Or, she sort of had a boyfriend. She had a Connor. And she’d just seen him that afternoon, just told him that she liked him.
So why couldn’t she stop imagining how it would feel to roll a little closer to Eddie, to feel the warmth of his chest against hers. To—
“You’re not sleeping,” Eddie said out of nowhere.
Hendricks stiffened, feeling caught. “You can see me?”
“The moonlight is reflecting off your eyes.”
“Oh.” Hendricks tried to make out the shape of Eddie’s face in the darkness, but it was no use. The window was behind him, so all she could see was an outline of blankets. “That’s not fair, I can’t see you at all.”
There were several beats of silence. Hendricks blushed again, worse this time, as she realized how she must’ve sounded.
And then she felt the mattress move, felt the heat coming off Eddie’s body as he shifted closer to her. His face separated from the dark, and now she could see the line of his jaw and nose, the shape of his eyes. They were open, watching her.
“Better?” he asked, his voice thick.
“Yeah,” Hendricks said. She wanted to reach for him. She dug her fingernails into her palms. “You’re not sleeping, either.”
He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his throat. “No,” he said. “I’m not.”
Neither of them said anything for a long moment. Hendricks could feel him watching her and wondered what he was thinking, wondered if he was imagining the same things she was imagining. Her breath had gone shallow . . .
She rolled closer to him, pressing her chest to his chest, burrowing her head under his chin, her arms pinned between them.
For a moment he just lay there, stiff, and she knew she’d made a huge mistake, that she’d misjudged the moment. Shame washed over her . . .
And then Eddie wrapped his arms around her, pulling her closer. Hendricks relaxed into him as he lowered his face to the top of her head, his exhale tickling her ears.
“You’re not crazy,” he whispered.
She closed her eyes, his words releasing something inside of her. “Thank you,” she said. She felt safe for the first time in weeks.
And then, finally, she was able to drift to sleep.
CHAPTER
25
The next morning, Hendricks was faced with a seemingly impossible decision: throw on yesterday’s clothes? Or brave Steele House for something clean?
Wrinkling her nose, she grabbed her rumpled jeans from the floor and pulled them back on.
“Wakey-wakey,” she said, nudging Eddie with her elbow.
He groaned and covered his head with the pillow. “Five more minutes.”
Hendricks sat up, scraping her hair back into its usual messy knot. “Come on, wake up,” she said, standing. “I want to get a move on.”
Eddie didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, moaning, he tossed his pillow aside, mumbling something that sounded like “okay.”
Twenty minutes later, they were loaded up in his car. Magik & Tarot didn’t open until ten a.m., so Hendricks insisted that she treat Eddie to coffee, as a thank-you for letting her crash the night before.
Eddie reluctantly agreed, though Hendricks could tell that he didn’t like the idea of letting her pay. But when they drove past Dead Guy Joe, the coffee shop on Main, Hendricks saw Portia, Raven, Connor, Blake, and Vi crowded around a table just inside.
Eddie kept driving.
“What about coffee?” Hendricks said, twisting around in her seat. “I don’t think you understand how badly I need caffeine.”
Eddie shot her a look. “There’s a shop in Devon.”
Hendricks hesitated, trying to ignore the tiny ball of relief growing inside of her. She knew it was shitty to hang out with Eddie in private but not in front of her friends. But when she tried to imagine walking into Dead Guy together and explaining how they came to be hanging so early in the morning, she just couldn’t do it. Better to avoid that problem, for now.
They picked up coffee at a shop called The Sparrow in Devon, and then walked the block and a half to Magik & Tarot, arriving at ten a.m. on the dot.
There was a sign taped to the door:
Closed for Imbolc
“Imbolc?” Hendricks said as Eddie leaned past her to try the door. “What’s Imbolc?”
Eddie found the door locked and leaned back on his heels, shoving his hands into his jacket pockets. “I dunno. Maybe it’s like Groundhog Day?”
