Chapter 9
The world seemed to stop—the sound of the ocean, the flicker of the candle, all of it shifted into stasis as my mind struggled to wrap itself around what I was seeing.
She was dead. The woman who had brought me the grimoire, who we were so sure would hold answers for the many questions we needed to unravel, was dead.
I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t make sense of it.
She was alive two days ago. I’d sat with her—spoken to her. And now she was just… cold. Lifeless.
I had to get help. I pulled my hand back from her wrist, and saw something caught beneath it— an intricately knotted bracelet, rather like a friendship bracelet, lay among the leaves.
I picked it up and stared at it. Something had sliced it clean through, and it didn’t take me long to realize what it was; a small pocketknife lay open in the dirt, the blade still extended.
I moved the candle closer to the knife, expecting to see blood, but the blade was clean.
Scrambling back to my feet, I stumbled toward the edge of the woods and out into the far edge of the parking lot, to the theater.
My legs barely held me as I ran, stumbling and sobbing, toward the theater itself.
There was no sign of anyone near the main entrance of the building, but I knew the security would be concentrating on the back side.
I began to call for help as I jogged around the south side of the building.
Within moments, a Sedgwick Cove police officer came running out from around the back, following the sound of my cracked and terrified voice.
I recognized her as one of Zale’s older cousins. I thought her name might be Maeve.
“What’s wrong? Who are you, what—oh!” the young woman stopped at the sight of me, eyes wide. “It’s Wren, right? Wren Vesper?”
“Yeah,” I said, panting. “I… something’s happened. There’s a girl over in the… I think she’s d-dead,” I replied, the words barely forcing their way past my chattering teeth.
“Whoa, who, slow down,” the woman said, reaching out as I swayed, and supporting me at the elbow. “What do you mean? Who’s dead?”
“This… this girl. She… I recognize her. She’s lying in the… the bushes over there, but—” I gasped against a sob, and more tears gushed down my cheeks.
“Okay, okay, calm down,” she said soothingly, even as she pulled her walkie talkie off her belt. “This is MacFayden, requesting backup and an ambulance to Sedgwick Cove Playhouse.” Then she returned the radio and said in a very calm voice, “Why don’t you show me where you saw her, okay?”
Together we walked back toward the trees, she asking questions I couldn’t answer, and me, too busy sobbing to say anything else coherent.
My body went into fight or flight as we approached the tree line, and I froze where I stood, utterly incapable of getting any closer.
I didn’t want to see her again, the terrible stillness of her.
Officer MacFayden turned back to me, her expression sympathetic, but also urgent.
“Can you show me where she is? You don’t have to go in there, just… just point, okay?” she said soothingly.
I nodded, and then pointed a violently trembling finger to the clump of bushes right at the edge of the tree line. “She’s right under there,” I said, the words little more than a strangled whisper.
It was enough. Officer MacFayden nodded. “Did you see anyone else?”
I shook my head in reply.
“And you say you know her?”
“Y-yes. I only met her a couple of days ago. Her name is Jess Ballard.
Officer MacFayden crept forward, weapon drawn, crossing the last few feet of the grass and right up to the bushes.
She disappeared behind them, and for a moment all I could do was hold my breath and wait.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Officer MacFayden would reappear any second with Jess beside her, looking disheveled and disoriented, but otherwise unharmed.
I found myself rolling the broken friendship bracelet between my fingers, like a talisman for good luck, hoping…
Officer MacFayden reappeared, and her grim expression shattered whatever fragile threads of hope I’d managed to spin in her absence.
My knees gave way, and I sank into the grass.
Everything felt dim and muffled, like I was watching it all from underwater.
Officer MacFayden helped me to my feet and walked me over to her car, which was parked over in the corner of the theater parking lot.
She sat me down in the back seat, and turned on the car so that the heater was blowing—I didn’t realize until I tried to say thank you that my teeth were chattering like she’d just pulled me out of a frozen lake.
Was I in shock? Probably. I’d never seen a dead body before outside of the very controlled atmosphere of a funeral home, and accidentally stumbling upon one, especially one I recognized, was not at all the same thing.
