Page 10

Heathcliff

When I get home to the Grange, I gag at the smell the second I walk in the door.

Hindley has passed out in his recliner, his foot resting in a puddle of his own vomit.

“Shit stain,” I hiss at him as I walk by. I grab paper towels from the kitchen and clean up the mess. If Hindley knew where I’ve been…if he knew that I’d found a banshee…

Banshees are like cash cows to necromancers.

They predict death, which means if you got a banshee who can give you enough advance warning, you could take her to the person who’s supposed to die and use her knowledge to convince them they’re in danger.

Then you take a down payment, create the matching tattoos, and resurrect the person after they die…

which means more money. Buckland told me about a family of necromancers out in California who kept a banshee in their basement and got rich off her.

He was always hoping to find one. Never did.

Hindley and the Coosaw Lockwoods would pay a lot for the name of the banshee I just discovered.

They’d pay me enough money to leave this place.

Flip side of that is, they’d never let me go because they need my abilities.

If Hindley ever thought I was really fixing to leave, I’m pretty sure he’d fit me with a shock collar or something… anything to keep me here.

It’s all a moot point anyway. I’ve got no intention of telling anyone Cathy’s secret. Not sure why I feel so damn protective of her, but I do. She needs somebody in her corner, watching out for her.

Speaking of watching out for folks, I should check on our unconscious guest. Hindley finally told me the guy’s name—Ian Holcum. Not sure if it’s his real name, but it’ll do.

I flip on the light in the back room and survey the dark-haired man lying motionless on the bed. He’s still breathing, which is good, I guess. There’s nothing physically wrong with him. I did my work well, and as far I can tell, his soul went back into his body just fine.

But he’s still unconscious. It’s like he’s having trouble re-syncing to mortal life.

He’s not consuming anything, and he’s not pissing or shitting himself either.

He should look shriveled and starved, but he seems perfectly healthy, like he’s in a weird kind of stasis.

I looked into getting him an IV, but that shit’s expensive, and Hindley swore the money wasn’t coming out of his share.

Maybe it’s selfish, but I don’t want to pay for it either, especially not when I remember how his soul felt, the wrongness of it.

I lay a hand on his forehead and close my eyes.

I can’t heal normal living humans, only those we’ve just summoned back from death. But Ian’s body was rebuilt with my energy and power, so I should be able to figure out what’s wrong with him.

Maybe this is happening because he was burned so badly when we found him. But that shouldn’t matter, as long as the tattoo was intact when he died.

“Heathcliff.”

I glance up. Hindley’s standing in the doorway, looking like death.

“Got a text today,” he says. “Everyone’s comin’ here for Halloween.”

Great. The cousins from Coosaw and the rest of the Lockwoods.

Hindley treats me like shit, but they’re worse.

All except Meemaw Lockwood, the ninety-year-old matriarch of the clan.

She’s actually decent, and we get along.

Besides her, the only one I’m actually friendly with is Bean—Benjamin Lockwood.

He and his sister, Morgana, have a tattoo shop near Beaufort.

Any skilled artist can create the matching tattoos needed for a tether, but Bean and Morgana have a unique talent no other Lockwoods possess—the ability to create ornate, long-lasting tattoos in a fraction of the usual time.

It’s some mutation of the necromancy gift, and as such, they’re considered outsiders.

The family uses their skills, and they come to all the holiday gatherings, but they’re treated differently.

Halloween is the Coosaw Lockwoods’ favorite holiday. They blend it with traditional Samhain festivities, complete with bonfires and weird rituals—and pounds of candy washed down with kegs of beer.

“The rituals might be different this year,” Hindley adds. “Salter says there have been…stirrings.”

“What the hell is a stirring?”

“Fuck if I know. Has something to do with that goddamn church, the one we can’t go near because of the barrier.”

The invisible barrier around Wicklow is the reason Hindley sent me to do the delivery to Aunt Nellie’s.

He can’t get through, but I can, since I’m not a Lockwood by blood.

The barrier was cast around the same time the Lockwoods’ island mansion was spelled, and it surrounds Wicklow and Old Sheldon Church, keeping out the Lockwoods and a few others, like the LeGare and the Byrne families.

Hindley’s apparently done talking about stirrings and barriers for now. He jerks his head toward the comatose guy. “He wake up yet?”

“Oh yeah, he did. He woke up, recited a monologue, and bored himself back to sleep.”

Hindley gives me a baleful look. “Go ahead, make your jokes. It’s your hide if he’s not up and conscious by next weekend, you hear me? You better have him awake by then.”

“I pinky swear it.” I hold up my middle finger.

For a second I think he’ll come at me, but then he retches a little and stumbles off toward the bathroom.

I rise, giving Ian Holcum one last look.

Wait a second…

“Hey, Hindley,” I call. “Did you flip this guy’s pillow?”

“Course I didn’t. I’m not a fucking maid,” he hollers back.

I could have sworn the open end of the pillowcase was on the left side last time I was in here, and now it’s on the right.

But it’s been a hell of a long day. I’m probably imagining things.

I head upstairs, take a piss, and throw myself on the bed without bothering to shower.

I’m dog-tired, but I can’t sink into a good sleep.

I keep seeing Cathy Earnshaw, pale and red-eyed, wandering the woods in her little sundress, weeping and moaning and wailing her grief to the skies.

I’ve never seen anything like it. She looked so frail and tragic and beautiful—and fucking strong, too.

I could tell it was taking every ounce of her will to control where her wanderings took her, to fight the compulsion of the spirit inside her.

She’s a banshee. A real one.

When I was a kid, whenever we hung out with the Coosaw Lockwoods, Meemaw would tell me about creatures and characters from old Irish lore.

I ate up those stories: tales of the far darrig, the cunning trickster dressed in red; the fear gorta, phantoms of hunger; the Leannán Sídhe, muses of creative inspiration; and the púca, a shifter capable of taking various animal forms. She told me about the Gancanagh, the handsome Love-Talker, capable of influencing those around him, and Failinis, the gigantic, invincible warrior-dog of kings.

My favorites were the abhartach, or vampires, and the banshees.

Meemaw had plenty of tales about all of them.

According to her, some of the old gifts still exist, but they fade with each generation or sometimes skip a generation entirely.

Which makes a lot of sense, given the decline of the Lockwoods’ abilities, but it doesn’t explain my extra gifts—the healing, the unnatural strength.

And it doesn’t explain the connection I feel to Catherine Earnshaw.

There’s a wild, whispering energy about her that I recognize—the signature of the Vague, the haunting flavor of Death.

Sure, our abilities are two different aspects of the same thing, but it’s more than that.

It’s like I feel an echo of myself in her.

Which is damn odd for me because I don’t usually connect with women.

I could count on my hand the number of women I’ve fucked, and even though I’ve always taken my time and learned how to please them, I don’t lie awake thinking about them.

I don’t go online to look up their family connections and their address, and I sure as hell don’t visit their church on the off chance of seeing them again.

None of that is stuff I do. Except I did all of it for Cathy.

When I finally fall asleep, my dreams are full of her pitiful, pale face and her anguished voice, weeping and moaning, while her thin, white fingers scratch at my bedroom window, leaving bloody lines on the glass as she whimpers, “Let me in, Heathcliff. Let me in.”