The Haunted

by Danielle Vega

  She threw her closet door open, her eyes skating over the clothes still piled on the floor until—

  There. She felt a rush of triumph as her eyes snagged on the familiar orange fabric of Grayson’s old soccer jersey.

  She’d tried to explain to Eddie why she’d kept it, but she didn’t think she’d done a very good job. It wasn’t because she’d wanted Grayson back. She was far past ever wanting him back. But that didn’t mean she wanted to forget how things had been in those early days, when they’d been in love. It had been those same strange, complicated feelings that’d kept her with Grayson even after things started to go so wrong. Those same feelings had driven her to Connor, even though she wasn’t sure she was ready to be with someone new.

  Hendricks didn’t miss Grayson. She missed love.

  Her heart ached. If she sacrificed the jersey, it was like she was sacrificing what Grayson had once meant to her. She was giving up the dream that she’d ever feel like that again.

  She only hoped it would be enough.

  The pain in her ribs stabbed at her, but Hendricks clenched her jaw, ignoring it as she made her way back to Brady’s nursery, jersey in hand.

  The ghost looked up as she stepped into the room, his black eyes zeroing in on her. He growled and snapped his teeth.

  “Eddie, give me your lighter,” Hendricks said.

  Gasping in pain, he pulled his lighter out of his pocket and tossed it to the middle of the room. Hendricks knelt to pick it up.

  The ghost stood up. “Don’t do that.”

  Hendricks flipped the lighter open. A flame leapt between her fingers.

  The ghost moved too quickly, standing over Eddie one moment, and then hovering beside Hendricks the next. His lips were pulled tightly over his teeth, making his smile wide and garish. His eyes had disappeared, so that there were only two deep, rotted holes in the middle of his face. A maggot squirmed out of his skin and dropped to the floor, wriggling beside Hendricks’s feet.

  The ghost grabbed her shoulders, his fingernails digging deep into her flesh. “Don’t!”

  Hendricks touched the flame to Grayson’s jersey.

  I sacrifice love, she thought.

  The slick fabric was slow to catch the flame, but once it took hold, the stink of melting and burning overwhelmed the room, in a blinding flash of red and orange.

  The boy let out a thundering roar.

  I sacrifice love, she thought again and again, tears streaming down her face. Hendricks wasn’t sure if she was speaking the words out loud or in her head, but she knew the boy could hear her.

  He vanished in a cloud of smoke.

  Hendricks dropped what remained of the jersey to the floor and stomped out the smolders. Then she collapsed against the wall, gasping.

  The light in the hall was on, and it threw a long, yellow rectangle into the dark nursery. Hendricks could see that there was blood splashed across the floor and matted into the fibers of Brady’s rug.

  Across the room, Eddie was pushing himself to his knees, one hand pressed to the gash on his chest. Hendricks’s heart ached. She wanted to go to him, to comfort him, but she didn’t think she could move. Her ribs throbbed.

  “Eddie,” she croaked, trying to sit up straighter.

  “Don’t move.” He stumbled, fell, and then picked himself up again. His hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat. “You could break—”

  There was movement in the hallway, and they both froze instantly, like prey animals in the wilderness. Hendricks’s heart was beating fast and hard.

  They waited.

  Nothing.

  And then . . .

  A sound, just outside of the door to the nursery. Like footsteps but slower, dragging. Hendricks met Eddie’s eyes and saw her own fear reflected back at her.

  Not another one, please no, please God.

  Ileana appeared in the doorway, gasping. “There were two of them in the bathroom, but they just disappeared. What did you do?”

  CHAPTER

  28

  Eddie collapsed against the wall, exhaling in relief. Hendricks slid to the floor beside him. Her legs felt weak and shaky. She wasn’t sure she’d ever stand again.

  “I made a sacrifice,” Hendricks explained. “That’s how I got rid of them.”

  She expected Ileana to ask her what the sacrifice was, but the woman only blinked at her. “You see them, don’t you?” she asked after a moment. “The ghosts.”

