by K. C. RILEY
A sharp pain erupted through my head again, and my grip wavered. Nausea rolled through my stomach. I wanted to puke, but couldn’t.
“What are they saying? The whispers?” Cassie asked.
I steadied myself against the statue as my hand touched the pages. The whispers at my head exploded into screams and wails from the very graves and crypts I crept through minutes before. The smell of burnt wood and flesh stifled my breath. The symbols on the page glowed like lava burning through metal. They then broke apart and rearranged themselves until I could understand them. The rows of symbols were names women, girls.
“What’s happening?” Cassie asked.
“Sir Isaac Crane.” I read out loud. “Sarah Thomas, Elain Hopkins, Laura Pilgrims, Mary Wyler, Bethany Wheeler.” The list went on and on. I remembered the girls that were burned with Sir Isaac in the Blood Book. I couldn’t explain how some of the names felt like them. “It’s a ledger with the names of the girls Remy executed. Most of them were our age.” My eyes stung and watered from the soot and smoke that was there, but not. “The nameless headstones and the crypts, it’s a witch’s graveyard.”
I climbed down off the statue as my blood boiled in anger. How could Remy murder all these innocent girls?
“What about Mason’s story? The kids Sir Isaac sacrificed for the Devil. How do we know that’s not what happened here?”
“I think Mason’s story was just that, a story. Maybe something to cover the truth. You were in the book when those girls burned. We burned with them. Sir Isaac. His students. Innocent women. They all feel trapped here.”
“What now?” Cassie asked.
I turned to the howling entrance of the crypt. “We right the wrong?”
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
“No. But what choice do I have? Somehow it all connects back to me. I need to know how and why.”
With a stick in one hand and Cassie’s phone in the other, I stepped into the mouth of the crypt’s entrance and onto the first stair. Cassie placed her hand on my shoulder and stayed close behind as we descended into the blackness.
“This isn’t working,” Cassie said. “Pass me the phone. I’ll hold the light and your hand. You focus on the webs, and whatever happens, do not let go.”
I nodded. We took another step down into a massive spider web, and both eeked as I cleared it away with the stick.
The sides of the walls and ceiling were bricked with dark slabs of stone. The air was thick with the smell of old earth and metal. Between the horrid wheezing and howling of the wind, the air was also getting thinner by the second. The walls felt like they were closing in. I wasn’t fond of close tight spaces. I couldn’t catch my breath and stopped to lean over.
Cassie placed her hand on my back. “Breathe.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
A few more broken spider webs, and we were at the bottom of the stairs in front of an entrance wide enough for three people to get through at once.
“What is that?” Cassie pointed the light into the entrance.
“It looks like the roots of a tree.” I still could barely breathe and placed my hand on my chest.
“We can go back.”
“No. I need to keep going.”
Cassie tightened her grip on the straps to her bag. “Okay then. On the count of three.”
I nodded.
“One...two. Make sure to keep your mouth closed. Three.”
With pressed lips, we ran through the tunnel. The feeling of falling rats and tentacles brushing over my head and shoulders made we want to die. The illuminating flashes of light from Cassie’s phone only highlighted the nightmare.
We shot out of the tunnel of roots and webs and into a pitch-black clearing where we stomped and shook out all the things—according to our minds—that were still crawling and falling on our heads.
“Don’t move,” I told Cassie.
“What? What is it?” She held her body stiff as a board.
A roach the size of my hand sat on her shoulder. There was no way I was going to touch it. No way in hell.
“What?” Cassie eeked. “Lizzy, get it off. Get it off.”
I wanted to help her, I really did, but I couldn’t. I tried. We both went into hysterics until I finally manned up and brushed it off. She gave her hair one final shake before looking around.
One by one, torches ignited to illuminate a chamber filled with marked symbols on the walls. At the center of the floor was an old wooden chest encircled with what looked like more glyphs. I had seen pentagrams in some of the books I borrowed from All Saints library. But this wasn’t like that. These symbols felt familiar, timeless, and magical, though I couldn’t say why.
“The Devil’s Gold,” Cassie said. “You still think this has nothing to do with Mason’s story?”
I didn’t have time to think.
A strange heat swirled, pulsed, and fluttered in my stomach. The sensation pulled me toward the wooden chest almost as though the chest had been waiting for me.
“I don’t think you should open it?” Cassie’s voice cracked.
“What about Justice? Setting a wrong, right?”
“I’ve got a bad feeling about it. Death, it’s still in play. And this has got Death all over it.”
“Everything I thought I knew about myself, my life, it’s all been one big lie. I’ve spent months being numb, running from the truth. And in some ways, I’m already dead.” It was the most honest thing I had heard come out of my mouth in some time.
Cassie nodded.
I moved closer to the chest and stepped into the circle etched into the ground. It looked like a simple chest with a lion’s head fastened to the top of it.
I immediately knew what to do. “Any chance you’ve got a pocketknife in that bag?”
“No. But I’ve got a hairpin.”
“Perfect.”
