October Darlings

by Wendolyn Baird

  “Uhm, no,” I wave her off. “Actually, I want to talk to you about my aunt... and my house.”

  “Ah yes, the mysterious haunted manor sitting on the side of the highway. Do you want gardening tips or what? Because I can’t help you there. I’ve killed every plant I've owned.”

  “Not exactly, but it does have to with the garden. How would I go about figuring out who in my family had magic? As far as I know, Delia knows nothing, which means our resident ghosts know nothing.”

  “And you know otherwise?” She raises one finely arched eyebrow at me, her cunning smile curving into dimples.

  Narrowing my eyes, I tuck my hands into my jacket pockets, neatly hiding Frank away. "I... suspect. And if there’s magic, I want to know why it’s there."

  “And maybe, how to use it?” Eden guesses shrewdly, and I shirk back. “I told you,” she murmurs. “I’m good with secrets.”

  “Okay then. Yeah.” I nod and step in closer, drawn to her like a moth to flame. “How do I find magic? How do I use it?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  Skipping two classes back to back probably isn’t the best idea, but I also don’t care. Curled up in the lighting booth above the theater, Eden flips through several black bound notebooks and the narrow silver letters flash by as she skims her notes.

  “What is all this?”

  “Research.” Her eyes stay trained on the page she’s reviewing, and by the relaxed slope of her shoulders, she doesn’t mind ditching class either.

  “On what?”

  “Everything. Miranda loves to fall in love, Sabrina loves breaking and entering and uses her grave rubbings as trophies, no matter what she says, and I on the other hand, love everything my mom says I shouldn’t.” Eden glances up, her dimples flashing and her fiery hair swinging in braids besides her ears. “What can I say? There’s something addicting about breaking the rules.”

  “I can’t say that I relate. Well, unless the rule makes absolutely no sense. Those ones are fun to break just out of spite.”

  “Exactly!” Her eyes light up and she pats my knee before turning the page. “See, Nix, my view is that all rules are crap! Might as well break them all! Oh, here we are.” She runs a finger down a list and stops halfway down the page. “Signs of magic. I knew I’d written it down somewhere. I got interested after reading about them in my world lit class. We went over a whole list of folklore, and you wouldn’t believe the lengths people used to go through to protect their homes. Take this for example. Devil’s Shoestring. People used to carry bits of this dried root around to keep evil away.”

  She hands the notebook to me to read and picks up the next one. As I fall into reading her scribbled notes, I forget the world around me, and sink deeper into the definitions of a thousand plants I’d always taken for granted. Sage is for protection, lavender for peace, rosemary for memory and luck, mint for cleansing. Everything has its own purpose. Even the dozens of cats that skulk around the place are drawn near by the intangible air of power. No wonder there are so many souls wandering the house.

  “Hey, I forgot about this one,” Eden mutters. “Some of the older houses even used specific carvings to relay different meanings.”

  “Let me see that?” The back of my neck tingles as I think of the many scorpions all over the house. Is there a reason for Frank's form?

  Click.

  Oh crap! Not now!

  Click, click.

  “What’s that sound?” Eden sets her book down, frowning.

  “What sound? I didn’t hear anything.” I grab at my wrist, trying to hush Frank, but it’s as if he knows I was thinking about him and he won’t stop squirming.

  Clllliiiick.

  “No, I’m pretty sure I just heard something.” Eden rises to her knees and peers around us. “You weren’t clicking a pen or something?”

  “Nope. I have no idea what you’re talking about.” The writhing form under my palm is difficult to conceal beneath my jacket sleeve, and I clench my jaw as I struggle to keep Frank from crawling down my hand. What the hell? “Uhm, I’ll be right back. Bathroom.”

  Running as quickly as I can down the spiral staircase, I dart into the hallway and across to the nearest bathroom. Ducking my head, I check beneath the stalls to make sure that I’m alone, and then wrench my sleeve up to my elbow. My heart is pounding, and I think this is the most awake I’ve been during the day all month.

  “Frank! What the hell?” I hiss at him, raising my arm to eye level. His little iron face turns my way as he continues to click, and I pinch the bridge of my nose. “I don’t know what waving your pincers means but cut it out. Someone is going to see you!”

