“No. It doesn’t sound silly at all,” I said. Our entire town was founded on more ridiculous twists of fate.
Laura walked over to a metal rack in the corner and grabbed a brochure. It had a photo of Hampton House on the cover and a brief history of the town. Part of Harriet’s “marketing efforts,” I thought it made us sound like a bunch of freaks, but not surprisingly, no one had ever asked my opinion about marketing.
Annie flipped through it, and I watched the blood slowly drain from her face. “Oh.”
Her skin began to take on a green tint, and I knew what that meant.
“The bathroom is over there.” I pointed through the kitchen.
Annie looked apologetic as she got up and ran in the direction of my finger.
I followed, ignoring Harriet’s eye rolls. Then I ran the water in the kitchen sink on full blast to drown out the sound of retching that came through the door and filled a glass.
Laura’s hand landed lightly on my shoulder. “Dec, are you okay?” As she moved to take the glass from my hand, I realized I was shaking.
There was no point in trying to lie to Laura. “I just…”
The bathroom door opened and Annie stood there looking flushed and sheepish as Laura handed her the glass. Annie took a deep sip of water, keeping her hazel eyes on me. They looked blue in the afternoon light rather than the emerald green her posters accentuated.
“I am sorry,” she said. “I can only imagine what you think.”
It’s impossible, I thought, that you could have any idea.
“Are you okay?” I asked. “Where were you heading? Your train, I mean.”
“Montreal. I have a… I am meant to be on my way to Montreal.”
“What’s in Montreal?” I asked, forgetting for a second that I wasn’t supposed to know the tour section of her website said she would be playing Cleveland next.
She sat and under her breath, said, “I was on my way to a funeral.”
Icy fingers caressed my neck. I was used to spending the summer around loss. Parents who had lost children. Children who had lost parents. Lovers who had lost each other. Each one reminded me of my own parents and how much I missed them and how the way we’d lost them had damaged all of us. Harriet became bitter. Laura worried about me twice as much as my mother ever had. I was still trying to figure out all the ways I’d been changed.
Anastasia. Annie had been my fantasy—the dream of escape that I held onto through it all. I didn’t need her wrapped up in the whole “contacting the dead” thing too.
“Dec.” Laura shook my arm.
I cracked my knuckles, needing a physical “something” to make me focus. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”
Annie smiled and my pulse raced. I needed to get out of the house.
“Do you want a tour of St. Hilaire?” I blurted before I could chicken out. Laura’s eyes went wide, but Annie nodded.
I gave my sister a hopeful glance. “You’ll deal with Harriet?”
“Don’t I always?” she replied.
I pulled back, struck again by the reality that I was really going to leave St. Hilaire without Laura.
I needed to find a way to apologize to Laura, to the memory of our parents, to the whole freaking universe. But here was Annie Krylova waiting at the door for me. For me. And so I simply mouthed “thank you” to Laura and hightailed it out the back door with the girl whose picture was hanging on the inside of my closet door.
Chapter 8
Russ
I rubbed my eyes. Trying to decipher my grandmother’s notes was a challenge. The paper was brittle and the ink was fading, and her notes were obviously meant as reminders to herself and not as instructions to her desperate grandson.
“I need a break,” I said to my empty bedroom, proving that I really did need one.
I headed out. The chilly air carried the scents of wintergreen and clove, jasmine and sage. The garden was a cacophony of fragrances, a congruence of potential magic and possibility.
But no amount of herbs was going to stop the chilling cut of the wind. It sliced through my ragged wool coat, making me feel like I’d jumped in the Chicago River in the middle of December.
When I was a kid and complained about the Chicago deep freeze, my mother would roll her eyes and say I had “thin blood.” She should have known better. She’d grown up in St. Hilaire and had spent her entire early life trying to leave. It had only taken her a couple of hours, once she’d been forced to accept that I’d inherited her family’s abilities, to decide to deposit me and my father in her childhood home and disappear with only an annual Christmas letter from the Virgin Islands to remind me I’d ever had a mother.
Only after my father and I moved to St. Hilaire did I make the connection that I was always freezing when spirits were around; and here, they were always around, even now in August.
It was hard not to think about the warmth of the Mustang. Had we won, I wouldn’t be trekking through the backwoods of St. Hilaire in a threadbare coat, trying to force the incompatible ideas of Dec’s non-moving piano, the poker game, and the freaking Mackenzie brothers into a box and still get it to close.
I’d broken my own rule when I allowed myself to hope for the car. When I’d given up hope of my mother returning to St. Hilaire, I vowed to give up hoping.
But that car. That freaking car.
Dad and I had been working on an old Vespa, but we rarely had time to make any progress on it. Besides, it was too undependable even when it did work and the weather was warm enough to ride it. Next year, if the Guild chose me as Student Leader, I would need to be ready to respond. I wouldn’t have time to slog through the woods, hoping not to trip in the mud or freeze to death.
Those were the practical reasons for my interest in Ian’s car.
The other side was that the thing fascinated me. I had a spreadsheet that listed every detail I could collect about the car: each part, its origin, and the associated rumors. It had been stupid of me not to ask Ian more about it when I’d had the chance, but talking about cars hadn’t really been how Ian and I had spent our time.
With Ian gone, St. Hilaire was left to deal with not only the untamed car, but with the even more feral younger Mackenzie brothers. The fiasco of a poker game had Alex’s grimy signature all over it. Regardless of the reasons for the piano not budging, there was still the issue of why Alex and David Sheridan wanted it in the first place.
And Colin. He’d already graduated from high school and was working gate security, but, thinking about it, he’d been milling about Guild offices more and more. My dad said he’d seen Colin and Willow in deep conversation outside Eaton Hall as he was heading to work the other morning. It didn’t make sense. The two of them couldn’t be more different. There had been talk recently about the Guild moving in a “new direction,” but I couldn’t imagine “just-this-side-of-psychopath” as the direction they’d choose.