Page 36

Heathcliff

Enough is enough.

Cathy still hasn’t contacted me, but I’m sure as hell not waiting any longer.

I’ve completed two more resurrections. I’ve got the truck, and I got me a fake driver’s license, one that’s good enough to fool all but the most fastidious of cops.

There’s so much cash stuffed inside my mattress it blows my mind, like why the hell didn’t I do this sooner?

Guess I just needed somebody besides myself to save.

It’s time to get Cathy and leave this place behind.

I haven’t heard anything about gods or weird deaths from Hindley, but Halloween is in a couple days, which means the whole Coosaw clan is going to descend on the Grange, and that’s a paranormal shitstorm I don’t want to deal with, besides the fact that more people in the house means more chances of my stash of bills being discovered.

Cathy goes to church with her dad every Sunday, so that’s where I’m going this morning. I’ll catch her either going in or coming out, and we’ll leave. We’ll drive to her house, grab a few of her things, and run.

I text her again before I leave, and I keep it generic, in case her dad sees it. Might stop by church.

No response. Not that I was expecting one.

I’m gonna talk to her today, no matter what. If I don’t find her at church, I’m going to her house, the store—hell, I’ll scour the forest to find her. I’m not giving up unless I hear straight from her mouth that she doesn’t want to leave with me.

Hindley’s sleeping off an ass-ton of whiskey in his room, so he doesn’t notice me carrying a couple bags out the back door and through the trees to my truck.

I head inside one more time to check on our Sleeping Beauty in the spare room.

Not sure what Hindley’s gonna do with him once the Coosaw cousins show up wanting beds and entertainment.

They’re gonna have all kinds of twisted fun with our comatose buddy.

If I could take Ian with me, I would. But I gotta put me and Cathy first, and there’s no way we could lug around some supernatural coma patient. Besides, something about the guy still weirds me out.

“I’m leaving,” I tell Ian quietly. “Just wanted to say I’m sorry you’re like this.

Maybe it’s better this way. I got the feeling you weren’t a great person.

I mean you look decent, but inside…nope.

Your soul, man, it’s messed up. So yeah…

this is probably best for everyone. Maybe you’ll pass on quietly one night, if the Coosaw Lockwoods don’t kill you first. Or maybe you’ll stay like this forever.

Who’s to say? Anyway, I’m gone, and I’m taking Cathy with me. Good luck.”

A muscle in his face twitches.

Frowning, I lean over him. “Hey.”

He doesn’t respond. His eyes don’t move beneath his eyelids, and his breathing remains steady.

If he’s waking up, I need to get out of here before he makes any noise. My escape window narrows the longer I hang around here.

I hurry downstairs and out of the house, closing the back door quietly behind me. Then I hop into my truck and check my phone again.

Nothing from Cathy.

The fear that’s been dogging me since I last saw her nags at the back of my mind. I’ve looked for her on socials, but if she had any accounts, they’re gone. I haven’t set eyes on her in days. What if her dad hurt her? What if the church folks at Wicklow hurt her, despite what that pastor said?

I don’t care if she really is ghosting me or not; if anyone has hurt her—if they’ve so much as touched her or scared her, even a little—I’m going to lose my fucking shit. She doesn’t have to be with me, but she deserves to be free.

There’s another possibility, of course. She could be wandering around the woods on some crying jag, deep in one of her banshee episodes.

Maybe she’s had more episodes than usual lately, and that’s why she hasn’t been in touch.

Or…god, what if she had an episode and fell in a hole, broke her leg or something, and she’s lying out in the woods waiting for me to come find her?

What if she wandered onto the road and got hit by a truck? What if…

The bottom drops out of my world for a second, and my brain screams, What if she died? right before I remember the tattoo that links me to her.

If she’s dead, I’d know it. But I can’t bear to think of her needing me when I’m not there.

Unless my first theory was right and she’s done with me. Can’t bear to think on that too long either.

I’m driving dangerously fast. I need to slow down.

Don’t wanna test how genuine my driver’s license looks just yet.

I got me a Social Security number now, too, all linked up to the license.

The guy I bought the identity package from said the SSN was legit, that everything was “clean,” so I’d be good to go, whatever that means.

He better have been right. I sure paid him enough.

There’s a mist hanging over the grass this morning.

