The sound of my beeper going off woke me the next morning. The balcony doors swung slightly back and forth, and I rubbed my eyes to see the sun coming up over the horizon, an indigo blur burning across the Atlantic Ocean.
My fingers immediately trailed over the hickey he left me. It pulsed just under the surface of the skin of my neck as if it were a thing with a heartbeat of its own.
I jumped to my feet, scurried across the wooden floors, and looked in the mirror. The bruise was a cold, deep purple against my white skin, a ghost of where his mouth had been. I closed my eyes when the memory of last night flashed behind them.
He’d arrived so abruptly and left all the same. He’d left me with a warning, with a craving, with a demand to stay out of the woods. And I would stay out of the woods, but I knew he wouldn’t stay out of my mind.
Especially not with his mark pulsing under my skin.
After quickly getting ready, I called Jonah from the house phone in the kitchen as I put on a pot of coffee for Gramps. Jonah had said to meet him at a trailer in a Norse Woods neighborhood. He’d said he couldn’t wait for me, and that he would drive the hearse for transport and wait for my arrival.
A trailer park was tucked away in the woods past Voodoos Bar. The black hearse sat in front of a single-wide hoisted up on cinder blocks, a broken lattice fencing wrapped around the bottom.
A small crowd gathered behind yellow tape blocking the home’s perimeter, and it was there, and through the bustle, I spotted Jonah trying to calm down a neighbor with a police officer and Monday at his side.
“What took you so long?” Monday asked, pushing her way toward me through the commotion of the enraged mob of neighbors.
The scene was utter chaos. Curses and accusations filled my ears as she pulled me through the crowd.
“The Parish should perish!” some chanted. “Murderer!” “Our town isn’t safe anymore!”
Milo was there too, carrying a notepad glued to his hand with another girl holding a tape recorder between him and a neighbor, interviewing and searching for an exclusive.
I scanned the trailer park, noticing people watching the scene play out from atop their porch steps, some from inside the homes, peeking through blinds or behind curtains. My gaze bounced around the street, seeing cars lined up along the curb.
It dawned on me.
The angry townies weren’t neighbors at all.
The attire, the hair, the shoes. They were all upper class from Sacred Sea.
My eyes widened. “What the hell is going on?”
Monday shot me a wide-eyed look as she lifted the tape and pulled me underneath.
Beck was sitting on the steps of the trailer with a cigarette between his tattooed fingers. A hood was pulled up and over his buzzed hair as he kept his head down, smoke rising from the dark void of his face. Crystal blue eyes looked up in front of him in a distant gaze as his knee bounced uncontrollably over the wooden steps.
I’d only known it was Beck Parish because I’d seen him in the cemetery digging graves countless times now. I recognized his build, his demeanor, and the way he carried himself, icy waters lurking in the irises of his soul.
Monday ushered me past him and into the mobile home. Cigarette smoke and a stale breath of booze loomed in the air like a shadow.
We walked straight into the living room where a man was sitting over a beaten couch with his head in his hands.
Faux-wood vinyl sided every wall. The carpet was dingy and stained. The home, if one could even call it that, was an ashtray and graveyard for empty beer cans and take-out boxes.
Brown work boots peeked from behind a coffee table where the body was lying.
“This is Earl Parish. Beck’s dad,” Monday introduced the man who was sitting on the couch, and he glanced up from his hands with a shirt tied around his face, an elixir of anger and agony boiling in his glossy blue eyes. Beck’s father.
Monday knelt beside the body that laid face down over the floor, and I followed her. There was no blood, and rigor mortis had already set in, which only meant he’d been lying here for at least three to four hours. The body was trapped in a death chill, and his skin was pale with purple blotches at the underside where the body met the floor.
“Ready to talk, Earl?” someone asked, and I turned to see another officer standing under the opened doorway. “Beck, Julian, no one’s talking, and I’m getting answers today. I’ll take you all three down to the station if I have to.”
