I hadn’t forgotten that and still wanted to know what it was I’d seen. There were so many questions and so little time to ask all of them.
I bit my front teeth, feeling a twinge of pain at her words. Mom had been dead and buried almost ten years, but to hear Annabelle confirm she wasn’t there, maybe I’d been hoping to get a chance to see her now too. Since Annabelle was here, why was it unrealistic to imagine Mom might not come back?
Annabelle was so close to me now that my skin tingled from the current of energy that flowed from her into me.
“So that’s a haunting?”
She nodded. “Essentially, yes. When you go someplace where terrible and deadly violence occurred, sometimes trace memories get left behind. Images, so real that you can touch them, feel them, sometimes even taste them. It’s called an imprint and it is full of darkness.”
“So what happened? How is it in here now?”
She rubbed her hands nervously together and I wanted to hold her. Comfort her. I clenched my fingers tight.
“I was killed outside. Me and Jules, that’s all I remember.”
“The wolf? Who would do that?”
She shook her head. “Jules...isn’t a wolf. He is...was,” she thinned her lips, “a shifter. And he was my fiancé.”
My nostrils flared, and ice settled in the pit of my stomach. “Your fiancé? I see.”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Of course she’d had a life before all of this. And it wasn’t like I had any claim to her. She was dead for crying out loud. I was firmly rooted in the land of the living. So why the heck couldn’t my brain seem to grasp that simple concept? And why had I suddenly felt like I’d been sucker punched?
“It’s...it’s not like that. Not anymore, Dante,” she said softly, not looking at me. “He lives his afterlife as a shifter now. There is very little of the man left in him, and it’s been many years now since we’ve thought of each other in that way. He is merely my companion in death as I am his.”
Feeling stupid because I’d clearly not hidden my feelings as well as I’d hoped, I said, “I’m sorry if you thought I was—”
“No,” she swatted my words away, “Of course not. I just felt you had a right to know.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why were you killed? I’ve read about your death, Annabelle, and it doesn’t make any sense to me. It just feels so random and yet not.”
Her laugh was bitterly cold. “I think you’d know more about my death now than even me. When I died I turned off all the memories, severed them from my conscious mind, until now I’ve lost them completely.”
“The article I read said your bodies were found in the snow lying feet apart, he was face up and you were face down. You were killed by a blow to the back of your head. You don’t remember this at all?”
She shrugged. “I wish I did. I wish I could remember. Maybe then Jules wouldn’t have been bound to this place.”
I shook my head, hating the fact that if she’d not been bound too I never would have met her, and a small part of me was selfish enough to be glad for it.
Which made me feel like the worst scum of the earth.
“What do you think Hyacinth is going to do?”
“Make me remember,” she sighed.
“To what end? What if you just shut it out again? Trapped it back outside?”
She shook her head and looked miserably down at the table beside us. “I don’t even know how I let it in, something is happening to me, Dante. I’m feeling more than I have in so long. It’s like I’m coming awake and it’s completely out of my control. I never intentionally trapped it outside, and I have no idea how to put it back out there. But if I can break its bond to me, then maybe I can set Jules free. Maybe I could be freed too.”
A terrible feeling of helplessness came over me, and I hated that I was so selfish that the idea of her leaving left me feeling cleaved. That wasn’t fair to her.
I opened my mouth, but the kitchen door was flung open and in stepped Hyacinth and my dazed looking sister whose hair—never known to be tamed—was a riotous mass of unruly curls poking up every which way.
“We flew,” Blue said. “Flew.” She mimed flying with her hand and then giggled, a sound that sounded just short of being mental. The whites of her eyes nearly eclipsed her irises. Her dress had slid down one shoulder and was hanging limp and lopsided. I’d never seen my twin look so discomposed.
“Oh tut, dinna be such a baby, I told ye I’d not let ye fall.”
“You barrel rolled. And not just once either.” Blue was starting to get the shakes.
