I turned Camila’s jewelry box over in my hands. I had started thinking of it as hers because I found it in her luggage, but now I knew it belonged to her in a way no piece of property had ever belonged to me. The way Horace talked about coming back for “the others” made me sure of it.
Graham nodded down at the box. “So she’s in there right now? Like a genie in a bottle?”
We sat together on the floral couch in his apartment. As soon as I had felt strong enough to walk, I insisted we go somewhere—anywhere—other than the place Horace tried to kill me. Striker assumed her favorite position on my lap, and her claws pierced the skin on my belly again and again as she kneaded me. It was her ritual whenever I was sick or upset, and I never had to heart to tell her to stop.
“I don’t think she’s trapped in it,” I said. “I think it’s more like how, when I’m astral projecting, my body is my anchor. Somehow, Horace anchored Camila’s spirit to this box after it detached from her living body.”
He stared at me. “He can do that? How?”
“I think it has something to do with the invitation rune. They must do more than just lure his victims to the box.”
“So it’s a mousetrap,” he said softly. “Only it’s both the cheese and the bar that snaps the poor thing’s neck.”
I shuddered. His analogy was uncomfortably accurate.
“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you,” he said. “It’s not that I don’t think you’re capable of doing whatever you set your mind to. I just think… Well, I think I didn’t want it to be true. It’s pretty terrifying to know that when you go to sleep, your spirit is getting up out of your body and running around with ghosts.”
That made me laugh. “Sure, when you describe it like that. But it doesn’t feel scary when it’s happening. I mean, it hasn’t before tonight. Mostly, it’s just been exciting. Exhilarating. Like being on a roller coaster.”
He flashed his dimples. “Just don’t turn into some kind of paranormal adrenaline junkie, okay? I like it best when you’re in the living world, with me.”
Striker hopped off my lap and used her claws to pull herself up to the back of the couch, where she curled into a ball and flopped one paw over her eyes to block out the light from the reading lamp.
“She looks exhausted,” Graham said.
I gently pulled one of her ears. “She came to my rescue again, just like the very first night I lived here. She’s incredible.”
“She’s fierce, that’s for sure.” He ran a hand down her silky back, then frowned. “She was so agitated around that first box, but she doesn’t mind this one at all. It must feel different to her.”
Kit had theorized the same thing, that Striker could tell Camila’s jewelry box was associated with a kinder spirit. But Graham’s words resonated differently with me in light of my conversation with Horace.
It must feel different to her.
You’ve managed to hide one of my own vessels from me.
The box didn’t just feel different to Striker. It had felt different to Horace too. He hadn’t been able to sense it in my apartment. Why? What was different about this box, other than the spirit anchored to it?
The answer took me longer than it should have to puzzle out, especially given that it was one of the first things I had noticed about this box back when I found it.
“Remember how the box we found at Cambion’s Camp had the Seal of Solomon carved into the bottom?”
Graham was more familiar with the symbol than I was, having been commissioned to add the two interlocking triangles that comprised the six-pointed star to a number of different sculptures over the years. He’d also been with me when Kit’s girlfriend, Amari, explained the legend behind the symbol, that it was used to trap demons in the ancient world.
He seemed to understand where I was going with my question and reached over to pluck the box from my hands, then flipped it over to check the bottom. “This one doesn’t have it.”
“Yeah. So what if that was more than just the name of the symbol? What if it was an actual, literal seal?”
Graham frowned and gave the box back to me. “That’s a depressing thought. But I don’t get why it’s not on this one. He had to kill her to trap her, right? Why go to all the trouble of murdering somebody and then just leave the box lying around in the desert for anyone to find?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t have the chance to collect her.” I thought back to our conversation with Fred Hawkes about how his wife had found Camila just hours after she died. Had Horace been counting on a larger window to collect his prize?
