Bone Cold: A Soul Shamans Novel (Volume 2) (2 page)

Since I’d saved him from a violent spirit attack on his home three months ago. We’d passed each other in the hallways at school like usual, nodding as we each shuffled to our next class, but his pinched smile gave me the feeling he was no longer sure how to talk to me. When humans realize there’s more to the world than meets the eye, it can be a massive shock. And I was the unfortunate person who’d introduced him to that.

“You should know by now that I never give up without a fight,” I said.

Whirling toward the ocean, I threw my feet forward and raced past my classmates who were clustered around the bonfire, leaving George in a cloud of sand. Laura was already to the shoreline. She splashed into the ocean, her shriek echoing off the rocky cliffs that rose high into the night sky. The lapping water reached out for my feet like frozen fingers. Gritting my teeth, I threw myself into the waves.

A chill swept over my entire body, and my voice merged with Laura’s as we yelled in both pain and delight. George jumped in after us, tipped back her head, and let out a thunderous roar. Shivering, I pushed further into the ocean until the churning water splashed against my shoulders. Laura met my gaze, the distant bonfire flickering in her dark irises.

“One,” we said together. “Two…”

“Three!” We both dove under the water. My breath whooshed out of my lungs, surrounding my face with a legion of bubbles. The ocean engulfed me. It stung my skin and turned my bones to ice. The only thing I could feel was the cold. Every inch of my body was frozen in place, an ice sculpture in the sea.

My toes pressed against the slick bottom, and I pushed up. When my head crested the water, I gulped in a breath of air and screamed again, though this time it came out as a shrieking laugh.

“Holy shit, that’s cold!” Laura shook as a wave splashed against us.

“This may be the dumbest thing we’ve ever done.” My teeth chattered hard.

“You guys are seriously insane.” George shuddered and slicked back her wet hair. With a grin, I gave her a high-five for joining in the insanity.

“Definitely
not
the dumbest thing we’ve done,” Laura said with a pointed look. Even though she didn’t elaborate, I knew what she meant, and a different kind of chill swept through me at the memory of September.

“Okay, fine,” I said. “Then it may be the most
normal
thing we’ve done in the past few months.”

Before my mom’s mind had gotten stuck halfway between Lower World and the real world, Laura and I had done stuff like this all the time. Beach parties, bicycle races, midnight trips to the abandoned red barn near the harbor. But after Mom got sick, I stopped doing all of that. And now, even with her health back to normal, I still spent one hundred percent of my time at home, at school, and at Nathan’s house when he wasn’t buried under a mountain of work.

It was high time for my life to return to normal, even though I didn’t
feel
normal, and the tickling sensation in my forehead had kept me from letting go. Maybe all I’d needed this whole time was a dunk in the frigid ocean to wake me up to the reality of life. I was regular old Holly Bennett again. Not a shaman. Not a breadwinner. Not a con artist. Just a girl.

The problem was, I didn't know if that made me happy or sad.

A scream ripped through the air, and I twisted to face the shore, expecting to see another lunatic jumping into the waves to join our nighttime swim. Instead, my eyes found a shaking body curled up on the ground, her hands flailing as if to swat at a swarm of invisible bees.

“Holly!” Jason’s deep voice bellowed from the shore, his dark form silhouetted by the bonfire. “Get here quick! I think it’s a ghost!”

The world blurred before me, the figures on the beach lurching toward the quavering form in exaggerated slow motion. Salt stung my eyes as I blinked at the chaos, my heart squeezing inside my chest. This couldn’t be happening. Not again.

Jason had to be wrong. Spirits don’t attack out in the open. It was impossible.

My head swivelled toward Laura. She jammed a shaking hand into the wet hair plastered to her forehead, and her mouth opened into a wide
O
. George looked back and forth between us, eyebrows crinkled in confusion, mouth hung open in surprise. The laughter was gone from her eyes, just as I knew it was gone from mine.

“Not again,” Laura whispered, and the world blurred back into motion.

“There has to be some other explanation,” I said.

