Chapter 14
Gabriel slid into his desk a few minutes before the bell rang. His hair was fluffed in a way that Miles was starting to recognize as half-dried from a recent shower, and he was wearing a sweater vest Miles hadn’t seen before, deep blue and charcoal argyle.
“I can’t believe you made it,” Miles teased. “I figured I’d have to call later and make sure you hadn’t drowned.”
When they’d dropped him off at the Hawthorne gate this morning, he’d warned Miles he’d be taking a three-hour minimum shower to feel “any semblance of clean again.”
“You can thank Edmund. I’m quite sure he broke every single speed limit on the way here.”
Miles made a mental note to never let Edmund and Charlee get in a car together.
“Here.” Gabriel pulled a bundle of dark fabric from his bag and passed it over. “Since you were so irked last night.”
Miles made the mistake of peeling back the scarf, and caught sight of a plain wooden hilt. It was the kill-anything knife.
“You can’t bring this to school,” he hissed, jamming it into his backpack. “If someone sees it, I’ll be expelled.”
This was the second surprise knife Gabriel had whipped out in the last twenty-four hours. Miles hoped this wasn’t becoming a pattern.
The lack of concern on Gabriel’s face was a little insulting. “Then don’t let anyone see. I assumed you’d prefer to have it with you.”
Well, yeah. But what if he pulled out his binder and it fell on the floor? Or worse, what if he poked himself with it? Would it kill him?
Okay, now he understood why Gabriel wasn’t eager to carry the thing around.
“I don’t know why I have to be the pack mule,” he muttered, adjusting the knife so it was nestled beside the heart-jar.
“Should I start by pointing out that you’re closer to the size of a mule, or that you’re the one who insists on carrying a pack everywhere?”
Nice to know being Gabriel’s boyfriend didn’t mean Miles was spared from his snark.
From the way he was looking at Miles, teasing him like before, he didn’t regret their late-night decision. But he could take it back, blame it on stress or sleep deprivation, and Miles wouldn’t blame him.
The corner of Gabriel’s mouth ticked up. “Should I be concerned you’re already trying to find an out?”
Miles kicked halfheartedly at Gabriel’s seat, knocking his own knee on the underside of his desk. Mind-reading your new boyfriend was just unfair.
The shrill bell rang, a few stragglers settling into their seats as Ms. Padilla called the class to attention.
“Since so many of you have asked: no, homecoming week doesn’t mean the test on Friday is canceled.
In fact”—she grabbed a stack of papers from her desk and strolled to the front row—“I have your study guides right here.”
Everyone groaned in unison.
“I’m sure you’ll all survive.” She handed out the sheets as she made her way down the row. “If you’ve been keeping up with the assigned reading, it should be easy.”
Miles leaned across the aisle as she drifted around the room. “By the way,” he told Gabriel, “I knew you were lying when you said you didn’t care about Spirit Week. I think it’s cool you decided to join in.”
His eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”
Miles did a slow, deliberate scan of the room—most of the class were dressed head to toe in various shades of blue, from jeans and T-shirts to increasingly absurd hats and sunglasses, one guy even wrapped in a turquoise feather boa—before settling back on Gabriel’s sweater vest.
Gabriel glowered down in disgust. The color was dark enough to almost be mistaken for black, but it didn’t matter. He fit right in.
“It’s color day, and juniors got blue.” Miles didn’t bother hiding his delight. “Such school spirit, Thistle High must be winning you—”
“You know this wasn’t intentional. It isn’t funny.”
It was hilarious.
“If you have any questions about the study guide,” Ms. Padilla stated as she headed down the row next to Miles’s. “I’ll have the answers up Thursday—”
The stack of papers exploded out of her hands and into the air. She shrieked. Several people jumped, whirling around.
Miles’s necklace gave a pulse of heat. Gabriel reached into his pocket, pulling out the chain of charms Miles had gifted him.
His gaze cut through the room. Miles ducked down, unzipping his backpack to check that the containment box was still properly sealed, the grimoire locked away. It was, but something was up.
“The air conditioning must’ve switched on,” Ms. Padilla stammered, flustered but trying to hide it as her papers swept lazily through the air to land on the floor. “I’ll have to call maintenance.”
Miles thought it was an explanation for the phantom gust of wind—but a moment later, he felt a cold breeze. Other students started rubbing their bare arms, glancing around in confusion.