Jonah pushed through the front door. “Officer Stoker, a word, please,” he insisted, gripping the officer’s elbow.
And that’s when I saw it. A dark outline of a figure cowered behind the front door that was hung open.
The spirit yanked at his thinning hair behind the door, spewing curses only I could hear. Shocked and scared eyes fixed on his dead body—the body he’d inhabited only hours before and only a shell of what he used to be—as everyone else moved about the trailer as if he weren’t there.
But he was there. I saw him, enraged and scared and powerless.
The officer went on again, threatening Earl.
Jonah was growing impatient, steering Officer Stoker away from Earl.
“What ar-ya thinking?” Monday asked.
Another officer came into the house, requesting for more backup to control the mob outside.
The ghost stepped out from the corner screaming for someone to hear him.
A ringing buzzed in my ears as the room swayed, my knees weakening from the chaos unfolding around me. My breathing turned hollow. My palms were sweating.
Too many people. Too many voices.
I slapped my hands over my ears to erase the noise. “QUIET!”
The ghost, Jonah, Monday, the officers, Earl, they all studied me from where they froze with piercing scrutiny. Even the shouts outside dimmed by my voice. My palms dropped from my ears.
“Take it outside,” I announced. “Let me do my job in here.” What I really wanted was to see if I could get through to the ghost. The spirits came first. They always came first.
“Yeah,” Monday added.
I looked over at her. “You too, Monday.”
“Wait, what?”
Either I had to admit how strange I indeed was, or I’d have to leave the ghost of this man here to fend for himself, to be lost and unsure of what had happened to him. Because I had this gift, I’d always felt it was my responsibility to help them, talk them through it.
Some spirits wanted nothing more than to make sure their death was avenged. Others wanted to watch karma play their part in a slow and torturous manner because it was worse and more fun that way since their pain tethered them here, allowing them to stick around and watch.
But watching turned them into the maddening and crazed kind of spirits—the ones who could never find peace.
“Please,” I stated in a calmer voice. “I just need a minute.”
The officer took Earl out of the room and down the steps where the angry town’s people awaited him, Jonah and Monday close behind.
As the door was closing behind them, I caught a glimpse of Julian, who was standing in front of Beck, and my heart skipped inside my chest. Julian lifted his eyes to mine just as the door shut, closing me inside alone with a dead body, a ghost, and the aftermath of a harrowing incident.
I sucked in a breath and turned my attention to the ghost in the corner of the room. “What’s your name?”
“What happened to me? How is it that I’m standing here? Put me back in! I’m fine! You make this go away.” His enlarged eyes looked over his hands, his shirt, grasping at himself frantically. “Fix me!”
“I can’t, you’re already dead,” I said slowly, hoping to soothe his energy. They had never physically hurt me before, and I didn’t know if it was at all possible. “Can you tell me what happened?”
“I-I-can’t remember,” he stuttered, then his stutter turned into a roar, and he banged his palm repeatedly against the side of his head. “Why can’t I remember?!”
“Because you haven’t accepted what’s happened to you yet. You need to accept it, then your memories will come back.”
“How do you know this? Who are you?”
“Fallon. Fallon Grimaldi.” You’re a Grimaldi, Marietta had always told me, and I didn’t know why I’d said Grimaldi at that moment, but it felt right, as if it would answer all the burning questions inside him. I was a Grimaldi. A girl who could see and talk to ghosts. A girl whose father was a witch, and a mother I still knew nothing about.
Yes, I was a Morgan, but I was a Grimaldi, too, and maybe that meant something.
I didn’t know how much time had passed as I watched his expression twist into different phases, almost as if he was trying to accept, trying to remember. He stared at the walls, the door, and the floor like the room was speaking to him.
“Jury.” Then he looked at me. “My name is Jury Smith.”
I nodded, keeping silent to not break his train of thought.
