She started walking again. Slowly, at first, her head hunched against the wind, watching her feet like before. And then she lifted her head, a thought occurring to her. She walked a little faster, and then she started running.
She suddenly realized where she wanted to go.
* * *
• • •
The Drearford Cemetery was about five blocks from Eddie’s house, bordering the edge of town. Hendricks had run the whole way there. When she reached the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the grounds she doubled over, hands propped on her knees, breathing hard. It took her a minute to catch her breath.
Finally, she straightened, wiping the sweat from her forehead. It felt strangely peaceful over here. There weren’t any people, and the only light came from the old-fashioned-looking lanterns that dotted the winding sidewalks. The air smelled like flowers and freshly turned dirt.
Hendricks began to walk. She hadn’t been to the cemetery since Eddie’s funeral, and she was surprised by how pretty it all was, more like a park than a graveyard. The grass was lush and well maintained. Large oak trees shaded the path, and there were little patches of flowers, tulips and daffodils and daisies, planted every few feet. Even the gravestones were beautiful, in a strange way. The marble caught the light of the setting sun and seemed to glow.
It all made Hendricks feel vaguely ill. It was a lie, she thought. This wasn’t a park at all. There were bodies buried beneath the lush green lawn, the swaying flowers. Hundreds of corpses lay in boxes under her feet, rotting. Eddie’s was one of them.
Just a few months ago, she’d kissed his lips and run her fingers through his hair and touched his shoulders, his back. And now he was just meat and bones.
The thought caused tears to spring to her eyes.
It kept hitting her over and over again, how much she missed him.
She wandered through the cemetery, winding around the sidewalks, closer and closer to Eddie’s grave.
Cicadas hummed. The sun dipped behind a distant hill. Shadows stretched toward her, long and dark.
The mood shifted, a chill coming over her. She could see Eddie’s gravestone in the distance now, a small concrete slab jutting up from the earth like a crooked tooth. The shadows were so heavy over here that it wasn’t until Hendricks was standing just a few feet away that she realized there was someone there, some hunched figure kneeling before the gravestone.
Her heartbeat sputtered. Deep in her soul, a small part of her had hoped he would be here.
She stepped off the sidewalk and cut across the grounds, her sneakers kicking up bits of dirt and leaves. The figure in front of Eddie’s gravestone had his back to her, but she could tell that it was a teenage boy wearing a black leather jacket, black jeans, and scuffed combat boots. Dark hair hung over his face. Seeing him, Hendricks felt like someone was squeezing her lungs between their hands. She knew that hair. She’d run her fingers through it.
She stopped walking, feeling suddenly frozen.
“Hi,” she said, her voice a croak.
The boy straightened.
Hendricks didn’t know what to say. Her mouth felt impossibly dry. Her heart was beating so loud inside of her ears that she couldn’t hear anything over it, even her own thoughts. It was Eddie, finally, after all this time, after everything she’d done to try to reach him.
He stood, very slowly.
She took another step toward him, reached out, and touched his shoulder. He turned around.
Hendricks stared for a long moment, confused.
This boy wasn’t Eddie.
He was young, like Eddie had been, but his face was rounder and boyish, a strange contrast with his tall, broad-shouldered body. He had a patchy mustache that didn’t quite connect to the hair on his chin, and though he had black hair, up close it didn’t look like Eddie’s at all. Eddie’s hair had been thick and wavy, but this boy’s hair was thin and straight. His roots were growing in a deep ginger that made it look like his scalp was bleeding.
His eyes narrowed on Hendricks’s face. He was wearing thick black eyeliner that made them look very small and beady.
“Who are you?” he snarled through chapped, cracked lips.
Hendricks couldn’t quite find her voice. “I—”
She stopped speaking as a smell rose up from the ground below her. It was a dank, slightly sweet smell. Fruit gone mushy. Fresh manure. Decay.
Hendricks covered her mouth with her hand, gagging.
