Phantom Heart

by Kelly Creagh

  “Wait,” said Charlotte, cutting in. “Lucas, what’s going on?”

  “I just moved here from St. Louis,” I told her.

  “Yeah,” replied Charlotte. But it might as well have been a “duh.”

  “And so ensue-eth the brandishing of claws,” recited Wes in an eerie monotone. “The gnashing of teeth. The desperate attempts to undermine one another in the pursuit of my ardors.” He held up a halting, silver-ring-lined hand. “Ladies, take heart, I am not as celibate as my nickname might imply.”

  “Shut up, man,” Patrick said, shoving Wes’s hand down. “Nobody wants your creepy ass.”

  “She lives in Moldavia,” said Lucas.

  Wes’s near-smile fell. Patrick’s expression sobered.

  Charlotte’s glare went from glacial to apprehensive.

  “You live in Moldavia.” Wes repeated the statement, his pale gray, kohl-rimmed eyes boring into me.

  I chose that moment to speak to the table at large. “Okay. Will someone—I don’t care who—please tell me what the story is on my house?”

  “What’d you see?” Patrick asked, causing Charlotte’s stare to bounce between everyone.

  “Buddy Holly come back?” With this question, Lucas tipped back in his chair, folding those finely sculpted forearms over the dark pinstriped vest he’d buttoned over a white dress shirt. Which, I had to admit, looked snappy on him.

  “Try Zedok,” I said.

  The front legs of Lucas’s chair came crashing to the floor, his glasses knocking askew.

  Wes’s spoon made a crash landing on the floor.

  “Nope,” said Patrick. “We’re all booked up with nope. Indefinitely. Sorry for your luck.”

  “Trick,” chided Lucas, and it took me a second to realize that was another nickname.

  “Oh, please,” said Charlotte. “She’s messing with us, you guys.”

  Lucas frowned at this. At me, too. Like he thought Charlotte had to be right.

  But I didn’t care what any of them thought of me or my motives for joining their lunch table. Not after a reaction like that. Not as long as someone started telling me what was wrong with my house.

  “What about the name Zed—”

  Wes hissed—actually hissed. Wincing, he held up a finger.

  “What?” I splayed my hands.

  “Names hold power,” answered Wes. “To speak a demon’s name is to summon it.”

  “Demon?” Internally, I officially started to freak. Because Erik said something similar in the dream. He hadn’t called Zedok a demon, but he’d told me not to say the name.

  “Wes is our resident demonologist,” explained Lucas in a dismissive tone. “He thinks every haunting is demonic.”

  “And Lucas,” Wes retorted, “is our resident fearless leader and professional debunker. His superpowers include dismissing full-bodied apparitions as fart clouds.”

  “Excuse me if I didn’t want to scare her, Wes,” Lucas said through gritted teeth.

  “Sounds to me like she’s got good reason to be scared, Lucas.”

  “Guys.” Charlotte again. “Hello. She’s lying. You know as well as I do where she got that name.”

  “Excuse me,” I said to Charlotte, because if there was one thing I could not stand, it was people talking about me like I wasn’t there. “My six-year-old sister is where I got that name.”

  “You sure your six-year-old sister wasn’t in the next room when you were watching the documentary?”

  “I don’t know anything about a documentary,” I said, officially starting to hate her. “She’s been talking about this Zedok guy since the night we moved in.”

  “Okay, yeah,” Wes said through an uneasy grin. “Can we not . . . say that name? I think we’ll all have a far more pleasant afternoon if we refrain from invoking the infernal.”

  “What are you all talking about?” My blood started to race again, both with fear and mounting agitation.

  That’s when Charlotte veered on me. “Oh, come on. You got the name off of that TV special Paranormal Spectator did on the house six years ago. It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that you watched the ‘Phantom Fury’ episode over the weekend. And now you’re messing with us. Or Lucas. I’m just not sure why.”

