16. Freddie #2
She floats a few inches off the damp forest floor, her ethereal form glowing with a faint, bioluminescent silver light.
She looks to be about my age, with pale, high cheekbones and long blonde hair that cascades all the way down to her waist, partially covered by a shredded lace veil.
But her eyes—staring straight through us—aren’t soft. They’re a menacing brown.
Goosebumps bloom across every inch of my skin. Shit. I really, really did not feel like dealing with a possession today.
The ghost drifts forward, her shredded silk dress floating around her as if she were underwater. Her gaze locks entirely onto Callum, ignoring me completely.
“Francis?” she whispers. Her voice has an archaic, formal cadence that feels centuries old. She begins to circle him, her translucent form drifting through the cold air like smoke. “Is that truly you, my love? Have you finally returned to the shade?”
“I’m—I’m not Francis,” Callum stammers, taking a protective step in front of me. “I—”
He tries to step forward again, but the ghost’s eyes flash. With a flick of her translucent wrist, a wave of invisible force slams into Callum’s chest, snapping him back to where he started and freezing his boots to the ground.
Callum looks over his shoulder at me, panicked. “What the fuck?” he mouths.
My jaw drops. Ghosts are memories, lingering energy. They can fling a pebble or make the lights flicker, but they do not cast kinetic binding spells. They don’t have access to active magic.
Unless…
Unless she didn’t lose her power when she died. Unless she was a witch so powerful that her magic bound itself to her soul, keeping her tethered to this earth long after her body rotted away.
Francis. That name…I’ve heard it before. And the bridal gown trapped in the middle of a cursed forest….
The pieces snap together in my head so fast it leaves me breathless.
“Oh, holy shit,” I whisper as I stare at the beautiful, deadly entity hovering over Callum. “The Frost Maiden…”
The woman’s head snaps in my direction, her neck unspooling with a sickening, fluid grace before her eyes lock right back onto Callum.
She drifts closer to him, her translucent skirt brushing the ferns without disturbing a single leaf.
“Francis…” she breathes, her layered, echoes-in-a-well voice making my stomach churn.
Her ghostly fingers trail slowly up the front of his shirt, dragging across his chest before her palm cups his jawline.
“I thought I’d never look upon your face again. ”
Callum’s eyes are stretched wide, his breathing coming in shallow, frantic hitches, but he can’t move an inch. He looks like a statue trapped under three feet of solid ice.
“Hey! Lady!” I yell, stepping forward and waving a hand. “That’s not Francis! You’ve got the wrong guy!”
Genevieve shrieks. The sound is like nails dragging over a rusted sheet of metal, ripping through the woods. Before I can even blink, she shoots across the space between us, her face contorting into something skeletal.
I scramble backward, my shoe catching a slick tree root, and fall right onto my ass and into the mud.
She looms directly over me, her tattered veil floating around her pale face. “Like hell he isn’t!” she snarls.
Jett instantly leaps over my legs, planting his front paws in the mud right in front of me. The fur along his spine is blown out twice its normal size, his lips peeling back from his fangs as he lets out a dangerous hiss.
Genevieve curls her top lip in disgust, recoiling from my cat like he’s something vile. With a dismissive flick of her wrist, she glides right back to Callum. She reaches up, her ice-cold thumb tracing the line of his cheekbone.
“He has my Francis’s eyes,” she murmurs, her voice turning eerily sweet as a small, tragic smile touches her lips. “I’ve missed those baby blues.”
“Freddie,” Jett growls out of the side of his mouth, his tail whipping nervously against my knee. “Who the hell is the Frost Maiden?”
I push myself up off the ground, brushing dirt off my pants while my mind races through every local history book I ever skimmed in the town library.
“I thought she was just a myth,” I say with a shaky voice before I force it steady.
“Her name was Genevieve Vance. She was a powerful elder witch back in the late 1800s. She fell in love with a mortal man named Francis, and they were supposed to meet out here in the woods to run away and get married. Only he never showed up. He abandoned her. She waited out here in her dress until she froze to death.”
“He didn’t abandon me!” Genevieve screeches, spinning around to face me again, her cold eyes flashing like lightning in a storm cloud.
She launches herself at me a second time, but this time I don’t fall. I plant myself in the dirt and stare her down. No dead, bitchy bride is keeping me and my friends trapped in these woods today.
Genevieve slows her approach, drifting in a slow, predatory circle around me.
