Ominous

  The next few paragraphs told of how Eliza, Theresa Billings, Catherine White, and Alice Ainsworth had formed a coven of eleven girls. Some of the girls were apparently reluctant but were convinced by Theresa’s cunning. She described the night they had read the incantation, and what had happened just after the words were spoken.

  My hand clutched my stomach. The light had gone out, and then their individual candles had flickered back to life. Just like that night in the chapel basement. Just like the night Ivy and I had said the incantation as well. My brain swam and I closed my eyes, holding back a wave of nausea. This couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be. Outside in the hallway a door slammed, and I opened my eyes, forcing myself to continue.

  There were stories of fun spells—a boy with boils on his hands, a headmistress with a wayward skirt. Stories of celebrations with the coven, retellings that sounded so much like the gatherings I’d had with my own friends it was almost eerie. And then, just as I was feeling comfortable again, another part stopped me cold.

  Eliza had dreamed that her friend Theresa and the maid, Helen Jennings, had thrown Catherine White into a ditch in the woods, killing her. And then, just a few nights later, Catherine died in almost that exact way. She was fighting with Theresa when Eliza happened upon them: A spell had gone wrong, and Catherine had fallen to her death.

  I leaned back against my bed, trying to breathe. Catherine had died? All those times I’d read through the BLS book, I’d imagined the two of them together, hanging out on the Billings campus, reading books and flirting demurely with hot turn-of-the-century boys. But from the date on the entry, Catherine and Eliza had barely known each other a month when she’d died.

  But this wasn’t the worst realization of all. Eliza had a horrible nightmare that had sort of come true. Now I’d had two horrible nightmares that had sort of come true. Did this mean that Astrid had really been kidnapped? That Lorna was really … dead? My heart all but stopped inside my chest and I bent forward at the waist, fighting for breath as I was assaulted by the horrifying images from my dreams. This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real.

  I looked down at the pages in my hands and wished I had never found them. Whatever this was, I couldn’t handle it. Whatever it was, I wished it was happening to anyone other than me.

  After taking a few deep breaths, I forced myself to sit up straight again. Part of me didn’t want to read any further, but I knew that I had to. I had to know. Stoically, silently, I read. I read about the coven bringing Catherine back to life. About how it had turned out to be some kind of monster and not Catherine at all. How the thing had attacked Eliza. How Helen and Theresa had saved her. How the thing had cursed all of them, and all of their ancestors, before finally falling over dead.

  I felt sick and scared and confused. Did I really live in a world where things like this could happen? I felt like I was reading a horror novel, not a diary. But these things had actually happened to Eliza—or at least, she believed that they had. The sorrow as she described the night she and her friends had brought Catherine’s body back to the site of her original death was so real. The description of how they’d buried the trunk full of books, and how Eliza had thrown the locket in the ditch as well, was detailed and vivid. As I read these last words, my hand touched the chain around my neck.

  If Eliza had been so done with it, if she’d hated it enough to throw it away, why had she led me right back to it?

  The second the thought crossed my mind, I scoffed at myself and got up off the floor. A thick fog cleared rapidly from my brain as I extricated myself from the fantasyland of Eliza’s story and planted my feet firmly in the real world.

  This was crazy. This whole thing was making me certifiable. A ghost hadn’t led me anywhere. It was impossible. I was falling for all of this like some gullible moron, but it couldn’t be true. No truer than Cheyenne sending me e-mails from the grave or leaving me spooky presents to find. All of that had had a reasonable explanation—Sabine had been trying to scare me. Clearly something similar was going on now. Someone was messing with me. It was the only explanation.

  But how did they get inside your dreams, Reed? A little voice inside my head asked. What about the dreams?

  Suddenly my door swung open and my heart hit my throat. Noelle looked me up and down.

  “Get your coat on. Let’s go.”

  “Wait,” I said. I closed my eyes and held out the pages to her. “Please just read this. Just read it and tell me I’m not going crazy.”

  Noelle sighed with impatience but took the pages. As she began to read, all the color drained from her face. “Where did you get this?”

  “It’s Eliza’s,” I said. “It fell out of the book of spells. I’m pretty sure the pages were torn out of the BLS book at some point. Who knows when?”

  I sat down shakily on my desk chair and Noelle sat on the edge of my bed. To my surprise, she slowly, carefully, read each and every word. The pages trembled in her fingers as she shuffled them.

  “Somebody’s messing with us,” she said suddenly.

  I took in a breath and waited for the relief to follow, but it didn’t.

  “What do you mean, us?” I asked.

  “This,” she said, standing and holding a couple of pages in each hand. “This doesn’t just affect you anymore. It affects me, too.” She put the pages back together and studied them. “Who could have done this? It’s so freaking elaborate. I mean, look at the pages. They really do look ancient. Who could have known about—?”

  “Noelle.”

  Her head popped up. She looked confused, like she’d forgotten where she was or that I was there too.

  “What do you mean, it affects you, too?” I asked.

  She hesitated a moment and I felt my blood start to boil. I’d told her everything. She’d better not even think about holding back from me.

  “Girls!”

  We both jumped as Mrs. Shepard stuck her head in the room. “Downstairs in five minutes!”