Hendricks raised her eyebrows. She couldn’t picture the occult woman from the other day closing her shop in honor of something like Groundhog Day. “We could check the store’s website for a contact number. Or maybe this place has a Twitter—”
“Check it out.” Eddie jerked his chin, and Hendricks looked up at a curl of black smoke hanging in the air just above the old house, looking a little like an upside-down question mark against the gray sky. It seemed to be coming from directly behind the shop.
“Come on,” Hendricks said.
They followed the smoke down a short cobblestone alley that led to a small overgrown yard. The remains of a wooden fence separated the yard from the rest of the alley. Or, at least, it tried to. The fence had long ago been overtaken by moss and weeds and rot. Grass wove through the slats, and gnarled trees grew up alongside the fence itself, their ancient roots bursting from the ground below and splintering the wood and pushing up the cobblestones.
Hendricks looked around for a gate, and that’s when she noticed the dolls. They were small, no larger than her hand, and crudely fashioned out of straw and twine. Now that she knew to look for them, Hendricks saw that the dolls were everywhere: hidden behind leaves and twitching from tree branches and wedged between the slats of the fence. There were dozens of them—maybe hundreds—all faceless and strange. Watching her. When the wind blew, the dolls spun, like they were dancing.
“Shit,” Hendricks muttered, taking a quick step backward. Nerves crawled, very slowly, up her spine.
Eddie nudged her in the side with his elbow, murmuring, “Look.”
Hendricks followed his gaze past the trees and the fence, and saw a woman standing in the middle of the yard. For a moment, Hendricks didn’t think it was the same woman they’d met in the shop but someone much older, with long, white hair and deep wrinkles. And then a cloud moved past the sun and Hendricks’s eyes adjusted to the dim, gold-tinged light. She’d been mistaken; it was the same woman after all. She wasn’t that old, maybe only a few years older than Hendricks herself. She wore ripped jeans and combat boots, and a sleeveless black T-shirt supporting a band called Dead Man’s Bones. There was a flower crown perched in her dark hair, somewhat inexplicably.
Hendricks watched as the woman lifted a clay pitcher from the ground and began pouring something that looked like milk into the grass. A small bonfire crackled beside her.
Hendricks glanced at Eddie. This didn’t seem like something they should interrupt.
Before either of them could decide what to do next, the woman looked up. “Can I help you?”
“We didn’t mean to bother you,” Hendricks said quickly. “We can come back later, if you’re busy.”
But the woman was already walking toward them, still clutching the clay pitcher. She had lovely hands, Hendricks noticed. Long, thin fingers with rounded nails. A snake tattoo wrapped around her thumb.
She stopped just inside the wooden fence. “You came into the shop the other day.”
“Yeah,” Hendricks said, holding out her hand, “I’m—”
“You’re Hendricks.” The woman didn’t shake her hand, but only frowned, slightly, like she didn’t know what it was for. “I’d recognize the girl who moved into Steele House anywhere.” She said this in a strangely flat voice. “My name is Ileana. And you’re Eduardo Ruiz, of course. I was very sorry to hear about your broth
er.”
“Y-yeah,” Eddie sputtered, clearly surprised.
“He never should’ve been convicted.” Ileana didn’t blink as often as she should, and her gaze had begun to wander over the line between intense and creepy. “But I suppose ‘ghosts killed my little sister’ wasn’t exactly a good defense?”
“You already know about the ghosts?” Hendricks asked.
Ileana only shifted that intense gaze to her, eyes dark and massive. “A nine-year-old died in your cellar,” she pointed out. “It’s unnatural for a child to die so young. Her death would have left marks on the place.”
A shiver crept up Hendricks’s arms. She kept her eyes trained on Ileana so she wouldn’t have to look at Eddie. “Maribeth isn’t the one haunting my house.”
Ileana still hadn’t looked away. “No, I don’t suppose she would be. We think the haunting at Steele House started long before that.”
“I’m sorry, we?” Eddie asked, at the same time Hendricks said, “What do you mean, started?”
