Page 136 of Love at First Fright

“Come on, then,” Brad said, louder now. “We know you’re here. Stop pissing about and show yourself.”

The wind picked up.

Not a gentle breeze. A sudden, violent gust that sent my hair whipping across my face and made the apple tree’s branches groan overhead. The sky, which had been merely slightly cloudy, darkened to an ominous grey-black.

My pulse quickened. Even after everything I’d witnessed here, some naïve part of me hadn’t actually expected this to work.

The wind intensified, howling now, and Brad’s carefully constructed salt circle began to blur. White grains lifted from the ground, swirling in miniature cyclones before scattering across the garden like snow.

“Oh, shit,” Bat breathed. He flew to my side, his form flickering with panic. “Charlie, we need to go. Now.”

He grabbed my arm, trying to pull me away from the grave, but his grip kept phasing in and out.

“Run!” he shouted over the wind. “Please, just run!”

Thomas and Molly had already vanished.

The skeleton began to vibrate against the earth, bones rattling like chattering teeth. Then, impossibly, the scattered pieces drew together, fusing into solid form as the frame lurched upright.

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

I couldn’t breathe. And I most certainly couldn’t move.

Around the standing bones, the air shimmered. A figure materialised—translucent at first, then gaining substance and fury. A woman in a tattered dark dress, her face twisted with rage and her eyes burning like coals.

When she spoke, her voice carried the weight of centuries and the promise of violence. “How dare thee disturb my rest!”

For the first time since I’d met him, Brad looked genuinely terrified—his face drained of colour as he looked to me, eyes wide with panic.

I shrugged. What did he expect me to do? Genuinely surprisingly, the ExorSquad handbook hadn’t covered Confronting Vengeful Spirits You’ve Just Dug Up.

Brad dropped to one knee in the dirt, bowing his head. “Great witch, we—”

“WITCH?”

The word exploded from Margery’s lips like thunder. The ground beneath us shuddered violently, and the apple tree’s branches thrashed overhead as if caught in a hurricane.

“I AM NOT A WITCH!”

Her voice boomed across the garden, rattling the manor’s windows. The sound reverberated in my teeth, in my bones, in every cell in my body. Oh dear.

Brad scrambled backwards on his hands and knees. “I—I meant no disrespect, I was only—”

“Shut up, Brad,” I said.

Bat’s grip on my arm intensified, his shape flickering with desperation. “Charlie, please, we have to go. She’s too strong, she’ll hurt you!”

A large part of me wanted to listen to him. To let him pull me away from here. To run out that gate and never look back.

Yet I found myself stepping forward instead, raising my hands in what I hoped was a placating gesture. “Madame Margery, we just wanted to ask you some questions. That’s all. We didn’t mean to—”

Margery’s burning gaze snapped to me, and the world exploded into pain.

An invisible force slammed into my chest, lifting me clean off my feet and hurling me backwards towards the apple tree, and I had just enough time to think this is going to hurt before my back collided with the bark.

The impact drove every molecule of air from my lungs. White light splintered through my vision as supernatural power pinned me against the wood, crushing my ribs, making it impossible to breathe. My glasses flew from my face, spinning through the air before striking the small M.D. grave marker with a sharp crack.

The sound of my lenses breaking seemed ridiculously important, considering I was probably about to die.