“Would you believe me if I told you a clown is hiding in there? In that face of his?” he asked, coming from the dark corner of the room with wrinkles in his drooping forehead. “The clown, it choked me with one hand. I couldn’t breathe.” The ghost clawed at the shirt covering his stomach, lifting it and exposing his hairy gut. “He stabbed me! I remember the pain in my lungs!” We both lowered our gaze and examined his stomach as he twisted in place, but there were no lacerations or knife wounds. The ghost dropped his shirt, his body shaking. Then he looked up at me through strange pale eyes. “But I felt it. It fucking stabbed me.”
“It? Do you mean Earl? Beck?” My stomach dropped. Julian?
“No!” he screamed. “THE CLOWN!”
Julian
Later that night
I’d told her what I should have told myself all these years. I’d told her all the things I couldn’t face myself.
Fallon Grimaldi carried the same stain on her soul as mine from the weight of rejection and insults. The fear rimming her eyes reflected my own, and perhaps that was why I noticed it—why I cringed in the way she couldn’t see that she was the most real thing in this town of deceit. She carried the same lies I’d carried for twelve years, but Fallon Grimaldi wasn’t enslaved by a mask. Fallon Grimaldi didn’t have to hide, isolate, or become someone she wasn’t.
Fallon Grimaldi was kind, not a killer like me.
Pure, not cursed like me.
She was everything I wasn’t, yet looked at me—to me—as if we were stitched by the same string.
She looked at me, and it drove me crazy, it drove me calm. My god, I was at peace when I didn’t deserve it. Just being around her felt as if she took a knife to my chest and sliced me open to let my darkness bleed out. Being around her felt like I crawled into myself and confronted my soul. Being around her? It made me feel naked, burdens on display, scars ruptured, making everything intense like an open wound. And I had snapped. Snapped!
I wanted to punish her and kiss her at the same time for the way she was making me feel.
I had tried to keep my cool, to keep my distance. I had promised myself I would, but how could I when she was looking at me from across the bar like she was doing now, powder blue eyes both challenging and filling me with her moonlight. As if I didn’t kill a man less than twenty-four hours ago. As if I deserved it!
And as if her innocence wasn’t already messing with my head, she had to wear a slinky black dress on top of it. The girl couldn’t be taller than 5’2’’ but all legs, wearing her white hair piled on her head with the hickey I gave her on full display.
I wanted Fallon Grimaldi to never forget the cursed Heathen who had shown up in her room—the warning to stay out of the woods. It was for her own good.
Hate me, moon girl. Hate me like the rest of them. Hate me as I hate me.
Because if you don’t, one of us will kill you, and it will probably be me.
“Jules, you’re up,” Zeph sang at the corner of my eye as he walked around the pool table. I downed the rest of my drink and placed it on the shelf.
We’d come to Voodoos every Friday night since we were kids, just like our dads with their fathers. The torn green felt on the side was from when I was four, and I’d snagged it while running my 1968 Brown Custom Camaro Hot Wheels toy car across. To hide the car, I’d shoved it down the side pocket and into a hole, and it has been stuck there ever since. The car was now worth at least three thousand dollars, and the only way to exhume it was to take apart the pool table. And we loved the pool table.
The dent on the right corner happened when Beck was thirteen. I’d stolen a bottle from Earl’s trailer. Drunk Earl had marched up here and grabbed the back of Beck’s head and slammed it against the corner because Beck refused to give me up. Two scars that day, which was the last time Drunk Earl was allowed inside Voodoos.
My thumb grazed the crack in the pool stick, the time Maverick smacked Zeph’s sister’s ass when I was sixteen. Maverick has had a lean in his stride ever since. The chip in the solid three-ball? The first time Phoenix Wildes snapped in public, and none of us really knew why he threw it across the bar six years ago. The hole was still there, an empty wooden frame around it.
He dated it and tagged it, “The Gunslinger.”
We’d learned to walk around this pool table, and have been walking around it every Friday night since.
We only had two rules when we played the game: no magic and no one else.
The pool table belonged to the Hollow Heathens.
I flicked my eyes over to Fallon, seeing Kane’s hand drifting across her thigh under the bar. The pool stick slid between my knuckles too hard, slamming the eight-ball in behind the solid. Fallon adjusted in her seat, clearly uncomfortable, and my jaw clenched.
“You think she knows?” Beck asked, and I heard him but didn’t. “You know she was in my trailer for a while after she kicked everyone out. That was strange.” Beck was concerned about someone finding out I killed Jury Smith, and all I was concerned about was Kane Pruitt touching her thigh when I shouldn’t be. “We should have just burned the body like last time.”
I caught all the words he’d said, but Fallon’s eyes were on me, Kane’s hand on her thigh.
Beck shoved my shoulder. “Look at you, man. You’re here, and you’re not.”
“I am,” I insisted, throwing a glance at him. Zeph re-stacked the balls as I stood beside Beck, my focus back on Fallon and my grip tightening on the pool stick. “She can’t prove anything.”
I’d killed Jury Smith. Jury had shown up at Earl’s trailer with a knife, crazed and out of his mind as if he’d been compelled or hexed by someone. It wasn’t Earl or Beck’s fault for what had happened to Jury, and there was no other way but to kill him. Jury Smith had gone to the trailer with no other intention than leaving with blood on his hands, so I’d made a decision. Everyone depended on me. And the safety of the Norse Woods Coven came first—always.
“You and I both know the dead can talk,” Beck continued. I looked over at him as his eyes flicked to Zeph then back to me. His voice lowered to a whisper, “Everyone seems to forget she’s a Grimaldi too. Her mother knew those woods better than you, and that’s saying a lot, Jules. Freya always wandered in our woods, talked to the dead,” he said. I wanted to laugh. No one knew the woods better than me. Freya Grimaldi may have walked the woods, but I slept in them. A twilight sleep-walker, curled in the womb of Norse woods as if I’d been born from her cold, hard ground. “What if she’s just like her mother? Am I the only one who thinks we should corner her? See what she knows?”
Zeph’s green eyes snapped up to us. He’d heard.
Over my shadow-blood would I allow Zeph or any of them to go near Fallon. “Cornering her would only give her reasons to pry, and quite frankly, I’m not worried about it. I did it. I killed Jury, not you. Plus, there’s no proof. Let the dead sing their song. Fallon still can’t prove anything.”
Zeph fisted the pool stick. “If she interrupts the plans—”
I forced a laugh. “You think a flatlander with the brain of fish could screw the plan? The same plan that’s been years in the making?” I clicked my tongue, faking my feelings, “You give the girl way too much credit.” I wrapped my hand around the back of his neck and pinned his focus to Fallon. “Look at her. Back straight, white-knuckling her drink, can’t even look at her new friends in the eye. She’s hardly comfortable.” She never looked out of place with me. “She’s just a scared, insecure girl. She doesn’t have the nerve to cross Kane, let alone us.”