Page 70 of Wicked Dreams (Fallen Royals 1)

I get in the passenger seat, closing the door in his face.

Once he’s in, he eyes me. “What do you want most in the world?”

I suck in a breath. “I don’t know.”

“I think you do.” He speeds toward his house.

Once we arrive, I follow him down the side driveway. My stomach is cramping again.

This is where my parents used to park. This is where the bus used to drop me off, and I’d rush down the little walkway to get home. Later, Caleb and I would run through his house before our parents separated us for homework or dinner. It wasn’t unusual to spend the entire day together.

I snap myself out of it as he opens the side gate. I can almost smell my mother’s cooking.

I take in the grime on the windows, the weeds and vines crawling up the siding.

It’s abandoned.

Just like me.

Even sitting in Caleb’s family’s backyard, literally yards away from their back door, my old home has turned into a graveyard of memories.

He unlocks the door to my old childhood home and then steps aside. “The past isn’t a happy place,” he murmurs. “Why don’t you want to leave it buried?”

He’s been tormenting me because of this. Because of a past that only he seems to understand. “Why don’t you?”

He exhales, shoving the door open. “After you.”

Stepping inside now hurts worse than before.

Before was shock. Spikes of pain. Relief that I remembered things the way they were.

Now it’s total annihilation.

I stop just across the threshold. Ghosts are here, bringing an icy chill with them. I can’t do this.

You have to face your fear.

I glance over my shoulder at Caleb, but he’s watching me with unreadable eyes. I step in farther, ignoring the dust collecting over every inch of the space. The wine-red rug under the kitchen table. The four chairs crowded around it, one of which has a loose leg. Dad used to stuff it with newspaper when company came over.

Company being Caleb, of course. Sometimes Savannah.

Never Amelie.

The cup is in the exact same spot, so I move past the kitchen. Caleb follows me like a second shadow, past the living room on our right and into the narrow hallway. Mom got a grippy material to put under the rug when I was six, because I slid headlong into the wall with the rug bunched around my feet.

I had been chased there, but I never said so.

The first door on the left is the bathroom, and my bedroom the next door down. Between them, on the right, is the door to my parents’ bedroom. I hesitate, brushing my fingers against the painted wood.

“It’s not going to bite,” Caleb whispers.

Yes it will. The memories will sink their teeth into me and never let me go.

I take a deep breath and push the door open anyway. What I see steals the air from my lungs.

It’s a wreck. Vandalized.

There’s a broken lamp on the floor next to the bed, cracked into three pieces. The lightbulb is smashed. Clothes… everywhere. It looks like a hurricane went through the room.

---