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Mom was quiet for a moment before she said, “Sweetie, Emilia died twenty years before you were born.”
“What?” I dropped my phone from my suddenly limp hand.
Fumbling to retrieve it before she hung up on me, I pressed the receiver back to my ear in time to hear, “…It started when you were four. You’d say you wanted Yaya to come back and play tea with you. That’s exactly what your father said he used to call her, too. Yaya. And when he asked you more about her, you described her perfectly, saying she wore a coral and pearl necklace and smelled like lemons, which was what he remembered most about her as well. Except no one had ever mentioned her to you before. There was no possible way you should’ve known any of that or even who she was.”
“Oh God,” I uttered.
“But what really shook your father,” my mom went on, “was when you told him that she had a message for him; that she’d seen him take her La Catrina figurine, but it was okay because she wanted him to have it, anyway.”
“So…” I asked. “Had he really taken the figurine?”
“Of course. He said he only intended to borrow it and show it to one of his school friends, then put it back, but then she died, and he could never return it.”
“Wait.” I frowned. “Are you talking about the little knickknack that’s sitting on the mantle in the front room?”
“The very one,” Mom answered. “Until you passed that message along to him, he’d had it hidden away in a chest for years, too guilty about taking it in the first place to let anyone know he had it. But when you told him she was okay with it being with him, he finally brought it out and put it on display for everyone to see.”
“No way,” I croaked. “That is just…” I could literally feel my hair start to crawl. “Jesus, Mom. I can’t freaking believe this. Why in the world did you nevertellme any of this before?”
“Well, frankly, honey… It kind of freaked me out,” she admitted. “And I didn’t want to freakyouout too. I mean, you never went through anything like that again, so apparently, you must’ve outgrownwhateverit was.”
After blowing out a long breath, I answered, “Except…I don’t think I have. Mom, something really strange happened to me here.”
There was a pause, and then my mother released a breath. “Oh Lordy. Who did you see this time?”
33
OAKLYNN
Well, Thalia had been right; calling my parents had made me feel a lot better. After talking everything through with Mom, something inside me calmed. I knew I could handle whatever came next.
And refusing to be afraid of my own bedroom, I walked up the stairs.
The hallway was stillnotmy favorite place in the brownstone. But reminding myself that the monster in the darkness was just Thalia, I felt better.
The door to her room had been shut. I tried the handle, only to find it locked again.
That was fine. I didn’t want to go in there and see the eerie, empty walls, anyway.
“Thalia?” I called hopefully, wondering if I could just get her to appear whenever I wanted.
But no one answered.
So I trudged to my room and took a long shower.
That night, I slept in my own bed, and everything was okay. Except Thalia didn’t show herself to me for the rest of the weekend.
Damien stayed away too. He didn’t visit, didn’t call, didn’t text.
I had told him to get out, so he’d followed my order to a T, giving me all that space that I had demanded.
I wasn’t sure what to think of that. I was still confused where he was concerned.
But, just because I got nothing from the Archer siblings didn’t mean I had no visitors at all.
On Sunday afternoon, a knock on my door had me curiously wandering to the front window to peer out the curtain and see who it was.
And the six guys gathered on my front step immediately had me groaning.
