Ominous (Private 13)

“Because you are a skeptical girl, Reed Brennan. You need proof.” She lifted her hands and clasped them atop her knees. “I’ve come to tell you how to find it.”

She said this last bit in an excited tone, as if she were a little girl proposing a new scheme. I was about to answer when my eyes flicked past her shoulder. Something had just moved, there in the trees. A figure. A girl. I was sure of it. But when I stared into the darkness broken by tree trunks and underbrush, I saw nothing.

“Tomorrow night, you will return to this place,” Elizabeth instructed. “Bring a shovel, and a candle to light your way. If you dig in this very spot, you will find what you are looking for.”

A shock of blond hair ducked behind one of the trees. My heart skipped and I stood up. A branch cracked. I caught a whiff of a scent—something earthy and sour—and my senses recoiled. It smelled like death. Leaves rustled. The sounds grew closer. There was someone out there. Someone moving toward us through the trees. I opened my mouth to warn Elizabeth, but suddenly my throat constricted. It was as if someone had curled their fingers around my throat and started to squeeze, but no one was there. When I tried to call out, all that I could manage was a croak.

I waved both my hands, trying to get Elizabeth’s attention, but her head was bent toward the earth. She was stroking the ground with her fingertips again. Behind her, the branches swayed. The crunch of footsteps approaching grew louder still, but she didn’t flinch. Didn’t look up. There was no air, and I couldn’t move. Not to defend her, not to defend myself.

Suddenly someone sprang from the underbrush and pounced on top of Elizabeth, wrestling her to the ground. A blur of blond hair and pale skin. The girl closed her fingers around Elizabeth’s neck, slammed her head into the dirt floor of the forest, and whipped her head around to glare over her shoulder at me.

“Ariana!”

My door banged open and I sat up straight in bed, my hand covering my heart. Ivy stood in the doorway, her hair knotted with sleep, her nightshirt falling off one shoulder. She held an aluminum softball bat over her shoulder.

“Reed! Are you all right?”

She pulled the bat back and looked quickly around the room, as if ready to destroy the first thing that moved.

“Why?” I asked, trying to catch my breath.

Her stance relaxed slightly. “Because you were just screaming about Ariana.”

My cheeks warmed with embarrassment. But the memory of what had just happened in my dream was burned on my brain. Elizabeth Williams had been dying at the hands of Ariana Osgood. It was all so impossible, but it had seemed so real. I remembered exactly where we had been when Ariana had attacked. Just north of the Billings Chapel, at an untouched clearing in the woods.

I glanced at Ivy’s concerned face as she lowered her bat to the floor.

“It was just a dream,” I said.

She sat down at the foot of my bed. “Not a good one, from the sound of it.”

My heart still pounded fretfully. “Yeah. No.”

“What was it?” Ivy asked, shifting slightly. “Do you remember?”

I chewed on the inside of my cheek, drawing my knees up under my chin. I wanted to tell her about it before the details slipped from my mind. Tell her about the clearing and the spot Elizabeth had indicated. She’d probably tell me it was just a dream—that I was crazy. Which would probably be a good thing. Because would a sane person actually be considering following a dead dream-girl’s orders?

“Ivy, there’s something I need to tell you,” I said seriously. “It’s about the BLS.”

Ivy placed the bat aside, leaning it up against the sliver of wall between the end of my bed and my closet.

“Okay,” she said, matching her tone to my own. “I’m listening.”

Josh had looked at me like I was crazy more than once in our year-and-a-half-long on-and-off relationship, but never for so long, or with such complete conviction. We sat at our private table in the corner of the dining hall, while the rest of Easton Academy laughed and chowed down and checked over homework around us.

“What?” I said finally, turning my spoon upside down to suck strawberry yogurt off of it.

Clearing his throat, Josh shimmied forward on his chair, shoved his tray of half-eaten turkey sandwich aside, rested his elbows on the table, and leveled a dubious stare at me. One dark blond curl fell over his forehead and I smiled slightly, feeling that little tingle I felt whenever something particularly Josh happened—something only I would know was particularly Josh.

“So let me get this straight,” he said. “After everything that’s happened on this campus—the murder, the stalking, the kidnapping—you want to go up into the woods—by yourself, in the middle of the night, based on something a ghost in a dream told you—and dig a hole?”

Well, when he put it that way …

“Come on. I basically have to do it,” I said, placing the spoon and yogurt cup down. “If I don’t, I’ll always wonder if there was really something there.”

It was Ivy who had convinced me. That morning, as I’d gotten dressed, I’d railed on about how it was only a dream. And you didn’t see me running around Croton, Pennsylvania, looking for a river made of marshmallow fluff, did you? (That was a recurring dream of mine when I was in kindergarten.) No. You didn’t. Because dreams are complete insanity conjured up by our subconscious, not treasure maps to be followed in the dead of night. Ivy had listened to all of this patiently before saying the magic words—the ones I had just repeated to Josh.

“Yeah, but if you don’t go,” she’d said, her arms crossed over her chest, “you’ll always wonder.”