“Hell?”
“Whatever you want to call it.”
“What if I can defeat him?” I said. “Then you and Odette and the rest of the ghosts from King and Queens can pass peacefully.”
She let out a humorless chortle. “You? Defeat him? I’d sooner bet on Odette or Riley.”
“If you didn’t have at least some faith in me, you wouldn’t be following me around,” I said. “Face it, Stella. I’m your best bet, so you might as well tell me what I need to know.”
She studied me with mixed apprehension and hope. “I suppose you’re right, but you’ve already begun to figure out what you need to know without my help. The reason Jazmin is so affected by him is because the two of you have such a strong connection. Right now, he’s using it against you. You need to find a way to turn it around. Use your love for Jazmin and Riley to fight against him. It’s the opposite of his own power.”
“But Jazmin’s not psychic. Why would he target her?”
“It doesn’t matter if she’s psychic or not,” Stella said. “She has energy—an aura, a soul, whatever you want to call it—which means she can lend her inner power to you. You draw strength from her. That makes you a bigger threat to him than if you were isolated. Haven’t you noticed the discord in your little group as of late? That’s a result of his influence. He wants you separated from your loved ones so that you have no support.”
“Well, he’s doing a great job so far,” I said. “Riley broke her arm and Jazmin had to be taken to the hospital. She has blood poisoning. Are they going to be able to help her or is a demon bite fatal?”
“There is no cure for a demon bite,” Stella said gravely.
My heart plummeted as if I’d been standing on the edge of a cliff and someone had pushed me off from behind. I free fell toward the craggy rock below, blood pumping into oblivion at the thought of having to live without my best friend.
“So you’re saying she’s basically already dead,” I whispered.
“No, I’m not,” Stella replied. “I’m saying that her fate is linked to yours. Should you choose to go up against the demon of King and Queens, the outcome of said duel will affect you, Jazmin, Riley, and everyone else involved.”
“I can still save them?”
“Yes,” Stella said. “You can still save them. I recommend gathering information. I cannot give it to you without revealing my position. As soon as he realizes that I’m traveling to and from White Oak, he’ll put me down and I won’t be able to help you at all anymore. When the time comes, I promise to show up. Until then, you’re on your own.”
Her image began to fade out, the telltale sign that she was leaving this part of the earth for whatever dimension held ghosts from their true place in death.
“Stella, wait!” I called. “How am I supposed to find out more? Who would know something?”
“He comes to you in your dreams,” Stella said, her voice fuzzy as if it echoed over a poorly-tuned radio. “Go to him in his nightmares.”
I sprang Riley from her room in the medical center that night. She was dead asleep with her bad arm tucked against her chest as if to protect it from harm. Her good arm flopped over the edge of the bed, hyperextended at the elbow. Her tiny muscles clenched and loosened in a rhythmic flow. She was dreaming about something. From the way her toes wriggled, I figured the dream had to do with skiing.
“Riley,” I whispered, tapping her on the chest. “Wake up, kiddo. We’ve got work to do.”
She murmured something and tried to turn over, but the plaster cast on her arm got stuck in the bedsheets. The restriction startled her. She yanked herself free and woke up at the same time. When she shot upright, I barely had enough to time to dodge her incoming head butt.
“Lucia!” she gasped as she hugged herself with both arms. “What are you doing in here? Is everything okay?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “Jazmin’s in the hospital, and we’re running out of time. I think I know how to get the information to get rid of this demon guy, but I need your help. Are you up for it?”
“Right now?”
“Yeah. It has to be while I’m asleep.”
Riley swung her legs out of the bed. “Tell me you brought me a pair of pants because this gown is a bit airy in the back.”
I tossed her a pair of sweatpants and a sweater that I’d brought her from the room. “Shake a leg, kid. Let’s get this show on the road.”
