by Sarah Dalton
“He wants her,” one says.
“She’s important,” says another.
“We’ll help him get her,” says the third.
“That means stopping you,” says the fourth.
“Killing you. Forever,” says the last.
“You’ll never get her,” I reply. I feel the power flooding through me, fuelled with anger for what has happened to my friend. My hair lifts from my shoulders as the electricity imbues me with strength. “I’ll never let you.” I snap my teeth at them and think I see Willa flinch from the other side of the room.
The ghosts come at me with their clawed hands ready to scratch me to pieces. But I throw as much strength at them as I can, knocking two off their feet. I’m vaguely aware of Mary bucking against the bed and Jack yelling for her to wake up. Willa carves the symbols around on of the ghosts as I fight the others, resorting to clawing at them like a wild animal. I cry out in pain as a ghost bites into my arm. I hiss at her and draw my hand back to scratch her face. But another ghost grabs that arm and drags me back. I wrench myself free of their grip and shove them through the wall of the room, before turning back and kicking the biter in the chest. Willa plunges the knife into the chest of a ghost, but then she’s attacked from behind.
“Willa!” I shout.
The ghost wraps its fingers around Willa’s neck, squeezing tight. She drops the Athamé and tries to pull at the ghosts fingers, but her hands move straight through its form, scratching at her own neck.
I push my way through the fighting ghosts to get to her, throwing myself on top of the ghost strangling Willa. My hands claw at her head, pulling her back. When Willa is free, she drops to the floor and retrieves the Athamé. Then, quick as a cat, she’s back up, carving a symbol into the air.
But I’m pulled off the ghost by two others. They drag me away from Willa, who is desperately trying to carve the second symbol to stop the ghost from moving. Her wrist flicks through the air.
“Just stab it!” I cry.
Willa’s head snaps up. Her eyes widen. Then she focusses back on the ghost, leans forward, and plunges the knife through the ghost’s heart. There’s a burst of light as the dead girl screams up at the ceiling. Then in a flash, her original form is shown, before she disappears from the room.
“So I guess we don’t need the symbols to send them back!” Willa says, with her eyes bright and wide.
With three ghosts left, we have a good chance of ending this. Willa strides over towards where the ghosts are holding me captive. She slashes the knife towards them and they cower back, letting me go. But the girl from the bridge seems stronger than the others, more determined. She snaps her teeth and charges at Willa, knocking her to the ground, so that the Athamé falls onto the carpet. I snatch it up, focussing my energy on holding this object. Willa screams as the ghost drags its fingernails across the flesh of her neck. Without even hesitating, I plunge the knife into the ghost’s heart.
When I retract the blade, the ghost staggers back. It’s like the breath has been knocked out of me when the ghost turns and meets my gaze with its disorientated eyes. At first I think she’s going to berate me for stabbing her, but then she changes back into the girl she was before she jumped to her death.
She opens her lips as she’s disappearing from the room. “Thank you,” she whispers.
Then the light consumes her and she’s gone.
I’m trying to get my breath back when Mary lifts from the bed, knocking Jack to the floor. She sucks in a deep breath, and then she screams one word.
“Bram!”
Chapter Twenty-Five
MARY
How long did it go on for? I don’t know. How long did he beat me before I woke up? It felt like hours, days. But I open my eyes and I’m in Jack’s bedroom. His hands are on both my shoulders and he’s talking to me, but I can’t figure out what he’s saying. Lacey is pale and pasty. Her eyes are wide. She’s staring at me, holding the Athamé. Willa is next to her. But there are two more ghosts in the room. Two ghosts from Bram’s suicide-girl army. The room is oddly still. From the mess in the bedroom, and Willa’s scratched neck, I can see that there’s been a fight, but now no one is moving. The two suicide ghosts are staring at the remains of a bright light with their jaws hanging open.
“Talk to me. Are you hurt?” Jack demands. His brown eyes search my face, my body, intense and concerned.
I touch his face, trying to calm him. “I’m fine. I need to get Bram.” I swing my legs over the bed, ignoring their hollowness. “He will stand before us.”
The two ghosts slink away from us, disappearing through the wall of the bedroom. Lacey passes me the Athamé.
“Mary, you don’t look so good.” Lacey flashes me a grin. “But I’m glad to see you.”
“Are you sure you’re up to this?” Jack asks. “What happened in the dream?”
I shake my head. “You don’t want to know.” And he really doesn’t. I don’t think I can repeat any of it. I shudder at the thought. I think of Bram in the woods, chasing me down, hitting me, his fists pounding my flesh. I can’t… I have to focus.
“Bram! I demand you face us!”
“Oh God,” Willa says. She moves across the room to where Jack is standing. “I don’t know if I can face him.”