With a deep breath, I splashed back to the shore. My body seized from the sudden chill as I exited the water, but I forced myself to focus on the task at hand. I ran to Jason’s side, sand clinging to my wet feet and icy droplets dripping down my skin. A crowd blocked my view of Megan, but her high-pitched wails gave me enough of a mental image to know she was in serious pain. The kind of pain a spirit brings.

“What the hell is going on?” I swiped the wet hair out of my eyes.

“I don’t know.” Jason held out my hoodie, and I yanked it over my head, grateful for some protection against the ocean wind. “It’s Megan. She was fine one minute and then the next…We’ve called an ambulance, but this seems more up your alley than theirs.”

“Megan Joseph?” I asked, almost stopping in my tracks. Megan had been one of the rich kids targeted by the shamans who had wreaked havoc on our town a few months ago. Even though she’d been attacked, she’d ended up fine once Laura and I had banished the offending spirit from her house. What were the odds she’d be attacked again now? And outside?

When I reached the group huddling and whispering and murmuring quiet sobs, they parted to make way for me to reach the body on the ground. It was Megan Joseph all right, with her blond bob and curvy frame, presented before me in a ghastly display. She twitched in the sand, skin a stark white and breath shaking in her chest as if a cancer had taken hold of her lungs.

Dropping to my knees, I swiped the hair out of her eyes and pressed my fingers against her clammy forehead. Her skin was the temperature of the sea. She peered up at me, pupils dilated and eyes gray.

“Megan?” My voice boomed in contrast to the silence around us. The only other sounds were the gentle lapping of the waves against the shore and Megan’s wheezing breath. “Can you tell me what happened?”

Her eyelids fluttered shut. “It felt the same as that time that spirit thing came after me.”

Her voice was so weak, I could barely make out the words. Frowning, I glanced around me for some kind of explanation. There was no way a spirit could have done this. They can’t just
attack
a human out in the open on a beach.

“Did anyone see anything?” I asked, scanning the crowd for someone I could trust. Someone who had been there before, someone who had seen what spirits could do. Kylie Wilkinson would know better than anyone what a spirit attack looked and felt like, but her familiar pixie face was nowhere to be found amongst the fearful expressions.

Brent met my eyes, but he only shrugged. “We were over by the keg when she started screaming.”

Siren wails sounded in the distance, and the football guys let out a bark of surprise before taking off down the beach toward their cars. Several of the cheerleaders followed close behind, abandoning the party for an express ticket to anywhere but here. Plastic cups littered the ground surrounding the beer keg. A few half-smoked joints peppered the sand. We were going to be in a hell a lot of trouble when the cops showed up, but I couldn’t leave Megan to suffer alone.

“Megan.” I took her hand in mine, her palm cold and slick, even to my own ocean-kissed skin. “An ambulance is going to be here any second now, but I need you to tell me anything you can. Are you sure this is like that time a spirit attacked you?”

I waited for a response but none came. I didn’t even hear the wheezing of her breath anymore.

“Megan?” I shook her body as gently as I could. Her hand flopped to the ground. “Megan, I need you to stay with me.”

No response. My heart thumped a painful beat.

I leaned down and pressed my ear to her mouth, my fingers snaking up to her neck to feel her pulse. The absence of a heartbeat was as deafening as the silence from her lungs. A tear leaked out of my eye when I glanced up to meet the somber gazes of those who had stuck around. Laura, Jason, George. The heavy expressions on their faces told me they knew exactly what I was going to say before I could find the courage to form the words.

“She’s dead.” My voice felt thick, as if my mouth was full of marbles. “She’s already gone.”

George took a step back, blinking rapidly at the body on the sand. “So, life in Seaport’s not that different after all.”

CHAPTER 2

“H
olly Bennett. Death seems to follow you around.” Sheriff Lynch handed me a towel where we stood in the warm safety of the bonfire. An ambulance had shown up fifteen minutes earlier. The paramedics had declared Megan deceased, sliding her body into the back of their van before driving away from the beach, lights off, pace slow.

