*Pepper had closed the attic door this morning, after she’d walked through the house, checking for anything untoward. Now, it was open, and as far as she knew, nobody had been up here except herself.
It was dark inside and it appeared empty. “You don’t frighten me,” she said, although she appeared to be taking her time before walking into the room.
She waited for the door to move or for someone or something to fall out from behind it.
Nothing. Even the screeching had stopped.
This was no horror movie and if it were, someone would be yelling, “Don’t go in there!” And what would Pepper Mackillop do? Take no heed, being a woman who didn’t listen to anybody and just went ahead with her own brash ideas.
Although this one was making her stop and think.
“As soon as I get in there, I’m going to kick your ass!” she shouted at the open door.
Strange how she still hadn’t been able to put one foot in front of the other though.
Suddenly, all the lights in the house grew brighter and the screeching hurtled through the house like a flying banshee let loose from a cage.
Fear rushed up her spine, forcing her to arch her back and let her head fall backward as though she’d been pummeled by a rapid tornado, there one second, gone the next.
“Okay, that wasn’t funny!”
She rotated a shoulder and pulled herself together.
The light in the house was so bright she had to narrow her eyes. But the attic remained dark.
She pushed at the door with her fingertips, snatching her hand away as it banged against the wall, the noise resounding in all the corridors of the empty house.
Hauling in a breath, she straightened her spine and walked inside.
Her gaze was drawn immediately to the window that faced the front of the house, almost before she had time to register the cold which coiled around her, even though the floorboards beneath her bare feet were warm.
Her breath caught with a rasp when the light above her flickered and the bulbs in the attic’s chandelier lit up.
Then the door slammed shut behind her.
*
“Does she know what to do?” Jack asked as he strode to the house, covering ground at what must be an Olympic rate.
“She works best on instinct,” Marie said, holding up her dress as she skipped alongside. “That’s why we didn’t forewarn her.”
He halted. “You mean you knew what was going to happen here tonight?”
“We haven’t left her unguarded for a second since she came home,” Marie said. “And not only on the physical side of things. We’re Mackillops,” she said forcefully, as though he needed reminding.
“I told Aurora it wasn’t fair!” He’d known something too, he’d felt that chill, and he hadn’t warned Pep that her grandmother knew something was happening and now it was goddamn happening! “Next time, I’m not listening to any of you,” he told Marie as he took a flashlight off Ralph who had just jogged up to them.
Marie lifted her hands in a what-can-I-say manner. “There won’t a next time, Jack. This is it.”
Jack upped the pace and ran to the house, bounding up the porch steps and throwing himself at the front door. He rattled the handle. Locked. He put a shoulder to the door again. He did it again. And again.
Saul and Mark appeared and they too hit the door, three guys in unison, with considerable strength between them—and nothing. It wasn’t budging.
Jack gave it another try, again putting his body weight behind it.
Mark put a restraining hand on his shoulder. “That door’s not shifting, Jack,” he said, looking like he saw a drowning man he couldn’t save. “It’s not meant to. You won’t get in.”
“I need an axe,” Jack said, thrusting him off. “Somebody get me a goddamned axe!”
He was aware of more people suddenly. Molly and Lauren, the townspeople—and the press. They were all standing around, doing nothing. Waiting for him to do something.
He ran to the front windows, where all the light fittings blazed as though empowered with an overload of electricity.
He scanned the ground and found an old brick. Covering his face with his arm, he struck the front window with all his might. The brick bounced off the pane like the glass was a steel trampoline, the recoil shuddering up his arm.
“Jack! Move!” Saul called. “The porch roof’s collapsing!”
He looked above his head as the beams snapped as though a giant had trod on them.
A moment later, an explosion shook the air.
Everyone ducked. Jack flinched but didn’t take his focus off the house for longer than it took to wipe dust from his eyes.
“Fire!” somebody called. “It’s going to go up!”
Jack blinked through a momentary haze, ignoring the panicked voices around him. The glass in the front windows was still intact, the light from the explosions illuminating the interior of the house. “It’s the chandeliers,” he called. They were exploding, one by one, shards of crystal flying through the air in each room.
“The wall lamps, too,” Mark said, pointing.
“The windows are intact. Why haven’t they blown up?”
Jack looked at Saul and shook his head, his mind buzzing. “I don’t know.” But Pep was stuck in the house, which was detonating around her. He yelled her name. He yelled again. Nothing.