Ileana finally dropped her eyes. She touched a weed growing up through her fence. “Other supernatural enthusiasts,” she said. “Steele House might not have the national reputation of a place like Amity-ville, but regional enthusiasts have always been drawn to it as a place of deep spiritual energy. We think it started out as a baby haunting at first. Flickering lights, cold drafts, that sort of thing. It would’ve only progressed as the house took more victims.”
“You talk about the house like it’s alive,” Hendricks said, and Ileana lifted her eyebrows without looking up. Hendricks exhaled through her teeth. “What I’ve seen is definitely not a baby haunting.”
Ileana pursed her lips. “I’d have to see what’s going on there myself to know for sure. But that’s why you came to find me, right? So I would look at your ghosts?”
Hendricks blinked. She wasn’t sure she wanted this incredibly strange woman inside her house. “Well—”
“Yes,” Eddie cut in. “We want you to take a look.”
Ileana pulled the weed out of her fence and began twisting it around her finger. Distantly, Hendricks heard a phone ringing. It seemed to be coming from inside of Ileana’s house, but Ileana made no move to go inside to answer it.
“I’ll need to get a few supplies first,” Ileana said once the ringing had stopped. “Wait here.”
CHAPTER
26
Ileana entered Steele House like she was entering a church. She walked slowly through the living room and into the kitchen, seeming to see beyond Hendricks’s parents’ furniture and paint colors and the family photographs hanging on the walls.
“There’s definitely something here,” she said, dropping her duffel to the floor with a thud that made Hendricks jump. “I can feel its energy in the air.”
“So, uh, what do we do first?” Hendricks asked, her eyes on the duffel. It contained the supplies Ileana had brought. And it smelled strange. Like incense and sour milk.
Ileana said nothing but reached into her pocket and pulled out a stack of dog-eared cards, like playing cards but larger. The tops were pure black. As Hendricks watched, she began to shuffle, moving the cards easily between her long, thin fingers.
Ileana flipped a card over, frowning down at a smudgy image of a skeletal figure holding a scythe. Death, the card read.
“There are lots of different types of ghosts,” Ileana murmured, studying the card.
She shook her head, and slid the Death card back into the deck, beginning to shuffle again. “Residual hauntings are like echoes, or reflections. They can’t hurt you or interact with you in any way. But you’re dealing with some real rage here, which usually means murder.”
She paused and, this time, she slid three cards out from the middle of the deck.
More smudgy images. The Tower, one of the cards read, and Hendricks thought the picture looked like a woman hanging from a noose. Queen of Swords, read the next card. And the third, Judgment.
“Something happened here that no one ever found out about,” Ileana said quietly, frowning at the cards. “A terrible crime. That’s why the energy in this place is so tainted.”
“Some boys were hurt here,” Hendricks said, pulling her eyes away from the image of the woman hanging from the noose. “Three, I think.”
“Interesting.” Ileana tapped her fingers against the deck of cards. She took a deep breath in and slowly exhaled while surveying the room. Hendricks got the sense that she wasn’t looking for something but feeling for it with her breath. Hendricks shivered. After a moment, Ileana said, “If those boys were murdered here, they might be angry that no one ever punished the person who did it. Which means they’ll want vengeance.” Her eyes flicked up to Hendricks. “Anything else?”
“There was a message on the wall,” Eddie cut in. “It looked like it’d been written in blood.”
“It said one more,” Hendricks said. “We thought it meant that the ghosts wanted one more victim. Like, as a sacrifice.”
“Mmm.” Ileana nodded, shuffling the tarot cards again. “An eye for an eye. The ghosts want one sacrifice for each of their deaths. Maribeth and Kyle were sacrifices one and two. Which means they’ll need one more before they can rest.”
Hendricks felt a chill work its way down her spine. “So one of us has to die before they’ll leave us alone?”
“A sacrifice doesn’t necessarily mean a death,” Ileana said calmly. “For a sacrifice to work, you need to give up the thing you hold most dear. That doesn’t always have to be your own life.”