Rotten, she thought out of nowhere. That was exactly what this smelled like. It was as though there was something rotting in the ground beneath her, the smell only just reaching her nose.
When she looked up again, she saw that the boy’s face had changed. His teeth looked longer than they’d been a moment ago and crooked, like they didn’t all fit inside of his mouth. There was something between them, something blackish and . . . oozing. The cracks in his lips had grown deeper.
“Who . . . the fuck . . . are you?” Now the boy’s voice seemed layered over other, unearthly voices. His words echoed around her.
Hendricks couldn’t breathe. This was familiar, all of it, so, so familiar. Fear solidified inside of her, leaving her entire body cold. She took one stumbling step backward.
“I—I’m leaving,” she said, and she lifted her hands, like the boy was a wild animal she was trying to keep calm. “I’ll go. Okay?”
The boy’s mouth split into a laugh. The cracks in his lips began to bleed. “Bullshit.”
Then, with a sound like raw meat hitting a cutting board, a chunk of his skin peeled off the bones of his face. It curled away from his cheek, still attached by a thin strip of flesh. A wasp landed on the meat of the boy’s face, its tiny wings twitching.
Hendricks balled a hand at her mouth. She felt sick.
She took a single, slow step backward, and as though waiting for this, the boy’s hand shot out, his fingers curling around her upper arm. He held her roughly in place.
“Hold still,” he said in that strange, layered hiss of a voice. The putrid scent of his breath washed over her, making it hard to breathe.
“Let go.” Hendricks pushed the words through clenched teeth, trying hard to keep herself from inhaling the scent of him, the rot.
She felt a cold wave of fear wash over her. She tried to pull away, and the boy shot his other hand out, now grasping both of her arms. She screamed and arched her back, trying to break free, but he held her so tightly, his fingers pressing against her skin, making her cringe. Laughing, he lifted her off the ground.
She stretched her feet down, down, trying to brush the tips of her shoes against the grass—
He pulled her harder, up, up, up.
“Please. Let me go,” Hendricks said. The boy grinned, showing decaying black teeth. Hendricks squeezed her eyes shut.
“Okay,” he muttered. “I’ll let you go.” He gripped her tighter, then jerked her body away from him, throwing her to the ground.
Hendricks screamed as she landed, hard. The air left her in a whoosh, and for a long moment, all she could think about was the pain. It lit up the entire left side of her body, pounding through her hips and shoulders, making her head scream.
She rolled onto one side, hands grasping at her ribs, wondering if she’d broken anything. It took her a couple of tries to force her eyes open again.
The boy looked her over, grinning. The smell of his breath was enough to make Hendricks start coughing again. Her head began to swim. She couldn’t breathe.
“Please,” she murmured, turning her face into the dirt, as far away from this boy as she could manage. “Please . . . don’t. . . .”
He dragged her off the ground, rocks and sticks slicing at her arms, and pinned her against a large, crumbling headstone. Hendricks grunted, her head lolling forward. She was having a hard time regaining her strength. Darkness flickered at the ed
ges of her eyes. Everything hurt.
And then, she heard something else: a low, throaty gurgle. It seemed to travel a great distance before reaching her ears, and it took her a long moment to realize it was coming from the boy. He was laughing at her pain. Anger flickered through her, and without thinking about what she was doing, she began to drag her hand over the ground, fingers searching for something, anything . . .
There, a rock. Hendricks gripped it clumsily. I’m not a victim anymore, she reminded herself.
With a grunt, she lifted the rock and brought it down against the boy’s skull—hard. He released a groan and crumpled, his grip on her arms loosening.
Hendricks jerked her knee up, catching him right in the gut. He doubled over, crying out in pain. “Bitch.”
Hendricks darted around him and started to run. He turned with a grunt and caught the sleeve of her jacket, pulling her backward, and the momentum sent both of them stumbling to the ground.