  “Okay!” we both replied.

  As soon as she was gone, I stood up to face Noelle. “What, Noelle? What is it?”

  “Okay, promise you’re not gonna read too much into this.” Noelle took a deep breath. She folded the pages up, tucked them under her arm, and shook her hair back, lifting her chin as if ready for a fight. “Theresa Billings? She was my great-great-grandmother.” She cleared her throat. “Our great-great-grandmother.”

  “What?” I blurted out.

  My heart pretty much stopped. My eyes blurred as I stared at her, trying to figure out what this could mean.

  “My father’s mother’s mother’s mother,” Noelle said, narrowing her eyes. “Yeah. I think that’s right. Anyway, remember how annoyed I was when you found the BLS book in your room? That was because I saw her name on the list of members. I figured if anyone should have it, it should be me.”

  I nodded once.

  “But now that I know we’re sisters …”

  “Yeah.”

  My brain would not go past one-word answers. It was like it was afraid to think beyond that. Everything beyond that was a swirling black void of horror.

  “So that means that you and I are Theresa Billings’s ancestors …,” Noelle said in a leading way.

  Suddenly I felt like I was spinning and falling, spinning and falling, right down into the void. I clung to the back of my chair and tried to ground myself.

  “So whatever that thing was that took over Catherine’s body, when it cursed them, it cursed us,” I said.

  “Yeah. Sure,” Noelle said with a scoff. “And I’ve got some crown jewels I’d like to sell you.”

  Suddenly everything snapped into focus. “Noelle, did you not read what Eliza wrote?”

  “I read what somebody wrote,” Noelle said with a dubious expression. “Clearly none of this is true, Reed. It’s a piece of science fiction! This kind of stuff does not happen in the real world!”

  “Fine. You think someone planted that in my room? Let’s just see.” My wh
ole body shook as I walked over to my duffel bag, unzipped it, and yanked the BLS book out of the bottom, spewing clothes all over my floor. I dropped it on my desk with a bang and opened it right to the spot where the pages had been torn out. “Give me the pages,” I demanded, holding out a hand.

  Noelle rolled her eyes but handed them over. She stepped up behind my right shoulder and watched as I lined the torn side of the pages up with the torn scraps along the spine. My mouth went completely dry. The tears, the bumps, the shreds—all of them lined up perfectly.

  “Nobody planted this, Noelle. Eliza Williams may have been crazy, but she wrote these pages,” I said. “Whether or not any of this really happened, she believed that it happened.”

  Noelle glanced at me, her skin suddenly waxen. My experiment had clearly scared her. She took a step back, groaned, and covered her face with her hands.

  “If you want to believe all of this, then you should probably have all the facts,” she said. Her hands dropped, leaving behind momentary red fingerprints on her pale skin.

  “What facts?”

  “Well, there’s something else,” Noelle said. She looked at the pages and the book instead of at me, and tucked her hands into the pockets of her coat all casual. As if we were discussing the latest issue of Vogue. “And you’re not gonna like it.”

  My heart hit my toes. Suddenly I realized the dorm had gone silent. Everyone had fled but us.

  “What?” I said.

  “Catherine White? This person who turned into some thing that cursed our family?” Noelle said, looking me in the eye. “She was a distant relative of Ariana’s.”

  “Yes, Vienna, all bodyguards are welcome,” Noelle said into her cell that night, rolling her eyes over her shoulder at me as she sat down on the chaise in front of her personal fireplace. “Okay. See you soon.”

  She ended the call and tossed the phone onto the settee next to her.

  “That’s everyone,” she said, sitting back as if exhausted.

  We’d just called all of the Billings Girls—including Missy, Constance, and London—most of whom were staying somewhere in the city, and asked them to come over. Ivy had been on her way to her home in Boston but had told her driver to turn the car around. Kiki, who lived in California, was staying at her aunt’s place in Brooklyn, and Amberly’s parents had put her up in a suite at the Waldorf with a pair of armed guards, and her mom was on her way out from Seattle via private jet to be with her.

  “Missy was the hardest sell,” Noelle said. “But she’s coming.”

  “Good,” I said flatly.

  I dropped the magazine I’d been furling in my hand onto the bed and walked over to sit on the edge of the cushioned settee. Noelle’s bedroom, on the second-from-the-top floor of her parents’ opulent Upper East Side home, was roughly the square footage of the entire Billings House—or at least it seemed to be. Aside from the huge bedroom with its four-poster bed and massive fireplace, her suite had its own kitchen and bath, a living room, and a closet that could have fit both my bedroom and my brother’s inside of it. Right now we were lounging in the cozy alcove adjacent to the foot of her bed, a real fire raging in the brick fireplace as snowflakes began to swirl outside the huge windows overlooking Central Park. With four guards placed throughout the house at her father’s orders, I felt completely safe, and with the insane spread of food the cook had sent up for us upon arrival, I also felt cared for. Not that I had been able to eat a single bite.

  “What are you going to say to them when they get here?” Noelle asked, crooking her arm behind her head and leaning back into it.

  “I’m going to tell them what I found,” I said. “One dream could have been a fluke. Two were a coincidence, but three?”

