Page 64 of The Sisters of Crimson House

Charley stepped back from him, afraid of the way he was looking at her. She’d already been attacked once today. She cradled her hand as if to hide it.

“What I know is that when you and I are in the same room, bad things happen,” she told him. “I see things I don’t understand, and then that thing tries to kill me or the people I love.” She was horrified to feel her eyes stinging with the threat of tears. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. “Somehow, it has something to do with you.” Making a decision, she held out her hand to him.

“Please. I—” she paused, correcting herself. “We need to know why.”

He slowly reached out and took her hand in his.

Nothing happened.

“What are you feeling?” he asked, his voice a hoarse whisper.

“Nothing,” she said, looking at him. They were still holding hands. “I don’t feel anything.”

He closed the space between them and kissed her softly, tentatively. She kissed him back, sinking into him, feeling a weightlessness she hadn’t known was possible. He held her face as he kissed her, his thumb tracing her cheek, and she used the hand he wasn’t holding to press him closer into her. Suddenly the need was overwhelming. An urgency to have him even closer as he kissed her harder. Her entire body thrummed to life, nerve endings on fire as he was all around her, overwhelming everything. There was a loosening in her chest. Like a door opening. Someone was opening the door.

A sudden panic surged throughout her body, her hand singing with pain. She knew this door was supposed to stay closed, but it was opening now because this was an invitation. She was not supposed to be opening the door, but she was giving herself over to the greater mystery building thrillingly throughout her body. They were letting her out. Oh my God, they were letting her out, and they were helpless to stop her now, and she was here.

Her skin registered the change first, the way her arms prickled from the humidity, her skin damp and cold despite the warmth. Before she even opened her eyes, she knew in her body that she was no longer in Sadie’s office but outside. This was an August heat, heavy and pregnant with storms. She opened her eyes to a night sky bruised green and purple with shocks of heat lightning. This wasn’t October in Memphis. She didn’t know when or where this was. The only thing she knew was that she was alone.

“Hello?” she choked. Where was Sy? Where was anybody?

The air felt like rubber, thick and alive with menace. Lightning strobed the night sky, and this time it revealed striated mountains so layered and dense, they looked like ocean waves. Her brain revolted at the impossible vista, and she staggered back, reedy dandelions brushing against her legs. She looked around in a panic. She was on the edge of a forest, a phalanx of rhododendrons swelling and contracting with the wind of the impending storm at her back. This was far from Memphis, but with a shared ancestry reflected in the wet heat, the screech of cicadas in the trees overhead. It didn’t make sense in the suffocating heat that a bonfire raged fifty feet from where she stood watching, that a tall white woman in hiking pants and a bandanna holding back graying curls threw another branch onto the raging fire. Another surge of fear as her eyes focused on the two figures next to her staring into the flames.

“Celeste?” said Charley, taking a step closer to the fire. Her aunt seemed to glow orange from the flames, her eyes black pits.

“Hold her,” the gray-haired woman commanded, and Charley watched as Celeste positioned herself behind a waxen Miranda, so sweaty and slick, she looked like a mirage in the heat. Miranda’s eyes were closed, swaying slightly in front of the fire. Celeste placed her hands on Miranda’s shoulders, and Charley could see the fear in her aunt’s eyes, could feel the flames licking at her skin as if it were her own.

“Tell her it’s time,” ordered the woman, her voice strong despite the mountain accent that stretched the time into a two-syllable confection.

Celeste took a steadying breath before speaking.

“May you wake from dreaming,” she said, almost like she was singing a song. “Take your leave of this place, never to return. But leave the girl. She is needed here still.”

Nothing happened. Miranda continued to sway and sweat in front of that roaring bonfire. And then Charley saw it. Through the flames, through the waves of heat, an outline of someone, something else, like an overlay of Miranda’s entire silhouette. Like her shadow had become entirely separate.

“Again,” the woman commanded.

“May you wake from dreaming,” Celeste said, and this time it was a song, the melody achingly familiar. It was a lullaby but for a mother rousing a baby from slumber. “Take your leave of this place, never to return.” It was being banished, but where was it going?

The gray-haired woman walked over to Miranda and placed her hand on her shoulder opposite Celeste. She gave her a terse nod. From fifty feet away, Charley could smell the meaty hickory smoke, an offering in the air. She knew that the fires were mingling with the spirit of a tree that had fallen on the property in a previous storm. That the fire and smoke and song were a spell that Celeste and this practitioner were working into being. A trade. A plea.

“May you wake from—” Celeste began again, abruptly cut off as Miranda began to screech. Her eyes flew open wide, her smile ecstatic. She was smiling, Charley realized with a dawning horror, because she was laughing. Miranda threw her head back and howled into the night sky. The practitioner recoiled in fear, but Miranda was faster, grabbing the woman and pushing her into the fire. The flames roared, a bonfire turned funeral pyre mixing with the woman’s screams and Celeste shouting Miranda’s name in horror.

Charley couldn’t scream; she couldn’t close her eyes. She wanted to be banished far from this place, never to return, but there was no such spell for her. Celeste dove into the pyre, dragging the woman from the fire and laying her down, making quick work of extinguishing the flames. The woman rolled to her side, coughing up singed lungs, smoke drifting off Celeste like a volcano on the verge of erupting. She did not see Miranda advancing on her like an avenging angel. Charley tried to scream for her aunt, tried to warn her that whatever was wearing Miranda’s body looked to have sprouted giant claws that were now raking across her aunt’s face. Celeste screamed, and she squeezed her eyes shut. Charley did not want to bear witness any longer. She pressed her nails into her savaged palm that was already slick with blood, but she pressed harder, willing the pain to wake her up, to take her anywhere but this field on fire.

Like in a nightmare, Miranda now stood inches away from Charley’s face, furious and final. “You’re not supposed to be here! You’re not supposed to be here!” she screamed.

Charley desperately tried to back away. Her legs weren’t working. Whatever wore her sister as its skin was going to kill her. The gasp took her eyes from Miranda’s. Sy stood next to Charley in the tall grass, his face a scream in the firelight.

She reached out to Sy in terror. Shadow-like hands poured from Miranda’s mouth, grabbing at Charley’s legs, her hands. It wanted her to scream, to open her mouth wide so it could climb inside and take root and destroy her from the inside out. Charley was screaming now, and she wasn’t sure she would ever stop.

An explosion brought her back to herself. She opened her eyes. She stood in Sadie’s office, holding hands with Sy; the ancient fern that stood sentry in the corner shattered by a scream she didn’t hear so much as feel rippling through her body. Sy ripped his hand away and stared at it in shock, the blood on his palm a perverse sacrament.

“You were there,” Charley said, panting with fear. “You saw it.”

“I saw…” The terror on his face as his eyes met hers made her heart twist anew with fear. Had he really been in her head? Had he seen Miranda raging before a funeral pyre? Celeste dying in the firelight?

Zavier and Astrid were suddenly filling the room, all threats and confusion and yelling, as Charley sank to the floor to make herself small, to make it all stop.