Chapter 19
Sylvie
My teeth are chattering, clacking against each other in some weird combination of cold and too much adrenaline.
I’m scared.
Tonight is different—this isn’t anything like seeing some spectral figure at the top of the stairs.
There is nothing spectral about it.
My living room and kitchen are completely different, from the moment they appear at the bottom of the stairs. Gone are my familiar couch and the ugly ceramic vase I made in high school, the prints I haphazardly hung with Velcro strips nowhere to be seen.
A buttery yellow and green floral striped wallpaper hangs from ceiling to rough wood floors. The kitchen, once modern, now boasts what appears to be a cast-iron stove, a fire crackling merrily inside.
The fire does nothing to dissipate the cold, and I press myself closer to Aiden’s warm body.
“It’s not real,” Prudence yells, growling low in her throat. She’s wriggling between the feet of the half-dozen or so people crowded in the room. The polite conversations they seem to be having sound discordant and strained, too loud in the small space.
Vertigo seizes me, motion-sickness-like, because what my eyes and ears are reporting are totally at odds with what I know to be reality.
“What the fuck,” Aiden mutters, and a sidelong glance shows him wild-eyed as he takes it all in.
“Ghosts?” I offer, feigning a tentative smile as I tug him along behind me. “We have to keep moving. We need to seal the entrance.”
The ghosts mill around, and the sound of eerie laughter echoes off the old-fashioned décor.
I don’t feel certain at all. In fact, I feel about one second away from losing my cool completely.
Everything about this screams that it’s very, very wrong.
My skin crawls as one of the ghosts walks through me, the feeling akin to being plunged into an ice bath.
Her long dress, one that went out of style over a hundred years ago, swishes against the floor.
A creaky gramophone in the corner begins playing as she glides over to a velvet chaise lounge, her grey-streaked hair pulled back in a loose bun.
The scratchy-sounding orchestral arrangement is just out of tune enough to make, unbelievably, everything even eerier.
“That’s so much worse,” I say, exasperated. “It’s almost as bad as one of those creepy-ass ballerina jewelry box things.”
“At this point, that’s really saying something,” Aiden agrees.
We share a look, and when he squeezes my hand, I almost feel like everything is going to be okay.
You know, except the freaky-ass ghost party we’re currently crashing kinda gets in the way of that.
“The Foster child fell sick this morning, too,” one of the ghosts near me says, walking past and sitting on the chaise next to the other. “That makes a dozen in the last two weeks. Doctor Grassley doesn’t seem to know what’s causing it, but with the fever and rash…” She trails off.
“There has to be something we can do to stop it from spreading,” a third ghost is saying, her face twisted with worry. “The Hanson boys recovered, but the Marley child… That poor family.”
“Stop what from spreading?” I ask, but they don’t seem to be able to hear me.
It’s like I’m witnessing a memory.
The music stops.
The back of my neck tingles with the feeling I’m being watched, and when I turn my attention away from Aiden’s face, my stomach turns leaden with dread.
All the ghosts are looking straight at me.
“Oh, shit. Shit, shit, shitshitshit.” I back up and Aiden pulls me closer, slightly angling his body in front of mine. “This cannot be good.”
“You.” They say it as one.
The ghosts, eleven of them—all women, I realize with a start—raise their hands, pointing at me, even as Aiden tries to shove me behind him.
Which part of me recognizes as an unbearably sweet gesture, and the other part of me is unbearably annoyed because truly, what does he think he’s going to do against a dozen ghost witches?
I blink.
That’s what they are—that’s what they have to be.
Witches.
It rings through me with a truth that makes perfect sense and no sense all at once.
I know it in my bones.
“You’re the coven who sent me the book,” I say, stepping out from around Aiden and speaking more clearly than I would have thought possible, considering it’s freaking freezing-cold and I’m scared enough I could piss myself at any second. “What are you trying to tell me?”
They stare at me, their eyes all-seeing and sightless all at once, disturbing and infinite—and then something snaps back into place.
The gramophone music picks back up, faster than before, and the scene around us blurs, the ghostly women all moving around as though they’ve been sped up.
My fingers are numb from gripping Aiden’s hand much too hard.
My breath comes in foggy clouds, the tip of my nose beyond cold, and I sidle closer to Aiden, needing his heat and to know someone else is here with me.
I’m not alone with this.
The women have formed a circle, their clothes slightly different, their hair different, too.
A different day, then.
I squint, a circle with a symbol inside it glowing on the floor. It’s not real—not here right now, at least—but I can feel its power, like it’s resonating through time.
