Whispers at Moonrise (39 page)

Intrigued by the conversation, Kylie barely noticed the noise when it started. Just a slight knock, as if someone were tapping on a door. The tap became a loud knock. Confused, she looked around, and oddly, no one else reacted.

Inhaling a strange vibe, she stared straight ahead again. As the noise grew louder, a slight movement to the right of the teacher caught Kylie’s attention. The closet door behind Miss Kane rattled on its hinges, telling her where the banging originated.

Cutting her eyes left and right, she prayed she’d see someone, anyone, reacting to the obvious disruption.

Nope.

Then the cold of a spirit sent goose bumps racing up her arms. A trail of steam floated up from her lips, impairing her vision. Miss Kane said something, but Kylie couldn’t hear over the ear-piercing hammering.

“Kylie? Kylie?” Someone called her name.

Who? Kylie couldn’t think.

Forcing herself to look up, she saw the teacher staring at her as if waiting for a response. Kylie tried to talk, just a muttered, “Huh?” but not a word would leave her shivering lips. Then she saw it. Steam, lots of steam, billowing out from under the closet door.

Damn! Damn! This wasn’t a normal spirit’s visit. It felt more like the beginning of a vision.

That thought had hives popping out all over her chilled skin. Not because visions were scarier than hell, but because visions generally ended up with Kylie unconscious, or even worse, babbling incoherently.

Not here, Kylie pleaded. Not in front of twenty-five other campers.

An icy touch whispered across her shoulder. She looked back. A woman, her skin a pale ashen color, with dark purple circles under her gray eyes, stared at Kylie.

“She needs to see you.”
The spirit wore a white nightgown and her long brown hair hung around her shoulders. She raised her hand and pointed to the closet in front of the class.

“Who are you?” Kylie asked, and realized she’d forgotten to talk in her head.

All the students were now staring. Kylie could hardly think. So cold. She could barely feel her own skin anymore.

“Who’s in there?” she asked.

In the distance, like static noise, Kylie heard others talking. Someone else called her name, maybe it was Della, and then she thought she heard Derek, but nothing sounded right, or felt right.

“She needs to talk to you.”

Suddenly, realizing it could be Hannah behind that door, Kylie forced herself to stand up and walk to the closet. Even determined to do it, she hated doing it in front of people. But what choice did she have? Her knees wobbled as she neared the closet door.

She saw Miss Kane backing across the room, fear turning her complexion pale.

Kylie completely understood. She was pretty damn scared herself.

She reached for the closet’s doorknob. Before she touched it, a hand ripped through the wood. Bony fingers latched onto the front of her shirt and yanked her through the splintered wood of the closet door. And yet it wasn’t the closet.

The dark, dank place smelled of dirt, herbs, and death.

She screamed. Hard. Loud.

“Kylie? Kylie?” The voices echoed in the distance and then faded. Now, the only sound she heard over her own screams was the clanking sound of metal hitting metal.

She lay flat on her back. Gritty dirt rained down on her cheeks from above. The desire to brush it away hit, but her arms were locked at her sides. Even before she opened her eyes, she knew where she was.

The grave—she was in the grave with Hannah and the other girls.

And something told her she might never escape.

Chapter Thirty-four

Buried alive.

Panic scraped across Kylie’s mind and clawed at her chest. Opening her eyes, she saw only darkness, but felt more particles of dirt sift down. She went to blink and each speck of grit scraped across the top of her lids.

Please, I don’t want to be here,
she screamed in her mind. Her eyes adjusted to the dark and tears stung her sinuses, but the watery weakness helped wash away some of the grit.

She went to breathe, but her mouth wouldn’t open; something held it shut. Her lungs demanded oxygen, so she drew air in through her nose. Her throat knotted at the smell, the smell of death and then a heavy herb scent. She forced herself to turn her head to confirm what she suspected: that this vision had landed her in the grave.

A long strand of red hair rested against the side of her face. As had happened in the other vision, she was the spirit. She was Hannah—only unlike the woman whose body she inhibited, she breathed. The thought that she was in the corpse brought on another wave of nausea. Then another followed when she saw a large black beetle move across her lashes. Its prickly legs inched over her cheek and poked its head up into her left nostril.

She started snorting and struggling to free herself, but nothing worked.

