Page 35 of House of Hearts

I’m surrounded by the dead.

Shadows wade in and out of focus all around me, their spectral forms born from thin air.

Anastasia is the first to float along the lawn, her bare feet bent at an impossible angle and her toes barely grazing the ground.

She stares at me like an owl, eyes a wide, milk-foam white.

There and gone before Oleander replaces her.

He strides purposefully my way, his figure aging as he walks. Over several steps, he transforms from young student to graying Headmaster. His expression is the one constant: a grim determination thinning his lips and a haughty lift of his chin in the air.

I’m frozen in place as his astral form breezes through me.

I flinch with the icy gust of a spirit cutting through mine, and it’s enough to send me running.

As soon as I find my strength, I’m sprinting through the academy’s open-air corridors, outrunning the hearts in the cafeteria and the ghouls waiting for me around every corner.

Was Calvin right? Is there really no hope here?

Am I doomed like Emoree was, fretting over an unsolvable problem?

I’m no closer to figuring any of these questions out as I slide down the stone siding of the Winthrop Music Hall to catch my breath. I crane my neck around the side of the building and search my surroundings for students and spirits alike.

Satisfied that I’m well and truly alone, I sacrifice my scarf and use it to staunch the bleeding on my palm.

Then I whip out my phone and scroll to Mom in my contacts list. Her smile in her profile picture might be weathered from a lifetime of labor and lost love, but despite it all, her eyes remain childishly hopeful for the future. I wish I had her optimism.

I wage war with the part of me that would throw away my phone and go back to hyperventilating on the ground. In the end, the sliver of me that misses my mom wins out, and I cradle the phone to my ear. I’m prepared to give up on the fifth ring when her voice crinkles through the speakers.

“Honey? What’s up, is everything okay?” She might be miles away from me, but with her voice in my ear, I can easily pretend the two of us are together on the couch.

I do my best not to sniffle. “Yeah, everything is fine. I just miss you, Mom.”

“Aww, I’ve missed you too, honey,” she hums softly on the other end. It’s such a strange feeling to be the broken one.

“How are things at home?” I ask, and I wonder whether she’s eaten today. Whether the fridge is stocked and the bills are paid. I worry if she’s back at her typical dating haunts, plucking terrible men out of obscurity and shoving them in the hole in her heart.

“G-good, things are good,” she mumbles absently, her mind clearly elsewhere. I listen to the groan of creaking wood and the telling squeal of cabinets. She’s pacing in circles, yanking out drawers and rummaging frantically inside.

“Are you looking for your keys again?” I guess, and the familiarity of it all is strangely soothing.

The noise stops all at once, overtaken by a trill of shocked laughter. “I swear you’re psychic.”

“Psychics don’t exist,” I say before remembering I’m literally cursed by a ghost , so God only knows at this point. “If they’re not in between the couch cushions, they’re on your bedside table. If they’re not on the bedside table, there’s a decent chance you left them in the fridge.”

Hell, maybe I am psychic. I’m in a whole other state, and I can still picture the moment Mom storms over to the kitchen, swings open the freezer door to rummage around in the frozen peas, the smothered gasp when she brushes against cold metal, and the jangle of her lanyard as she pulls it out.

“That’s my girl,” she marvels, but the tail end of her voice is lost to static. The sound stretches out longer than it should, devolving to the shrill pitch of a whistle.

“Did you hear that?” I ask, wincing as I put distance between my phone and myself.

“Hear what, hun?” she asks, but the words are warped and underwater.

“My phone’s acting up,” I explain, but there’s a knowing deep in my bones that tells me otherwise.

“Violet.” Mom’s voice is more than distorted. It’s wrong. I sense it down to my marrow, feel it running in the currents of my veins. This isn’t my mother. “It’s all in your head.”

I’m surprised I can speak at all. “It isn’t,” I manage to say, but the words tremble on their way out.

“It’s all in your head.” The voice flows from the receiver, spilling along my shoulders like a shawl of morning mist. “Or maybe it’s not your head; maybe it’s your heart.”

I hitch in a staggering breath, and there’s no mistaking what this is about now.

“Don’t worry, you won’t have it for much longer,” the voice says, and that’s it .

