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Beatrix had seemed nearly relieved that both Jace and Irelia wanted to spend their first weekend camping. Remarkably cool about it: in fact, what her first worry was homework, and so long as they assured her they would take it and do most of it Thursday so that they had little to do on Saturday and Sunday (though she bored both of them by giving them maths sheets, and language sheets -- trust misery to give them a teacher as a parent). Three teenagers in the house. Three teenage girls, who all seemed to menstruate en masse, which meant a charming mix of tantrums, fights, and sobbing -- three teenage girls who needed bras, better underwear, and hair care products. Beatrix went around with a slightly baffled look on her pale face now, eyes as bandaged as ever but rubbing them fretfully as though she hadn't quite signed up for that amount of hilarious grief.

The rule was that they had to call Beatrix every night, to make sure they were still alive, and turn up by midday on Sunday. This sounded doable, unless they died horribly.

Wisp had wanted to go, but thankfully Wisp was grounded for running off to Neverland with Chris and Rory. She was only going to be let out Saturday for good behaviour, so she was on her best behaviour, saying her dreary French drills over the dinner table so that she could hopefully bat her eyelashes at Iggy Garcia. Jace found this pretty gross.

But she and Irelia faked it well -- it was only once they were out of the house, on the bus out into the countryside, that they both grew grim and quiet. Their backpacks were full of camping gear; their backpacks were also full of, hilariously, a Bible, salt, some holy water, some virgin's chalk she'd nicked off Uncle Jack, a few haphazard holy symbols and the world's largest supply of matches.

She pulled Irelia's hand into hers and laced her fingers in the other girl's the entire ride, sharing one iPod, sharing cooties with their waterbottle.

"Still time to bail," she said under her breath.

Apparently not. They got off the bus with their heavy knapsacks, looking like hikers, and made their way into the village; they bought some more water at the dull little kiosk there, and some chocolate bars, which Jace slipped into the pockets of her jeans. At least Jace didn't have to worry about getting tired.

"You girls aren't setting up camp east of the river, are you?" said the plump, anxious lady at the kiosk.

"Yep," said Jace. "Set up there last time. It's not private property or something, I know that -- "

"You shouldn't," said the kiosk lady, more clouded over than ever, "it's a bad area, girls, it's bad -- they say that gangs like to hide out in the old insane asylum, never mind everyone saying it's haunted, my no! There's thieves and young hoodlums and rapists there, mark my words, and you've got nobody with you -- the police should do something about it, but nobody likes it, says there's a curse over that place."

They walked away from the kiosk with Jace's eyebrows raised. "That's a change," she murmured under her breath, kicking at a blowing leaf with a sneaker-encased metal foot. She was rolling her beat-up t-shirt over her shoulders; the cotton was so thin it stuck to her, same with her dusty jean shorts, and she was looking at Irelia's blouse. Usually Irelia's blouses didn't matter for anything except that Irelia was in them, which means a lot of cleavage: it was an old check one that had once belonged to Beatrix, with the buttons open. Jace had made cracks about flicking gold down into her boobs, plinking off the lock.

"They didn't say s**t about that last time. Just blah blah blah idyllic area."

Jace had simply given a war whoop of dismayed exultation as the skies had opened up and lightly pissed down snow upon them both; nothing brought down Jace, even though she hated the cold. It wasn't sticking -- yet -- and they tramped down the trail, which was familiar to them by now, the blazes drawn on the trees to help lead them to the camping site. Nobody else was camping: summer was long, long over. It was nearly Christmas.

Probably better. It meant nobody else to wander into the Winchester Insane Asylum, to innocently walk into their mutual ******** of setting a tent, they went to the tiny shelter instead; it had a concrete floor and cobwebby windows, and they laid out their ground-sheets and sleeping bags as they changed into their jackets. Jace pulled on two hoodies (she really did hate the cold) and stuffed herself full of holy water -- put it in water pump bottles, a squirt gun, draping herself bandolier-style. Salt. More salt. A cross around her neck, even though Jack had told her they rarely worked on those who didn't have bloody faith anyway.

She would have told Irelia she didn't have a big butt, if the girl had asked. She might have broken out in big butts, but privately thought Irelia just basically looked like a chick in a dirty movie, which was kind of all right by her. Irelia had an a** and a half. In Bea's jeans (Bea did not have an a**: Bea was utterly flat) she looked like the kind of chick guys would whistle at down the street and make jokes about buns to.

