The Voices in Our Heads Read Free Page B

grew back on him bigger, thicker, tougher, more akin to his ‘bird’ side. But even turned ninety-nine percent beast, he never went back after Katie Claypool for revenge.”
    Why not?” Melanie said.
    Brandon shrugged. “It was a backward curse. They’d made a promise to love each other forever, remember?”
    “That’s lame,” Robbie snorted.
    “Shut up,” two of the girls said simultaneously. Brandon dug in the fire for a moment, searching back for the creepier tone that had shaded most of his prior narration.
    “But you can bank on the fact that he never forgot how he died, the torture, the disfigurement, the idea that he was bound by the dark magic of the wood to pass over the one who betrayed him.”
    “ Might have betrayed him,” Valencia interrupted. “The father could have grounded her, making it so she never had the chance to put her spirit ribbon on the pump in the first place.”
    “They didn’t have spirit ribbons back then,” Robbie said.
    “Whatever.”
    Brandon looked up, the reflection of the fire dancing in his eyes. “Doesn’t matter what the truth really was. It mattered what Adam Michael Rothman believed. Fact is that Katie Claypool was exempt, Rothman didn’t like it, and no one else was safe from there on in. No one. And she knew it when she got the general store, when she remarried, when all those long years made her old and bitter, twisted up in guilt every time someone new went M.I.A. She lived until 1975, always rocking on her porch, warning anyone who would listen about the betrayed, angry spirit lurking around up here in the woods.”
    “It’s a good story,” Ashley said. She stood up and brushed off her butt. Her shirt had ridden up a bit, showing off the new dragon tattoo she’d gotten a few weeks ago, snaked there along her hip and the right side of her belly. The guys were all staring out the sides of their faces. She looked good at her middle; flat and hard, and she was a blonde.
    “Be right back,” she said. She had to “wee,” and she wasn’t going to do it too close to the campfire. Too easy for Brandon, or Dana, or especially Robbie to get it on a cell phone and post it on YouTube. They’d title it “Squatter’s Rights,” or something that would really make Daddy proud. She sidestepped down the short incline and walked a few paces along the path, almost tripping and taking a header when she bumped her toe against an overgrown root raised there like some corroded old vein. She found a thick bush, made her way behind it, dropped her drawers, and delivered there in the shadows.
    When she’d finished and pulled everything back together, she looked for a pile of leaves to hide the tissue under. Too dark. She got out her cell phone, aimed it at the forest floor, and hit the red button. The pale wash of light exposed dirt channeled and sloughed by past rains, twigs, patches of short weeds. She turned twice and spread her view, but saw nothing but a grainy flash of bare ground and foliation, and then it went dark. She hit it again and moved a bit south away from the path behind her, then a bit west, then a tad east; stands of intertwining elm, tufts of ragweed, snarls of thorn. There was a waist-high stone wall over run with hard vine and thistle, and the light went off once again.
    Hell with this. She dropped the damp tissue there on the ground and turned back the way she had come. She was glancing up in the general direction she thought would yield the glow of their fire up on the hill, but the afterimage kept her in a pale, temporary blindness.
    She bumped into something. Hard.
    “Ow!” she said, and her voice deadened in the stillness around her. She felt at her forehead, already knotting with the bruise, and hit the button on her cell phone.
    She had bumped into a birch tree, pressing close to its twin.
    “No way,” she whispered, turning the opposite direction, trying not to run in the mild state of panic that was rising in her. The light went off, and