“You can,” I say. “You’re strong. You can do this.”
“Willa, you just took down three ghosts on your own,” Lacey says. “You can face Bram.”
“Seriously?” I reply, genuinely impressed.
Willa nods shyly.
“We’re a team. We can take down Bram. We’ve evened out the playing field. I think standing up to Bram in my dream helped to weaken him. He gains strength from manipulating people into doing what he wants. He feeds off that energy. Well, we’ve stopped that cycle. Now all we need to do, is dagger him.” I turn the Athamé over in my hand. This has to work. One more time. “Bram. Come and face us.”
The temperature of the room drops. The lights flicker on and off. Willa moves closer to Jack, and Jack tenses his jaw. My damp palm grips the Athamé. I move to stand next to Jack, all of us now in front of his desk, staring at the door to his room as though we expect him to walk in the door like a regular person. Even Lacey is tense. Her eyes are hard and determined. Her arms are folded. But there are dark circles of fatigue under her eyes. I hope she’s strong enough to help us fight these ghosts.
That’s when I realise. We’re an army, too. Bram tried to create his own army of ghosts, but what he did was force us to become the team we needed to be. I smile to myself. I actually believe we can do this.
But the room goes dark, and the window cracks. The overhead bulb explodes, plunging us into the dark. Bram’s grinning face appears before me. My first reaction is one of horror, triggering memories from my dream. I almost drop the Athamé.
Bram takes advantage of my moment of weakness. He grasps me by the throat. Willa’s first reaction is to scream, while Jack punches at him, but his fist goes straight through him. Jack screams in frustration. Lacey is the only one with a cool head. She hits Bram on the nose, and then scratches at his hands until he loosens his grip on my throat. I stagger back, sucking in the cold air. Bram disappears with a laughter that chills through my skin to the marrow of my bones.
When he comes back, he’s with the two ghosts. His minions. He stands on the other side of the room and tuts at us.
“You’ve taken my girls. That makes me very angry. But it does warm my heart to see you again, Sister Willa. You are as beautiful as I knew you would be, but then I already know that, because I’ve been watching you.”
Willa pales. “You disgust me.”
“You disgust me, too, Sister Willa. The things you do with those other girls. You’re a deviant, Sister.”
“Shut your mouth,” Jack snaps.
“Brother Jackal, you’re as much of a pest as always.” He smiles slowly. “If only I’d had the chance to kill you. Never mind, I’ll enjoy it just as much now that I’m dead. Ma
ybe more. You always thought you were better than me, didn’t you?”
“No,” Jack replies through gritted teeth. “You always thought you were better than everyone else, and that was your problem. You thought you were Father’s favourite. Maybe you were, I don’t know. Maybe you two enjoyed being psychopaths together, killing children and leaving them on the moor. Whatever. You’re sick. You’re a sick, narcissistic bully who enjoys hurting people. You murdered all those girls and now you’re going to pay for it.”
“Oh, boohoo,” he taunts. “Mr. Moral over here. You were born evil, even Father Merciful thought it. That’s why he called you Jackal.”
Jack’s face loses colour. His jaw slackens in horror. Bram’s words have cut him deep. He’s hit a deep insecurity in Jack. I can’t believe anyone could think that Jack is evil. Not after the way he’s helped me. And Willa. She’s goodness all the way through.
Bram turns his cold eyes to me. “We were just getting started, my love. The nightmare had only just begun. Why did you wake up so soon? There was so much more I wanted to do.”
“What did you do to her?” Jack demands.
But I hardly hear him. The room seems to narrow so that all I can see is Bram, standing there, taunting me. I race at him, with the Athamé high in my hand. He smiles sardonically, enjoying this game of cat and mouse. The psychopath probably enjoys pain as much as he enjoys inflicting it. I don’t care. I’m going to end this.
Lacey is by my side in an instant. When one of Bram’s sidekicks attempts to stop me, she crashes into them, knocking them away. Her hand lifts up and she scratches the girl across the face. Bram stands before me, not moving. I slash the knife at him, but he disappears, leaving me falling into the ghost behind him.
“Mary, you can stab the ghosts through the heart without the symbols,” Willa shouts out. “It still works.”
But the ghost won’t stay still. I catch her on the arm with the knife, but when I try to stab her through the heart, she gasps and sinks through the floor. Then there are hands on my shoulders, dragging me back.
“Remember our dreams? Remember our sweet kisses,” he whispers in my ear. “You taste like ice cream.”
I wriggle away from him, every part of my body flailing away from his touch. He makes my skin crawl. He tugs on my hair.
“Mary!” Jack shouts.
“The Athamé!” I throw the knife up in the air as Bram snakes his fingers back around my throat. The Athamé flies up through the room, behind my back. I have no idea if anyone has managed to catch it, but I can only hope.
