The Unleashed

by Danielle Vega

  Her dad gave a deep, long-suffering sigh and pinched the bridge of his nose with two fingers. “It’s our land, honey,” he said, exasperated. “We paid for it. I know you have a bad association with that place, but we’re looking at a huge loss if we don’t get it back on the market.”

  “But—”

  “This town is having a moment right now. It’s on all sorts of best small-town lists,” her mother added, cutting her off. “It’s not just about recouping our losses. It’s about saving for our future.”

  A million arguments sprung up in Hendricks’s mind.

  There were more important things than money, for instance, and if you really cared about the future, you would make sure that house wasn’t part of it.

  She opened and closed her mouth, feeling a bit like a fish on dry land. Desperate, dying. She’d tried those arguments before, along with many, many others. Nothing had worked.

  Steele House was going to be rebuilt.

  “I have some reading to do for history class,” she said in a small voice, and drifted into the hall, toward her new, boring bedroom.

  As she closed the door behind her, one last reason for leaving the grounds of Steele House alone played in her head. It was the real reason she was so staunchly against rebuilding on that land, and it had little to do with protecting the town or saving unsuspecting families from ghosts.

  Steele House was where Eddie had taken his final breaths. It was where Hendricks had crouched in the dirt, holding his head in her lap as he died. The grounds of Steele House were sacred. If there was a chance that some small part of Eddie had remained in Drearford after his death, Hendricks knew that was where he would be.

  And her parents wanted to cover it in concrete.

  Thinking about that, Hendricks heard a roaring noise in her ears. Something deep within her began to shake. If that happened, she might never be able to reach the other side. And Eddie would be lost forever.

  CHAPTER

  3

  Hendricks leaned her head back against her bedroom door and took a moment to breathe.

  Steele House is going to be rebuilt, she thought.

  She opened her mouth in a silent scream. She dug her hands into her hair and slowly slid down the door to the floor. It was hard to explain how she felt just then. Everything was falling apart, and the only way she could stop herself from falling apart was to curl into a very small ball and hold her body very close.

  A minute passed, and then another. Hendricks didn’t fall apart. She breathed in through her nose, and slowly, slowly, her heartbeat returned to normal. Her muscles unfurled.

  Steele House is going to be rebuilt, she thought again.

  This time, the need to scream wasn’t quite so intense. Progress.

  She decided to put it out of her head for now. Quietly, she dragged her desk chair across the room and wedged it beneath her doorknob, double-checking to make sure it was firmly in place. She doubted it would stop her parents from coming into her room if they really wanted to, but it might give her a second of warning before they did.

  She dropped to her knees and dug under her bed for a cardboard box. She’d written the words old clothes across the top in Sharpie so her parents wouldn’t snoop around inside.

  It wasn’t old clothes, though. Opening the box, Hendricks found every book she’d bought on the occult, her blessed salts and crystals, a Ouija board, and some black candlesticks and half-burned sage.

  This stuff was all from Ileana’s shop: Magik & Tarot. Since Eddie died, Hendricks had become something of a regular. She’d gotten into the habit of swinging by the shop most days after school, picking through the crowded shelves and tables, desperate to try something—anything—to make contact with the spirit world.

  So far, every prayer, every spell, everything she’d tried had failed.

  Hendricks dug to the very bottom of the box, finding Eddie’s Zippo lighter. She flipped it, watching the little blue flame leap to life between her fingers. Then, with a sigh, she closed it again, and the flame went out.

  She’d found the lighter two months ago, on the sidewalk in front of Steele House. It had seemed to appear from thin air, and at the time Hendricks had been positive that Eddie himself had left it, that he’d been trying to make contact with her from . . . well, wherever he was.

  Now, though . . .

  Hendricks released a heavy sigh, shoulders slumping. Now she felt foolish. If it was possible for Eddie to waltz out of the spirit world or wherever for long enough to leave his lighter behind, shouldn’t it also be possible for him to talk to her? Or leave a note? Something? In the three months since his death, there hadn’t been so much as a whisper of him. Hendricks was starting to get desperate.