“I was out of it … I don’t know how I ended up there, but I was so mad. I came here to confront Earl about something, and he was just as surprised to see me. But it had to be about something. Kill Earl …” His eyes darted behind him to the door. “There was another man! He … he jumped me from behind!” He looked at his hand, and his face transformed as if a light went off with a memory. “I was holding something in my hand, but it was knocked to the ground.” His eyes slid to the couch.
I followed his gaze to the couch and looked underneath. There was a knife, but there was no blood anywhere near or on the body or around the living room. The knife couldn’t have been used.
“His face,” he continued, “I’d never seen something so … so …”
“Scary?” I asked on my knees beside the couch, my heart slamming inside my chest as I looked up at the ghost who held a world of terror in his deadened eyes.
His jaw slammed shut, and he shook his head vehemently, gripping the ends of his hair.
“What did you see?” I probed further.
“Would you believe me if I told you a clown is hiding in there? In that face of his?” he asked, coming from the dark corner of the room with wrinkles in his drooping forehead. “The clown, it choked me with one hand. I couldn’t breathe.” The ghost clawed at the shirt covering his stomach, lifting it and exposing his hairy gut. “He stabbed me! I remember the pain in my lungs!”
We both lowered our gaze and examined his stomach as he twisted in place, but there were no lacerations or knife wounds. The ghost dropped his shirt, his body shaking.
Then he looked up at me through strange pale eyes. “But I felt it. It fucking stabbed me.”
“It? Do you mean Earl? Beck?” My stomach dropped. Julian?
“No!” he screamed. “THE CLOWN!”
Julian
Later that night
I’d told her what I should have told myself all these years. I’d told her all the things that I couldn’t face.
Fallon Grimaldi carried the same stain on her soul as mine from the weight of rejection and insults. The fear rimming her eyes reflected my own, and perhaps that was why I noticed it—why I cringed in the way she couldn’t see that she was the most real thing in this town of deceit.
She carried the same lies I’d carried for twelve years, but Fallon Grimaldi wasn’t enslaved by a mask. Fallon Grimaldi didn’t have to hide, isolate, or become someone she wasn’t.
Fallon Grimaldi was kind, not a killer like me.
Pure, not cursed like me.
She was everything I wasn’t, yet looked at me—to me—as if we were stitched by the same string.
She looked at me, and it drove me crazy, it drove me calm. My god, I was at peace when I didn’t deserve it. Just being around her felt as if she took a knife to my chest and sliced me open to let my darkness bleed out. Being around her felt like I crawled into myself and confronted my soul. Being around her? It made me feel naked, burdens on display, scars ruptured, making everything intense like an open wound. And I had snapped. Snapped!
I wanted to punish her and kiss her at the same time for the way she was making me feel.
I had tried to keep my cool, to keep my distance. I had promised myself I would, but how could I when she was looking at me from across the bar like she was doing now, powder blue eyes both challenging and filling me with her moonlight. As if I didn’t kill a man less than twenty-four hours ago. As if I deserved it!
And as if her innocence wasn’t already messing with my head, she had to wear a slinky black dress on top of it. The girl couldn’t be taller than five-foot-two but all legs, wearing her white hair piled on her head with the hickey I gave her on full display.
I wanted Fallon Grimaldi to never forget the cursed Heathen who had shown up in her room—the warning to stay out of the woods. It was for her own good.
Hate me, moon girl. Hate me like the rest of them. Hate me as I hate me.
Because if you don’t, one of us will kill you, and it will probably be me.
“Jules, you’re up,” Zeph sang at the corner of my eye as he walked around the pool table. I downed the rest of my drink and placed it on the shelf.
We’d come to Voodoos every Friday night since we were kids, just like our dads with their fathers.
The torn green felt on the side was from when I was four, and I’d snagged it while running my 1968 Brown Custom Camaro Hot Wheels toy car across. To hide the car, I’d shoved it down the side pocket and into a hole, and it has been stuck there ever since. The car was now worth at least three thousand dollars, and the only way to exhume it was to take apart the pool table. And we loved the pool table.
