Page 167 of The Spider & the Storm

“Are you ready to tell me what Max said?” Stormy asked, parking the car outside a bright and cheery colonial-style house in an equally bright and cheery suburb.

There was the faintest tinge of impatience in her tone, nearly undetectable but there all the same. And who could blame her? She had suggested I rest on the two-hour drive, but she hadn't mentioned anything about uncomfortable silence and nervous knee-jittering while my eyes remained fixed on the trees and buildings that passed. A healthy relationship wasn't healthy at all without honesty and unhindered communication, yet there I was, brushing her off once again because I was terrified of what she'd think of my supernatural suspicions.

Christ, hadn't she proven herself to me already? If she hadn't run for the hills after learning I'd unintentionally killed a man, why the hell would I think for a second that she'd be at all bothered by my fear of the potentially undead?

She turned to me, a helpless plea in her eyes, and the guilt of having clammed up again wrapped its tendrils around my unnerved body.

“I'm sorry,” I said, speaking for the first time since ending the call with Max. “I should've just said something before. I'm just … trying to wrap my head around it, I guess.” I huffed out a humorless chuckle and rolled my gaze toward the window. “Honestly, I've been trying to do that for the past couple of months, but …”

“What? What's going on?”

“Tommy is haunting me,” I said point-blank, and the moment the words were out of my mouth, I wanted to find a deep, dark hole to crawl into. “I-I know I’ve said it before, but I mean it. And honestly, it's probably nothing …”

I was downplaying when I knew I shouldn't. It wasn'tnothing. It hadn't been nothing since the first time I'd found the cigarette butt on the back of Luke's bike. But those other incidents, I could brush them off as bullshit pranks committed by local teenagers—maybe even those kids who'd tried to start shit with me a while back. I could loosely explain the hooded man—apparition?—I'd seen across the road from the house, the one Max had caught on camera.

But I couldn't explain this.

It was easy to brush things away when you were the only one to see them happen, but it was harder when there were witnesses.

So, before we climbed the steps to her sister's house, I told Stormy everything. Every moment I'd found something, every time I'd been struck with the scent of cigarette smoke. And she listened intently, not once flinching or snickering.

I didn't deserve her.

“And you think it's Tommy?” she asked after I laid it all out.

“Who else would it be?” I challenged.

“No, I know. I'm just failing to understand why he'd pick now to torment you when you said it's been, what, five years?”

“The only thing I can think is, I've spent those five years damning myself to a life of solitude. But I have you now. I'mhappy. But maybe he doesn't like that. Maybe …” I squeezed my eyes shut and pinched the bridge of my nose, painfully aware of how this all sounded. “Maybe my self-torture was enough before, but it wasn’tlongenough. So, now, he's taking matters into his own hands.”

It was ridiculous. Even as I said the words, I couldn't believe they were leaving my mouth to hang in the air around us. The absurdity of it all echoed with irritating flicks against my brain, and my cheeks heated more and more from the embarrassment with every passing second.

“I mean, I guess,” Stormy finally replied, sounding unconvinced. “It kinda feels like a stretch to me though. I think, if I were a pissed-off ghost, I wouldn't have waited five freakin' years to make you lose your mind. I'd have been right there the whole time, making your life a total living hell.”

“Thanks,” I grumbled while chuckling at the sincerity in her tone.

She reached out and laid her hand on my thigh. I took it, sliding my fingers between hers until our palms touched.

“We'll figure it out,” she declared softly, determined.

We. I sighed into the security of that little word and nodded. “Yeah,” I agreed. “We will.”

And just like that, I swept another incident under the rug and allowed myself, once again, to believe that everything would be fine.

If only I'd known how terribly, terribly wrong I was, if only I'd listened to the intuition that had never stopped talking since I was a boy …

If only …

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

CONNECTICUT, PRESENT DAY

Salem's history had always called to my dark and macabre heart, a place where the misunderstood had once been exiled and punished, only to now be accepted and celebrated. And I couldn't say for sure that there'd ever been magic in this world, but Salem had certainly felt magical to me then. It still did, and it was the only place I could ever envision myself calling home.

But there was a special kind of magic in the air that lay over River Canyon, Connecticut, too. I'd felt it the moment I stepped out of Stormy's car to look up at a cloudless, bright blue sky, the sun warm against my face. I sucked in a deep breath, cool and crisp, and was surprised to feel the expansion of my heart, thumping steadily with a peculiar sense of new life and contentedness.

I could learn to love this,I'd thought then, and I was still thinking it as we walked down the small town's quaint Main Street.

---