Ominous (Private 13)

“Lead the way, Elizawannabe,” he said.

I shoved him lightly and started into the woods. The spot where I’d been standing in my dream faced the back of the chapel, so I decided to walk around to the back, then head north from there to try to find the clearing. The three of us walked along in a straight line, Josh behind me and Ivy behind him, the woods silent except for the crunching of our shoes and the hiss of our breathing. Suddenly I remembered playing jungle adventures with my brother, Scott, and his friends when we were little—tromping through the woods behind our middle school with toy canteens and flashlights. Only then, my pulse hadn’t been pounding in my ears in this annoyingly unnerving way.

“Wow,” Josh whispered as we stepped into the large clearing around the chapel. “That’s a beautiful church.”

“You’ve seen it before, right?” I said, glancing over my shoulder at him.

He’d paused near the cornerstone and tipped his head all the way back to better see the tip-top of the spire. “Yeah, but never at night. I should come back up here and paint it before graduation.”

My heart panged at the thought of Josh leaving Easton, and he seemed to notice the change in my expression. He reached for my gloved hand and squeezed it.

“Which is many, many weeks away,” he reminded me.

I nodded. Ivy hung back at a respectful distance, her hands in the pockets of her coat, but I couldn’t help remembering that not that long ago, it would have been her hand he was reaching for. It was awkward enough when she’d been dating him and he was my ex, but now I was dating him again and he was her ex. The very fact that the three of us could be in the same room together, let alone on the same mission, was a small miracle. I cleared my throat and pulled away.

“Come on. We’re almost there.”

I walked to the center of the back wall, then turned my steps perpendicular to it and headed straight toward the woods. Now that we were so close, I suddenly realized how completely futile and insane this whole endeavor was. What did I really think I was going to find out here? This was just a product of my overactive imagination, spurred on by my obsession with the BLS and the book of spells.

But when I got to the tree line, I paused. Right in front of me was a pathway. It was a bit grown over, but it was there.

“What’s up?” Josh asked, coming up behind me.

“Look.” I pointed at the ground, trailing my finger up to indicate the line of the path. We both squinted into the darkness. Up ahead, it looked as if the trees parted. “Is that—?”

“A clearing?” Ivy said, stopping at my opposite shoulder. “You bet your ass it is.”

She pushed ahead, leading the way into the woods.

“I suppose we have to follow her,” Josh said.

“It would be rude, right? To leave her here alone,” I joked back.

“Majorly.”

I glanced up at the sky for a moment, feeling suddenly that someone was watching. Not in a bad or scary way, just in an … interested way. I reached for Josh’s hand, glad that I didn’t have to do this alone, and lifted my foot to step over the pile of dead leaves at my feet. When we caught up to Ivy, she was standing in the center of a circle of trees. The ground beneath her feet was packed dirt, no snow in sight. My heart quivered. I couldn’t have sworn it was the exact same clearing from my dream, but it was familiar. Slowly, I trailed my eyes around at the trees—oaks and birches, evergreens and maples. And then I froze.

“What?” Ivy and Josh said as one. “What is it?”

Josh sidestepped closer to me, the shovels clanging together, as if trying to see whatever I was seeing from exactly my vantage point.

“There,” I said, pointing. “That’s it. That’s the tree from my dream.”

Ivy and I arrived at the foot of the enormous oak at the exact same time. She crouched down, just as Elizabeth had the night before, and I was hit with a sickening punch to the gut. I almost reached out to grab her—to pull her back. But then, that was ridiculous. It wasn’t as if Ariana was really about to charge out of the woods and attack.

I took a deep breath to calm my fluttering heart and studied the woods around us. There was no one there.

“Look at this,” Ivy said. “This area is packed down in a whole different way. Look. It’s lower than the rest of the clearing.”

My stomach filled with butterflies the size of baseballs. Josh swung the shovels off his shoulder and handed one to me. He drove the tip of his straight into the hard, cold dirt.

“What are you doing?” I asked, stopping his arm with my hand.

“Digging,” he replied, matter-of-factly. “Isn’t that what we came here to do?”

I smirked. “What happened to skeptical Josh?”

“He’s officially left the building,” Josh replied. “So are you gonna help me or what?”