“Hello?” he called out. The fog seemed to consume his words; they dissipated almost as quickly as they’d left his mouth. “Is someone there?” Had Crow seen his car and doubled back to confront him?
No response. JD squinted down the row of graves, focusing on keeping his breath even and quiet. He strained to hear the voice again, to try to place where it was coming from. Took a few steps in the other direction.
Then the sound came again, traveling like leaves caught in a swirling gust of wind, fading in and out in a spiral. He caught fragments of words, and the high trail of someone’s laughter. He stood weighted down, like every ounce of his blood had turned into a liquid metal. Move, he told himself. More snippets of a girl’s voice, melodious, as through from a music box. Otherworldly. ?JD had seen his share of scary movies, but nothing could have prepared him for the way his heart was pounding in his chest right now.
“I can hear you,” he said, a bit louder. He balled his fists and turned in a circle, unsure what direction it was coming from. Every headstone seemed to grow taller, the sky grayer. As far as he knew, he was the only person in the cemetery now that Crow was gone. If Crow was gone. No other cars had been parked when they got there, nor had any arrived in the past few minutes.
And then he spotted her, not ten yards away. A girl, sitting with her back against a huge, bare-branched maple tree that towered over a white-stone mausoleum across the way. How long had she been there? She was in navy-blue sweatpants and a white T-shirt, and her hands and feet were covered in dirt. Her blond hair was stringy and her body looked gaunt. JD made his way toward her.
“I see you,” she said in a singsong voice. She pulled at the grass around her but didn’t look up.
He stopped short and waited for her to say more, but nothing came. He took slow steps toward her and finally, she raised her head, startled—as if she hadn’t called out to him just moments ago. She scrambled to her feet and he could see that she was about his age, with dirty-blond hair and a blank gaze. He could tell she’d been beautiful once. Her eyes were green, but bloodshot. JD swallowed hard.
“Are you—are you okay?” he stuttered. He saw a long, angry scar along her hairline and his stomach went tight.
She turned away from him again, staring intently at a patch of grass for seemingly no reason. She whispered something, to herself or to him, he couldn’t be sure. But he took one more step closer, straining to hear what she was saying.
“From blood the seeds are borne and from blood they will be buried,” she murmured as though reciting something—a poem, or a spell. It was eerily similar to the words in the book he’d seen on Em’s bed.
“Hey . . . Hi. Are you all right? You must be freezing. Can I get you some help?” In the pocket of his Windbreaker, JD closed his fingers around his cell phone.
The girl swiveled again, but this time her expression was different—softer, more lucid, like she somehow recognized him. She reached up to tuck her hair behind her ears, smearing dirt on her cheeks in the process. “I’m sorry,” she said, looking embarrassed. “Did you say something to me?”
JD looked around; it was an empty graveyard at nine o’clock in the morning. “I asked if you needed help?”
“Oh, well, now that you mention it, I think I should call my aunt.” She smiled a wide, toothy smile—the kind you’d see in some sort of beauty pageant—and cocked her head slightly. It was weird how quickly she had shifted from Crazy Girl in the Cemetery to Miss America at a Dinner Party.
JD fumbled for his phone. This girl could be on drugs or insane or maybe she was just a wild hippie chick, but whatever she was, he didn’t know what to do with her. “Sure,” he said. “You can use my phone.”
But when he handed it to her, she just held it limply in her hand—looking at it like she’d never operated a phone before. It fell to the ground. Her arms were shaking, like she was starving and weak, or didn’t have complete control over her muscles.
“I’m supposed to call her whenever I hear them,” she said, blushing deeply. A single tear ran down the side of her face, leaving a pale rivulet in the dirt. “They’re so loud. They’re laughing. They’re—”
“Who?” he said, grabbing his phone out of the dirt.
“The Furies.” She looked at him matter-of-factly. “I can hear them. It’s getting worse. Henry was just candy to them. That’s what they said. Just easy. Easy, easy, easy. Easy prey.” She spoke evenly—like they were talking about the weather—but her words were totally out-there. JD was completely mystified.
He stared into her eyes then for the first time, feeling a current run up his spine, raising all the short hairs on the back of his neck. The Furies. Those words again. He didn’t know what to say. “Listen, do you need me to make the call for you? Who’s Henry? Do you want to call Henry?”