We agreed to go back to the Owl House right after school.
“We should have brought the Stone with us,” I said for the gazillionth time since we’d left school. “Nothing weird is going to happen without it.”
Ilona was pushing my chair, helping me across the rocky old graveyard as we approached the abandoned church.
“Not happening. No one is ever touching the Stone again, not Dad, not Suzie, and definitely not you,” she responded for the gazillionth time. We reached the church and she came around in front of me. “Do you enjoy being sick?”
“I’m not that sick anymore,” I lied, holding her biting, beautiful stare. “I feel way better.”
“Do you believe me when I say the Stone would kill you? Even Dad understands that.” She nodded at the tombstones around us. “Do you want to join them?”
I looked down at my legs rather than at the graves, my frustration mounting again. I believed her. But I still wanted the Stone.
“Harold? Do you believe me?” she asked again.
“I do,” I conceded.
“Good.” She gently touched my shoulder, then turned to face the church.
“I guess I need to go in there, then,” she said, hands on her hips.
I nodded reluctantly. She picked up a stick and used it to clear some leaves out of the hole Suzie had dug, then threw the stick over her shoulder, dropped to her knees, and crawled into the building.
“Scream if you see anything horrifying. Like Alex’s body. Or worse,” I said as I approached the hole. But she didn’t reply.
“Ilona?”
Still no answer.
“Talk to me!”
“If anything’s strangling you or eating your tongue, just knock twice on the wall.”
She knocked twice on the wall.
“Very funny,” I said. I went to the back door and Ilona opened it for me.
“Is there anything in there?”
“Yes, an answer to some of our questions.”
“Which questions?”
I followed her in and she pointed at what she had found: Alex’s BB gun, the one he’d been carrying when he came to feed the owls, was lying on the floor by the altar.
She gave it a little kick. “He’s been hiding in here.”
“Or someone dragged him in. Or something.”
“So, I have good news and bad news,” she said, brushing dirt and spiderwebs out of her hair and off her black dress.
“Start with the good,” I suggested.
“We’re going to spend the evening together. And since I like you, I see it as a good thing.”
“Since I like you too, I think that’s a brilliant idea,” I said. I was trying to sound cool, but my burning cheeks weren’t helping.
“The bad news,” she continued, “is that we’re going to spend the evening here, with that gun, waiting for the thing that took Alex to show up.”
The Hewitt dogs had been silent so far, but now they started to bark in the distance. We both turned at the sound.
“Funny,” I said. “Sounds like the dogs don’t like your plan.”
“It’s a great plan,” she objected. “Let’s go home, get ready, and prove them wrong.”
Mum agreed with the dogs, though. She thought going out that night was a terrible plan, even after I drank a couple cups of her fart tea and did my best to pretend I felt perfectly fine.
Of course I didn’t tell her about the cemetery or the hunt for the missing bully—I told her Ilona and I were going to the beach for a nighttime picnic.
But Mum knew there was something I wasn’t telling her. And to make things worse, everyone in Bay Harbor was talking about Alex’s disappearance and the dead dog. Mum was completely freaked out and ready to lock me up at home.
“I’m just going to eat a sandwich and watch the ocean, right there in front of the house,” I said, pointing out the window past the dunes. “Nothing bad is going to happen.”
Mum started making the sandwiches, even though I told her I could do it myself. She was too nervous to stand still, and I could tell she was fighting the urge to send me to my room and barricade the door.
“I want you home by eight o’clock sharp or I’ll come out and drag you home in front of your girlfriend.”
“Fine,” I said. “But she’s not my girlfriend.”
I moved closer to the counter. “Can you make a couple sandwiches without ham or pickles? And go easy on the mustard.”
There was a knock on the door. Mum gave me a dark look and abandoned the sandwiches to go open it.
Ilona wasn’t dressed in her trademark black dress. She had swapped it for black jeans, a black turtleneck sweater, black boots, her usual black coat, and a black beanie to finish off the look. She looked like she was dressed for a bank robbery, not a picnic on the beach.
“You ready?” she asked, standing on her toes to look at me over Mum’s shoulder.
“Mum? Are the sandwiches ready?” I asked.
Mum mumbled something about how silly it was to make sandwiches without ham, pickles, and mustard, and went back into the kitchen to make butter and cucumber ones instead.
“Why so much black?” I asked, pulling my jacket down from its hook by the door.
“To make myself one with the night.”
Mum heard that. She sighed and slammed my lunchbox closed. “That’s it. I’m coming with you.”
“Mum!”
“We will be fine, Margaret,” Ilona said, punching me on the shoulder. “We just need a little fresh air and some freedom after a long, stuffy day spent not skipping school.”
