The first, redheaded Effie, put a hand on Nicholas’s shoulder. “No more,” she said. Then Judy Templeton, and lastly, his own love, Abigail. She was still dripping wet, still bore the marks of Nicholas’s hands on her neck.
“You held me,” she said. “So tenderly. Under the black water. Until it filled me up. Until I became the water.” She turned his face to her, so their noses were nearly touching. “For that, I thank you. I live in the river, Nicholas. You ended me, but I live in the river, and it’s not a bad life.”
“I live in the fire,” Effie said. “I live in every sad soul who passes by on the bridge. I burn for every one of them.”
“I live in the rocks,” said Judy. “I’m the weight on your soul, Nicholas Day. The weight of everyone you took before their time.”
They looked down at Jo. “You’re not one of us,” said Abigail. “You are not the ice. You are not the wind or the cold.” Through her translucent form, Ash House gave a roar, a last death rattle as the roof caved in.
“Go,” Effie said. “Go back to the world. You brought him home.”
“Yes,” echoed Abigail. “And home is where his heart shall stay.”
“
He turned his eyes on Jo. “Please, Josephine. Nobody can love you like me.”
Jo rubbed her bloody hand across her freed throat. “My name,” she rasped, a voice like ashes, not her own, “is not Josephine.”
Nicholas and the three moved backward, on a current of their own making, until they stood in the red door, framed by the fire. Things leaped and danced in the flames, screamed and wailed, until the wind gave one last push and the house collapsed on itself, eating its own innards in a jet of flame that shot into the silvering sky.
Jo stood, and watched, blood dropping into the snow, and she watched the spot where Nicholas had last stood. She watched until the Coffin Hollow volunteer fire department came crawling down Route 7 in the blizzard, and watched until an EMT—Ani’s father, as it turned out—brought her to the ambulance. She watched, but she never saw Nicholas Day or any of the girls again.
7. Epilogue—January
Jo never said a word, and no one ever asked her beyond a cursory question how Ash House had burned. Ani came and sat with her in the ER and asked if Jo could forgive her for telling her father her best friend was fixing to do something stupid.
Ani’s grandmother patted her bandaged hand when she came by to return the necklace. “You hold on to that, child. You’re going to need it more than I ever did.”
Jo asked why, and Ani’s grandmother sighed, and lit one of her rancid cigarettes. “You think just everyone goes around attracting the dead, honey? Ain’t so. You’ve got an eye that sees into that shadow place, and unless you want to be deviled all your days—you keep that thing on.”
They went back to school, where nobody questioned that Jo had cut her hand on a broken glass in her own home.
Drew Powell came up to her their second week back. “You have my lighter,” he said.
“Not anymore,” Jo said. “Trust me, it went to a good cause.”
He reached out and lifted the necklace from her clavicle with his finger. Jo realized this was the first time she and Drew had ever touched. “Interesting,” he said. Jo shrugged.
“It’s broken. The clasp.” She twisted the chain to show where she’d affixed the two ends with a paper clip.
“I could fix it for you,” Drew said. “And maybe you can tell me why my mom had a nervous breakdown the day after Christmas, and told me that her friend from high school forgave her for not getting her out of the river.”
“I couldn’t tell you,” Jo said. She wanted to pull away, but Drew’s eyes caught her, while he tilted his head.
“Can’t, or won’t?”
“Drew,” she said. “Some things are just better off staying buried.”
He considered for a second. “You want a ride home?”
Jo smiled. “Yeah. I’d like that.”
“Come on, then,” Drew said. He smiled back at her. Jo realized this was the first time she’d seen Drew Powell smile. His smile was crooked and half-mast, like a bend in a country road. Nothing like a knife.
January thaw turned the roads to mud while Drew took the turns too fast, throwing up a fantail of earth and ice. Birds chittered from the bare trees, and on Route 7, the Acushket burbled under the ice, whispering in the language of black water. Jo reached over, turned up the radio, and drowned them out.
Drew didn’t slow down when they passed the bridge and the burned relic of Ash House, and Jo was glad. She nodded when Drew offered her a cigarette, and rolled down the window so she could put her hand out and feel the wind.
The trees would get green and the river ice would melt, and she and Ani would apply to all the same colleges and probably end up going to different ones. But not too far away. Spring would come. She’d spend time getting to know Drew Powell, whose eyes were gray and clear and hid nothing, and whose hands felt like nothing but warmth and calluses.
And soon, all along the banks of the river that had once hidden Nicholas Day’s terrible secret, the wild roses would bloom.
Hare Moon
BY CARRIE RYAN
It’s because the paths are forbidden that Tabitha always finds her way to them. She’s tired of being trapped behind the village fences, tired of being told what to do all the time. She wasn’t made for a life like this: sedate, rule-following. Boring.
The first time she opens the gate it’s on a dare to herself. To see if she’s just a dreamer or if she’s someone who can follow through on her promises. She wants to know that she’s more than just desires—she’s action.
She’d like to believe she isn’t terrified. That she doesn’t approach the gate and hesitate. Look through the rusty metal links at the brambles and brush obscuring the path and tremble.
That the dead along the fence don’t frighten her, their cracked and broken fingers reaching, always reaching and the moans calling for her.
It’s the sound of them that gets to her, the way they invade every part of her life. She hears them in her sleep, in her daydreams, during chores and services. She hears them when she’s praying to God.
And on the path there’s no escaping the Unconsecrated. They shuffle along the fences on either side of her, pushing and pulling and grating and needing. She’s never known need like that in her life. Doesn’t understand it.
But all the same she wants it.
Tabitha knows there are rules and rules are meant to be followed. Every morning she attends services and every evening she recites her prayers. She gives deference to her parents, cares for her younger siblings and completes chores without complaint. Well, without too much complaint.
During the winter months she does as she’s asked and smiles and demurs to the eligible young men her age, waiting for a husband to choose her.
They never do.
She’s okay with this because it isn’t the young men who call to her at night. It’s the Forest of Hands and Teeth. It’s the whisper of the trees that there’s a bigger life outside the fences. That there’s still a world that’s