Beautiful Darkness (Caster Chronicles 2)

The stranger didn’t say a word.

Sounds intensified at a dizzying rate—branches breaking, leaves rustling, my pulse throbbing. I thought about the hundreds of unsolved crime shows I’d watched with my mom that began exactly like this—a girl standing alone somewhere she shouldn’t be, staring at the guy who was about to attack her.

I stepped back, thick mud pushing up around my ankles like a hand rooting me to the spot.

Please don’t hurt me.

The wind cut through the graveyard, lifting tangles of long hair off the stranger’s shoulders and the thin fabric of a white dress from her legs.

Her legs.

Relief washed over me. “Have you seen a gray and white Siamese cat? I’m going to kill him when I find him.”

Silence.

Her dress caught the moonlight, and I realized it wasn’t a dress at all. She was wearing a nightgown. Who wandered around a cemetery in their nightgown?

Someone crazy.

Or someone sleepwalking.

You aren’t supposed to wake a sleepwalker, but I couldn’t leave her out here alone at night either.

“Hey? Can you hear me?”

The girl didn’t move, gazing at me as if she could see my features in the darkness. An empty feeling unfolded in the pit of my stomach. I wanted to look at something else—anything but her unnerving stare.

My eyes drifted down to the base of the cross.

The girl’s feet were as bare as mine, and it looked like they weren’t touching the ground.

I blinked hard, unwilling to consider the other possibility. It had to be an effect of the moonlight and the shadows. I glanced at my own feet, caked in mud, and back to hers.

They were pale and spotless.

A flash of white fur darted in front of her and rushed toward me.

Elvis.

I grabbed him before he could get away. He hissed at me, clawing and twisting violently until I dropped him. My heart hammered in my chest as he darted across the grass and squeezed under the gate.

I looked back at the stone cross.

The girl was gone, the ground nothing but a smooth, untouched layer of mud.

Blood from the scratches trailed down my arm as I crossed the graveyard, trying to reason away the girl in the white nightgown.

Silently reminding myself that I didn’t believe in ghosts.

2. SCRATCHING THE SURFACE

When I stumbled back onto the well-lit sidewalk, there was no sign of Elvis. A guy with a backpack slung over his shoulder walked by and gave me a strange look when he noticed I was barefoot, and covered in mud up to my ankles. He probably thought I was a pledge.

My hands didn’t stop shaking until I hit O Street, where the shadows of the campus ended and the lights of the DC traffic began. Tonight, even the tourists posing for pictures at the top of The Exorcist stairs were somehow reassuring.

The cemetery suddenly felt miles away, and I started second-guessing myself.

The girl in the graveyard hadn’t been hazy or transparent like the ghosts in movies. She had looked like a regular girl.