The Unleashed

by Danielle Vega

  Almost.

  He’ll be back for you, she thought, and shuddered so violently that Mike looked up from her coffee, frowning. She flashed him a tight smile, thinking, Who?

  Eddie?

  And then, her stomach twisting, Grayson?

  Grayson was another ex-boyfriend. He’d been manipulative and emotionally abusive, and he was the reason Hendricks had moved to Drearford in the first place. She’d thought all that was behind her, but now she wondered. Could the voice have been warning her that he was coming back for her finally?

  The thought sickened her.

  Mike clapped a plastic lid on top of Hendricks’s coffee cup, snapping her back to the present. “Thanks,” Hendricks said, digging around in her pocket for a few crumpled bills. “And a maple éclair.”

  Mike got her pastry, and Hendricks balanced the coffee and doughnut bag in one arm, sticking a dollar in his tip jar on her way out the door.

  Coffee dribbled out from under the plastic lid and seared the skin on her thumb as she reached for the door, then froze. Connor was outside.

  Hendricks stuck her thumb into her mouth, frowning. Was he waiting for her?

  She considered weaving to the other side of the shop, so she could go out the back door and spend the rest of her morning obsessing over the fingers and the voice, but at that moment Connor looked up and saw her through the glass.

  He waved. She waved back.

  You’re friends now, she reminded herself, as she pushed the door open and joined him outside. Stop being weird.

  She knew from experience that this was easier said than done.

  “It’s May, why the hell is it so cold?” Connor said, rubbing his hands up and down his arms.

  “No idea,” Hendricks said. Were they really talking about the weather? She glanced around the empty gray sidewalk, hoping Portia would materialize between the parked cars. They’d made tentative plans to meet at Dead Guy before class. “I don’t mean to run, but I told Portia—”

  “Portia and Vi are making out in the school parking lot,” Connor said, a little sheepishly.

  Hendricks felt her lips pull tight. Oh. “Well, then I’m free as a bird.”

  For a moment, they walked together in silence. Connor stared at the sidewalk, his hands bunched beneath his armpits. Hendricks studied the lid on her coffee cup. For a fraction of a second, she considered telling Connor about what she’d seen the night before but then immediately decided against it. They’d never spoken about what had happened that night at Steele House. She wasn’t sure she wanted to open that Pandora’s box just now.

  Finally, Connor said, “Okay,” on an exhale, air whooshing out from between his lips. And then. Again. “Okay, so here’s the deal. Vi and Portia are planning to do the big, romantic prom night thing, but a bunch of other people were thinking of going in, like, a group. Sort of a casual thing, and I wanted to see if you were interested in coming with us. With me.”

  Hendricks lifted her coffee to her mouth and took a drink to buy some time before she was expected to answer.

  The coffee was way too hot, and it burned her tongue.

  “Shit,” she said, jerking the cup away. Hot coffee spilled onto the sidewalk. “Shit.”

  Connor stopped walking. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I just burned myself.” She pressed her lips together, grimacing. It wasn’t a bad burn. She sort of wished it were worse, that blisters had popped up along her lips, or that the coffee had burned right through the layer of skin on the roof of her mouth. She would’ve had to rush back into the coffee shop then and get some sort of special salve from the first aid kit and maybe suck on an ice cube. Which would’ve meant that, at least for a little while, she would’ve be able to dodge Connor’s question.

  But she didn’t have any blisters. Hendricks’s mouth was starting to feel better and Connor was standing in front of her, eyebrows raised, and there was no reason at all why she shouldn’t give him an answer.

  This whole thing would be a lot easier if Connor weren’t so cute. Not just cute in the good-looking sense—although he was good-looking. Cleft-chin, kind eyes, the usual.

  But at CTE, she’d gotten to know another side of Connor. He liked nature and working with his hands, but he was also a tiny bit afraid of the dark. He hated s’mores, which was completely unacceptable and made her want to make him a dozen different types of s’mores, using all different types of chocolate and graham crackers until she found a combo he liked.