I felt kind of bad for my sister. Maybe something a little harder than tea would help steady her nerves. I glanced toward the cabinets. I was sure I’d seen a bottle of something hidden around here somewhere.
Blue was already one step ahead of me. She moved shakily toward the cabinet, grabbed a mug and poured a generous serving of now lukewarm tea into it. Then she reached behind a large potbellied soup pot and grabbed a dark bottle. She poured a generous serving of that out too then took a sip, grimacing but sighing all at once.
Hyacinth scoffed and then gestured at a massive and ancient looking book in her hands. “We’ve no time for idle tittle tattle. You lived, end of story. I’ve got another straggling about outside, but once Zinnia comes in we’ll be laying some ghosts to rest, aye.”
In my short time knowing her, Hyacinth had never been anything but taciturn. Now though, she was brimming over with barely leashed anticipation. She began to hum cheerily beneath her breath as she placed her weathered tome down in the center of the table and began pulling strange items out from a hidden pocket in her bell sleeve.
“And that there’s a sadist as I live and breathe,” Blue whispered, creeping up behind me with a mug that smelled more of a liquor than of tea.
Truer words had never been spoken.
Chapter 9
Dante Martin
HYACINTH AND ZINNIA bustled us all out of there, telling us they had to ready the home for channeling and to clear out any unwanted spirits, and that us standing around like bumps on a log would only impede their work.
Well, Hyacinth had said it. Zinnia had apologized profusely for her cranky aunt, who’d merely snorted and sauntered off, muttering incantations beneath her breath as she held onto the tiniest cast iron cauldron I’d ever seen. Neon green smoke had been belching forth from it and had surrounded the green-skinned witch in a fog of it, making her appear slightly sinister. All she needed now was the beaked and warty nose and she’d be the perfect caricature of Hansel and Gretel’s witch.
Blue, who was still dealing with a case of the shakes, had crawled into her VW bus and slammed the tie-dyed curtained door behind her. A sign that she would cut me if I tried to interrupt her meditation chants. Or whatever the heck it was she was doing. Smoking a bong was probably more like it. But whatever worked.
I glanced over to where Annabelle hovered. She hadn’t wanted to leave the shelter of the house, and I’d been able to tell that by the way she hesitated before crossing the threshold. But she’d done it, stopping once she reached the weathered banister of the porch.
There was a swing beside her. I should join her, but I wasn’t sure whether she’d welcome my intrusion. She’d grown so quiet tonight and distant. And I got it. I might not like it, but I understood it.
Not sure what to do, I found myself stuck right where I’d stopped when I’d exited ten minutes ago, standing by the door, feet firmly cemented in place.
I looked at the giant ball of light in the sky. The moon was so deeply blue here and massive to gaze upon, it almost looked unreal.
I couldn’t even remember how many days I’d been here now as each day had blended into the next. It seemed like I’d been here forever sometimes.
Like my life of numbers and my occasional weekends with Lili hadn’t been my life at all, but someone else’s. Someone always so stressed out that he’d had to gnaw on antacids li
ke it was candy just to make it through a day. I almost couldn’t reconcile the man I’d been then to the one I was now, just a handful of days later.
It was like my life had flipped the script. Now I was hanging out with witches and trying to send a ghost to the other side. Weird and complicated didn’t even begin to describe things.
I heaved a sigh as I ran my fingers through my hair. When I looked up, I saw her looking at me with her big luminous indigo eyes. The short cut of her almost midnight black hair seemed to gleam like an inky brushstroke beneath the gentle glow of the porch light.
I swallowed hard.
“You gonna be okay, Annabelle?”
Her smile was sad. “I was just about to ask you the same. You don’t have to be here, Dante. I can’t imagine this would be your ideal way of spending a Friday night. It sure wouldn’t have been mine.”
Heart beating just a little bit harder as I neared to her side, I never looked away from her as I finally took a seat on the porch swing I’d been eyeing the past ten minutes.
