At a quarter to ten that night, I swing open my bedroom door to find Evie standing just outside it. I jump and bite back a scream, glaring daggers at my sister. "What the hell?"

Evie flicks her gaze down my body, taking in my coat and boots, before meeting my gaze. "What're you doing? Where are you going?"

"Answer my question first." I insist.

Evie narrows her eyes at me, before glancing over her shoulder, and returning her focus to me. "Mom's...not here tonight."

The code for my mother's symptoms sends a pang of understanding and alarm through my body. I suck in a breath, meeting my sister's gaze. "How is she?"

Evie shakes her head, sweeping her dark hair out of her face. "Not bad, but not great. You know how it is this time of year."

Of course, I do. My mom's episodes are sporadic throughout the year, but the closer the days get to the anniversary of his death, the more her symptoms get worse. When they do, my mom shuts herself in the attic, candles lit and crystal ball dusted, seated around a seance table and waiting for a sign from beyond that will never come. She claims to hear voices and see terrible things when she does, but neither Evie nor I have ever heard or seen a thing.

"Has she taken her meds?" I ask, my attention darting up to the ceiling as I hear the boards creak.

"She takes them," Evie says simply. "The question is are they working?"

My mom was diagnosed with a form of schizophrenia shortly after Dad died. Her obsession with finding out what happened, coupled with the effects of the ley line, drove her to have some really bad problems. It was Evie who found her in the corner of the attic a month after Dad died, wielding a book like a weapon towards a dark corner, screaming at it from inside a circle of salt. Once she'd calmed down, she'd realized her hallucination and Evie drove her to get help.

She's gotten a lot better, and if you didn't know she had a condition, you wouldn't even realize she had one. That's the thing about schizophrenia: it has such negative connotations and isn't portrayed accurately. With the right training and help, people suffering from its symptoms can live life as normally as they could without it. It was just a challenge to get that way. And for my mom, whether it really was schizophrenic symptoms or something else entirely causing her to act the way she did, it could definitely prove a formidable challenge at that.

The creaking snaps me out of my reverie, and Evie sighs. "I'm going to go check on her. Where are you going?"

"Out," Is all I say, and Evie doesn't push. She has more important things to worry about, and I don't blame her.

"Be back by midnight," Evie calls over her shoulder as she starts for the staircase. "Don't make me come after you."

She disappears up the stairs to the attic before I can fire back a retort, but then again, I don't have it in me. I just sigh, shut my bedroom door behind me, and make my way down the stairs and out of the house, making no noise whatsoever.

-<>-

"If I had a dollar for how many people in history have been named John or any variation of John, I'd be rich enough to buy my own island."

Stepping over a haphazard rock in Hope Cemetery, I cast a wayward glance at Nick, who, for someone bounding through a cemetery in the middle of the night, is surprisingly chipper. "Are you ever not indignant?"

Nick winks at me. "Of course not."

I roll my eyes, continuing down the central path cleaving the cemetery in half. I wave my flashlight left and right, surveying the headstones and occasionally illuminating the eyes of various small woodland animals, sending them scurrying back to the treeline beyond.

"What're we here for anyway, Stella?" Nick calls, loud enough to wake the dead. Literally.

"She had a hunch," Jase reports, jogging to keep up with me.

"A hunch," Nick echoes, his voice twinged with incredulity.

"Yes, a hunch." I look over my shoulder at him. "Is there a problem with that?"

Nick puts his hands up in mock surrender, and bounds over to flank my other side. "So what kind of hunch are we talking about? Raising the dead? Finding vampires and other cast members of Twilight?"

I whack Nick's arm, shooting him a look. "Ha-ha, very funny."

"Thank you."

"It's about the Harbingers," Jase quips from my other side. "We visited Marie today."

Nick's eyebrows shoot up in intrigue. "Really? Where was I?"

"Sleeping through AP Physics," I respond, smiling at him brightly.

Nick sticks his tongue at me, averting his attention back to Jase as we continue down the path. "No, seriously, next time you guys visit Marie, I wanna come too."

"Why?" I ask. "She just told us a bunch of myths and legends. Y'know, the bane of your existence."

Nick waves his hand, as if dismissing the idea. "She makes the best hot chocolate in all of New England."

"Can't argue with the kid." Jase grins at me.

"Kid? I'm at least a foot taller than you," Nick rebuffs.

Jase slides his gaze over to Nick. "Try a few inches."

Before Nick can make an obscene remark from Jase's words, the cemetery path we're walking along bisects another. Just beyond the path, right before us, is an above-ground tomb, covered in dust and cobwebs.

"Lovely," Nick comments. "An unmarked grave."

"That's strange," Jase observes. "Above-ground tombs like this are normally very well maintained."

Nick furrows his eyebrows at Jase. "How did you know that?"

"It's common knowledge, Nick." I answer for Jase. "If a grave is above ground, it means people had the money to make it so. Bigger, grander resting places call for bigger, grander maintenance efforts."

I head closer to the tomb, casting my flashlight over the tomb. It's simple stone and plaster, nothing too special, but special enough.

"So why this one in particular?" Nick asks.

"Because." My light catches some engravings on the front of the tomb, and I reach forward, ridding the front slab of cobwebs and dust until the name ROWENA MARLEY is revealed. "The lady inside this tomb is very important."

"No way." Jase marvels, surging to my side. "How'd you find this?"
I shrug. "I figured since she was reasonably wealthy, her grave had to be above-ground. Since she wasn't particularly well-liked, I looked for the only unkempt tomb and lo and behold."

