Gramps shifted on the floor, and his startled gaze darted around the kitchen.
“Don’t move, Benny. The doc is coming,” Julian stated from behind me.
Dr. Morley took his time checking Gramps’ vitals and his head. Gramps sat in the dining chair, glaring at Julian, who hadn’t moved from the counter.
The doc removed the thermometer from Gramps’ mouth. “Your temperature is at a hundred. I told you to stay in bed. You keep overexerting yourself, you’ll never get better.”
Dr. Morley was oddly tall. He stood close to seven feet at full height, making him the tallest man I’d ever seen—a large frame of bones. His knee caps bulged even as he stood, his elbows too even when his arms were straight. The bottoms of his slacks hit right at his calves, his sleeves at his forearms.
“Clowns. I got dizzy, is all,” Gramps mumbled. “No need for all the dramatics.”
“For once, listen to him, Gramps.”
Winds howled around the house as rain pounded against the kitchen window. The storm was here, the skies black in the late morning, and the house’s lights flickered.
“Tomorrow,” Dr. Morley started, towering to his feet, “Come see me so we can do more testing at the office. I’ll be better equipped.” He looked down at Gramps, whose brows were pushed together and downward. “If there’s something I can do to help, better now before it’s too late.”
Gramps kept his lips pressed together in a hard line, not speaking a word.
Not until after Dr. Morley left.
As soon as the door closed behind the doctor, Gramps couldn’t keep it in any longer. “Duke of limbs is nothin’ but a moron.”
“Gramps!”
“I should be on my way,” Julian muttered.
“Damn right, yah should go,” Gramps seethed through his veneers. “And you, yah Heathen. You stay away from my granddaughtah.”
Julian pushed off the counter and walked past me without a word or glance in my direction.
The rattle of the front door closing behind Julian echoed, and I jumped to my feet to run after him.
“Where yah going, Moonshine?” Gramps called out. “You better stay away from those Heathens … Stay away from Blackwell … Yah hear me? … Stupid girl.”
My feet moved fast. I swung the front door open and ran off the steps as rain pounded into me, soaking my hair and my clothes, the strong winds beating me from every direction. Through squinted eyes, I spotted Julian walking down the driveway with his head down.
“Hey, wait!”
Julian turned at the sound of my voice. “What are you doing out here?” he shouted over the rain, walking back up the driveway. My eyes locked onto the cylinder pendant hanging from around his neck as it swung back and forth. “Go back inside!” He pointed at the house behind me, his thick black hair soaked and sticking to his forehead.
“You’re going to walk all the way home in this? No, let me drive you!”
The winds were forceful, threatening to rip our clothes from our bodies, our hair from our scalps. Rain drove into us, intending to pierce through our flesh. There was no way he could walk home in this. Thunder clapped, the sound bouncing up through my spine, and I licked the rain from my lips, stepping through the soggy grass toward him where he stood like a statue. The shirt under his soaked coat clung to the sharp ridges of his torso. Rain dripped from the tips of his hair over his eyes.
“Please, let me drive you. It’s the least I could do!”
Julian shook his head, erased the distance between us, and dropped his mouth to my ear. He hovered there for a moment. I could hear the sound of his breath in my ear, playing along with the slapping of the icy rain. “I’d rather walk home in this than be seen with you.” His hollowed eyes lifted to mine, and rain dripped from his long black lashes.
My eyes froze ahead into a blurry painting of a grey storm, unblinking and still processing his words.
Julian shook his head, turned, and descended the hill back toward the street.
And the rain beat over me as I watched him go.
Chapter 8
Fallon
The rain had lasted for three days, and on the fourth day, the town worked together to clean up the aftermath in Town Square and the surrounding neighborhoods. A limb from the giant beech tree near the gazebo went straight through the front window of Hobb’s Grocery, and Agatha and a few other townies stopped to help the grocery store owner nail up a tarp.
Mina passed out coffee since her diner hadn’t lost electricity as most of the town had, and I worked alongside Jonah and Monday, my gaze searching for Julian. I hadn’t seen him since he’d walked home when the storm first started. I hadn’t seen any of the Heathens out and about, helping the town. But why would they? From what Monday and Fable had told me, they didn’t care about anyone or anything. They were cold creatures with a cutthroat blood type, Heathens who stayed hidden in the woods and only came out at night.
Once the phone lines were back up, I’d made a call to Dr. Morley and forced Gramps out of the house and into the Mini Coop.
“What is this? This isn’t a cah, this is a hearse for midgets,” Gramps had commented, rambling the entire way to Dr. Morley’s office as he looked over the buttons on the car. “I’ll show yah a real cah, Moonshine. This,” he had tapped over the dash at all the buttons, “This is a toy. Does it even take gas or yah gotta buy a powah pack? Plug it intah a wall? Is this what it feels like when yah pickin’ up dead Bahbie?”
Dr. Morley said that Gramps had a mild heart attack, and the lack of blood flow to the brain caused him to get dizzy and pass out. We’d left with a bottle of aspirin and strict orders to keep stress at a bare minimum. As far as the virus, it had to run its course.
That night, Casper cried from the foot of the bed, pacing back and forth atop the quilt covering my feet. But it hadn’t been the cat to pull me from my unconscious state in the middle of the night. There was a flickering moment behind closed eyes when a shadow watched me. It was a sinister lull. In those fleeting moments, I had no earthly—or unearthly—idea what was waiting for me once my eyes opened, but it was there. I could feel it in my bones, in my soul.
I’d always imagined the worst. A contorted face, ripped skin stitched from the center of the forehead and across the eye, disfigurement from a car accident, part of the head missing from a gunshot wound, the most gruesome of death.
A skin-prickling breeze skimmed over my face. Whatever it was, it was here with me. I was not alone, and a lazy terror crawled through my veins as it always had just before I acknowledged the spirit—the ghosts who found me.
I opened my eyes, and both balcony doors were ajar, creaking back and forth, along with the wind. The grandfather clock chimed from the bottom of the stairs, and I held my breath until it was over. The Atlantic Ocean’s colors were one with the night sky, endless depths of darkness. A half-moon glimmered over the inky waters, monarch colors glittering over the surface.
The light giggle of a child carried in from the balcony, and my eyes darted to the sound. A small boy with cropped dark hair and a striped red and white shirt appeared behind the billowing curtain hanging between us. His little voice drew me from the bed, and I planted both bare feet onto the wooden floors.