Chapter 11
Iwoke to a sharp clinking sound.
I sat up in bed, rubbing at my sleep-crusted eyes.
My first instinct was to look for Freya—she tended to be the culprit when it came to weird noises in my bedroom at night.
But she was still curled up against the back of my legs, blinking up at me from heavily hooded eyes that told me she’d been just as soundly asleep as I had been, before that noise woke us up.
Clink.
This time I saw it as well as heard it—the noise was actually a small pebble ricocheting off one of the windowpanes.
My pulse sped up. I didn’t exactly have an abundance of adoring admirers—actually, I didn’t even have one adoring admirer—so the thought that this was a moonlight tryst or some romantic gesture didn’t even cross my mind.
I did, however, have a surprising number of enemies, so it was with extreme caution that I leaned forward and risked a peek down into the garden below.
Bea stood in a flower bed, her anxious little face upturned. I swore under my breath at my window as I struggled to open it—the extreme humidity of the ocean air had swollen and warped the wood. Finally, I was able to shove it wide enough to stick my head out.
“Bea? What’s going on? Is everything okay?” I called down in a whisper.
“I need to talk to you! Can you come down?” Bea hissed back.
“I’ll be right there,” I replied. I eased the window shut again and tiptoed out of my room, down the hall past my mom’s room, down the stairs and out the front door onto Lightkeep Cottage’s wide front porch.
Bea was already coming around from the side of the house at a jog, and met me at the bottom of the porch steps.
“Bea, what’s happening, you’re freaking me out,” I murmured. “Is someone in trouble? Is it Eva, or—”
“No, my family’s fine, it’s not that. But someone does need help,” Bea said. She was wringing her little hands together, and biting at her bottom lip. “Do you remember when… when I showed you some of my sketches? Before Litha?”
“Of course.”
“Well, lately it’s been… hard. To draw, I mean,” she said. “I used to see things so clearly inside my head. But now everything is… blurry.”
“Blurry?”
“Yeah. Like, I can’t… I can’t see the way I used to.”
I swallowed hard. I’d wondered if Bea might be having problems with her gift, too, since Xiomara and I were having so much trouble making progress, but Xiomara had been reluctant to ask her. Now, it seemed, I was getting the answer anyway.
“But then tonight,” Bea went on, “for the first time in a long time, I could see! It was like I…” she pointed to my glasses, “…like I’d lost a pair of glasses, and then found them again. It came through so clearly, but it wasn’t just an impression. It was a plea for help from someone.”
“Who is it?” I asked.
“I’m not exactly sure,” Bea admitted.
“Okay, well, where are they?” I tried again.
“I’m not really sure about that either.”
“What do they need help with, can you tell me that?”
Bea shook her head.
I paused a moment to look at her, feeling lost. “Maybe I’d better just let you talk, then,” I said. “I don’t seem to be getting anywhere with these questions. What can you tell me?”
“Not much,” Bea said. “But I can show you.”
As I watched curiously, Bea tugged her backpack around to the front of her body, unzipped it, and pulled out one of her sketchbooks. She thumbed through the pages until she found what she was looking for.
A serious face with big dark eyes and masses of dark hair stared back at me. I recognized the mysterious half-smile at once.
“That’s Jess Ballard!” I cried.
Bea looked relieved. “So you know her?”
“Yeah. Well, I mean, not really, but I know her name. She was the… she just died. Her body was down by the Playhouse,” I said, shuddering. “Why are you drawing her?”
“She came to me. She said she needed help,” Bea said. “Well, actually, she said she needed your help.”
“My help?” I asked, frowning. “But she’s… she’s dead. How could I possibly be of any help to her now?”
Bea shrugged. “I’m not sure. But she’s debating the whole dead thing.”
“I… I mean, I get the denial, but I don’t really think that’s debatable. I mean, I saw her body. It was carried away in a body bag.”
“I know, but this is what she keeps telling me,” Bea said, and flipped to the next page in her sketchbook, which was filled with words and strange symbols instead of likenesses.
I bent my head low over them, examining them.
I saw the words, “back to my body” and “running out of time” and then a strange symbol over and over again, along with the words, “on her wrist,” and then my own name: “Wren Vesper.”
“I don’t understand,” I muttered to myself.
“I don’t either, but she won’t go away, Wren,” Bea says. “It’s like she’s stalking me or something. I didn’t know what else to do.”