The cops hadn’t taken anyone in. Yet.

“Trust me, it isn’t by choice,” I said as I dried off my legs with the scratchy blue material.

“Want to explain what happened?” He flicked his flashlight toward the water as if the lapping waves might hold all the answers to his questions. And mine.

Shivering, I stepped back into my jeans and shook my head. “I don’t know what happened. Laura, George, and I were in the ocean when Megan collapsed.”

“Swimming with it this cold.” He chewed on his words like they were some foul dinner his grandmother had forced him to eat.

Now that I was dry and fully dressed, I felt a little more sure of myself. I didn’t know what had happened to Megan, but there was definitely something off about it. These weren’t thoughts I could share with Sheriff Lynch though. Despite the fact we lived in a town that fully acknowledged and celebrated New England’s witchy past, the talk of spells and mages was all a big joke. No one really believed in the supernatural here. Except Wanda, the magic shop owner. Maybe. I still hadn’t figured out what her deal was.

“It was a dare,” I said. “After Megan collapsed, we got out of the water to see what had happened. Jason Harris can tell you more. He said it looked like she had a seizure maybe.”

Sheriff Lynch kept chewing, his face giving nothing away. “Yep. That’s what they’re saying all right, but I was more interested in what
you
would say.”

I blinked. “I don’t know why. I didn’t see what happened.”

“Mmm-hmm. You have a theory?” He avoided my eyes, rocking back on his heels while he jotted something down in a little black book.

What was he getting at? Surely he wasn’t trying to accuse me of something. It’s not like I could have killed Megan from the water. And if he was genuinely interested in my opinion, it would definitely be the first time the Seaport cops had ever given me any indication they were aware of the supernatural reality of our world.

“I don’t have a theory,” I finally said, stuffing my sandy wet feet into my socks.

“Alright.” He glanced around us. The beach was still covered in the remnants of our disastrous party. Illegal ones. “I’m not going to haul you kids in tonight, even though I should. You can’t be out here drinking, especially not at your age. Get this mess cleaned up and find a sober ride home before I change my mind. This is your warning. If I catch you again, I won’t be so kind.”

My breath whooshed out of me. Tonight wouldn’t be my second trip to jail, thank god. I wasn’t prepared to go through that again, and I sure as hell wasn’t eager to call my mom and tell her that as soon as she’d gotten her life under control, I’d gotten myself locked up. She still didn’t know about the first time. Laura’s dad had spared me that, at least.

As Sheriff Lynch meandered over to Laura and George, I began gathering the confetti of red cups and abandoned cigarettes. My mind wandered to Megan’s slack face. It didn’t make any sense. There are rules about the spirit world. They’ve existed this way for centuries. There was no reason for that to change now. Unless…

No
. I snatched another cup from the ground and added it to the stack in my hands, shaking my head. Just because Megan said it felt like a spirit attack didn’t mean it was one. I was letting my paranoia get the better of me. Anthony Lombardi was gone from Seaport, hopefully for good. The Shaman Congress had taken down his illegal Founder’s Institute and freed everyone trapped inside. Wherever Anthony was, he was alone, zapped of his life-prolonging spirits and all his little helper bees. He couldn’t bend the rules of magic any more than I could.

“Holly!” Nathan’s familiar voice snapped me out of my daze. I glanced up to see him running down the sandy slope, his face screwed up in concern. My heart lifted, and a smile touched my lips.

He rushed toward me and wrapped his arms tight around my body. He was sturdy, strong, and sure. Leaning close, he whispered into my hair. “Thank god you’re okay. Brent called me and told me what happened to Megan. I’ve been so worried.”

I sighed into his chest, letting the tension roll off my body and into the light sea wind. Nathan smelled and felt like home. Oranges and cookies and fresh laundry and hope. My heart lifted me ten feet off the ground, and suddenly I no longer remembered why I’d spent so much time concentrating my dark thoughts on Anthony Lombardi when I had Nathan Whitman in my life.