  She studied the various objects for a long moment before choosing a pack of tarot cards and Eddie’s lighter, and setting herself up at her desk.

  Hendricks wasn’t very good at tarot. In fact, her current deck was still stiff and unused.

  Ileana told her she needed to “make herself familiar” with her deck by shuffling and choosing cards daily. But Hendricks felt dumb doing that, so she’d only ever pulled the deck out on days like today, when she wanted to talk to Eddie so badly she thought she might explode.

  She shook the cards into one hand and placed them to the side. Then she took up Eddie’s lighter and held it in her hand for a long moment, letting the metal grow warm from her skin. Her eyes closed. As Ileana had instructed, she tried to conjure an image of Eddie in her mind.

  He was wearing his familiar worn black T-shirt and faded jeans, his skin warm and soft, his dark eyes locked on hers. She saw him cock one of his thick eyebrows at her, the way he did when she said something he thought was ridiculous or funny. She could practically reach out and touch the faint spray of freckles on his nose.

  She held the memory of him in her head until she could trace every line of his face.

  And then, the memory changed.

  Eddie’s skin went horribly, deathly pale. Blood coated his face and clumped between his eyelashes. Though his dark eyes gazed up at her, they couldn’t seem to focus on her face. They didn’t seem to actually see her at all. She was holding him, sobbing, begging him not to leave her as fire and smoke surrounded them.

  His lips parted, like he was going to say something, and Hendricks’s heart went still inside of her chest as she waited for his next words, his last words. But the muscles in his face failed before he could utter them. He was just . . . gone.

  A choked sob escaped Hendricks’s lips. Her hand flew to her mouth, fingers trembling. This was how Eddie had looked the last time she’d seen him, dying in her arms.

  She closed her eyes and, shuddering, pushed the image from her head.

  She opened his lighter and placed it on the desk in front of her, the flame flickering. Ileana once told her that a candle was the only thing you really needed to communicate with the dead. You could ask yes or no questions and watch the flame. If it grew longer, the answer was yes. If it flickered, the answer was no.

  Hendricks swallowed and said, her voice raspy, “Eddie? Can you hear me?”

  For a very long moment, the flame stayed still.

  Hendricks pressed her lips together. They felt dry, tight. Rain pelleted her window and somewhere farther into the house she could make out the rise and fall of her parents’ voices. She kept her eyes on the flame, not daring to breathe. She curled her fingers into her desk, her fingernails pressing down on the wood—

  Come on.

  Slowly, the flame stretched up, up toward the ceiling.

  Yes.

  Air whooshed out past Hendricks’s lips, a sudden exhale. Yes, she thought again, and bit back a smile. Blood rushed into her face, making her feel suddenly warm. He could hear her.

  “I want to talk to you, okay?” she said, her eyes trained on the flame. While she watched, she shuf
fled the tarot cards in her hands, moving slowly, trying to imbue the deck with intention, like Ileana had taught her. “I need to know you’re okay.” Then, hesitating, she added, “I—I miss you.”

  Her voice cracked on the word miss, and she closed her eyes, her hands going still. The cards felt so stiff between her fingers. She took a deep breath and tried again.

  “Just tell me where you are, okay? Tell me if you’re all right?”

  The flame stayed still.

  Hendricks flicked the lighter closed and placed three cards before her. It was the simplest tarot layout there was, and the only one she really knew how to do. The position of the cards was like a question you were asking, and the cards themselves were the answer. The positions of the three-card layout could represent anything you wanted them to. Past, Present, Future was a popular interpretation. Another was Current Situation, Obstacle, Advice.

  Hendricks liked to think that they represented Body, Mind, and Soul.

  The flame flickered as she leaned closer, her eyes moving over the pictures on the three cards.

