Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles 3)

A young girl appeared, an overcoat hastily thrown over flannel pajamas.

“Becca!” shouted Alice. “So help me gods, I’m going to kill you.”

The girl look appropriately shamed; her cheeks flared red and her eyes were downcast. “Sorry,” she muttered.

Zita looked directly at Alice. “What is she doing here?”

“I’d ask her the same thing,” said Alice, her eyes not leaving the young girl.

“I know what you’re doing,” said the young girl.

“Oh yeah?” asked Zita.

“Becca, go home,” said Alice. “Do Mom and Dad know you’re gone?”

The young girl ignored her sister’s question. “You’re calling the Empress.”

Zita’s eyes flashed to Alice’s. “What did you tell her?”

“N-nothing,” stammered Alice. She glanced around at the gathered girls, hoping for some rescue. Finally, she frowned and said, “She heard us talking. Last night. She said she’d tell Mom and Dad if I didn’t let her in on it.”

“I wanna come,” said Becca, still staring at Zita. “I want to see you do it. I want to see what happens.”

“You’re too young,” said Zita.

“Who says?” said Becca.

“I do,” said Zita. “And I’m the May Queen.”

This seemed to silence the little girl.

“Go home, Becca,” said Alice. “And I won’t make you rue the day you were born.”

Becca rounded on her sister. “I’ll tell Mom and Dad. I swear to the trees. I’ll tell ’em. And then you won’t be able to go out for a week. You’ll have to miss the school Spring Pageant.”

Alice gave Zita a pleading, desperate look that seemed to say, Little sisters: What can you do? The May Queen gave in, saying to Becca, “How much do you know?”

The young girl gave a deep, relieved breath and said, “I heard about it before, but I didn’t know anyone who’d done it. At the old stone house. Off Macleay Road. They say she died there.” She looked from girl to girl, judging by their silence that there was truth in her telling. “You say something? A chant? In the center of the house. And turn around three times. To wake her. Her ghost.”

Zita listened to the girl in silence. When she’d finished, Zita nodded. “Okay,” she said. “You can come. But you’ve got to swear you’ll not tell a soul what you see. You swear?”

“I swear.”

“Follow me,” said Zita, and she continued walking. Alice, cuffing her sister on her head, took up the rear of the procession.

A clock struck the half hour, somewhere in the distance, and Zita quickened her pace. “Not long now,” she said.

“Why the rush?” asked Kendra.

“After midnight, it won’t work. It’s got to start before the hour. The first of May, too loo too ray.”

Kendra looked to Alice for some sort of explanation, but Alice only shrugged. Zita had long been a mysterious force in their lives: Since they were little, she’d always had a kind of peculiar magnetism. An imaginative girl, she’d captivated her friends with strange drawings and poetry, with her long-standing fascination with the occult.

The forest grew wilder as they moved away from the populous part of South Wood and into the mangy scrub that bordered the Avian Principality. A path led through the undergrowth; before long, the girls arrived at the house, or what was left of it.

It was a ruin, its stone walls worn down by the elements and nearly consumed by a thick blanket of winding ivy. Branches invaded the house where the roof had been, and thick swatches of moss lay in the chinks of the stone. The four girls walked cautiously into the center of the house, its floor long overtaken by the forest’s greenery: a carpet of ivy fighting for dominion of the small enclosure. Whoever had lived here before had made do with very little: The house amounted to a single, small room. Two breaks in the rock walls suggested windows; a door, its keystone long collapsed, led out into a dark, empty expanse. Which is not to say that the house had remained entirely uninhabited all these years: Empty tins of food, their labels sun-bleached indecipherable, littered the corners of the house, and the names and exploits of past explorers made a kind of diary on the inner walls: BIG RED SLEPT HERE SOME. TRAVIS LOVES ISABEL. NOT REALLY NOW NOT ANYMORE. LONG LIVE THE EMPRESS! were all scrawled in chalk and paint or chiseled into the stone.

Zita looked at her watch. She nodded to the other girls. “Let’s do this,” she said.