Page 77 of The Sisters of Crimson House

“What do you want?” Charley said, staggering back in fear, feeling the pain radiate in her hand, throughout her body.

Miranda but not Miranda was upon her then, calm, efficient, a shark closing in on its prey. Nothing was reflected in those fathomless black eyes.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” she said.

Miranda grabbed her hand, and Charley screamed in pain, blood seeping from her palm as the final line of the Seeker’s Star was etched in place.

Thirty-Seven

Charley opened her eyes.

She was outside, and she struggled to take in her surroundings. It was dark, the night sky vast and starless above her. The hulking silhouette of a warehouse loomed before her, a neon sign winking off and on in the window, the h long since burned out. She knew this place. She was on Elizabeth Street, not the residential blocks of old Victorians that included Crimson House but the darker industrial strip with warehouses and few streetlights. It was a conduit she often took to the grocery to run errands. It was also the most direct route to the closest hospital. Surely Zavier had driven this way with an injured Astrid and Sy in the Subaru.

Charley’s heart thumped painfully in her chest, making it hard to hear the sound at first. She knew why she was here. She wanted to run back home, run far away from anywhere but here, but her legs rooted her to the spot. A noise from far away. The high-pitched keening of a car horn. Charley started walking toward the sound, and then she was running. There was a car crumpled against a fire hydrant. An old Mercedes that her father would sometimes let her drive as she sat on his lap, barely able to see over the wheel. They would laugh as he made her promise not to tell her mother, who always knew anyway. Of course she’d known.

Charley did not want to see inside that car, begged any god listening to make her wake up now, but she was wide awake, her feet inexorably drawn to the twisted, still-smoking metal of the car accident. The geyser of water that had erupted from the hydrant upon impact was now just a trickle, making small eddies around Charley’s feet. She was crying. She could feel hot tears on her cheeks.

She looked inside the car.

Charlie Reynolds rested against the steering wheel, his face mercifully turned away from her. Nicole Bryde’s long black hair drifted inside the car like ink. Like a magic trick on TV, they’d said on the news. A car locked from the inside full of water. Charley placed her palm against the glass of the passenger’s side window. There was no saving them now. She would never be able to save them.

Nicole opened her eyes, sitting up as if she had just been asleep. She screamed, the sound unintelligible underwater as she looked over Charley’s shoulder, beating the window with her scarred palm as if in warning. Charley whirled around in fear. Miranda stood just behind her, wearing the black slip dress that had been her costume for the Halloween Spectacular. She stared at the car, her face a blank mask as her mother continued to scream for help. Miranda’s mouth stretched grotesquely, as if something were clawing its way out from the inside. She doubled over, emptying out black smoke that curled and rippled as it stretched and elongated. Her sister collapsed, a spent, empty carcass.

“Miranda!” Charley sobbed. A woman in black made out of smoke and fear and agony glowered down at her. It had killed her parents that Halloween night long ago, drowning them while wearing the body of Miranda Bryde to do it, and it was here to finally finish the job. There was nowhere to run. Her mother’s screams echoed in her ears. Nicole beat her palm against the window, and in the final moments of her life, Charley did as she always had: turned to her mother for comfort. She placed her palm against her mother’s. Two Stars colliding, a supernova rippling across the universe.

Everything went white.

Thirty-Eight

Charley moved just in time to avoid the little girl pedaling by on her bicycle.

“Miranda, wait up!” she yelled.

She was the little girl on the bicycle. She was standing on the sidewalk watching herself pedal by. Blackness threatened to tunnel her vision, her stomach twisting and bile rising in her throat at the wrongness of it all. She could not be seeing this, feeling this. How was this possible?

“Stop following me!” yelled Miranda in response, her black hair streaming behind her. She maneuvered her bike off the sidewalk and onto the street, and Charley watched their destination, the massive oak tree that looked primordial in her vision, a giant standing nearly eighty feet tall with paper snakes that writhed and unfurled and hissed along its branches.

“You’re not supposed to ride in the street,” yelled Miranda.

“So go home and tell on me,” whispered Charley under her breath as she pedaled faster. Miranda knew this wouldn’t deter her. Charley would never be told no. Especially when there were snakes hanging from the tree. Little Charley pedaled faster, a grin on her face as she followed her sister’s bike off the sidewalk and into the street to cross after.

Charley was inside a sunlit car. She thrashed around the passenger seat in panic as she desperately tried to get her bearings. She squinted against the nearly unbearable brightness, winter sunlight streaming through the window, the window from her visions. It was a car window. Bouncy pop music played on the car radio, the driver humming along and seemingly unconcerned with Charley’s histrionics. The woman—late thirties, curly brown hair—squinted against the light and reached for her sunglasses from the glove compartment, knocking them to the floorboards by mistake. Charley stared at the woman with dawning horror.

“Shoot,” the woman said. One hand stayed on the steering wheel as she rooted around for them, her hand brushing the half-finished can of beer sloshing in the console. She lowered her head for just one moment. One impossible, perfect, terrible moment as the car hurtled through the two-way stop. Margaret Humphreys sat up, glasses in hand, her mouth only starting to take the shape of a scream as her brain and body braced for the impact, her car plowing into the little girl on the bike. Into Charley. Charley felt the scream rise in her throat, drowned out by a rising agonized wail that delivered her into an entirely different realm.

***

Sadie Bryde clamped a jeweled hand over her mouth to stop herself from screaming.

“My God,” said the woman with the brown curly hair in panic. “What did you see?” Margaret Humphreys sat opposite Sadie in her parlor, a lit candle between them.

Charley sat, invisible at their feet, but feeling her senses expanding everywhere in the room. Margaret’s hand was still outstretched, hovering in midair where Sadie had just been holding it. Sadie tried to recover, elegantly folding her hands in her lap. Her eyes filled with tears, and she dug her nails into the Star on her palm to stop them from flowing.

“My dear,” she said finally, and Charley could see her grandmother struggling to keep her breath under control, struggling to look her anxious client in the eye. “Sometimes the spirits are generous in their tidings, and sometimes they show us things just to remind us how little control we have.” She gave her client what she hoped was a reassuring smile. “I received a message that was intended for me, blatantly interrupting our session. I apologize for scaring you.”

“It’s no problem,” said Margaret, because she did not know what else to say. There came a knock on the door.

“Would you excuse me for just a moment, Mrs. Humphreys?”