Once, I read that women had something woven into their genes that allowed a man to break down and expose his feelings without it compromising his manhood. I suppose that was why I’d ended up on Fallon’s balcony, distraught and out of my mind, needing the same comfort and peace she’d always been able to satisfy. For Fallon Grimaldi had become my safe place.
The meeting with Clarence and the Heathens reminded me I was nothing more than an object or a weapon, whichever way they required me to be and saw fit at the time. A host for magic.
I’d been loyal to my coven. I couldn’t recall at what point things had turned, for it seemed as if the corruption itself had become corrupt. Perhaps it had always been this way, and I’d been a blind fool, or it could have been the moment Dad had walked the Green Mile in my name.
I didn’t know, and for a mere moment, I thought it would do the town and the Heathens a favor if the coven did fall. But only for a moment. Because in spite of everything, they were my family.
“Something’s bothering you,” Fallon pointed out. I was lying back on her bed as she was straddling my waist, her white hair curtaining my face, in my eyes, but I didn’t mind it.
“Nothing for you to worry about.” She didn’t need to know that Clarence had threatened me. And if he found out about River Harrison, it could be over for me. My days could be numbered, and I’d rather spend them with Fallon, not talking about it. I only needed to be around her. For her to fill me with her peace. “Were you close with Tobias?” I asked, changing the subject. “Did he ever warn you about anything? Talk to you about the town, us, or anything strange?” The more information I had, the better.
Her father had taken away her choice, and I had to know why. Was it solely to protect her from the monsters of Weeping Hollow, or did he know something I didn’t?
“No, we hardly talked. He rarely talked about my mom, let alone the town,” Fallon said, pulling back from me and sitting upright. “Why are you asking me about my dad?”
I unlinked my hands from behind my head and wrapped my fingers around her wrist, pulling her back over me. “Your father asked for Sacred Sea’s protection. I want to know why,” I told her, her hair falling back over my face again. I liked her on top of me, her lightness touching all over me as if it could fix me.
“Well, I got this letter sent to me back in Texas. It’s why I came in the first place, but Gramps said he never sent it,” she explained, her finger drawing lazy circles over my temple as her expression turned distant, recalling. “We passed letters back and forth for about a year, you know. Then I got the last one, and I should have known it wasn’t his. But when I read how sick he was, I just packed my bags and jumped in the car. I didn’t even think twice about it.”
“How do you know it wasn’t from him?”
“He told me himself. You should have seen the look on his face. It scared me. And you know I don’t get scared easily, but, Julian, he looked like … I don’t know, but it was like everything he was so afraid of was staring back at him. He wouldn’t talk to me for days. Come to think of it, his health really took a turn after I showed him the letter. And I know this sounds crazy, but my thoughts go and go then spiral, always assuming the worst. Still, I can’t help but think Gramps was giving up, so his body was giving up too.” She paused and moved her eyes downward. “Like he knew something bad was going to happen to me, that there was nothing he could do to stop it, and he wanted to die before I did. Or maybe it’s all in my head.”
My chest tightened. “Let me see it.”
Fallon’s clear eyes snapped to mine. “See what?”
“This letter. Show it to me.”
My hand fell from her thigh as she turned and hung off the edge of the bed, her bottom in the air as she searched through something. My gaze flicked over her little round bottom, the small space between her thighs.
I’d never experienced the same form of intimacy with anyone else as I did with Fallon. Before Fallon, it had always felt forced and unnatural, and I’d been ashamed of doing it because it felt as if I were forcing myself on a female even though I was the one being forced.
But with Fallon, it was freeing, the reason I could never pull away from her at the last second as I had with everyone else before her. Fallon willingly gave herself to me. Fallon trusted me. Fallon moved with me. She never cared about my magic, never asked a thing of me other than to be myself.
“Here it is.” Her hand raised from the edge of the bed with the letter between her fingers. I sat up against the headboard, and she crawled next to me, handing me the letter before crossing her legs at my side.
Moments passed in utter silence as I scanned over the letter, feeling the weight of her stare with her nail between her teeth. “Has Benny always written with a quill pen and ink?”
“A what?” she asked, her finger still between her teeth.
“This letter,” I flipped it over, “It was written with a quill.” My eyes snapped up to hers, and Fallon lifted her shoulders in a shrug. Any time I’d received an invite to the Order’s Chambers or any correspondence, it had always been with a quill pen and ink. But I didn’t recognize the handwriting. “Do you have the envelope?”
