The Forsaken and the Fated (The Hollow and the Haunted Duology #2)

Chapter 1

Getting cursed out by a teenage ghost in a curly mullet and a sweater that looked like the eighties threw up on it was, unbelievably, not the worst thing to happen to Miles today.

That honor was reserved for the throbbing ghost bite on his arm, which had a solid fifty-fifty chance of giving him supernatural rabies.

“Will you just tell me if you’ve seen him?” Miles asked tiredly, holding up the charcoal drawing of Gabriel he’d done earlier. “That’s all I want to know. He went missing Tuesday morning—”

“I don’t care what you want,” the ghost cut him off, crossing his arms like a petulant child. The neon colors he was wearing were making Miles nauseous. “You drag me here without warning and start bossing me around? What’s your damage?”

He’d been pissed since the moment he appeared, taking one look at Miles and Charlee before launching into a rant about never being summoned by anyone interesting or hot. He seemed most upset about the hot part, calling Charlee a freckled freak and yanking one of her curls.

“I mean…” Miles glanced at Charlee for help, but she shrugged. “That’s how this works. We summoned you. If you’d answer our questions—”

“That’s how this works,” the ghost mocked in a high-pitched voice. “Bite me, asshole.”

He gave them the finger and disappeared with a pop that reverberated in Miles’s ears and through his teeth.

A whirl of ghostly wind whipped around his room, sending his tacked-up pictures flapping like crow’s wings against the wall and his homework flying off his desk.

His dresser drawers crashed open with a bang, and several books fell off shelves.

Well. That was rude.

“Another dud,” Charlee grumbled, blowing out the candles and wafting the smoke towards the open window with a pillow. “We’re three-for-three. These ghost douches would rather die again than help you.”

“I know, I just—” Miles raked a hand through his tangled hair. He hadn’t gotten any sleep last night, the sickly-sweet smell of the vanilla candles was giving him a headache, and Gabriel had been missing for over three days now. He might be losing his mind. “I don’t know what else we can do.”

No news. No sign of him. No overnight reappearance. Not even a call or text to reassure Miles he was still alive.

Silence. Suffocating, unbearable, maddening silence.

Charlee hadn’t picked up anything helpful from Gabriel’s scarf, so they couldn’t even get a hint of where to start.

These séances were her idea, set up in his bedroom when he got home from school.

They couldn’t exactly go around putting up missing posters of Gabriel, knocking on doors and asking strangers if they’d seen him.

But they could manage something close with the spirit world.

Most séances were used to contact a specific ghost, summoned by name or with one of their personal items. But they could also be used to seek information. If you were lucky and had a powerful enough medium, an ask could summon a ghost with an answer.

Miles had seen it done a few times, mostly to contact long-dead witnesses who could answer questions about what injustice had created a vengeful spirit or where a body was buried. Desperate attempts to piece together enough of a breadcrumb trail to get that name, that personal item, that gravesite.

According to his dad, these attempts were usually more trouble than they were worth.

It was never going to be a sure bet. When you were aimlessly calling into the void for answers, everything had to be left open for the ghosts to come through, the path as clear and accessible as possible.

They couldn’t put down a salt ring, Four Thieves Vinegar, or even protective crystals.

It was the strategy of the truly desperate, and it was dangerous.

Miles was starting to get that.

He was using the world’s sloppiest séance setup—a circle of blue candles and clear quartz around Gabriel’s scarf and the drawing of him—risking their safety and his mom’s wrath for something he didn’t even know would work.

He’d been cussed out, told that Gabriel had been spotted burning in hell, and chomped on by a feral, potentially rabies-ridden ghost hard enough to draw blood before Charlee chucked a handful of salt at it from their oh shit bowl.

And they’d only been at this for a little over an hour.

A scream had been inching its way up Miles’s throat for half of it. His arm was throbbing nearly as hard as his head, and his knees were sore from kneeling on the bedroom floor.

He had no idea what they were doing.

“Let’s take a break,” he told Charlee, hearing the exhaustion in his own voice. He tried not to feel guilty. He wasn’t giving up, just catching his breath. Recuperating. “I’ll text Edmund, see if he’s heard anything.”

After leaving the Hawthorne estate on Tuesday, he’d received a message from an unknown number—Edmund, asking if he’d found anything in Gabriel’s room. Miles had managed to get him to agree to wait longer before telling Felicity, but that clock was steadily ticking down.

The sympathetic look Charlee gave him made that inevitable scream inch up his throat a little farther. “Yeah, sure. We need to let it clear out in here anyway. The last thing we need is the smoke detector going off and your mom breaking down the door.”

Thankfully, Miles and his mom had made a silent agreement to avoid each other. She hadn’t been up in his room in days, not since she found out he’d been secretly seeing Gabriel.

