“So we’re just going to bike on over and tell the priest we need holy water to help protect us from a ghoul?”
Eric shrugged. “I was thinking we’d steal it?”
Vi laughed. Her goody-two-shoes brother wanted to steal holy water from a church?
“Stolen holy water,” Iris said. “Doesn’t that wreck its powers or something?”
Eric rubbed his face with his hands. “I don’t know. I’m trying, but it’s hard when we don’t even understand what we’re up against.”
Vi looked down at the Polaroid again. It might not be anything at all, just a shadow cast by the trees, a bright spot caused by the camera flash. Maybe Eric had imagined the whole thing.
But what if he hadn’t?
“Okay,” Vi said. “We do whatever spells of protection we can. And on the next full moon, we go out and try to find this thing. Hunt it down.”
“What do we do if we find it?” Iris asked.
“Banish it or kill it,” Vi said. “Do whatever we need to do. In the meantime, we keep our eyes open. We do research. We try to figure out what this thing is and what it wants.”
Eric looked scared. “It saw me, Vi,” he said, voice trembling a little. “It knows who I am. I feel like… like it knows all about me.”
“It’s okay,” Vi told Eric. “We’ll put a circle of salt around your bed. Draw some sigils on the floor. Hang a cross on your wall. We’ll make sure you’re protected, Eric. I promise.”
* * *
“DO YOU THINK he really saw a ghoul?” Iris asked her later. “Do you think it’s real?”
They were in Vi’s room. Iris sometimes panicked when she slept by herself and often crept in to be with Vi late at night. Gran had figured out what was up, but she didn’t seem to mind.
They’d moved a twin mattress in and set it up on the floor in the corner of Vi’s room—right across from her own bed. Vi had helped Iris make it up with her own spare sheets—white and clean and smelling like sunshine because they were dried on the line in the backyard. Iris slept every night with the rabbit puppet Vi had given her.
She was on her mattress, and Vi was propped up on one elbow in her own bed, looking down. It was after midnight, and they spoke in low voices.
“I think…” Vi chose her words carefully. “… that he believes he saw it.”
“But is it real?” Iris asked.
“Maybe believing is enough to make it real. Maybe if you believe strongly enough, you can actually, I don’t know, conjure monsters.”
“Do you think so? That they’re out there just waiting to be conjured? That there are really… monsters?”
Vi looked at her, there in the dark.
Iris had on a pair of Vi’s old pajamas, and Vi was thinking about the page on doppelg?ngers in The Book of Monsters. A doppelg?nger was a spirit, a creature that looked just like a person, could step right into that person’s life, just take her place and no one would ever know the difference. When you saw a doppelg?nger—if you happened to pass your twin on the street—it was bad luck. It meant something terrible was coming your way.
She and Iris could really be sisters—they looked so much alike, dark-haired, dark-eyed, skinny girls. Vi found herself thinking （not for the first time） that Iris couldn’t be real. That she might be someone Vi had imagined to life, a secret sister.
Could you call a doppelg?nger to you? Conjure it just by believing? Was that possible?
Her head hurt. She’d taken some Tylenol from the medicine cabinet, but it didn’t seem to be doing much good. She pressed her thumbs into her eyes.