Chapter 37
A sudden wind gusts around the room, whipping our hair into a frenzy, although the salt on the floor doesn’t budge.
The desk drawers, already on the floor, dance a jig, and that loud thumping starts up again, right where the two chairs once sat.
The temperature drops, raising goose bumps along my arms. It’s like being plunged into ice water, the cold seeping into my veins.
“You have to finish it,” Farrah whispers. “Ignore what’s happening outside.”
I refocus on the paper, but the wind yanks it out of the circle and toward the open storage room door. I try to step on it, but it’s out of range.
“Don’t let go!” Farrah shouts, and I don’t know how to proceed, because even if I had memorized the last words, I don’t remember how to pronounce them.
With a loud squawk, Maggie flaps to the ground outside the salt circle and waddles after the paper.
She catches it in her beak right before it slips through the open doorway.
She has to fight the wind on her way back, her head jutting forward and her feathers billowing in the gusts.
I’m worried it’s going to blow her away since she weighs just about nothing, but she makes it into the circle and uses her feet to flatten down the spell.
The words come up slowly, like they’re fighting to stay inside me.
Hunter squeezes my hand hard, and I finish the spell as Maggie gets blown backward into the wall.
The air immediately goes still as all the banging and stomping cease.
There in the middle of our circle stands—
A ghost.
Gently glowing, a shape takes form.
A bent old man.
Abraham.
“It ain’t right,” he says in a voice like twinkling stars. “Let the girl undo it.”
“Abraham, are you ready to move on?” Farrah asks, her voice solemn.
The ghost turns toward her and blinks. “This is my home,” he says as if surprised to be asked such a ridiculous question. “She’ll need me. I didn’t mean to raise a fuss, but she wouldn’t listen.” He steps in front of me, leans in, and whispers, “It’s under the office. Go give ’em hell, kid.”
And then he dissolves like fog burned off by the morning sun.
I look down, expecting Maggie to start screeching in my head at this truth bomb, but she’s lying on the floor, still as a stone.