When I sat I felt myself relax just a little. I wanted to ask her about what was to come, what all of this meant. What the witches were doing and would she really leave if her door came for her.
But time felt fleeting, and there were so many other things I wanted to know too. Like who she’d been. And what she’d loved.
“What would you have done on a Friday night?”
Annabelle looked at first surprised by my question, but then a slow smile rolled across her lovely features and she said, “Oh, Friday nights were the bee’s knees. I lived during prohibition you see, but a little thing like the law never broke my will to have fun. Friday nights me and my mates were always at the Blind Pig just down the street. Drinking and gambling till the sun came up.”
“Blind Pig?” I asked.
“You might know it as a speakeasy. I was rather fast and loose back then.” She waggled her fingers and gave me an effervescent smile. “Life was short, so why not live a little?” She glided toward the spot right beside me and sat, though the chain did not creak from being forced to support her weight.
I drowned in the smell of her frost and flowers, swaying without thought toward her. I knew the moment our shoulders brushed because I felt the zip of black ice skate down my spine.
But unlike the darkness, her ice didn’t hurt me. I inhaled deeply as I slowly rocked the swing. The rhythmic squeak of the chain played like a melody through the still night.
“What about you?” she asked a moment later. “What would you have done on a Friday night?”
“Me?” I rolled my eyes. “Well, my Friday would have been a wild party of checking my investment portfolio. Maybe watching a couple of mind-numbing hours of C-SPAN. And if I was feeling really froggy, I might have even run out for a pint of vanilla bean and fudge ripple at the creamery down the road. Yeah, the life of the party, that’s me.”
She chuckled and I sighed, deciding that just this once—since time was such a fleeting thing for us—I would open up to someone else.
“I didn’t always suck so much though, you know.”
She turned to me with her brows lowered and her lips pulled down. “You don’t suck, Dante. I don’t think.” She looked puzzled. “I’ll admit your modern vernacular sometimes confuses me.”
Rocking us gently back and forth, I stared out at the fog dappled woods beyond and thought that this would be a memory I’d remember even on my deathbed. The sheer pleasure of just being with someone I really wanted to be with, coupled with the gentle nip of chill in the air that hinted at winter being just around the corner. Fall and winter had always been my favorite times of year.
I chuckled low, feeling uncommonly content.
“No, I think you got the gist of it. Thing is, once upon a time,” I glanced at her askew, debating whether or not to be honest and then deciding to just go for broke because deep down I knew I could trust her, “the life I had wasn’t at all the life I really wanted growing up.”
“No?” A curious smile played along her plump lips. “So what did you want to be then?”
I glanced over, seeing the wooden siding of the house like a picture through her. My smile was sad. It was too easy to forget sometimes who I was talking to.
“Mom was big into restoring the classics. Really didn’t matter what, you know. Anything vintage or antique was what got her going after Dad died. But her real passion was woodworking. We used to have this little old neighbor who lived down the road from us, and he had this awesome woodshop in the back of his house. Told us he’d stopped working back there cuz of his arthritis, but that we were welcome to it and the tools whenever we wanted. Mom and I spent most of our weekends there. We’d buy these really trashed pieces of furniture and restore them, sell them on the side for a little bit of spending money. Which we basically rolled back into our business. Her one dream though was buying an old house someday and restoring it back to its former glory.”
Realizing I was babbling, I clamped my lips shut and gave her a self-conscious grin. She was beaming though.
“That sounds so lovely, Dante. I never had a Mama. Or a Daddy for that matter, never really felt I was missing much either. But I think I might have liked it if I’d had ones like yours.”
I brushed my hand over my hair and chuckled. “That all probably sounded corny to you. And foolish. Idealistic, no doubt. There definitely wasn’t any money in it.”
She laid her hand on my forearm, and the ice of her touch made me tremble. “But the memories are worth more than that. She’s gone now, Dante, but your love for each other lives on because of it. I think it’s beautiful.”