“No,” her shoulders sank, “No, I don’t.”
“I want you to think hard, Fallon. Did it have any seal on the envelope? Like a wax seal with the Norse Woods symbol? The star inside the circle?”
“No, I know the symbol you’re talking about. I would’ve remembered that.”
I folded the letter into a perfect square. “I’m keeping this,” I told her, leaning to the side to tuck it into my back pocket.
I knew no one else in Weeping Hollow who wrote with a quill pen and ink. It had to be from the Order, and if it were, I had every right to question Augustine Pruitt as to why someone lured Fallon back home, knowing her father never wanted her to return.
However, confronting them without solid proof could backfire or draw attention to Fallon. For now, the only option was to move forward with the plan to steal the books back from Sacred Sea, see if the answers I needed were there. It was a major risk … but I was going down anyway, may as well bring the Order down with me.
“You already have so much going on. This is my problem, not yours,” Fallon insisted.
I placed my hand over her bruised and purple throat, not thinking, but Fallon didn’t flinch. She tilted her head to the side, stretching her neck and offering herself to me, and I watched her as she closed her eyes in my touch as my palm slid up the length of her neck.
The small reaction from her made my mouth part behind my mask, words sprinting from my chest but never making it into the air between us. I’d choked her only nights before, and her trust in me was unconditional. At that moment, I almost told her I loved her, and the sudden thought caused my heart to splinter.
Instead, I pressed my lips together, traced her sharp jawline with my thumb. “Please, it’s a distraction from my tragic life.”
“There’s something else...”
I raised a brow. “What is it?”
“I’m gonna sound crazy,” she started, shaking her head with her eyes downward.
I lifted her chin. “Tell me.”
“Remember Beth Clayton?”
I swallowed. “Yeah,” I said, and my voice shook. I cleared my throat. “Yes, what about her?”
“I can’t help but think someone thought she was me. Like they got the wrong girl. She’s the only girl I know in all of Weeping Hollow who has almost the same hair color as me. Same height as me. Same build, everything. What if whoever killed her thought she was me?”
My fingers dropped from her. The possibilities of my shadow-blood attempting to kill Fallon again fogged my head, fisted my heart. Would I ever have it under control? Was this all a crazy coincidence?
My eyes bounced between hers, wanting to believe I could never hurt her, but I already did once. What’s not to say I wouldn’t try again, and worse, succeed?
Fallon had this plea in her eyes, asking for me to believe her thoughts and that she wasn’t alone in them. She had these eyes that trusted I had nothing to do with it, and it made me feel like a traitor somehow.
“I believe you,” I told her, then tore my gaze away for a moment before hitting hers again, unable to lie to her. “But, what if I killed Beth Clayton? The possibility isn’t too far-fetched, considering …”
“No,” Fallon shook her head, leaning closer and grabbing my hand. “I know what you’re thinking, don’t go there. You didn’t send me a letter, so it couldn’t have been you. That’s ridiculous—” she paused, then, “Someone else was trying to get me here. Someone else did this.”
Clarence confirmed it was me who killed Beth Clayton, but I had a feeling there was nothing I could say to convince Fallon otherwise. “You have too much faith in me when you shouldn’t.”
We stared at each other for a long moment, then, “She came to me, you know,” she drew closer to me and rested her knee against my side, “Her spirit did. She was trying to tell me something, but she couldn’t because her lips were sewn shut.”
“Whoever killed her knows you can see spirits,” I concluded, trying to rack my brain for a memory of the incident for answers. Why couldn’t I remember?
“That’s what I was thinking too,” she whispered, looking at me but not really looking at me. Behind those eyes, her mind was somewhere else.
“Don’t act like you’re scared now, Fallon Grimaldi,” I told her. “You’re not afraid of anything, remember?”
“You know that’s not true.”
“And you know I’m not going to let anything happen to you, right?” The words came out so quick and easy, but I meant them.
“It’s all too much. Are you sure this is something you’re up for?”
My brows pinched together. “I jumped off a cliff. I’m pretty much down for anything at this point,” I said through a chuckle, then sank into her bed on my side, pulling her down with me, determined to change the subject. “Now, tell me something about life on the outside.” This had become a game of ours.
The tip of her finger drew imaginary lines over my chest and my stomach, connecting the dots of my three freckles. My abs clenched. “No, it’s your turn to tell me a story,” she whispered.
