“Any day above ground is a good one, I’ll tell ya. But there’s something in the air that’s giving even me the heebie-jeebies around here. Maybe it’s the storm rolling in, so careful out there on the waters today, salty dogs. I know, I know, no storm will hold ya back. But hey, whatever floats your boat,”—he paused to chuckle— “And these are your Hollow Headlines with Freddy in the Mournin’. Let’s kick Saturday off with some good music …” Freddy announced, interrupting Gramps and my conversation.
Gramps mumbled, his jaws chomping at his dentures that were barely holding on. “It’s because tha window in yah room is facin’ east. Maybe yah should move to tha othah room down tha hall,” he replied, but I hardly believed my nightmare from last night had anything to do with the direction my window faced.
“I thought you didn’t believe in all that mumbo jumbo nonsense,” I playfully said as I sat across from him with the warm mug between my palms and the nightmare still sticking to my mind.
Gramps’ eyes hit mine above the rims of his bifocals. “I’m done talkin’ to yah today.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I stood when the bread popped out of the toaster. I plucked the toast at the hot edges and dropped it on a plate.
Last night I’d left my scooter at Voodoos and walked the rest of the way home. Kane’s words of “Morgans are Sacred Sea territory” lodged itself into my brain. Morgan’s were someone else’s territory?
Territory.
When Kane had said the word, it felt as if he had bound my arms together. A shiver jumped up my spine to the back of my neck. Territory. The single word had stayed with me the entire way home, and last night I’d dreamed of the night I’d desperately wished I could erase. Blood and blackness and the blistering cries—what those kids had done to me seventeen years ago. My thumb anxiously twisted my mood ring around my ring finger.
“Moonshine,” Gramps’ voice broke apart my thoughts. “My toast.”
I dropped my gaze to see the toast already on a plate waiting for me to spread the butter.
I let go of a breath and pulled a knife from the drawer. “Do you know anything about Dad’s side of the family and Sacred Sea?” I asked casually, spreading the creamy butter over the toast.
Gramps leaned back in his chair and dropped his pencil, the crossword puzzle far from finished. He would never leave the table until it was. “I know-a lot about a lot around heyah. Why ar-yah askin’ about Sacred Sea?”
I licked a splatter of butter off my thumb and rested the fork over the sink. Walking toward him, I continued, “I met some people last night. One said something about Morgans being Sacred Sea…territory,” the word wouldn’t roll easily off my tongue. It clung to the back of my throat as if my mind refused to say the word aloud.
Kane had gone from uninterested to overprotective in the blink of an eye. He’d rather see me hit the ground than have a Heathen come near me.
I retook my seat and leaned over the table with one elbow propped near the edge and blinked up at him. “What does that even mean?”
The old man cocked his head and looked out the window into the sea, his jaw grinding and jowls shaking. Inside those tired eyes rested a museum of history and secrets and conspiracy theories. When his gaze returned to me, his brows furrowed. “What do yah know already?”
My lips moved faster than I’d intended. “What do you know.”
“I asked yah first.”
His stubbornness was uncanny, comical even, but this was hardly the time to laugh.
We stared at one another in a standoff, neither one of us Grimaldis backing down. But after a few seconds, I cracked first.
“When I was a little girl,” I started to say then paused to find the right words, to think it through. I dropped my gaze from his and pinched the seam of my oatmeal-colored cardigan draping over my knees. “I would sleep all day and stay up all night. Marietta called me her Moonshine. I thought that was the reason why too. Because I would ‘Wake and sleep with the moon,’ she’d say,” I returned my eyes to his, “She would tell me stories, Gramps. About Weeping Hollow and Norse Woods and Sacred Sea. Some I still remember, some are so vague it feels like a dream. But I thought they were just stories. I didn’t believe any of it until I started getting your letters. Then I get here, and Weeping Hollow is real. Dad was part of a coven…and my mom…my mom, I still don’t even know anything about her, but this town knows. Everyone seems to know everything but me. All I know are vague memories of these bedtime stories my nanny used to tell me.”
Gramps’ hard eyes locked on mine, and a long pause dragged between us.
“Tell me what it means,” I pleaded.
“Yah shouldn’t be hangin’ around fopdoodles who have the handshake of a wet sock,” Gramps spat, red replacing his pale cheeks. “Yah shouldn’t even be heyah at all! Yah ask too many damn questions, just like yah mothah. And I’m gonna tell yah the same thing I told her. Theya’s a burden that comes along with knowin’ the truth. It’s heavy and cripplin’ and comes at a price. Don’t ask questions yah not ready to heah.”
