Kiss Me Deadly Page 25

  “You know what’s wrong with her?” Drew said. “Because I sure as hell don’t.”

  Jo knew she was going to fall over soon, but Ani was there, and Drew, and they held her up. “Jesus,” Ani said. “I knew she was thin, but she’s ... Christ, she’s bones. ”

  “Listen,” Drew said. “I gotta get back, before my mom finds the rest of the holiday cheer and drunk-dials my dad up at the state pen. I’d just as soon not have that conversation.”

  His voice was a radio broadcast from some far-off country, fading in and out on waves of static and whispers from the ether.

  “I ... I’m sorry,” Jo tried. “I’m sorry, Ani...”

  “Shit, man,” Ani said. “Don’t worry about that now. Just come inside with me, okay?”

  Ani helped her inside, and while Ani’s grandmother made her hot tea, she told Ani the truth. “I think he’s ... he’s evil,” Jo said quietly. “Abigail said ... And now I let him out....”

  Ani’s grandmother sat at the table with them. “Now you’ve got to fix it.”

  Jo looked up at her. Everything blurred and gently vibrated around the edges. She half wondered if she was still dreaming. “You don’t think I’m crazy?”

  “Seen stranger things in my life,” Ani’s grandmother said. “Hauntings and worse. What you’re callin’ evil is ghost sickness. When the dead get under your skin, bleeding your life so they can cling to theirs for another minute or two. Makes you sick, makes you hungry, makes you do anything to keep them.”

  “Makes you dream,” Jo murmured. She’d ignored the warnings. Abigail and the others had tried to tell her, with the dreams. Tried to tell her that she’d pine and eventually die for Nicholas Day, by her own hand or his, just as they had.

  “Dream, ayuh,” Ani’s grandmother agreed. She reached under her plaid shirt, unhooked a silver necklace, a simple flat disc stamped with a symbol made of straight lines. “This should keep him off you for now, but the question remains, missy—what are you gonna do about your ghost?”

  Jo accepted the necklace. When it slipped against her skin, the spot the silver touched warmed, just a little. Her vision cleared, too, and all at once she was simply massively tired. “I don’t know what I’ll do,” she said honestly.

  “You better figure that out sooner rather than later,” Ani’s grandmother told her. “He already made three girls so sick and sad they joined him in that house forever. Don’t you go down that path.”

  “No,” Jo said, pressing the silver down into her skin with her palm. “I won’t.” She thought of Nick’s touch, of his taste, and even though she knew he was only ashes in her mouth, she still craved him. “I’ll try,” Jo amended.

  Ani took her up to the guestroom, and she really slept for the first time in months. She woke at the creak of the rocking chair in the corner of her attic room, saw the black-shod foot pushing back and forth across worn board, scritch-scritch. Creak-creak.

  “You said you’d never leave,” Nicholas told her. Jo gasped, grabbing at the necklace. Nick flickered, like he was a faulty TV channel.

  “What do you think you’re doing with that, Josephine?”

  Jo found her voice, though it was small as the puff of air her breath made in the suddenly frozen air. “Stopping you.”

  “Abigail thought she could stop me,” Nick said. “She loved me, but her head was mixed up. She ran from me. She cut her legs on the wild roses on the riverbank. I held her, until she stopped moving. Her hair was so beautiful under the water.”

  “They hung you,” Jo said. “In your own front yard. You didn’t kill yourself.”

  Nick nodded, steepling his fingers, and then he was up, pressing her into the mattress, hands on her bare arms. “They all loved me, Josephine, but I never loved any of them as much as I love you.” Lips against her forehead, searing with the black mark of frostbite. “And I’m never letting you go,” Nick whispered against her ear. “I’m going to haunt you until the day you die, Josephine Ryan. Be it sooner, or later. Die soon enough, and you can join me on this cold dark road. We can run on forever, like the river.”

  He vanished like smoke in a howling wind, and Jo was left shivering, until she kicked back the blankets and fumbled for her shoes. She went to wake up Ani. Nicholas wouldn’t stop. Wouldn’t stop when he’d killed Abigail, wouldn’t stop when he’d tormented Effie into drowning or pulled Judy down to be beside him forever.

  Jo knew what she had to do.

  The lights were out when Ani pulled into Jo’s dead-end street, both her mother’s and the Powells’. Ani touched her wrist. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah,” Jo murmured. Ani couldn’t be a part of what had to happen next. Jo didn’t want her to become one of the staring girls, the girls by the river.

  She waved until Ani pulled away, but instead of going inside, she went into the garage and filled up her bag until it was almost too heavy to shoulder. Snow started, light crystalline flakes falling from the sky, turning the road silver as she walked.

  By the time Jo reached the junction of Route 7, a full-blown blizzard swirled around her, wind turning the road into a tunnel of ice and snow.

