A spell to wake the dead, p.16
A Spell to Wake the Dead, page 16
Nora nods and pulls out her phone.
“Straight to voicemail,” she mutters, tapping out a text message. Even with my eyes on the road, I can see her hands shaking.
At the next traffic light, I waver. If I turn right, we can get to Midnight Alchemy in less than ten minutes. It won’t be open yet, but Ione might go in early. We could park outside and keep calling until she either answers or shows up for work.
The light turns green, and I start to nudge the wheel right.
Nora screams. The sound coming out of her mouth is agonizing, broken, terrifying.
“Sorry, sorry,” I say. With my heart in my throat, I cut the wheel left and head for Grays Beach.
CHAPTER 34
It’s raining again by the time we pull into the parking lot, the droplets tiny and slushy. I start to drive toward the water, where a long boardwalk stretches out over the marsh, but Nora shakes her head and points in the direction of the playground and barbecue pavilion.
“She wants us to go that way. To find another sister.”
Swallowing a mouthful of bile, I circle around and park beside the bathrooms, then shut off the car.
“Let’s call 911,” I say, “Let them find the body.”
But Nora just shakes her head like she’s too worn down to fight anymore. Like she’s resigned to being May’s puppet. Watching her break down like this is almost more horrifying than finding another corpse.
“Hey—” I start, but she just gets out, leaving the door open, and starts walking across the lot. The wind howls, covering Nora’s empty seat in icy raindrops, and I can’t let her do this alone. Muttering curses at May and her entire bloodline, I climb out, slam both doors, and follow.
Nora cuts through the playground, and I wonder if the next body is somewhere here—laid out under a picnic table or propped up on a swing—and my stomach lurches. But then she veers right, toward a narrow trail that cuts into the woods. I just want to drag her back to my car, lock her inside, and drive far, far away, but we’ll never escape May. Instead, I hurry to catch up, and I take Nora’s freezing hand in mine and squeeze. She squeezes back.
The path meanders through a small forest of gnarled trees, the dirt soft under our feet. Then the woods end, and a wide marsh opens up. It smells of low tide, dank and pungent and mucky. A boardwalk runs over a narrow channel of water, and as we trudge across the wooden planks, the dread in my chest gets heavier and tighter until I can barely draw a breath. When will this ever stop? How do we make it stop?
Nora pauses at the end of the boardwalk and lets go of my hand. She closes her eyes and sways with the wind, and I swear I hear a voice in between the raindrops, whispering something I can’t quite understand. Something I don’t want to understand.
With her eyes still shut, Nora steps off the path and wades into the grass, but I hang back. We’re not supposed to go off the path. It’s bad for the whole ecosystem because the grass is holding the soil in place, preventing erosion. Not to mention the mud is deep in places, and the low-tide muck smells like a toilet.
Nora’s in the channel now, up to her knees in water, wading back toward the boardwalk. Eyes still fully closed.
“Please, get out of there.” I double back across the planks to meet her. She takes a deep breath, and for one horrible second I think she’s about to dive in, but she leans down and pulls something out from under the boardwalk.
A wrist. Attached to a long, white arm. Filthy lace. No hand.
“Don’t,” I say as Nora continues to pull, slowly dragging the woman’s body out. “Nora, stop!”
Her eyes snap open, and she stares at me, but I’m not sure she actually sees me.
“Nora Elise Hawthorne,” I say. “Listen to me.”
She pauses, still holding that sawed-off stump of a wrist, and I want to vomit.
“Leave her there,” I say again, forcing steadiness into my voice. “It’s enough that you found her. It’s all May wants.”
She doesn’t answer, but she stops pulling. I hurry to the end of the boardwalk, wade through the boggy grass, and jump into the channel. Instantly, my feet and calves cramp, but I keep wading until I’ve got Nora and then I pry her fingers away. The arm flops into the water with a splash. This woman was decades older than the others when she died. Her sunken face is creased with wrinkles, and her long, gray hair is streaked green with seaweed.
“This can’t be May’s sister,” I say. “She’s too old.”
“That’s what she called her,” says Nora. “She said it multiple times.”
I mull over the word, and all the things it might mean. “I think we were right about them being in a rival coven,” I say. “They’re sisters in that sense, not the biological one.”
But Nora just turns away and starts whispering to herself, something fast and repetitive and panicky.
“Come on,” I say, pulling her back to the muddy shore. She slips in the grass and lands on her knees. Her sweatpants are coated in foul-smelling mud, and her nose is running. She still keeps whispering, even as I drag her onto the boardwalk.
“She’s laughing,” says Nora. “May is laughing right now.”
I’m about to be sick, right here on the boardwalk. If this is funny, what kind of sick game is May playing with us? I pull out my phone, but Nora slaps it out of my hand. It skitters across the boards and almost lands in the water.
“What the—?” I say.
“We can’t call the cops,” she says.
“I was going to take a picture of the body.”
“My fingerprints are on that arm,” says Nora. “I’ve found three dead bodies in less than a week. I’ll go to jail.”