Then he looked up.
“She’s up there!” he called, pointing at the attic and already looking around for something he could use to get up on the front porch roof.
“I can’t see her,” Mark said.
“She’s in there.”
“The beams are going to collapse any minute, Jack,” Saul said. “You can’t get up there. Nobody can.”
But he had to.
*
Pepper tugged at the door handle, using both hands and bracing a bare foot against the doorframe but couldn’t even get the handle to turn. They’d locked her in. She was imprisoned in the attic.
“I’m not particularly amused by this,” she told the GGs. “In fact, I’m getting seriously pissed off.”
The light bulbs in the chandelier above her exploded, and she thrust herself backward against the closed door, putting her hands over her ears and burying her head, protecting herself in case the glass in the windows shattered.
The noise was almost unbearable.
Then all the lights went off and she was left in darkness.
Claustrophobia tightened its grip. She went dizzy, and had to admit she’d never been so scared in her life.
Silence, except for her ragged breathing.
“Is that the best you’ve got?” she called, her voice thick in her throat.
Did they want to destroy her? Were they so mad from beyond the grave that they could make it happen? The last Mackillop without a man in her life. Still kind of homeless, but still standing.
“There’ll always be a Mackillop here!” she shouted. “We’ll never leave the valley! You’re not going to win, no matter what you do to me.” Inside, deep down, there was an inbuilt knowledge she was going to get out. She was going to get through this. She just didn’t know how.
“Jack,” she murmured, taking hold of her charm bracelet. “What do I do?”
Something crossed the windows, startling her.
Flashlights!
She ran across the small space, to the front window. Jack was down there.
She waved at him, banging on the windowpanes, which rattled in their frames.
“Pep!” he called when at last his flashlight hit the attic window. “I can’t get into the house! Open the window!”
She grabbed the handle of the window. Jack had opened it just yesterday and now it was frozen.
“It’s stuck!”
“They won’t let me in.” His eyes looked crazed, as though he’d run out of options and was beside himself. “There’s no way to get you out.”
Yes, there was. He just had to believe it. Because this wasn’t about knowledge, it was about the strength and the power of love. Unimaginable strength.
He stood, looking around him like a man searching for water after crossing a desert.
Then he moved. He lifted a hand to her. “I’m coming up to you!”
She nodded, but he wasn’t going to reach the attic window even if he got himself up on the fast collapsing porch roof. She was too high above him, another whole story above him.
“Pep!” Jack called. “Just hold on.”
There were other voices too. Her townspeople, the press.
“Jack, you’ll break your neck trying to climb up there!” Mark shouted.
“We need a ladder!” Saul’s voice. “Somebody get us a ladder!”
But Jack had already hauled himself up on the now half-caved-in porch roof. He was frowning hard, his gaze darting.
“I’m coming, Pep. I’m just figuring out the best way to get up to you,” he said, his focus still on the available means to reach her. “You just hang in there. I’ll be a couple of minutes.”
Pepper kept herself pressed against the window, willing the eeriness surrounding her out of her consciousness. It was the great-grandfathers playing with her subconscious—all the fears she’d had as a kid. Panicked by thunderstorms. Lonely when her so-called school friends called her names. Scared when she’d accidentally locked herself in an old shed one day and no one had found her for almost six hours. Frightened when a fire had started in the back of the Tack & Feed one summer Sunday and all the kids had run, but Pepper had been glued to the spot watching, near enthralled while also terrified as adults snaked around her, grabbing buckets filled with sand, trying to work the fire extinguishers—two of them dud—until Walter had entered with the fire hose from the back of the store and after another ten awful minutes, the fire was out.
The GGs were taunting her. They wanted her scared. They wanted her to remember everything that had created her fears. But what they hadn’t reckoned on was how the Mackillop women’s experiences over the years had bound them and toughened them. One by one, they’d enhanced their gifts and abilities and passed them to their daughters.
This window she was standing in front of was the one that faced the signs at the fork in the road at the entrance to the valley. This was their hub. This room was where they lay in waiting, plotting and planning over the decades. That was why the cousins had never been allowed inside. The grandmothers must have known but were unable to rid the place of the great-grandfathers’ anger at being kicked out of the valley. Because the grandmothers’ turns were over. Molly and Lauren’s turns were over. Now it was Pepper’s, and she was facing all three of them. They were ganging up on her, their last chance.