  Ash House rose out of the snow, crouched above the river like a sleeping thing, waiting for spring to wake up and be hungry again.

  Ani’s grandmother had told them that the dead were bound to the place or thing they’d held most dear in life. Her. And Ash House. The scene of all Nicholas’s sins.

  Jo pushed open the red door. She listened to the wind howl around the eaves, as if it would like to tear off the roof. She stripped off her gloves and closed her hand around the necklace. It wasn’t cold, but warm from her skin just under her coat.

  She jerked, and the chain broke. It was seconds, mere heartbeats, until Nicholas appeared before her.

  “I told you,” he said. “I’m yours now, Josephine. I’ll follow you no matter where you go. No matter where you try to hide.” His hand trailed over her cheek, left a cold teardrop. “I’ll find you. I’m glad you know that now.”

  “I do know,” Jo said. “But look where we are.” She kicked over the gas can Mel kept in the garage for emergencies—for storms, like this one. It spilled across the floor, melting the snow in its path, soaking through the rotten wood and tile.

  Nicholas smiled at her. Once so full of promise, now it was like a knife. “It doesn’t matter where we are, Jo. Just that we’re together.”

  “It does, though,” Jo said. “You’re home, Nicholas. On the same soil you died.” She pulled out Drew’s lighter, which had found its way into her pocket when he left her at Ani’s. The wheel sparked on the first try. “They hanged you right out there,” Jo said. “On the oak tree in the yard. After you killed her. You said it yourself—you held her under and drowned her. The girl you loved. ”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Nicholas said. “Everything I did was for love. It can be forgiven.” He touched her again, her hair, her cheek, her hand. “You can’t let me go, Josephine. You and I are together now. You can’t be free, even if you burn yourself up.”

  “I’m not the one burning,” Jo said. She cocked her arm and tossed the lighter. She wasn’t ready for the noise as the gasoline ignited—all of the air sucked out of her lungs, and her ears popped as a column of orange flame erupted in the center of the floor. “I’m burning this. This house!” she shouted. “You know what you love, Nicholas? Yourself! And this goddamn house!”

  Nicholas grabbed her by the wrists. “You’ll never leave me. You know it.”

  Jo jerked away from him. She made it to the porch when he grabbed her again, by the hair, whipping her off her feet. They rolled over and over, down into the snow and the brambles beneath.

  Nicholas was on her, ripping away her scarf and her coat, letting in the cold. Behind them, windows exploded in Ash House as the wind fed the fire.

  Jo rolled away from his searching, claw like hands and stumbled toward the bridge. She had to get to the bridge. Cross the running stream, like in Ani’s gran
dmother’s stories. If she could just get over the bridge, she’d be all right. At least, she repeated that to herself as she stumbled through the blizzard, through the bracken, guided only by the roar of the fire and the heat on her back.

  She didn’t get to the river. He found her again, through the swirling snow and screaming wind, in the half-daylight the blaze inside Ash House cast across the river.

  Jo fell, and felt her ankle twist the wrong way. Her exposed skin was blue-white in the predawn, ice frosting it. Nicholas put his hands on her neck. “She ran from me too, Josephine. But she loved me, even as she denied me. And so do you. You’ll die for me. In the end, they all do.”

  Jo met his eyes. He was solid now, solid as person. But he was cold. And his eyes were what they had always been—dead man’s eyes, staring a hole in her soul.

  “I don’t...” Jo managed under his grasp. Nicholas’s face slackened.

  “What?”

  Jo reached out for an icy, frozen tangle of thorns near her face, as Nicholas pressed her into the wild rose bushes, covered over with snow and frost. She pricked her thumb, tangled the vines around her fingers, watched the blood run down her wrist. Clawed at Nicholas with her free hand. Saw the marks on his arm for what they were, not razor cuts but nail marks, the last grasp of a desperate, drowning girl who hadn’t seen him, really seen, until it was far too late.

  She felt her blood run down, into the earth, soaking through the roots and stones and into the riverbed, born on the water, far far away from here, as the last of her air leaked out.

  The girls came when Jo knew she was dying. Black stars sparkled at the edges of her vision. Nicholas filled up the rest. Her chest was heavy, a stone where her lungs should be. And the cold. The cold was inside her. Her bones were ice. Her blood was snowflakes.

  The first, redheaded Effie, put a hand on Nicholas’s shoulder. “No more,” she said. Then Judy Templeton, and lastly, his own love, Abigail. She was still dripping wet, still bore the marks of Nicholas’s hands on her neck.

  “You held me,” she said. “So tenderly. Under the black water. Until it filled me up. Until I became the water.” She turned his face to her, so their noses were nearly touching. “For that, I thank you. I live in the river, Nicholas. You ended me, but I live in the river, and it’s not a bad life.”