The dent on the right corner happened when Beck was thirteen. I’d stolen a bottle from Earl’s trailer. Drunk Earl had marched up here and grabbed the back of Beck’s head and slammed it against the corner because Beck refused to give me up. Two scars that day, which was the last time Drunk Earl was allowed inside Voodoos.
My thumb grazed the crack in the pool stick, the time Maverick smacked Zeph’s sister’s ass when I was sixteen. Maverick has had a lean in his stride ever since.
The chip in the solid three-ball? The first time Phoenix Wildes snapped in public, and none of us really knew why he threw it across the bar six years ago. The hole was still there, an empty wooden frame around it.
He dated it and tagged it, “The Gunslinger.”
We’d learned to walk around this pool table, and have been walking around it every Friday night since.
We only had two rules when we played the game: no magic and no one else.
The pool table belonged to the Hollow Heathens.
I flicked my eyes over to Fallon, seeing Kane’s hand drifting across her thigh under the bar. The pool stick slid between my knuckles too hard, slamming the eight-ball in behind the solid. Fallon adjusted in her seat, clearly uncomfortable, and my jaw clenched.
“You think she knows?” Beck asked, and I heard him but didn’t. “You know she was in my trailer for a while after she kicked everyone out. That was strange.” Beck was concerned about someone finding out I killed Jury Smith, and all I was concerned about was Kane Pruitt touching Fallon’s thigh when I shouldn’t be. “We should have just burned the body like last time.”
I caught all the words he’d said, but Fallon’s eyes were on me, Kane’s hand on her thigh.
Beck shoved my shoulder. “Look at you, man. You’re here, and you’re not.”
“I am,” I insisted, throwing a glance at him. Zeph re-stacked the balls as I stood beside Beck, my focus back on Fallon and my grip tightening on the pool stick. “She can’t prove anything.”
I killed Jury Smith. Jury had shown up at Earl’s trailer with a knife, crazed and out of his mind as if he’d been compelled or hexed by someone. It wasn’t Earl or Beck’s fault for what had happened to Jury, and there was no other way but to kill him. Jury Smith had gone to the trailer with no other intention than leaving with blood on his hands, so I’d made a decision. Everyone depended on me. And the safety of the Norse Woods Coven came first—always.
“You and I both know the dead can talk,” Beck continued. I looked over at him as his eyes flicked to Zeph then back to me. His voice lowered to a whisper, “Everyone seems to forget she’s a Grimaldi too. Her mother knew those woods better than you, and that’s saying a lot, Jules. Freya always wandered in our woods, talked to the dead,” he said. I wanted to laugh. No one knew the woods better than me. Freya Grimaldi may have walked the woods, but I slept in them. A twilight sleep-walker, curled in the womb of Norse woods as if I’d been born from her cold, hard ground. “What if she’s just like her mother? Am I the only one who thinks we should corner her? See what she knows?”
Zeph’s green eyes snapped up to us. He’d heard.
Over my shadow-blood would I allow Zeph or any of them near Fallon. “Cornering her would only give her reasons to pry, and quite frankly, I’m not worried about it. I did it. I killed Jury, not you. Plus, there’s no proof. Let the dead sing their song. Fallon still can’t prove anything.”
Zeph fisted the pool stick. “If she interrupts the plans—”
I forced a laugh. “You think a flatlander with the brain of fish could screw the plan? The same plan that’s been years in the making?” I clicked my tongue, faking my feelings, “You give the girl way too much credit.” I wrapped my hand around the back of his neck and pinned his focus to Fallon. “Look at her. Back straight, white-knuckling her drink, can’t even look at her new friends in the eye. She’s hardly comfortable.” She never looked out of place with me. “She’s just a scared, insecure girl. She doesn’t have the nerve to cross Kane, let alone us.”
I couldn’t believe my own words as they were being said. Why was I protecting her from my own?