  That last bit she aimed at Lucas while I gawped at her, still too stunned by the invoking-demons remark to formulate a coherent thought.

  “Charlotte.” Lucas leaned forward to prop his folded arms on the table. “Chill for a second, okay? Let’s just hear what she has to say.”

  “I didn’t watch any stupid documentary,” I snapped. At all of them. “This . . .” I hesitated before saying the name again, strictly for Wes’s sake. “My sister started talking about this . . . ghost thing or whatever right after we moved in. I thought she was making it up. But now . . .”

  I trailed off, suddenly unable to articulate anything more. Because how could I tell them about the dream with Erik without sounding crazier than I already did?

  “But now you don’t think she’s making it up,” Lucas finished for me.

  Okay. So at least he believed me. That I wasn’t fabricating this as a way to get back at him.

  Right now, though, I still didn’t know what I believed.

  Before yesterday, I’d believed that dead people were dead and that if there were such things as spirits, they didn’t stick around on earth to haunt the living.

  Maybe, I had wanted to believe, souls transformed into angels.

  Because Mom had believed in angels.

  “I don’t know,” I said finally. “I just thought that, since you seemed to know so much about the house, you might be able to tell me something useful.”

  “Well,” said Wes, “something must have happened. Or else you really are pulling our chain. On a side note, chain-pulling is a pastime I, too, enjoy.”

  “Quit being a creep, Wes,” snapped Charlotte.

  “Just creepin’ it real,” replied Wes.

  “Please forgive my asinine ass-ociate,” said Patrick, holding up a hand to block Wes’s face from view. “His mom forgot to staple his tact to his shirt today. Not to worry. He and I are going to have a talk about it later. But, in the meantime, give it to us straight. Did you see him?”

  No one moved or spoke for several seconds. Not even Charlotte. Their waiting on tenterhooks made me want to give them something. But all I had was the truth.

  “I haven’t seen anything,” I admitted, keeping my gaze on Lucas. “Not . . . exactly.”

  “How do you not exactly see something?” Another question from the enchanting Charlotte.

  “What about your sister?” prodded Lucas, like he didn’t want Charlotte’s question to derail my answer. “Has she seen him?” The intensity of his stare told me his heart had to be pounding as fast and hard as mine. From fear or excitement, though . . . Well, I guess I didn’t know him well enough to say.

  “She blames a lot of stuff on him,” I said. “She says he talks to her. I thought he was some kind of imaginary friend but—”

  “What does she say he looks like?” This question from Patrick, who, along with Wes, had also begun to take me more seriously.

  I shrugged. “She says he wears a mask.”

  Several things happened all at once.

  Patrick threw up his hands, saying, “I’m out.”

  “Holy shit,” Wes muttered before making the sign of the cross at me.

  And though Lucas did his personal best to keep his poker face, the quiet way he sat back in his chair told me that I had obliterated the doubt in him, too.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, you guys,” spat Charlotte. She stood fast enough to cause the legs of her chair to screech. “I’m not sticking around for this.” She took up her tray. “We’re serious investigators. Not gullible idiots willing to risk our hard-earned reputa
tion on something that was proven to be a hoax anyway.”

  “They never proved or disproved anything,” argued Lucas.

  “Rastin came out and said he faked it,” Charlotte snipped back.

  “Who’s Rastin?” I asked. “And faked what?”

  “Controversial clairvoyant,” Wes answered in an aside. “He had an episode during that, uh . . . episode.”

  I scowled, the already tight knot of worry in my chest constricting. “What kind of episode?”

  “Like you don’t know,” scoffed Charlotte.

  Lucas cut in. “Boq later claimed Rastin only said he faked it because he was afraid of what the entity might do if people went snooping around the house.”

  “The episode was . . . bad,” Wes said, answering my question.

  “Rastin’s episode,” clarified Patrick. “ ‘Phantom Fury’ itself was actually pretty awesome.”

