Hopping out of my car, I plaster on my happy-go-lucky smile and hold up the keys. “You wanna do the honors?”
Zack’s cold eyes stare back at me. “Let’s just…get this over with.”
I nod and follow behind Zack like a lost little puppy as we climb the stairs to their place. A crime scene sticker sits on the door, and Zack wastes no time to cut it open with a pocket knife he basically pulled from thin air. I’m hit with an influx of painas the door opens and memories from only a few months before their death hit me like a brick.
The place is spotless—you can tell it’s been properly cleaned—and a small keening noise escapes my throat as the emotions begin to well up.
“You don’t think it’s like—haunted or something now, do you?” My voice comes out more confident than I’m feeling, and somehow it feels like Zack sees right through me.
“No, sweetheart. It’s not haunted. Ghosts and shit aren’t real.” He lets out a scoff as he walks into the room, and I stand there dumbfounded, because he would have no way to know the dagger he just threw at me unintentionally.
“Oh, yeah. Yep. Right, right, right.” I play it off, my lower lip trembling slightly as I look around.
“We’re born, we live, we suffer in this endless supply of bullshit, then we die. There’s nowhere afterwards. Just the ground for us to be consumed by the bugs.” The condescending tone of his words hit me in a way that should hurt me, but for some reason, it only makes me angry. Fuckingsweetheart? This asshole doesn’t even know me. I feel my blood pressure rising and I feel my cheeks heating, the red spreading up my neck. How is it possible that this man makes me feel like raging, yet also I want to fuck him six ways to Sunday.NO. Hazel calm down.
“Is that what you really think? Honestly, you mean to tell me that we spend all this time on Earth, with all these beautiful things around us, and you don’t think there’s anything after death?” My brow raises inquisitively, my arms cross as he continues to make his way around the room.
“Yep. It’s literally—” Zack stops abruptly as he bumps into a table and a false drawer opens underneath it. This is literally some shit out of a mystery movie.He looks at me for the first time with something other than the confidence he’s so proud of exuding.
“You go see what it is.” My voice wavers softly, a chill running through my body. Something doesn’t seem right. I’m scared, and it almost looks like in his own way, Zack might be, too.
In an instant, though, he looks at me then at the drawer which has magically opened before us. His shoulders straighten, and suddenly he’s back to being the tough guy he was moments ago. I watch as he looks around the drawer, probably looking for any booby-traps or something. He gently opens the drawer and pulls out two journals and a pile of letters. One labeled:To Zack. The other labeled: To Hazel. His eyes shoot to mine as he holds them.
“They’re journals. Made out to us.” Zack’s voice is cold and unassuming, his southern twang coming out just a little more than usual.
CHAPTER SEVEN
NO ONE NOTICED
ZACK
What the hell is going on?
I look at Hazel, my heart stuttering at finding these two journals with both of our names. My grumpy ass self knew that this is 100% something that Cameron would do. This isnot, however, what I expected to find when I came up here today.
Hazel moves slowly, scanning the living room with that sharp gaze of hers—like she’s expecting to catch something mid-move. I hover near the drawer for a second before letting it close, the click sounding like a gunshot in the still room. I hand her the top one and she takes it, our fingers leaving prints in the dust.
I open to the first page and start reading.
March 1st
I thought I saw someone across the street again. Same spot, three nights in a row. Juststanding under the streetlamp. Not moving, just watching. When I finally worked up the courage to go outside, they were gone. Leyla thinks I’m imagining it. She’s trying to distract me with movie nights and dumb games. I love her for it, but she’s wrong. I know what I saw.
My throat goes dry as I flip through the next couple pages. Hazel reads them with me with bated breath.
March 4th
Leyla heard it this time. The knock on the back window. She laughed it off—some neighborhood kid, she said. But I saw her face. She’s scared now, too. We didn’t sleep last night. I sat in the living room with the lights off and a knife in my hand like some paranoid idiot. Still…I swear I heard breathing in the hallway.
I look up at Hazel. Her eyes are wide, fixed on her own notebook.
“They were being hunted,” I whisper. The words come out before I can stop them.
She nods slowly. “Or at least Cameron thought they were.”
I turn to a page marked with an old receipt. Cameron’s handwriting is more frantic now, the letters jagged. My best friend is slowly descending into his own form of madness, andmy cold, dead heart can’t handle that. Just another way that I’ve let someone else down.
March 7th
