always go.

"And Taylor has taken possession of your body."

I nod solemnly. I don't think you should tell her you know she isn't me.

"No, you're right, I won't."

I don't know how she thinks she can pull this off. Do people with concussions really have such drastic memory issues? She didn't even know my full name.

"They can. And she knows your name now. I told her."

I have a feeling she'll be pestering you.

"That's okay. You know," he says quietly, "I thought there was something odd about you. Your eyes. They just looked ... unfamiliar."

I wonder if my mother will notice a difference in my eyes, too, or if Rei is the one person in this world who knows me best.

Rei presses the spot between his eyebrows hard for a minute, and the red and green layers surrounding him seem to roll into each other and become an indigo blue.

"Okay, so let's look at this logically. If she hadn't come into you, what would she have done?"

She should have gone into the light, but I didn't see one. I don't know if I wasn't paying attention or if the sun was too bright. Or maybe there just wasn't a light for her.

"Okay, so for whatever reason, she didn't go into the light. So she's a spirit that's taken possession of a living body."

Now that he puts it that way, it sounds so sinister. I nod.

"So can you search 'spirit possession'? See what the internet has to say."

I type in the magic words, hit the enter key, and voila ... nine million hits.

I make a wow face at him, and he smiles for the first time in a while. Not a big smile, but enough to charge me up for a few more minutes.

"So why don't I look these over and see what I come up with while you go find Seth."

I flip back to the word processing screen. What do you want me to do with him once I find him? Surely he doesn't want Seth to see me.

"Just find him; make sure he's safe. Let me know where he is."

Okay, I'll be right back.

Seth is a little farther south now. I trace him to a wooded area not more than twenty miles away, and he's still moving at a steady pace. I would love to know where he's going. What he's doing for food and water. What thoughts are swimming around behind that blank expression on his face. As bad as he might think this is, he cannot imagine how bad it could get unless I get back into my body.

I bounce back to Rei's bedroom before he's finished reading the first article on spirit possession. As soon as he sees me, he pushes his chair back so I can use the keyboard.

He's fine. He's walking through some woods between St. Albans and Milton.

"So he's not too far away. Let's go get him."

It takes me all of a second and a half to determine this is a dangerous idea for Rei.

What are you going to do with him once you find him?

"I'll talk him into going to the police and they'll straighten this whole thing out," he says. "You said it yourself: he didn't do anything wrong."

It doesn't matter what I say-n.o.body can hear me. The police will be listening to the Anna Rogan who tells them Seth pushed Taylor.

"Well, the law says he's innocent until proven guilty."

The school already has him coded with behavior issues. And all of Taylor's friends have told the police Seth was there with her, and they didn't exactly portray Seth in a very positive manner.

"How do you know that?"

I went to the school today. I heard them talk to the police.

"Okay," Rei sits back and spins his desk chair in little quarter circles while he digests this latest bit of bad news. "How can I help Seth, then? I can't just leave him out there."

He seems to have something planned. Let him do what he's doing. He's done plenty of camping; he knows how to fend for himself. If he doesn't get in touch with you by tomorrow afternoon, I'll bring you to him.

"Fair enough," he turns back to the computer with his poker face in place, but his aura tells me differently. He's not happy with this compromise, and his blues give way to layers of dismay.

The air feels heavier, like a wave of negativity has rolled into the room. I'm sure it's Rei's energy reacting to my reluctance to lead him to Seth until I hear a car door slam, then another. I fly to the window just as the doorbell rings.

CHAPTER 13.

I give Rei a warning look while the sound of the doorbell echoes through the house.

As soon as he sees who is here, he mutters one of those j.a.panese words he won't translate for me.

"Wait here," he tells me.

Not a chance. I hover at the top of the stairs, out of sight. The police look in expectantly when Rei opens the door.

"Can I help you?"

"Are you Rye Ellis?" asks the same short, bald police officer I saw at school.