I’m choking. Bram’s cold, dead fingers squeeze ever tighter. Black dots dance in front of my eyes. Willa screams loudly as I feel myself sinking to the floor. The floor is moving. What? What is that? I’m so tired, so exhausted from everything that has happened. I long to stop, to give up, to make all this over. Something scratches at my legs. There’s a sensation, like an animal scurrying up my body. Someone else, it could be Jack, begins to beat at my legs, knocking the scurrying creatures from my legs and torso.
Rats.
He’s brought rats to the house.
Every inch of me feels like it’s turning to ice.
But there’s a voice in my mind telling me to keep fighting, to keep trying to get free. I need to focus on Bram, not the disgusting rats making my flesh crawl. Even my life, so touched with death as it is, is special enough for me to grasp it with both hands and fight for it. I won’t let go. I won’t let this darkness take me…
I fall to the floor. Above me is a bright light with a boy hovering within it. Standing over the boy, holding a knife—which is buried deep within the boy’s chest—is Jack. His eyes are level with Bram’s. The two of them stare at each other.
“I know where your mother is,” Bram says.
“Tell me!” Jack demands.
Bram shakes his head. “I don’t need to. He’s going to find you, you know.”
“Who?” Willa moves closer to the light.
But Bram is fading, he’s being pulled to the otherside. “Father Merciful.”
The bright light is gone.
*
“That’s the last of them.” Willa rubs her palms over her jeans as though ridding them of dirt. “I’m glad that’s over.”
“Well, I guess you could say that you’ve been trained in the art of slaying ghosts,” I say. “Although, I might have found an easier introduction for you.”
“I learned a new thing,” she says with pride. “Now we know that we don’t have to perform the symbols. We can just stab them.”
“Yes, but the symbols do help to keep them still,” I say. “They are slippery bastards.”
“Hey, who are you calling a bastard?” Lacey replies with a grin.
I’m on Jack’s bed, propped up with cushions. Willa has sent the last of Bram’s spirits to the spiritworld, or wherever it is they go. The rats scuttled out of the house after Bram was sent away. They seemed even more confused than we were.
Bram is no more, and every ion in my body is glad of it. At one point I’d thought that Bram was my salvation. Now I know he was nearly my destruction.
Jack sits on the chair next to the bed, leaning his chin on his fist, thoughtful and melancholy. Bram’s words hurt him the most. I can’t even imagine what it’s like to lose a mother, and then get taunted about where she is. I reach across and take his hand. His eyes lift to meet mine and a tingle runs down my spine. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the way he looks at me.
“We’ll find your mum,” I say. “We’ll do it together, okay.”
He squeezes my hand. “Thank you.”
Willa lifts a lamp from the floor and puts it back in its rightful place. “If our father really is looking for us, we need to be prepared.”
“Our father is in prison,” Jack says.
Willa shakes her head. “What if he isn’t? What if he’s dead?”
The word hangs in the centre of the room. It’s not something I want to think about. Bram was a strong, manipulative, powerful ghost. Willa’s father is the leader of a cult. He’s charismatic and dangerous. If he became a ghost, he’d be just as powerful as Bram, if not more so.
“Let’s not jump to any conclusions,” Lacey reminds us. “We don’t know anything yet. We need to investigate this. But we can do it. Together.”
Willa smiles at her, and I finally figure it out. They’re a couple. I frown. Maybe I’ll worry about that some other day.
“There’s something else we need to say.” Lacey turns to me. “Mary, we’ve let you down. You were in trouble and we didn’t help you in time. It’s been Jack telling us to help you over these last few weeks. He’s been the one looking out for you. I’ve let you down, I’m sorry.”
Tears spring to my eyes. I wipe them away quickly. “There’s nothing to be sorry for.” My voice cracks. “I’m… I’m ready to accept help. There’s something wrong with my mind. I don’t know if it’s PTSD or something else, but I’m ready to acknowledge it.”
Jack grips my hand even tighter. Now I can’t stop the tears falling. Willa climbs onto the bed and wraps her arms around my shoulders. Her eyes are damp, and soon I feel the wetness of her tears through my top. Lacey joins in, hovering over us both, her electricity pulsing through us. Then Jack comes closer, wrapping an arm around me. I sob on them all. My friends. My family.
~ A Note from the Author ~
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About the Author
Sarah grew up in the middle of nowhere in the countryside of Derbyshire and as a result has an over-active imagination. She has been an avid reader for most of her life, taking inspiration from the stories she read as a child, and the novels she devoured as an adult.
Sarah mainly writes speculative fiction for a Young Adult audience and has had pieces of short fiction published in the Medulla Literary Review, Apex Magazine, PANK magazine and the British Fantasy Society publication Dark Horizons.
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