"Don't forget," she said, "put on your cross and crap."

They'd fallen silent.

"Holy s**t, I don't know anything about hair," protested her friend, "I haven't got any, you ******** curly-headed orphan. God. Lemme see what s**t I can pull out of my sleeve."

Her fingers sifted through Irelia's silky mass of brunette curls, scraping them back into a ponytail -- it was a damn huge ponytail, as the sheep-girl had hair that devoured brushes and combs to make it nice and shiny, and it took some doing getting an elastic into it and looping it around enough so that it stuck. The ponytail was a kind of cloud coming out the back of Irelia's head, but oh, well, what the hell, they'd have to make do.

Jace didn't have gun training; she was leaving that to Irelia. Jack would have pissed fire if he knew they were taking guns. Jace did hand-to-hand.

"You got everything?"

"Don't piss yourself," her friend advised grimly, "it attracts ghosts."

The Winchester Insane Asylum looked, from the outside, as nice as it ever had: which was to say, not at all. The white stone of the once-handsome building was bleached as bones out in the desert, somehow stark and sterile, and while they had gone some kind of rust and rot had spread out from the pipes in long, creeping veins over the walls -- long shadows of indeterminate colour, as though the stain was trying to reclaim the building. The weeds choked it, but the weeds were dead because it was winter, and so the building was covered at the corridor to the atrium with brown dead spray.

Jace stopped when they reached the open corridor. There were stains there, too. Big rust ones on the chipped concrete, rust that looked eerily like bloodstain. From far-off they heard a clanging like a door blown into a wall over and over and over.

"Any last words," she said. "Make them sweet, Midge."

"You always think you can make me blush," said her best friend. "I laugh at your pathetic little attempts, woman. Like this: ha ha ha ha ha. Anyway, I never want to be able to say that I got into M.B.'s jeans. Damn that is a horrible thought."

It was noticeable that Jace herself did not confirm or deny virgin status, though it would have been slightly impossible or at least deeply skanky for her to have lost it in the handful of days she'd been a teenager. Instead, she saluted Irelia with a rakish grin, and without saying her own last words traipsed into what was now a crypt.

The asylum had changed. They were ankle-deep in water, scummy, floating water, with little drips and trickles that sounded out throughout the building -- it was dark and things were floating past them. Bits of furniture. Detritus. She raised the torch and fixed it on her shoulder, between cheek and the bone there -- furniture, some bits of old wood, what looked to be an old clipboard, and -- a child's doll, eyeless, staring up blindly at the ceiling as it bobbed past.

There should have been no current but it bobbed past anyway, in that stagnant water, in the dark.

It would have been redundant saying she was scared. So she said levelly: "Let's go up to the seclusion room and cut a b***h."

They both heard it, as well: there was someone wading in the water, close by. Jace shone the torch around rapidly, but there was nobody to see, just the wading sound of someone sloshing and sloshing.

Despite trying to keep her cool, Jace scrambled up to the first landing, watching the water: every nerve screaming for Irelia to get there too, breathing hard, reaching down to yank Irelia's arm up as the water roiled at the first floor. The torchlight played over the sudden churn of the water -- and, as they watched, it parted as though someone was moving. Slow, again. Not running. Slosh... slosh... slosh.

It stopped at the bottom of the stairs. The water parted around two invisible legs. Whatever was there just stood there, waiting, staring at them. Jace did not wait to see if it did anything, and both girls bolted up to the second floor.

The second floor had no water. The second floor had rust. Rust bloomed everywhere: it looked like blood, it covered everything in a flaking bloom of peeling auburn, Jace's hands did not shake as she drew a line of salt at the top of the stairs. Thick rock salt. A stub of candle, too, set down, her fingers pressed to the wick as she tried to light it.

The second floor had also changed. The door through to the ward was closed and rusted over, the Level One door, which lead through the long line of love-abandoned detritus to the Seclusion room -- the other door that they'd never gone through, was maybe another way in, that was open, but the other one was fused shut with that blood-red rust and the window slit had been painted over. Scratched in that black was:

NOT ALIVE
NOT ALIVE
NOT ALIVE

Jace recalled her earlier words about not pissing herself.