  “Though you have to agree that the show itself isn’t as good as Ghost Adventures,” said Wes.

  “Ghost Yellers, I think you mean,” snorted Patrick.

  Charlotte brandished a finger at Lucas, ignoring the others. “That’s because it was Boq’s show on the line!”

  “Boq died shortly after that investigation, Charlotte.”

  I blinked at the dual rapid-fire discussions happening around me until the gravity of what Lucas had just said finally hit me. Someone else had died in the house?

  “Later. Of natural causes.”

  “A heart attack at age thirty-eight is not a natural cause!”

  “She watched the documentary, Lucas.”

  “She said she didn’t!”

  I folded my arms. Because here I was again—just part of the scenery. And what the hell was I even still doing here? Why hadn’t I, at the barest mention of there being a documentary, gotten up and walked away from these Winchester-boy wannabes?

  Since I didn’t have an answer to that, I stood, officially done.

  “Wait. Stephanie. Where are you going?” Lucas asked.

  “To the library to see if they have this stupid documentary. Something tells me I’m better off watching it instead of trying to get something coherent out of any of you.”

  “Don’t,” said Lucas, and I jumped when his hand, warm, caught me by the wrist.

  I swung with a glower to face him, and he released me, retracting his hand as though my skin had burned him.

  “Don’t watch the documentary, I mean,” he said, probably as aware as I had become of the three sets of eyes now trained silently and unblinkingly on the two of us. “Let me come over first.”

  “What?” Charlotte and I both blurted in unison.

  “Let me take a look around the house,” Lucas said. “Inside, I mean. Make a preliminary sweep. Document your experiences before you get any more outside information.”

  “Dude.” Patrick’s brows lifted. “You sure that’s a good idea?”

  “Information is why I’m here,” I said. “And did you say some guy died of a heart attack inside the house?”

  “Not in the house,” corrected Wes. “Three months after filming.”

  “In his sleep,” amended Patrick.

  “But there was also the piano guy who died,” said Wes.

  “The piano guy?” I asked Lucas.

  “I’ll tell you everything you want to know.” Lucas held a staying hand up to Wes and Patrick, who went obediently silent. “I promise. I’ll even let you borrow my DVD of the P.S. documentary. But first, let me come over.”

  “Um,” I said, still caught off guard by the notion. Because if he was asking to come over to my house right in front of a bristling Charlotte, and she wasn’t chiming in to forbid it, wasn’t that pretty solid evidence for them not being a thing? “Well. My dad’s doing a lot of work in there. We’d . . . have to stay out of his way.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Charlotte.

  “I’m coming, too,” said Wes, his words tumbling out fast, as if he’d only been waiting for the invite to drop.

  Patrick saluted us. “Y’all have fun. Send me a postcard from the fourth dimension.”

  “Just Lucas,” I said. “My dad would have a coronary if I brought home a paranormal investigative team.” As if having Lucas over wasn’t going to be tricky enough. “You can come tonight. Six o’clock.”

  “Lucas, we have practice tonight,” Charlotte said, her voice quieter now.

  “We can practice tomorrow,” replied Lucas.

  Huffing, Charlotte spun and marched away.

  “Listen,” I said to Lucas, staring after her. “If you have to practice for something—”

  Lucas shook his head. “It can wait. And don’t mind Charlotte. She’s this way with everyone when she first meets them.”

  I glanced to Wes and Patrick to see if they would back that statement up, but both avoided meeting my stare.

  “I’ll be there tonight,” he said, rising to his towering height and collecting his tray. “Six.”

  With that, he hurried to catch up with Charlotte, leaving me with Patrick and Wes, both of whom eyed me as though I were a witch marked for burning.

  “Is it really that bad?” I asked. “The house?”

  “Since this seems like it’s heading toward being an official SPOoKy investigation,” said Patrick, “I get why Lucas doesn’t want you to be influenced by any outside information or history yet. So, for now, I apologize, but mum’s the word.”

