Shadows (Bayou Magic 1)

“I’ll show you.”

She pulls herself out of the chair, and we follow her through the house to the back entrance, right next to the door that leads to the storage space under the stairs.

I spent the majority of my childhood under there.

I wait for Mom and Daphne to go outside before I open the little door really quick to poke my head in.

It hasn’t changed since the last time I was in there with my sisters. It’s as if Mama never went in there, but she must have at some point. She pulled the rocking chair out.

I close the door and join Daphne and Mama outside, just around the corner of the house.

Mom’s smiling.

Daphne’s face is white.

“Can you please tell Brielle what you told me?” Daphne asks her.

“Oh, is Brielle here?” Mama glances over at me and frowns. “I thought you were dead, Brielle. That’s what he told me.”

“Who told you that?”

“Don’t remember.” She rubs her nose with the back of her hand. “Anyway, he’s buried right here.”

“Who?”

“Your daddy.” She rolls her eyes. “Never liked him. Mean son of a bitch.”

“He was mean,” I agree with a nod and stare at all the blooming roses. There must be twenty bushes, a riot of beautiful color. “You must spend a lot of time out here, taking care of your roses.”

“Nah, he just keeps fertilizing them. Mean old man.” She shakes her head. “Told me I was crazy. Can you believe that?”

“No, ma’am,” Daphne and I reply in unison.

“Kept callin’ me that over and over again until I showed him just how crazy I could be. Buried him right here.”

Daphne swallows hard, her hand hovering over a bloom.

I need to get her out of here.

“We found it,” Millie says as she and Cash come around the side of the house. “We saw you out here.”

“You have a beautiful garden,” Cash says.

“Who are you?” Mama demands, her face immediately scrunching in rage. “I don’t like the mens around here. Git outta here. Y’all leave, now.”

“Gladly,” Daphne says as we hurry around the house to the car. She starts it, and once we’re all inside, she peels out of the driveway, watching Mama in the rearview. “Brielle.”

I look back, shocked to find the shadows joining Mama, huddling around her. They’re pouring out of the house, coming around the sides, and they cover her, wrapping their arms around her.

It’s the creepiest fucking thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

“You can see that?” I ask Daphne.

“We all can,” Millie says and sighs.

“I can’t,” Cash says.

“You’re lucky.” I rub my hands over my face. “But at least we have the book. Where was it?”

“Upstairs, in her old bedroom,” Millie says.

“It’s still intact?”

“If you can call it that,” Cash replies. “We looked around the entire house, just to check everything out.”

“I wrapped us both in my shields,” Millie says. “And it’s a damn good thing I did. Did you guys notice how out of control the activity is there?”

“It’s like a hotspot for paranormal activity,” I say, thinking it over. “I never considered that before, but that might be the case. Perhaps the house is built on a burial ground, or something so horrible happened there in the past that the ghosts are drawn to.”

“And because we’re sensitive, it fucked with us as kids,” Daphne says, nodding. “It makes sense.”

“Now that we’re gone, along with our spells and potions of protection, there’s nothing there to protect Mama from the activity,” Millie says. “You guys, I know she was a bad mother and, honestly, she’s a bad human being. But no one deserves that kind of torment.”It doesn’t surprise me when the dreams come. After spending the morning doing my best to deflect the atrocities in my mother’s house, I figured I’d have a difficult time in my dreams.

“Come on.”

Now, there are four. When I went to sleep, there were still only two spirits following me, but now there are four.

“I want to help you. Tell me what to do.”

“You have to follow us,” one of the girls says, and relief immediately sets in. They can hear me. This one’s new. She has a slit throat, but aside from that, she looks whole. “Come on.”

The next thing I know, I’m standing in a room. It’s good-sized, sectioned off into different areas. In one corner, there’s what looks like a workbench with shelves above it, lined with tools.

A chair sits in another corner. It looks like an old-timey electric chair with leather straps on the arms and legs.

In the third corner is a door, presumably leading to the rest of the house.

And then there’s the fourth corner, where there are currently four women tied to what looks like toddler beds. The tiny mattresses are bare. Some have blood and pee stains.

The smell in the room is as bad as my mother’s house, but lingering with the stench of feces and urine is the metallic scent of blood.