Home, I thought again, and sorrow crept into my chest, a nostalgic longing for something unknown to me. It was an unfamiliar ache that was new to me. I’d never been homesick before, but I imagined that if I ever had a home, this was what it would feel like to be without one.
Adora flashed in my mind, and the ache in my chest only intensified. I used the heel of my palm to soothe it, wishing I was back with her at the lighthouse and not in a small cabin with four strangers who could be holding me against my will. Or, as Adora had once said,skin my flesh and roast me over a fire like a pig on a spit.
Was there truth in all her stories? Was I even still in Weeping Hollow?
“Yes, you are in Weeping Hollow,” Eleanor, the eldest, said from the other side of the room with a thicker accent than Kioni, almost as though she’d heard my thoughts. “But you are safe here in my home. I placed a protection spell on this property.”
“You can trust me,” Ocean said. “You can trust all four of us.”
“I am a stranger to you.” My throat was raw and scratchy, having not spoken a word in days. “You shouldn’t trust me, and my trust isn’t given freely. It’s earned.”
“Oh, I know who you are, Danvers.” Ocean leaned in with two squinted eyes. “The question is, do you?”
CHAPTER 37
STONE
December 31, 2020
New Year's Eve
I was backin the coffin at the bottom of the Atlantic.
At least it felt like I was—dead or sleeping or dreaming.
Perhaps none of it ever happened. It was possible I’d dreamt up Adora and the cave, the lighthouse, the island, and,dammit, the best six weeks of my life. Perhaps I’d journeyed to the afterlife with the girl from my drawings, bonded with her, touched her, kissed her, made love to her. But each time I blinked, I was still here without her, walking along the fence line surrounding a cottage with Ocean as he told me all about the Shadows.
I had believed they were another one of Adora’s made-up stories.
Ocean had to have been in his fifties or sixties, five-foot-five, a cane fixed at his side—only for his stiff knee that acted up in the cold, he’d said—and eyes that disappeared when he smiled, which was a rarity in the brief time I’d come to know him. His clothes were well-worn and stained, and he had a round belly that entered a room before the rest of him. As he had mentioned, he was without a home, but the town took care of him.
I straightened my back and rested my hands on the fence, gazing past the cottage as the nightly winds chaffed my face. Flurries drifted and draped over rotten corn that poked from the snow like desperate fingers as though the stalks were being buried alive. A fresh scent of brittle leaves, rich soil, and melting snow permeated the air. I breathed it in.
About a quarter of a mile away was the barn where the Heathens had tortured me.
I scanned the horizon for a sign of them.
“Don’t worry. For anyone to hurt you, they first must see you, and Eleanor took care of that.” He grinned, his eyes disappearing. “Magic only exists if you believe in it, my boy.” Beyond the barn, in the distance, there was a plantation-style home with a landscape of perfect white that seemed to extend north for miles. “Goody Estate,” Ocean sighed, staring at the same house in the distance. “Kioni’s mother, Winta, resides on the property. Both her and Kioni work for them.”
“Eleanor, too?”
“No. Eleanor owns a psychic shop in Town Square.”
“Psychic.” I nodded. “Suits her well,” I said with a slight grin, recalling how Eleanor always seemed to know what I was thinking. Could she also see Adora in my mind, too?
“Tell me more,” I continued. “What do the Heathens want from me, and why do they believe I can help stop the Shadows?”
“Because you’re a Heathen,” Ocean dropped like a grenade. “They’re your brothers.”
I looked at him, surely dumbfounded. “You’re speaking of those men who tortured me in that barn?” I nodded to the wooden structure standing in front of us, where I’d been brutally beaten. Everything I’d known and read about brothers was that they did not harm one another but protected one another. And from what Adora had told me, these men were murderers. “Those Heathens are not my brothers.”
Ocean narrowed his eyes, seemingly offended. “By bond and oath.”
“Absurd lies. I could never be one of them.”
“Beck Parish, a descendant of Norse Woods’ five founding families. The element of water.Yourbrother.”
I peered down at the small man, shaking my head and breathing deeply to calm myself, but he continued, adamant. “Phoenix Wildes, a descendant of Norse Woods’ five founding families. The element of fire.Yourbrother.”
