Page 13 of Soul of Shadow #1

That day at school, Charlie told herself she was done with the investigation. That she had nosed around enough. That nosing brought her more questions than answers.

Everyone was talking about the missing boys.

The Peterson twins. Charlie used to know them well.

They were both rowdy and athletic. When Sophie was still alive, their mom used to send them to the Peterson house for playdates.

Something about being the only sets of twins in their grade.

Their moms assumed they should be best friends.

And they were friendly with the boys, bouncing on the trampoline in the backyard or showing off a simple magic trick or two, but they never became best friends. Not the way they did with Lou.

All afternoon, Charlie tried to keep her mind off of them.

When Lou and Abigail blew up their group chat with messages, she slipped her phone into her pocket.

When her other classmates showed each other news clips of the carved-up tree on their phones, she averted her eyes.

She had made a promise to her mother, hadn’t she?

And even though she had already broken it once, that didn’t mean she should do it again .

That was what she told herself, over and over, until the final bell rang.

After school, she dropped off Lou and Abigail at their respective houses. Then she stepped on the gas, heading straight for the woods.

The forest was just as flooded with police as it had been the first time. If anything, there were more authorities involved. Probably at the state level, maybe even federal. The longer this case went on, the more attention it would get. Charlie had watched enough murder mysteries to know that much.

She parked well out of sight. The tree they were investigating this time was approximately two hundred yards from the original. Whoever took these boys clearly had a target area: this forest. Which Charlie promised her mother she would stay away from. A promise she had now broken twice.

She shut the car door quietly. Touched her back pocket, checking to ensure her lucky deck of cards was still in place. Then she crept over the dying leaves and moss-covered rocks, deeper into the woods.

As she walked, she wondered, for the dozenth time, why she was there.

What she could possibly add to this investigation that the police couldn’t handle on their own?

She received decent grades and never struggled with her subjects, but she was no genius.

Not like Abigail. She supposed the best display of her intelligence was through her magic tricks, through her quick mind and even quicker fingers, always one step ahead of the viewer.

But magic didn’t solve missing persons’ cases, did it ?

Still. She felt compelled to be there. It was as if a siren stood somewhere in the forest, and it was calling just to her.

She was contemplating the image of a siren when she saw him.

At first, it was only a flash of dark hair, the hem of a black T-shirt. Someone was darting from tree to tree, trying to keep out of view of the police. Charlie crouched low, taking cover behind a patch of juniper and peering out over the top.

Behind the tree, twenty feet ahead, was Elias.

She knew it the minute she saw his haircut. Knew it in the wide lines of his shoulders, the circumspect way he peered around the tree trunk. He was here, at the scene of the crime.

Again.

Charlie thought back to Monday afternoon, when, after her conversation with Mason, she had written him off as not suspicious. She had been so sure then. So sure that he was just a lost boy, marred by grief, masking that sadness with humor and sarcasm. But now…

Now she wasn’t so sure.

Up ahead, Elias crept a few yards to the left, so Charlie crept a few yards to the left, too. Elias dropped to his hands and knees and bear-crawled between bushes. Charlie did the same. She played this copycat game for five full minutes before realizing that she was, in fact, stalking him.

What was her purpose here? Elias hadn’t actually done anything wrong. Sure, he showed up in the forest when he shouldn’t have, but if that was her accusation, Charlie was guilty, too.

Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something deeper was at work here.

Either he was connected to these disappearances, or he felt the same siren’s call to the forest that she did.

In either case, she wanted to know the truth.

So when Elias skirted around a bush and ducked under a tree, she did the same, never letting him out of her sight.

Charlie followed Elias deeper into the woods. He wound through the trees with clear purpose, as if he had walked this way many times before. Ducked around birch and cedar, high-stepped juniper and moss. Charlie followed at a cautious distance, keeping her footsteps as stealthy as possible.

Before long, she saw Elias push aside one final cluster of branches, disappearing from view.

She counted fifteen seconds, then tiptoed out from behind the tree where she was hiding and skirted over to where Elias had just been.

Holding her breath, she stuck her fingers into the branches and nudged them gently aside.

In the clearing beyond was a house.

The house took her by surprise. Most homes in Silver Shores looked like your average American home, with red brick and white picket fences.

Not this one. This house appeared to have been pulled straight out of a Victorian storybook: old and ornate, with blue-painted wood; a steep, gabled black roof; and a tall turret in the northeast corner.

A porch wrapped around the front, painted the same dark blue as the rest of the house.