  The first was the Death card, in the body position.

  Hendricks felt a jolt move through her as she glanced at it, recognizing it immediately. It showed a sketchy black drawing of a skeletal bird, a few raggedy feathers still attached to its bony wings. Hendricks hated this card, but she supposed it made sense. She’d asked where Eddie’s body was, and Eddie’s body was dead. There was no other way to say that.

  Again, she saw Eddie’s dead face staring back at her. Those lifeless eyes, the pale cast to his skin . . . A strange feeling slithered up her spine. This time, it was harder to push the memories of his face from her mind.

  It might be true that Eddie was dead, but that didn’t mean she had to like it.

  She moved to the next card, the one in the mind position.

  This card showed two crossed swords at the center, a burning yellow sun between them. Hendricks frowned. She’d never gotten the Two of Swords before. She quickly located the card’s meaning in her booklet:

  Indecision, it read. Stalemate. You are facing a challenging decision but are unclear of which option to take.

  Something prickled up Hendricks’s neck. This was important, she realized, tracing the edge of the card with one finger. Eddie might be dead, but he still had a decision to make. So, what was it?

  Her heartbeat picked up, becoming a steady thrum in her chest. Could he be trying to decide whether to move on, to whatever came after death? Or come back here, to her? It seemed possible. What other decisions were the dead asked to make?

  She looked to the final card, the card in the most important position of the layout. Soul. As her eyes moved over it, her heartbeat went still.

  She’d gotten this card before.

  The image was drawn in the same sketchy style as the others. It depicted a strange, monstrous creature, a claw with maggots crawling around it, two eyeballs rolling to either side. The claw creature was being struck with swords, nine in total.

  Hendricks’s skin crept as she considered it. She didn’t have to look up the meaning of this card. The Nine of Swords stood for deep turmoil and anguish. It meant that things had gotten as bad as they possibly could.

  Hendricks pulled the card almost every time she did a reading. It was the reason she hated coming back to this deck.

  Things can’t get any worse, the card kept telling her.

  But it was wrong. Every day they got a little worse.

  Hendricks slapped a hand over the card. Her shoulders drew tight around her ears, and her entire body slumped.

  A choked sob erupted from her lips—and then, abruptly, it became a groan of frustration. She was so sick of being sad. She’d been sad for three months.

  Annoyed felt better.

  For a moment, she allowed herself to imagine that this was all part of some elaborate trick Eddie was playing, to mess with her. Anger flared through her.

  “Damn it, Eddie,” she gasped, clenching her eyes shut. Tears were gathering behind her closed lids, making her eyelashes sticky.

  She sniffed, blinking them away. “We both know that ghosts are real, and you’re the most stubborn person I’ve ever met. I don’t believe for a second that you can’t talk—”

  Hendricks heard a buzz of electricity and smelled something like burned-out matches. And then, darkness.

  The light bulb in her desk lamp had blown. The room was now pitch-black.

  She felt a lift of hope. She snatched Eddie’s lighter off her desk and held it before her. “Is someone there?”

  Her voice shook, which bothered her. This is what she’d been waiting for, after all—contact with the other side. There was no reason to be afraid.

  It’s just Eddie, she told herself. He’s just trying to talk to you.

  But she was suddenly very aware of the rasping sound her breath made as it moved up her throat, and the way her chest seemed to constrict with every beat of her heart.

  She held the lighter up higher, illuminating the four walls of her bedroom, her door, her furniture. Her palms had started to sweat, leaving the warm metal of Eddie’s lighter slick beneath her fingers.

  She watched the flame coming from the lighter. “Tell me where you are,” she said, steeling herself. “Tell me that you’re okay.”

  The flame flickered, steadily, mocking her.

  And then, a sound.

  It was like . . . scratching.

  Hendricks turned around on her chair, scanning the shadows in her bedroom for the source of the noise. This room was so much smaller than her room back at Steele House had been, barely large enough for her twin bed, narrow dresser, and tiny desk. Hendricks hadn’t bothered putting anything up on the walls or displaying any photos of her friends. Half of her stuff was still in boxes.