“A story.” I laughed. And from me, she always wanted to hear stories, ones that were real, ones that weren’t. Legends and tales and ones about my childhood. “Okay,” I said, closing my eyes, one coming to mind that may put her at ease.
“When I was a boy, before Johnny and Jolie were born and it was just me, Agatha used to make me moon milk every night. I wasn’t a very good sleeper either, never slept like everyone else in the way I should. And even after I fell asleep, I would wake after the witching hour and sleepwalk through the woods as if I were on the hunt for something, always searching and searching.
“Agatha always made a joke about me being born from the womb of the forest with only half a soul. I didn’t understand it really, but nights she made the moon milk were the quietest ones. The ones I slept without waking. She would make me moon milk with chamomile, fresh strawberries and sprinkled red flower petals, lavender cacao, and some with graham cracker and marshmallow. But my favorite was the blue Majik moon milk. Cinnamon and maple syrup and vanilla—” I paused, pushed my hand through her hair. “I’ll have to make it for you one day.”
Fallon nodded, smiling. “I’d like that.”
I didn’t tilt my head to the side when my own smile appeared behind my mask this time. Perhaps I deserved this one. “So, after Jolie was born, I was about nine or ten at the time, she had a hard time sleeping, crying all hours of the night. I remember waking up to make her the moon milk so my mother could rest, but the drink never worked on Jolie. Then with Johnny, I did the same thing, and still, it did nothing for them.
“I’d asked Agatha about it one day, why it was only me who found so much reprieve with the midnight drink. She’d said the moon milk recipes had come from the Lone Luna of Weeping Hollow, meant for only the first-born son of a Blackwell to offer him peace during restless nights. And I never understood it, not until a few months ago, I suppose.”
“Why’s that? Why only a few months ago?”
“Because the Lone Luna was Freya Grimaldi. Your mother.”
Fallon
“The Harrison’s are looking for any information that could help in locating missing eighteen-year-old River Harrison. If you know anything, head down to see Officer Stoker,” he paused, gathered a breath, “In other news, there are two weeks until Samhain, witches. I hope you’re stocking up on candy for the little flatlanders and finalizing plans on where you’ll be celebrating. Who knows, I could be right next to you and you wouldn’t even realize it. Spoooooky, right? This is Freddy in the Mournin’ with your Saturday morning Hollow Headlines. Keep safe out there, and remember, no one is safe after 3 am. Owooooo,” Freddy howled.
The flyer pinned to the Beech tree in town square flapped with the mid-morning winds, a “Have you seen me?” tag line printed over a black and white photo of River Harrison.
A chill crept into the air. Not the bite of wintry intimidation, but just a nip to warn us. An overcast hovered Town Square, only glimpses of the sun shining through a thin layer of gray clouds like a stained-glass window. Most trees stood naked, adorning the sidewalks with their scarlet and gold beauty. How was it that the season of death was so alluring? I was convinced my soul lived in the haunting fall.
Kioni and I walked through the pumpkin patch as pies and crumbles swelled in the air, everyone in wool coats and snug hats to cover their ears. Leaves tumbled from stubborn branches. Each one fell as if plucked by an invisible hand, Fall’s version of a snow globe.
“This one,” Kioni stated, standing in front of the largest pumpkin of the patch with her arms crossed, a cup filled with Wicked Death Wish hanging from her fingers. I pulled the wagon closer to her and dragged my gaze from the pumpkin to her maple eyes to the wagon, then back to her. She shrugged, studying the pumpkin. “We’ll need a bigger wagon.”
“We need a smaller pumpkin. Or a forklift.” I squinted an eye. “Maybe a crane.”
“No,” she shook her head, set her coffee down, “I refuse to leave this for the Goodys. Winnifred always wins. This year, I’m winning. Come on, help me.” Kioni parted her legs, squated in knee-length boots to secure hold at the pumpkin’s base. When I hadn’t moved, her desperate eyes snapped up to mine. “Please, it will take both of us.”
“What’s the prize?” I asked, dropping the wagon’s handle and walking to the opposite side.
“A year … supply … of—” she released a heavy breath as we tried to lift it off the wooden crate floor “—Mina’s hotcakes.” She groaned before the pumpkin slipped, and we both fell back on our asses. “What could possibly be in this thing, a dead body?”
