Chapter eight

Will stepped forward, his face grim. "Charlotte?"

Charlotte glances at me, like she doesn't want to say what she's about to say in front of me. "The Carstairs, Emma's parents..." Charlotte glances down as Will draws back at the name Carstairs.

"What about them?" Will's voice is low and heavy. I can feel my own heart take a dive off the deep end when I realize something must have happened to Emma or her parents.

Please let Emma be alive. Please.

"They're dead," Charlotte confirmed, "but not in the attack."

I tilt my head to the side. I knew of the attack on the Los Angeles institute. Emma's parents were presumed dead, even though the bodies hadn't been recovered at the time.

"They found the bodies. But...they have...they didn't..." Charlotte struggles for words. "It certainly wasn't at the hands of the endarkened." She waves her hand in a circle. "No one knows how they died."

"Wasn't someone watching them?" I pipe up. My voice stands out in the sea of European accents.

Charlotte shook her head, baffled. "I talked to their relatives, some people who would be keeping watch over them. They said it was as if the pair blinked out of existence. They couldn't be sensed anywhere."

Will's eyes widened. "No one saw anything? At all?"

"Nothing."

"Have you tried talking to the ghosts?" I asked. I felt a little out of place. Charlotte and Will where much older than me. They probably knew more than I did.

"They remember nothing that happened to them." Henry came to stand by Charlotte. "I just came back from talking to them. They have no memory of it."