This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, business establishments, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Published in Canada and the United States of America by Bad Unicorn Press, Vancouver B.C. www.DJHolmes.com
Copyright Dee J. Holmes and Saranna DeWylde ©2019
Cover Art by Bad Unicorn Designs
ISBN: 978-1-9995178-7-8 (eBook)
978-1-9995178-8-5 (Print)
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Thanks & More
About the Authors
For all those who share our love of dark places, best friends and rock n’ roll.
Chapter One
An hour ago, I buried my mother in the cold, wet November ground. And now, in the middle of her wake, my so-called father had gone and sold his soul.
Was this what the loser parent did when the good one died on Halloween?
I guessed so.
Trust Jim to take a shitty situation and fuck it up worse. The man who’d abandoned us and only returned when my mother could barely gasp into a respirator. Looking at him through the shifting sea of black-clad strangers, I knew what he’d done. I couldn’t explain it, but I knew it. He should have been in full color, but his skinny form flickered into shades of gray. A sickly shadow circled his chest; the sight of it made my whole body go hot and cold at the same time.
An alarm screamed in my head, clanging with a single word: soulless.
He’d left the small apartment front room, crammed with people wearing fake smiles, and returned with a mound of swaying, purple gelatin.
Plus one dessert for the shitty buffet table—minus one soul.
All in all, I’d bet he’d sold it for something stupid. Jim was like that.
Asshole.
If I ever turned today into a song, it would be the angriest, most vicious country ballad to ever crawl out of a metal guitar.
I stared at the cake-shaped gelatin undulating before Jim.
Jesus Fucking Christ, when I dropped dead, assuming anyone missed me, I hoped they wouldn’t mark my life with a Jell-O mold. At least not one that horrifying. It was dark purple and heavily populated with strangely-shaped pale chunks—something that belonged in an Addams Family remake, not on a table for actual human consumption.
Why would anyone think something like that was a good thing to bring to a funeral?
Didn’t they know I’d seen enough odd growths in the past two years to last me a lifetime?
No. I guess they didn’t. Barely three of the twenty-somewhat people crammed into our apartment had ever spoken to me before today. They hadn’t visited the hospital and they hadn’t called. So I guess they were exactly the type to bring cancerous Jell-O to a funeral. No wonder Jim seemed so happy standing there, holding the scary thing and smiling at useless strangers as if he hadn’t just sold his soul.
He placed the dessert in the center of the table and faced me.
A table, a couch, and at least ten people lay between us—I still shivered. I guess his hand lifted in a hesitant wave, his mouth formed a smile—but all I could see were the lines of gray writhing through his body like demonic worms.
I swallowed hard.
Part of me wanted to beg for a divine intervention, but the Powers That Be hadn’t seen fit to intervene in this shit show yet, so why expect them to start now?
I inched backward, ducking under the waving arms of a downstairs neighbor. I needed to get out. Find a place to hide. Although, I didn’t know what I was hiding from. He’d lost a soul, not gained a…
I froze, heart beating frantically.
If he lost his soul, had he stuffed something else where it was supposed to be?
No. Somehow I knew that wasn’t the case. The person who’d come back from the kitchen was less than what had left—which was really saying something. I didn’t think he could be any more foul and alien to me than he had been an hour ago in the cemetery when he’d awkwardly tried to hold my hand.
I hadn’t let him.
Why would I? It wasn’t like he’d lost someone he’d loved.
My hands tightened, fisted into the damp cloth of my stupid black dress. Why bother selling your stupid soul now? I silently raged. She’s gone! You left us and never looked back. No word or card or phone calls for ten years. Not until the time had passed for all the doctors, the hard conversations, the needles and tubes and finally the waiting… Not until all my dreams, all my hopes were ready to be laid to rest in the cold November ground along with my mother.
I wanted to charge across the room, slam my fists into his chest and demand answers. Why couldn’t he have sold himself to save her? My mom was all I’d had. Her, and my music.
Now, it was just my music.
My music and a middle-aged failure who’d sold his fucking soul.
I slunk into the back corner of the room, avoiding eye contact with everyone I passed. Between the bookshelf and the corner was a shadowed gap I could just squeeze into. Backing in, I wedged myself beside the worn oak bookshelf. It was real wood—and heavy. It had taken Mom and I an hour to wrestle it six blocks from the back alley we’d found it abandoned in. I leaned my head against it, wondering if my skin could touch the last place she’d touched, if somehow I could take that feeling with me. I wanted to gather up all the bits of her I could, fold them up like a blanket and keep them forever.
