The Unleashed

by Danielle Vega

  “I officially call this meeting of the prom planning committee to order,” Portia said. “Can everyone gather around?”

  The kids that had been standing beneath the basketball hoop huddled closer, but the girls on the bleachers stayed where they were. A new wave of annoyance fluttered through her. Hendricks glanced at Portia, wondering if she was going to call them out, but Portia didn’t seem to notice them. Hendricks felt a flicker of curiosity. Maybe they were really popular. Or, like, bad girls. They would have to be if Portia was too intimidated to call them out.

  “As you all know, Raven is currently recovering from a terrible injury, so I’ve asked Hendricks to step up and assume her duties.” Portia motioned to Hendricks and there was scattered applause. Hendricks lifted her hand awkwardly. Bored eyes blinked back at her.

  “Okay, first things first. Decorations committee, where are we at?”

  A slender boy with Coke-bottle glasses said, “We just placed our Amazon order for basically everything we need for the SS Drearford theme, but we could really use some help assembling the balloon arch and decorating king and queen chairs.”

  “That’s great, Oliver,” Portia said. “We’ll divide up to help you as soon as we’re done here. Since the decorations are under control, could you to switch your attention to ordering tickets, invitations, and favors? If you don’t have a good stationery place, see me after and I can give the contact info for mine.”

  Portia flipped to the next page in the binder. “Lydia? You were looking into a DJ, caterer, and photographer?”

  A tall brunette with pale skin looked up. “DJ and caterer are booked, but, uh, photographers cost, like, twenty-five hundred dollars? I’m not sure we can actually afford one?”

  Hendricks glanced at Portia. Prom with no photographer seemed like a disaster, but Portia just smiled wider and said breezily, “Everyone has cameras on their phones now, anyway. Let’s set up a couple of selfie stations and figure out a prom hashtag where everyone can share their pics. Good? Okay, that’s all I have for my checklist today. I want all of you to see Oliver to get your decorating assignments. Hendricks and I will take over the chairs. That’s all.”

  Portia clapped again and the rest of the committee scattered. She kept her smile firmly in place until everyone else was focusing on their tasks, and then, to Hendricks’s surprise, she pressed a hand to her mouth, her eyes closing tight. It took Hendricks a moment to realize Portia was trying not to cry.

  “Are you okay?” Hendricks asked.

  “Sorry . . .” Portia sniffed, pulling herself together. “It’s just that thing about the photographer made me overwhelmed. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who even cares about any of this stuff. At least when Raven was here . . .”

  Her voice cracked and Hendricks felt a sharp pang of pity. As much as she missed Raven, she knew Portia missed her more. She kept telling herself that Raven was going to be okay, but it had been three months. It was getting harder to stay positive.

  “Raven’s going to get better,” Hendricks told her.

  “Yeah, I know.” And then, looking around at the other kids in the gym, Portia added, “Do you think they all think I’m a bitch?”

  “Of course not!” Hendricks said. Portia gave her a look, and she admitted, “People just don’t like strong women.”

  “I’m not trying to be bossy or whatever. I just want us to have a good prom.”

  “I know.” Hendricks squeezed Portia’s shoulder and said, in the most cheerful voice she could manage, “I don’t care if you boss me around. What do you need me to do?”

  Portia gave her a grateful smile. “The king and queen need thrones for when they’re crowned. We have to cover them with glitter and stuff. Make them look regal.”

  Two tall, wooden chairs stood on the far side of the gymnasium, directly in front of the stage, which was loaded with boxes of ribbons and scattered balloons and tubs of glitter. Portia grabbed a roll of silver and began deftly weaving it around the chair back. When she’d finished, she twisted the remains of the ribbon into an effortlessly jaunty bow.

  “See?” she said. “Easy, right?”

  Hendricks re-created the bow on the second chair and moved on to the box of glitter, wondering if there was a way to use the silver to make it look like the chairs were all shimmering, like icebergs. That was on theme, wasn’t it? Since there were icebergs in the ocean? Or was it tacky because of the Titanic?

  It was easy work and after several minutes she found her attention shifting to the conversations scattered around her, everyone chattering about decorations and dresses and prom dates, their faces all lit up and worry-free. People were preparing for this party like it was the biggest event of their lives.

  Hendricks felt her good mood fading. Her fingers felt suddenly clumsy. She couldn’t make the glitter do what she wanted it to do.

  She tried to regain her excitement for the iceberg chairs, but instead she found herself thinking about dead fingers touching her neck, her ear. The whispered warning echoing in her head. He’ll be back for you.

  She fumbled the jar of glitter and sent it scattering across the floor. Portia raised an eyebrow.

  “Sorry,” she muttered. As she tried to scoop the glitter back into the jar she found herself wishing she could be like every other girl in the gym, whose biggest problem was trying to decide between two equally beautiful dresses, or scouring Pinterest for hair inspiration, or saving for her share of the limo.

  Portia’s voice cut into her thoughts. “So, are you going to tell me what happened with Connor this morning or what?”

  “Connor?” Hendricks asked, slapping a cap back onto the glitter. It took her a second to figure out what Portia was talking about. “He told you he was going to ask me to prom?”

