Chapter 2
THE RETURN
Reporters call out questions as I hurry past them—the same greedy hoard that was present on Halloween night.
A security guard holds them back as the front doors of the hospital slide open.
I rush inside to a waiting room that crackles with tension.
The phone at the front desk rings. The receptionist barely has time to field the call before another comes through.
A male police officer stands in front of the doors leading to triage.
Mrs. Winslow—mother of Ivy Winslow, the other girl I watched combust into flame—pleads with him.
Her eyes are sunken, her cheekbones sharp, her mouth drawn tight like a prune.
The poor woman looks to have lost twenty pounds over the last week.
“Please,” she begs. “I just want to know if she was with my daughter.”
The officer gives nothing away, which is probably policy. But sometimes, policies are cruel. If he has any information about Ivy Winslow, then screw protocol. He should tell her what he knows.
Mrs. Winslow clutches his arm. “Please just tell me. Does she know where Ivy is?”
“Ma’am,” he says.
But before he can finish his thought, Griffin Tate steps into the scene—Lainey’s ex-boyfriend, his face red, his fists clenched.
The officer holds up his beefy hand. “I’ve already told you, son. Only family are allowed back at this point.”
“But she came to me. She came to my house. She wanted to speak with me!” And then, before Mrs. Winslow can get out a word edgewise, Griffin turns to her with a note of compassion. “And no, she didn’t say anything about Ivy. She hardly had time to say anything at all before these guys showed up.”
The doors behind the officer slide open.
A nurse steps out with a clipboard and a paper chart.
Mrs. Winslow and Griffin lean toward her hungrily.
But she only calls out for someone named Kathleen.
A woman with an ice pack pressed against her cheek stands from her chair. When she moves, I catch sight of Kate Calloway, gathered in a huddle with a handful of friends.
Kathleen heads back with the nurse.
Griffin attempts to follow, but the officer blocks him and the doors close. He lets out a roar of frustration and marches back from where he came, barreling through Kate and her group of friends, who scatter and split like bowling pins. He takes an angry seat near Twig.
Gloomy sunlight spills through the windows, illuminating my tall, lanky friend. He’s folded himself in half with his elbows propped on his knees, a cast on one arm, a boot on one foot, his opposite leg bouncing.
Twig has gone through the wringer as of late.
He broke his arm when a parade float nearly crushed him to death, and he cooked his foot when that demon from the deep almost dragged him through the rift after Lainey.
For the past week, he’s been grappling with survivor’s guilt, as if a teenage boy with a broken arm should have been able to stop a fallen angel and her psychotic monster squid.
As though sensing my stare, he looks up—his brown eyes puddled with relief. Because surprise! Lainey isn’t dead after all. He comes out of his seat and joins me as Mrs. Winslow begins to sob and the phone continues to ring.
We shuffle toward the alcove off the waiting room.
“How is this possible?” I ask him in a low voice.
He shoots a quick glance over his shoulder. “Griffin said she showed up at his house earlier this morning. I guess his neighbor spotted her and called the police. They came and got her, and now she’s here with her mom.”
“Intact?”
“Apparently.” Twig sets his hand on the top of his head. “Are you sure you saw what you think you saw on Halloween night?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
“It’s just—”
“Twig.” I gesture toward his boot—protection for his healing burns. Burns that happened through his shoe, all because his foot got close to the rift. Meanwhile, Lainey and Ivy were dragged through it.
A female officer joins the other. She hands a distraught Mrs. Winslow a glass of water and gently escorts her to a chair.
This past week, I couldn’t let myself think about Ivy’s mom, knowing what I knew—that while she was distributing flyers, speaking with the media, coordinating with the police, desperately clinging to hope, her daughter was dead. At least, that was my understanding.
But now?
If Lainey is alive, then couldn’t Ivy be, too?
I just don’t understand how.
“We need to speak with Lainey,” I whisper to Twig.
“I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon,” he whispers back.
Behind us, the front doors slide open.
The reporters converge.
The phone lets out a shrill ring.
And Jude Vandenberg sweeps inside, his dark golden hair windswept.
The second his gaze finds mine, his brooding, autumn eyes flood with relief.
Like he somehow thought I was in the hospital when I told him to meet me at the hospital.
He joins us in two confident strides, wraps his arm around my waist, and brushes my forehead with a kiss.
I melt into him for a second.
Just a second.
Then I take him and Twig by the arm and pull them deeper into the alcove. “I need to show you something.”
I remove the seed from the pocket of my puffer vest and open my hand.
It’s no longer glowing.
The seed is just a seed.
The three of us stand there in the hospital alcove, bent over my palm.