She’d hated black. The awful shade rendered us nothing more than a bunch of crows, pecking at crackers and pretending things were going to be okay. Nothing was okay.
I didn’t think anything would ever be okay again.
My mother was dead. I’d blown my college fund and every last penny of my Mom’s savings on chemotherapy and rent. And the only parent I had left was soulless and not just a little bit worthless.
My lip trembled, so I bit it—hard—and studied Jim from the shelter of the bookcase.
How the hell could he have sold his soul—and how was I so certain that’s exactly what he’d done?
I’d always known odd things at
odd times. How the most popular girl in school was secretly unhappy, even though she’d never wanted to talk about it. Or that the young, earnest doctor was lying when he said the latest treatment was working. Mom and I both knew that wasn’t true.
The knowing was nothing new. Mom had been the only one who’d ever understood, who’d listened and explained how other people couldn’t. So I should have known better than to try and explain my so-called sixth sense to kindly Dr. Bartlett, the hospital psychiatrist, then I wouldn’t have had to worry about the pills buried in the depths my backpack. Just to help me sleep a little, he’d said—but I’d known those pills wouldn’t keep the nightmares away. Still, I’d never known someone had sold their soul before. Never really thought about souls. Souls were stuff for people who went to churches and prayed to gods who didn’t listen.
But Jim had just sold his.
Breath hitched in my chest and I fought to stay quiet. Maybe I was imagining things. Maybe I just wanted to hate Jim because he was here and Mom was gone and I would have given anything to have it be the other way around—maybe even my soul. But no one had bothered to ask me. And I wasn’t wrong.
Lifting my gaze, I glared around the room.
From his new position by the front window, Jim caught my eye. Smiled.
I shivered and kind of wanted to rip off my skin. Anything to get away from that feeling, from that wrongness, crawling over me.
What could I do?
There was a preacher in the room, but he seemed more interested in the flask he thought no one noticed hiding in his right jacket pocket. I’d watched lots of horror movies, ones with demons sneaking into young girls and making people crawl across ceilings. There was always some expert who helped perform an exorcism to kick the bad-ass spirit out and usually got killed for his trouble. I wasn’t overly worried about Rev. James, but did exorcisms even work for people who’d sold their souls?
Kicking something out wasn’t the problem.
“Hey, Ash, I need a word, honey,” Jim called out, heading toward me.
Nope.
I shot from my perch in the corner and hurried to the folding table by the window, pretending to tidy a pile of plastic cutlery. I wanted none of whatever he was going to say.
“Ashley, darling!” A voice full of syrupy-sweetness wailed next to me moments before hands wrapped around my right arm.
Surprise sparked a full-bodied twitch that did nothing to dislodge the hands. Turning my head, I found the platinum-topped form of Mrs. Beth Beauford beaming up at me. Everyone in the neighborhood knew Mrs. Beauford. She volunteered to be in charge of everything. With metal bracelets chiming at her wrists, blue eyes generously topped with shimmering gold and a wide plastic smile, she made me think of a cartoon cobra ready to happily gobble up mice. Unfortunately, I was the mouse.
“Ash,” I corrected her.
“Now, now,” she tsked at me, “Ash is a boy’s name. And aren’t you just a lovely little girl.”
“Ashley’s a boy’s name, too,” I grumbled. “And I’m seventeen.”
“You poor thing.” Cheerfully ignoring my reply, she latched onto my cheeks and squeezed. “What a hard week this has been for you. Why, just look at you.”
Her eyes panned from the tips of my studded black boots, up legs clad in spider web tights, skimmed over the mundane black dress I’d been forced into by some friendly acquaintance who’d never proven useful before, and landed firmly atop my head. A hand glittering with rings reached for my hair.
I took a hasty step back, my top lip curling into a sneer. She wanted to judge my appearance? Fine.
“Her favorite color was red,” I stated defiantly, crossing my arms and tilting my head up. I was particularly proud of how the bright dye had turned nearly fluorescent on my bleached hair; it had been worth splurging on two packs. It was totally rocker-worthy, spiked in a halo around my head. And it was the only thing about today I didn’t hate.
“Where are all your friends, dear?” Mrs. Beauford asked, blinking in some kind of plastic-cobra attempt at sympathy. “Every girl needs someone her own age to talk to.” A tittering laugh that made my arms break out in goosebumps followed the question.
Friends? What did she know? Friends didn’t want to go to hospitals or understand why you couldn’t be in the stage band that year.
“I don’t have friends,” I sneered at her.
“Oh.” More blinking. “I suppose they couldn’t make it. Why don’t you talk to my darling Ally? Now that you’ll be back for your senior year, it's important you get caught up on all your classes.”
