CHAPTER EIGHT PRESENT DAY
“You aren’t the only one who’s cursed.”
Rage vibrates in my chest. I fly to my feet.
“Are you making fun of me again?”
“Look, I’m fully aware of how this sounds.” Jesse scrubs a hand across his jaw. “Just hear me out, okay? I listened to you, didn’t I?”
“That isn’t the same.”
“True. You made me tie my shoelaces together and sit on icy metal steps first.”
I scowl. A pointed reminder, but a fair one. Deflating, I return to my seat, but not without crossing my arms and setting my chin. If this is a prank, I won’t saunter into it willingly.
Once he confirms I intend to stick around, Jesse’s attention moves to the window behind me.
Shades of silver curtain the sky as dense clouds swirl over our street.
Unlike my window, Jesse’s faces west, giving him a clear view of both of our driveways and the rest of the neighborhood.
Wind slams the storm shutters on the aging houses.
Down the street, Mrs. Khan’s clothesline comes loose, whipping her nightgowns into a flower bed.
Yusuf Ahmed runs out to his front yard in a bike helmet, securing the tangerine tree’s branches together with strips of torn tarp.
Our neighborhood is one of the oldest in Ward, and from here, I can see all its wrinkles and gnarled bones.
When Jesse steels his shoulders, I steel myself, too.
“My mother was the third child in a family of five and a registered nurse from Sarasota, Florida. In her entire life, she left Sarasota only once. She flew to New York on her twenty-sixth birthday to visit a friend from college. During her trip, she met my dad.” Jesse picks at the fabric over his knee.
“They hit it off, somehow. I guess a jaded New York mortician and a perky RN have more in common than you’d think.
My mom went back home, but they kept in touch.
Eventually, my dad followed her to Sarasota.
They tied the knot, moved into a house with a white picket fence, got a Costco membership—the whole nine yards. ”
My throat tightens with trepidation. I hate the feeling of following a story I know doesn’t have a happy ending.
“Fast-forward to three years later. My mom has spent two of those years trying to get pregnant, but nothing seems to work. When they eventually get tested, the results break my parents’ hearts.
They have pretty much zero chance of naturally conceiving a child, mostly due to something wrong on my dad’s side of things.
My mom was just … crushed. Dad says she didn’t get out of bed for weeks.
For some reason I’ll never understand, she desperately wanted a litter of kids with her and my dad’s DNA.
To pass along her gallstones and my dad’s bad back, maybe. I don’t know.”
Jesse chances a glance at me. I wipe my features clean. It wouldn’t help to tell him I understand where his mother was coming from. I’d spent too many nights dreaming of what I’d name Alex’s and my babies. How I hoped they’d have my hair and his eyes.
“Nothing works. They try IVF for two more years, but the cards are stacked against them. My dad wants to call it quits, but my mom … she has this idea. She’d worked in the maternity ward for most of her career, and she had heard stories.
Outlandish superstitions, she thought. Patients who swore some spell or hidden force helped them conceive when nothing else worked.
One night, my mom comes home and she doesn’t speak to my dad.
She walks right into the yard, sits in the dirt, and starts singing.
Dad says he didn’t have a clue what she was saying—it could’ve been English or ancient Greek for all he could tell, since she was muttering so fast and rocking back and forth.
If my dad tried to touch her, she’d scream. She didn’t move for twelve hours.”
A frenzied energy grips the dark-haired boy, and he paces the limited length of his room as he speaks. His shadow follows him on the wall, rippling across his dresser and disappearing when he passes the mirror.
“My dad was about to call an ambulance when she finally snapped out of it. He swears she just stood up, dusted herself off, and asked if he wanted waffles or oatmeal for breakfast.”
Jesse pauses and shoots me a doubtful glance. “Still with me, Mansour?”
I hesitate. “Still with you, Talbot.”
One of Jesse’s hands parses through his hair. The black locks fall like spun silk through his fingers, framing his agitated face.
“Nine months after my mom’s episode in the yard, I was born, and my mother died.”
My breath catches. I figured this would conclude with the truth of Mrs. Talbot’s fate, but it still hits me harder than expected. “I don’t understand. Did the treatments work?”
A caustic laugh. “Nope. The doctors called me a medical marvel.”
The pieces won’t come together no matter which way I fit them.
Jesse must notice my struggle, because he heaves a sigh.
“A couple of years after my mother died, my dad managed to translate a few sentences of what she’d been mumbling that night in the yard.