The women—ghosts, I tell myself—are chanting, the sound forceful and pained and wrong.
“This isn’t right,” I tell Aiden, shaking my head.
Their chanting grows louder and Prudence hisses somewhere in my real kitchen where I cannot see her.
“We need to seal the salt line,” Prudence yells, and I vaguely wonder if she’s seeing this too, or if it’s just Aiden and I witnessing this strange memory.
“This is important,” I tell her, mesmerized by the haunting scene before me.
These witches are trying to show me something, something that’s going to help me figure out my little poltergeist issue in the bookstore.
Hopefully.
The air temperature plummets further and I shiver, pressing as close as I can to Aiden.
The chanting swells to a crescendo, the lines drawn on the floor pulsing with power that sinks into my skin.
It doesn’t feel right, though, and I grit my teeth at the sensation. This circle lacks that golden pulse of energy I felt when I dumped the salt at the doorways—it feels oily, wrong, and instead of gold, it glows a sick pale green that makes me think of pea soup.
Which is gross. “I hate peas,” I whisper.
Aiden gives me a sidelong glance. “What?!”
I shrug, trying to concentrate on what the ghost witches are doing. They have power, a lot of it, and even though I’ve somehow tapped into mine, this feels different. More like the power of the ocean during a storm compared to opening up the plug when I drain the bathtub.
It’s an exponential difference.
Their ghost hair floats around their heads, their eyes unfocused and eerie, the sickly light emanating from the circle draining the whole apartment of color. The image flickers like static on an old black and white television, a sense of foreboding making my own hair stand on end.
The chanting stops, the room falling silent, and the witches glance at each other, fear and concern wrinkling their foreheads.
Whatever they’re doing, it doesn’t look like it’s turning out how they’d planned.
I swallow hard against a lump of fear in my throat.
“It didn’t work,” one of the witches snaps, her eyes wild. All color’s been leeched from their faces, their clothes, and I shift, uncomfortable and unsure. “It was supposed to cast the protection spell, send all those poor children’s trapped souls on, and we should have felt the effects by—”
She keels over, dropping to the ground, and all around her, all at once in a great thud that shakes the floor, the rest of the coven does, too.
The light from the circle drawn on the floor expands, crawling over them, growing stronger with each new witch it spreads across.
“It’s taking something from them,” I mutter. Part of me really wants to get closer. It’s a tiny part, though, and my rational brain keeps me rooted to the spot—and to Aiden’s side.
“What do you mean, it?” he asks, his voice low.
“Whatever they…” I gesture wildly to the circle thing on the floor, “I don’t know, summoned, spelled, did—it is draining them. Look at it, can’t you tell?”
“You mean how it’s growing brighter?”
I nod emphatically. “Exactly. I think it killed them, whatever spell they cast—ooooh.”
A horrible thought occurs to me, and I turn my head slowly towards Aiden. “Do you think they’re the ghosts? The ones trapped in the bookstore?”
“I’m not sure how you expect me to have any idea about this, but I will say that you do seem to have ghosts in your house right now.” His voice is steady, and there’s an amused tilt to his lips that makes me feel better.
Stronger.
If Aiden, who flatly refused to believe in ghosts only a few hours ago, can smile in the face of this absolute shit show… it makes me feel like I can figure this out.
Like it’s going to be okay.
My ears pop, and from the way Aiden moves his mouth, I assume his do too.
The temperature rises, so quickly that it makes the tip of my nose and my fingers tingle slightly as they warm.
“That was informative,” Prudence says, and there’s a sad note to her voice.
“Was it?” I ask her, hurrying to the kitchen to grab the salt.
At this rate, I’ll need to keep boxes of salt on hand.
“I know what we have to do,” the cat says, licking her paw.
“Oh, hell yeah, Prudence!” I hold up a hand for a high-five, and Prudence looks at me like she’d rather cough up a hairball.
“Go salt the door so you can get some more sleep. You’re going to need it.”
“Ominous,” I tell Aiden. He’s still standing in the living room, looking around with a wild-eyed expression. Right.
“What do we have to do?” I ask Prudence.
She stops licking her paw and gives me a long, serious look.
“You’re going to need back-up. It’s time to call in the big guns.”
“Big guns?” I repeat.
“The Romantics. All three of them. We’ll need them to set this to rights.” With that, she hops off the counter and bounds down the stairs, leaving me goggling behind her holding a box of salt.
I guess she was paying attention while I was chatting with Tara about them.
I follow her down the stairs, salt clutched to my chest, immediately thumbing through my phone.
I can’t say I’m shocked when Ivy picks up the phone on the first ring.