together by duct tape.
“Flip it open,” Scott urged. “To the pictures.”
I did so gently, opening to the small plastic sleeves that held a handful of wallet-sized photos. Scott pointed to them.
“Go to the third one. It’s a group shot.”
I flipped to the one he indicated and examined it, frowning. The photo was tiny, almost too small for me to make out the individual features of the seven or eight people seated in it.
“It’s my whole family,” Scott explained. “At least, all of them that live in Oklahoma. We took it a few years ago, during my freshman year. See? That’s me in the front row.”
He smiled shyly and pointed again. I peered back down at the photo and saw a younger version of Scott, with shorter hair and a few less inches of height, smiling up from the first row.
Then my eyes trailed to the back row, where the elders of his family stood. On the far left, standing a few feet apart from everyone else, was a white-haired woman with thick glasses and a broad smile. She looked strangely familiar, though I didn’t know why.
Noticing my stare, Scott leaned closer and pointed to the old woman.
“That’s my gran. She was on the decorating committee at First Baptist. The same church Ruth Mayhew used to attend.”
Suddenly, I knew where I’d seen her face before. She’d been in the church the day Ruth marched me outside and threatened me with exorcism. More importantly, this old woman had been at my cemetery, standing in a circle of Voodoo dust, the night Ruth called off my exorcism so that I could save Jillian’s life.
The woman in the photograph was a Seer. And Scott’s grandmother.
Which means that Scott is . . .
“How long have you known?” I whispered aloud, still staring at her picture. “What you are?”
“Not long. My gran never told me about this stuff, and she didn’t raise me with the superstitions, like Ruth did with her grandkids. But I know Gran believed in ghosts. And I know she had some pretty creepy after-church activities, judging by all the jars of weird crap she kept in her house.”
“‘Kept’?” I asked, catching his use of the past tense.
He shrugged, but I could see a glint of sadness in his eyes. “Yeah, she passed away this January.”
“I’m sorry,” I said softly. And I was, even if the woman had tried to end my afterlife. Loss hurt, no matter who it was you lost.
I closed the wallet and handed it back to Scott carefully, making sure that our hands didn’t touch. He took it from me and slipped it into his pocket. Then he shrugged again, more awkwardly this time, and cast an uncomfortable glance at Joshua.
“Jillian and I have been . . . hanging out a lot lately. She needed someone to talk to after everything that happened at Christmas, and when we put together all the different pieces about my gran—”
“Jillian realized that she had a new Seer boyfriend?” Joshua concluded bitterly. “One who was willing to listen to all of Amelia’s secrets?”
“No, no!” Scott flapped his hands desperately in the air. “Jillian never bitched about Amelia, not to me. She just warned me that something bad might happen again, and that we needed to be ready with a plan to fight it.”
“Like the ‘something’ that happened an hour ago,” Jillian added forcefully. She gestured to me emphatically. “Tell them, Amelia. Tell them about your little truth-or-dare disaster.”
I startled, surprised that I hadn’t done that yet. I’d been too wrapped up in the shock of another person knowing what I was, and why.
With a shudder that had nothing to do with the cold night air, I repeated my conversation with the dark visitor in the mirror. As I spoke, I saw Joshua’s jaw tighten and his fists clench reflexively.
Scott trembled too—with fear, not anger. But somehow, he found the courage to interrupt the end of my story.
“Amelia, we have to do something,” he urged. “Don’t you see that? For your sake, and Jillian’s.”
I wouldn’t
Kit Tunstall, R.E. Saxton