Chapter 30
Thirty
Sam stood rooted on the cracked sidewalk, staring up at the house he’d barely escaped only hours ago. The sight of it was enough to make his stomach knot. Every instinct screamed at him to turn around, get in the truck, and drive, taking Erielle far from here.
But Erielle’s fingers twined with his, anchoring him in place. She needed him here. Hattie and the others needed him here. And God help him, he was stronger than his mother. Physically, anyway. What the hell would be left of him mentally after today remained to be seen.
Erielle’s voice was low but steady. “After today, she’ll be gone. We’ll be safe.” She hesitated, her eyes flicking to his. “I’ll be safe.”
“After today, she’ll be gone. We’ll be safe,” Erielle murmured. Then, “I’ll be safe,” she amended.
He didn’t want to leave her, not when things were building as they were, but he had to go.
His dad was still too weak to help Leslie the way she needed help.
Maybe he could get Susan to meet them in Baton Rouge, because it could be easier for her to visit a city instead of the bayou, but first he had to get through this.
He could feel a vibration running through Erielle. She wanted to go inside. He could feel it. She was staying out here for him. But she was pulsing with anticipation. He didn’t think it was just because they were getting rid of Millicent.
But he didn’t want her going in on her own, without him to protect her. And he wasn’t ready to step inside.
Allison was the first to arrive in her little car. She dressed in white, even to a scarf over her dark hair. She looked ethereal. She nearly floated up the walk to them, looked Erielle up and down. Then she handed them each a cloth packet.
“I made these special. Don’t drop them, no matter what.”
“What are they?” Sam asked.
“Protection.” Allison’s tone was matter-of-fact. “She’s not going to go easily.”
“My mom made me protection, and still she came for me.”
“Imagine what would have happened without the protection,” Allison said simply.
No, he didn’t want to do that.
Marie pulled up next, parking her bike behind Allison’s car.
She, too, was wearing a long white shirt over her jeans, sleeves rolled up, the rest billowing around her as she came up the walk.
Wordlessly, Allison handed her a packet, which Marie tucked into the front pocket of her jeans, so Erielle and Sam did the same.
Finally, Hattie came up the sidewalk, her white dress flaring with each step. She carried a knit shoulder bag stretched to accommodate the books. She, too, took the packet from Allison wordlessly, and tucked it in the neckline of her dress.
“Are we ready?” Hattie asked the others.
“I don’t know, are we?” Marie asked, motioning to the books peeking out of Hattie’s bag.
Hattie drew her lower lip between her teeth, hesitating only briefly before nodding. “I know what we need to do.”
“Why are you all wearing white?” Erielle asked as they walked up the sidewalk to the house.
“White reflects,” Allison said. “Black absorbs.”
“Should we change?” Erielle’s voice was a little high as she flipped a finger between her and Sam.
“If you have something. If not…” Allison reached to remove the wrap from her hair.
“Keep it,” Sam said, not wanting to be the reason Allison got possessed, or whatever the white was supposed to reflect.
Erielle opened the front door they had forgotten to lock when they bolted last night. This morning. Whenever. The group of them stood for a moment, before Erielle stepped inside first.
“We’re going to the workroom,” Hattie announced. “Safest place.”
“I’m—going to find something white,” Erielle said, resting her hand on the newel post, her gaze holding Sam’s.
His legs shook as he started toward the stairs to accompany her, but she put her hand out to stop him.
“I’ll be okay. I’ll be fast.”
He couldn’t be sure. She had the protection packet Allison had given her, and they hadn’t encountered Millicent during the day, at least as far as he knew. But the thought of her out of his sight set his nerves on edge.
“We need you, Sam,” Marie said, tucking her hand through the crook of his arm and drawing him toward the library. “There are some things you’ll need to get down for us. She’ll be fine.”
He looked over his shoulder, dread weighing in his chest as he watched Erielle go. But he let Marie guide him into the library.
Erielle returned in a white polo with the name of her restaurant stitched on the breast. Because she didn’t have anything big enough to fit Sam, she had bundled her bedsheet and carried it down in her arms.
He gave her a look when she shoved it at him, a small smile lifting the corner of his mouth, the first lightness she’d seen in him since he’d walked in on his mother at the church.
“Shall I just drape this over myself and make myself a ghost? Maybe as a disguise?” he asked, and she grinned in response.
“Just don’t trip over it when you reach up to get those candles on the top shelf,” Hattie chided, opening both books on the workbench. She selected a razor-tipped tool from the top shelf of the bench and bent over something on the desk.
Erielle stepped closer and realized it was the bayou painting that had taunted Erielle for the past few weeks.
Her stomach dipped. “What’s that doing in here?”
Hattie didn’t look up as she put one finger on a symbol in the book, and etched a rough copy onto the back of the painting. “We’re going to bind Millicent to it.”
