“You calling me a liar?” Zack shouted at Jared, who was already a quarter of the way down the block.
Jared stopped short and turned back to face Zack. The other boy’s fists were clenched, and Jared knew that if he didn’t say exactly the right thing, Zack would come after him, and if he did, Chad would too. That was how it worked. “I’m not calling you anything,” he said, backing down as he saw the anger in Chad’s eyes as well as Zack’s. “All I’m saying is that if Baker was coming this way, he’d have been here long ago, and if we wait any longer, we’re all gonna be in trouble.”
Zack took a deep breath and one last look toward the corner where Seth Baker should have appeared at least fifteen minutes ago. “Okay,” he said, finally giving in. “But after school—”
“After school,” Chad broke in, “I’m gonna do what I should’ve done a long time ago. I’m gonna get him, and by the time I’m done with him, he’s gonna wish he’d never come near you last night.”
As Zack’s lips twisted into an ugly grin of anticipation, Jared Woods wondered whether Chad was just trying to impress Zack or if he was really going to help Zack Fletcher give Seth Baker the kind of beating he was talking about.
Teasing Seth all those years had been one thing.
Actually hurting him was something else.
Heather Dunne was waiting nervously by the front door as the three boys raced up the steps just as the first bell was ringing. As Zack reached the top step, Heather’s eyes widened. “Zack? What happened?”
“I’ll tell you later,” he muttered, unwilling to try to convince Heather that there’d been nothing he could do to defend himself from Seth Baker, not until he had enough time to figure out an answer for every question she might ask. “Got to get to class.” Chad and Jared had already gone into the building and were racing up the stairs to their lockers, and now Zack hurried after them.
“Zack!” Heather called out. “Wait a minute! You’re not going to believe—”
“Later!” Zack yelled back over his shoulder. “Tell me at lunch!”
Not even pausing at the landing halfway up the staircase, he took the second flight two steps at a time. He came through the door to the stairwell running, and almost crashed into Chad and Jared. Instead of frantically working the combinations to their lockers, as they should have been, they were standing frozen in place, staring down the corridor. Barely keeping his balance, Zack was about to push Chad aside when he saw what his two friends were gazing at.
Halfway down the corridor, standing in the very center of the corridor, was a figure clad completely in black. The face was an almost ghostly white, slashed with a bloodred gash of a mouth.
Two enormous eyes — eyes far larger than Zack would have thought possible — seemed to be staring right through him.
As he too stood frozen between his friends, the figure moved slowly toward him, and just as slowly, Zack recognized the face.
Angel.
His cousin.
Except this morning everything about her had changed.
It wasn’t just the makeup she was wearing, and the black clothes.
There was something else.
Something in the way she moved.
Instead of edging along the wall as she usually did, looking like she hoped no one would notice her, she walked down the center of the wide corridor, her eyes fixed on him.
Fixed on him in a way that made his blood run cold.
As she drew closer, he involuntarily took a step back, then wished he hadn’t. But it was too late.
She’d seen it.
And so had Chad and Jared, who were now edging away from him.
“Get out of the way, Zack,” Angel said. “I want to go downstairs.”
Zack’s mouth opened but nothing came out. What was going on? What did she think she was doing? But before he could figure out how to react, Angel slowly raised her right arm and pointed at him.
“I know what Seth did to you last night,” she said, “and I can do it too.”
As the terrible memory of being hurled straight up into the tree rose in his mind, Zack backed away.
Backed away, and let Angel pass.
Pausing at the top of the stairs, she turned and looked back at him once more.
“It’s witchcraft,” she said softly. “Or didn’t you tell Chad and Jared what really happened last night?”
His face ashen, Zack watched as Angel disappeared down the stairs. When she was gone, he turned back to Chad and Jared, to find both of them staring at him.
Staring at him almost as coldly as Angel had stared at him a moment ago.
Angel Sullivan paused outside the door to her first period class. She was late, but not very late — maybe a minute or two. But she didn’t care, because the look on Zack Fletcher’s face when he’d seen her coming down the hall was still fresh in her mind. He’d looked just as scared of her as her father had when she came downstairs this morning.
Having people look scared of her instead of the other way around was a whole new experience for her, and for the first time in her life, Angel didn’t care if people looked at her. In fact, as she’d walked to school that morning with Houdini frolicking along beside her, she actually looked forward to school for the first time.
Looked forward to walking through the group of girls who were always clustered around Heather Dunne on the front steps.
Looked forward to walking into the cafeteria at lunchtime. By then everyone in school would have heard about what she was wearing, and they would all turn and look at her.
Stare at her.
And she no longer cared.
It had happened after she forced her father out of her room last night. She had to use all of the strange power given to her by the broth she and Seth drank that afternoon. But it didn’t matter because this afternoon they could make more.
Or experiment with some of the other recipes in the book.
Forbearance Wynton’s book.
As she lay in the dark last night she’d thought about Forbearance Wynton. And about Forbearance Wynton’s father.
It was him she’d seen in the moonlight that night, reaching toward her — she was sure of it.
She’d shuddered in the darkness, remembering the hands that pulled the bedding away…
Had reached toward the buttons on her pajama top…
Had been about to put his hands on her…
But the man hadn’t only been Forbearance Wynton’s father — he’d been her father too. How could that be? She turned it over in her mind, trying to figure it out, and then Houdini had appeared out of the darkness. As on that first day in the house, she had no idea how he’d gotten into the room — the window was closed, and so was the door — but somehow he was there, leaping up onto the bed, sliding under her hand so she could scratch his ears. And as she stroked the cat, she began to understand.
They were all one.
She was Forbearance Wynton, and her father was Forbearance Wynton’s father, and everything that happened hundreds of years ago was happening again.
How many other people in the house had been part of it? She was sure about the last family. Rogers was the name. Nate Rogers had killed his wife and himself in her parents’ bedroom after he killed his daughter in the room that was now hers. Had the same things happened to Nate Rogers’s daughter that had happened to her? Had Nate Rogers crept into his daughter’s room at night, touching her and caressing her and—
Angel had cut off the thought before it was fully formed, but in the darkness, with Houdini purring softly beneath her hand, she’d begun to understand last night that what was happening to her now had happened over and over in this house. It didn’t matter who lived here — it was something in the house itself.
But Forbearance Wynton’s book had saved her, had given her the power to protect herself. Forbearance had
