‘You too,’ I mumbled. It had been nice to meet Kit. The not-nice thing was how a teeny part of me wanted to punch him in the face right now. Not a normal reaction to seeing one friend hug another friend.
‘You got everything you need?’ I asked, not quite looking at Callum before I swung up behind him on the quad bike.
‘Are you okay?’ He disregarded my attempt at small talk.
‘Fine.’ I wound my arms around his middle. ‘Fine, fine, fine.’
Callum waited a second, but then started the engine. As we climbed up into the mountains, we had no more opportunity for talking. I hoped that once we reached a certain altitude, the memory of my weird reaction to him hugging someone else would drop out of our heads.
The drive back to the cabin was more sedate than our mad careen down to the village. Callum had filled the trailer with sacks and it was probably harder to drive like a maniac uphill. I had time to admire the scenery, rather than closing my eyes and hoping my inevitable death would be quick and painless.
I hadn’t lied when I said Doughnut became more beautiful each day. Callum had told me winter was lingering—which I understood was a bad thing since his eyebrows drew down as he said it—but I was glad to be here for the awakening of plants that had burrowed into themselves during the colder months. All around us, tiny flowers created pinpricks of colour amongst the grass and the buds of blossom on the trees looked about ready to burst.
I hadn’t had to concentrate on connecting to my powers for days. As we travelled up into the mountains, the surrounding vegetation sang to me.
There was always an off note though. No matter how far I roamed from the hollowed-out house, it cried out. Not in a way that suggested it needed help. More like it wanted to be heard. It was a part of this island. It couldn’t be forgotten.
Bonnie and her friends’ dismissal fanned the flames of my curiosity. I was glad I hadn’t asked Callum. Judgingfrom his sister’s reaction, he would have wandered into the mountains and never been seen again. Since I couldn’t talk to anyone about the house, I had to hope my old friend Google held the answers.
Callum stopped the quad bike outside his cabin and I unpeeled my arms from around his waist. The drive up here hadn’t been as perilous, but that didn’t mean I hadn’t clung to him like a scared baby orangutang.
‘Do you need help with this?’ I waved a noodle-weak arm at the sacks tucked into the trailer. Clinging on for dear life was exhausting.
Callum furrowed his eyebrows. ‘You don’t know where anything goes.’
Then he did something I’d never seen him do before. I wouldn’t have called him graceful, but he was normally confident and steady. As we stood next to the quad bike, I could only describe his half movements as dithering.
‘You okay?’
‘Yeah.’ Callum shook his head, then half reached for one of the sacks, and shook his head some more. ‘Can I just?’
He didn’t finish the question, but stepped up to me so we were almost chest to chest. He raised his hands to the exact places Bonnie had coasted her palms over my skin.
My heart shot right past hammering and settled on using an industrial-sized mallet to thump blood around my body as Callum closed his eyes and lowered his forehead to mine.
‘My sister is an arsehole,’ he murmured, his calloused hands loose at the sides of my neck.
I huffed out a laugh. ‘It’s a known fact.’
Callum stepped back, whatever had interfered with his usual self-assurance gone. He lugged a huge sack over oneshoulder and carried it around the side of the cabin to the stores he’d vaguely mentioned.
Not a single item in the trailer looked Aster sized, so I let myself into the cabin. It certainly wasn’t my conscious plan to research the abandoned house immediately, but my laptop powered up on my knees as I rubbed life into my cold fingers before the smouldering fire.
Callum would be unloading the trailer for a while, so this was the perfect opportunity to find out what had happened. Strangely, typingDoughnut Abandoned Houseinto Google didn’t bring up anything useful. I had to unearth my ferry ticket to find out how to spell the island’s actual name.
Then I lost myself to article after article. I felt cold as we bombed along on the quad bike, but a chill more like when I’d gotten caught in the non-snowstorm invaded my bones as I read.
The abandoned house had belonged to Callum and Bonnie’s family. Their mum and dad lived there, plus an aunt and uncle and some cousins. They had a younger sister as well.
They’d all died at sea during a terrible storm.
As I tracked the articles chronologically, I noted the main points while trying not to spend too much time gazing at a younger Callum as he walked through a crowd outside a courthouse. His face might have been turned from the camera, but I couldn’t miss the broken slump of his shoulders.
It was murder. A woman and her grandad had tricked Callum’s family onto a boat during a storm and had purposefully damaged it so it would sink once they were out of rescue distance. They offered no excuse for theirbehaviour, stated what they’d done in a way that one reporter calledsoullessly robotic. They’d been sent to prison for the rest of their lives.
The woman was called Naomi White. Her grandad’s name was George. Callum’s reaction made a whole lot more sense now.
The door of the cabin swung open, and I slammed my laptop closed.