White Oak was somehow eerier than King and Queens at night. The silver moonlight filtered in through the lookout, casting a ghastly filter across the lobby. Devoid of guests, the resort’s modern flair lacked warmth. The sharply-angled designs were cold and creepy. The exposed ceiling beams threw long shadows across the floor, like thin bridges that threatened to buckle underfoot, sending passersby to the depths of the rushing river below. I was thoroughly creeped out, but Riley made the empty lobby her playground.
“This is awesome,” she whisper-yelled, jumping onto the nearest white leather sofa to hop up and down. Her purple cast did nothing to hinder her excitement. “We should do this every night.”
“You’re going to get footprints on the fabric,” I scolded her.
“So what?” She deliberately stomped her feet. “Nick’s probably got a steam cleaner on speed dial.” She leapt from one couch to the next with a gleeful chuckle. “This is the most fun I’ve had in ages. You should try it.”
“Maybe once we’ve gotten rid of this demon ghost thing that’s trying to kill us all,” I said. “I broke you out of jail for a reason, remember?”
She jumped high then kicked her legs straight out in front of her so that she landed on her butt. If her resulting wince was any indication, the leather couch wasn’t as kind to her tailbone as she thought it would be.
“You’re right,” she said, rubbing her butt. “What’s the plan? I’m assuming you have a plan.”
I gestured for her to follow me. “I spent the whole day researching people like us. Boy, you wouldn’t believe how many creepy subReddits there are on this crap, but I finally talked to a couple people who have experienced stuff like this before.”
“Uh-huh,” Riley said. “So what are we doing in this gym?”
“I thought we could use the mat room in case this gets weird.”
The mat room was exactly what it sounded like. It was a wide space free of any equipment or furniture and covered wall-to-wall in padded polyester mats. From what I’d heard in my limited time at White Oak, people did all sorts of things in here from mixed martial arts to yoga. The reason I knew about it was because Jazmin had practiced some of her Brazilian Jiu Jitsu rolls in here a few days ago. I ushered Riley inside and locked the door behind her.
We laid a few of the white complimentary towels on the mats to make it more comfortable. I rolled one up and stuck it behind my neck as a pillow. Then I lay flat on the floor as Riley knelt beside me.
“Now what?” she asked.
“Check my bag,” I told her. “I brought everything we need, including the instructions.”
She rifled through the small backpack I’d toted along with me, pulling out white candles, chalk, and a wrinkled sheet of paper covered in my handwritten notes. Lastly, she removed a bottle full of murky green water. She unscrewed the cap and sniffed it.
“Oh God,” she said, screwing up her face at the smell. “Please tell me you’re not going to drink this.”
“We both are,” I said. “It’s Calea. One of the sub-Redditors mentioned it. It’s known as the Mexican Dream Herb. Apparently, it enhances lucid dreaming, and it’s particularly effective for psychics.”
“Lucia, this smells like dead squirrels.”
“Would you shut up? Plug your nose and drink it.”
“Why do I have to go first?” She shoved the bottle at me. “You’re the one falling asleep. I don’t need this crap.”
“We’re connected, remember?” I caught a whiff of the Calea tea’s pungent odor and nearly gagged. I sat up, held my breath, and chugge
d half the bottle. It tasted better than it smelled, but not by much. I shivered as the disgusting brew hit my stomach and handed Riley the bottle. “Ugh. Your turn.”
Riley eyed the pieces swirling around in the water. “How did you do that so quickly?”
“Years of practice.” I rested my head on the towel as my vision began to swim. The tea’s effect was already setting in. “You’ll understand when you get to college.”
“Psh. College. I’ll be lucky if I make it to high school. My family drops like flies, remember?”
“Don’t say that!”
“Whatever. Here goes nothing.”
She gave the tea one last glare before tipping it back and swallowing the remaining portion with a grimace. She shuddered and threw the bottle across the room, where it hit the far wall and rolled to a stop, the sound silenced by the mats.
“I’m gonna hurl,” Riley said. “What’s next?”
“I wrote out the directions for a reason, slick.”
She unfolded the piece of paper and squinted at it in the dark. As she swayed back and forth, I wondered if she was actually moving like that or if it was a side effect of the strange herbal tea we’d just thrown back.