Callum tries to fight the invisible weight pinning him down. A low grunt tears from his throat as he strains to reach a hand out toward me. “Winifred—”
Genevieve doesn’t even turn around. She just snaps her fingers behind her back. A harsh crack echoes through the air, and Callum’s arm snaps back to his side, his entire body locking up even tighter than before.
“Good boy,” Genevieve purrs softly over her shoulder, not taking her eyes off me.
She glides closer, her gaze dragging down my jacket, my messy hair. She stops and her eyes widen in genuine shock.
“Impossible…” she whispers, looking me up and down like she’s seeing a ghost of her own. “A Resonant?”
My temper flares, burning away the lingering chill of my panic.
The moment my irritation spikes, the Witch Wood answers.
The wind picks up out of nowhere, whipping pine needles off the ground in a jumbled spiral around my boots.
A low-hanging branch overhead snaps, showering us in cold drops of rain, and the canopy shifts, leaning in closer like it’s waiting for my command.
Genevieve glides backward, a bitter laugh spilling from her lips. “Oh, little girl…if you only knew how powerful that Resonance in your blood truly is. If you only knew what you could tear down with it.”
“I don’t care about my blood,” I say as I take a step toward her, keeping my hands where she can see them. “Just leave him alone. Please. Don’t hurt my friend.”
“Your friend?” Genevieve’s laugh turns maniacal, echoing off the trunks of the trees. “He was my friend first. He was my everything.”
She turns back to Callum before I can stop her. She reaches out, her pale fingers catching his chin and tilting his face up to meet hers. And then she leans in and presses her ghostly lips straight onto his.
Callum’s eyes fly open in horror. He tries to pull back, his shoulders shaking as he fights with everything he has against the magic holding him, but his body refuses to obey.
An ugly spike of jealousy flares right in the center of my chest, taking me so completely by surprise I almost choke on it. It’s irrational and completely ill-timed, but watching another woman—even a dead one—touch him, press herself against him, makes my blood boil.
Genevieve breaks the kiss, stepping back with a strange, shattered expression on her face. Her ghostly brown eyes search Callum’s features, scanning every line of his forehead, his nose, his mouth.
“Francis…” she whispers with devastating grief. “It’s me. It’s your Ginny.”
Callum draws in a ragged, gasping breath the second her lips leave his. “I’m so sorry,” he says softly. “I’m not who you’re looking for, Ginny. I’m not Francis.”
Genevieve shakes her head slowly, stepping back into the mist as tears spill over her long lashes. “No,” she whimpers. “That’s not possible…it can’t be…”
I take a step toward her, my hand outstretched, ready to try whatever soft-spoken negotiation might work on an unhinged nineteenth-century ghost. “Genevieve, listen to me—”
Before the rest of the sentence can leave my mouth, Genevieve’s head snaps up and she thrusts a palm flat against the air.
A jolt that feels like shards of ice shoots straight through my body.
My shoes lock to the mud, my arms drop like lead weights to my sides, and every muscle from my jaw to my toes completely freezes.
I pull against the spell, trying to wiggle my fingers or even bend my knees, but I’m stuck. Completely, terrifyingly immobile.
Holy shit. To pin a mortal like Callum is one thing, but to hold a practicing witch in place without so much as a chalk circle or a handful of salt? Genevieve Vance must have been one bad bitch back in the 1800s.
She buries her face in her hands, letting out a ragged wail that flies through the trees above us. “I just want my Francis,” she sobs. “I just want to see him…”
“Please,” I manage to rasp out, my throat barely working against the pressure of her spell. “Genevieve, please. Let us go.”
Her hands drop. She snaps her chin up, her ghostly brown eyes flaring. “No!” she screams. “Why should I let you go? Why shouldn’t I leave you right here? Leave you to rot in these decrepit woods, bound to them just like I am?”
“I’m sorry,” I say softly, trying to keep my breathing even. “I’m so sorry for what happened to you.”
“I don’t want your apologies!” she snarls, gliding three inches off the ground until her face is inches from mine. “I want Francis.”
I take a shallow breath, my brain frantically running through every spell, every ancestral lesson, every weird piece of theory my mother ever droned on about in our kitchen. “Do you have anything of his?”
Genevieve pauses. The furious frost in her eyes falters, replaced by a skeptical caution. “Why?”
“Because,” I say, my voice steadying as the idea takes root in my head. “I might be able to let you see him again. Not a dream, not a trick. A memory. It’ll feel like you’re re-living it, exactly the way it happened before. But I need something that belonged to him. A physical anchor.”