“It just doesn’t make any sense,” I murmur.
“Maybe itdoesmake sense, and you’re just not looking at it the correct way.” Seth’s voice precedes the boy himself entering the living room, dressed in an oversized hoodie and ripped blue jeans. A pair of oversized headphones rests on his shoulders around his neck.
Jake lifts a brow. “Care to elaborate, baby bro?”
Seth’s fingers begin to tap against his thigh as he focuses on the wall, the ceiling, the framed photographs in the corner…anywhere but us. “Maybe you need to look at it differently, that’s all.”
With that, he turns on his heel and exits the room.
Jake and I stare after him in confusion.
“That’s… Well, that was something,” Jake says, forking his fingers through his hair and ruffling the strands.
“He has a point,” I say.
Jake nods. “I’m just wondering if it’s more than just a point, if you know what I mean. Maybe he…knows something that we don’t.”
All four of us foster kids—Jake, Lissa, Seth, and me—are a part of the supernatural world in some capacity. I’m, apparently, the offspring of a witch and a wolf. Jake is a golem. But Lissa and Seth? We still don’t know what they are or the powers they possess. It’s entirely possible that Seth has insight we’re not aware of.
“How is Lissa, by the way?” I ask, thinking of my younger foster sister with her jubilant smile and love for pink.
Or at least, that was the case until recently. After she discovered a dead body in an abandoned barn, she changed, turning into a shell of the girl I remember.
I miss my bubbly sister.
Jake hesitates, and unease curdles in my gut.
“What? How bad is it?” I demand.
“Did you see what she did at the picnic? I didn’t, but I heard about it.” Jake nibbles on his lower lip—an obvious sign of his distress.
“Yeah. I mean, I don’t understand what happened, but she was there?—”
“And I screamed.”
Lissa’s voice makes me jump a foot in the air.
I don’t normally lower my guard, but being around Jake—in a house that has become more familiar to me than anywhere else in the world—has made some of my tension drain away until I felt almost…normal.
Something I’ll definitely have to rectify. In this world, you can’t afford to lose your defenses, even for a second.
Jake and I both turn to see Lissa watching us from the doorway, still dressed entirely in black. Black sweatshirt. Black leggings. Black shoes—though I swear at one point they were white. Did she paint them?
“I screamed,” she repeats, her voice an emotionless monotone. “I screamed, and screamed, and screamed, until everyone’s ears and eyes bled. You want to know who else screams?” She cants her head to the side, a strand of dyed hair sliding over one shoulder. “Or, a better word is,whatelse screams? A banshee.” Her upper lip curls away from her teeth in what I’d almost describe as a snarl. “I screamed like a literal banshee.”
Thirty
IZZY
Words from the book Soraya lent me flit through my mind.
Banshees…
Harbingers of death…
Their screams signaling the end…
I think of the eerie trance Lissa found herself in when she led me to the barn, where the first woman was murdered. Her blood-curdling scream. The vacant look in her eyes when she arrived at the picnic. Her unhinged jaw. The blood.
