by Lyla Payne
“I might be inclined to feel badly for you if you didn’t have a gun pointed at my face.”
“I don’t need you to feel sorry for me. I don’t know how you knew about those planks or what’s on this piece of paper, but you’ve done enough. And I’m grateful.” He screws up his face, backing up a few paces. Brian sets Dr. Ladd’s prize on the roof of the car, reaches into his pocket, and pulls out a pair of handcuffs.
They land in my lap.
“Cuff yourself to the wheel.”
I heave a dramatic sigh. Annoyance quickens my movements, and my mind keeps going back to the piece of parchment I damn well paid my dues to get. The handcuffs click closed around my left wrist, chafing far more than my skin. “You’re an asshole.”
“You know, I’ve heard that before.” He turns and stalks back to his cheap black Ford Focus, tossing the gun and my treasure inside before opening the trunk and pulling out what looks like a gas can.
“Oh, shit.”
I was wrong about him being harmless. The guy is actually unhinged and he’s going to kill me.
Fuck that. Let him try.
I start to struggle, which is about the dumbest thing ever because I just locked my left wrist to the steering wheel. I force myself to go still, let my brain breathe into some empty space, and start to look around for answers. Brian might be banana balls, but I can tell he’s not experienced. He’s already made mistakes, like not making sure I secured both hands.
My eyes wander toward the shit he dumped out of my messenger bag and I reach out, snapping up the pry bar and dropping it between my feet before Brian comes back in view. He treks around the car, dumping the contents of the red gas can as he goes. The pungent stench finds its way inside my cousin’s SUV, so strong my eyes start to water.
Brian finishes his dastardly deed and pokes his head back in the passenger door. The expression on his face is full of such honest regret that it takes me aback. “I really am sorry about this, you know. But I can’t have you stealing my thunder, and I’ve been to that prison enough times to know being inside it wouldn’t suit me.”
With that, he pulls a book of matches from Pearlz Oyster Bar out of his pocket, lights one, and drops it in a puddle of gasoline. Then he’s gone and my cousin’s car is on fucking fire and my dear Lord, it is actually hotter than hell.
“Christ!” I screech, digging with my free hand between my feet until my fingers touch blessedly cool metal. Fear threads through me, making me sweat, making me cry, making me shake, none of which is helping me get out of this death trap.
“Focus, Gracie. Or you’re going to be crisp enough to dip in tomorrow morning’s eggs.”
The fire stings my skin until it feels like I’m melting. I put the pry bar between the handcuffs and twist the metal links that connect them until they pull taut and start to give.
“Come on come on come on.” In my mind, all the cars I’ve ever seen blow up on a television show or in a movie explode like fireballs. Like I’m about to, once these flames heat up my engine or reach my gas tank.
The metal handcuff chain creaks, then snaps. I’m coughing so hard from the smoke that it takes me three tries to grab my wallet and cell phone and another two to kick open my door. I crawl away from my inferno of a car, hacking a sooty lung onto the midnight pavement, fingernails holding on to reality for dear life.
And that’s why, maybe, it takes me so long to realize that Brian’s screaming like a banshee.
Chapter Twenty
It takes me a minute to get to my knees, then my feet, and to be honest, I really don’t care if he’s being eaten alive by rabid deer, or wolves, or anything else that might be lurking out here at night. He did just try to kill me.
I stick to the shadows cast by the fireball that used to be Millie’s SUV, but once I see what’s making him scream, I can’t help the hoarse laugh that pushes past my lips.
Brian’s on the ground near his trunk, hands out in front of him like they can ward off spirits, and standing a few feet away is the ghost of Dr. Joseph Ladd.
He’s not doing anything, just standing there with his arms crossed, foot tapping. I don’t even have to see the expression on his face to know he’s seriously pissed off, and as I get closer, I see that Brian is pissed on.
As in, he’s peed himself.
“Oh my stars above, you pissed yourself? One of the longest running, most lauded tour guides in one of the most haunted cities in America, and this is how you handle seeing your first real live ghost?” I sneak a glance at the doctor, who appears to be almost weak with relief at the sight of me. “Thanks, Doc. I’ll take it from here.”