  Frowning, Hendricks looked at Eddie. “We all saw them.”

  But Eddie was staring at her, mouth agape. Hendricks’s heart stuttered. “Didn’t you?”

  Eddie frowned. Ileana shook her head.

  Hendricks turned to Ileana. “You’re, like, some mystical ghost hunter,” she sputtered. “You honestly expect me to believe you’ve never seen a ghost?”

  Ileana made a sound between a huff and a snort. “Sometimes, in a really intense haunting, the temperature in a room will drop, or maybe I’ll see a strange shadow or a spot of light or feel a presence. But I don’t see actual figures. No one does. Except you did, didn’t you? You said you saw a boy in the bathroom.”

  Hendricks swallowed, her throat feeling suddenly dry. “I’ve seen three, so far,” she said. In her head, she thought, Four if you count the cat.

  Ileana pressed her lips together. “Your sacrifice must have been pretty powerful,” she said very solemnly. “My fox pelt is still downstairs. I’ll need to douse it in rosewater to complete the ritual.” Her eyes moved from Hendricks to Eddie, and one eyebrow went jagged. “Will you two be okay?”

  Hendricks nodded, and Ileana walked out the door. A second later, Hendricks heard her boots thudding against the stairs.

  Eddie pressed a hand to the wound on his chest, blood dripping between his fingers.

  “God, you’re hurt.” Hendricks crouched beside him. “Can I see?”

  He nodded, and she carefully moved his hand away from his chest. The cut was long but shallow, and the bleeding had mostly stopped. “You need a bandage. I think we have some in the bathroom, but—” She glanced at the door to the hallway, hesitating. She didn’t want to go to the bathroom alone.

  Eddie seemed to read her mind. “We’ll go together.”

  Clumsily, he pushed himself to his feet, his free hand moving back to the cut on his chest. Despite her aching ribs, Hendricks pulled his other arm over her shoulder, and the two of them stumbled down the hallway to the bathroom.

  Hendricks flipped the light switch near the door, her eyes immediately moving to the shower curtain. Everything looked normal, but she still felt something in her chest tighten.

  She wondered if she would ever feel truly safe here.

  “Sit,” she said, pulling her eyes away from the curtain. Eddie lowered himself to the toilet seat as she shuffled through the medicine cabinet, pulling out gauze and antiseptic and cotton balls.

  “Can you, um, move your hand?” she asked, motioning with a cotton ball.

  Eddie’s eyes flicked up to hers. For a moment it looked like he might say something, but he just nodded and dropped his hand. Hendricks crouched between his legs.

  “This might sting a little,” she said, dabbing his skin with the antiseptic.

  Eddie cringed, then blushed.

  “I know . . . I hate this stuff, too,” she told him. Hendricks’s voice felt strangely tight. She cleared her throat. “When I was little, like nine or ten, I took a bad fall on my bike and completely shredded the skin on my knees. My dad made me put this stuff on every night until the cuts all closed up, so I wouldn’t get an infection. I swear it hurt worse than messing my knees up in the first place.”

  Neither of them spoke for a beat. Hendricks kept dabbing until her cotton ball turned pink. Eddie’s chest was warm beneath her fingers. Distractingly so.

  “So you’re saying I’m about
as manly as a nine-year-old girl?” he murmured.

  She grinned. “To be fair, I was a pretty badass nine-year-old.”

  “I believe it.” After a moment, Eddie lowered his hand to hers, his fingers lightly brushing the tops of her knuckles. She paused.

  Hendricks’s fingers had been touched a million times before. They were probably the most frequently touched part of her body.

  But this was different. She felt the heat of Eddie’s hand burn through her, spreading up her arm and into her shoulders, down her back, until it was as though he were touching all of her, all at once. Her skin hummed.

  She stopped dabbing, her eyes lifting. Eddie was already watching her, and she felt her cheeks flush as she held his gaze.