Hendricks pushed herself up to all fours, gasping. The ghost got her by the leg, but she was still holding the rock, so she swung out wildly, trying to smash it against his skull. He was too quick. He grabbed her wrist and wrestled the rock away, tossing it to the ground. Hendricks noticed that his fingernails were long and painted black, the polish chipping. She felt a prickle in her skull, remembering how he’d dug those fingers into her throat.
And now, he dragged her backward, pulling her off her knees so that her face slammed into the packed earth. Her teeth cut into her tongue. The taste of dirt and blood filled her mouth. Choking, she tried to push herself up. Her arms trembled. She’d only just managed to pull her knees below her body when he grabbed her by the shoulders, flipping her over so quickly and with so much strength that white stars burst around the edges of her vision. An ache like fire burned through her back. The ghost’s black eyes bore into hers. She could smell his rotten breath.
He pulled a knife out of his pocket, opening it with a flick of his hand. There was still blood dried along the blade.
Hendricks drew in a sharp breath. She could die right here, she realized. Just like Maribeth had died. Just like Kyle and Eddie.
Her heartbeat slammed in her temples. The sound of it blocked out all other noise. Gathering the last of her strength, she kicked out, not aiming, just thrashing.
The ghost grunted and stumbled backward. Hendricks scrambled away—but not fast enough. His hand shot out, fingers catching around her wrist. She yanked her arm back and those long black nails left a jagged gash along her skin, stretching from elbow to her wrist. Blood bubbled up along the scratch.
She screamed and lunged for another rock, hurling it without looking to see where she was throwing. She missed.
“Stay the hell away from me!” she shouted. There were no other rocks to throw, nowhere for her to run. “Stay—”
Her voice died in her throat as the grass around her began to whither. It curled in on itself, turning first brown and then black. Ice crawled up each individual dying blade. The temperature around Hendricks grew several degrees colder. She felt her jaw grow tight.
The boy stared at her, his eyes a deep, solid black, his long teeth hanging over his chapped lips. But he didn’t come any closer.
And then, strangely, he began to sink.
Down, down, down. First his ankles, then his hips, then his torso disappearing into the earth.
Hendricks stood there, frozen for a long moment, one hand pressed to her chest. She watched the ghost’s head sink down below the ground and that’s when she noticed that the dead grass had formed a perfect circle around her.
Almost like something had been protecting her.
She closed her eyes, her head dropping forward. She took a few deep breaths, trying to steady herself, and then she moved away from the tree. On instinct, she pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and checked the time.
9:22, it read.
She blinked, and the time changed. Now, it read 7:43, the correct time. But Hendricks knew what she’d seen.
All she could think about was how badly she wanted to get away from here. But first, she glanced over at the tombstone where the boy had been kneeling. He’d left an inverted pentagram drawn in blood next to the name.
It wasn’t Eddie’s tombstone.
Instead, it read Samantha Davidson, 1970–2019.
CHAPTER
15
Hendricks didn’t realize how badly she was bleeding until she pushed the front door to her house open, and her mom screamed.
“Oh my God! Baby, what happened?”
Hendricks stood there, numb, while her mom raced across the room and began fussing over her arm.
The scratch she’d gotten from ghost’s long, creepy-ass nails looked much more . . . garish in the light. The deep, jagged cut stretched all the way from her wrist to her elbow, and it was still gushing blood. Hendricks looked down and noticed that there was a dark brownish-red smear down one side of her body, over her jacket and her jeans, splattering her shoes.
Damn, she thought distantly. I liked those shoes.
A ruined pair of shoes probably shouldn’t have mattered just then, but it was the one thing Hendricks could think about as her mother knelt beside her, gingerly touching the edges of the cut with her finger. All of the other thoughts were just too horrible. She just felt numb now.
“This might need stitches,” she murmured, grimacing.