Then I remembered something else Fred had told us that day about their competitor, Arcane Oasis. The motel had been forced to close after people kept disappearing. How many of those tourists had been drawn into the wilderness by a lathu rune in a jewelry box? It must have been a fertile hunting ground.
Or maybe Horace wasn’t a hunter. Maybe he was a trapper, and the boxes were carefully placed near his victims, easy to collect at his leisure.
That felt the most true, especially given that he hadn’t originally come to Donn’s Hill himself. He sent his errand boys to collect everything from the Franklin cabin, and they’d been the ones to move the original jewelry box around like a token in a board game. He had confirmed it himself: they were bringing “his” spirits back to him.
The box from Cambion’s Camp must have come from his house in New Mexico. That was where he marked them. He had emptied the house of every stick of furniture, except what remained in the basement. He didn’t need the two extra beds and the two dressers anymore, not when Cyrus and Shawn were never coming back to use them.
I shivered. Had they worked for him by choice? Lived in his basement of their own free will? Or had he kept them trapped somehow, kenneled like a pair of hunting dogs when they weren’t out retrieving his prey?
And why had he been willing to let his lackeys bring one of his trapped spirits to Donn’s Hill? Why was he toying with me? What made me different than his other victims?
Why was he killing at all?
I sighed. “Gabrielle tried to warn me about the danger of making assumptions, and I just keep making them anyway. I need to confirm some things or I’ll never figure this out.”
Graham’s face paled. “Not by summoning Horace again.”
“No, nothing like that. I need to talk to Camila.”
There was no more time for games like twenty questions. I needed to be able to communicate with her as clearly as possible. I needed to be able to channel her the way Gabrielle channeled spirits at her séances.
But I couldn’t.
I gripped the box in my hands, nearly scratching off some of the varnish with my nails as my fingers curled into frustrated claws. I hadn’t been able to channel the ghost of the miner at the Ace of Cups, and he had been sitting right in front of me. I wouldn’t be able to channel Camila now.
There wasn’t any point in even trying.
“Who should we call?” Graham asked.
“Call? For what?”
“For the séance.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket. “Do you want nine again, like at the cabin?”
I stared at him. He seemed to have followed my train of thought halfway to the obvious conclusion, but he must have gotten off at a station that still had some optimism left.
When I didn’t answer, he frowned. “You need to be able to ask her questions, right? And you haven’t been able to hear her on the astral plane, so a séance would be the next best thing… right?”
“It won’t work.” I glared down at my socks, disgusted by my lack of power. “It never works.”
“You’re not even going to try?”
“I will. Tomorrow or the next day, I’ll astral project again and try to talk to her there.”
“You’re going back again?” His eyes went wide behind his glasses. “Mac, Horace knows you can do that now. What if he’s just waiting for you in there?”
I touched my necklace. “This will protect me.”
“How do you know that? You took it off while you were awake, and you put it back on while you were awake. We don’t know that it’s not just luck that kept him from wandering over to the house while you were astral projecting before, but if he’s half as smart as I think he is, he’ll be projecting into your apartment every single night, just waiting for you to fall asleep.”
The thought sent a shiver down my spine, and my shoulders trembled. Graham was right. It wasn’t safe for me to visit Camila anymore, not until I figured out who Horace really was and how I could protect myself from him.
If I wanted to talk to her, I had to do it the old-fashioned way. Gabrielle’s way.
“Okay.” I slid off the couch and onto the rug, then set Camila’s jewelry box in front of me. “But don’t call anybody else. This will just be you, me, and Striker. I don’t need a huge audience when I fail again.”
Graham joined me on the floor and took my hands into his. Striker hopped down off the couch a second later, climbing into my lap and settling into a compact loaf with her paws tucked beneath her chest. They were ready—more ready than I was.
With a deep sigh, I closed my eyes and began to center myself with Elizabeth’s measured breathing exercises. I didn’t expect anything to happen, but I figured I might as well go through the motions. After all, this was practice. This was putting in the time.
