Chapter 27
“Entity discredits ghosts as non-issues and wants to distance themselves from that brand of ‘paranormal,’ but I’ve seen what ghosts can do. There’s no way to get rid of them, either. The best we can do is protect ourselves and pray we’re able to ward off the worst of them.”
Journals of Warden Michael Keane
Alexys ran for her life.
Cold wind whipped across her face, and her breaths rushed painfully from her lungs. She tripped and staggered over brambles and bushes and fallen trees. Vines of kudzu and low-hanging branches, nearly invisible in the darkening sky, caught her face as she ran past. She didn’t dare look back.
The sound of her feet crashing through the leaves echoed around her, and it was joined by her heartbeat reverberating in her ears. Alexys didn’t know if Waylan (or anything else) was following her, but she didn’t want to find out.
She cut around a giant cedar tree and begged her legs to go faster. Her calves ached, her lungs burned with each frantic breath, but she pushed on, driven by a desperation to put as much distance between herself and the ghost of Waylan’s house.
The sound behind her. Like soft footsteps.
No, no, no!
The steps grew closer.
Alexys chanced a look back, despite every instinct inside her screaming not to, and screamed.
White eyes chased her through the dark. The shape of a boy made of shadow and moonlight seared itself into her mind and sent terror clawing through her.
Her foot caught, and she fell. Pain lanced through her ankle, and the palms of her hands burned as she landed hard on her hands and knees. She tasted blood on her lip.
She didn’t have time for pain. She pushed herself to her feet and kept running.
Crying, mournfully dark and twisted, echoed through the trees behind her. She could hear him calling for his mama, blaming her for being late.
Sobs choked past the tightness in her chest. She was about to die alone where no one would ever find her body.
If a body was left.
Tears blurred her vision, and Alexys was so blinded she nearly ran right past a silhouette standing among the trees.
She hardly registered the cold eyes of Silas Lockwood as she dashed past him, but when the shape moved and she saw him, she skidded to a stop.
Whether or not he could handle whatever Waylan had become mattered little.
She was more than willing to sacrifice Silas to the Haint if it meant she got to live.
“Please!” Alexys panted, pointing toward the uncanny light that moved through the trees toward them. Alexys pressed herself against a tree, shaking with fear.
“Oh my, what have you gotten yourself into, Miss Keane?” Silas tucked his hands into his pockets.
There was no sense of fear, nothing to indicate he was at all frightened of the Haint that rapidly approached them.
He radiated deadly confidence, and Alexys realized she ought to fear him far more than some wayward ghost.
An awful sound split the evening. A horrible combination of a scream and a roar that sounded more demonic than anything she’d ever heard before. It was a sound that shouldn’t have been able to come from the lungs of a boy.
Alexys forced her eyes shut and started praying. She didn’t know what she was praying for, but she prayed for anything that might save her from the godforsaken situation she’d landed herself in.
The roaring stopped, but Alexys didn’t move. Her ears rang from the sound as it finished echoing through the mountain.
“You can come out now,” Silas said dryly.
Her hesitation lasted long enough that she could hear Silas laugh softly. Alexys pried one eye open, then the other. Suspicion prickled her senses. Silas and Waylan stood on either side of a stream, watching her.
“What’s going on?” She had to keep hold of the tree to stop herself from shaking. Her thigh muscles trembled, and her twisted ankle ached.
Silas gave her a look. “Did you know Haints can’t cross running water, or was that luck?”
Alexys looked down at the stream she had indeed crossed and suddenly noticed the soggy state of her shoes. She may have heard that Haints couldn’t cross running water, but she hadn’t even noticed that she’d crossed it. Her focus was a bit too fixed on trying not to die.
“Yes,” she lied. “That’s why I crossed it.”
“How resourceful of you.” Silas’s smile was mocking. “What’s next, then?”
Alexys looked at Waylan. He lingered on the other side of the stream. There were twigs and leaves caught in his riot of curls, and his overalls had fresh mud splattered across the cuffed hems. But his eyes, which had been so earnest and blue, were two white lights in the night.
