It started like this, normally. Sometimes, it didn’t work. Sometimes, it did. I really needed it to work so that I could do the job I had been hired to do.
When I opened my eyes again, I was enveloped in complete and absolute darkness. I felt a stillness to the air that indicated that I wasn’t where I had been before.
I could hear so many voices, so many of them, all pleading for my help.
But I wasn’t there for them, no matter how much it hurt my heart to hear their pleas.
And there were so many of them.
So, so many.
Holly. Holly Stone.
I didn’t say it, but I might as well have, because the voices suddenly stopped. I could see nothing, but it was as if the temperature had dropped, and the voices had stopped.
It was as if they were making space for Holly Stone.
After that, there was only silence.
More silence.
Bone-chilling silence.
I felt like I might throw up from it. The silence was worse than the weeping, the screams, the demanding voices. The silence felt like dread had enveloped me completely.
Holly.
I called for her again, my eyes still not used to how dark it was. If this had been a different realm, if I had been somewhere else, my eyes would have gotten used to the dark by now. But I knew they wouldn’t.
She finally appeared in front of me, though I couldn’t see her. I could feel her presence.
“You’re here,” she said. Her voice sounded hollow. Strange.
I was afraid of her. I could feel the hatred and anger coming from her.
“I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Hello, Holly,” I said. “What do you need from me?”
Everything.
She didn’t say it, but I could feel her voice reverberating in my bones. If I could feel nauseous, I thought I would have. But I didn’t.
I couldn’t give her everything. I could hardly give her anything, when I had no idea what it was that she wanted.
“What do you need from me?” I repeated.
I was trying my best not to seem afraid, because seeming afraid was the easiest way to make things go south.
Everything!
She roared and my entire being trembled. I felt the fright seeping into my body, into my blood, into my bones.
“Listen to me,” I said, trying my best to keep my voice steady. “I can’t give you everything. I can only give you this. Why have you been hurting people?”
I felt the slap before I could process what was happening. It was more than a slap, it was as if someone had punched me hard in the face, and I felt like I was going to throw up.
I fell to my side, hitting the cold floor under me. My head hurt. Everything hurt.
“Stop,” I said. “I’m not trying to hurt you.”
There was laughter.
Deep, troubling, awful cackling.
I felt something warm on the side of my forehead and was vaguely aware that I was bleeding, though the pain was brief, temporary.
“Stop,” I said again, though I could hear the trembling in my voice. I was afraid, and we could both tell that I was afraid, and I could tell that she thought it was funny.
I didn’t think it was funny.
I knew, was acutely aware, that I was in danger.
With every moment that passed, the danger increased.
“Please,” I said. “Let me help you.”
Another punch, this time harder, quicker. Even though I was already on the ground and I wasn’t a threat, Holly was punching me on the side of the head, as hard as she could, and all I could taste was blood in my mouth, and I could feel blood trickling down my skin.
And then I couldn’t feel anything.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ELIAS
2019
I was trying not to pay attention to what Lily was doing, partly because I didn’t understand it, and partly because I didn’t want to interfere.
But when I heard her body thud on the bed, I couldn’t help but look back at her, and my heart dropped when I saw that she had a nose bleed and her eyes were rolling back in her head.
“Lily? Lily!”
I walked over to where she was. Basil’s eyes were large as saucers and I wanted to shake him.
“How long has she been like this?” I asked.
He waved his hand in front of his face. “This just happened,” he said. “She just fell over.”
“You said you can take her out of this,” I said. “Has this happened before?”
“Yes.”
“Does it happen often?”
“Not really, only sometimes,” he said.
“Well, get her out of it,” I said. “If there’s a way to get her—”
“Lily,” Basil said, walking over to her and putting his hands on her shoulders, sitting her upright. I wanted to tell him to stop, since it looked like a seizure, but before I could, Lily’s body moved violently away from the bed, as if her body was on a string.
She was being swept around the room as if she was on a harness, and she bounced violently against the sides of the room. Basil and I followed her, trying our best to catch her, but the room was too tall and whatever had her in its grips didn’t want to let go of her.
“Hey!” I said. “Leave her alone.”
It only served to piss it off. Lily’s body moved faster and faster, twisting in unnatural ways, until it levitated on top of the bed. I held my breath. It looked like she was going to be let go onto the bed and maybe she would have been okay, but the thing slowly moved her to the side of the bed and it would have dropped her several feet, clearly hurting her.
I wouldn’t have been able to catch her, and Basil wouldn’t have been able to catch her.
I felt like I might faint myself as her body started spinning while she fell toward the floor, never slowing down. Her body was going to hit the floor, she was going to get hurt, and I wasn’t going to be able to stop it.
Then her body slowed down.
I could smell Meredith’s perfume and heard her voice as Lily’s body was set softly on the wooden flooring. “It’s okay,” Meredith said. “It’s going to be okay.”
I looked at Basil, who was staring at me. “You know her,” he said.
