The Complete Burn for Burn Trilogy: Burn for Burn; Fire With Fire; Ashes to Ashes (91 page)

I’m smudging the shit out of the space around his bed when Reeve comes back with a tray. “Please don’t burn your goth girl incense in here,” he says, setting the tray down on the bed. “It gives me a headache.”

“It’s not incense. It’s sage. I’m clearing negative energy, you ignorant ape.” And with that, I run out the door.

“Hey! My mom just made you a snack!”

*  *  *

I’m burning rubber to White Haven. I call Lil, and she picks up on the first ring.

“Kat. What’s taking you so long!”

“I found a spell that’s supposed to protect our houses. I did mine, and I stopped by and did Reeve’s. We can do yours before we leave.”

“Thank God!”

“There’s one more thing. To do the most powerful binding spell, we both need to bring something that’s precious to us to sacrifice—as, like, an offering. I think we have to do it. We don’t know how strong Mary is, and I ain’t doing this twice.”

“So, like, the pearl necklace my dad gave me for my sweet sixteen?”

“No, you dummy! Nobody cares about your pearl necklace. You don’t even care about your pearl necklace.”

“What did you bring?”

“My Oberlin acceptance letter.”

She gasps. “Kat! No!”

“Mary knows how badly I want to go there. I’ll give it up for her.”

“Well, you don’t need the letter anyway. You can still go.”

“It’s what the letter represents. I ain’t going to Oberlin.” Damn, it hurts to say the words out loud.

“But you didn’t apply anywhere else! That means you’ll be stuck here for another half year at least.”

“I’ll figure something out. We can’t fuck around, Lil. Who knows how far Mary’s going to take this! Come up with something good. Be outside in five!”

I
OPEN THE JEWELRY BOX
on my dresser and take out Reeve’s necklace. I hold it in the palm of my hand. I couldn’t bring myself to give it back to him after we broke up.

I’ll never be able to separate Reeve from Rennie’s dying, and Mary, and all of it. There hasn’t been a time in our relationship that wasn’t weighed down with secrets and lies and pain. And the longer I hold on to him, the longer I’ll be haunted by the what-ifs and the what-could-have-beens. It’s too late for that. We don’t have a future. But if I do this, if I set him free forever, he will.

*  *  *

After Kat makes sure my house is safe, we head to Mary’s. Kat goes through the plan with me, and then we ride in silence. We’re both too scared to talk.

To comfort myself I reach into Kat’s backseat and pet Shep. He’s coming along as protection. Kat figured out that animals sense ghosts, so he’ll be our lookout. When she said that, I realized what must have happened that day at the stables with Phantom. Mary had to have been there.

She could have killed me.

I still have trouble believing that Mary, my friend Mary, would ever hurt me. But I can’t think like that. She has become something else. She’s not the girl I met on the first day of school.

We park the car, and I let Shep out of the backseat. He sniffs around in the grass and then sits down and tries to give me his paw.

“Good sign,” Kat says. She turns to face the house. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”

It has to work. We have to contain her. With prom two weeks away, I can’t shake the feeling that Mary’s just lying low, waiting to make a big move. Like the homecoming dance, only way, way worse. What if more people get hurt because of us? I couldn’t live with myself.

I have to force myself to move, to put one foot in front of the
other and walk toward this dilapidated old house and not away from it. As we walk up the front steps with Shep at our heels, Kat quips, “God, I need a cigarette. Quitting smoking during a freaking ghost exorcism was a dumb-ass move on my part.” Her hand shakes as she turns the knob of the front door. “Here we go.”

We step inside, and the house is dark and empty. And freezing cold, which feels impossible for May. I wish I’d brought a jacket.

“Is cold a thing mentioned in the books?” I whisper.

Kat whispers back, “I don’t know. I didn’t have time to read everything.”

Shep sniffs around, and I turn on the flashlight on my phone and hold it out so we can see. We stay huddled together, taking tiny steps. Then we hear something creak, and we both shriek. It’s just Shep tripping over a raised floorboard. I clutch her arm tighter.

“Lil, I’m gonna go upstairs and do the—”

“Shh!” I mouth,
Mary could be here.

Kat nods and rummages around in her book bag. She takes out a container of sea salt. It’s already almost empty, and I have a sick feeling we won’t have enough. Next, a roll of twine. She lifts her eyes toward the staircase, and I give the thumbs-up.

