Page 29 of Sweet Silver Bells
Hunter 2:01 am
I’ve been throwing up all night. Thanks for covering.
This is who he was now, lying about being sick, waking up with no idea of why he was sitting in his car in the middle of the night. It felt like he had been under a spell, a haze encompassing him, a lullaby, a voice that he could almost hear, singing to him, clinging to him, refusing to let go.
There is no song.
Hunter turned his head to the passenger seat, imagining the infectious smile Sarah gave him after she’d playfully hit him in the shoulder. He would have been making fun of her, maybe for whatever her newest hobby was. That food scientist's paycheck had to go somewhere, and they could only travel in the summer because of Hunter’s school schedule.
Mushroom foraging it is.
Hunter liked to imagine still living in the bubble of love he had once thrived in. One that maybe he hadn’t deserved.
Go home. Just drive home.
The last thing he needed was to get pulled over by security and alert the school that he was lurking in the parking lot after calling out sick during school hours. Hunter put his foot on the gas and began the short drive home. If he wanted to stare out the window in the darkness, he could at least be parked in his own driveway.
Whatever was going on with him, he needed to figure it out fast. He knew he’d left the school in a panic. He remembered something, something so important that it had been worth putting the one thing he had on the line: his career. Not that he was a career kind of guy, but he also didn’t normally rock the boat. He didn’t mind safe. He didn’t mind stable.
That’s why he had fallen in love with Sarah, because she was the opposite, filled with light and a healthy amount of chaos.
Why did you leave? Where were you going?
Hunter had half an urge to call his mom and inquire about their family's mental health history. A call this late would surely cause problems for him, though. He didn’t need his parents to worry, to drop their overly comfortable retirements and dote on him.
You know that they would love to.
They liked having something to do, someone to focus on. Especially his mom.
The car was parked. Hunter blinked back in disbelief that he wasn’t home. Time seemed to have skipped. He was so wrapped up in his head that his body took over, and a ten-minute drive turned into something longer.
He was in another parking lot, not the school’s, and certainly not his driveway. A large, towering estate stood eerily in the dark. He was back at their wedding venue, the trees swaying in the distance, a dark, ominous dance, twisting and bowing to the snow flurries drifting through the night air.
Vultauge Manor.
That lullaby, that haze that clouded him, urged him to step out of the car as he squinted in the dark, trying to see something, anything. He heard a voice, one so beautiful, so heartbreaking that it felt like the world was crying, melting, then freezing back solid while encompassing Hunter’s body within it.
Sarah.
No, it wasn’t Sarah. It was a spirit of a different nature. Where Sarah had been filled with light, this one was filled with darkness, the kind that existed only in the deepest depths of the ocean, hiding secrets while life floated by at the surface.
Hunter saw a wisp of her breath, a ghost floating up over her head, but proof that she was there, proof that she was not a spirit, a hallucination.
So familiar. Even this, even her.
He walked right toward her, though he carried trepidation in his heart. His head told him something different; it told him he needed to get to the bottom of this, to figure out what was wrong with him, so he could decide if it was worth fixing.
The distance between them closed as his strides grew long and quick, stars peeking out from behind the clouds of the night sky, which moved quickly, pushed by the wind that plagued the grounds and slapped his cheeks in an unwelcoming way.
“You came back,” that voice, that song that followed him, infected his heart.
It’s you.
Hunter shook his head as if trying to clear a blockage in his ears, in his mind. Something was there, something was in the way, and he knew he knew the nude woman whose feet stood in snow at the edge of the Berkshires, dark hair wrapping around her body.
“I came back,” he replied.
She stared at him, her smile mischievous, even conniving, as if he had walked right into her plan, her trap.