It was warm up there. Even before she got the candle going, small black blobs came out of the second dark door and headed straight for Irelia -- just formless little black things, gelatinous, oozy.

"I hate to say this so much," she said, voice tight, "but why did we not bring along Antony -- "

Jace's scream of Irelia had been swallowed up by the water and the dripping and the asylum itself -- whatever had taken Rel obviously knew what it was doing, knew that Rel was the arbiter of whatever had stopped Jonathon before: knew that Rel probably also had the gun. She stamped down on the little blots of dark that attached themselves to her legs: they left little smears of rust behind, and she body-checked herself into the wall to get rid of them.

She dropped down to her haunches to get the candle alight again -- finally it flickered into a grudging, tiny, flickering flame, which seemed to settle in cool yellow stillness over the stairwell. It was as though the walls crept back from its light: thank god for Uncle Jack and his holy candles, even though she had no idea what they were made of. Probably unfortunate priests. Anyone.

She wanted Jack, too.

Jace pulled herself back up into a fighting position, fists held high like a boxer, moving around in a circle to see anything coming at her -- but there was just that horrible stillness, the far-off silk of rushing water. There was no way to get through to Ward One and the seclusion room, and so she took the next door -- Ward Two, screaming "Irelia!" once more for luck. She was shaking. She was shaking so hard and her fists felt hot -- she only realised they were aflame after a few seconds and panicked at that, too, beat them out at her hips before she realised that she was the one doing it, that she was setting her own clothes alight. She had to take a deep breath.

The beds in Ward Two were more intact than they had been in Ward One. Above every single one -- intact or not -- was a sheet knotted above it. Half of the sheets were knotted neatly into tangled, rotting nooses, with the rest of the sheet pulled through the hole and left to dangle down.

"I would officially piss myself now," she said into thin air, "only it ain't coming out."

Instead of opening up into seclusion rooms, the end of the ward was a tiled space -- showers, it had been once, most of the tiles falling off, the same rust that crept over everything making the space a dark and featureless stain. There was a light giggle, which nearly made her jump out of her skin; when she swung herself around to look at the corner of the tiled space, there was a little girl sitting there, playing by herself with little bits of wood.

It wasn't a little girl, she realised, heart beating oddly slowly inside her chest. It was a ghost. There was a thin, transluscent quality to her, dark hair pulled back in a clip at the back of her head, baby-fine. She couldn't have been more than six. She wore the type of stuff M.B. had dressed her and Wisp in as kids -- a kind of little denim overall with a polka-dotted t-shirt underneath. One of the straps of the overall was broken so that it all hung adorably like Dennis the Menace.

She'd thought she was wearing something around her neck, the little girl, as she got closer -- it wasn't, it was bruises, and as she turned her head to look at Jace offhandedly her head was weirdly tilted. Her small, fragile neck was covered in the mottled marks of strangulation, big man's thumbs on what had been her throat, and when she giggled again she recognised the sound as thin and choked-off.

Jace pulled the stub of chalk out of her pocket and immediately drew a circle around herself on the ground, the floor a little spongy with age and the linoleum pockmarked, but it was a circle. She wondered why she could see her. She wasn't like Wisp and Antony; she didn't see ghosts.

"I'm sorry, kid," she said, absurdly wanting to cry. "I'm really, really sorry."

Another few, long moments. It was all dark except for the flickering of the torch and, if she concentrated, the sooty orange glow from her fingertips when she set them aflame -- just a kid's trick, it felt like. She left burn marks on the ground when she touched them. She hollered, "IRELIA," into the darkness, and waited for her best friend to answer: nothing.

You couldn't leave a ghost alone, and anyway the poor little dead squirt was stuck there, in that asylum. Adding to the laundry list of people who should have been there, she immediately wanted Wisp: Wisp the light magic user and Wisp the bad Catholic, whose exorcisms probably would've been way better than her own. Her metal feet clanked and broke down some of the tiles into dust as she reached towards the little girl -- the ghost didn't budge, just kept absorbedly playing with the pieces of wood, as she started to draw a haphazard circle around her. After the chalk, it was the salt --

That drew Jonathon's attention. Every single crapped-out bed in Ward Two jumped, rattled down again to earth on the floor, all of it sounding like a gun report in Jace's ears. She let out a long, repulsive string of curses, and that made the little girl look up at her with such a censorious look she would have laughed if she hadn't wanted to upchuck.