  “Hendricks.” He said her name slowly, like he was savoring the taste. “You saved my life tonight.”

  “I—I didn’t,” she breathed. She grabbed a bandage, unwrapped it, and awkwardly pressed it to his wound, letting her hand hover over his chest for a moment longer than necessary, holding it into his skin.

  “Yeah, you did,” he said.

  Hendricks stared at his mouth for a moment, distracted. She could feel his heart beating beneath her palm. She looked at him, and he looked at her, and when she couldn’t stand the silence any longer, she said, “Eddie.”

  The name worked like a spell. He slid to the ground in front of her, his knees gently easing hers apart. He took her face in his hands and pressed his mouth to hers. Their chests touched.

  Hendricks was still for a moment. And then she kissed him back.

  She couldn’t seem to get close enough to Eddie, couldn’t seem to touch enough of him. His fingers traced down the line of her back and then hooked into the waistband of her jeans, thumbs brushing, tantalizingly, against her bare skin. Electricity shot through her. She snaked her fingers up his neck, through his hair—

  She remembered holding Grayson’s jersey above the flame, watching the orange fabric go up in smoke, and the words that had seemed so clear inside her own head.

  I sacrifice love.

  She pictured herself teetering on the edge of a great cavern, pebbles crumbling beneath her feet. One misstep and she’d plummet down and down and down.

  She jerked away from Eddie, blushing. “I’m sorry. I—I shouldn’t have done that.”

  Eddie blinked at her. “What?”

  “I can’t.” The words tumbled out of her mouth, and she regretted them immediately. But she didn’t know how to explain what she’d just sacrificed. She wasn’t sure she understood it herself.

  Would the ghosts come back if she fell in love again?

  The weight of all that she’d just given up pressed down on her shoulders, and for a moment, Hendricks wasn’t sure she’d be able to hold herself upright. She thought of all the years still left ahead of her, years she now knew she’d be spending alone, thinking about this exact moment.

  What had she done?

  Eddie stared at the tile floor, as though he couldn’t bear to look at her. He cleared his throat, fingering the edge of the bandage she’d just pressed to his chest.

  “I should probably go,” he said, his voice low.

  Hendricks felt something lodge itself in her throat. “Yeah.”

  He stared at the floor for several more seconds. When his gaze returned upward, she could see some sort of struggle going on behind his eyes. “See you around, Hendricks.”

  Without another word, he stood and brushed past her, hurrying into the hallway.

  Hendricks let her eyes close, adrenaline churning inside of her. She was dimly aware of the hair rising on her arms, the steady thrum of her heart. Every part of her body felt alive and raw.

  She’d sacrificed love so that the ghosts wouldn’t take Eddie, or her little brother, or her.

  Kissing Eddie was dangerous now.

  But that didn’t mean she didn’t want to do it again.

  CHAPTER

  29

  “We’ll be back first thing in the morning,” Hendricks’s mother was saying. “There’s money for food on the table, and a list of phone numbers for emergencies. Although, why would you need a list? You have all our numbers in your phone already.”

  She seemed to say this last part to herself, so Hendricks didn’t bother answering, or even looking up from her phone. “Uh-huh,” she murmured.

  “It’s just a checkup,” her dad added. “The doctor just wants to touch base with the specialist in New York. Nothing’s seriously wrong.”

  This was directed at Hendricks’s mother, who had been anxious for the last few days. The only thing wrong with Brady was that he hated his tiny baby cast and desperately wanted it off.

  Hendricks glanced up and saw her dad massaging her mom’s shoulders, encouragingly, while her mom buried her face in her hands.

  She put her phone down and flashed what she hoped was a bright, confident smile.

  “Brady is fine,” her mother stated, sounding like she was trying to convince herself. She slid her hands down, so that they were only covering her mouth instead of her whole face. The skin between her brows had creased. “You really don’t mind staying here alone?”

  Her fingers muffled her words, so that it sounded like reallydonminstayinherlone?

  Still, Hendricks caught her meaning. “Nope,” she said. “I’m perfectly okay.”