“You never talk about my mother. You never wanna talk about anything important,” I pointed out, and I hated how my voice sounded like a child’s. “Why do I feel like everyone’s keeping a secret from me? You and Dad, no one wants to talk about—”
“Yah have no ideah what yah talkin’ about!” His voice was harsh and eyes wide. “Tobias took yah away to protect yah. Best decision that dumbass evah made!”
My face cringed from the blow, the way Gramps had spoken ill of my dead father. A father who never visited the daughter who could see the dead when his spirit was the only one I looked for in every room I walked into.
I bit the inside of my cheek and let the dumbass comment slide. “What does it mean I’m Sacred Sea territory, Benny?” I repeated, sterner this time—more adult than child. I’d realized this was my last hope of getting anything out of the man.
“It doesn’t mattah anyhow!” he shouted. “Yah wanna know why?”
“Why?”
“Because even though yah a Morgan, yah a Grimaldi too! Yah my blood, my granddaughtah,” Gramps finally said for the first time with a glimmer of compassion in his features, his cheeks and finger shaking. “Yah no one’s territory, Moonshine!”
My Mini Cooper passed by the living room window facing the street, stealing my attention.
“What is it?” Gramps asked, disturbed.
I got up from the small table in the kitchen when Gramps shifted in place as if he were to get up, but we both knew he didn’t want to. The crossword puzzle wasn’t finished yet.
“I think someone’s here.”
I walked through the living room, craning my neck to see outside the window. My car was parked in the gravel driveway. Barefoot, I shuffled down the porch steps. Black clouds were rolling in from the east over the Atlantic, and the air was dew-like and misty. A storm was coming.
I narrowed my eyes, my hand shielding them to keep my hair from my view. The Mini Cooper idled in the driveway for a long time before the door swung open.
Boots landed over the gravel, and my eyes scanned up the black pants and coat. Thick icy-black hair waved with the oncoming storm when he turned to face me. With liquid smoke in his eyes, Julian’s gaze met mine through the threatening winds.
Julian Blackwell was in my driveway.
An arctic chill breezed past me, and I pulled my cardigan closer around my chest, trying to cover my tank and midriff.
“What are you doing here?” As the words left me, I felt stupid for asking them. He was only returning my car. The car he had fixed.
Julian walked up the path toward me with one hand in his pocket, the other grasping my keys in his palm. Each step he took, his eyes remained on mine and never veered down my body or past me or around me. A deadlock.
He stopped only inches before me, and I had to lift my head to see his covered face.
He could easily reach out and touch me, but he didn’t have to. His intense eyes cut through my skin, grabbed hold of my soul, and gently caressed it. There was a serenity lurking behind the walls of his madman illusion—a false imprisonment of a wonderland I wanted to wander in. A place I could get lost in.
“Your keys,” he stated, holding them out between us with a stone-cold stare.
I held out my palm when he dropped them into my hand, physically not touching me and making sure of it.
A faded song of breaths counted the next few seconds, neither one of us saying anything or making an attempt to move.
Then a loud clatter came from inside the opened door, sounding like glass shattering, and Julian’s eyes blinked once before they ripped away from mine.
My heart dropped when it dawned on me. “Oh my god, Gramps!”
My feet moved quickly, up the steps and through the front door.
Gramps laid motionless over the kitchen floor, the broken plate surrounding him, and his hat had slid across the floor from his balding head. My eyes bulged, a panic struck my chest.
“Gramps!” I cried out, running toward him. I collapsed to my knees near his body.
His eyes were closed.
Mine were burning.
He wasn’t moving.
What do I do, what do I do, what do I do … my mind was in shambles, my heart left somewhere outside, probably gone with the wind.
Julian appeared and crouched down near Gramps’ head, pressed two fingers against his neck.
“Get away from him!” I shouted, pushing against his shoulder. “Don’t touch him!”
Julian caught my wrist in his hand, and I froze. “He’s still breathing,” he spoke evenly, his voice coarse and detached. “I’m going to walk over there and call the doc.” His fingers remained firmly around my wrist, his gaze holding mine.
Julian bounced his eyes between my panicked ones, then moved my hand to Gramps’ neck and placed my fingers over his pulse. “You feel that?”—A gentle tap of Gramps’ pulse hit my fingers, and I nodded, tears streaming down my face, my lips trembling— “He’ll be okay. Hold on to his heartbeat.”