And then we get to it. We go from door to door in the house,
starting with the second floor, wrapping each doorknob six times with twine and then putting a line of salt before each threshold.

When we reach Mary’s bedroom, her door is open and the room is pitch-black.

If Mary is already in there, would she come out and talk to us? Would I be able to see her like always?

Suddenly I feel prickles go up my spine. Someone’s here. Watching me. I can feel it. The spell’s working. It’s called her home.

“Lil,” Kat hisses. She has her length of twine ready. I reach out, wrap my hand around the doorknob, and start to slowly pull the door closed. Shep starts growling, low and long, and I freeze. “Keep going!”

I close it fast, and Kat winds the string while I throw down the salt.

Kat looks up at me and smiles.

And then the bedroom door starts to quiver and shake, like someone on the inside is trying to rip it off the hinges. Shep lunges forward, teeth bared, fur standing up on end.

“Oh my God!”

“Come on!”

Each door we pass starts to do the same, as if there is a spirit behind each one. Or maybe Mary’s just everywhere.

Kat goes down the stairs, and I follow after her, shaking salt on each one. Kat has one of the books open in her hand, and she starts to chant. But I can barely hear what she’s saying. Shep’s barking like crazy now, deep and throaty, as if he were a pit bull. The doors upstairs sound like they’re going to break open any second.

The temperature is even colder than before, like it’s the dead of winter. Our breaths come out in little white clouds.

Kat takes out her Oberlin acceptance letter. “Give me your thing!” she screams. I fish the necklace out of my pocket and drop it into her hand.

I watch as tiny cracks begin to break along the walls. They’re like spiderwebs. Pieces of plaster chip and fall onto the floor. Mary’s in the walls, in the ceiling. The floorboards start to buckle up and snap one by one, like toothpicks.

Kat lights the corner of her letter on fire with her Zippo, and the whole thing goes up in a flash.

I swear I see someone streak past me, from the living room to the kitchen. Shep breaks free from Kat’s hand on his leash. “Shep! Shep!”

Kat lunges to grab his leash, but it slips through her hands. He only gets a few feet away from us before the floor splinters violently. A board snaps in half and slices him straight through his belly like a wooden sword. He makes a sickening cry, and the sound goes right through me.

Oh no. No. Kat falls to her knees and lets out a moan. She picks him up in her arms and sobs. “Sheppy. Sheppy, I’m so sorry.”

I go to her. Tears blind my eyes. “Kat, we have to go.”

She’s crying too hard to get up. Her sobs rack her body; they fill the whole house. They’re all I hear. I pull on her arm. “Kat, please,” I cry. “We have to go.” She lets me pull her up. We pick Shep’s body up together and then we run for the door.

Kat has my necklace dangling in her hand. I grab it, hang it on the front doorknob, and pull the door closed.

And just like that, it’s quiet.

We run as fast as we can to Kat’s car. We put Shep in the backseat, and Kat sits back there with him, her head bent close to his, tears falling onto his coat. She has blood on her shirt, blood on her arms. So do I.

I get into the driver’s seat and gun it out of the driveway. I look up, and I see Mary in the window, expressionless, sedate. Trapped.

F
OR THE NEXT TWO DAYS
I post up at Reeve’s house, just to make sure Mary doesn’t figure out a way to come and get him. Also, it’s easier to sleep here than at my house, where Shep would have been trying to climb into my bed with me all night. He might’ve been as old as hell, but he died like a champ, protecting me. My poor puppy.

I take out my Shep grief on Reeve and basically order him around like crazy. His room is disgusting. I make him throw out the booze, take a shower. The essentials. That first night after Mary’s bound to her house, he sleeps like a baby. An overgrown
snoring baby. The stuff at school eases up on him too. He catches as break when two juniors get stoned during lunch and then go swimming in the fountain nude, and that becomes the thing everyone talks about.

Reeve’s mom has tears in her eyes when she thanks me for looking out for her Reevie. God. I almost tear up too, been super emo ever since Shep died. I had to make up some shit to Pat and my dad about him running in front of a car on the road.

I do drive past Mary’s house once, to make sure the spell worked. As soon as my car pulls along the curb, she runs up to the window in her bedroom and puts her palms up to the glass. It scares the shit out of me, and I burn rubber the hell out of there.