“Draw a chalk circle around the dreamcatcher,” she read off. “I assume you’re the dreamcatcher.”
“That would be correct.”
She fetched the chalk from the floor and made her way around me, scratching it across the blue mats in a rough circle. When she finished, she consulted the instructions again.
“Connect the dreamcatcher to the guardian with a double line,” she recited. “Am I the guardian?”
“You sure are,” I said. “Are you up for it?”
The angle of her mouth set itself in a straight line of determination. “You know it. You’ve been protecting me ever since you got to Crimson Basin. It’s about time I returned the favor. What do I have to do?”
“From what I could figure out, the guardian has the ability to rescue the dreamcatcher if things go too far,” I said. “Some of the people who have tried this ritual before don’t come out of it. They’re comatose because their minds get lost in their own consciousness. Obviously, we’d like to avoid that.”
Riley looked nervous. “What happens if I can’t pull you out?”
“Don’t think about that,” I told her. “I’m counting on you, okay? We have a tight bond. You should be able to sense if I’m in distress, but don’t pull me out too early. I need time to figure out the truth about who this demon ghost really is.”
“You trust me to be able to tell the difference?” Riley asked as she drew a circle around herself and connected us with the double lines. As soon as the chalk from her circle reached the line of mine, a thrum of energy radiated from me to her and back again.
“Feel that?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I squeezed her chalk-free hand. “I totally trust you. Let’s do this.”
The incantation was the weirdest bit of the instructions. Riley had trouble reading my writing because my hand had been shaking earlier when I’d put it all on paper. It was a bizarre Latin phrase meant to invoke “the truth in dreams.” It all sounded a bit ridiculous to me, but I was desperate for a solution. If this worked, we would be one step closer to getting out from under Crimson Basin’s creepy thumb forever.
Riley began to chant, getting a feel for the rhythm of the words. She stumbled over them at first then settled into a beat. She lit the candles one by one, placing them at each of the cardinal directions around me. My eyelids sagged. The steady cadence of Riley’s voice plus the sleep-inducing tea was beginning to take effect. As she lit the last candle and placed it on the double line connecting us, I sank into unconsciousness.
For the second time, I found myself at the top of the bunny slope on King and Queens’ side of the mountain. I was no taller than the waist of the adult woman next to me, who had clearly never skied a day in her life. I glanced over my shoulder, to the east, where White Oak would have been if this were present day. There was nothing there but empty sky. King and Queens was the only resort in Crimson Basin.
I checked out the hill. It wasn’t too steep, and the body I occupied was confident in our conjoined abilities to make it to the bottom without falling. I trusted its instincts and pushed off. We sped across the snow, the skis sliding effortlessly beneath me. Push, push, glide. Push, push, glide. Why did I think skiing was so hard in the first place? This body loved it.
Everything was in crisp, clear focus. I was aware of both myself as Lucia and as the child whose eyes I currently experienced the world through. King and Queens looked the same as it did in my last dream like this. The old wing was still intact. This was before the fire in the eighties that burnt it down. I wondered what it looked like in its prime. I wanted to go inside, but this wasn’t my memory. I was at the mercy of someone else’s mind and body.
Near the bottom of the hill, I spotted Noah—the skinny brown-haired boy—from the last time I’d had this dream. Just like before, I got as close to him as possible before turning my skis perpendicular to him and showering him with snow.
“I thought you might do that,” he said again. “So I came prepared.”
Though I knew the snowball was coming, my host didn’t. She didn’t duck early enough, and the snowball smashed us right in the nose. My awareness couldn’t alter the events of the dream. I had to go with the flow. Noah and I went through our usual banter. It felt comfortable to my host. She was familiar with this boy. They seemed to like each other despite the clear differences in their social status. Noah was all hand-me-down clothes and overgrown hair, whereas when I looked down at my host’s outfit, she was decked out in the newest gear the mountain had to offer.
“Is your mom working today?” I asked.