  He’d played pranks on her and Portia almost every day. Dumb ones. Once, he’d left a fake rubber dinosaur in her sleeping bag. Another time, he followed them on a hike and kept trying to jump out from behind a tree to scare them, only he’d been really loud the whole time, and they could always tell exactly where he was.

  He was . . . ridiculous and funny and completely wrong about s’mores.

  In other words, he was the sort of guy she should want to be with.

  But he wasn’t Eddie.

  Hendricks pulled her eyes away from Connor’s and stared, hard, at the crack in the sidewalk. She should tell him no. It was the kind thing to do. She would just be thinking about Eddie at the dance, anyway. Connor deserved someone who wanted to be there with him.

  She knew this. And yet, she couldn’t quite make the word no form on her lips.

  “Can I think about it?” she asked.

  Not a no. But not a yes, either.

  Connor’s eyebrows flicked. “It’s not a big deal, either way,” he said too quickly, his gaze shifting down to his shoes. “Like I said, it’s a casual thing. As friends. No big deal either way.” He’d already said that.

  “Right,” Hendricks said.

  Connor waved goodbye and took off in the opposite direction. As he walked away, Hendricks noticed that the backs of his ears were tinged red.

  I’m such a jerk, she thought, hating herself.

  * * *

  • • •

  With nothing else to do, Hendricks found herself pushing through the doors to Drearford High thirty minutes before the first bell. For a moment she just stood there, considering the dark hallways, the empty classrooms.

  No one was here yet, not even the teachers. Or if the teachers were here, they were hidden away in the teachers’ lounge or in their offices, where early-bird students couldn’t bother them. There was a light switch to the left of the main doors. Hendricks flipped the switch, watching the cold fluorescents flick on, illuminating faded linoleum and battered locker doors.

  For some reason, the light just made the halls feel emptier.

  When Hendricks had first started coming to Drearford, Portia and Connor and their friends all congregated at a table in the cafeteria before school. Now that it was warmer, Hendricks noticed that students mostly hung in each other’s cars, or nursed coffees at Dead Guy, or milled around outside in the parking lot. No one seemed to go inside early, but Hendricks had no interest in finding out what Portia and Vi were up to in the parking lot, and spending any more time with Connor felt strange now that she’d maybe’d his prom offer.

  She tugged her bag farther up her shoulder and began walking toward her locker. Her footsteps echoed off the walls, the vibrations moving through the floors, making the locker doors jangle. A whiff of disinfectant hung in the air, along with the faint smell of food. Meat of some kind? Hendricks wrinkled her nose. The cafeteria workers must be here already, hunched over the stoves in the basement, cooking up lunch.

  The light directly above her sparked. And went out.

  Hendricks kept walking, unbothered.

  Until a second bulb blew.

  And then a third.

  “The hell?” Hendricks stopped walking and looked up at the ceiling. Every single light bulb she’d walked beneath was now black.

  The hair on the back of her neck slowly lifted. She chewed her lip, wondering if s
he should go back outside, find Portia or Connor or anyone really. Perhaps it had been stupid of her to come here alone, especially after what’d happened last night.

  This was school. Nothing supernatural had ever happened to her here.

  She thought of what she’d seen last night, those dead white fingers reaching out from her box of tarot cards. She’d assumed nothing bad could happen to her in that boring rental house, too. She’d thought the hauntings were only at Steele House.

  Stupid, stupid.

  She whipped herself around, muscles twitching beneath her light jacket, but she didn’t see anything. She took a single, clumsy step backward, hearing her boot scrape across the linoleum. She was afraid to keep walking toward her locker in case more lights burned out, plunging her into total darkness. But she didn’t know what would happen if she walked back down the shadowy black hall toward the front doors, either. She pictured those same fingers reaching out from the lockers, stretching toward her, grabbing for her—

  She stood, frozen for a long time, dread building. Her eyes darted from one end of the hall to the other. What to do? Where to go?

  A cold finger touched the back of her neck and traced down her spine.

