Page 10 of Counting Quarters

“What do you mean?” I saw Hailey tilt her head from the corner of my eye and finally gave in, swinging my gaze over to her.

“You know, what's going to help you cross over? Go into the light? Follow the big guy's voice or whatever?”

“I don't understand. I just want to go back home. I have an interview for a marketing firm in Seattle and I haven't prepared anything.”

Oh, gods. Of course, she didn't know she was dead. That would just be too easy for me.

“I hate to break it to you, Hailey, but that interview is long gone. You didn't get the job. But the good news is that you'll never have to work another day in your life because your life is over. You're free to frolic and play around the spirit world.”

Her eyes grew wide, and she stared at me in complete, creepy silence. After a few seconds passed, I turned and bent down to grab my bag from the ground to leave.

I'm sure there was a nicer way to go about this, but I didn't have the energy to coddle her right now. I was already late to my shift at the hotel, and I wasn't looking forward to Grammy laying into me about it.

Hailey went missing months ago, when Rayner, the town madman, started kidnapping local girls to frame the Quarters and turn the town against them. He didn't have to kill them, but Rayner was all about going the full mile. I'd been running into his victims all around town and quickly grew tired of explaining their passings to them.

The police already moved on from their cases, assuming they were victims of the Movement that Rayner ran in an attempt to overthrow the Quarter families and become High Priest of the Watchtower coven. In the beginning, Sheriff Abbot assured each of their parents that he would do everything he could to find them at our town meetings, but eventually, it became clear that they weren't coming home alive.

That wasn’t to say they gave up on finding them; they just stopped looking for girls who were alive and reluctantly started looking for their remains instead.

Hailey was pacing back and forth behind me, fumbling over her words. I slung the strap of my crossbody bag over my shoulder and walked off, knowing she'd be close behind.

“Blaire, you have to stop. You have to explain this to me. Please. You're the first person I've been able to talk to in months.”

Her voice broke when she reached out to touch me, and her hand passed right through my shoulder. I paused to watch the realization burn through her translucent form, my broken heart splintering into a thousand more tiny little pieces.

This.

This was why I was positive I'd been cursed. Because what kind of gift allowed you to look into someone's eyes while they realized they no longer existed? To watch their soul shatter and disconnect from the idea of what they could have been.

I couldn't handle it. Grammy was tough-skinned, and Mom was well-trained in avoidance. Me? I was weak and empathetic and tortured with this burden that they severely under-prepared me for.

Hailey's crumpled form fizzled out and disappeared, leaving me alone in the middle of the trees again. I huffed out a breath and continued my trek to the hotel, knowing she’d be back. They always came back. That was the problem. And something told me Hailey was going to be a tough one to break through to and help cross over.

Once I made it to the opening of the forest, I shifted the streets to make a shortcut for myself to the hotel. It was something I’d done a thousand times before and never realized was part of my magic. I truly thought everyone could set a path in their mind and command the earth to bend and conform.

I really should have taken my time to get there to give myself an opportunity to shake off my horrible mood, but it would only make Grammy angrier, and that always made me feel worse. A person could only take so much verbal abuse before they turned bitter. I was quickly reaching my breaking point.

“You're late,” her deep voice grumbled from behind the hotel desk.

Does it matter?

The only thing she did whenever I relieved her was sit on the couch and berate me from across the house that was attached to the hotel office. And with the mayor's most recent restrictions on tourists, the hotel was mostly dead.

I chose not to engage this time. Instead, I took the old computer chair that was still warm from her plump bottom and began combing through the schedule for the next twenty-four hours. No surprise; it was basically empty. Grammy took the hint and limped off into the house, slamming the door behind her.

I would love to leave this place. Not just the motel, but Beacon Grove. I often envisioned myself taking the winding, one lane road out and driving as far as I could go. But Grammy wouldn't even let me get my license when I reached the legal age. By the time I was old enough to go on my own, my hopes of leaving had slowly dried out and died off like rose petals, leaving nothing behind but a bitter, thorny stem.

It was easier to handle when spirits weren't haunting me at all hours of the day and I wasn't forced to hide the biggest piece of me from the world. In the past, that wouldn't have hurt so badly, but I was finally finding my footing when my gifts activated and Grammy and Mom admitted that there was more to the Granger bloodline than being hotel owners and midwives.

We were the most powerful witches in our coven.

A coven, I should add, that had ostracized and mistreated us since before I was even a thought.

The bell over the door rang and yanked me from my staring contest with the computer and Sheriff Abbot walked through. He practically had to duck his head to make it under the short doorway, and when he noticed me in the chair, he tucked his chin into his chest in greeting.

We've been seeing a lot more of him since Rayner tried to burn my best friend, Storie, alive to weaken our Quarters, and he was the first one to arrive at the ritual and save her. Of course, she didn't need help by then, but that was a detail the Quarters have decided to leave out of the story whenever it came up with the coven for fear of giving away too much about the power of Counters.

“How can we help you, sheriff?” I greeted in a dry tone.

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