“Yeah, she’s—”
The hand came down on Noah’s jacket. The jacket tore. The man in the designer suit hauled Noah away from me and shook him. This was my host’s father. He looked familiar. I’d seen him somewhere before, but I couldn’t put a name to his face.
I studied each person through the eyes of my host as the three of us fought about Noah’s presence on the mountain. Noah was scared yet defiant, his eyes wide but his teeth set in a bared grin. The well-dressed man reeked of rage, but there was something else beneath the surface that I couldn’t put my finger on. Though he handled Noah roughly, he seemed to be holding back. Was it for the sake of keeping up appearances for the other guests of King and Queens or was it because of something else? When he tossed Noah aside, he made sure to aim for the deepest snow bank in the area. He didn’t really want to hurt Noah, but when he rounded on me, his grip on my upper arm was painful enough to make me wince.
“Just wait until your mother hears about this,” he growled, tugging me toward the resort.
Last time, I hadn’t made it this far into my host’s memory. I could feel the fear coursing through me as the father figure switched his grip from my arm to my earlobe. If I stalled, the skin burned and threatened to separate from the rest of my head. The man dragged me through a back door of the resort, flashing a badge at his waist to get in. We entered a deserted hallway, no less ornate than the rest of King and Queens, but clearly off limits to the guests. This was the owners’ quarters, the area sectioned off for the Watsons’ use only. The man rounded a corner and pushed me into a small library. Sitting in the book nook, wearing a creamy cashmere sweater dress that outlined her impressive figure, was none other than Stella Watson. She glanced up as the man dragged me in and deposited me at her feet.
“What’s happened now?” she asked in a tone drier than gin.
“She was with that boy again,” the man said. “Noah.”
Stella stood up and cast her book aside. My host scrambled away from her, and I felt a shiver of fear myself. This version of Stella was colder and even more strict than the one that I knew. If I were truly a child, I’d be scared of her too.
“Odette, how many times do I have to tell you
to stay away from that boy?”
With the name, everything clicked into place. It was a wonder I hadn’t figured it out before. My host was Odette Watson, the first ghost I’d ever seen at King and Queens. She was Stella’s daughter, and before she and her family were killed in the fire, she was the princess of King and Queens. That meant the man who separated me from Noah was—
“Richard,” Stella snapped. “Why is he still allowed on the property? Haven’t I asked you to take care of that fifty times already? It’s been eight years.”
“What am I supposed to do?” Richard argued back. “His mother works here, and there’s no one to watch him.”
“That isn’t our problem,” Stella said. “You might as well fire her and be done with both of them.”
“You know I can’t do that without casting suspicion.”
Stella pushed aside her daughter—me—to approach Richard. She smacked him across the face. “We wouldn’t be in this mess if it weren’t for you. Figure something out. I don’t care if you have to plant something on her. I want her and her son out of this resort.”
“Yes, dear,” Richard sneered.
Stella turned her back on both of us. “Get Odette out of here. I was enjoying my afternoon before the two of you ruined it.”
Before Richard could touch me, I rushed for the door. I didn’t want to be in the library any more than Stella did. Richard, however, needed to vent his frustrations. He aimed a kick at my waist line, forcing my back to curve in at a terrible angle. I yelped as a sharp wave of pain rocked through me. My heavy snow boots caught the edge of the carpet, and I went down hard. My nose hit the floor first, causing bright flashes of light to impede my vision.
“Get up,” Richard growled, but he grasped the back of my jacket and hauled me to my feet before I could get my feet under me. He shoved me out of the room and closed the door behind us. “See what you’ve done, Odette? Mommy’s mad, and it’s all your fault.”
“She said it was your fault.”
The comeback dropped from Odette’s mouth before she had fully considered the consequences of it, and she regretted it instantaneously. Richard turned to face me, and I felt the full force of the fear Odette had of both her parents. He bore down on me, his hand raised at the level of his eyes. As he swung through, aiming for Odette’s face, the hellfire took over his eyes.
The Haunting of Riley Watson Page 53