"Rei Ellis," he corrects them.

"Okay, Rei. I'm Officer Daigle; this is Officer Mooney. We'd like to ask you a few questions about Seth Murphy."

Even if Taylor called the police right after Rei left, they wouldn't be here asking questions so soon, unless ...

I zip over to the river where I last saw Taylor's body bobbing in the current. The birch branch now cuts freely through the water, and the mud along the sh.o.r.e has been trampled and stamped with dozens of heavy boot prints.

They know.

There's very little Rei can tell the police about Seth. He mentions Seth's stolen phone, the note on his locker, the fact that he hasn't heard from him since yesterday afternoon. The police ask Rei about me, so I'm going to take a wild guess here that Taylor wasted no time after Rei left to make that call. Rei mentions my concussion and memory issues. Twice. They don't leave until the short, bald police officer hands Rei a business card and asks him to call if he hears from Seth.

Rei crumples the card slowly in his hand as he watches the cruiser back out of his driveway and head over to my house, then he takes the stairs two at a time. "Anna!" He stops short before he plows right through me. "Sorry. Hey, the police are on their way to question Taylor. Can you go listen to what she says?"

Me? Eavesdrop on a private conversation? Sure, why not.

Twenty minutes later, I'm back, furious at Taylor and even more anxious for Seth. Rei stands at his bedroom window watching the police car leave my driveway when his keyboard clatters into motion.

She described everything Taylor was wearing, how all the b.u.t.tons were ripped off her shirt and her fingernails were all bent back. n.o.body would know that unless they were there or they had seen the body. Which they found, by the way-I checked.

Rei sits on the edge of the bed and leans over to read the computer monitor.

"Wait a second. You told me before that when Seth grabbed her, her shirt ripped. You meant all the b.u.t.tons were ripped off?" I can tell by his expression that his attempt to visualize this is having staggering results. "Wow. That's really ... bad."

It was a really flimsy shirt, but still, it does look really incriminating.

"Well, yeah, I guess it would."

If I can just get her out of my body, they'd have no witness.

"You know," Rei says with a trace of bitterness, "it would be nice if your father could just tell the police you were home in your room the entire time."

Yes, it would, but Rei knows as well as I do that my father's brain has all the mental retention power of a sewer drain.

"Okay, so we've got to get you back in your body. We were Googling spirit possession. Let's get back to that."

Rei sits in the chair and I read over his shoulder.

"I read one while you were gone that said we just need to convince her she's dead and her loved ones are waiting for her on the other side of the light."

Nothing is ever that easy. This light, this highway to heaven is an obscure thing to me. If Taylor qualifies for the light, if we could figure out how to summon the light, could we convince her to cross over to the other side? Ha! I can just imagine the conversation now: Rei: "Taylor, I'm sorry to break this sad news to you, but due to a tragic accident, you are dead. On the brighter side, your loved ones are waiting for you on the other side of the light!"

Taylor: "p.i.s.s off."

I give him a thumbs down and point to the next result.

Rei opens it up and we both read. "So this site wants me to enter my credit card number, and for one hundred euros, they'll perform a long distance spiritual release exercise on your body." He smirks. "Is anyone really that stupid?"

Sadly, yes.

He clicks over to another link. "This one says some people can be partially possessed. Maybe your mom could negotiate a time share with her." I go through the motion of smacking his shoulder and he goes through the motion of pretending he felt it, but he won't meet my eyes as he toggles over to the next screen. Down at the bottom of the page, one heading catches my attention. I point to it.

"That one?" Rei clicks.

Yes, that's the one. I hover close to Rei so I can read.

SMUDGING: In order to clear negative energy, the Native Americans tie white sage twigs (salvia apiana) into bundles which are then lit and allowed to smolder. The pungent smoke is waved through the air to cover all areas that are thought to harbor negative energy. Traditionally, an abalone sh.e.l.l is used to catch falling embers.