The lights flickered, triggering a chorus of screams. At the front of the room, a ghostly figure appeared by the whiteboard.
Gabriel’s hand shot across the aisle to thwack Miles.
“I know, I see her.”
They were the only ones who could, judging by the lack of terrified yelps and hysteria.
The ghost was an older woman, in her sixties if Miles had to guess, her bobbed golden-blonde hair streaked with gray and wrinkles at the corners of her mouth.
Her clothes were outdated, a matching jacket and flared skirt in a cheerful buttery shade and a floral scarf draped over her shoulders.
Like all spirits, she was smudged and blurred at the edges.
She was staring right at Miles, wide-eyed, like he was the one who’d popped into existence in the middle of her government class.
“What do we do?” Gabriel prompted in a hushed voice.
The ghost vanished, only to reappear a moment later outside the classroom, peering in through the window. She must want them to follow her, which meant she was lucid and probably not immediately malicious. Both wins in Miles’s book.
“See what she wants, I guess. Call backup if she tries to kill us.” He could only imagine the rumors if his parents burst into the school and started fighting off an invisible assailant.
Miles lifted his hand, catching a visibly shivering Ms. Padilla’s attention where she was stacking her mess of papers into her desk. “I need to use the bathroom.”
“Take the pass.” She gestured at a plastic stegosaurus with their class number on its side hanging on the wall. Miles hadn’t yet worked up the courage to ask her what exactly dinosaurs had to do with government.
Gabriel jumped to his feet and announced, “I also have to use the restroom.”
She blinked at him. “Can it wait until he gets back?”
“No,” he said, so straight-faced, you had no choice but to believe him. Miles stifled a snicker.
“Fine. Go together, but be quick.”
Miles snatched up the stegosaurus and hurried out of the room, Gabriel hot on his heels.
The ghost was waiting for them in the hall.
“Is this smart?” Gabriel murmured.
“Probably not.” But she hadn’t tried to murder them in front of their classmates, so she clearly wanted to talk. She could be a teacher who’d died here at the school. There was a ghost janitor who liked to haunt the library upstairs, straightening books and humming rock music under his breath.
Her attention didn’t move from Miles’s face.
“Do you need help?”
“I’m sorry for disrupting your class, but your home was too well protected for me to enter.”
Not what Miles had expected her to say. “Who are you?”
Her mouth twitched into a strangely familiar smile. “You don’t recognize your own family?”
Family? What—
“Rosalie,” Gabriel guessed, before Miles’s brain could connect the dots. “You’re Rosalie Warren.”
“And you must be a Hawthorne. I can see Jocelyn, here”—she lifted her hand and grazed the shape of his chin, then his cheekbone—“and here.”
Miles was wildly underdressed to meet a dead relative for the first time. “Oh, uhm… it’s nice to meet you?” What was he supposed to say? Sorry you died before I met you in person, hope I haven’t been making you roll in your grave?
“It’s nice to meet you too. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to see family again.” Her expression took on a wistful tinge. “I barely have enough energy to be here right now after drifting for so long.”
Which begged the question…
“What are you doing here? No offense.”
It was a massive professional oversight that his parents didn’t know there was a ghost in the family.
“Miles’s family are buried in the Thistle Cemetery. Were you one of the… reanimated?” Gabriel’s chin dipped with guilt.
Oh, God. There was no way, right? Those bodies had been empty vessels. They hadn’t summoned spirits.
Unless Rosalie’s body being reanimated had pissed her off so much that she’d hauled herself back from the afterlife to kick their asses?
“No. But your attempt to summon Jocelyn last night sent ripples through the afterlife. I sensed your call to her and knew she wouldn’t be able to respond, so I came instead.”
“How do you know that?” The sound of a door closing down the hall made Miles’s heart skip, but the footsteps headed in the opposite direction. “Wait, someone’s going to see us and wonder why we’re talking to thin air. C’mon.”
They went to the end of the hall where a staircase stretched to the second floor, a private alcove behind it. Miles had eaten lunch here once or twice when the cafeteria got too overwhelming.
“What do you know about Jocelyn?” he pressed, once they were safely out of view. “Do you know why the summoning ritual didn’t work?”
“Because the spell you used is the same magic that’s holding her prisoner. It can’t, or won’t, work against itself.”