I throw my phone against the wall and let the screen shatter into a million horrible pieces.

It doesn’t matter; the static continues to erupt from broken speakers, humming in my ears like a biblical swarm of locusts.

I abandon my phone there on the ground, my mother’s face cracked and distorted, the screen splintered where her eyes should be.

I don’t even have a moment to catch my breath before I see Oliver and Birdie around the corner. If I had any question about whether I was still cursed, all I have to do is watch as they storm across the open lawn, chattering hurriedly to themselves until they make it to the woman waiting for them.

All my bad luck has manifested into a single person: gray hair swept tightly to her scalp, overplucked brows, and a monochrome beige pantsuit.

“It’s about Violet,” Birdie says, and I instantly forget how to breathe. Headmistress Lockwell listens intensely, her body rigid as Birdie continues. “I followed her last night into the chapel and overheard her with Calvin—”

The rest of the conversation is hushed to an indiscernible whisper, but I don’t need to hear any of it to know what she’s about to say: that if I don’t figure this out ASAP, I’m joining the Lockwells’ long list of the dead.

A phantom slips through the veil and rips my attention away from the trio.

It’s Emoree. She is all consuming, her auburn hair cascading down her back and her gap-toothed smile transcendent even in death.

She cranes her neck to look at me before beckoning me to follow with a slight incline of her head.

Common sense would say Girl, for the love of God, don’t follow your dead best friend again around campus …

And the key word there would be “again” because the first time didn’t go so hot.

But since I’m not in my right mind and I haven’t been for quite some time, I go scampering off at her heels as she leads me around the back of the building.

We cut through the campus, and thankfully the final destination isn’t Final Destination . She instead leads me to a house I’ve been in only once before. Headmistress Lockwell’s campus residence sits empty, and when Emoree turns to me next, she fades through the door.

Unfortunately, the odds for quantum tunneling are one in a hundred billion, so I can’t follow her that way. I’m left with the only mortal route available: breaking in. The front door boasts an impressive key-code panel, and it’s going to alert someone if I screw this up.

I can’t have that. I’m already in hot water; I don’t need to switch the temperature to boiling.

C’mon, think, think . I know the code is Percy’s birthday because Calvin wouldn’t stop griping about it the whole way over to her office.

“ At least make it a little less obvious you have a favorite.” What the hell is his brother’s birthday again?

I squeeze my eyes shut, concentrating with everything in me on all the inane conversations I had with Em about him. She was relieved he was a Taurus, wasn’t he?

“I got lucky, he was on the cusp. Two days away from being a Gemini.”

“And that’s a problem?” I asked, failing to see the importance of astrology.

“Obviously!”

Two days from the cutoff. That would land him…when? I do the math in my head, running along the dates she prattled off before rushing to punch in the four-digit code. Gemini begins on May 21, so that would place him on the 19th.

0519

The half second stretches achingly long before the green light flashes and I can push the door open. It’s bizarrely normal to see Emoree waiting for me inside.

She’d always hang outside my last class once the bell rang. Totally lost in her own head until the moment our eyes met; then and only then would a smile explode on her face, and it was like seeing someone’s soul from the inside out.

“Thank God for the zodiac,” I tell her, and my heart pangs as she doesn’t smile now. “I’ll never make fun of it again.”

She’s entirely blank-faced as she turns, gliding across the familiar hallway and toward the headmistress’s private office.

I’m ditching class and breaking into the headmistress’s house—both things that would’ve given me a stress rash before Hart.

Now I’m relieved that the study door is unlocked so I don’t have to kick it in.

Emoree floats over to the curio cabinet, and I follow her eyeline to the knife perched behind the glass.

It was ominous before, but seeing it today has me wanting to crawl out of my own skin.

The baser part of my brain recognizes what the rest of me refuses to.

I’m in danger and Calvin’s right. There will come a time when Anastasia gets her wish and the curse has me perilously close to death… a time when I’ll need to fight back.

“Is this what you wanted me to find?” I whisper, but she disappears on the heels of my question. Her image blows out like candle smoke and fades into nonexistence. I’m all alone as I unlatch the frame and free the blade from its prison.