I pull off the road just before I get to the church and walk through the fog until I’m right at the edge of the trees bordering the church’s land.

I can see the parking lot pretty clearly, and the entrance to the church.

Everything is gray and wet and dripping, and the people entering the church fit the mood ’cause they’re all dressed in black.

There’s a reddish car pulling up, the dull color of drying blood. It parks, and Cathy’s Aunt Nellie gets out.

A couple seconds later, Cathy climbs out of the passenger side.

She’s wearing a black dress, long sleeved, high necked. Her brown hair has been combed flat against her skull and woven into a long, tight braid. Not a stray curl. I can only see the side of her face from here, but she looks calm and content. Like this church service is where she wants to be.

Holding a Bible to her chest, she walks sedately at Aunt Nellie’s side.

She mounts the steps just as Edgar fucking Linton comes through the open double doors.

He pauses. Takes her hand in his. Smiles with all his stupid teeth, leans close, and speaks in her ear.

She nods and then follows Aunt Nellie into the church.

My hand shoots out and grasps the slender trunk of a sapling near me. I clutch the tree savagely, my chest heaving.

The Cathy I know is wild, mischievous, hungry for sex and adventure. But in the two weeks since we last spoke, she has changed. They’ve turned her into one of them.

Here I was, like an idiot, working my ass off, draining myself to the dregs, struggling to make enough money so we could run away together—and all the time she was ghosting me on purpose. She was making her choice, and she chose them . Him.

I almost leave right that second. But I’m determined to talk to her, to make damn sure this is what she wants, that she’s not being forced into this or playing some act—so I stalk through the trees, back and forth, for the next hour and a half, until the churchgoers start filing out of the building and into their cars.

It’s a slow exodus, since they all seem to want to stop and say goodbye to Edgar Linton, who stands at the door and sheds a benevolent smile over every church member.

Why is he acting like the pastor all of a sudden? And why does everyone seem so fucking obsessed with him? Several of the women actually kiss the back of his hand before leaving.

When I glimpse Cathy’s pale face in the shadow of the doorway, my stomach flips and my heart starts racing. Shit, I got it bad.

She’s smiling at Edgar Linton. Looks a little forced to me, but it’s tough to tell at this distance.

I’m about to walk out of the shadow of the trees, cross the distance between us, demand some answers from him, from Cathy—but someone else comes out of the church and my lungs seize up with shock and I just stand there, stunned.

It’s Ian. The coma guy from the Grange.

But it can’t be. I just left him there. He was sleeping. I said goodbye…

And now he’s standing at Edgar Linton’s side, plain as day, wearing a suit, shaking hands with the congregation just like a pastor would.

What the actual fuck is going on?

Cathy is halfway across the parking lot with her aunt Nellie. If I’m going to talk to her, it’s got to be now.

Ian squeezes someone’s hand, descends the front steps, and heads around the corner of the church.

I can follow him and see where he’s going, or I can run across the parking lot to Cathy.

Cathy is mine and I’m hers. I should go to her. But my brain, my whole body, is yelling an alarm about Ian, and I can’t shake the nauseating sense of dread connected with him.

Looks like Cathy’s going home with her aunt Nellie. I can find out the address and catch her there later. But if I don’t move now , I’m losing my chance to figure out what Ian is up to and how he’s awake…if it really is him. Maybe he’s got a twin.

I jog through the woods, skirting the church property, keeping my eye on Ian.

When he gets to the back of the church, he pauses. No windows back here and nobody around.

Ian shakes himself—a quick shudder—and then he jumps forward. In the middle of that leap, his body fluidly shifts into a new shape—a black stag whose branching antlers look like twin tangles of wicked, gleaming thorns as long as my forearm. The stag bounds into the forest and disappears from sight.

Fuck.

Just… fuck .

He’s a supernatural, that much is clear. Hindley pretty much said he was, didn’t know what kind, but now I do. Shapeshifter. A púca, maybe, from the old stories. Those are rare, but they can shift into all kinds of animals—goats, horses, stags, dogs, crows, cats.

Question is, why has he been pretending to be unconscious this whole time? And why would he show up here, at Wicklow Heritage Chapel? Does he know how dangerous this town is for supernaturals like him?

I can’t keep up with a stag, so I head to my truck and drive back to the Grange.