Miles’s suspicions had been correct in that regard, but he didn’t say so. He understood why Gabriel had to try.
“Prisoner?” Gabriel repeated edgily.
Grief flooded Rosalie’s eyes. “That’s why I’m still here.
When Jocelyn went missing, I never gave up hope.
I searched everywhere for her, snuck onto the Hawthorne property, tried every spell I could find…
I thought about her until the day I died.
I couldn’t bring myself to move on without her.
” Unshed tears glistened, diamonds beneath the glare of the school lights.
“I’ve been here waiting for her, waiting to cross over with her. She was my soulmate.”
“Oh.” Miles wasn’t sure what else to say. The undisguised adoration in her voice made his cheeks burn. “I’m sorry.”
He thought back to the framed Warren family tree on his parents’ office wall. He couldn’t recall if Rosalie had ever married.
Gabriel found words first. “Do you know what happened to her?”
“My brother, Harry, and I had our suspicions, but nothing we could prove. I tried—” Her voice quivered. “I tried so hard to get the truth, to find her, but it didn’t matter.”
“It was Florence,” Gabriel explained. “She sacrificed Jocelyn in a ritual for more powerful gifts.”
The window behind Rosalie started to rattle in its frame. Frost twisted up the panes of glass as the temperature dropped, goosebumps breaking out across Miles’s body.
“I knew it,” she said fiercely, “but I couldn’t prove it.
Jocelyn told me about the grimoire she found, about Florence’s strange behavior, and when she blamed Harry with all those disgusting lies—” She cut off with a muffled gasp, fist pressed against her mouth.
“I knew she’d done something terrible, but I couldn’t do anything about it. ”
Miles lifted his hand before remembering he couldn’t touch her. “I’m sorry. You were right, though I doubt that makes you feel better.”
“Perhaps this will,” Gabriel offered in a low voice. “We banished her ghost like she was nothing. We told her she’d lost, that Jocelyn helped bring about her demise, and then we showed her how little her power meant.”
Rosalie’s tortured expression smoothed out, settling like a disturbed lake once again going calm. She had the same brown eyes as Miles’s dad, he noticed. The same as his.
“Did it hurt her?” she asked Gabriel. “When you banished her?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“He’s making it sound way more badass than it was.” Miles felt the need to point this out. “But now we’re trying to break the curse she put on her family line. We didn’t know if Jocelyn’s spirit was stuck here because of unfinished business or magic.”
Rosalie cocked her head. “I thought you knew. Jocelyn’s spirit isn’t stuck here.”
Miles and Gabriel exchanged a confused look. “What do you mean? You just said she’s being held prisoner. That you’re waiting for her to cross over.”
“I wasn’t talking about her spirit. Jocelyn isn’t dead.”
Miles’s brain took a moment to process that, unsure if he’d heard her correctly.
“Of course she’s dead,” Gabriel proclaimed.
“She’s not.” Rosalie’s tone left no room for argument. “The two of us are bound together. I can feel her. I can feel that it’s the same magic holding her captive as the spell you used last night. And I can feel that she’s not dead. I would sense it if she was.”
That was a lot to unpack. “You can sense her? Like, her exact location? If you know where she is, we could—”
“Not like that. It’s just a feeling in here.” Rosalie lifted a hand to her chest. “The flickering flame of her life, the warmth it still gives off. It’s weak, but she’s not dead.”
He didn’t want to disrespect Rosalie, but that didn’t make any sense. Not only would Jocelyn have to be well over a hundred years old, but Miles had seen her in his premonitions, talked to her in his dream. She hadn’t aged at all since she’d gone missing.
Plus, the way she’d been sending him visions had to be some kind of ghostly power. Unless…
She was still a Hawthorne. If she really was still alive, would she have been cursed with unnatural gifts like the rest of her family?
Miles suddenly wasn’t sure of anything.
“Dead or alive, she needs our help,” he settled on, and Gabriel nodded. “But if you’re right, why hasn’t she died? There must be a reason if the grimoire’s magic is involved.”
“I don’t know. If I did, maybe I could’ve freed her years ago.”
Voices echoed down the hall, reminding Miles of where they were. They’d already been gone too long.
“We have to get back,” he told her reluctantly. He still had so many questions. “How can we reach you when we need to talk again?”
“If you call, I’ll come,” she said simply.