Julian jumped up and disappeared behind me, grabbing the house phone from the wall.
“I’m right here, Gramps. Don’t you dare die on me, you hear me?” Tears sputtered through my words. I sucked in a more stable breath as his pulse thumped against my two fingers beneath his paper-thin skin. “It’s all my fault,” I cried to whoever was listening. The spirits who followed me, Gramps, Julian. “I shouldn’t have pushed you so hard. I shouldn’t have upset you. I’m so, so sorry.” All my words tumbled out, one right after the other. Gramps was sick, and I’d made him so angry because I’d asked too many damn questions. “This is all my fault.”
Gramps’ eyes blinked open, and a gurgled moan escaped from his lips. I scrambled closer.
“You’re okay.” I sighed in relief as he came to, another tear falling from the corner of my eye.
Gramps shifted on the floor, and his startled gaze darted around the kitchen.
“Don’t move, Benny. The doc is coming,” Julian stated from behind me.
Dr. Morley took his time checking Gramps’ vitals and his head. Gramps sat in the dining chair, glaring at Julian, who hadn’t moved from the counter.
The doc removed the thermometer from Gramps’ mouth. “Your temperature is at a hundred and two. I told you to stay in bed. You keep overexerting yourself, you’ll never get better.”
Dr. Morley was oddly tall. He stood close to seven feet at full height, making him the tallest man I’d ever seen—a large frame of bones. His knee caps bulged even as he stood, his elbows too even when his arms were straight. The bottoms of his slacks hit right at his calves, his sleeves at his forearms.
“Clowns. I got dizzy, is all,” Gramps mumbled. “No need for all the dramatics.”
“For once, listen to him, Gramps.”
Winds howled around the house as rain pounded against the kitchen window. The storm was here, the skies black in the late morning. The house’s lights flickered.
“Tomorrow,” Dr. Morley started, towering to his feet, “Come see me so we can do more testing at the office. I’ll be better equipped.” He looked down at Gramps, whose brows were pushed together and downward. “If there’s something I can do to help, better now before it’s too late.”
Gramps kept his lips pressed together in a hard line, not speaking a word.
Not until after Dr. Morley left.
As soon as the door closed behind the doctor, Gramps couldn’t keep it in any longer. “Duke of limbs is nothin’ but a moron.”
“Gramps!”
“I should be on my way,” Julian muttered.
“Damn right, yah should go,” Gramps seethed through his veneers. “And you, yah Heathen. You stay away from my granddaughtah.”
Julian pushed off the counter and walked past me.
The rattle of the front door closing behind Julian echoed, and I jumped to my feet to run after him.
“Where yah going, Moonshine?” Gramps called out. “You better stay away from those Heathens … Stay away from Blackwell … Yah hear me? … Stupid girl.”
My feet moved fast. I swung the front door open and ran off the steps as rain pounded into me, soaking my hair and my clothes, the strong winds beating me from every direction.
Through squinted eyes, I spotted Julian walking down the driveway with his head down. “Hey, wait!”
Julian turned at the sound of my voice. “What are you doing out here?” he shouted over the rain, walking back up the driveway. My eyes locked onto the cylinder pendant hanging from around his neck as it swung back and forth. “Go back inside!” He pointed at the house behind me, his thick black hair soaked and sticking to his forehead.
“You’re going to walk all the way home in this? No, let me drive you!”
The winds were forceful, threatening to rip our clothes from our bodies, our hair from our scalps. Rain drove into us, intending to pierce through our flesh. There was no way he could walk home in this.
Thunder clapped, the sound bouncing up through my spine, and I licked the rain from my lips, stepping through the soggy grass toward him where he stood like a statue. The shirt under his soaked coat clung to the sharp ridges of his torso. Rain dripped from the tips of his hair over his eyes.
“Please, let me drive you. It’s the least I could do!”
Julian shook his head, erased the distance between us, and dropped his mouth to my ear. For a moment, he hovered there. I could hear the sound of his breath in my ear, playing along with the slapping of the icy rain. “I’d rather walk home in this than be seen with you.” His hollowed eyes lifted to mine, and rain dripped from his long black lashes.
My eyes froze ahead into a blurry painting of a grey storm, unblinking and still processing his words.
Julian shook his head, turned, and descended the hill back toward the street.
And the rain beat over me as I watched him go.