The edge of Cassie’s hairpin wasn’t sharp, but it wasn’t dull either. Closing my eyes, I did the unthinkable and jabbed the hairpin into the fleshy part of my left palm. The small puncture was enough to raise small droplets of blood that fell into the lion’s mouth. The chest shook until the lock dropped, and the lid popped open. By then, Cassie and I had both stepped back.
A royal blue light pulsed and throbbed from within. I edged closer for a better look while Cassie peeped over my shoulder. Inside the box was a charred skull that sat on top of ash mixed with bits of bone.
“Sir Isaac,” we both said at the same time.
“It’s just like Mason said. The Devil etched a map to the gold on his skull.”
Maybe Mason was right. I wanted to hurl at my next thought. So did Cassie.
I reached into the chest and held the skull in order to see where the light was coming from. The charred crusts of flesh crumbled away to reveal the source, a map that was etched into the bone.
“What is it?” Cassie asked.
“I don’t know,” I whispered.
As I continued to stare into the light, the markings and notations of the map swirled together. A stream of glyphs flowed from the skull into my hands, up through my arms, and into my eyes. The area in the middle of my forehead throbbed with thin electrical currents. In another second, the pressure of holding Sir Isaac’s skull in between my hands disappeared. The entire thing collapsed to ash.
“We’ve got to go.” Cassie’s voice sounded heavy, lethargic, like she was speaking in slow motion.
My body trembled. Or was it the floor? Everything was hazy. It felt like I had been drugged.
“Lizzy, we’ve got to go now.”
“That’s what Mom said.” I was out of it.
Cassie pulled me up to my feet and dragged me by my hand. That’s all I remembered. One minute we were down in the chamber, everything shaking, the next we were back in the cool night air panting.
“You need to breathe.” Cassie’s voice still sounded off.
But the cool air against my face as I breathed deep was sobering.
In another m
oment, I felt like I was back in my body. The smell of rubble and dust circled around us. “What happened?”
“The whole chamber collapsed.”
I looked behind us. The crypt was now nothing more than crumbled stone and rock. “Thanks.”
“Liz, look.” Cassie pointed to the statue of Remy.
One by one, orbs of light emerged off the pages of the ledger he held in his hand and ascended into the sky until the faint trail of their light disappeared.
“I can hear them,” Cassie said. “They’re saying—”
“Thank you.” Their spirits were free.
As the book in Remy’s hand crumbled, so did the statue. Remy’s hold over their souls was over.
“What happened down there?” Cassie asked.
“I don’t know.” There was no way I was telling Cassie the truth.
Cassie stayed silent for a moment. “You don’t remember anything?”
“Nothing,” I lied. “We better get back to camp. I think that’s enough ghostbusting for the day.”
“Can’t argue with you there.”
There was no way Cassie had bought my story. She was too smart for that. But she also wasn’t the one with a psychic map etched into her brain, a map I wanted nothing to do with if it meant me or someone else dying for it. We could have both been killed. The chamber collapsing had been the last straw. I was done with Casper the friendly ghost and all things supernatural. Well, almost. There was still Jake.
We were about to leave when we heard voices. Startled, we dove behind another crypt.
“Did you see anything?” a woman said. “Are you sure you’ve got it set right?”
“I’m telling you the damned thing said this way. I’m sure we’re in the right place,” a man said.
The voices sounded familiar, and I peeped around the corner. It was the couple from Vye’s, the ones that were looking for the ghost tours on my first day of work. Duke and Charlene, if I remembered correctly. Duke was still carrying around that contraption he called a ghost meter. I would have questioned what on Earth they were doing in an abandoned witch’s graveyard late at night. But then again, they weren’t the ones chasing Casper down into a booby-trapped crypt, escaping near death, and hiding in the dark.
“Did you hear that?” Charlene shined her flashlight toward our direction.
Duke’s ghost meter beeped. “It came from over there.”
They both stopped at what used to be Sir Isaac’s crypt.
“Someone was already here.” Charlene pointed her flashlight in every direction.
I motioned for Cassie to be quiet with a finger at my lips. I then bent down to pick up a rock and threw it in the direction of another crypt that was farther away.
“Over there,” Charlene said. “Come on.”
“What about the meter?”
“I know what I heard. We need to go this way.”
With the coast clear, we both let out a sigh of relief as they headed in the opposite direction.
“What the heck were they looking for?” Cassie whispered.
“That’s a good question. Let’s get out of here.”
We turned to get up to leave and gasped at the large shadow that towered over us.
“Hello, luvs. Thought I would never find you.” It was the creepy Abercrombie model, Zander.
It felt like ants were crawling all over my body. I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t like the guy.
“Josie sent me out to look for you.” He stepped closer with that same crazy look in his eyes, a look that said he was always up to the wrong thing. “She was worried.”
Cassie and I both stepped back as a wolf howled in the distance.
Zander turned and looked toward the direction of the sound. “Nasty things in the dark. You shouldn’t be out her alone. I’m glad I found you.”
Zander took another eerie step.
“There you are,” a voice said from out of the dark. Jake. “I was looking for you.”
A sense of relief washed through the tension at my neck and shoulders. “What are you doing here?” I asked. “I mean, I thought you weren’t coming. To the bonfire.”