Maybe if I do this for twenty years, I’ll finally channel a dead bird or something, I thought bitterly.
A few minutes into calling out half-heartedly with my psychic senses, I already wanted to throw in the towel. I could sit here and burn through all the bent spoons in the world, but it wouldn’t make a difference. Camila wouldn’t show.
Just as I was on the verge of letting go of Graham’s hands, Striker began to purr.
My eyes flew open.
Graham’s living room didn’t look right. The high-ceilinged room was still cluttered with cast-off furniture that didn’t match his personal style, and every surface was covered in unsold vases and statues. But everything outside of our tiny circle was muted by a thin layer of gray mist, like a photograph covered by a sheet of vellum.
The veil, I realized.
An icy bolt of shock shot through my body. I had always thought of the veil as a metaphor, something a psychic could pierce through to the other side and sense the unseen. But as Camila appeared behind Graham and stepped through the mist to stand behind him, I was forced to acknowledge that—as I had been on so many things—I was wrong.
My ghostly friend’s thin face was filled with worry. Her eyes glistened with tears as she looked me up and down like she was inspecting me for damage, and her arms were wrapped around her torso in a tight self-hug.
Still stunned to see her standing there at all, it took me a few seconds to get my mouth to move.
“Are you okay?” I finally asked.
She nodded and gestured at me with an impatient hand.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Thanks for saving me back there.”
Graham twisted, looking behind and above himself. “I can’t see her,” he complained.
“That’s okay. If this works, you’ll be able to hear her.”
Camila tilted her head and raised one eyebrow.
“Bear with me here,” I told her. “I’ve never done this before, and I’m pretty sure you haven’t either. But I’ve seen it, and I know it’s possible. Now that you’re here on this side of the veil, I think you can…”
I hesitated, not quite sure how to describe it. At my very first séance, I had witnessed Gabrielle speak for a spirit. The ghost had sat inches from her face, eyes locked on hers. When she spoke, her voice took on a strangely doubled quality, like a musical instrument with two reeds. If I listened closely, I had been able to hear the dead man’s voice behind her own.
“You can borrow my voice,” I finished.
Camila still looked confused. My shoulders sank a few inches. I hadn’t expected to get this far, and now that we were here, neither of us had any clue what to do next. Some psychic I was.
“I, uh…” I cleared my throat and raised my voice. “Camila Aster, if you can, I invite you to speak through me.”
That did it.
With no warning, Camila flew forward. Instinctively, I recoiled. She was moving too quickly; she wouldn’t be able to stop before she slammed into me.
And she didn’t.
She collided with me.
Then, after a pause that lasted less than a breath, she possessed me.
My skin tingled as Camila passed through it, and I felt suddenly cold. My stomach twisted as her energy connected with my gut, and my lungs compressed. There wasn’t enough room inside them for her and for air. I gasped, scratching at my throat, and my eyes watered.
Graham leapt to his feet. “Mac! Are you okay?”
I shook my head. No, I wasn’t okay.
I was drowning.
I was dying.
Then, as suddenly as the pain had begun, it stopped. I could no longer feel her spirit inside of me—not the way I had a moment before—but I knew she was there. I sat, stunned into motionlessness for a moment. When I had seen Gabrielle channel a ghost, it didn’t seem like he had literally inhabited her body. I didn’t know if the difference was because of my lack of experience or what, but if I’d known it would be like this, I wouldn’t have signed up for it.
When my body finally let me move again, I straightened my spine and took a long, deep breath, savoring the sweet feeling of oxygen in my lungs.
“Sorry,” I heard myself say.
I clapped a hand over my mouth. Graham hovered over me, looking unsure.
“Mac?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said at the same time a slightly higher voice said, “No.”
He backed away from me, eyes bulging.
“It’s okay,” I said. My voice sounded strangely flat without Camila’s ringing behind it. “I didn’t expect it to feel like this, but I’m fine. Camila is here. You can sit back down.”
