“Sorry boys, I lied a little. You know how it is getting close to our dear Ava. Sometimes we have to lie a little. Right, Caspian?” He winked at Cas.
“You possessed her!” He yelled. Makwa shrugged.
“Yeah but I like to think of it as more than a simple possession because I’m not a simple ghost.”
“What are you then?” I asked.
“A perversion,” he said, making Ava’s face smile too wide. He looked right at me with full black eyes. “I was like Ava once. A witch,” he said, sweeping his eyes to look at the other two.
“I’ve never heard of a ghost with black tentacles,” Caspian said.
“I never heard of fish men. Guess we’re even. Enough about me. We should all be worrying about this bastard Wendigo.” He pointed at me and made a look of distaste.
“What?” I asked.
“Sorry, time’s up,” he said, retreating from the bars. He laid down, head resting on his hands.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Ava is waking up.” The thing inside Ava winked at me then closed their eyes. Ava’s lips opened and a slow steady breath came out as her face relaxed.
21
My mind was captured in a repeating nightmare. I was being carried in a wooden box into a cave. My fists slammed the top and I scratched at the wood, screaming. No one cried or talked but I could hear their soft shoes pressing into the earth. Their steps never faltered and no one complained as they carried me deep into the tomb of spirits.
“You fools!” I spat, laughing maniacally. I felt the dead like a cold shiver up my spine. Taking me here was a mistake but it was hard to feel any sense of victory when I was trapped in a coffin.
They dropped me to the ground, bruising me further.
“You’re making a mistake!” I barked out, aching everywhere. They’d beaten me before shoving me in the box. I felt the ghosts in this place pressing in, curious and attracted to my presence.
“May you rot, Makwa,” the leader of our tribe said before I heard them all shuffle out. I laid there tight-lipped thinking this through. They wouldn't really nail me in a box and leave me to die slowly, would they? No, they lacked the nerve. They would come back eventually and when they did, they wouldn’t find me humbled and sorry.
They would find me vengeful and ready to make more ghosts for this tomb.
The dream snapped away and I woke up with a start, my heart thumping quickly in my chest. My head swung around as I took in that I was inside something. A box.
I was still inside the box, wasn’t I? I was still inside the cave, inside the coffin. I started to panic.
“Let me out!” I yelled, kicking out.
“Ava!” I heard Caspian and jerked my head to him. He looked at me with concern, his hands wrapped around the bars of his own cage. I felt fingers brush my ankle and sucked in a breath when I saw the thing in front of me. A man with a deer skull.
A flash of electric green hair laid on the top of the skull. Memories flooded back in. Ben, his cult, Caspian and Mothman tied up, and the awful thing he’d done to Brandon—a knife gleaming in the firelight before plunging down. The complete savagery of it had made me feel sick in a way hard to describe. A mental feeling of revulsion.
“Are you okay?” Brandon asked. His blue eyes peeked out from the skull’s gaping eye sockets.
“You’re alive,” I said in disbelief. His chest was still stained in blood but otherwise fine. What had happened? The last thing I remembered was the knife… then it was black.
“Ava, look at me,” Caspian begged and I turned my head to him. He pressed his handsome face against the bars of his cage and bore holes into my eyes.
“It’s really you. It’s going to be fine,” he sighed in relief, reaching through his bars towards me. We were too far apart to be able to touch though.
“Fine?” Brandon spat out at Caspian. “What about any of this is fucking fine to you?”
“What happened?” I asked. We were in the room with the four-poster bed again. There was a pressure in this room as if some ancient form of magic was soaked into the walls. The art, skulls, and oddities leered at me.
My eyes caught on the huge black thing shifting in yet another cage. Pollux’s red eyes appeared, blinking at me. His feelers pressed down flat on his head.
