“Come on, Sabby!” Bulan nudges me with his nose. “Chin up! Your grandmother would hate to see you like this.”
I moan-sniffle. “Nrghhrrrughhh guhh guhhkk.”
“This is very unlike you, Sabby. You must tell me what’s wrong! It’s a matter of urgency. I have made a vow I can’t turn back on, you see.”
With effort, I manage, “I don’t. Black halls. Remember?”
“I promised your grandmother I would look after you.”
What?
Effortfully, I claw back to the memory of when I first discovered Bulan; of opening the closet door to find him—grinning ebulliently atop a dusty shelf of unfolded linens. He wasn’t surprised by my presence. No; he couldn’t have been. I’d been blaring BTS from my phone; stomping from room to room and muttering about Grandma’s dubious friends and equally dubious housekeeping. Bulan must’ve known I’d find him.
He’d been waiting for me.
“She put you up to it,” I realize, wiping my upper lip. “This whole time you’ve been Grandma Rose’s puppet!”
“It’s true,” Bulan confirms. “I was determined to honor yourgrandmother, in spite of your cruel maltreatment. The attempted murder, the punting, the jokes.”
“You love the jokes,” I sniffle. “You’re all about jokes.”
“So are you. And so was Rosie! And both of you, whether you’d like to hear this or not, can be quite careless in how you treat those whom you love. But, deep down, your grandmother was a warm, fluffy pair of knitted socks. As are you.”
What kind of metaphor is that? “Do you even remember why people wear socks?”
“Stop interrupting! Even Mandy knows when to be serious.” That shuts me up. I huddle more tightly against myself, braced against the bitterly cold stone floor as Bulan rambles on. “Your grandmother regretted falling out with you. Oh yes, I was there—I heard everything that happened when you were a child! Terrible, that whole dagger business. In case you were wondering, I was living in the cupboard. Well, sometimes the bathroom cabinet. The point remains. Rosie pleaded with your mother to give her a second chance, to have you stay over during summers at least. She worried about you, and she wished nothing more than to ensure your well-being.”
“She had a weird way of showing it,” I mutter.
“Did she? In the months before she passed, Rosie changed her will and wrote you in. As a last attempt to help you, to keep you from abandoning your destiny. From throwing the head out with the bathwater, so to speak.”
Maybe that’s true. If so, Grandma had way too much faith in me. Elsewise she would have known I’m not cut out for the paranormal world, or any world. Not even oubliette world.
“I don’t have a destiny,” I say to the floor.
“You do too, Sabby,” Bulan argues back. “Which is why Rosie made me swear that if I had the chance, I’d pick up the torch and help you.”
“But there was no torch,” I say. “Just a woo-woo stipulation in her obnoxious, nefarious will.”
“Yes, that was a clever thing, wasn’t it?”
“A horrible thing,” I argue. “Not clever—oh.”
I roll onto my side and stare into the darkness.
The implications had been lost on me until now, but if Bulan was used to being Grandma Rose’s puppet, could he have taken on her postmortem mantle of beingpuppeteer? Is it possible his playacting ventriloquy with me when we walked around Salem was meant to lull me into a false sense of safety, when in fact he was aware of Grandma’s plans for me? And he was evenhelping to accomplish them?
I beat away my scratchy wedding skirt, crawl onto my forearms, and somehow push myself upright.
“Don’t tell me you were involved in trapping me in Salem,” I say.
“Goodness, no,” Bulan says. “But it wasn’tsoawful, was it?! You liked it in Salem! You enjoyed setting up the shop, the wedding planning—”
“So what if I did?” I shout, admitting it aloud at last. “I could’ve enjoyed the path I was already on if it weren’t for you! And for Grandma Rose! Instead, I realized I hated it! My accounting job was hard, and it wasn’t fun, and everyone I met sucked, and I hated living in New York, and now… now…”
“Now what?” Bulan huffs. “It sounds to me that nothing about your situation has changed. Merely your understanding of it.”
I can’t think of a rebuttal to this. Could Bulan be right?