“Could very well be River’s,” a voice stated, coming up behind us. I looked up, and Kane held out a hand to help me up. I didn’t take it. “Would you look at that, Fallon has a new friend and suddenly she’s too good for us.” He withdrew his offer, fastening his hands together behind his back and looking down at me as Maverick and Cyrus appeared at his side. “Has she been filling your head with nonsense about us?”
Leaves crunched and shuffled under my boots as I got to my feet, tucking my hair behind my ears when Kioni took a seat atop the giant pumpkin. “Yes, Kane, because the three of you are so interesting. Please, go on,” she waved her hand in a get-on-with-it gesture, “I need more material for the afternoon.”
Kane smiled with tight lips. “I see living on Goody Farms has soured your mood. Why don’t you and your mother stay with me a while? I have room for the both of you,” he said, lifting his arms out at each side. “I’ll even make sure you’re ripe before I drop you back off at the farm.” Maverick laughed, and Cyrus stood silent with foolproof posture.
“You’re disgust—” Kioni started, when Kane’s voice swallowed hers, “Oh, calm down. I only want my girl back.” He looked at me. “This is your last chance, Fallon. Come to Crescent Beach tonight. Your coven will be there waiting for you.” I couldn’t come up with something brilliant to say in time before they walked away without a trace other than my angered heart.
A tension-filled silence moved in the air as we watched their backs.
“Asshole,” I whispered.
Kioni side-eyed me.
The wagon’s wheels shook from behind Kioni’s bicycle as we rode the beaten path up the willow-lined dirt road to her cabin, her fat pumpkin slowing her down. I was less awed by the tunnel of autumn colors and more concerned for Kioni as her breathing became harsh and as rugged as the rocky path.
“Goody Farms?” I asked, riding next to her in my scooter as she struggled up the hill. “Did he say you live on Goody Farms? Like Clarence and Zephyr Goody Farms?”
“Well … there’s … no … other … Goody … here,” she huffed out through strenuous breaths.
“Let’s switch,” I suggested, feeling terrible even though she was the one determined to have this specific pumpkin because it was the one.
Kioni shook her head, my offer to help only giving her momentum to push through with determination. “I have it.”
“Do you talk to them?”
We’d reached a plateau, and Kioni’s shoulders sank with relief. “Not really, no.” She blew a wayward black curl from her face. “Winnifred talks to me the most, or really, talks to herself. ‘Kioni, isn’t this dress beautiful? It is, yes.’ ‘Oh, Kioni, fetch me a carafe of water.’ ‘Kioni, the ivory silk or lace? Ah, the lace, will do,’” Kioni mocked in a light and bubbly voice undoubtedly foreign to her lips. “They leave the daily schedule posted in the breezeway, so I don’t have to speak with them. For anyone else, I’m sure it seems like an awkward situation, but it has always been this way.”
Rolling hills stretched out for miles around us. We meandered through cornfields, passing a scarecrow tied to planks of wood in the shape of a cross. A crow perched over the straw hat, flapping its wings and crowing into the somber afternoon skies. To our right, rows of apple trees led the way to the white plantation home in the distance, and we followed the property line until we arrived at a small cottage hidden inside a hill.
My scooter rolled to a stop just as Kioni swung her leg off her bicycle’s banana seat and pushed through a gate no higher than three feet that was attached to a wooden fence enclosure.
Green moss covered the front of the cottage and outlined two small windows and a curved, wooden door. Something enchanting you’d only find in a storybook. As I stood beside the scooter, my mouth fell open in awe.
“I’ll be out in a second,” Kioni called out, walking past the black pot hanging over an unlit fire pit to her front door.
Minutes passed in eerie silence as I waited, and when Kioni returned, she had a cotton tote hanging from her arm and a tumbler cupped in each hand.
“My bibi says hello.” She smiled, walking the stone path toward me. “She whipped up spiced mulled apple cider. Says you can’t carve a pumpkin without it.”
“I think your grandmother hates me,” I admitted, thinking about the time she had forced me out of her shop after the very vague yet brutal psychic reading. The same reading that had led me to jump off the sea cliff.
Kioni laughed. “She’s very passionate about her work and gets intense when emotional. If she was dramatic, it only means she cares.” She passed the gate and asked for me to take the blanket from her bag, lay it out. “We’ll carve it right on the wagon. I have a feeling if we manage to get the beast off, we won’t be able to get it back on.”