  And that was the whole truth. She was perfectly okay.

  It’d been two weeks since she, Eddie, and Ileana had gotten rid of the ghosts. Fourteen days where the only noises in the hall came from her parents trying to sneak past her bedroom without waking her up. While she didn’t sleep for the first two nights, she was slowly beginning to trust the new quiet that surrounded her. She even picked up the phone the last time Grayson called and told him that if he didn’t delete her number she was going to call the cops on him again. After that, she stopped seeing his name on her screen. She thought about him less than she had before, and when she did, she didn’t feel nearly as guilty.

  Progress, she thought. Maybe sacrificing love wasn’t all bad.

  “Portia said she might come over to study later, but that’s all,” Hendricks said. Her phone pinged and she slid a hand over it, not bothering to pick it up. No sense clueing her parents into the real plan now. For the first time since moving to Drearford, she was starting to feel normal.

  And normal girls threw parties when their parents went out of town.

  She inched her smile wider. “I’ll be totally fine. Now go.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Raven showed up an hour after Hendricks’s parents left for the city, carrying two shopping bags filled with Jell-O shots. Portia was only a few seconds behind her, tapping at the screen of her phone.

  “I put in an order for a bunch of pizzas from Tony’s,” she said, breezing past Hendricks as if she owned the place. “They’ll be ready in about an hour, but we can send one of the boys to pick them up.” She looked up from her phone and flicked a finger. Blake and Finn trailed in after her, carrying a keg. “Where do you want this?”

  “A keg?” Hendricks asked, stunned. “Since when do we have a keg? I thought we were keeping this thing pretty small. You guys, me, Connor, Vi, and that drama club guy Raven’s into.”

  “Quentin,” Raven said dreamily. Portia rolled her eyes and Raven smirked. “You have to tell her.”

  “Tell me what?” said Hendricks.

  “Portia invited a few more people,” Raven said. Portia shot her a look.

  Hendricks could feel dread creeping over her. “How many is a few?”

  “This wouldn’t have happened if you were on Facebook,” Portia muttered.

  “Portia!” Hendricks snapped.

  Raven grimaced. “She put out an open invite for the whole school. Everyone’s coming.”

  “Everyone?” Hendricks’
s stomach dropped. Their class at Drearford had at least two hundred people in it. There was no way everyone was going to fit inside her house.

  “You were the one who said you want to cleanse the juju in this place,” Portia pointed out.

  Hendricks swallowed. She did say that, but all she’d meant was that she wanted to have some friends over to talk and hang out and help her forget that just two weeks ago she’d been terrorized in her own home. “This wasn’t what I’d had in mind.”

  Portia threw her hands up in the air, exasperated. “Well, I can’t be expected to read your mind. I just figured, you know, nothing cleanses juju better than a good old-fashioned house party.”

  “What do you know about juju?” Raven asked.

  “My grandma back in Nebraska has a psychic phone line.”

  “And she told you a house party cleanses juju? Really?”

  The doorbell rang. Hendricks dug her fingernails into her palm.

  Here we go.

  * * *

  • • •

  Over the next few hours, people filtered into the house regularly. Hendricks played hostess, telling them they could throw their jackets into the spare room and making sure to direct them to the keg sitting on the kitchen counter. Portia and Raven, meanwhile, set up the Bluetooth speaker by the still-empty pool and started the dance party.

  Hendricks was about to join them. She was hurrying down the front hall, to the kitchen, when a voice stopped her in her tracks.

  “Hey.”

  She stiffened. That voice was achingly familiar. She turned and found Eddie standing behind her, leather jacket slung over his shoulders.

  He looked so good. She’d forgotten how his T-shirts were so worn-in and soft looking, begging you to run your hands over the fabric. When he stood this close, she could just make out the smattering of freckles on his nose and the campfire smell of his skin.

  He stared at her with those dreamy dark-fringed eyes, but otherwise, his face was impassive. Guarded.