  Connor and Portia had been friends since they were in diapers. They told each other everything.

  “He didn’t, like, tell me, tell me,” Portia said. “He just asked whether I thought it was a good idea, and I told him that you’d be at Dead Guy before school, and he told me that you said you were going to think about it.”

  “Do you even need me for this conversation?” Hendricks meant for this to be a joke, but her voice came out more snappish than she’d intended. She caught Portia’s disappointed expression from the corner of her eye and felt a pang of guilt.

  “Sorry,” she added quickly. It wasn’t Portia’s fault she was in a mood.

  It was hard to explain exactly why she was so upset. She was having a hard time sorting it out herself.

  It was the memory of that hand reaching for her the night before, and the fact that the Steele House grounds were being repaved.

  It was Raven, lying motionless in bed, her skin pale, and Eddie’s coffin being lowered into the ground, his mother sobbing nearby.

  It was the fact that bad things kept happening and Hendricks couldn’t stop them, and she couldn’t understand them and she definitely couldn’t control them.

  And Portia was all happy with her new girlfriend, and Connor wanted to go to prom, and they were covering chairs with ribbons so they looked like thrones.

  Everyone else had gone back to normal.

  It was like the other stuff wasn’t even there. Like it didn’t even matter. It made Hendricks feel like there was something wrong with her, because she couldn’t be happy like they could. She didn’t know how to move on.

  “He said you were going to think about it?” Portia prodded.

  Hendricks dropped her hands, giving up on her glitter for the moment. “Yup.”

  “What is there to think about?”

  She shot Portia a look over the top of the chair.

  Portia’s shoulders slumped. “Eddie?”

  Hendricks exhaled, her eyes closing. She felt a double rush of emotion. On the one hand, it was cool that Portia just got it, that she didn’t need to explain.


  On the other hand, she felt guilty that she kept pulling everyone into her grief when they were all trying their best to move on.

  “Yeah.” Hendricks stared down at the ribbon she was holding. “Eddie.”

  “He’ll always be in your heart, you know,” Portia said, her head tilted to the side. “My aunt Sam died earlier this year, and I still get so sad whenever I think about her.”

  Hendricks snorted. Losing Eddie was nothing like Portia losing her aunt Sam.

  Out loud, all she said was “You sound like a Hallmark card.”

  Portia rolled her eyes at her. “Connor gets that you’re still hung up on Eddie,” she said. “He wants to be there for you, as a friend. What’s so wrong with that?”

  The way Portia said as a friend, made Hendricks realize that all this “friend” stuff had probably been her idea. “I don’t know . . . I guess it feels like I’m betraying him, sort of.”

  “Betraying who?” Portia frowned. “Eddie?”

  “I’m explaining it wrong,” Hendricks said. “It’s just . . . sometimes I feel like Eddie’s still out there. Like, if I try hard enough, I could find him and . . . I don’t know. Talk to him.” Maybe he could tell me what the hell is going on, she added silently.

  “Well,” Portia asked. “Has it been working?”

  Hendricks shoulders slumped. “No.” She glanced at Portia, chewing on her lip. “I actually wanted to go back to Ileana’s shop today. I think she might be able to help me figure out what I’m doing wrong.”

  She expected Portia to laugh at her. To tell her she was living in a dream world. That Eddie was dead, and she needed to let him go.

  Or worse, go silent on her again, not wanting to get dragged back into her creepy supernatural world.

  But Portia just dropped the ribbon she was holding back into the box and said, “Why not? Can you drive? My car’s getting detailed.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  Ileana’s shop was in Devon, a touristy town twenty minutes from Drearford. Portia fumbled with the radio the whole drive, singing along to every song she knew, switching to a new station before the last song was even over, scowling whenever she hit static.

  “Can I plug in my phone?” Portia asked, after a full thirty seconds of static. “I have the new Ariana Grande.”

  “We’re almost there.” Hendricks drove past quaint coffee shops and farm-to-table diners and a retro movie theater. Then she took a left.

  Here, the businesses were fewer and farther between, the houses derelict. Windows were dark and boarded up, and the yards were unkempt.

  Hendricks slowed to a stop and cut her engine.

  Beside her, Portia frowned. “What are you doing?”

  Hendricks jerked her chin toward a Victorian house with boarded up windows. “We’re here. Ileana’s shop is in the basement.”

  Portia glanced at the house, her expression unchanged. “No, it isn’t.”

  It was annoying how confident she sounded. There wasn’t any part of her that believed that Hendricks had taken them to the right place.

  “Hello? I’m the only one of the two of us who has actually been here before.” Hendricks opened her door and stepped outside.

  “But—” The car door slammed shut, cutting off Portia’s voice. A moment later she’d scrambled out of the car and was following Hendricks across the street, talking quickly. “But that is not a store. That is a creepy abandoned house. Haven’t you had enough creepy abandoned houses for one lifetime?”

  Fair point, Hendricks thought. Out loud, she said, “Portia, chill.”

  “Chill? That looks like the sort of place where psychopaths keep their child brides locked up in the basement. What do you mean chill?”