  He lowers his head, shuts his claws, and curls his tail tighter. Huh, this is what a sentinel looks like while pouting. Good to know.

  Sighing, I run my finger down his back and roll my eyes. “I’m sorry, okay? I just can’t have everyone knowing about you. Ellis is okay, but to everyone else you’re just a bracelet. That means no moving or clicking in front of people.”

  His tail winds tighter. The neat spiral it creates is stunning, and I wish I had my camera on me. I could do a whole series on just Frank and be happy. Which probably explains the potato shaped scribbles with tails my dad saved away in a scrapbook. He thought they were cats with extra legs, but thinking back on them, my drawings couldn’t have been anything except scorpions.

  Blinking, I stumble backwards, focusing hard on the vague memories rushing through my brain. Crayons and watercolors, sunlight hitting the front porch, and shadows shifting across the sloping lawn. I filled an entire coloring book with drawings of the graveyard, and it terrified my dad. No wonder he stuck me in grief counseling, and I couldn’t have been more than eight.

  The final bell rings, and jumping, I snap back to the present. My face is pinched when I catch sight of myself in the mirror and superimposed in my reflection is a face I know can’t really be there. A softer jawline than my own, a broader nose, and darker skin. But the same deep eyes, the same wavy hair, the same thick eyebrows. It’s my mom. She’s not a real ghost, just my regret. I didn’t think I had any. Not anymore.

  The door swings open behind me, and as a trickle of students meander in, I stagger my way out. I’m so dazed, I try to walk past Eden as she blocks my path to hand me my backpack.

  “Hey!”

  “What?” I blink at her. Focusing on her face is like staring down the flash of a camera.

  “Are you okay?” Her quick eyes slide from my face to my hands, searching for any telltale sign of my distress.

  “Yeah. Of course. Yeah.” I nod, take my bag, and hope the crowd will swallow her up. It doesn’t. “Oh, there’s Sabrina, I’ve got to go!”

  Heading towards Sabrina, I walk alongside her and Miranda without contributing to the conversation. It’s enough to stand nearby and appear somewhat included. Anything to avoid facing my thoughts.

  Orange and black streamers are beginning to fill the halls, and errant posters covered in cartoon spiders and black cats are taped to the lockers. Fall is in the air, and it doesn’t help my case. The last time I saw my mother was when she left me sitting in the backyard while she went to check out a noise in the trees.

  I cradled our pumpkin in my lap for what felt like hours while I waited for her to come back. I wasn’t allowed to walk past the cemetery on my own, and I couldn’t get the back door to open. She had promised we’d carve the jack-o’-lantern together, but instead, Delia found me crying on the porch with a smashed pumpkin in my arms.

  Mom never came back, and her death was ruled an accident, but that didn’t make sense. She knew how to swim, and the creek was in the complete opposite direction from where I watched her enter the woods. But I was five, Delia was frantic, and my dad refused to talk about her. What else was I supposed to think? The only thing that made sense when I was old enough to decipher it was that the world was too cruel for her, and I wasn’t enough to keep her holding on.

  And there’s my secr
et, there’s my regret. I’ve never been enough.

  “THAT’S THE THIRD ORDER you’ve messed up on.” Ellis slams the cash register shut and stops me from heading out into the dining area. His hand catches the crook of my elbow, and my breath hooks in my throat. I’m no good at lies, and he knows me too well to be fooled by them anyway.

  “What’s going on?” His eyes are disarming, and I want more than anything in the world to let him fix me. Fix everything. He can’t though, nobody can.

  Pursing my lips, I pull back and shrug him off. The tables need cleaning, and the floor is covered in enough candy corn to fill a jar. Delia is hurrying around the back right now, but the moment she sees me like this, I know I’ll lose it. Bakeshops are not places for breakdowns, and work is not the place to fall apart.

  “Addie?”