"You found Rowena Marley's tomb." Nick whistles in appreciation. "Damn, Stel. I have a newfound appreciation for your morbid spidey-senses."
I roll my eyes, fixing my attention back on her marker. The words LOST SOUL are etched into the stone beneath her name, and the symbol for her family--a weeping willow, surprise, surprise--is etched above it.

To be quite honest, I'm not sure how I managed to find Rowena's tomb. Sure, I'm skilled at tuning my senses to that which could not be easily perceived, but this? I'm not sure. Maybe it was the ley line I lived atop, or maybe it was how Rowena's portrait in Marie's book seemed to stare right at me, but I needed some sort of evidence that the girl who'd supposedly been forged of shadows and became a legend was nothing but flesh and bone. And all that was flesh and bone died and rotted away.

I run my fingertips over the engraving of the weeping willow.

How could a girl become a sorceress?

I look up at the top of her tomb.

How could these legends be real?

I get to my feet, reaching for the heavy stone slab concealing Rowena from this earthly world--

The sound of footsteps tromping through the surrounding forest snaps me out of my thoughts, and I whirl back around towards the sound. Jase and Nick are aiming their flashlights in the direction of the footsteps, if not casting wary looks my way. I clear my throat, following suit and raising my flashlight towards the treeline.

What just happened?

"Who's there?" Nick booms, his voice reverberating through the quiet night.

We don't get an answer. For a while, the only things audible are the hoots of owls and the beats of our thundering hearts. Well, mine at least. People are infinitely scarier than spirits, and I don't want to mess with anyone who mills about a graveyard in the middle of the night.

Jase must know what I'm thinking because he gives me a sarcastic look. "Whoever it is can't be much different from us, Stel."

I blink, as if remembering that I, too, am milling about a graveyard in the middle of the night.

Before I can fire off a witty comeback, the sound of Skrillex emerges from the treeline with Clay in its wake. Flanking him on either side are two of his college buddies whose names I don't know, but judging from their respective statures, one must have been a stalk of asparagus in another life and the other most likely a bull shark.

"Hey," Clay drawls, hopping onto the nearest path to his neck of the woods. He's hardly ten feet away and I can smell the weed and alcohol seeping off of him. "Ella, right?"

"Stella." I wrinkle my nose. "Charmed, I'm sure."

"Aw, come on now, why the sad face?" Clay attempts to pout, but just starts giggling.

"Oh, excuse us," Jase chimes from my side. "We're clearly thrilled to see you, Clay."

Clay raises a hand to point at Jase. "Thrilled to see you too, music dude."

"Right," Nick says, trailing off as if he isn't sure where to go with this. He clamps a hand on my shoulder, steering me away. I grab Jase's forearm to ensure he doesn't get left behind. "Well, nice seeing you all."

"Wait, wait, dudes," Bull Shark calls as we turn around. Despite ourselves, we look over her shoulders. I aim my flashlight at his eyes accidentally, and red as they are, he reaches up to shield himself. "There's gonna be a party down by the creek this Friday."

"Darn," I deadpan. "We're busy."

"It'll be fun," Clay giggles. "Start of Harbinger season, you know."

I narrow my eyes at Clay. It was no surprise that the town hooligans held parties during Harbinger season to try and summon spirits. It was also no surprise that most of them would be taken into custody year after year for drinking too much or reeking too much of marijuana. Even if the Harbingers weren't monsters and just people with supernatural abilities, it baffled me to know that some people could so willingly engage in the kind of activity that ensured one's death in just about every horror movie ever.

"Pass." Nick and Jase chorus, and we hurry as casual as possible back down the way we came through the cemetery.

"Should we, like, tell someone that Clay's frolicking in the woods high off his ass?" Jase asks.

Nick waves a hand. "Clay's a big boy, he'll be fine." He looks down at me, pinning me with an inquisitive look. "Besides, I'm more concerned about Stella's little trance."

I make a face, even though I know exactly what he's talking about. "What trance?"

"The trance where you stared hypnotically into the stone of Rowena Marley's tomb," Jase quips.

"Oh, that trance."

"What happened?" Nick asks as we walk down the main path of the cemetery.

I shrug, mostly because I have no plausible answer either. "Just got lost in thought, I suppose."

"Well, next time you get lost in thought near the grave of a supposed evil sorceress--"

"She's not a sorceress."

"--warn either Jase or myself so we can stop you." Nick winks at me triumphantly, having run through my rebuttal.

I roll my eyes at him, whacking him with my flashlight. He yelps, ducks, and scampers ahead of Jase and I.

"You looked possessed!" Nick calls over his shoulder, still jogging.

I slow in my tracks at his words. Jase leans over and whispers, "Keep bugging him about this, maybe he'll run ahead and leave us alone."

I manage a weak laugh, prompting Nick to whip his head around and say, "Oh, so you both are laughing at me now?"

"Always!" Jase calls back.

The two of them engage in their typical verbal battle until, before I know it, we've reached the exit.

I glance back over my shoulder at the cemetery and its endless rows of headstones and tombs and find myself looking directly at Rowena Marley's tomb, virtually a haze of gray and white at the end of the winding brick path.

I don't get a good look at it, given the darkness and the distance, but just before Jase tugs on my arm to keep up with Nick, a shadow forms before Rowena's tomb, and then just like that, it's gone and so am I.