I released Zeph, his eyes hardened. But my gaze remained on Fallon as her lost gaze stared out into nothingness in deep thought. I dropped my back against the brick. She did that often when she was around them. Gone, but still there. Where are you going when you do that, Fallon?
After another round of Zeph kicking my ass, we huddled in the corner as the DJ pumped a song through the speakers. Most left the bar to dance, and Phoenix’s rush had slowed, finally pouring us a round of shots.
Fallon stood on the sidelines, shaking her head as the redhead pulled on her hand toward the dance floor.
I downed the shot under the flap of my mask, wiped the corners of my mouth with two fingers, and dropped my elbow on the bar, watching her as the guys talked around me.
“Hi,” a girl said over the hitting bass, approaching nervously with her two friends close behind.
They were standoffish and scared of us, as they should be. Usually, no one talked to us—no one approached us—but now and then, we would get the brave soldiers who came over as a dare or mission to see if they could be with a Heathen for the night. Curious to know what it would be like, to see if we had a heart at all, or to try and change us.
Monsters could have hearts too, and the truth was, we had a heart just like every other living thing. But we couldn’t let anyone get close enough to feel it, see it, take it, shape it.
We had to push them away to protect them.
Because when people get close, they die.
Beck’s eyes glued to the drink in his hand. Phoenix kept his attention on the bar, and I returned my focus on the dance floor, watching Fallon sway awkwardly in place with her straw between her teeth.
“My friends dared me to come over here,” the girl continued, but neither one of us opened our mouths to speak to her. She would walk away eventually.
The rest of the silent and awkward rejection fell into the background when Kane pulled Fallon deeper into the crowd, her drink splashing down her legs. I tensed in my chair. Fallon pushed against his chest, shaking her head as her eyes darted around, landed on me. She didn’t want to. I fisted my drink.
“Not one dance?” the girl tried again.
Kane’s hands slithered down Fallon’s sides. The white shirt she was wearing under the slinky dress bunched up at the sides, revealing her smooth white skin. I lifted myself over the bar and blindly reached for a bottle.
“Not interested, now move along,” Phoenix caved, annoyed, waving the flatlanders off until they scurried away. “For fuck’s sake, I’m not a piece of meat,” he hissed under his breath.
And I chugged from the bottle as Kane used his ways on Fallon, getting her to relax.
The Pruitt’s were Sea Witches, having the ability to manipulate the weather, the sea, and little freakshows too, if that was who they wanted. Kane could trick and influence minds and, on his worst day, enter the unconscious, give wet dreams, lust-filled fantasies, and make anyone fall for him.
Thanks to Kane’s grandfather, we were all forbidden to use our magic out in the open—especially since the flatlander population had increased—but Kane was childish, a one-upper.
And his move on Fallon was all a show for me.
Kane’s manipulation worked on her, too. His hands slipped into the dress’s openings at her sides, and her ass grazed across his Khakis. His eyes bounced to mine, a look of victory while Fallon’s lips pulled into a drunken smile—drunk on him and under his spell.
“Don’t,” Beck whispered all-knowingly in my ear, gauging the tell of my gaze. I could never hide anything from him—could never pretend with him. “He’s seeing how you’ll react.”
“I don’t play games.”
“I know, man. I’m just saying.”
Kane flashed me a cocky grin, his hands gripping Fallon’s bare flesh, and I flung the empty bottle into the trash on the other side of the bar. “I’m ready to go.”
Zeph cocked his head, watching me slide into my coat. “The night’s still young.”
Adjusting my waistband, I looked up at Fallon, an anger-induced dizziness simmering just below my surface that I couldn’t quite understand.
If Zeph or Phoenix noticed how much she was already getting to me, they could do something stupid. They could harm her, get rid of her. I couldn’t take that chance. The reason I’d warned Fallon to stay away from the woods, away from them, away from me.
“I have an early morning at the shop.”
On my way out, the dark pulled me under.