“I wasn’t calling the cops, and they’re not going to put you in jail,” I say, picking up my phone, which is miraculously unbroken. “There’s no proof that you did it. Unless you’ve got murder weapons stashed somewhere in your house?”
It’s meant to be a joke, but Nora’s eyes dart sideways.
“What if they found one in my house, though.” She doesn’t phrase it like a question.
“But they wouldn’t.” The world is starting to go all fuzzy around me. “They wouldn’t, Nora. Right?”
She shrugs. “It’s such a mess with all the moving boxes. It’d be so easy to hide things.”
This whole conversation has taken a sudden and bizarre turn.
“Do you think someone is framing you for these murders?” I ask.
“No.”
“Then why are you talking about hiding murder weapons?”
She clenches her fists and starts whispering again, but I can’t hear her words over the sound of my teeth chattering.
“What?” I say.
“I said, what if we’re next?” A tear slides down Nora’s cheek. “What if that’s why we keep finding these bodies?”
Fear spreads like ice through my veins. Whether that idea is coming from May or from Nora herself, it’s horrifying. She’s nearly hyperventilating now, and I try to put my arm around her, but she won’t let me.
“We need to go to the…” I trail off as the enormity of our situation hits me. Detective Huld’s voicemail last night. Her threats of bad things happening to us if we didn’t stop meddling. And now we’ve meddled again, and another body has turned up. I can’t be responsible for your safety if you don’t listen, she said, and we didn’t listen. But what choice did we have? I’m certain Nora would have ended up in the hospital with brain damage or an aneurysm if we hadn’t followed May’s orders.
All I know is that we can’t keep doing this on our own. It’s long past time for us to talk to our parents. Even if they don’t know exactly what to do. Even if it makes my dad start drinking again. We need practical advice on how to handle this situation with the authorities, not just magical help from Ione.
Nora’s gasping breath slowly eases, and her eyes drift shut. I desperately hope this doesn’t mean May is back. Carefully, I reach my phone over the side of the bridge to take a photo of the dead woman, but she’s drifted underneath again, and there’s no way I’m getting back in that water to pull her out. I can just make out the bottom of her shoe, so I snap a photo of that, for whatever it’s worth.
“Come on,” I say, taking Nora’s elbow. She’s shivering and drenched, her boots squelching. “Let’s go to the car. We’ll drive to your house and get cleaned up, put on some dry clothes, make some tea, and we’ll just talk for now. We’ll figure something out, okay?”
“The police can’t help us,” she whispers. “Ione can’t help us. Nobody can help us. I think maybe…” She trails off and starts twisting a strand of her hair.
“Maybe what?”
“Nothing,” she mutters.
* * *
~ ~ ~
The whole way to her house, Nora scrolls on her phone. Half of me is irritated that she’s ignoring me, and the other half is relieved that she seems to be disconnected from May—for now. She’s still shivering so hard I can hear her teeth clattering, but being cold is a simple thing we can handle. Once she puts on dry clothes, it will go away. May, on the other hand…
“Can you text Elliot?” I ask. “See if he can leave school and meet us?”
“Elliot can’t help us either,” she says, but she taps out a message anyway.
Seconds later, her phone vibrates, and she catches her breath.
“Is that him?” I ask, relieved that Elliot is checking his phone during school.
“Who?” Nora doesn’t look up.
“Elliot. Did he write back?”
“Um.” Nora’s thumbs fly over her screen. “No.”
“Who are you messaging, then?” I ask.
My only answer is the rapid clicking sound of her keypad.
“Hey,” I say, turning onto her street. “Who are you writing to?”
Nora sets her phone face down on her leg. “Nobody.”
It’s so obviously a lie. I wonder how long she’s been lying to me.
CHAPTER 35
While Nora showers, I change into a pair of her leggings and grab dry socks from her dresser. There’s not much I can do about my soaked boots—she wears a smaller shoe size than I do—so I prop them up beside her heater. Warm and damp is better than cold and damp, at least.
The shower’s still running as I head for the kitchen in search of a shopping bag for my wet clothes. The whole room is stacked with moving boxes, some open, some filled and sealed, some empty. Nora’s refusing to pack until the day before they leave. She says she doesn’t want to feel like she’s camping in her own house, even though it’s not going to be her house for much longer.
Hoping her mom hasn’t packed the shopping bags yet, I pull open the drawer beside the fridge. It’s still stuffed with paper bags, but my clothes will soak right through those, so I keep digging. At the bottom, I find another one of Nora’s witchy tote bags, this one printed with skulls and moths. It’s surprisingly heavy.
As I pull the bag out and peek inside, I almost drop it. There’s a meat cleaver inside. The blade must be six inches wide, and twice as long. My mouth goes paper-dry. This thing could take someone’s hand off, if you really wanted it to. But no, I’m letting my imagination run wild. The blade looks clean, and there’s no sign of blood on the bag. Maybe Nora’s mom put it in there so it wouldn’t cut anything when they packed it. But why put it in the bottom of a drawer instead of a moving box?
“Nora?” I call, tapping on the bathroom door. “Are you almost done?”
No answer. The shower is still running, and she must be out of hot water by now. I rub the goose bumps off my arms and knock on the door again. “Hey, are you okay in there?”