I went still, waiting for her to laugh it off or tell me she was only teasing. Lili had seemed distressed when I’d confessed to her over drinks one night that I’d never planned to become a boring accountant. In fact, she’d been so derisive and dismissive about it that I’d never brought the topic again.
“You really think so?”
Annabelle’s smile was guileless. “Of course I do, Dante. And I know you think dreams are dead, but I think that maybe you were brought to Blue Moon Bay for a reason.”
I bit down on my front teeth, wanting so badly to tell her so many things, knowing I’d be a fool to say any of them. Annabelle was my calm in the raging tide and unknown of my life, but we were ships passing in the night. This could never be between us.
“I should...” she swallowed and glanced at me uncertainly, “I should warn you, Dante. Blue Moon Bay isn’t what you think it is.”
I snorted. “If you’re talking about this place being full of monsters and other creatures that go bump in the night, it’s a little too late for that. Cat’s out of the bag. You guys do a terrible job hiding it.” I shoulder bumped her and phased right through, sighing because it was so easy to forget sometimes.
She chuckled huskily. “No, not that. Truth is, our town is cursed to be forgotten by the world save for once in a blue moon. When the veil parts, humans can come and go as they please, but soon the veil will close over us again and anyone here when it does will be forced to remain. And...I...I thought you should know that for once I’m...gone.”
I thinned my lips. “Hey, don’t worry about curses right now. Believe me, if there’s one thing Blue and I excel at it’s surviving. Will we at least get a heads-up when the apocalypse gets ready to roll back through town?”
“Green fog. You’ll always see the green fog first. And then go, Dante. Promise me, go and live and buy your old house someday and fix it. There won’t be anything else here for you in Blue Moon Bay.”
Her face was tense, her fingers curled on her robed lap. I wanted to take her hand in mine and give it a gentle squeeze. Let her know I was okay. No matter what happened, I’d bounce back. Somehow I always did.
“Promise me,” she asked again, voice so low it was barely a whisper.
“Promise.” I winked, hating how much all of this sounded an awful lot like goodbye.
Her eyes thinned. �
�You wouldn’t lie to me just to shut me up?”
“Me,” I tapped my chest, “I’m offended you’d think so low of me.”
She giggled and slapped playfully at my chest, icy fingers bringing a delicious zip of tingles down my spine.
“You know what I mean, you silly boy.”
I lifted my brow and rocked us gently. “I’m no boy, Annabelle. And I do promise.”
Now it was her turn to shiver as a soft smile played along her lips, and though she didn’t say she’d noticed I was definitely a man, I could practically hear her think it.
We gazed up at the sky peppered with twinkling stars.
“This is nice,” she said softly a couple of minutes later.
I glanced at her translucent form beside me, surprised all over again how very unweird this was for me. From the second I’d locked eyes with her, I’d been able to accept this new reality far too easily. It just felt right. Thoughts of leaving Blue Moon Bay, of going back to the city and looking for a job, were becoming little more than a random thought here and there.
I knew this couldn’t last forever, especially if everything went according to plan and Annabelle got her doorway out of limbo, but I could enjoy the few moments we still had left.
“What is?” I asked just as softly as her, afraid to spoil the intimacy of the moment by speaking too loudly.
“This. You. The night. Having company. I’ve been so alone for so long that I thought it was what I wanted, but I forgot how good it felt to be around other people. Well,” she snorted, “people who don’t faint and run away at the sight of me that is. I have no time for people like those.”
I coughed into my fist remembering I had, in fact, fainted. Thank God she didn’t seem inclined to hold it against me.
“Don’t you have friends here?” I asked, aching at the thought of Annabelle being shut up in this big house all by herself for God only knew how long. “I can’t imagine that being alone so long would be good for anyone, not even a ghost.”
Holly, Curses, and Hauntings Page 12
