Julian lifted his head and blew his icy breath over my neck where his mouth had just been. “There,” he said, finally calm and collected, admiring his work before his silvery eyes snapped up to mine in the mirror. “This time, when you wake up in the morning, you’ll see this and know tonight was real.” He pulled up my cardigan over my shoulder and released his hand around my throat. “And you’ll remember to stay out of the woods.”
Chapter 12
Fallon
The soundof my beeper going off woke me the next morning. The balcony doors swung slightly back and forth, and I rubbed my eyes to see the sun coming up over the horizon, an indigo blur burning across the Atlantic Ocean. My fingers immediately trailed over the hickey he left me. It pulsed just under the surface of the skin of my neck as if it were a thing with a heartbeat of its own. I jumped to my feet and scurried across the wooden floors and looked in the mirror. The bruise was a cold, deep purple against my white skin, a ghost of where his mouth had been. I closed my eyes when the memory of last night flashed behind them.
He’d arrived so abruptly and left all the same. He’d left me with a warning, with desire, with a demand to stay out of the woods. And I would stay out of the woods, but I knew he wouldn’t stay out of my mind.
Especially not with his mark pulsing under my skin.
After quickly getting ready, I called Jonah from the house phone in the kitchen as I put on a pot of coffee for Gramps. Jonah had said to meet him at a trailer in a Norse Woods neighborhood. He’d said he couldn’t wait for me, and that he would drive the hearse for transport and wait for my arrival.
A trailer park was tucked away in the woods past Voodoos Bar. The black hearse sat in front of a single-wide hoisted up on cinder blocks, a broken lattice fencing wrapped around the bottom. A small crowd gathered behind yellow tape blocking the home’s perimeter, and it was there, and through the bustle, I spotted Jonah trying to calm down a neighbor with a police officer and Monday at his side.
“What took you so long?” Monday asked, pushing her way toward me through the commotion of the enraged mob of neighbors.
The scene was utter chaos. Curses and accusations filled my ears as she pulled me through the crowd.“The Parish should perish!”some chanted.“Murderer!”“Our town isn’t safe anymore!”
Milo was there too, carrying a notepad glued to his hand with another girl holding a tape recorder between him and a neighbor, interviewing and searching for an exclusive. I scanned the trailer park, noticing people watching the scene play out from atop their porch steps, some from inside the homes, peeking through blinds or behind curtains. My gaze bounced around the street, seeing cars lined up along the curb.
It dawned on me.
The angry townies weren’t neighbors at all.
The attire, the hair, the shoes. They were all upper class from Sacred Sea.
My eyes widened. “What the hell is going on?”
Monday shot me a wide-eyed look as she lifted the tape and pulled me underneath.
Beck was sitting on the steps of the trailer with a cigarette between his tattooed fingers. A hood was pulled up and over his buzzed hair as he kept his head down, smoke rising from the dark void of his face. Crystal blue eyes looked up in front of him in a distant gaze as his knee bounced uncontrollably over the wooden steps. I’d only known it was Beck Parish because I’d seen him in the cemetery digging graves countless times now. I recognized his build, his demeanor, and the way he carried himself, icy waters lurking in the irises of his soul.
Monday ushered me past him and into the mobile home. Cigarette smoke and a stale breath of booze loomed in the air like a shadow.
We walked straight into the living room where a man was sitting over a beaten and sunken couch with his head in his hands. Faux-wood vinyl sided every wall, and the carpet was dingy and stained. The home, if one could even call it that, was an ashtray and graveyard for empty beer cans and take-out boxes.
Brown work boots peeked out from behind the coffee table where the body was lying. “This is Earl Parish. Beck’s dad,” Monday introduced, and the man glanced up from his hands with a shirt tied around his face, an elixir of anger and agony boiling in his glossy blue eyes.Beck’s father.
Monday knelt beside the body that laid face down over the floor, and I followed her. There was no blood, and rigor mortis had already set in, which only meant he’d been lying here for at least three to four hours. The body was trapped in a death chill, and his skin was pale with purple blotches at the underside where the body met the floor.
“Ready to talk, Earl?” someone asked, and I turned to see another officer standing under the opened doorway. “Beck, Julian, no one’s talking, and I’m getting answers today. I’ll take you all three down to the station if I have to.”
Jonah pushed through the front door. “Officer Stoker, a word, please,” he insisted, gripping the officer’s elbow.
And that’s when I saw it. A dark outline of a figure cowered behind the front door that was hung open. The spirit yanked at his thinning hair behind the door, spewing curses only I could hear. Shocked and scared eyes fixed on his dead body—the body he’d inhabited only hours before and only a shell of what he used to be—as everyone else moved about the trailer as if he weren’t there.
But he was there. I saw him, enraged and scared and powerless.
The officer went on again, threatening Earl.
Jonah was growing impatient, steering Officer Stoker away from Earl.
“What ar-ya thinking?” Monday asked.
Another officer came into the house, requesting for more backup to control the mob outside.
The ghost stepped out from the corner screaming for someone to hear him.