Brian’s shaking like a little baby, his eyes as wide as saucers. “It’s him. Dr. Ladd. The Whistling Doctor. I heard … I heard him whistle.”
“Congrats.”
“You weren’t lying. You see him. He showed you those boards.”
“I’m so happy you’re a believer now, Brian. Really.” I kick his gun into the grass and peer inside his car, noting the keys hanging from the ignition and Dr. Ladd’s parchment still safe on the passenger seat. “You know, it means a lot to me, knowing you don’t think I’m crazy. You on the other hand … you should get some fucking help, you psychotic dipshit.”
I get behind the wheel and manage to move the parchment before Dr. Ladd gets in beside me, loosing a nervous laugh from my chest. As if he’s going to squish it.
The engine turns over and the car has more than enough gas. We get two miles before I have to pull over to throw up.
With that done, I drive the seven miles back to Heron Creek, debating whether to call the police the whole time. In the end, I don’t. Brian isn’t going to come after me; he’s just a sad little man with an alcoholic dad and no future. Amelia will forgive me about the car, and the actual bottom line is that I’m so stinking tired that even the thought of taking a shower to get the smoke out of my hair and off of my skin makes me start crying.
Dr. Ladd disappears when I pull into the driveway. He hasn’t tried to touch me the way Anne and pushy Glinda did, which is awesome. When ghosts touch me it’s like turning to ice from the inside out. If he could have offered a real hug I would have taken it.
The house is quiet. Everyone’s asleep, no one’s worried about whether I’ve made it home. My anger over that fact flares hot but doesn’t last. Fatigue smothers it, along with the knowledge that Millie would care if she were herself. It’s okay. I don’t need anyone to put me to bed.
My shoulders straighten and I slog up the stairs, sticking my head in to check on Amelia, as I’ve been doing since she started the intense dreaming/sleepwalking thing. As far as I know, she hasn’t gotten out of bed again, but there’s a good chance I wouldn’t know if she did. I sleep like the dead. Or I did, before nightmares started attacking me, too.
I watch her chest rise and fall for a minute, pulling out my phone and texting Beau back so he won’t worry in the morning. One week until the trial.
Hey, sorry I missed your good night earlier - lost in research. Good night. <3
With that done and the bones in my legs aching to high heaven, I step into the shower and wash my hair, scrub the grossness of tonight away, and try to let it go as it swirls down the drain. The scrapes on my legs and the slice across my palm clang in a dissident, throbbing song that doesn’t stop once the water turns off or when I’m wrapped in a towel. My pajamas are soft, though, and the quilt and clean sheets soothe the slight pain.
I remember my head hitting the pillow, then there’s nothing but blissful, blissful blackness.
And then there’s cold. It turns my bones to sticks of ice that could be wielded as weapons by Elsa from Frozen. The frigid frost seeps into my blood, turning it to crystals, and by the time I manage to open my eyeballs, they feel like marbles that someone left in the freezer.
Dr. Ladd is leaning so close to my face that I want to scream, but my lips are stuck together. He’s got his hands pressed into my biceps and all I can do to communicate my dist
ress is roll my marble eyes toward his iron grip.
He gets the message, jerking away from me with a sheepish expression that only lasts a split second before it morphs back into the panic I’d woken up to. The doctor scrambles back off the bed, the lack of movement on the mattress disconcerting. He’s over by the door in a flash, trying like hell to grab the knob, and it would be comical if his hurry to get out of this room didn’t scare me.
I toss on a cardigan and stuff my feet into a pair of flip-flops by the door. The ghost waits in the hallway, his finger glowing in the dark house as he points toward Millie’s room.
My feet move into an awkward sprint. One hand grabs the threshold to her room, and I peer inside, too aware that I closed the door after checking on her earlier and heading to bed but now it’s open. The covers are rumpled, balled up toward the foot of her bed.
My cousin is gone.
There’s no light on in the bathroom, no movement at all except for the fluttering of the curtains in front of the open window and the rapid movements of Dr. Ladd in the corner of my eye.