“Is… that what you wanted to show us?” Twig finally asks, sounding very much like someone who doesn’t understand the punchline of a joke.
Only the joke is on me.
“It was glowing before,” I say. “When I picked it up. It was glowing.” It also gave me an intense, very bizarre vision. But I keep this tidbit to myself for now. “I was at the well when I heard something behind me. I looked into the bushes and there was this creature.”
Jude quirks an eyebrow. “A creature?”
“A cryptid.”
“A cryptid?” he repeats.
“A small one.”
“How small?” Twig asks.
“About the size of a raccoon. Or more like…” I snap my fingers. “A gremlin! It was the size of a gremlin.”
“What is a gremlin?” Jude asks.
Twig and I look at him.
He looks back.
“From the Christmas movie,” I say.
His expression remains blank.
“You’ve never seen Gremlins?”
He gives his head a wary shake, and I’m reminded once again of his life before Foggy Hollow.
His wealthy, insulated boarding school life, where classics and the 1980s were not synonymous.
“They’re these cute little creatures that turn into monsters when they get wet.
Only this one had lavender fur and eyes that looked like full moons without any pupils or irises. ”
Jude blinks. “You saw this in the woods?”
“It coughed up this seed,” I say, lifting my hand.
He goes a bit pale.
Up until very recently, Jude was not a believer in uncanny things.
He wore that skepticism on his sleeve. But then we found a portrait painted two centuries ago by his ancestor, Ezra, featuring me of all people, which led to an avalanche of supernatural discoveries, including but not limited to: a family curse, an immortal cousin who was never really his cousin but Ezra’s brother, Raphael, resurrected by a fallen angel, an alternate dimension with actual monsters, magical amulets—one of which brought Jude back to life after we broke the curse—and the incontrovertible truth of his angelic lineage.
Apparently, I have one too. Which was why we could go into that alternate dimension and not combust into flame.
Or so I thought.
Up until my phone started exploding with text messages in the woods, I thought this alternate dimension was deadly to anyone without angelic blood.
Hence, Lainey Sikes and Ivy Winslow combusting and Twig’s cooked foot.
Now? I’m not sure what to think. Needless to say, Jude’s had to process a lot in a very short amount of time.
His entire worldview has been flipped upside down and inside out, and now must include the very real possibility of gremlin-like cryptids hopping through the woods on his estate.
“Did you get a picture?” Twig asks.
“There wasn’t time. As soon as I saw it, it coughed up this seed and darted away. I chased after it and—” I peek into the waiting room, where the phone keeps ringing, and lower my voice. “It led me to another rift.”
Jude and Twig stare at me.
“The creature hopped through it, and then my phone started blowing up about Lainey.”
I peek at Mrs. Winslow, who continues to plead. Griffin Tate, who continues to sulk.
“Now you have this,” Twig says, taking the seed from my palm.
I watch him expectantly.
But nothing seems to happen. He just holds it between his thumb and forefinger, examining it beneath the light. “How do you know this is the thing it coughed up?”
“Because at the time, it was glowing.”
The front doors slide open.
A harassed-looking man hurries inside with a wailing toddler.
“I want to go back,” I say.
“To the rift?” Twig asks.
“I need to see if it’s still there.”
Twig frowns. “Even if it is, I won’t be able to see it.”
He’s right, of course. Twig can’t see rifts. That particular ability seems to be reserved for humans with an angelic lineage. While Twig doesn’t actually know his lineage—he was left on a doorstep as a baby without so much as a note—it doesn’t appear to be angelic.
“Selah and I can go,” Jude says. “You can stay here, see if you can get some more information out of Griffin.”
Twig bobs his head, like this is a good plan.
But something tells me Griffin has no more information to give.
“Let’s meet up for dinner,” I say, taking the seed back and sliding it into my pocket. “Six o’clock at the Ember Oven?”
The three of us agree and I excuse myself to the ladies’ room. My mind spins as I use the restroom and wash my hands. I’m not sure why I didn’t tell them about the vision.
My mother, running through the woods.
Me, the thing that was chasing her.
Why did touching the seed give me that vision?
And how in the world is Lainey alive?
I’m fixating on the questions, working the soap into a rich lather when the bathroom plunges into darkness.
The power has gone out. There’s an audible reaction in the waiting room—a collective gasp, followed by the low rumble of confused voices as I stand in place, water running in the sink.
Then, just like that, the light returns, blinking to life.
Only I’m not alone.
Rafe Vandenberg stands behind me.
“Help,” he rasps.
With a strangled cry, I spin around.
But Rafe isn’t there.
I turn back to the mirror, my heart pounding inside my chest.
Rafe isn’t there, either.
It’s just me and my frightened reflection.