“Fair enough,” Logan said. Her head spun. Between Ashley’s strange nausea in the woods and her nightmares and Nick’s disappearance, something was happening. It wasn’t quiet and slow like the last few weeks. Something was happening tonight. She felt it in her bones, in the air, in the ground beneath her feet.
Maybe this fear was the dark thing in Snakebite that Gracia had mentioned.
They entered the house in silence. The main room was exactly what Logan had pictured—rural decorations and beige furniture and whitewashed walls. It was the kind of home that felt like a home. The kind of place they’d snap pictures of for cutesy magazines. It’d been a long time since Logan had been in a place like this. She tried to push down the jealousy that rose in her chest.
A crash sounded from down the hallway, clattering like metal on wood.
Ashley’s eyes widened. “Sounded like my room.”
Logan nodded and they made their way toward the sound.
Ashley’s room was a surprise. It had a twin bed covered with a pink patchwork quilt, a kid-size desk against the wall, and a bookshelf lined with old textbooks whose only purpose was to collect dust. Ashley’s room was humble and impersonal, like a preserved memory. Logan guessed this was how the room had looked for Ashley’s whole life. It was the room of a girl who’d never known herself well enough to make it her own.
The air in the bedroom was so thick it was suffocating. Logan spotted the source of the crash. Ashley’s bulletin board was facedown in the middle of the floor with a wreckage of Polaroid photos scattered around it: pictures of Ashley with Bug and Fran, Ashley on the ranch, Ashley and Tristan. The window above her bed was wide open. Wind whistled through the screen, buffeting the curtains like a ghost’s breath. It was perfectly reasonable to assume the wind had knocked over the bulletin board.
It was perfectly reasonable, but Logan knew it hadn’t.
Behind them, the bedroom door slammed shut.
The desk lamp’s bulb flickered, then burned out.
Ashley stumbled away from Logan. She was hardly visible in the sudden darkness, but she was clearly afraid. Logan cautiously made her way over, stepping carefully to avoid the pictures.
“What’s going on?” Logan asked.
“I think he’s here,” Ashley whispered. “I don’t think he’s alone.”
“Who’s here? Tristan?”
Ashley nodded. She sank to her bed and knotted her fist in her bedspread. “I think he’s mad at me.”
“Why would he be mad at you?”
“Because I…”
Tears dotted the corners of Ashley’s eyes.
“Okay, never mind. We’ll get back to that.” Logan cleared her throat. She tried to put on a calm face, but there was nothing calm about this. Her heart raced. This wasn’t like their first trip to the cabin. She could feel something happening here. “You said he’s not alone. Who else is here?”
“I can’t see them. It’s just, like, a feeling.” Ashley’s hands shook. “Parts of it are Tristan. Other parts … I don’t know.”
Logan swallowed. “Try.”
“I think it’s … Nick?” Ashley’s expression was complicated. It was tangled between hurt and fear, caught in the brambles of panic.
Logan imagined her own expression was similar. It was the crushing, spiraling dread that she was responsible for this. She’d invited Nick to go along with them. She hadn’t made sure he was okay the next day. She hadn’t even given him a second thought until they found the hoodie.
“It’s my fault,” Ashley whispered. “Both of them.”