  “So you really think you’re psychic?” Noelle said doubtfully.

  “I don’t know, but I know that if I dream about your death next I’m going to warn you,” I shot back.

  We both turned to look at the fire. I watched the flames dance and thought of the flickering candles in Eliza’s story.

  “I have to ask you something,” I said.

  “I had a feeling,” Noelle replied patiently.

  “If you knew all along that Catherine White was related to Ariana … why didn’t you tell me?”

  Noelle blew out a sigh and sat up straight. She crossed her legs at the knee and placed her hands on either side of her on the delicate brocade of the chaise.

  “Reed, it was ten million years ago,” she said slowly. “I didn’t think it mattered. To be honest with you, I’m still not sure that it does.”

  I let that one roll off my back. “But how do you even know?”

  Noelle pressed her fingertips into the corners of her eyes for a moment, as if fending off a nasty headache. Then she stood up and walked closer to the fire, crossing her arms over her chest. She stared down into the flames for so long, I thought she’d forgotten I’d asked a question.

  “At the end of our junior year, Ariana did a genealogy project for her sociology class,” Noelle began. “She was always into that stuff and she took the project seriously—a lot more seriously than everyone else. While she was doing her research, she found out that her great-great-grandfather’s sister, Catherine White, had gone to Billings at the turn of the century.” She paused and looked up at the painting above the fireplace, a colorful, abstract rendition of the original Billings House that Noelle’s father had commissioned for her a couple of years back. “I’ll never forget how excited she was. She came running back to Billings like she’d just found out she was descended from royalty or something.” Noelle looked at me over her shoulder. “She figured the relationship proved she was a legacy so she could get an invite to the Legacy the next year.”

  I narrowed my eyes, thinking back to all the invitation and plus-one drama last fall. “But she didn’t.”

  “No. It turned out you had to be a direct line,” Noelle said, sounding almost sad. “A great-great-great-aunt wouldn’t cut it.”

  “Oh.” I bit my lip. An ember jumped out of the fireplace and glowed on the slate hearth. Noelle lifted her foot and placed the toe of her boot on top of it, crushing the light out of it.

  “So, if Eliza’s story is true, then Ariana’s great-great-great-aunt cursed our family for all eternity,” I said.

  Noelle turned around fully. “Weird, huh?”

  “Actually, it makes sense out of a whole lot of crap,” I replied.

  Noelle arched her eyebrows. “So you think … what? Ariana murdered your boyfriend because she was playing out some kind of ancient curse?”

  “I know, I know. It sounds insane. But isn’t this all just a little too coincidental?” I said, touching Eliza’s locket with my fingertips. “And don’t forget Sabine. She was related to Catherine too.”

  Noelle shook her head, her expression irritatingly condescending. “Reed, Ariana killed Thomas because she was out of her mind with jealousy. And Sabine did what she did because she was plain out of her mind. Clearly there’s something off in their DNA. It has nothing to do with a curse.”

  “Whatever,” I said, standing. “What I want to know is, whatever happened to Eliza and her family? And what about Helen?”

  “Google them,” Noelle said lightly. “If we find out their kids all died in a fire or were born with two heads, then I’ll believe you.”

  There was a rap on the door and Ginny, the head of security and the one female guard of the bunch, opened it. Apparently she was ex-Secret Service, and I could imagine she’d been very good at her job. With her broad shoulders, WNBA-worthy height, and serious scowl, she could intimidate anyone.

  “Your guests are starting to arrive,” she said, ushering Tiffany and Rose inside.

  They walked toward us warily, and I saw Tiffany eyeing the food laid out on a buffet-style table near the far windows.

  “Nice spread,” she said, placing her camera bag down on the end of Noelle’s bed. “Are we having a party?”

  Rose, who looked tired and harried and
scared, looked Noelle and me over slowly. “Why do I get the feeling you guys didn’t invite us here to eat?”

  I took a deep breath and looked at Noelle. She made a dismissive gesture with her hand, like, This is your thing. You deal with it.

  “Let’s wait until everyone gets here,” I said. “I only want to tell this story once.”

  “So this is why all this is happening?” Constance asked tremulously. “You guys are cursed?”

  I had just read Eliza’s entire entry to all of them, then explained the dream I’d had about Lorna. Ivy had squirmed up from her seat at my description of Eliza’s coven’s initiation, and I knew she was thinking the same thing I was—that Eliza’s description of what happened after they’d read the incantation was exactly like what had happened to us. As the story went on, I saw Tiffany, Portia, and Vienna grow more restless and eye-rolly, while Rose, Constance, London, and Amberly looked completely terrified. Kiki seemed merely intrigued, her eyes never leaving mine as I spoke, but Missy simply stared straight ahead the entire time, her jaw set obstinately, as if wishing she could be somewhere else.

  “We’re not cursed!” Noelle said, throwing up her hands.

  Amberly looked to be about five seconds away from being in dire need of smelling salts. She lifted her head weakly. “But Reed just said—”

  “I know what she said, all right?” Noelle replied, pacing from the head of her bed to stand next to me in front of the gathering of our friends. “I just … don’t think it’s true.”