“Brrrllll,” Striker agreed, still purring loudly and steadily.
Graham’s legs shook as he lowered himself to the ground. “Should I talk to her?” he whispered.
I blinked. I was the one with the questions, but it did feel a little strange to ask them of myself.
“If you want,” I said.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“It’s okay.” I cleared my throat again. “I’ll do it.”
It took me a few moments to gather my thoughts. If I let myself worry about what was happening right now, everything scattered. But the reality of it kept barging into my mind, over and over.
Would the Mackenzie Clair who had arrived in Donn’s Hill in the back of a pickup truck have believed this if she saw it? Would the woman who had been terrified beyond words by her first encounter with a poltergeist have been capable of doing something like this?
No way.
That Mackenzie was still deep inside me. She still made up the core of my being. But over the last seven months, I had been growing. Without even noticing, I’d been bulking up. And now, suddenly, I had the psychic power to channel a spirit.
The suddenness of it bothered me. I couldn’t focus on it, though. I had no idea how long I could maintain this, and there was just too much I needed to know.
I took another deep breath. “Okay, Camila. Fill me in. What happened to you on your trip to New Mexico?”
The answer came from my own mouth in double timbre. “Thank goodness you can actually hear me! Do you know how hard this would be to act out?”
Even though we were talking in such a weird way, she still managed to make me laugh. Between that and the stunned expression on Graham’s face, I struggled to focus on her half of my voice. I closed my eyes, tried to pretend we were just chatting over the phone, and concentrated. I wasn’t sure if she always had this much to say or if she was just excited to finally be heard, but her words flowed in a steady rush.
“I was down there to check out the Very Large Array. You know, the one SETI uses? It’s been on my bucket list forever—holy crap, I just realized I kicked the bucket while I was checking something off my bucket list. How unfair is that? And I didn’t even get to see the VLA, because the first night I was there, I walked out a little ways to do some stargazing, and I got this random urge to walk down by the river even though I’m honestly terrified of drowning. Then, a little before the river’s edge, I got another wacky urge that I should start digging, and I listened to it because I was sure—totally, completely positive—the aliens left me a message buried in the ground. When I found the little wooden box, I freaked out. Then I blacked out.
“Next thing I knew, I was standing over myself, looking down at my own body. I was pretty close to my yurt, so I think I must have tried to crawl back or something. Then I felt this weird sensation. You know the way water looks when it drains out of the tub? It was like that, only it was me, and I was draining into the little box.”
My mouth stopped moving, and I shifted uneasily. The pulling sensation she was describing reminded me a little too much of the way I felt when sleep—or rather, the astral plane—tugged at me in the days after Elizabeth’s funeral.
“Are you… okay with all this?” Graham asked. “You sound way more cheerful than I think I’d be about it.”
A wave of cold washed over my body. Camila’s sorrow over the loss of her own life rushed into me like a crashing wave, and I had to gulp back tears.
“Of course I’m not okay,” she said with my voice. “I’m dead. But what can I do about it? Nothing. And don’t get me wrong, I was mad at first. Furious, actually. I was stuck at the yurt resort, alone, watching the dude who runs the place pack my stuff wrong, watching him try to find a place to send it back to. I tried to leave him a note to tell him just to burn it all, but I couldn’t figure out how to pick up a pen.”
“There’s no one who would want it?” I asked.
Her answering “nope” was terse and clipped, and I didn’t press the subject.
“We’ll tell him,” Graham promised. “I don’t know if he’ll believe us, but we’ll try.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Being a ghost isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I kind of get why the old lady haunting my laundry room is so pissed all the time, but I’m trying to make the most of it.”
I wrenched control of my voice back from her. “Wait, what old lady?”