“What?” Erielle’s voice echoed in the small space.
Hattie looked sideways at her. “We have to bind her to something. I thought this would be appropriate.”
“And then what? We burn it?”
Hattie snapped straight. “Absolutely not. Destroying it will set her free again. No. We can hide it in here, in the attic, but we have to keep it safe, or she’ll be loose again.”
“I’d write on there, in big bold letters, Do Not Destroy, ” Sam said, sheet wrapped around him like he was going to trek through the desert. “But I thought you said we were in here because it’s safe. And yet you’re calling her in here to bind her?”
“It is safe,” Hattie murmured, turning back to the painting and etching another symbol. “Allison is making sure of that, as long as you don’t move from your spot.”
Allison was on her hands and knees, drawing symbols on the floor inside a pentacle. Erielle’s heart did a little skip of alarm when she realized what she was going to have to do. They were calling Millicent in here. With them.
“Will that be enough?” Sam asked.
“We’ll stand inside it, one on each point, and hope that’s enough,” Allison said. “I worry her connection to Sam might make her stronger, but that’s why we have the packets and are wearing white. Come here, Erielle.”
Hattie set the painting up on the bench, the painting facing out. Erielle traced her fingers over the brushstrokes made by her grandmother.
“Are you sure this is going to work? I mean, it has the symbols painted into it. Won’t that protect it from her?”
“That’s not how the symbols work,” Hattie said. Once she was satisfied with the placement of the painting, she turned the journal toward Erielle. “Here. Read this.”
“I can’t,” Erielle said automatically. “That’s why we needed to find the red book.”
“Erielle. Look at it,” Hattie urged. “Can you read it?”
Erielle was still in the middle of denying when her gaze fell to the page in her grandmother’s hand. And the words jumped out at her. She took a step back. She wanted to look at Hattie, but didn’t want to look away, to lose this connection.
“Why…” Erielle’s brain was spinning. “Why am I able to?”
“You had contact with Angeline last night,” Hattie said. “I wasn’t sure if you could but the fact that you can means it’s for you to do.”
Behind her, Sam placed a candle at each point of the star inside the pentacle. Then each of them took their place in the symbol, except Marie, who walked around lighting the candles and murmuring words Erielle didn’t understand.
“This seems dangerous,” Sam said, bundling his sheet closer to him.
Hattie flashed him a chiding look. “This is all dangerous. But leaving her here only makes her more powerful.”
The bookcase rumbled closed when Marie pulled the lever, sealing them in. Claustrophobia clawed at her throat. No one else knew they were here, in here. What if they got locked in?
“Don’t panic,” Allison said calmly, as if she’d done this dozens of times.
Had she? Had she even done it once? Panic flared in Erielle’s head. They were closed in here, and were about to call on forces she had no experience with.
Marie flicked off the fluorescent lights, so the only illumination was the candles at their feet. Erielle cast a panicked look at Sam, thinking to see her own emotions reflected in his face, but he was strangely calm.
Okay. Okay. She could take something from that.
“Erielle,” Hattie said. “It’s time. Read.”
She realized she’d closed the book, but when she lifted it with shaking hands, it fell open to the exact page.
She wouldn’t have thought she’d be able to read the words—written in pencil on yellowed pages—in the candlelit room, but the pages nearly glowed, so the words jumped off.
She saw them, clearly, almost three-dimensional, and she read them.
Suddenly she smelled Gigi’s lavender vanilla scent, heard her voice, saying the words with her. Erielle stumbled to a halt, realizing if she completed this, she’d never hear her grandmother again, never smell her.
Behind her, the pictures on the wall rattled, at first slightly, then more violently. The room turned icy. Every hair on Erielle’s body stood at attention.
“Erielle, you have to finish,” Marie’s voice said sharply. “She’s awake, and she’s angry.”
But Erielle couldn’t make herself speak the words, even as she watched Allison crouch to draw the lines that were smudging as Millicent’s tantrum grew.
“Hattie, the herbs,” Allison ordered, and Hattie turned to drop some herbs in the flame of the candle behind her, then walked to each point to repeat it.
“Erielle! Read!” Marie pleaded.
Erielle watched the flames shoot upward, heating the whole room, then looked over at Sam, whose face was pale above his draped sheet. But he was calm, and she clung to that.
“Sweetheart,” Gigi said, either in her head or next to her ear. “You have to do this. You have to read. You can. You’re strong and beautiful, just who I always thought you would be.”
Tears burned her eyes, and Erielle squeezed them shut. And when she opened them, her voice came out strong and pure, reciting the incantation in words she’d never heard before, echoing in the room. Across the room, the painting slammed face down on the workbench, like a trap falling shut.
And then everything was silent.
Her ears rang with the absence of noise for only a moment before the book slipped from her fingers and she collapsed to the floor.