“Were you attacked?” This came from her dad, who was hovering nearby, a wriggling Brady in his arms. His face was stony and grim. He was speaking in a voice that Hendricks had only heard him use a few times before, deep and angry. “Was it that boy again? Did he come here?”
That boy. He meant Grayson.
Sometimes her life felt like an endless cycle of one drama after another.
Hendricks shook her head. “No, it wasn’t a boy. I was trying to hop a fence over by Tony’s and my jacket got caught on the metal wire. I fell.”
The lie just popped into her head. It was a pretty terrible lie, now that she thought of it. There weren’t any fences over by Tony’s, for one thing.
Her father frowned at her. He must’ve been squeezing Brady too tightly, because Brady began to squirm in his arms, saying, “Daddy, down.”
“I swear, Dad,” Hendricks rushed to say. “A boy didn’t do this to me.” At least not a living boy, she amended silently. “I fell, that’s all.”
Her father seemed to deflate some. “Well,” he muttered, still looking unconvinced. “Either way, that cut looks terrible. We should go to the hospital.”
The hospital. Hendricks had already been there once, when Brady got hurt a couple of months ago. She remembered the harsh fluorescent lighting and the thick smell of antiseptic in the air. She shuddered.
“Dad, no. No hospital.” She looked at her mom with pleading eyes. All she wanted to do was take a shower and climb into bed and think about what she’d just seen.
The ghost in the graveyard. The gravestone he’d been kneeling beside. Samantha Davidson.
Hendricks didn’t know who Samantha was, but if she was the reason this boy had returned from the dead, she had to figure it out. The idea of wasting time that could be spent researching made her skin itch.
“Please, it’s fine. I just need to clean it up and slap on a few Band-Aids.”
A muscle near her dad’s eye twitched. Hendricks figured he was thinking about how badly he wanted to avoid the nightmare that was the emergency room at this hour, too. He was already in the worn sweats he wore around the house when he knew he wasn’t going to have to leave again, and there was an open beer on the table behind him, condensation still clinging to the glass.
After a moment, his shoulders sagged, and a silent, weary cheer went through Hendricks’s head. She’d won this round.
“You just make sure to put some antiseptic on that cut,” her mom called
after her, as she drifted down the hallway. “And clean it well! Soap and water! I don’t want your arm turning green and falling off.”
“Promise,” Hendricks called back over her shoulder, and ducked into the bathroom.
* * *
• • •
It took several wads of tissue for Hendricks to soak up all the blood from her arm, and by the time she was done, the bathroom looked like a crime scene. There was blood dotting the porcelain sink and a spray of it across the mirror. A pile of bloody tissues sat next to the toilet.
Hendricks ran her arm under warm water from the tap and dug a bottle of first aid ointment and Band-Aids out of the hall closet. It took five Band-Aids snaking up her arm and into the crook of her elbow to cover the whole cut, but she was fairly sure her arm would be okay.
After she’d cleaned the sink and tossed the last of the bloody tissues into the trash, Hendricks fished her cell out of her pocket and texted Portia.
911!! GHOST IN CEMETERY
She pressed send. She hadn’t even managed to move her thumb from the return key when she got a response.
Come over, Portia texted back. I can’t leave my room
Hendricks frowned. Huh? Why? You grounded?
Three little dots appeared, telling Hendricks that Portia was typing. Then they vanished. Hendricks waited for them to appear again, but they never did.
She set her phone down on the sink and walked over to her bedroom window. She could make out the shape of Portia’s shadow moving behind the thin curtain of the house next door. She waited for Portia to throw the curtains back and lean outside, but she didn’t. Weird.
Hendricks doubted her parents would be cool with her leaving again after she showed up with a freaking gouge up the side of her arm, so, as quietly as she could manage, she slid her bedroom window open and crawled outside. The grass was cool beneath her bare feet and a little crunchy with frost. She crept across the ground between hers and Portia’s bedrooms and rapped on the glass.
The Unleashed Page 13