“Back in Gainesville, every time I went downstairs to do the laundry, I could feel eyes in the back of my head. When I turned around, nobody was there. But then, a few months after I moved in, when I looked over my shoulder, I saw a woman standing there. Just standing. She watched me do my laundry with this mean look on her face, like she hated the way I was measuring the detergent. I asked the other tenants about her, and one of them told me the building is supposed to be haunted by the old lady who originally built the house. I guess she’s mad they turned it into apartments or something.”
She said it so matter-of-factly, but her words took the mental puzzle I’d been working on and rotated it around. Suddenly, the picture made so much more sense.
Camila was a psychic.
Horace wasn’t just sprinkling his jewelry boxes everywhere he could. He was targeting psychics, and he laid his traps where they were most likely to be. That’s why so many people disappeared from Arcane Oasis. And once they shut down, he moved on to other out-of-the-way motels that appealed to those adventurous souls with eclectic tastes.
My mind raced, trying to process this new information and snap the pieces together as fast as I could. If he was targeting psychics, Donn’s Hill was certainly a fertile hunting ground. Did he know Elizabeth was an Empath? Had he gone after her specifically, or had he cast a wide net and happened to catch her?
Of course he knew she was an Empath, I realized with horror. You advertised it around the country.
Our videos. We might as well have sent him an embossed invitation with a list of names and cordially invited him to come pick off every intuitive in town. He must have seen Elizabeth’s video and come to add her to his collection. He only knew she existed because of us.
She was dead because of me.
The guilt came swiftly, settling over me like a heavy cloak and tightening around me like a vise. Blackness closed in at the edges of my vision. My fingernails clawed into my knees through my jeans.
Then, just as I thought I was about to faint, a sudden vision flared into my mind. I saw Stephen sitting at his rune-reading table, surrounded by cameras. We had made a featurette of him too.
And it was set to air on Monday.
“I have to tell Yuri,” I gasped. “We have to pull Stephen’s video.”
I was halfway to my feet when Camila yanked me back to the ground with my own muscles.
“Hey, what about me?” her high voice echoed behind my own. “You promised you’d help me break free, remember? I don’t want to be stuck here forever.”
She was right. I had told her I’d figure out a way to help her move beyond the boundaries of Primrose House.
“Do you even know how to do that?” Graham asked me.
I stared down at her jewelry box for a few seconds, then answered his question in a flat, hollow tone. “I do. I’ve seen it happen. You were there.”
To Camila, I said, “If I’m right, this is a one-way street. Are you sure you’re ready to move on?”
The responding laughter was quick and harsh. It wasn’t a sound I’d ever heard come out of my mouth before, and from the way Graham cringed away from me, I could tell he wasn’t used to it either.
“Okay,” I said. “Silly question.”
At that moment, my spirit reached its limit. My vision fuzzed, and a wave of nausea rocked me. I reached out a hand and steadied myself by gripping the couch beside me. Bile welled up my throat, and I thought I might be about to throw up.
If I had been in full control of my own body, I would have grabbed the nearest concave-shaped thing to me and bent over it. But my unexpected copilot had other ideas, and she tipped my head backward.
Then, mouth pointed straight up at the ceiling, I did throw up. Only it wasn’t vomit that rocketed upward; it was Camila’s spiritual energy. The gray mist around us lifted, and I collapsed onto my back with a noisy sigh.
Graham peeked out from behind his arms, which he had flung over his head in anticipation of something horrible raining down from above. “Are you okay? Is she gone?”
“I think so.” My voice sounded normal to my ears—full and slightly high pitched, not musical but not disagreeable. I laughed at how good it felt to speak as just one person. “Yes. It’s just me now.”
Striker stood and trotted up my chest to my face. Her little pink tongue darted out once to lick my forehead. Then she walked over to the kitty bowl Graham kept by his kitchenette, nudged it with her nose, and yowled.
I pushed myself back up into a sitting position, arms shaking. “You too, huh? That really took it out of me.”
My stomach growled, but I didn’t feel right taking care of my own needs until Camila was free.
“Do you have any gasoline?” I asked Graham.