  He frowns at me, so I turn my back and press all my weight onto the table, biting my lip and pretending to be engrossed in scrubbing off a string of dried caramel. A family comes in, ringing the bell as they pass the entryway, and he falters, halfway between me and the counter. The customers win, and staring out the window with the backs of my eyes burning, I can’t stop seeing my mother’s face.

  One of the hardest things about my dad sending me here is that it reminds me of her. It isn’t fair that I should lose both of them this way, and not even be given a chance to really say goodbye. Sure, he says he’s doing okay, but with chemo, what is okay? It’s not good. Not unless he could say the treatment is working, which he can’t, and he won’t.

  “Out.” Norma interrupts my thoughts, her manager’s badge gleaming against her saffron apron and her dark lipstick outlining the thin set of her mouth.

  “What?”

  “Del says you and Ellis need to take off. We’ve got it handled here, and she told me to tell you she’ll pick you up from the Fisher’s around nine.”

  “I’m sorry, did I do something wrong?”

  Ellis angles back around the counter, his apron already hung up in the back and his truck keys swinging from his hand. His hood is pulled low over his head and his jeans are covered in so much powdered sugar, the denim almost looks bleached. “No,” he says. “We’re taking the rest of the night off. Special permission.”

  He leads the way out, opening the door for me as we step into the chilling evening. Already, the steady glow of the moon shines across the wide sky, and a swarm of bats makes their way past the town square. Like Delia’s windows, several other shops on the street are painted with pumpkins and leaves, and a few even have faux jack-o’-lanterns sitting inside their doors. The smell of apple pies cling to our clothes even as the crisp wind blows my hair away from my face.

  “Come on.” Ellis wrenches open the passenger’s side door with a creak, and I clamber in with my heart thumping quickly in my chest. Any minute now, he’s going to ask me again, and I still don’t know what I’m supposed to say.

  The orange plastic gourds glow with their battery powered tealights, and the grinning faces seem to be mocking me. Their hollow stares follow me down the road as Ellis drives back out to the edge of town, and I reach for Frank. Consistently soothing, he comes to life beneath my hand, clicking once more, and twitches his tail as I absentmindedly pull at his legs.

  “Are you still not talking?” Ellis doesn’t look at me as he asks, but his flat tone carries enough disapproval that I know he’s frowning at me. “Is this about this weekend? Because I understand if you’re worried.”

  “No, no. I just, it’s nothing.” I chew on the inside of my lip and wait for him to argue against my feeble lie, but the protest never comes.

  We veer down a side road I’m not familiar with, and as the trees rise up on either side of us, they block out the light of the moon. It’s too warm for the heater, too cold for the AC, and huddled in my jacket, I can feel the cold slipping into the interior of the vehicle. The pavement is pitch black, and the tiny yellow eyes peer out of the branches, glaring in the beam of the headlights.

  “Where are we?”

  “It’s just a backroad. They’ve got a haystack maze set up off the other side of the road and the traffic has been driving me up the wall. This time of year, this is the closest way home from the bakery.”

  I shiver in my seat, and the more the night sets in, the faster the trees pass us by. The creeping shadows are impossible to track with my eyes, but every few hundred yards, I catch glimpses of movement. If they weren’t accompanied by wisps of violet, I’d shrug it off to deer or raccoons, but the chill inching up the back of my neck tells me better.

  “It gives me the creeps.”

  “We’ll be there soon; my house is less than a ten-minute drive from here.” He flicks on the radio, and as the static buzzes away, we hit a large pothole, sending us swerving off the side of the road and straight into the dark.

  By some stroke of luck, Ellis manages to avoid the hulking tree trunks and we crash into a wooden gate. The boards snap under the tires, and my seat belt cuts into my collarbone as we jostle over the wreckage, stopping in the center of a dirt road half covered over in roots. My head bumps against the back of my seat, then again on the window, before finally jarring against Ellis’ shoulder as he flings his arm out to keep me in place. A large crack splits down the windshield and the creaking of settling wood mingles with the fading hum of the engine in the quiet of the evening.

  “Are you okay?” I push his arm away from my chest and fumble with my seat belt buckle. My head is aching, and my stomach is churning as I struggle to gather my bearings. Beside me, Ellis is clutching one hand to his face, and although I can only see the outline of his shape in the dark, the muffled way he’s breathing tells me he might have a bloody nose. He must have knocked into the steering wheel when we crashed.