The hardest part for me, really, is to go back to normal life, to pretending I don’t know what I now know to be true. I go over every minute in my mind of the time since I met Mary, looking for clues. There are plenty, and the books help me understand why people could see her on Halloween, but I still don’t know if I’d ever have figured it out on my own. And since that’s the case, the only thing to do, really, is to try to forget.

Lil and I basically have a new unspoken pact. We haven’t talked about Mary once since that night. It’s easier that way.

At school Lil asks me if I’ve bought a dress for prom yet, and
I tell her I already have something, and she gives me this dubious look. “Send me a pic,” she says.

So when I get back home, I put on the one semi-fancy dress I own, a black strapless bandage dress. I look like a hooker. Why didn’t I realize I looked like a hooker when I bought it a year ago?

Now I’m wondering if I shouldn’t just wear black pants and a button-down and a bow tie, and go for an androgynous formal look. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the more edgy actresses wearing tuxedos at awards shows.

But I just end up looking like a waiter. So I put the dress back on and figure I’ll wear a blazer on top of it.

I text Lillia a selfie, and she writes back,
UM NO. Come over right now.
I tell her thanks but no thanks, but damn, that girl can be persuasive when she wants to be.

So that’s why I’m sitting on Lil’s bed in my bra and leggings, tearing up my nails while she’s taking her sweet time sifting through her ginormous closet. From inside, Lillia calls out, “Close your eyes, Kat. I’m going to present you with two different but equally striking options. Whichever one you gravitate toward first will be the right one. Just follow your gut.”

I roll my eyes. “Lil, it ain’t that deep.” Lillia steps out of the closet holding up two dresses. One is a floor-length teal silk halter dress that drapes in the front and dips low in the back; the other is a corseted canary-yellow cocktail dress that nips in
at the waist and hits right above the knee. I let out a low whistle. “Holy shit. Why do you have such fancy stuff?”

“This one was for a black-tie wedding of a family friend, and, um . . . this other one I just had.”

I reach for the long one. It still has tags on it. Six hundred and ninety-five dollars from some store called C’est La! Holy shit. “I can’t wear this. It’s too expensive. I’ll be scared of spilling something on it. Give me the other one.”

“The yellow one was even more expensive,” Lillia says.

“Well, I don’t want to wear this one if you haven’t.”

She shoos my hand away. “Don’t worry about that. Which one do you like better?”

“I don’t know!” I feel suddenly insecure—what if I look like I’m trying to be something I’m not?

Lil holds the teal dress up to my face, then the yellow. “You’d be a knockout in either . . . but the teal one brings out your eyes, and it’s more grown-up. I think you should wear that one. Try it on.”

I slip it on over my bra and leggings, and Lillia helps me with the zipper. She ties the halter neck into a bow, and the ends float down my back like streamers.

I stand in front of the full-length mirror, and Lillia and I stare at my reflection. “It’s perfect,” she breathes. She pulls my hair up and away from my face. “You should wear your hair up. It might not be too late to get a hair appointment at Cut. You’ll
probably get stuck with a super-early time, but that’s better than nothing. I have the perfect shoes for this dress too. Suede, crisscross with a hidden platform.” She pulls her hair into a ponytail. “What size shoe do you wear again?”

“Eight.”

“Darn. Why are your feet so big?”

I glare at her, and she giggles. Then she screams, “Mommy! I need your help!”

Mrs. Cho appears in Lillia’s doorway a minute later. Breathless, she says, “Lilli, you scared me half to death. Don’t scream like that—” Then she notices me standing by the mirror, and her face lights up. “Oh, Kat! You look gorgeous!”

“She’s wearing it to prom,” Lil tells her.

Confused, Mrs. Cho says, “I thought you—”

“Can she borrow a pair of your shoes, Mommy?”

I break in. “Wait. Mrs. Cho, I don’t need—”

“I’ve got the exact right pair,” Mrs. Cho says, nodding to herself. She disappears into the hallway and comes back with a red shoe box. Valentino. Shit.

They’re gunmetal gray, studded, with a pointy toe. Rocker chic. Brand-new. I’m pretty sure these shoes are worth more than my car. They’re freaking gorgeous.

Lillia pouts when she sees them. “I’d die for those shoes. God, I wish I had big feet like you guys.”