“My fiancée,” I said, my voice sounding strangled.
“I’m sorry,” Basil said. “How long has it been?”
“A few years,” I said, walking over to where Lily was. Her eyes were fluttering open. “Lily!”
She came to and set her gaze on me, her eyes glassy. “I’m okay,” she said. “I’m fine.”
“You’re bleeding,” I said. “What happened?”
“She doesn’t want to be talked to,” Lily said as she sat up. “We’re going to have to get her out.”
“Okay,” I said. “But what about you?”
“We can worry about me later,” she said. “This spirit is dangerous. Whatever happened to her, I don’t know if we can help her.”
Basil gasped, which made my heart do flips in my chest. If Basil was scared of this, then I was terrified. I had no experiences with this and no baseline, but they both seemed frightened.
“So how do we do that?”
“Sage,” Lily said, standing up as soon as I offered her my hand. “And a little faith. You have to believe in the process, otherwise, it’s not going to work.”
I blinked. “To be honest, I don’t know what to believe.”
“We need you to believe,” she said. “If you don’t believe, we’re not going to be able to get her out of here.”
I licked my lips. “I don’t understand why she’s doing this.”
“I don’t think she understands why she’s doing this, either,” she replied. “I think she’s deteriorated and just remembers her pain. She wants everything, but I think everything means that she needs to get away from the pain she felt.”
I blinked. “Did she tell you that?”
Lily shivered. “No,” she
said. “I just felt it. I can feel how afraid she is herself. Spirits are rarely straight up evil, they’re always much more likely to be lost.”
“So it doesn’t want to hurt people.”
“No, it does,” she said. “But it’s because she’s hurting herself. She needs to be released from her pain and needs to be able to move on. That’s why we need you to believe, because if you don’t, she’s never going to be able to move on. We need her to move on.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “I’ll try my best,” I said. “But I can’t promise anything.”
Lily grabbed my hands and looked into my eyes. “You believe, Elias,” she said. “I know that you believe.”
I blinked and swallowed. “I don’t know if that’s true.”
“I know it is,” she said. “You’ve been getting messages too, and I just… I need you to commit to it right now, okay?”
She squeezed my hands and I squeezed hers back. “Okay,” I said. “Okay. I’ll believe you.”
She smiled. “Believe me now.”
I swallowed and looked into her eyes. She was right, enough things had happened that I should believe her. I might not be able to process them quite yet, but I understand that all of these things were bigger than me. I just needed to believe her, and believe in her, and I could do that.
I understood it.
“Do you have any dark clothing?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said.
“Okay,” she replied. “I need you to go and get dressed in dark clothing, because the smoke is going to get on your clothes and it’s going to smudge.”
I smiled. “Good call. These aren’t my clothes.”
“They are now,” Basil replied. “Just keep them on, it’s okay.”
“You sure?”
“Yes,” he said. “I just want to get this done as soon as possible.”
“Okay,” I said. “If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure,” Basil said. “I’ll go get the sage.”
“We’ll start here,” Lily explained. “This is the place where everyone seemed to start being sick. It’s important that we start here, because this is probably where she died.”
“Why?”
“I expect that a lot of the patients were downstairs, and this used to be like a staff sleeping room,” Lily said. “I expect if the staff died, they died here.”
I nodded. “Yeah, okay, that makes sense.”
“So we’re going to cleanse the space here,” she said. “Then, depending on how it feels, we’re going to see if we have to move to other rooms.”
“Got it,” I said, turning to Basil as he got herbs out of his bag. “So what do I do?”
Lily smiled at me. “Just stand back and let us work.”
“Okay,” I said.
I stood back and let them work, looking at what they were doing with curiosity but trying my best not to interfere. There was nothing to do except watch them. Basil took a lighter and lit the herbs on fire and the air was filled with their scent.
He wafted the herbs around the room, letting them fill the room. “Open a window, Elias,” Lily said.
“Okay,” I replied.
The windows were way up high and it was difficult to reach them, so I had to practically climb on top of some furniture in order to let the air out. Instinctively, I knew how important it was to keep the window open, because it was important to let the spirit have somewhere to escape from.
They didn’t chant or do anything of the sort, which I expected them to do. Basil wafted the herbs around the room as Lily followed him, her eyes closed, until she nodded.
It wasn’t until she nodded that Basil would move on to another side of the room, certain that whatever presence had been removed. My arm was starting to ache but it felt like my job was important. It felt like it was, though there was no way for me to prove it except to stop doing what I was doing, and I wasn’t going to do that.
The smoke was making my eyes water and my arm might have hurt, but from the way that Lily was wiping under her nose, I could tell that she was bleeding.
That this hurt her.
I wanted to go over there and scoop her up, tell her that it was all going to be okay, tell her that she didn’t have to do this. But it would have been a lie. She needed to do this, and I knew that she needed to do this, and just thinking about it for too long was upsetting. I wanted her to stop for her own well-being but I knew things were not that simple.
