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“Fine,” I said. “But if this goes sideways, I’m holding it over you both for the rest of our lives.”
“Deal.” Kira held up her crisps like a drink to toast the pact.
Alison and I picked up a snack each, and we touched them together above Sammie’s head. He sniffed up at them, his eyes as wide as saucers.
I pulled open my bag of chips and dipped my hand inside, eyeing Kira.
Despite their harebrained ideas and kleptomaniac tendencies, I couldn’t deny I had missed the craziness they brought.
And it didn’t get much crazier than an anonymous mystery date.
I awoke in a tangle of blankets and limbs, both human and furry.
Like most of our sleepovers, we had fallen asleep chatting and eating rubbish. Neither Kira, Allison, or Sammie stirred as I rolled off the bed to have a shower and get dressed.
In all the craziness, I had forgotten to attend to some important business.
Once I had thrown on a casual blue dress, my favourite black fashion belt, and a pair of leggings, I grabbed a smooth rock with a hole full of small crystals from my rucksack.
Mum would like it. Maybe.
The sun was still rising, and the rest of the family hadn’t yet stirred. The corridors were empty as I walked down the stairs toward the garden.
My feet stopped halfway down the hall, almost against my will. A dark feeling blossomed through my veins, infecting every corner of me. At that moment, I realised why I had stopped.
I turned to the door on my right, which was scratched and dented. It was the one door in the house that nobody cared for.
Kneeling down, I looked through the keyhole.
The sight stole my breath, like always.
A wooden pillar stood in the middle of the room, with an arrow lodged in it halfway up. The arrow that helped start it all.
It, like the bow that had fired it, were gifts from the dryads that had welcomed my ancestors to the island. Yet, my ancestors had used it to kill a member of the family they had journeyed here with. Of course, if the Everharts hadn’t also killed a member of my family, maybe they would have escaped the curse.
The arrow was a stoic reminder of our legacy, and anyone who tried to remove it died as suddenly as Ray had yesterday. I couldn’t help but look at it sometimes.
I got up and headed at double speed toward the back door. We had enough morbidity around here without me staring at that damn arrow.
I slipped out of the kitchen door and into the garden, the grass tickling my bare feet, and the dew brushed my toes.
It didn’t bother me. In fact, I loved the water so much I had made immersing myself in it my entire career. Even a smidgen of dew was enough to brighten my day.
Well-kept topiaries dotted the lawn, and pristine flower beds ran along the hedge. Sandra had the hedges planted when I was young to hide what lay beyond.
I found the iron-wrought gate between the hedges and stepped between rows upon rows of mossy headstones. The family graveyard held every Arrowood who had fallen since the day we landed here. But the one I was looking for wasn’t far.
“Hi, Mum.” I sat down cross-legged in front of her granite gravestone.
Dad had tucked the cloth he used to polish the stone under a glass jar half-filled with beach pebbles. I popped mine inside.
Dad’s stories of the good times he spent with Mum often involved her running around on the beach, picking up pretty rocks. As I grew up, a tradition developed of finding nice rocks to lie at her gravestone.
“I got that one in the Lake District, camping with some friends. I hope you like it.”
Whether she could hear me or not was another matter.
Dad persisted for years in finding a necromancer that could find Mum’s spirit. But like every other Arrowood before her, she was nowhere to be found.