Turning her cheek a little farther to the right, her gaze came upon the face of Cindy Shaffer. A scream rose in Kylie’s throat, but stayed bubbled in her mouth that was still forced closed. Her heart thumped against her breastbone at the sight. The girl’s facial skin hung loose, exposing some cheekbone. But the girl’s mouth was covered with duct tape. Staring down past her own nose, Kylie saw she bore the same tape. And the decomposing body she was in was shackled with chains. Was this supposed to mean something? Or had the killer really done this?

Another loud clank came from above. Kylie’s gaze shot up toward the noise. She saw a long iron spike being pushed through a hole in the slats that appeared to be decaying wood flooring. The piece of iron dropped on top of her, and the cold of it sizzled against her forearm, which was pinned at her side. On one end of the metal bar was some kind of ornament, a cross. Kylie recognized the emblem as being like the rusty fence and gate at the cemetery.

Footsteps sounded on the floor above as if someone was walking away, but then he returned, and another piece of rusty fencing was pushed through the hole. This time, Kylie saw the hand of the person shoving the iron inside. As the arm moved almost in front of her face, the cuff of the shirt rose slightly upward, exposing the edge of a silver watchband.

What am I supposed to learn from this?
Kylie asked with her mind, and looked at the dead girl at her side. Another wave of panic filled her lungs when a fat snake at least two feet long slithered up her chest and then higher. The cold, damp feel of its underbelly muscles inching across her cheek had a scream building in her throat.

She had to get out of here.

*   *   *

“You’re fine.” The calm sound of Holiday’s voice had Kylie opening her eyes seconds later. She took a quick look around. She was in Holiday’s office. But why was she…?

The vision played in her head like a horror movie in fast forward. Panic flooded her chest. She jackknifed up, jumped off the sofa, and slapped at her arms, legs, and face, hoping to chase away the feel of death and underground creatures moving against her skin.

“It’s okay,” Holiday said again.

No, it wasn’t. She’d been dead and had a snake crawling over her face and a bug playing peekaboo inside her nose. That was so not okay.

Kylie took a deep breath, then bent over and barfed—once, then twice. Barfed all over someone’s dark pair of shoes.

“Oh, damn!” a deep voice said.

Kylie recognized the voice and the shoes.

She looked up at the disgusted expression on the badass vampire and started to apologize, but instead barfed again. She missed Burnett’s shoes this time, but made a direct hit to the front of his shirt.

“Oh, fu—,” Burnett muttered, but never finished the word.

Holiday wrapped her arm around Kylie. “Breathe. Just breathe. It’s going to be okay.” She guided Kylie back to the sofa. Burnett, holding his arms away from his shirt front, handed Holiday a damp cloth, which was quickly pressed to Kylie’s forehead.

Kylie reached for it and wiped her mouth, and then looked at Burnett. “I think you need it worse than me.” Tears filled her eyes and her whole body trembled. “Sorry.”

He looked down at his shirt and back up at her. “I’m not mad.”

She focused on Holiday’s face, felt the calm flowing from her touch, and tried to remember exactly what had happened. How had she gotten … Her memory started to fall into place one piece at a time.

But it only took a few pieces for her to start panicking again. “Please tell me I didn’t go wacko in English class.”

Holiday’s gaze filled with empathy. “It’s not your fault. And Della brought you here as soon as she got you out of the closet.”

Kylie flopped back on the sofa and started to wish she could vanish, but stopped herself before it came true. “I hate this. I really, really hate this.”

Kylie stared at the ceiling. Burnett left the room, but returned in record time wearing a different shirt. Obviously he didn’t keep a new pair of shoes handy in his office because he now stood in his socks.

After a few minutes, Holiday asked Kylie, “Can you talk about it?”

“I was Hannah. But … most of the time when I have these types of visions and I’m the spirit, the spirit isn’t dead and … in a grave with bugs and snakes.” Kylie’s breath shuddered.

“Hannah’s trying to show you something. That’s what visions are all about,” Holiday said. “Tell me what happened.”

Kylie swallowed a tight knot down her throat. “I don’t know what she wants me to see. We were in the grave. There were snakes and bugs. I saw plenty of those.” She wiped her face, remembering the snake slithering across her cheek.

“Tell me everything,” Holiday said. “Everything.”