“She’d probably let me burn,” Miles muttered. Sarah still hadn’t apologized or even tried to get his side of the story. She was barely talking to him beyond telling him it was his turn to do the dishes or that he needed to help his sisters with their homework.

Charlee stretched before falling back onto his bed, mattress springs groaning. She had her own mom drama to deal with now that Aunt Robin was up and about.

Miles grabbed Gabriel’s scarf and clumsily got up from the floor, his legs stiff and one foot asleep, and joined her, crawling around her fan of red curls. Charlee shifted closer, pressing their arms together.

“I wish I knew he was okay,” Miles whispered. He wrapped Gabriel’s scarf around his hand tightly enough to ache, sinking his fingers into the plush knit.

Knowledge had been such a terrible burden these last weeks that Miles hadn’t realized how awful not knowing would feel. Having someone vanish without a single clue, without any idea of where they were. Not knowing why they’d left. If you’d ever see them again.

He knew what Charlee thought: Gabriel had gotten spooked and run away.

She didn’t understand that he wouldn’t do that.

He hadn’t fled when his death was looming over him.

Why would he now that he thought he was safe?

When they had the grimoire, when they’d kissed, and Miles had pledged to help him break the curse?

Charlee had suggested that Jocelyn had appeared to Gabriel with her warning too, and he’d panicked. But Miles knew he’d never leave Bram.

Something made him leave. Someone had taken him or forced him to go, to vanish without a trace and leave his phone behind. He was either being held against his will, or dead.

No. He couldn’t be dead. Miles would feel it if he was.

And Jocelyn had told him the future was unchanged. Gabriel was still destined to die in that tomb, Miles watching him go.

But their whole quest hinged on the belief that that future could be changed. If they could do it, why couldn’t someone else? It wasn’t like they’d know if someone else already called dibs on murdering Gabriel.

Nothing felt guaranteed when he was gone.

Miles’s focus drifted across the room to the mirror atop his dresser.

After spending too much of the last few days staring into Gabriel’s eyes in it, asking him where he was— knowing he wouldn’t get an answer—he’d put himself on mirror restriction.

Looking at Gabriel only made him feel like a failure and sparked an awful fear that he wasn’t ever going to see him in person again.

It was still tempting. Miles had to fight the urge to look for a quick glimpse of pale skin and ebony hair.

He held out the scarf for Charlee. “Will you try one more time?”

“It’s not going to change.”

“I know, just—just one more time, okay? Please?”

She sighed but took it from him. A heartbeat passed, then two.

“I can barely feel him anymore,” she apologized.

“Your emotions are too strong. They’ve latched on.

But what I can feel is the same as before.

He’s hurting and cold, a darkness pulling him in.

There’s a pain, here”—she gestured to either side of her collarbone—“and he’s thinking of you.

Scared for you, but thankful you’re with him.

” Her hazel eyes opened, glassy before she blinked the fog away.

Miles had heard this already, decided it was from the last time he’d seen Gabriel wearing the gray scarf down in the tunnels of the old Hawthorne house, when the shadows had tried to consume him.

He must not have touched it before he’d left. Or his emotions from the tunnels were too strong, drowning out anything else.

Either way, it was useless.

Miles took it back, struggling to swallow around the lump in his throat. “Do you think we should tell Felicity? If he’s in real trouble and we’re wasting time—”

“What’s Felicity going to do? We both know she won’t be any help. We’ll find him, okay? If not with these séances, then something else.”

She pointedly didn’t mention that they had nothing else.

“I don’t think the séances are working,” he admitted, fidgeting with his necklace—he’d had to get a new chain after his broke in the cemetery, and it didn’t lie the same now.

“Yeah, this idea might be a bust.”

“It’s not a bust, we’re just… not very good at it.” His bitten arm throbbed.

Charlee snorted. “We suck.”

It would help if one of them was a medium.

They struggled to get the ghosts here in the first place, and once they were, couldn’t hold them.

The summoning was slippery in Miles’s mouth, like trying to find his footing on an icy sidewalk.

He’d never had a knack for it, which was one of the reasons he’d been so thorough and cautious with the ritual to summon Florence.

He didn’t even know if the ghosts who’d appeared knew anything about Gabriel, or if they’d been random catches.

Charlee stared up at the ceiling, freckled hands folded over her lavender sweater. “We could peek through your parents’ contacts, see if there are any mediums we can recruit.”

Miles shook his head. Too much could go wrong. There were too many secrets he couldn’t share, too big of a chance they’d go to Felicity—or worse—his parents.

It did make him think… There was one other person he knew who might be able to help, but it would be tricky.

“Wanna do something risky?” he asked Charlee.

“Riskier than this?” She pointed her toes at the shoddy séance spread across Miles’s tan shag rug. “Why the hell not?”