I swing around to face him. “Where is she?”
He’s already floating toward the steps down to the first floor, and it’s impossible to keep up with him. As soon as we’re outside he shimmers around the side of the house toward the river, and I know where she’s gone. I have shoes on this time, even if they are flip-flops, and break into a run. The grasses sting, and I’m out of shape enough to be in serious pain by the time my feet trade the soggy marsh for the sturdy, creaking boards of the dock. I whip around, searching for Amelia’s blond hair, her trademark knee-length nightgown—we always tease her about having a grandma’s wardrobe—but don’t see anything.
That’s when I turn toward the river and see her floating facedown in the river.
The water closes around me before my brain knows I’ve jumping off the dock, and then my arms are around her swollen waist. I flip her over and scissors kick for the shore, the burn in my legs and arms not registering until I’ve got her pulled up onto the muddy sand. My muscles tremble as I swipe the soaked ropes of hair from her cheeks and lips, leaning my ear against her mouth.
She’s not breathing.
Instinct takes over for the second time tonight. As something of a professional babysitter in my other, more responsible teenaged life in Iowa, I kept up a CPR certification and that training kicks in. My fingers link together and the heels of my hands find the right spot on her sternum, pressing one, two, three, four and then tipping her head back and breathing twice into her mouth. I repeat it three times without success, but on the fourth try she coughs and spits up water, rolling onto her side to vomit up more.
When she’s on her back again, eyes unfocused and drifting closed, I shake her. “Amelia. Millie. What happened?”
Her head lists to one side and she tries to swallow. “Dreams, Grace. The dreams. So real.”
It’s all she says before her eyes drop closed. Her whole body trembles and jerks, and her skin is clammy and freezing. I ran out of the house without my phone. She needs an ambulance, but I don’t want to leave her here alone.
“Shit.” Tears burn my eyes but I swallow them back, determined not to lose it just yet. It’s been about the shittiest day in the history of shitty days, and I’ve had more than my fair share of doozies.
A squishy thud startles me and I look over to find my cell phone in the mud. Dr. Ladd’s standing beside me, a shit-eating grin on his face that leaves me more than a little awed. I knew he learned how to pick things up, light things like the brochures and my hairpins, but none of my ghosts have ever carried something as heavy as a phone. That I’ve seen.
He must be a quick study. Or extra bored.
“Thanks,” I tell him, choking on more tears as I dial 911. “Hi, I need an ambulance. My cousin was sleepwalking and almost drowned.”
The woman doesn’t hear that one every day, but I refuse to allow her to ask me a million questions. I’m too overwhelmed to deal with humans. I give her the address, tell her where we are behind the house, and hang up as she’s asking me to please remain on the line until help arrives. I stretch out on the wet ground next to Millie, wrapping my arms around her and cuddling close to lend her my body heat.
The stars are out, the clouds from the past couple of days blown out to sea. It should be hopeful, the change in the weather. The fact that Amelia’s okay, at least for now. The wheeze of her breathing soothes me as far as that worry, but I can’t stop thinking about what she said.
The dreams.
Memories of my own too-real night terrors seize my heart. I haven’t talked about them with anyone because hell, they’re bad dreams and I am a grownup, not a kid crawling into my grandparents’ bed. There’s no one’s bed to crawl into except Amelia’s, and in there, the nightmares would have been waiting.
I think about what Odette said about the curse being stronger with Millie. I mull over what Mrs. LaBadie said about death finding a way to get to my nephew, and I know in my gut there are a million ways I’ve never imagined.
But if a curse can get inside our minds while we sleep, and convince my cousin to walk straight into the intercoastal waterway behind our house … How are we supposed to fight that?
It’s more than twenty-four hours later before reality starts to encroach on the world of the hospital, and twenty-four hours after that before I start to feel like an actual human being again.
Which means it’s Wednesday midday and Beau’s trial starts in five days.
I poke my head in Amelia’s hospital room. “Hey,” I say, startled by the sight of Travis in the chair beside her bed.