And, despite how I felt about it, I felt like I could feel that presence she was speaking about. The room felt darker, even though it hadn’t gotten noticeably darker. It felt like everything around us was darker, like there was a storm coming and I was going to be blown away and away from the castle, though I knew that was impossible.
The window started to shake and I tried my best to keep it open. The entire room felt like it started to shake and the desk under me felt like it was sliding back and forth.
“Just stay on the desk,” Lily said. “Don’t fall, Elias!”
“I’m trying!” I replied. I was trying, though the desk was shaking violently under me. I had to move toward the window, making myself as small as possible and trying my best to put my feet entirely on the windowsill, but my feet were too big and I knew I was maintaining my balance entirely from standing on the desk.
I saw something from the corner of my eye. Lily was staring it down, too, and I could see a ball, but this time, it wasn’t a ball of light. It was a ball of darkness and it was going toward her, hard.
“Hey!” I said.
The ball stopped, and the desk flew out from under me. Somehow, I managed to keep my grip on the window, even as I was falling down toward the floor. I practically rolled over as my ass hit the floor, pain shooting through my body. I tried to grit my teeth and tried not to scream, because screaming would have felt counterproductive, because doing anything but trying to fight this thing would have been counterproductive.
Even though I was in a huge amount of pain.
Then I heard a scream, agonizing and pain, and the ball of darkness escaped through the open window. Basil and Lily approached me. Lily helped me up as Basil tried to shut the window.
“I need some painkillers,” I said, trying my best for a smile.
Lily shook her head. “You need to go to the hospital.”
I nodded. “Painkillers first. Did it work?”
They looked at each other. “Yes,” Lily said. “I can’t feel her anymore. I think it worked.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
LILY
2019
I sent Basil to the pharmacy and to check on the cat. He told me that he would probably only be back in an hour or so, and I knew that he needed some time to calm down. I needed time to calm down too, but mostly I needed to debrief Elias, who seemed shaken. Elias asked him to swing by his hotel and get him a bag of clothes, since his were dirtier than they had been before the smudging and he wanted to change. Plus, he was still technically wearing Basil’s clothes, he was uncomfortable.
I grabbed him by the hand and led him to the bed, where I sat him down.
“Are you hurt?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Can you take your pants off?”
“At least buy me dinner first,” he replied.
I laughed, but not very uproariously. I was worried about him and I knew that he was using humor to cope. “Seriously, take your pants off,” I said.
“Fine,” he replied.
Just like I had suspected, his clothes were smudged with the residue from the sage. He kicked off the jeans and picked up his legs so that he was holding his knees close to his chest. I could see, from where I was sitting, that there was going to be a giant bruise forming on his legs.
I tried my best to seem neutral when I spoke. “I hope you didn’t break anything.”
“I don’t think I did,” he said. “I fell pretty well.”
“Good to know,” I replied.
“It’s
hard to say, though,” he said.
I raised my eyebrows.
“I should probably not strain,” he said as a way of explanation.
“Should we call an ambulance?”
“I don’t feel like I need an ambulance,” he said. “A therapist, maybe.”
I laughed. “I’m not a therapist, but we can talk about it, if you want.”
He closed his eyes. “I’m going to tell Dr. Overstreet that it was something in the water, undetermined, and hope that they do some environmental testing,” he said. “I’m also going to recommend that they don’t send anyone up here for a while.”
“It’s going to be okay,” I said. “I can feel it, you know, in my heart.”
He smiled. “You’re the weirdest person I’ve ever met, Lily Quinn.”
I nodded. “Or the most normal one.”
He leaned closer to me then, his gaze darting between my lips and my eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe.”
When he closed the space between us, kissing me on the lips, I didn’t stop him.
“Are you sure about this?” I asked. “What about—”
He pointed at the ring hanging from his necklace. “It’s a memory,” he said. “And she would want me to be happy, right?”
I didn’t stop him when he kissed me again. This felt right, it felt like the culmination of everything we had lived together, like the right bookend to all of this. I didn’t know how it was going to end, but I knew that I wanted him, that I had probably wanted him since the very first time I had seen him.
And he wanted me, too.
I could feel him from the way he was kissing me, from the way he had looked at me.
There was no animosity in the way he was touching me, it just felt like he was giving in to his deepest, most important desires.
And it felt like I was, too.
He put his hand on the back of my head and his kisses sped up. I allowed his tongue into my mouth as he slowly pressed himself against me, kneeling up while he continued kissing me.
When I was on the bed, on my back, he moved his face away from me. “What about you, Lily? Are you sure?”
“I’m definitely sure,” I said. “Definitely.”
He smiled at me and continued kissing me, first on the mouth, then down my neck. He moved his hands toward my jeans, unbuttoned them as my hips buckled, and breathed deeply on my neck, his breath sending a shiver down my spine.
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