Alexys weighed her options. They were few, and none of them filled her with very much confidence. Her only real option was to try to find her way back to Opal’s house and hope it was on the non-haunted side of the forest.
She turned to Silas to say as much, but he was no longer paying attention to her. His gaze was fixed on the spectral boy across the water.
“Waylan.” His tone was stern, that of a parent scolding a child. “Best be gettin’ on home now. Your Mama’s probably worried sick about you.”
Waylan tilted his head at the first sound of Silas’s voice. He looked so lost standing alone on the bank with his muddy overalls and tear-stained face.
“Mama?” His sweet, boyish voice returned, and the flickering of his body began to slow. His luminescent eyes were fixed on Alexys.
“Yes, your Mama.” Silas took a step forward, blocking her from Waylan’s view. “Run along home now. It’s getting real dark.”
Easy as that, Waylan left. Just turned around and vanished into the woods, taking his glowing white eyes and desperation along with him.
The erratic rhythm of Alexys’s heart finally started to slow.
“I thought Haints were just house-dwelling spirits,” she said. “Shaking furniture, knocking over glasses, that sort of thing. He seemed so normal, felt normal—I touched him.” The mocking lift of Silas’s brow made her swiftly lose confidence. “I didn’t know they could be corporeal.”
“In fact, they can.” Silas sounded like a professor trying to patiently give one of his students a remedial lecture that was so eerily reminiscent of Nic but far less enjoyable.
“Ghosts, spirits, Haints, it’s all rather circumstantial.
It’s not uncommon for them to find their way into homes, especially if that house is located on the land they used to live on.
However, some can get trapped within a much larger space. ”
He nodded his head in the direction Waylan had fled.
Alexys looked around them at the seemingly empty and eerily quiet forest. “Waylan is trapped here?”
“In a sense.” His smirk was a cold thing that sent chills skittering across her skin.
“When poor Waylan was alive, he used to play in the woods near his house. He was always warned to come back before dark lest he get lost and never make it home.” Silas exhaled.
“When Waylan died, he was on his way home, but he didn’t make it back, so his restless spirit attempts the same trip, at the same time, every day. ”
“Poor Waylan.” Her heart broke a little for the boy, even if he was a Haint.
“Poor Waylan, indeed.” Silas sounded anything but empathetic. He was looking at her with a calculated expression that set her even further on edge. “But you shouldn’t pity him too much, Miss Keane.”
Alexys frowned at him. “Why not? It’s a horrible fate to suffer for eternity, especially for a child.”
Silas beamed at her, but it was a cruel expression. “That it is, but what do you think happens to those who happen upon him in the woods, hmm? Who try to help him get home?” Images of the white-eyed ghost that chased her through the woods caused her breath to hitch.
“You’d do well to remember,” Silas said, shrugging thoughtlessly, “there are always two sides to a story: the monster and the victim. But who plays which role is determined entirely by perspective.”
She tried not to picture the dark spirit Waylan had become. Alexys wanted to remember the barefoot little boy holding up the pill bugs for her inspection. The crooked smile framed by freckles and dirt.
“How did he die?” she asked.
“That,” Silas said firmly, “is a story better left untold.” Alexys narrowed her eyes at him.
“Anyhow, you should return to Opal’s house before it gets much later.
Head straight between those trees, and you’ll eventually get there.
” He turned his back on her. “Make haste, Miss Keane. I don’t have the patience to rescue you a second time. ”
“Wait,” she called before he could walk too far. “I still don’t understand. Why are you here? Why did you save me? And what does this have to do with my Warden?”
Silas stopped. He didn’t turn around, and for a moment Alexys wondered if he was going to answer. Then he said, “Your Warden is of little consequence to me, but as for you, your time has not yet come. And when it does, it certainly won’t be at the hands of a Haint.”
He then walked through the trees and disappeared.