  “But, for the record,” Wes interjected, those storm-gray eyes alight with quiet foreboding. “Yeah . . . it’s that bad.”

  TEN

  Zedok

  The camera bag that the boy carried told me exactly what he was, if not who.

  From my second-story perch, through the window of the turret, I marked the young man’s approach as he made his way to the porch.

  He was as tall as I was, though broader, of course, in the shoulders.

  Beneath his attire, I imagined he must possess a muscular form, for he stood quite straight. The lightness of his step betrayed his engagement in some regular physical activity, too.

  I sneered, despising him straightaway, as I did any and all who dared to carry the hated title of “paranormal investigator.”

  Normally, it took loud announcements and flashy appearances before inhabitants called in reinforcements. Researchers, shamans, members of the clergy, and certain meddlesome mediums had all encroached upon these grounds before, each harboring the futile hope of eradicating the blight that plagued Moldavia. That was to say, me.

  The trespassers nearly always bore the same array of useless equipment. And always wreaked more destruction than good. On themselves as well as on me . . .

  So far, the only thing setting this creature apart from the others was his age.

  My guess was that he could not yet be eighteen. And so no more than a year younger than I had been at the time the curse had decimated my world.

  Reason dictated he must be a schoolmate of Stephanie’s. An acquaintance. She had not resided in the area long enough to acquire any more meaningful relationships. At least I did not think so. Regardless, he was here, and thus represented a complication I cared not for.

  What did he know of Moldavia? What had he told her? Or what had she told him?

  Had Stephanie spoken of Erik?

  Perhaps I should have warned her not to.

  The boy knocked, the noise rankling me to the bones.

  If Stephanie had told this boy about her encounter with Erik, did not his presence on these grounds suggest that he believed her?

  His status as an investigator aside, was that not on its own enough to make him officially my enemy?

  ELEVEN

  Stephanie

  “Hey, come on in.”

  Standing beneath the porch’s stone portico, Lucas gri
pped tightly with both hands the shoulder-slung strap of a camera bag. While I stepped back to make room for him to enter, he gave me a tight and apprehensive smile.

  What had him so on edge? Was it the house? Or possibly . . . me?

  “Thanks,” he said, and did this weird ducking walk into the foyer. Like he was stupid excited and trying (and failing) to contain it.

  I tried not to smile as he trailed right past me to stand in the center of the foyer.

  “Oh, wooow,” he said, turning in a slow circle so he could get the panoramic view. “This place is unbelievable.”

  “I’m just glad there’s running water.”

  He marveled at the dusty but lit chandelier that dripped crystals. “No, it’s beautiful,” he said, his voice breathy and lost and actually kind of sexy.

  He floated farther into the foyer, as though drawn inward by an invisible force, gaping at the walls as he passed them like they were coated in gold instead of cobwebs. I waited while his wandering took him all the way to the grand staircase. Propping one foot on the bottommost step, his hand going to the newel post, Lucas peered up to the second floor.

  “Geez-O-Pete,” he whispered, his fingers twining the newel post’s decorative cap—which then promptly came off in his grip.

  “Hey!”

  Lucas and I jumped in unison when my dad came tromping in from the back hall, his brow knit with annoyance. “What the deuce did you just do?”

  “Oh,” Lucas uttered, his entire face becoming one big O of shock.

  “Dad,” I warned, while Lucas took two retreating steps from the stairs. After drifting too close in my direction, it dawned on him that he still held the amputated cap, which he slowly extended toward Dad. Dad marched over to him, scowling hard until, suddenly, a smile broke through the Incredible Hulk facade.

  “I knew it was like that,” he said, accepting the piece from Lucas. “Haven’t glued it back on yet.”

  Pressing a hand to my chest, I rolled my eyes at my father and his guerrilla warfare tactics while Lucas’s whole body sagged with relief.

  “Dad,” I said again. “This is Lucas Cheney. The friend from school I’m doing that report with?”