Kylie started recounting it, from the footsteps sounding on top of the rotting wooden planks above her, to the herb smell and the scrap pieces of iron that looked like they came from the cemetery. When Kylie finished, Holiday’s expression went white.

“What is it?” Burnett asked, not missing the look on her face.

“Someone knows Hannah is reaching out from the grave.”

“How do you know that?” Kylie asked.

“The tape over their mouths and the chains. You said you smelled herbs and that you saw someone adding iron from the graveyard. In the past, it was called cold iron. It’s basically iron, but some of it was blessed by practicing Wiccans. It was used to keep spirits from escaping, and … the herbs, there are several that are used to silence spirits. That’s what she was trying to tell you. That someone is trying to stop her from communicating with us.”

“And Blake knows you are a ghost whisperer,” Burnett said. “It’s logical that Hannah would come to you.”

“But if that’s the case, why is he just now trying to silence them? He would have done that in the beginning.”

“She’s right,” Kylie said. “It’s someone here. Hannah told us that much. And excuse me for sounding like a broken record, but Hayden Yates is bound to have heard I’m a ghost whisperer.
Everyone
here has.” And if they hadn’t, today sealed the deal.

Holiday twisted her hair in a tight rope and then met Kylie’s gaze. “I don’t want to suspect someone here,” she said, and then met Burnett’s gaze. “But Kylie’s right. It could be someone from Shadow Falls. And if it was the iron from Fallen Cemetery, then Hannah’s and the other’s bodies are close by.”

“Fine,” Burnett growled. “I’ll go back and run Hayden Yates through every damn database I can find. Until then, you don’t let the man within two feet of you.”

“I still don’t think it’s Hayden,” Holiday said.

“And I still do,” Kylie insisted.

“Who else could it be?” Burnett asked.

“One of the new students or teachers,” Holiday said, “but…”

“Most serial killers are men. And I don’t see a teen being able to pull this off.”

“And Hannah keeps calling the killer a he,” Kylie said.

Burnett huffed. “I’m not sure Collin Warren could look at someone long enough to kill them.”

“But he’s strange,” Kylie said. However, Kylie’s gut just knew that Hayden Yates was up to no good.

“Being extremely shy doesn’t make him a killer,” Holiday pointed out. “It just makes him socially awkward.”

Burnett shook his head. “But just to be sure, I’ll check him out again, too. You stay away from both of them.”

Holiday rolled her eyes. “How am I going to run a school and not talk to any of the teachers?”

“I could always lock you in my cabin,” Burnett said.

“You wish,” Holiday said.

Burnett’s eyes brightened and a smile barely tilted his lips up slightly. “That I do.”

Kylie smiled for a second, too, completely getting Burnett’s underlying message. Then for some reason, Kylie thought about Lucas, and started missing him, wishing he could be here to help her cope.
Don’t ever fall in love, princess. It just hurts too much.

Her stepfather’s words echoed in Kylie’s head and right then, she knew. She loved Lucas.

As if the epiphany gave her heart and mind a reboot, she suddenly recalled being in Miss Kane’s closet and screaming at the top of her lungs. She closed her eyes as embarrassment flooded through her. If any of the other campers hadn’t quite made up their minds about whether she was or wasn’t a freak, she’d made it easy for them.

Kylie felt Holiday slip her soft hand against her wrist, as if reading some of her emotional angst. The touch had little effect this time. Kylie was in love with Lucas, a guy who couldn’t even be seen in public with her, and she’d made a complete idiot out of herself with one of her ghost visions.

“Burnett,” Holiday spoke softly, “why don’t you go find some shoes and give Kylie and me a few minutes alone.”

*   *   *

Something about being alone with Holiday had Kylie letting go and allowing herself to fall apart. She fell against the camp leader’s shoulder and started sobbing.

Holiday held her, held her so tight that Kylie cried harder. After a few minutes, Holiday spoke. “I’m so damn sorry. Hannah shouldn’t have come to you. You’re too young to have to deal with this.”

The words brought a sudden halt to Kylie’s pity party.

She pulled out of the embrace. “No. I mean, sure, it’s hard, but this is what I do. I’d do it for a stranger. And I’d do it for your sister again and again.”
And if it meant stopping someone from hurting Holiday, I would do that and more.