The detective is in the middle of a story that’s sort-of maybe supposed to be funny, based on Amelia’s expression, and my cousin has at least a quarter of a smile on her face. More than I’ve managed to get out of her in the past couple of days.
“Oh. I can come back.”
“No, stay. I’ve got to get back to work. Just stopped by on my lunch break to check in on Miss Amelia, here.” Travis gives me a smile, but it’s not all that friendly. We haven’t talked about my stealing that printout off his desk, but he must figure now’s not the right time.
I’m sure he won’t forget to bring it up later.
My eyes narrow of their own accord but I try to remind myself that Millie needs everyone she can get on her side. It’s just that the intentions of a guy trying to swoop in on a battered, pregnant woman who’s trapped in the hospital on a psych hold while they determine whether she tried to kill herself can’t be good. Right?
“Okay.” I flop into the chair he vacates, and he bends over, swiping a kiss on Millie’s forehead.
“Take care of yourself.”
“I will. Let me ask you, Dylan, do you make a point to visit all of the crackpots under your purview?” My cousin might be kidding, but the bitterness in her tone says she’s not.
His cheeks redden, but he gets himself together pretty well. He might actually have more of a sense of humor than I originally thought. “Yes. And don’t you forget it. It’s legal code.”
“It’s some sort of code,” Millie mutters, uncertainty twisting her face.
“See y’all.” Travis pauses in the doorway. “And Miss Amelia, you’re not a crackpot. I know it.”
He leaves and I roll my eyes and snort, earning her attention back from the spot where he disappeared. “He’s a piece of work.”
“I don’t know what he is.”
“Does he bother you, coming here? Because I can tell him to hit the bricks.”
Now my cousin rolls her eyes. “If I didn’t want him here, I’d tell him to leave myself, Grace. I might be bats, but I’m not a child.”
“He’s right about you not being nuts. I’m an expert.”
“Really? Because walking into a saltwater river in your sleep and almost dying is a common thing among sane people?”
“And you were saved by a two-hundred-year-old ghost. Let’s not forget that part.”
&nbs
p; “That’s your crazy. You don’t have to share.”
“You were never big on that, anyway. Brat.”
We smile, but there’s hollowness between us, a big empty space that needs to be filled with answers neither of us have. Despite my budding friendship—or bribe-ship—with Odette, I’m just not sure we’re going to get them. Not clear ones, at any rate, which leaves us back where we started.
Afraid.
“Beau came by this morning,” she tells me.
“He told me.”
“He looks like hell.” She presses her lips together, worry drowning any sparkle in her eyes.
“Well, he’s about to go to trial and it seems like he’s going to lose.” My heart twists for Beau and also for the fact that I can’t talk to Millie about the whole thing with the Carusos and Chandler Wellington. She’s got enough on her plate.
“And Dr. Ladd?”
“I found something the other night, but with everything that’s happened, I haven’t gotten to look at it yet. I need clean room stuff at the library. Going back to work tomorrow, so I’ll check it out then. He’s been around less since he woke me up the other night.” I shrug. “Maybe he knows we need a little time together.”
“I don’t understand what happened, Grace. But I do know that the dreams I’ve been having feel like reality. When I wake up I can hardly convince myself they didn’t happen. Like when your alarm goes off and you get up and have coffee and get ready, and then you actually wake up and you’re late for work, and it’s like you’re doing it all over again.”
“I know what you mean. I’ve been having them, too. Scary shit.” I pick at my cuticles, licking my lips and swallowing several times to try to dislodge some of my deep, deep dread. “I think it’s the voodoo. I’ve been reading about it—what I can find—online, and messing with dreams is something people believe can happen.”
“I know. She’s still after us.” Amelia’s big eyes pool with tears that slip down her cheeks. It’s not her terror so much as her hopelessness that punches me in the gut.
I cover her hand with mine, wanting more than anything for us to have a reason to believe this will all turn out okay. “It’s not going to happen, Amelia. Unlike our mothers and grandmothers, we know what we’re up against. For the first time in generations we have an advantage, and we’re going to get through this. So is he,” I add, nodding at her belly.