Bea’s bottom lip began to tremble, the sight of which made my heart contract, like a giant fist was squeezing it. I hated to see Bea scared, and it was happening more and more now that she had confided her abilities to her grandmother.
“It’s okay, Bea,” I said, reaching out and patting her bony little shoulder. “You did the right thing. I just… I wish I understood this better.” Even as I said the words, I felt an icy breeze on the back of my neck that raised violent goosebumps on my arms. “Is she… is she here right now?”
Bea nodded, gnawing at her bottom lip again. “She’s following me around. She feels…”
Bea paused, searching for the right word, but the icy breath on my neck was causing more than just goosebumps.
I could feel an alien feeling flooding through me, a feeling that I knew hadn’t originated in me, and yet was coursing through me all the same, causing my heart to race, my muscles to tense.
“Afraid,” I said, completing Bea’s thought. “Afraid and… desperate.”
Bea nodded, and her eyes shone with unspent tears.
“Did you tell Xiomara?” I asked.
“No.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“She doesn’t want Xiomara. She wants you,” Bea said.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “We just need to… to find a better way to communicate. I’ll be right back. Stay here, okay?”
I waited just long enough to see Bea nod before turning and running back into the house. I didn’t go back upstairs, but instead darted through the living room to the library. Once there, I scanned the top rows of the shelves until I found what I was looking for.
“Bingo.”
I grabbed the little stepstool and dragged it over to the shelves over the doorway. I stepped carefully up onto it, and retrieved a velvet bag tied closed with a length of gold cord that ended in tassels. It was the Vesper family spirit board. I clutched it to my chest, and ran back outside again.
I’d never used the spirit board before, but I’d seen my mother and her sisters use it.
Asteria had left it with her friend Lydian, who had been responsible for discharging Asteria’s will after she died.
My mom and my aunts had used it to communicate with Asteria after she had passed away.
She’d had a message for them, an important one, and the spirit board was the only way they had been able to communicate clearly enough to receive that message.
I didn’t know much about spirit boards, but after months of lessons with Xiomara to hone my spirit affinity, I knew the basics.
“Let’s take this down to my mother’s garden,” I said to Bea when I had arrived, somewhat breathlessly, back outside. “I don’t want to wake anyone up.”
Bea agreed, and together we hurried through the garden gate, across the expanse of yard until we reached the door in the stone wall that led to my mother’s garden.
It had been locked up for years since we had fled, and so it had grown wild and feral in our absence.
But in the months since we’d returned, my mother had been patiently and tenderly restoring it to its former glory, pruning and trimming and weeding and tending, by hand as well as by magic.
Now, as we stepped through into the splendor beyond, it was hard to imagine that it had ever been neglected.
Lush blooms glistened with dew all around us in the moonlight as we walked down the path to the little gazebo at the center, where I placed the spirit board on one of the stone benches.
“Have you ever used one of these before?” I asked Bea.
“Of course,” Bea said, looking startled. “Haven’t you?”
“No,” I said a little bitterly. “I mean, not a real one. Your grandmother insists I have to practice without ‘cheating,’” I said, rolling my eyes.
Bea giggled as I unwrapped the spirit board and its planchette, and set them carefully on the bench.
“But I’ve read about them. Should we do it together?
” I asked her. “Two spirit witches are better than one, right?”
Bea smiled, and we took our places on the bench, sitting cross-legged on either side of it, and placing our fingertips lightly on the planchette.
I had a vague memory of doing this once at a sleepover with Poe using a novelty Ouija board, but we’d giggled and cheated too much to even scare ourselves.
Now I wondered, if we’d taken it seriously, would my latent magical abilities have turned an innocent sleepover into a terrifying paranormal experience?
For the second time, a frigid breeze sent shivers shooting down my spine. If Jess Ballard really was here, she was getting impatient.
“Okay, okay,” I muttered. “Chill out.”
Bea knelt on the opposite side of the bench, and together we placed the tips of our fingers on the planchette. Instantly, a hum of energy, almost like electricity, buzzed beneath the pads of my fingers.
“Whoa,” I muttered. “Do you feel that?”
“Yeah,” Bea said, her eyes widening. “I told you she really needed to talk to you.”
Feeling jumpy now, I tried to channel my energy into concentration. I closed my eyes, and at once the planchette began to move. My eyes flew open. The planchette was whizzing around the board so quickly I couldn’t register the letters.