It took him a long time; apparently, she’d been weaving together languages and dialects from all over the world.
According to him, she’d convinced herself that she made a deal with some entity. ”
Jesse’s shadow moves over his bookcase as he resumes pacing, flitting across the torn spines of well-read mystery paperbacks.
“To invite new life, she would need to usher out her own.”
I try to swallow around the rock in my throat. “What does that even mean?”
“Apparently, not all of the stories in the Sarasota maternity ward are a crock of shit.”
I pull my legs up onto the rocking chair, squeezing them into my chest. As much as the part of me that subscribes to a logical, ordered world wants to argue with Jesse, the truth is I believe him.
I believe that eighteen years ago, a woman across the country had a desperate wish, and so she made a desperate decision.
I believe something dark preyed on that desperation.
Where pain exists, predators thrive. Whether in El Agamy or in Sarasota.
“I’m sorry, Jesse.”
Jesse props his shoulder against the window, pressing his forehead to the misting pane. “Yeah.”
The light pours through the glass, fracturing around Jesse. The broken rays scatter his shadow across the wall. When Jesse pushes away from the window, his shadow re-forms once more.
And stays perfectly still as Jesse walks across the room.
Jesse is talking, but I don’t hear a word. Every drop of blood in my veins turns to ice. The shadow moves, creeping over his water-stained ceiling. I watch, unable to blink, until it settles on the wall to my left.
“Jesse,” I try to whisper, but my teeth are clenched too hard. His name is a barely audible hiss.
The shadow steps out of the wall.
I grab the chair’s armrests, but my legs refuse to lift. I’m frozen, pinned like a moth in a glass case, helpless to do anything but watch as the shadow drifts to the foot of Jesse’s bed.
Jesse passes in front of the shadow, momentarily blocking it from my view.
When he steps forward, a young boy sits on the edge of Jesse’s bed.
Green-eyed, with curly hair the color of clover honey, he wears a rumpled gray and white outfit that looks straight out of a medieval movie set.
The sleeves hang over his small fingers, and his suspenders are buckled into shorts that might’ve been made out of potato sacks.
Beneath them are wool stockings that disappear into his flat, rounded shoes, which appear at least one size too large.
The boy smiles at me, revealing three missing teeth at the bottom of his mouth. He swings his short legs.
My knuckles whiten around the armrests. Despite the racing speed of my heart, my mind manages to cut through the haze to assess the situation with something approaching clarity.
I sniff, but the air smells the same. No trace of sewage or rot. The boy’s unblinking, smiling eyes are green, not orange.
What is this?
A drop of blood lands on Jesse’s gray rug. Another joins it, then more, until a river of red soaks through to the ground.
The boy’s legs keep swinging.
It takes every ounce of my willpower to drag my gaze from the blood-drenched rug to the boy’s face.
He continues smiling as blood drips from his eyes, coursing over his round cheeks. It flows from his ears and nose, running down his neck, his chest, disappearing into his uniform.
When he stands, the rug squelches beneath his oversized little shoes. He steps toward me, that eerie smile still fixed on his face, and covers the hands I’ve wrapped around the armrests with his own.
He feels real. Like skin and bone instead of the shadow he came from.
My jaw finally unlocks enough to force out a single question. “What. Do. You. Want?”
“Look what you did, Annie.” A voice, older and distinctly feminine, slides out of his bloody mouth. “You almost wasted this boy. I found him running down the street, screaming for his papa. What if he’d gotten away?”
The blood has nearly coated the boy’s entire face. When he brings it close to mine, I can barely see his features beneath it. “We have debts to pay, Annie. This life isn’t free, and you cannot afford to have friends, my love. Not when it needs to feed.”
Again, a blade of clarity temporarily cuts through the terror. It. The creature?
Tears slip from the corners of my eyes. The boy stumbles away from me, and his sob hits me like a fist to the chest. He finally sounds like a child, alone and terrified. His knees wobble as he trips forward and lands behind Jesse. He utters a pained sentence in a language I don’t recognize.
With barely a sound, the boy’s body melts into the floor.
My stomach roils. I can’t breathe.
A shadow stretches behind Jesse once more when he steps toward me. The air thins, and time seems to restart with a shudder.
At last, my body thaws from its petrified curl. My limbs belong to me again. I can move my hands, my jaw.
With breath I shouldn’t have, I unleash a blood-curdling scream.