My money is in a waterproof gym bag, so after parking the truck in its usual spot, I find a hollow in the ground and stick the bag there, covering it up with a thick layer of leaves and branches.

I drag some kudzu vines over the heap for extra camouflage, and then I hoist my duffel bag of clothes and possessions onto my shoulder.

No way am I leaving town before I figure out what’s going on.

If I’m lucky, Hindley will never know I almost left today.

Inside the Grange, I race up to my room and chuck my duffel bag in the closet. I’ll unpack later. First I need to check on our coma patient.

I burst into the guest room—and there he is, lying pale and peaceful on the bed.

“No way,” I mutter, striding in. I rip back the sheets.

He’s wearing the same pajamas he’s been in the whole time.

Okay, so as a stag he could head straight for the Grange through the woods, while I had to take the roads. He could have beaten me here and changed real quick.

Swearing under my breath, I search the room for a black suit. Nothing.

“Hey.” I smack the side of his face. “Wake up. Game over, okay? I know you’re not really unconscious.”

His head lolls at the smack, but otherwise he doesn’t stir.

And then I lose my temper.

I knock him around a bit, pull his hair, pinch his thigh, yell in his face, drag him off the bed, shake him around. Still nothing. He just hangs there, limp as a rag doll, mouth slack and eyes closed.

“I’m gonna cut your balls off if you don’t quit this act,” I snap.

“I swear it, man. I’m not fucking around.

” I shove his limp body into a jumble on the bed, then pull my knife from my back pocket and flip out the blade.

“Here goes.” I poke the tip of the blade against his crotch.

“Feel that? I’m not kidding. I’ll do it unless you drop this act. ”

But there’s no response. He doesn’t flinch, even when I dig the knife into his thigh until a couple red drops bloom through the pajama bottoms.

So…he’s not faking. Which makes me feel like an asshole for putting him through all that. But I had to be sure.

There’re a few possibilities I can think of.

One, the guy has a twin who’s a shapeshifter.

Two, he’s doing that astral-projecting thing I saw in a movie once.

Three, he’s been waking up sometimes and leaving the house to do things, then returning here to collapse back into his comatose state. Which makes no sense.

None of it makes any sense.

I rearrange the guy on the bed and pull the sheets over him.

Then I check the window. It’s not made for keeping folks in—easy enough to open and there’s no screen.

I fetch Hindley’s tools and some wood scraps, and I board up the window.

There’re a couple extra padlocks in the basement, so I fetch one and install it on the guest room door.

Hindley staggers out of his room while I’m testing the padlock. I’m surprised the noise I’ve been making didn’t rouse him before now. But when he drinks hard and takes drugs on top of that, he sleeps like the dead.

“The fuck you doin’?” he slurs.

“Renovating,” I reply.

“You think that’s funny? This ain’t your house and won’t ever be as long as I got somethin’ to say about it. I don’t care what Dad wanted. It’s mine, and—” He breaks off the sentence abruptly, as if he said something he didn’t mean to.

“Wait, what does that mean? ‘What Dad wanted’?” My heart starts pounding again as the words sink into my brain.

“Never mind,” Hindley mutters. “Fuck. I don’t care what you’re up to. Just give me that key in case I need to check on him.”

“You never check on him,” I retort, but I hand it over anyway.

Hindley shuffles past me, heading for the stairs and leaving me with my whirling thoughts.

I never did see Buckland’s will. Hindley’s sleazebag of a lawyer read it aloud, but I never actually saw it. The family said Buckland Lockwood left me nothing. Everything went to Hindley. It hurt at the time, but I didn’t question it. After all, Hindley was Buckland’s son by blood.

Maybe I was wrong to accept it quietly. Too late now, though. If there was an original will that made me the heir to anything, Hindley would have destroyed it long ago. Even he isn’t dumb enough to keep a document like that around.

It means something, though—the idea that Buckland might have left me the house or even a share of it.

Might have meant more to me years back, when he died.

Knowing about the will might have given me a sense of belonging that I’ve never really had.

As it is, I don’t feel much more than a flicker of gratitude to the old bastard. I’m out of here soon anyway.

Something crashes downstairs, and Hindley roars several curses. Then he shouts, “Heathcliff, you dickwad, get your ass down here! My right ankle tattoo’s buzzin’! Looks like we got a job to do.”