  Hendricks yelped and spun around, one hand grasping for her neck. “Who’s there?” she shouted.

  Her own voice echoed down the hall, bouncing off the lockers around her: Who’s there? Who’s there?

  And then, in her ear, the same raspy voice she’d heard in her room last night:

  “He’ll be back for you.”

  The acid taste of terror flooded Hendricks’s mouth. She lurched backward, toward her locker, and another light bulb fizzled and burned out.

  “Who?” she shouted into the darkness. “Who will be back for me?”

  No response, just eerie silence. Hendricks could feel her pulse thudding in her temples. She had the strange feeling that someone was waiting in the darkness, watching her, peering through the slats of her locker.

  She said hesitantly, “Eddie?”

  A sudden bang! echoed through the halls, and Hendricks whirled around in time to watch the school’s front doors fly open. The lights switched back on as a small group of freshmen Hendricks didn’t recognize filled the hall, talking and laughing. They cast strange looks at her as they drifted past. Probably wondering what she’d been doing standing here in the dark.

  It took a long time for Hendricks’s breathing to steady. She didn’t know what else to do, so she shuffled toward her locker, the sound of her heart beating in her ears like gunfire. Her knees knocked together as she walked. The ground felt brittle beneath her boots, like thin ice that might crack open at any moment, swallowing her up.

  Her fingers moved on autopilot, twisting her combination, fumbling with the latch, pulling the locker door open—

  And then, she froze.

  There, sitting on the bottom of her locker, was a single rose, its leaves curled like dead fingers, its petals shriveled and black.

  CHAPTER

  5

  Hendricks’s fear soured throughout the day, eventually curdling into anger. She’d gone three whole months without any contact from the other side. And now she was getting this? Not Eddie but flickering lights and dead flowers and cryptic warnings.

  It was seriously messed up.

  The anger cropped up in algebra, when Hendricks’s teacher asked her if she understood the new formula and Hendricks snapped that she didn’t know why they were bothering to memorize this stuff when they could just look it all up on their phones. It followed her to the principal’s office, where she sulked and stared off into space while he lectured her about her “attitude” and threatened to call her parents.

  And it was still lingering after school, when Portia materialized beside her locker.

  “I heard they sent you to Principal Walker’s after third,” she said.

  Hendricks slammed her locker shut. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she muttered, hitching her backpack up her shoulder. She’d thrown the dead rose away, but the smell of it still lingered in her locker, perfuming all her books. “Except to say that Principal Walker is a sad little man with way too much power.”

  “Well, duh.” Portia’s eyes lingered a second longer, concern flickering through them. “Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked, in a softer voice. “You look a little . . . freaked.”

  For a beat, Hendricks considered telling her about the hand and the rose. As she had with Connor, she quickly dismissed the thought. Portia had been so traumatized by the last haunting that she hadn’t spoken to Hendricks—or anyone else, for that matter—for weeks. CTE had fixed all that, but Hendricks didn’t want to risk losing her again.

  “I’m fine,” she said. Portia fell in step beside her as they made their way down the hall. She changed the subject to something she knew Portia couldn’t resist: Vi. “Why didn’t you meet me at Dead Guy this morning?”

  Portia pressed one hot-pink nail to her hot-pink lips, grinning. “I was . . . busy.”

  “Busy making out with Vi, you mean?”

  Portia’s grin vanished. “Who told?”

  “Connor. He said you two were going at it in her car.”

  “We were hardly going at it,” Portia said. “One kiss, one, and it was closed mouth and everything. We just wanted to . . . celebrate.”

  A blush had risen in Portia’s cheeks. Hendricks knew she was supposed to ask what they were celebrating, but she kept her lips tight, making Portia wait for it.

  After a moment, Portia glanced at her, looking disappointed. “Aren’t you going to ask—”

  “What are you celebrating?”

  “As of this morning, we’re officially official.”

  Hendricks lifted an eyebrow.