“I’m fine!” she calls.
Back in her room, I set the bag on her rumpled bed. We have to talk about this before we even consider going to our parents. She was so unhinged in the marsh, and now there’s a huge knife in her bag. I’m grasping for a rational explanation here.
What if they found a murder weapon at my house? she said.
Nora could never murder someone. Surely that’s obvious. But she knew exactly where these bodies were, and if I remove May from this equation, there’s no rational explanation for knowing that. Our parents aren’t going to believe us about May speaking to her, and I can’t exactly blame them. It was hard for me to believe at first too.
Even now…
I’ve never technically heard May speaking. Only Nora has. What if we’ve all been imagining her? Or what if Nora’s been—I don’t want to finish my next thought. It feels like a boulder is crushing my lungs. I wonder who Nora was messaging in the car on the way here. I wonder if they know something I don’t.
My eyes stray to her laptop on the desk. The shower is still running. On silent feet, I cross the room and flip the screen up. Her password is the same as it’s always been. Cringing at this breach of trust, even though she’s absolutely been lying to me, I open her internet browser.
Mystical Mysteries
She’s still logged in, and there’s a new private message in her inbox.
“Sorry, Nora,” I whisper as I click the mailbox icon, then gasp at the screen full of messages between her and some stranger she’s never once mentioned talking to. I scroll up and start reading somewhere in the middle of their conversation.
Anon09: Now that I’ve answered your questions, it’s your turn to answer mine. Why are you so curious about the HoN?
May_be: no specific reason, i’m just interested in occult stuff
Anon09: There’s something more. I have a strong sense about you. Does this have to do with that woman who washed up on Mayflower Beach?
May_be: how did you know?
Anon09: Your username might have something to do with it :)
May_be: oh right, yeah i guess i do feel a connection to her
Anon09: I knew it. And unusual things are happening, aren’t they?
May_be: more than you could ever imagine
“Jesus, Nora,” I mutter. Every nerve in my body is crawling. “Why are you talking to this creep?” I tiptoe to the door to make sure the shower is still running, then hurry back to the laptop.
Anon09: Is she speaking to you?
It’s all I can do to keep from slamming the laptop shut. Everything about this is terrifying.
There’s a lag of several hours before the next message.
Anon09: Is she?
May_be: i don’t want to answer that
Anon09: What spell did you use to find her?
May_be: i also don’t want to answer that. i don’t know you.
Anon09: And yet here you are, asking for help from strangers on the internet. Do you think anybody else on this forum has any idea what’s happening to you? I do. I can help.
May_be: the dead woman talks to me sometimes, and i had a vision that i think was about her
“That was my vision,” I whisper, irritated that Nora’s taking credit for it, even though the last thing I want is to impress some nosy creep on the internet.
Anon09: Fascinating. Tell me more.
May_be: i don’t really want to share private stuff on here
Anon09: If you tell me more, I’ll tell you more ;)
May_be: are you actually in the HoN or something?
Anon09: Anything is possible.
“Nora Hawthorne!” I yell. “Please tell me you have not been actively messaging the Hand of Fucking Nephthys behind my back.”
The water is still running in the bathroom.
May_be: are you trying to trick me into becoming your next sacrifice victim?
Anon09: Believe me, if the HoN knew someone like you existed, someone who had visions of the dead and could speak with them, you’d be the last person they’d sacrifice. They’d love to have you as a member. You have a rare gift.
May_be: i wish i could return this gift
Anon09: It’s getting worse, isn’t it? It’s only going to keep getting worse. Do you think you can stand it?
Anon09: I’d really like to help you.
Anon09: I’ll text you a time and place. You can think about it.
May_be: thanks but i’m all set. anyway you don’t have my phone number
Anon09: I might ;)
There’s a loud crash in the bathroom. I dash into the hall and bang on the door.
“Hey! What just happened in there?”
No answer. I knock again.
“Nora? Answer me!”
Nothing. Panic hits me like a cannonball.
“Nora!” I scream, pounding on the door. “Open up!”
But the shower just keeps running. I grab one of my boots from Nora’s room and shove it onto my foot, then run back to the bathroom and kick the door hard. It crunches and springs open, and I rush inside. Instead of the steamy warmth I was expecting, it’s cold and oddly windy.
The shower is still running. The tub is empty. There’s a broken candle jar on the floor, and the window beside the toilet is wide open.
Nora is gone.
CHAPTER 36
“Nora?”
I poke my head out the window; she’s not in the backyard. Her wet clothes lie crumpled up on the bathroom floor, but I remember that she brought dry ones into the bathroom with her, and those are gone. I don’t know if she has shoes. I really hope she does.
“Nora!” I call, but there’s no answer, so I head for the front door, let myself out, and do a circuit around her house. My car is still in the driveway, there are no vehicles on the road, and Nora has definitively vanished. I try calling her, but she doesn’t pick up. There’s no sound of her phone ringing anywhere in the house, and I can’t find her wallet either. Kidnapped people don’t usually take their stuff with them. That should make me feel better, but it doesn’t.
I try calling Elliot, but he doesn’t answer because he’s still in class.