  Really, it wasn’t as bad as all that. The house was old, sure. The front windows were arched, reminding Hendricks of a church. Part of the porch seemed to be caving in on itself, and the house itself was painted such a dark green that it looked almost black. But the turrets were kind of cool, and there was intricate woodwork around the doors and windows. It was . . . pretty. Sort of. Creepy pretty.

  Hendricks jogged around the side of the house and down the steps to the basement. There, she found a red-painted door with a small black sign with the words MAGIK & TAROT hanging off the worn wood. Occasionally, Ileana left signs on the door, declaring that the store was closing early for a moon day, or Imbolc, or other strange holidays that Hendricks had never heard of. But today the door was empty, and when Hendricks tried the latch, it swung inward.

  The light inside the store was dim, a strange contrast to the bright spring day. It took a moment for Hendricks’s eyes to adjust to the sudden change. The windows had all been painted black. Ileana had told her once that this was so that some of her more delicate products wouldn’t be spoiled by the light—sort of like a wine cellar. The only outside light that drifted into the room was streaky and faint. Cluttered shelves lined the walls, filled with crystals and dried flower petals and demonic-looking statuettes. The smell of incense and something earthy and smoky that Hendricks now recognized as sage rolled over them.

  Portia started coughing and waving a hand before her nose. “Oh my God, is that pot?”

  “Shh,” Hendricks warned her, eyes darting around the shop. She didn’t want to offend Ileana.

  “Why are you shushing me?” Portia was whispering now, but this didn’t actually make her any quieter. “There’s no one here.”

  But that wasn’t true. At that moment, Hendricks saw Ileana standing at the far end of the room. She was very pale and had a lot of wild, dark hair, and she didn’t blink nearly as often as you’d expect. This had freaked Hendricks out at first, but she was used to Ileana by now. She’d almost go so far as to say she was a friend.

  Hendricks touched Portia’s arm and nodded at her. Portia, frowning, followed her gaze. It took Portia a second to separate the woman from the shadows, and when she did, she flinched.

  “Holy cow,” she whispered, eyes wide. “Has she been here this whole time?”

  If Ileana noticed Portia’s reaction to her, she chose to ignore it. She pressed her hands together at her chest and bowed her head toward Hendricks and Portia.

  It was the kind of gesture you expected of someone who was about to say, “Namaste,” but Ileana just said, “Hey. What brings you into the shop today?”

  Hendricks made her way across the room, Portia crowded close behind her.

  “Oh my God, what’s that?” Portia whispered.

  She was looking at the cobwebby glass display case that Ileana used as a checkout counter. A stuffed fawn with two heads crouched inside the case, marble eyes staring at them.

  “Be cool,” Hendricks muttered, and Portia nodded, but the look of shock didn’t quite leave her face.

  Hendricks took a breath, the events of the last twenty-four hours flicking through her head like playing cards.

  She remembered how she’d felt watching those withered fingers disappear into the empty tarot box, the ominous message whispered into her ear, and the cold that had spread through her when she felt something touch the back of her neck in the school hall. She could still smell that lone dead rose.

  What would Ileana say if she told her about all of this? Would she get mad? Tell Hendricks that she’d done something wrong? Hendricks thought of a thousand different television shows and movies where the wizened old wizard chided the young ingénue for playing with powers she didn’t understand.

  She couldn’t risk Ileana refusing to help her, telling her she’d gotten in too deep. If she could just contact Eddie, she was sure he’d be able to help.

  So all she said was “I’ve been trying to get in touch with Eddie. I tried the tarot cards, like you said. But, uh, I don’t think they worked.”

  “Mmm.” Ileana’s expression didn’t change. “Well, that can happen.”

 
Hendricks waited, hoping Ileana would say more, but she was silent.

  Hendricks cleared her throat and rubbed the back of her neck. “I, uhm, I was hoping you might have another suggestion for how I might communicate with him.”

  Ileana sat down on a stool behind the counter and pulled out an old-school Walkman. She switched out the tape and then shoved it into her pocket, resting the headphones around her neck. She seemed totally unbothered by the fact that Hendricks and Portia were staring at her, waiting for an answer.

  “Not all departed remain,” said Ileana simply.

  “What does that mean?” Portia asked. “Like, is Eddie not a ghost?”

  Hendricks could feel herself clenching, growing tighter, anxious. She thought of the card she’d pulled last night, the Two of Swords.

  Indecision. Stalemate.

  “Eddie would’ve stayed if he could’ve,” she rushed to say. It seemed important for Ileana to understand this. “I just have to figure out the right way to speak to him.”

  Ileana cocked her head to the side, considering her. Something about this movement seemed unnatural to Hendricks. The angle of Ileana’s neck, perhaps, or the way her collarbone jutted out from beneath her skin. Hendricks suppressed the urge to shiver.

  “There are ghosts around us all the time,” Ileana explained, after a moment. “But most of them are just echoes or reflections of the people they once were. They aren’t powerful enough to actually do anything, so they just sort of . . . exist. If you’re right and some part of Eddie did remain, there’s a way to call him forth, but it’s involved.”