  “She’s my girlfriend,” Portia explained. “I’m her girlfriend. We’re girlfriends.” Portia was bouncing, actually bouncing. “Oh my God, Hendricks, things are so good between us right now. You have no idea. It’s like she finally wants to be together for real instead of just hooking up at parties when she’s drunk.”

  “Lucky you,” Hendricks muttered. She didn’t mean to sound so annoyed, but she couldn’t help it. Portia being all happy and giddy with Vi just made it that much more obvious that she was alone, miserable, and scared.

  And then there was all the bouncing. Hendricks wanted to grab her by the shoulders and force her to walk normally.

  “Are you psyched about prom planning committee?” Portia asked.

  At this, Hendricks managed a real smile. “I am, actually. A little nervous, too.” She didn’t tell Portia this, but the two feelings were sort of mushed together in her gut, making her feel nauseated.

  “Don’t be nervous,” Portia said. “It’s going to be awesome, you’ll see. This is exactly what you need.”

  Hendricks wanted to believe her. Her decision to join the prom planning committee was another thing to come out of CTE. Every night, after they’d finished hiking and fishing and chopping wood, Hendricks, Portia, and Connor and the other kids at camp would all gather around the fire. There, they’d pass a twig covered in ribbons and glitter—called the Feelings Stick—around the circle and talk about their emotions.

  It was pretty cheesy. There was no other way to put it. But after a few days you sort of got used to it, and when it was Hendricks’s turn with the Feelings Stick, she’d reluctantly admitted that, sometimes, she didn’t really feel like she had a personality.

  “My ex-boyfriend Grayson was really controlling. He didn’t like it when I did things on my own,” she’d admitted. For some reason, the mountain air and flickering fire made it easier to say this sort of thing out loud, and Hendricks found that, once she’d started talking, she couldn’t stop. “He mostly wanted me to be there for him, like cheering him on at his soccer games, and hanging off his arm at parties and stuff. I was basically a prop. Now tha
t I’m not with him anymore, I don’t even know what I’m supposed to like doing.”

  The counselor had asked her what sort of things she’d been into before Grayson, and Hendricks had told her about how she’d helped out behind the scenes with her old school’s theater department. Grayson always thought it was nerdy, and after they’d gotten together, he talked her into quitting. Hendricks still missed it, though. It had been fun.

  “Our school musical isn’t until fall, but the prom committee needs help with decorations,” Portia had pointed out. “I’m prom president, I could probably get you signed up.”

  Which brought Hendricks here now, feeling nauseated but excited as she made her way into the gym with Portia. She inhaled, deep, pushing the nauseated feeling away. This is good, she told herself. It was the one thing in her life she was doing just for her, not for ex-boyfriends or ghosts. Or ex-boyfriends who happened to be ghosts.

  “I come from a long line of prom presidents,” Portia was saying. “It’s practically a family tradition.”

  Hendricks frowned. “Don’t you mean prom queen?”

  “Queen?” Portia huffed. “The queen is nothing but an empty figurehead who stands on stage and wears a pretty crown. The prom president has the real power. I get to be in charge of every single facet of the event itself. My mom did it for her class back in ’95, and my grandma before her, and my aunt planned the Drearford prom in ’86 before she had a mental break and had to be committed.” Portia said this with raised eyebrows, like it was something to aspire to.

  “Impressive?” Hendricks managed to choke out.

  “Since Raven can’t help, you can be my vice. Don’t worry, it’s totally easy. I’ll handle everything, you just have to sort of . . . pick up the slack when I can’t. Cool?”

  Portia pushed the doors to the school gymnasium open. “Hey, guys!” she called, clapping. There were about twenty other kids gathered in the gymnasium. Most were milling about beneath the basketball hoops, but there were a couple of girls in bright, oversize sweatshirts and leggings crouched on the bleachers. Hendricks frowned at them. Drearford High was pretty small, only about three hundred kids total, and she’d gotten to know almost everyone in the school, but seniors ate lunch off campus, so there were still a few groups of kids whose names she wasn’t sure of. The girls were unfamiliar to her. They looked like Urban Outfitters mannequins come to life.