I watched through a kind of haze as more police lights blazed into the parking lot, followed by an ambulance. Then my mom’s old Subaru swung into the lot as well.
Damn it. I should have realized they’d call my mom.
She jumped out of the car, leaving the door hanging open, and ran over to the small crowd of people gathered near the bushes, which someone was now cordoning off with yellow emergency tape.
She spoke with one of the officers, who turned around and pointed right at the car where I was sitting.
My mom came running over, her face starkly white, and opened the door.
“Oh, Wren, honey. Are you okay?”
I tried to nod. I wanted to be okay. But I wasn’t.
And so instead I burst into tears, and let my mother hold me like a child just woken up from a nightmare.
She didn’t ask any more questions at first, just shushing me and whispering soothing placations, until I had finally cried myself out and regained some control.
“We were just starting to get anxious that you hadn’t come back from the Shadow Tree, but we figured you had probably done the full walk to the Manor,” my mom said. “What happened, Wren? Can you tell me?”
I heaved a shuddering sigh. “I stayed behind,” I admitted. “I know I shouldn’t have stayed by myself, but I knew the way back and I felt really… comfortable there. I thought… my spirit powers… maybe it would be easier there. To connect, you know?”
“I certainly do. We’ve all felt it at the Shadow Tree,” my mom assured me. “Go on.”
“I… well, I didn’t have any luck with a clear connection, so I was about to leave, and then my candle—oh, my candle!” I cried, suddenly realizing I wasn’t holding it anymore. But then I spotted it in my mother’s hand, the tiny flame still leaping about.
“I’ve got it, sweetheart. It’s okay. Go on.”
“The candle suddenly extinguished,” I said, and then when I spotted the look of alarm on my mother’s face, added “well, not really. I thought it had, but actually the flame just sort of… reappeared in the clearing. Somehow I knew it was the same flame, so I followed it, and it led me here.”
“To the Playhouse?”
“Right to the edge of the woods there. When I reached that spot, the flame jumped back onto my candle. And then I tripped, and when I looked down to see what I tripped over—” The lump came back into my throat, and I choked on the rest of the sentence.
Luckily my mom understood without my having to say it out loud.
“The flame led you right to her,” she whispered, wonderingly.
I nodded.
“And she was already—?”
I nodded again, feeling another wave of sobs trying to shudder their way up.
“And you’re sure it’s Jess?”
“Y-yes.”
“And you don’t… you don’t know how she—?”
“No,” I said, my voice strangely high pitched.
“I didn’t see… there wasn’t anything obvious.
She looked like she… like she just laid down and went to…
to sleep.” At this point the sobs took control again, and I had no choice but to give myself over to them.
I had no idea how long we sat there, until Officer MacFayden came back over and leaned into the car.
“Kerri, you can take Wren home. We can send someone over to ask questions tomorrow,” she said.
“Thanks, Maeve,” my mom replied, sounding relieved.
I shuffled out of the police cruiser and into my mom’s waiting Subaru on numb feet.
My mom put the candle wordlessly into my hand as she slid into the driver’s seat.
I no longer wondered at how it burned on without depleting the candle or dripping wax all over my fingers.
I didn’t wonder how it produced no smoke that discolored the upholstery on the interior of the roof.
I kept my eyes fixed on the flame as a sort of anchor that kept me from spiraling back into the moment, and the place I’d just left behind.
I watched it until we pulled into the driveway, and my mom opened my door and helped me out.
I felt like a ghost floating up the walkway and into the house.
I moved toward the stairs, aching for the calm and peace of my bedroom, and the warm weight of my cat, but my mother applied just the slightest pressure to my elbow, steering me away from the staircase and through the living room to the kitchen, where Rhi and Persi were sitting at the table.
When they saw us come around the corner, they jumped to their feet, their faces so white and drawn that I didn’t need to wonder if they knew what had happened.
My mom led me over to the big beehive oven in the corner of the kitchen.
I’d only seen the fire lit there a handful of times during lessons, because the weather had not cooled enough for us to use the hearth.
Now, a glass lantern hung in the arched beehive oven that nested above the fireplace.
I understood without anyone explaining it—they had hung it there in anticipation of the flame still flickering in my hand.
This lantern would be its home until Samhain came and went.