There were no lights on, but she thought she glimpsed a faint orange flicker in one of the windows.

Was this where Elias lived? Was this his foster family’s house? She had never seen it before, but then, she’d never ventured this far into the woods.

Charlie crept toward the flickering light in the window. The yard surrounding the house was, thankfully, unkempt and peppered every few feet with unruly bushes. Charlie ducked behind a bush, waited a few seconds, then dove behind the next-closest one.

After a few minutes of this, she made it to the house. She stayed low to the ground, shuffling up to the blue-painted siding on her hands and knees. Once she could touch the wood of the turret, she turned around, pressing her back to the wall.

Charlie exhaled. What the hell was she doing?

She had followed Elias without thinking about it, moving with the purpose of a woman possessed by curiosity and suspicion.

Now she was here. About to spy on his foster family.

What did she even hope to find in there?

Murder weapons? Robbie Carpenter’s body?

The twins? Ridiculous! Unless his foster family were all serial killers, too, there would be no evidence out in the open.

But logic could not dissuade her from what she was about to do, because logic had not driven her here in the first place. It was a feeling. A buzzing in her veins, a tingle at her fingertips. An excitement, yes, but something greater than that, too. Something she could not explain.

She turned around and, inch by inch, rose to her feet to peer in through the window.

The inside of Elias’s house was dark but for a few dim lights that were probably candles.

Through the dusty windowpane, she could make out a small, round room tucked inside the turret.

There was hardly any furniture: a ratty armchair, a rickety side table, a moth-eaten rug.

A lamp sat on the table, but it looked like it hadn’t been switched on in years.

Charlie thought she even saw a spiderweb woven within the lampshade.

The other side of the turret opened up to the rest of the house, revealing a long hallway that disappeared into the dark .

What the hell?

Maybe she had been wrong. Maybe this wasn’t where Elias lived but instead was some creepy, abandoned house where he came to do drugs. Or something. Charlie had never done drugs herself, but she had always imagined that this was the type of venue where one found them.

If her hypothesis was right, she should probably turn around and leave. Drug addicts were notoriously volatile, like bombs that could go off at the slightest provocation. If she were discovered spying, there was no telling what Elias would do.

And yet. Her brother was friends with this boy. If Elias was into something dangerous, shouldn’t she find out?

A light clicked on in a room down the hall.

With its illumination, something switched on within Charlie, too. An impulse. A desire—no, a need to know exactly what Elias Everhart was doing inside this spooky old house. It thrummed within her, egging her onward.

Go.

She took off before she could think better of it.

Darted along the side of the house. Crept up the front steps and onto the porch.

Stepped carefully across, cringing every time one of the boards squeaked.

Stopped in front of the high, glass-paned front door.

Took a deep breath, then reached down and slowly turned the doorknob.

The front door wasn’t locked. She cracked it open, moving in slow motion as she pushed it wide. She silently thanked every god she could think of when the hinges didn’t squeak. She slipped inside the house and shut the door behind her.

Once inside, Charlie was swallowed by the dark. The house smelled of dust and decay. Shadow-eyed portraits lined the walls. Unlit candles sat on the entryway table. A coat rack loomed by the door, bare and skeletal.

She peered down the hallway. Three doorways down, orange light spilled out into the hallway and danced along the dusty floral carpet. If Elias was anywhere inside this house, it was in that room.

Charlie held her breath and tiptoed down the hall.

As she moved, she began to hear sounds. The crackle and pop of burning candles.

Wind blowing in through an open window. And something low and constant, like a hum or a murmur.

Something at first unintelligible but, with every step closer, coalescing into whispered words, not English, not any language she had heard before.

Deep. Melodic. Like a long-forgotten language risen from the dead.

She reached the doorframe. This was it. She could peer into the room and risk being discovered by Elias—or whoever else might be inside—or she could turn around and retreat into the shadows.

It was never really a question.

Charlie held her breath, fingernails digging into her palm as she poked her head around the doorframe.

The room was larger than she’d expected.

It looked as if it had once been a grand dining room, with high ceilings featuring long beams and ornate crown molding.

An immense, dust-covered tapestry covered the far wall, while a fireplace burned in the corner.

She could easily imagine a fancy dinner party taking place within these walls: a long wooden table, lavish dishware, a turkey at the center, guests in ballgowns and delicate white gloves.

But the scene didn’t hold in Charlie’s imagination for long, because what was actually waiting within…

Wiped every other thought away.