Eddie was frowning. “But Maribeth and Kyle—”
“Maribeth sacrificed her future when she died,” Ileana explained. “And Kyle gave up ever being able to prove his innocence. Those are two very powerful sacrifices. The ghosts would have liked that.”
Ileana held the deck of tarot cards out to Hendricks. Her eyes seemed a much deeper brown than they had a moment ago. Almost like they’d darkened the second she’d stepped inside this house.
“Cut the deck,” she said.
Hendricks hesitated, her fingers twitching. She didn’t want to touch those black cards. “Why?”
“People who’ve been murdered are looking for vengeance,” Ileana said. “Most of the time their ghosts want to punish the person who murdered them. But if that’s not possible, they’re going to find a proxy. I believe they’ve decided that you will be their proxy, Hendricks.”
Hendricks’s throat felt dry. “Proxy?”
“A stand-in. Someone who reminds them of their murderer.” Ileana nodded at the tarot deck. “These will help me read your energy. I want to know why the ghosts have chosen you.”
Steeling herself, Hendricks took the deck from Ileana’s hands and quickly split it in half. She flipped a card over.
The card showed a woman bound and blindfolded, a man pressing a sword to her back. Her mouth was warped in a silent scream.
Staring down at it, Hendricks felt her eyes sting. She remembered cold fingers crushing her wrist. Grayson’s voice in her ear.
Don’t you dare embarrass me here.
She suddenly felt like there was something lodged in her throat.
“Interesting,” Ileana said, taking the card from Hendricks’s hand. “Eight of swords.”
“What does it mean?” Hendricks asked.
“It’s the card of jilted and abused lovers. It seems to indicate that you’re a person who’s been . . .” Ileana hesitated before saying, “Broken. Trapped. They want to make you pay because they can’t make her pay.”
“So it’s my fault this is happening?” Hendricks asked. The injustice of it made her want to scream. When would she ever be done paying for what Grayson did to her? “What am I supposed to do? Sacrifice myself?”
Ileana tilted her head. “Think about the thing you’re most reluctant to give up, and cut again.” She held out the deck. H
endricks thought for a moment, and then flipped over another card.
This one showed two people, side by side in matching coffins.
“Two of cups. Interesting,” Ileana said. “This card could indicate that the thing you value most is either love itself, or a particular person you’re in love with. Now that would make for an interesting sacrifice.”
With effort, Hendricks tore her eyes away from the card. Love itself? How was she supposed to sacrifice that?
She nodded, trying to look like she was unbothered by this sudden revelation. She’d already given up her freedom, her sense of safety, even her home—all because of Grayson. And now she’d have to give up more? It wasn’t fair. Her eyes began to sting.
Ileana knelt beside her bag. “We can start with a smudging while you think about your sacrifice.”
Hendricks nodded again, but now her eyes were on Ileana’s long fingers, which were slowly pulling the silver zipper on her duffel. It seemed to take forever for the bag to fall open.
Ileana removed several thick bundles of fragrant, white herbs, a vicious-looking silver dagger with a jewel-encrusted hilt, and a reddish-brown fur crusted with blood.
And now the sour-milk smell was so bad that Hendricks had to take a step backward, her nose wrinkling. She pressed a hand over her mouth and nostrils. “What is that?”
“Fox pelt,” Ileana explained, spreading it out across the floor. For a moment, she was perfectly motionless.
Then, in one swift move, Ileana took the dagger and jabbed it into the flesh of her right ring finger.
Hendricks released a small yelp, and Eddie flinched. “Jesus,” he murmured.
Blood rose to the surface of Ileana’s skin, forming a perfect red bubble before tipping over the side of her finger and winding down around her wrist.
“The ritual you performed was probably fine, but I’m guessing it didn’t have any direction.” Ileana crouched over the fox pelt and, wielding her bleeding finger like a pen, began drawing on the hide. “This will tell the spirits what we want from them. The smudging ritual will show them the path to follow out of your house, and your sacrifice will release their anger, compelling them to move on.”
The Haunted Page 17