I zipped up my jacket and Mum gave me my lunchbox. “Eight o’clock! Sharp! Or I’m coming out to get you,” she reminded me.
“Absolutely,” Ilona said.
“She’s not buying it,” I told Ilona when we finally escaped the house. I put the lunchbox in my backpack, along with the flashlight and chocolate candies I’d already packed, and hung the bag on the handles of my wheelchair.
Mum came out on the porch to watch us walk toward the beach.
“Eight o’clock? Seriously?” Ilona said, once we passed the first dune and Mum couldn’t see us anymore. “There’s no way you’ll be back by eight o’clock. This could take the entire night.”
Mum had lifted the no-phone part of my punishment in case we were attacked by a bully-snatching thug. I checked the time. It was six o’clock and the sky was already nearly dark. “I give Alex or the attic lady two hours to show up. If I break Mum’s rules one more time, she’s going to box me in my room till spring.”
“Sometimes it’s hard to have a father like mine, someone who doesn’t know up from down and never remembers your birthday or shows up to a PTA meeting. Sometimes it’s great.”
“Did you tell him where we were going and why?”
“I said I was going out. He mumbled something about quantum mechanics and asked me to give him back the Stone of the Dead.”
“Did you?” I asked, too eagerly.
“Nope,” she said. “Hint: if you’re about to ask the same thing, here’s my answer: No Stone for you!”
I was silent, doing my best to hide my frustration as we took a turn north toward the Owl House, leaving the beach behind.
“I’ve been meaning to ask,” she said. “What about … your father?”
“Oh, I never had one of those.”
“Is he …?”
“Dead? Nope. He just doesn’t exist.”
“Everyone has a father. You must know that, right? About the birds and the bees and how babies come to be?”
“I know about the birds and the bees, but Mum decided to buy the bees at a clinic to have me on her own. It’s always been just the two of us.”
“She’s an interesting woman, your mom.”
“She’s cool. I like her.”
What I didn’t like was the feeling that we were being observed. I stopped and looked back. “Does it feel like someone’s watching us?”
“Oh, yes,” she said coolly. “They’ve been following us since we left your house. Didn’t you see them?”
“Who?”
“Alex’s gang. They were hiding in front of our houses all afternoon.”
I turned and looked in all directions, but I didn’t see them.
“Don’t worry,” she said as we climbed the hill toward the cemetery. “The second something scary happens, they’re going to run away screaming. They’re just a bunch of cowards.”
“Oh, you’ll be fine. They always go for the guy in the wheelchair.”
“Not when he’s with his awesome girlfriend,” she said.
I suddenly forgot all about ghosts and bullies. I even forgot about how much I wanted the Stone back.
I came to a stop and caught her wrist. “What did you just say?”
She looked at the ground, scuffing her feet in the dirt. It was officially night by then, but I could still see her in the moonlight. I could have sworn she was blushing. “You understand that was sort of a joke, right?” she asked. “The girlfriend thing.”
“Well, yeah. Of course.”
But something inside of me was performing a happy dance over the idea that she meant it for real. And a deeper part of me was whispering that this was meant to be. That we were always supposed to meet. And then, I realized I’d been staring at her silently for an embarrassingly long time.
“So,” she said, “should we go hunt some ghosts, or are we just going to stay here and be awkward all night?”
“Ghosts are fine,” I said, and we started moving again.
“Let’s get rid of them first,” she said, gesturing behind us. We got off the road and she pushed me across the grass of the cemetery. When we reached the edge, she pulled me back into a growth of trees and shrubby bushes that formed a perfect dome to hide in. We waited a few minutes and they emerged onto the road, looking around for us. There were five of them, all dressed in black, like Ilona.
Peter cursed. “Where’d they go?” he said, knocking the tip of a red aluminum baseball bat against the road.
I pulled on Ilona’s sleeve. “Baseball bat!” I muttered when she looked down at me. She put her finger over her lips.
“They were right in front of us, and then they disappeared,” one of them said.
“We should have jumped them on the beach,” said another.
“We need to know what they did to Alex first. Then we jump them.”
“Maybe they saw us and they’re hiding,” Ronny said.
Peter smacked the bat against the road rhythmically, the sound making me wince. “We’ll split up and search the cemetery. Whoever finds them calls the others.”
“Maybe we should stay together.” Ronny sounded as scared by the whole situation as I was.
“He’s in a wheelchair, and she’s just a chick.” Peter used the bat like a golf club to smash a rock. “What’re you scared of?”
“You saw how she pushed Alex. She’s crazy.”