  “I live in the fire,” Effie said. “I live in every sad soul who passes by on the bridge. I burn for every one of them.”

  “I live in the rocks,” said Judy. “I’m the weight on your soul, Nicholas Day. The weight of everyone you took before their time.”

  They looked down at Jo. “You’re not one of us,” said Abigail. “You are not the ice. You are not the wind or the cold.” Through her translucent form, Ash House gave a roar, a last death rattle as the roof caved in.

  “Go,” Effie said. “Go back to the world. You brought him home.”

  “Yes,” echoed Abigail. “And home is where his heart shall stay.”

  “ No,” Nicholas screamed, as the three girls bore him up and away. “No, she took me away! I won’t go back!”

  He turned his eyes on Jo. “Please, Josephine. Nobody can love you like me.”

  Jo rubbed her bloody hand across her freed throat. “My name,” she rasped, a voice like ashes, not her own, “is not Josephine.”

  Nicholas and the three moved backward, on a current of their own making, until they stood in the red door, framed by the fire. Things leaped and danced in the flames, screamed and wailed, until the wind gave one last push and the house collapsed on itself, eating its own innards in a jet of flame that shot into the silvering sky.

  Jo stood, and watched, blood dropping into the snow, and she watched the spot where Nicholas had last stood. She watched until the Coffin Hollow volunteer fire department came crawling down Route 7 in the blizzard, and watched until an EMT—Ani’s father, as it turned out—brought her to the ambulance. She watched, but she never saw Nicholas Day or any of the girls again.

  7. Epilogue—January

  Jo never said a word, and no one ever asked her beyond a cursory question how Ash House had burned. Ani came and sat with her in the ER and asked if Jo could forgive her for telling her father her best friend was fixing to do something stupid.

  Ani’s grandmother patted her bandaged hand when she came by to return the necklace. “You hold on to that, child. You’re going to need it more than I ever did.”

  Jo asked why, and Ani’s grandmother sighed, and lit one of her rancid cigarettes. “You think just everyone goes around attracting the dead, honey? Ain’t so. You’ve got an eye that sees into that shadow place, and unless you want to be deviled all your days—you keep that thing on.”

  They went back to school, where nobody questioned that Jo had cut her hand on a broken glass in her own home.

  Drew Powell came up to her their second week back. “You have my lighter,” he said.

  “Not anymore,” Jo said. “Trust me, it went to a good cause.”

  He reached out and lifted the necklace from her clavicle with his finger. Jo realized this was the first time she and Drew had ever touched. “Interesting,” he said. Jo shrugged.

  “It’s broken. The clasp.” She twisted the chain to show where she’d affixed the two ends with a paper clip.

  “I could fix it for you,” Drew said. “And maybe you can tell me why my mom had a nervous breakdown the day after Christmas, and told me that her friend from high school forgave her for not getting her out of the river.”

  “I couldn’t tell you,” Jo said. She wanted to pull away, but Drew’s eyes caught her, while he tilted his head.

  “Can’t, or won’t?”

  “Drew,” she said. “Some things are just better off staying buried.”

  He considered for a second. “You want a ride home?”

  Jo smiled. “Yeah. I’d like that.”

  “Come on, then,” Drew said. He smiled back at her. Jo realized this was the first time she’d seen Drew Powell smile. His smile was crooked and half-mast, like a bend in a country road. Nothing like a knife.

  January thaw turned the roads to mud while Drew took the turns too fast, throwing up a fantail of earth and ice. Birds chittered from the bare trees, and on Route 7, the Acushket burbled under the ice, whispering in the language of black water. Jo reached over, turned up the radio, and drowned them out.

  Wash away my troubles, wash away my pain, with the rain in Shambala....

  Drew didn’t slow down when they passed the bridge and the burned relic of Ash House, and Jo was glad. She nodded when Drew offered her a cigarette, and rolled down the window so she could put her hand out and feel the wind.

  The trees would get green and the river ice would melt, and she and Ani would apply to all the same colleges and probably end up going to different ones. But not too far away. Spring would come. She’d spend time getting to know Drew Powell, whose eyes were gray and clear and hid nothing, and whose hands felt like nothing but warmth and calluses.

  And soon, all along the banks of the river that had once hidden Nicholas Day’s terrible secret, the wild roses would bloom.

  Hare Moon

  BY CARRIE RYAN

  It’s because the paths are forbidden that Tabitha always finds her way to them. She’s tired of being trapped behind the village fences, tired of being told what to do all the time. She wasn’t made for a life like this: sedate, rule-following. Boring.

  The first time she opens the gate it’s on a dare to herself. To see if she’s just a dreamer or if she’s someone who can follow through on her promises. She wants to know that she’s more than just desires—she’s action.