  It didn’t take her long to look over everything in the room, to make sure it was all where it was supposed to be. Dresser drawers all closed, pajamas piled at the foot of the bed, objects from Ileana’s shop scattered over the rug. The lighter’s flame threw strange shadows over everything. When Hendricks moved her head, she thought she saw something flickering in the corner of her eye, but when she jerked back around again, the room was still.

  Fear prickled up her neck. She didn’t dare move, or breathe—

  Scratch . . .

  Scratch . . .

  She stood so quickly she set her chair rocking back on two feet. Fear flickered like a match inside of her.

  “Eddie?” she said, out loud. “Was that you?”

  Silence. And then the scratching started up again, so faint that Hendricks wondered if she was imagining it. It seemed to be coming from the box of tarot cards on her desk.

  Hendricks picked the box up, frowning. It was empty. Her tarot cards were scattered across her desk, and there wasn’t anything else inside that could’ve been making the noise.

  And yet—

  She heard another low scrape, like a fingernail picking at cardboard. Heart hammering inside of her chest, she lifted the box to her ear.

  She’d been right. There, muffled deep inside the box, was the sound of something scratching. Hendricks held her breath, the box pressed close to her head.

  Something thin and hard brushed against her ear.

  Hendricks jerked the box away. A sharp twist of fear blotted out everything else. Her hands felt thick and clumsy as she lifted Eddie’s lighter, illuminating three long white fingers. They stayed curled around the edge of the box for a split second, and then they slithered back into the shadows and disappeared.

  Hendricks gasped and threw the box to the floor. She felt like she couldn’t breathe. She’d caught only the briefest glimpse of those fingers, but she’d seen that the skin along the knuckles was scaly, and long strips of it had peeled away from the bone. The nails had been curved and yellow and sharp.

 
; A blood-curdling scream ripped from her lungs. Her scream was still echoing through the room when, in her ear, she heard a rasp of a voice, deep and gravelly:

  “He’ll be back for you.”

  CHAPTER

  4

  The sun didn’t bother coming out at all the next morning. Cold air whipped into Hendricks’s T-shirt, causing it to billow and flap against her goose bump–covered skin. She wrapped her arms around her chest, trying not to shiver. Fresh green weeds sprouted up between the sidewalk cracks, winking at her, as she made her way around the corner.

  Dead Guy Joe, Drearford High’s favorite coffee shop, crouched at the end of the street. Against the thin gray sky, it looked more like an abandoned garage than a place to buy food. Dirt clouded the windows, and a rusted hubcap rested against the concrete staircase leading up to the front door. Hendricks thought it was supposed to be art.

  She pushed the door open to a small room crowded with thrift store tables and cracked vinyl chairs. The owner, Mike, leaned over the coffee counter, studying a crossword puzzle from beneath the brim of his battered straw fedora. He looked up when Hendricks walked in, a rare smile flashing across his deeply creased face.

  “Morning, Mike,” Hendricks called, and Mike tucked the pencil behind his ear and grabbed a cardboard cup off the leaning stack, pouring a cup of black coffee without waiting for her to order. Mike didn’t understand anyone who didn’t drink their coffee thick as tar. He only owned an espresso machine because the afternoon baristas had more patience for whipping up macchiatos and lattes.

  Hendricks usually tried to force Mike to talk to her while he got her coffee, but today her mind was reeling. She thought of the hand reaching out of her box of tarot cards, those scabby, dead fingers brushing against her ear . . .

  Her parents had come running after she’d screamed, but she’d told them that she’d just overreacted to seeing a spider. They’d believed her, but they still stuck around for a while to make sure everything was okay, and after a long talk about stress and PTSD, Hendricks had almost been able to convince herself that she’d just imagined the creepy fingers and strange voice.