“We’re crazier,” Peter insisted. “Get going.”
They walked into the cemetery, then split up and went in different directions.
This was a tiny cemetery. The moonlight made us easy to see. If we didn’t manage to get away fast, they would find us in no time. I looked up at Ilona. She was focused on them, determined and beautiful. I felt something tightening inside me. I had been in this situation so many times: this same pack of guys out to hurt or humiliate me. But this time, I didn’t care what happened to me. All I cared about was protecting Ilona. I was ready to defy reality and jump out of the chair to strike the first one to come near her.
Ilona pulled my chair back, dragging me deeper into the dome of vegetation, but she made plenty of noise doing so. She cursed between her teeth and fell silent. We held still. I stopped breathing entirely as I heard someone coming toward us, pushing branches aside and cursing when they slapped him in the face. Inside our dome, the moonlight was scarce, but I recognized Ronny when he appeared, holding a huge rock in one hand. He looked at us for a long while. Then he let the rock drop to the ground and put his finger over his lips just like Ilona had. We stayed frozen, still observing each other silently until finally, I nodded, and Ronny nodded back. My throat tightened. Not out of fear or sadness, but out of a sudden overwhelming sense of clarity. Guys like Ronny had no innate evil in them. Most bullies were just weak people standing by, silently supporting the evil of others.
He held up his hand, telling us to stay put, and started to back out of the dome. But as he did, something pushed him back inside.
It was the tip of Peter’s baseball bat.
“You rat,” he said to Ronny when he saw Ilona and me. “You’re going to get it worse than them.” He swung his bat and hit Ronny hard on the arm. Ronny fell to the ground, balled up in pain. Peter pressed the bat into his chest, pinning him down. Even in the dim light, I could see the cocktail of madness and excitement on Peter’s face.
“We’re not afraid of you,” I said.
He smiled widely. “Yeah? So why are you hiding?”
He was enjoying all this power and control, savoring every second. He whistled, calling his friends to come see the show. Ilona jumped forward and grabbed the rock Ronny had dropped.
Peter raised his bat in the air. “What’re you going to do with that, freak?”
“I’m going to break your skull with it if you try anything stupid.”
Ronny had stopped moaning. He lay on the ground, quiet and still, doing his best to become invisible. I kept my eyes on Peter’s hand and the bat, tensing at the edge of my chair, ready to protect Ilona from the blow however I could. Peter whistled again, annoyed that no one was coming. “Guys! Here’s the party!” he yelled.
The branches moved behind him, and I thought it was the rest of his goons coming to enjoy the show. But then I realized it was something much, much worse.
“It’s her!” I shouted. Ice-cold fear squeezed my heart as the attic lady came toward us, pushing branches out of the way with her long fingers. Her face was a patchwork of reflected moonlight and shadows, and her lips twisted into an evil smirk.
“Holy crap!” Ronny yelled, his eyes nearly popping out of his face. He crawled away from Peter, stopping at Ilona’s feet.
“She’s not going to protect you,” Peter taunted, unaware that the monster was creeping up right behind him.
The rock fell from Ilona’s hands. Her mouth dropped open in shock. “Ohmyfreakinggod!” she yelled.
“What?” Peter said, finally catching on and turning around.
Up close, she was a nightmare worse than I could have imagined. Her skin was corpse-green and her filthy scarf didn’t hide that most of her throat had been ripped away. Her white eyes moved crazily in their deep, fleshless orbits, staring down at Peter with two glowing, silver dots that might have once been pupils.
He dropped his bat, opened his mouth, and let out a sad whimper. I was pretty sure he was peeing himself too. The attic lady lifted her hand, a garland of skin hanging off the bones of her fingers. As she grabbed his shoulder, her dry, leathery lips parted to reveal dark, rotten teeth.
Peter screamed, and then we all screamed. Ilona got behind my wheelchair and pushed me hard. Ronny got to his feet and ran, holding tight to his injured arm. We followed his lead and chased him out of the dome. The branches were slapping me in the face, cutting the backs of my hands when I tried to shield myself. I didn’t care, as long as we got away.
Soon we were back in the cemetery and the rest of the gang was running toward us at top speed. Ten minutes earlier it would have terrified me, but I didn’t care about them anymore. They must have realized that because they skidded to a stop before they reached us.
“Run!” Ronny shouted.
Then Peter screamed from inside the dome. It sounded like something was tearing him apart. His friends got the message and started running with us.
“Ohmyfreakinggod!” Ilona kept repeating, pushing me onto the road at super-high speed. “Suzie’s right. This is a FREAKING zombie ghost vampire monster!”
“Damn right, she is!”