it wanted to get a look at the new people who had moved into Lilith House. It’d come right up to the burned-up building—the place that made Haddie’s bones feel like lead—in the back before disappearing into the trees once more. It was like it was curious about them.
Haddie was curious too.
She stepped gingerly over a cluster of wild mushrooms, careful not to touch them because she felt their heaviness, glancing over her shoulder when she heard a soft crunch. Whatever was moving behind her slipped into the shadows. She only got the impression of darkness and the sharp edge of a horn or a tusk. Haddie’s heart thumped and she swallowed, trying to pull forth the weight of the thing. Not the weight of its body, the feeling wasn’t about that. Haddie didn’t have a better word for the sense she got about things. She only knew that when her bones got heavy, when her whole body felt full-up with the weight of a person or a thing so that she couldn’t even move, that there was badness in it. The opposite of her mommy who felt as light as a feather to Haddie. So light that when Haddie was around her, she sometimes felt like she was floating. Her mommy was good and . . . light. As weightless as the sparkly bubbles Haddie blew with the big yellow wand Gram gave her.
She stood still, trying, trying to measure the weight of the thing behind her, but could not. Something was wrong. Or . . . different. She couldn’t get a sense of what and that made Haddie’s skin prickle even while her curiosity kicked up.
What are you? Why can’t I feel you?
She’d experienced this before. Sometimes with people she passed on the street, and once with a little boy who was in her music class. Mostly, she got it with very, very old people. Sometimes those old people died very soon after, like Mrs. Klaus in the apartment building where she used to live. She wondered if the thing behind her was very, very old and about to die.
She stepped forward, and the thing followed. She bent down to pick a white flower with a black center growing in the shade of a giant tree, adding it to the yellow ones clutched in her fist. Mommy would like these. That worried look she got on her face sometimes when she stared at Haddie and didn’t know Haddie could see her would vanish momentarily. Mommy would smile and put the flowers in water on the windowsill the way she did when Haddie used to bring a rose home from Gram’s garden, and their new house would feel a little more like home.
As Haddie stood straight, a slow drumming sounded behind her along with words, said in a low, scratchy voice. It wasn’t singing . . . but more like the way the men in the church had sounded at Mrs. Klaus’s funeral as they walked with smoking sticks down the aisle behind her casket.
Haddie didn’t know what the words the thing behind her meant, but they made her bones heavy. They made her bones so heavy they ached. The words were bad words. They meant something bad and terrible. Haddie barely noticed the flowers drifting to the forest floor as, trembling, she turned around to face the thing saying the words she didn’t know but could feel. Her chest rose and fell rapidly as the drumbeat and the words grew quieter, moving away from her in the other direction, deeper into the cool darkness. Whatever had been following her was leaving.
Haddie stood still for several moments, the ache in her bones subsiding. Movement to her right caught her attention and she turned to see a red fox staring at her, its head cocked to the right. The red fox felt light. It didn’t mean her any harm. She wondered if the dark thing did. Haddie let out a slow breath, turning toward Lilith House and making her way back to her mother.
CHAPTER THREE
Scarlett set the box of dishes on the kitchen counter and wiped her hands down her thighs. That was the last of the boxes, all they’d shoved into the trunk of her SUV before leaving their small rental apartment in the Playa Vista area of Los Angeles. The moving truck would arrive in a few days with their beds, mattresses, and a few other pieces of essential furniture. But all their other possessions now resided inside