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Without even waiting for my answer, she crouches low, running her gaze over the page. “What… what is this?”
I know I must sound nuts, but I tell her, “I think it’s a ‘true love’ spell.”
HOPE
“What?” Excitement fills my sister’s voice. “Oh my God. We have to try it.”
“Johanna—”
“No, seriously. I mean, I don’t think it’ll work… but I didn’t really thinking the Ouija board would do anything, either. You have to do it.”
Me? I push the book back toward Jo. “No. You do it!”
She shoves it back. “I can’t. I’m already married.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Mark Megill is really your true love?”
“And the father of my kids, thank you,” Johanna answers readily. “But you’re single and ready to mingle. A dead guy can’t be any worse than some of the losers you’ve dated.”
He’s not dead. He’s just… a phantom demon from another realm who can follow me into my dreams.
“Fine.” I give in. If Johanna really things I should do this… “Look. There are some instructions written at the bottom. It says… it says we need to use some salt to form a protective salt.”
“Makes sense. Okay. Go grab some from the kitchen.”
I can’t believe I’m really doing this. Even as I go up on my tip-toes, grabbing the big container of salt I use to refill my shakers, I can’t believe I’m doing this… but that doesn’t stop me.
Setting the salt down on the coffee table, I look at the bottom of the page again. “Hmmm… I know I don’t have any chalk. What about you?”
With a strangely sarcastic look, Johanna pats her pockets. “Nope. Sorry. Fresh out.”
“Really? You’re a teacher. Why don’t you have chalk?”
“Maybe because we rarely use the stuff these days? It’s all computers at the school. Besides, you’re a librarian. Does that mean you always carry a book with you? And this haunted one doesn’t count.”
Oh, Johanna. You really should’ve known the answer to that one.
Without looking away from my sister, I go and grab my purse. After digging around inside of it for a moment, I pull out my e-reader and my emergency paperback I carry just in case I forget to charge my Kindle and it dies. Raising my eyebrows, I show them both to Johanna.
She sticks her tongue out at me.
Snorting under my breath, I stow my book and my Kindle back in my bag. “Real mature, Jo.”
“Hey. I’m not the one who insists they’re being haunted.”
I already got the chance earlier to explain myself as soon as I got out of work. Johanna called me on her drive up from her house in Helmetta. A forty-five minute drive to Westfield, she kept me talking for at least twenty of those minutes, alternating between teasing me now that I’m not obviously freaking out, asking detailed questions—though I refuse to tell her about what I let the monster do to me… or the fact that it’s a horneddemonwho might be haunting me—about why I think I am being haunted, and talking me down when I start to ramp up again.
That’s another thing to love about my sister. If you asked her yesterday if she believed in ghosts, she’d wave her hand and shake her head. Today? Because I seem so sure of it, she shows up with pizza for dinner and an Ouija board.
I point at the open book. “If I’m not haunted, how do you explain that?”
“I don’t,” she agrees easily. “Sorry, Hope, but I’m pretty sure youarebeing haunted. At the very least, someone or something wants you to read that spell over there. So… are you?”
You know what? I am. Hopefully, when nothing happens, I can chalk this up to one really, really weird evening. Maybe then I can fall asleep and imagine talking to Sammael again, and he can try to explain why my subconscious is so obsessed with that book.
If he’s not real, his answer will comes straight for me. And if heisreal…
I grab the salt from Johanna and start shaking it on the floor. I don’t have any chalk to draw the protective sigil on the page—and here’s hoping nothing bad will happen if I don’t—so I swirl the container of salt around my head a couple of times like I’m freaking Allison from the old Disney classic, Hocus Pocus.