“Yeah. I already finished all my home-schooling curriculum.”
“But it’s senior year, dear. You can’t miss out on winter formal—or prom.” She tittered louder this time and she sounded like a pack of chipmunks.
Parents of It Girls often treated me like this. They seemed to think if they could just bring me into the fold, I’d conform. I’d wear the clothes they thought were appropriate, think the thoughts they wanted me to think, and I’d stop being a bright, glaring sign that existence happened outside their carefully cultivated little bubbles.
Eat. Shit.
“And let’s not forget about those college applications,” she said. “I bet you’re needing extra credit to try and get some scholarships.”
Was it bad luck to throat-punch someone at your mother’s funeral?
I hoped not.
“I’m fine,” I ground out between my teeth, trying not to think of the stack of college applications I’d shoved into the recycling bin that morning. Soon my hopes and dreams would be reborn as a napkin at a coffee shop. Lucky me.
“You could use the help, couldn’t you?” Mrs. Beauford asked, blinking extra hard. “I’m sure my darling Ally can help.”
My gaze unwillingly tracked where Mrs. Beauford’s lacquered nail pointed and my stomach plummeted towards my boots. Alison Beauford, the belle of Waterdown High, headed straight towards us. The thing I truly despised about Alison was how perfect she was, from her long blond hair to her on-trend outfits. She wasn’t secretly miserable and I was pretty certain she still had a soul.
Bitch.
I played with the rhinestone and skull ring on my right finger.
“Ally, dearest, I was just telling Ashley how you’d be oh-so-glad to give her some pointers on which clubs still need a diverse member.” Mrs. Beauford and Alison exchanged air kisses that made me feel like I’d eaten the purple Jell-O. “Help her fit back in.”
Ticking a box for a bunch of privileged kids? Be still my heart.
“I’m not looking to fit back in,” I muttered darkly, glaring at the pair of them. You couldn’t “fit back” when you’d never “fit in” to begin with. Besides, what the hell was I going to do with just over half my senior year? I’d completed all the distance curriculum available during long waits in the hospital, and sure, my grades were good. But homeschooling didn’t carry the weight of actual school, and the top music programs didn’t care if you played well on your apartment stairwell—they wanted school bands or live theater or even acapella groups.
“Happy to help, Mummy. Poor Ashley,” Alison drew out my name while regarding me as if I was one of Mr. Rick’s specimen jars in the science lab.
Poor. Hah. You’re hilarious, bitch.
“I’m fine,” I stated, taking a step back.
“Colleges always save scholarships for your people, you know.” The bitter edge to Allison’s words sent a spike of fresh rage through me.
“My people?” Are you fucking kidding me?
Swallowing the rest of my retort—Mom’s wake needed less drama, not more—I sucked in a breath and begged the universe for serenity. Patience. Whatever would get me through the next hour.
“Now, Ashley, my Ally is just trying to help,” Mrs. Beauford said.
Sure. Maybe they were trying to help—if we lived in a better world and I abandoned a chunk of my IQ. But still… it’s Mom’s funeral. No scenes. “Jim is white,” I said slo
wly, letting out a long breath. “I was raised white. I can’t speak Spanish. I’m not a candidate for any culturally-granted scholarships.”
They stared at me.
I shrugged. It’s not like my tawny skin granted an instinctive understanding of Mexican heritage or anything. There were times when I wished it did. My mother had been my only connection to any sense of family, or belonging. She’d kept promising to tell me the old stories, to tell me about our family, but time had run out.
I couldn’t think about that right now or I was going to cry again.
But being raised white wasn’t my only problem—I wasn’t a joiner; I didn’t care about fitting into that group any more than the happy band crowd. Until this week hit. The world had plagued me for details on funeral rites and family practices and I’d had nothing to say. Nothing! My Mom was my best friend and I knew nothing about her family—my family—or what she wanted aside from being buried. Or, you know, some handy rituals for dealing with soulless creatures of the damned.
I glanced at Jim, fought a shudder.
Mrs. Beauford and Allison might make for shitty conversation, but they had souls. The longer I could tolerate their company, the longer I could avoid my suddenly scary, loser father.
“College isn’t for me.” I gripped the tiny gold cross pendant around my neck—the one Mom had worn every day until Halloween.
“Now, dear.” Mrs. Beauford seemed to rally, her smile hitching to new heights. If her tongue didn’t flick between her teeth the world had missed an opportunity. “A little tidy up, some engagement on your application, and a good essay, I bet you could land some community support.”
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