Page 132 of The Sister's Curse

“I’m not leaving you,” he said stubbornly.

“I need you to get Gibby away. This water is too high for him…he could drown. I’ll be along in a bit,” I whispered, as convincingly as I could. Truth be told, I didn’t want him to see what I was going to do next. Because it was going to be something my father would approve of.

“I can’t leave you,” he insisted.

“Nick, please.”

He reached out and kissed me, his lips cold in the rain. Nick and Gibby slowly retreated up the trail.

I turned my attention back to the scene before me.

Just yards from where Dana had been killed, Viv lay on the bank. I could tell she wasn’t breathing. She was curled in onherself, as if she occupied an invisible egg. Her throat was bruised. Her hands, tangled under her chin, were pierced by railroad spikes, and more spikes prickled from her feet. Blood trickled into the sandy soil. I was too late.

“What the hell did you do?” I turned on Lister, wrath boiling in my throat.

Lister looked up at me. He choked on his snot before answering. “Jeff and Quentin and I…when we were in high school…we killed a girl. It wasn’t my idea, I swear! And now…again…”

“Tell me,” I hissed.

“It was Dana Carson! It was Dana Carson!” he burbled.

“Why?” I demanded.

Snot bubbled in his nose, and it was like a dam broke when he started babbling. “When we were kids, we messed around with the occult. At first, it was just fucking around with a Ouija board in Jeff’s parents’ basement. Stupid shit. Lots of drinking.”

“Go on.”

“So…this one time, when Jeff’s parents were away, we tried to do a ritual at the creek behind Jeff’s house. We’d been reading about the Order of the Golden Dawn, and we tried some shit.”

“What kind of shit?”

He grimaced. “We found some stuff in Jeff’s basement—black candles, and shit written in old books. Jeff said he could channel spirits. It was…I guess it was good, creepy fun at first, but I think we summoned something. Something…Jeff called it the Forest King.”

I stopped breathing. “What did it look like?”

“Like…like a shadow with antlers.”

My grip on the shotgun trembled. This couldn’t be. It couldn’t be my father’s Forest God, Veles, could it?

“I thought I was drinking too much. Fuck me, I definitely was.”Lister’s words came out in a panicked rush, and I let them wash over me. “We were all sort of fucked up then, you know? Jeff’s dad had declared bankruptcy. Quentin was moving away. My parents were divorcing. Our worlds were coming to an end. Maybe that’s why we were willing to believe in crazy supernatural shit, and that if we made an offering…so the Forest King would do our bidding.”

“So you…sacrificed Dana?” My voice sounded remote, hollow.

“Shut up, Mark!” Sumner shouted, and Jasper kicked Sumner in the back of the knee, knocking him to the dirt.

Lister babbled. “Jeff…Jeff said we could make a sacrifice, and everything would turn out all right. We found Dana Carson on the Fourth of July. She was by herself, and we didn’t think that anybody would…would miss her. Especially not twenty-five years later.”

“She was a person. She mattered.” I kicked him in the ribs. He grimaced and clutched his side. “How did you do it?”

He wheezed. “Urk…Jeff…he drugged her with a chemical, and we took her to his house. We did a ritual then. We needed blood…We drew blood from her hands and feet with railroad spikes. Quentin read from one of the books while Jeff choked her. We thought she was dead. Jeff said we should burn her body—deep in the woods, so the King of the Forest would see.

“We put her in Quentin’s car, took her to the river. We drove past the fireworks, to here. This place was magic.”

I stood over Lister, listening. In the distance, thunder rolled. Water had pushed the candles in jars away, and they floated into the swelling river.

“But Dana woke up when we took her out of the trunk, and we freaked the fuck out. She was half-awake, crying, wheezing…Jeff’s dad…he kept some chemicals in the basement, and we tookthose. Jeff dumped her in the grass on that island in the river. He told me to throw the chemical on her. And he told me to set her on fire.

“I did it. I fucking did it. I threw a match on her. It was…horrific. She went up in a blue flash, screaming, and then lay down in the grass. When the fire burned out, I knew she was dead.