  “Yeah. You?” he splutters in a nasally voice, and as he turns my way, the smell of copper sends the world swaying around me. The headlights accentuate the dirt that’s floating around the wreckage of the gate, and the trees seem to slide from one side of the car to the other.

  Swallowing back my feelings of nausea, I try to shake off the sharp twinges of pain creeping up my shoulders and neck, focusing only on the little light we have, and our surroundings beyond it. The pothole shouldn’t have pushed us off course so easily, and I’m ready for the shadow creature to come crawling out of the underbrush any second now. “I’m perfect,” I lie. “We’re great.”

  The swirling purple wisps edge closer to fallen branches, and my adrenaline kicks into overdrive. They’re darker than the shades at Nix House; a deep indigo rather than pale lavender. If there were animals in the vicinity, they’re long gone now, and Frank is clinging to my wrist so tightly, waves of pain shoot up to my elbow. Whatever is coming, it can’t be good.

  With wide eyes, I snap my seat belt back into place and stare around for any other traces of movement. “Can you drive?”

  “What?” Ellis is still covering his face, too disoriented to hear the panic building in my voice.

  “Drive, Ellis, drive!” I scramble for the locks, yelling at him frantically to put the truck in reverse, and as we crash backwards through the same way we’d come, I lock eyes with a solitary figure manifesting in the glow of the headlights.

  Long curtains of hair stream down to her waist, and splotches fall down her dress in shades devoid of light. Her face is skeletal, her mouth nothing but the gaping grin of an empty jawline, and in one hand she holds a shattered glass lantern. The other arm she stretches out as we reverse back towards the main road, beckoning me to stay.

  Gasping violently, Ellis spits blood out of his mouth as it streams from his nose, and his silhouette is harsh as he precariously maneuvers us back onto the pavement. He doesn’t say a word or ask me why I yelled, he just drives, and I’m torn between watching the tree line for a glimpse at the unknown specter and wanting to help him.

  I’m shaking so much, I can hardly feel the needlelike twitches of agony setting in beneath my shock. Nix House, it seems was just the beginning.

>   Chapter Fourteen

  OWEN’S SHOUTS FOLLOW us through the rundown kitchen as he abandons his movie the moment we stumble in. Mr. Fisher is thankfully nowhere to be seen, and their mom I’ve yet to meet between her sleeping schedule and night shifts, but if she were home, I’d bet Owen’s yelling would send her running.

  “I’m okay, man!” Ellis insists. “It’s not even broken.”

  Blood is smeared down to his chest, and the dark droplets on his lap contrast horribly against the layer of sugar still clinging to his jeans. Next to him, my wild hair and the tiny cut across my shoulder and neck are absolutely nothing.

  “How do you know?” Owen demands. “Sit down and let me take a look at you.”

  Ellis groans, but heeds his brother, dropping into a chair with obvious relief. Stuck in the doorway as I am, I breathe as shallowly as I can, my head pounding and my jaw twitching incessantly as I watch them. Owen is shockingly helpful with the first aid kit, and for the first time since I’ve known him, I can see the side that Miranda adores. He’s thorough and in control, never faltering in his assessment even as his voice trembles and cracks from stress. They argue needlessly the entire time, but the undercurrent of affection is so great, I lock into my own silence.

  I should call Delia, I need to, but I’m tired of emergencies that need to be dealt with and people who won’t stay dead. Even Marlowe, with her concerned stares and gentle disposition is too much to handle right now. I wish I could just sleep, really sleep with no more nightmares, and just rest for a good month or two. Why can’t humans hibernate?

  Seeking refuge in their bathroom, I curl up against the frigid floor, staring at the way the tiles interlock and snake up the side of the wall. I should have known not to take that road; spoken up when I had the chance. There’s no point in having a power unless it’s useful, and all clairvoyance has led me to is heartbreak and attacks on my life. I can’t even keep friends because of this mess.

  Maybe I shouldn’t keep friends.