I agreed, opening the blanket in front of the wagon before taking a tumbler from her hand. “Is it just you and your grandmother?”
“No, my mother’s here too. Not right now, but most likely still working over at the Goodys’.”
“So, you both work for them?” My face pinched, finding myself being nosy, but questions had always flown from my lips without thinking first. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be so intrusive.”
“Fallon, it’s fine,” she insisted. “I know it seems weird, living all the way out here alone with the Goody family, but really, they live with us. My ancestors were here first before they took the land right out from under us. To ‘settle the inconvenience they’d caused,’ the Goodys made a deal with my great, great grandmother. We can stay in our cabin as long as we tend to the farm and living quarters.” She shook her head, released a breath. “It’s not ideal, but Bibi was able to open her business.”
She plucked the carving tools from the tote bag and spread them out around us as she continued, “My family has been in this cottage for over two hundred years, maybe even longer. It’s our home. We pick and choose our battles but stand our ground because our home is our home, as a home should be,” she explained as if rehearsed or had been told the same thing her entire life.
Kioni cut a circle around the pumpkin’s stem, and together, we scraped out the pumpkin, sifting the sticky and stringy guts and seeds into a plastic bag for later to make pies and pumpkin dishes.
Once Kioni’s pumpkin was finished, we moved on to my smaller sized pumpkin, repeating the same steps.
We spent the rest of the afternoon carving, drinking our refilled hot cider, and talking about everything between Gramps’ health and me jumping off the cliff to a missing River Harrison.
“It’s not everyday people just go missing. I mean, the town is like four miles wide. Where could she possibly go?” Kioni asked, bewildered. “Her parents showed up at my bibi’s shop, trying to find answers.”
“Did she find anything?”
“No,” Kioni answered, and her voice sounded more like a question, as if she couldn’t believe it herself.
If River Harrison was dead, she would have come to me. But she hadn’t. Maybe she wasn’t dead. Maybe she left town.
But when I asked Kioni about it, she said, “It’s possible. After all, she was a flatlander and could leave whenever she wanted. But she loved it here. I don’t see any reason why she would want to leave.”
Her comment tangled my thoughts, spinning and spinning them together in a chaotic mess. I lay back over the blanket and looked up into the gray clouds as the fall winds bit my cheeks. “I don’t ever want to leave this place,” I whispered, surprising myself.
Kioni lay onto her back beside me. “Then don’t.”
At that moment, I wanted to tell Kioni about Julian. I wanted to be the girl who could talk freely about the man I was in love with, confirm that everything I felt was perfectly normal.
I’d never had a mother or a girlfriend. I’d only had Marietta, who told me bedtime stories about the kind of love that only came out at night. The kind Julian and I shared, and the place where it all needed to stay. In the dark.
So, I kept my mouth shut. Maybe one day, I thought.
“Lie Lie Land,” Kioni whispered at my side. “The place we go when the world gets too loud. A quiet place inside our minds, a wild imagination filled with what-ifs and what-could-be.” I turned to face her, and Kioni’s eyes were closed as her silky locks blew over her porcelain cheeks. She must have felt my gaze because she turned her head to face me and opened her eyes. “Don’t go to Crescent Beach, Fallon.” She’d said it with worry as if it were a warning or a plea. Or something in between.
“I wasn’t planning on it.” In fact, I’d forgotten about it until she’d brought it up. “I get a strange feeling when I’m around Sacred Sea. Not good strange, either. I guess I was so desperate to have friends or feel closer to my dad, you know, because he was part of Sacred Sea. I thought being around them would help me understand, but it only made me even more confused. I thought I knew my dad, but I can’t see him being anything like them.”
“Because he was not,” Eleanor stated, and I pushed myself up on my elbows to see her standing behind the closed gate. “Tobias was a good man, Moonshine. One of the only things good in Sacred Sea. Hold on to the memory you have of him. It is the right one.”
She reminded me so much of Marietta, and emotion tugged at my heart. I nodded.
“I am off to work now,” she said as she passed by us. “Fallon, you should sleep here tonight.”
“Thank you for offering, but I should be getting home to Benny.”
Eleanor’s face turned grim but nodded before taking off.
As I tied my pumpkin to the back of my scooter, my gaze found a figure standing in the upstairs window of the Goody home. From here, I couldn’t know for sure, but the silhouette seemed to belong to Zephyr Goody, and the blood in my veins ran cold.