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you’re sure they haven’t left?”
    “I think not.”
    “Okay,” I said. “I’ll go check it out.”
    “Are you sure, sir?” Stanton said. “It could be dangerous.”
    “My brother’s in there, isn’t he?”
    “Yes but perhaps I should go with you?”
    “Stay here,” I said and walked into the building.
    Once upon a time there might have been life in here, plaster that wasn’t peeling and people who were alive but now it was a stinking, decaying hell-hole. Everything smelled of mold or rot. For a minute, it was impossible to believe Lane could be in a place like that. It just couldn’t be true. Lane was too much of a clean person to be in a place that smelled like there might be dead things in it. It was dark at first but then I started to see the light from candles and the people who had lighted them. Homeless people, I thought at first glance and then it occurred to me—they weren’t just homeless, they were all junkies; ghosts that inhabited this dark abode, and they all looked at me with the eyes of the dead. I felt like the only living person among them. And then out of the other dead people I saw two faces I recognized.
    “Lane?” I said to the barely conscious ghost who was still holding a needle to his arm and lying on the floor in one corner, next to the same ‘friend’ who had come to talk to us in that Brooklyn breakfast place. I couldn’t remember his name but now I knew Lane didn’t come all the way here for some stupid breakfast. I rushed towards my brother and removed the tourniquet from his arm, and he tried to look at me but I couldn’t tell if he even recognized me.
    “What’re you doing?” the other kid said but one glare was enough to shut up his stupid junkie brain.
    I put an arm around Lane and pulled him up but he couldn’t put much weight on his own feet, so I had to carry him out of there. Before I left, I glared once more at the other kid. “If you so much as come near my brother again, I’m going to have you arrested.”
    The kid said nothing in response, disappeared in the darkness like the other ghosts. Outside, Stanton saw me and came around to help carry Lane to the limo.
    “Where to sir?” Stanton asked.
    I looked at Lane’s sleeping form and I knew taking him to the emergency room would be a bad idea. “Let’s just go home, Stanton.”

ELENA

     
     
     
     
    We got to the apartment and there was something waiting for us at the door, well for me to be exact. It was a big pile of roses with a sorry note attached to it and signed Nick Jones. I crumpled the note right away and stepped through the pile of flowers to get to the door and unlocked.
    “Let me guess,” Penny said, closing the door. “Mr. Dick of the century realized he had to use every hook in the cheesy romance movie plot to get you to forgive his sorry ass.”
    I went straight to the fridge and filled myself a glass of boxed wine. “He can try all he wants, it’s not happening.”
    “How could you love someone that unoriginal?” Penny said, getting a glass for herself. “I would have shot myself in the head a long time ago.”
    I laughed, despite myself. “You’re right,” I said, going to sit on the couch. “He’s not exactly rocket scientist material, is he?”
    “I just wish he’d stop being stupid, though.”
    “Me too.”
    “What a waste of extremely good roses.”
    “Penny?”
    “Yes?”
    “Do you want to bring them in?”
    “Kind of.”
    “Well then, just do it.”
    “You’re sure?” she looked at me. “It won’t be weird?”
    “Weirder than having my ex send me flowers? I seriously doubt that.”

THORNE

     
     
     
     
    I couldn’t sleep the whole night. I sat in a chair next to the bed where Lane was sleeping and I constantly had the urge to check on him every fifteen minutes to see if he was breathing. That would make me relax for a few more minutes before I would start panicking again. At some point, I think I dozed off because I lost track of time. When