Jake never took his eyes off of Zander. “I changed my mind. Everyone’s been out looking for you guys. Zander.”
“Jake,” Zander countered.
Even though I was glad to see him, Jake’s voice was far from warm and cozy. I suspected he was still mad at me. But I also got the feeling that he wasn’t much of a Zander fan either.
“We better get back,” Cassie interrupted.
“Yeah,” Jake said with his eyes still locked on Zander. “That’s a good idea. You never know what you might run into in the dark.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Zander said, taking the lead. “Camp is this way.”
The walk back to camp was more than awkward. Neither Zander nor Jake said a word. Neither took their eyes off of the other the entire time. Cassie and I were silent too. I wondered about what the hell I had gotten myself into while Cassie watched me like she knew I was lying.
We were back at All Saints and Cassie opened the door to her room. We had both caught holy fire from Josie for missing the rest of the bonfire and promised to make it up to her. Josie was in for one hell of a birthday party.
“Thanks again for saving my life tonight,” I said.
“That’s what friends do.”
“Yeah. Well, thanks.”
“Sure.” Cassie was about to close her door.
“Hey, one more thing,” I said. “I think I ran into your aunt a couple of days ago. The night that thing jumped in the alley.”
“That’s impossible, my aunt lives in Chicago.”
“Is she a cop? Last name was Boswell?”
Cassie went silent. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“She said she wanted it to be a surprise. I just thought you should know.”
Cassie’s face grew grim. “Thanks for telling me.”
“What’s wrong?”
“If my aunt is here, that can only mean one thing. Tucker is out.”
Daughter of Cain. Witch. “Cassie, I’m sorry. That’s awful.”
“If it’s true, I can’t believe Grams didn’t tell me. Leave it to Aunt Reba to pull a stunt like this so she can spy on me.”
“Sounds like she’s just trying to protect you.”
“I guess.” Cassie quickly changed the subject. “Are you sure you don’t remember anything about what happened down in the crypt?”
“No. Not a thing,” I lied. “It’s late. We better get some rest. Sorry again about your dad. I hope they find him.”
“Thanks.”
I made a beeline to my room and closed the door. I hated lying to Cassie, but what other choice did I have? Casper almost got us killed and I wouldn’t risk Cassie’s life again.
I went and sat in front of the mirror.
It was strange how the feeling of dread and intrigue could occupy the same space at the same time.
There was a map inside of me. And while I peered deep into my eyes thinking the map would somehow reveal itself, it was still dangerous—the map, Casper, Mom’s messages, the Blood Book, all of it.
I traded intrigue for a bowl of raspberry chip ice cream, a bowl of hot popcorn with extra salt and butter, and an old movie on my laptop.
Once settled in, I clicked play and thought the distraction would work. But it hadn’t. I couldn’t stop thinking about Riley’s file, what she was looking for, and if I had found it. There was also still the matter of Jake’s secret. And that whole tiff between him and Zander. Questions, questions, and more questions ran through my head. And how far I was willing to go down the rabbit hole, only time would tell.
At some point, I must have drifted off to sleep.
It was 1:05 in the morning when the sound of a pebble clanking on the balcony woke me up. I sat up in bed, rubbed my eyes, yawned, and then closed my laptop. Another pebble clanked at the window. It must have been Cassie and Josie sneaking out again. Th
ere was no way I was going back out with them. And why couldn’t they just knock on my door? If I ignored them, maybe they would go away.
Another clank and I couldn’t take it anymore. I poked my head out the window to tell them no to whatever scheme they were up to, but it wasn’t them.
On the ground, Jake pointed to his phone and then pointed to me. He typed something, and I went and got my phone. I had forgotten it was on silent. There were a couple of texts for me to meet him on the roof.
Was he kidding? So he could throw me off? No, thanks.
Another message came through.
Do you want answers or not?
I wasn’t crazy about the tone in his voice even if it was a text. However, answers were exactly what I wanted. I wrote him back.
I don’t know how to get to the roof.
He wasted no time replying.
Go to the door at the other end of the hall.
I sat silent for a moment, not knowing if I could trust him or not.
He texted again.
Look... I’m sorry...
Jake apologizing? That must have hurt.
I should have been in my bed instead of creeping down a dark, creepy hall to go to the roof alone. At the other end of the corridor was indeed a door. But there was one problem.
There’s a padlock on the...
Before I could finish typing, the padlock clicked open. I wondered how he did it and what else he was capable of.
The door opened to a spiral stone staircase, and I ascended a narrow tower until I reached the roof.
Outside, a guy in a black hoodie stood on a ledge next to a stone gargoyle staring out into the night. It looked like the same guy I had seen on the roof the day I was with Cassie and Josie on the school tour. I also thought about the guy that had jumped me in the alley. The PTSD hit hard, and I hesitated.
“Liz, it’s me.” Jake pulled off his hood.
“How? How did you get up here so fast?”
Jake looked at me like, duh.
“Right,” I said. “Your secret voodoo powers.” The dead silence that followed wasn’t awkward at all. And Jake acted like he didn’t want to look at me. “So, what are you, exactly?” I finally asked.
The wind picked up.