A lightning bolt ripped through the sky—or had it struck the house? She felt a ripple beneath her feet as the floorboards shuddered.
She tensed, her body wired. It wasn’t lightning. A cable or a power board had exploded. Smoke crept beneath the door, and she heard the crackle and snap of fire.
*
“It’s on fire! Get back!” Saul shouted.
Jack’s senses were on high alert, adrenaline pumping.
He hunched down and covered his head with his arms as a piece of guttering fell from the rooftop and crash landed next to him, bursting into flames the instant it hit the porch beams.
He recoiled, scrambling to get away from it. Then he paused, and waited.
Flames licked the edge of the porch roof. Why couldn’t he smell it? He heard the wood crack and split, and he saw the embers char the beams, but there was no aroma. None.
“It’s not real!” he called to the people below as he pushed to stand. “The fire. It’s not real. Look!” He reached out and stuck his arm into a flame.
A woman screamed.
He pulled his arm out and held it up. His shirtsleeve wasn’t even singed. “It’s not real!”
*
Pepper’s heart just about turned inside out when Jack walked right through a ball of flames and out the other side!
“The fire’s not real!” he called up to her. “It’s not real, sweetheart.”
She clapped a hand over her mouth as a laugh erupted from within her, joyous relief filling her, although it could be hysteria. “You bastards,” she said to the GGs.
But it wasn’t over yet.
This was the moment she kicked ass. And they’d be doing it together, her and Jack.
The porch roof he was standing on was barely intact. The section he stood on, two simple wooden posts and a beam still attached to the house, were the only things beneath his feet. He kept thrusting his arm at her, pointing.
The window. He wanted her to smash it. But she had nothing to break the panes. No furniture, not even a candlestick and she’d kicked her damned shoes off before coming up the stairs otherwise she’d have used the heels.
A moment later, without hesitation, she ripped the hem of her dress at the split and tore off the bottom section. Heart in her mouth, she wrapped her right hand in the material, leaving the charm bracelet free.
She fisted her hand, turned her face away, and belted the pane of glass with the bracelet. It cracked, and she thumped it again.
This time, it shattered.
Keeping her eyes closed and her head down, she hit another pane, then a third.
Warm night air rushed at her face and the bare skin of her throat, her shoulders, and her arms.
She inhaled it deeply, welcoming it into her lungs. Then she used both hands to push at the thin wooden frames. Two snapped and she pushed another. It broke, giving enough space to get out of the window.
She glanced down at Jack.
“Come on.” The look in his eye was pleading. “I’ll catch you.”
“It’s too high!” someone shouted.
“You’ll break your back, Jack!” someone else yelled.
Mark and Saul were frantically looking around, probably for a ladder, although there wasn’t enough space on the section of roof for anyone but Jack and he didn’t lose eye contact with her.
“I’ll catch you, Pep. I promise. I’m not leaving you.”
The whole house shook then, cracks appearing in the walls of the attic, nails popping from the floorboards, but it wasn’t real. Just like the fire—it had been engineered to scare.
“Didn’t you like that?” she asked the great-grandfathers. Jack had said he wasn’t leaving her, and the forces around her were full of rage. “Tough. Because this is it.” The moment she broke the curse. The moment she and Jack broke the curse.
After this, the ghosts of the great-grandfathers could never come back to torment the Mackillops. If they tried, they’d be facing love in all four directions. From the towns. From the dwellings outside the towns, from the signs in the fork at the road. The power of that love would burn their black hearts to smithereens. All Mackillops from now on would be free of the curse.
“Watch this,” she told them. “Just watch this.”
She climbed out of the broken window, glass shreds scratching the skin on her knees and arms, but she didn’t feel the pain. She saw only Jack, waiting for her. She grabbed hold of a drainpipe to steady herself, her other hand on the window frame.
“Don’t do it!” someone called. “Don’t jump!”
“Jack, what are you thinking? Don’t make her do it!”
The voices were those of her townspeople, who thought Jack crazy. But he kept his gaze steady, his arms outstretched, waiting for her.
There was so much determination in his expression, she paused to appreciate it. How could she not have known from the start? It was Jack. It was always supposed to have been Jack.
She pushed from the windowsill.