She shot me a wry look that made me laugh.
After I finished my tea, I did some kickboxing to work off the cookies and all the angry energy knotting up my neck and shoulders. Plus, I had to practice if I was going to kick Noah’s ass.
A few minutes after I got out of the shower, Kevin arrived.
“You’re early,” I said when I came downstairs. He was in the kitchen, eating cookies, talking to Nan.
“I only had two classes today,” he explained. “I brought you a present. It’s in my trunk.”
“Is it a bag of douche-bag bones?”
“Lan-guage,” Nan sing-songed from where she stood making yet more cookies. I was going to gain fifteen pounds by the time we put Noah down.
“It’s his head.” My grandmother made a small sound of distress as Kevin took another bite of cookie. “That’s what was in the park. I haven’t found the rest yet.”
I grabbed a cookie off the plate beside him. I had no willpower. “If we only have one piece of him, the head’s a good one to have.”
“I can’t believe how matter-of-fact the two of you are.” Nan popped a tray of cookies into the oven. “I’d be scared out of my mind to be carrying around a skull. What if the police stopped you?” She looked at Kevin when she asked this.
He shrugged. “I’d tell them it’s a prop for a Halloween party.”
Nan gave him a soft smile. “Did you think of that before you came here, or just now?”
Kevin returned the smile. “Before I even took it out of the ground.”
She patted his shoulder. “Good boy.”
“This conversation is just so wrong.” I grabbed a soda from the fridge and tossed it to Kevin before getting one for myself.
“Hey, my parents don’t even believe in ghosts.” He popped the tab on the can. “They’d think I was nuts if I told them I could communicate with the dead. I’d take a ‘wrong’ conversation over their ‘right’ any day.”
“Nan is unbelievably cool,” I allowed, grinning at my grandmother. “Life would be a lot more difficult if I didn’t live here. It was a lot more difficult.”
A wooden spoon was shaken in my direction. “Your mother never recovered from losing Wren. It’s not her fault she’s frail.”
Kevin and I shared a glance. I rolled my eyes.
“Don’t roll your eyes at me, young lady.”
Kevin laughed. I stole another cookie. “C’mon, Sixth Sense, you can give me my present and help me set up.”
“Set up for what?” he asked as we went outside.
I cast him a sideways glance. “A séance.”
He stopped. “Have you forgotten what happened last time we had a séance?”
No, I hadn’t. “It will go better this time.”
“You can’t possibly know that.”
I gave him a shove out the door. “Well, you can’t possibly know that it won’t.”
A sharp burst of laughter shot from his mouth. “I can’t believe I let you talk me into these things.”
I made a face at him. “I don’t talk you into anything. You jump right in. You’re a freaking ghost magnet just like I am, and you like it.”
“Maybe I do, but that still doesn’t mean I understand it.”
We’d reached his car. He unlocked the trunk and took out a small tied garbage bag. He held it out to me. “Here you go. The head, I believe, of Noah McCrae.”
I took it, my fingers wrapping around the knot in the plastic. I wasn’t about to let my hands get any closer to it than they had to, just in case I got some sort of weird vibe or a shock or something. It wasn’t like I handled a lot of bones. Normally I just doused everything with something flammable and tossed in a match. Easy.
How much would burning his head weaken Noah? It would have to, wouldn’t it? It was worth a shot.
I went to the garage and got what I needed. The salt Nan put on snow and ice to melt it in the winter worked just as well as any other. Kevin followed me to the backyard where I built a small mound of paper, wood scraps and a couple pieces of wood in the stone-encircled fire pit. I put the plastic bag on top of the pile, dumped salt and a bit of lighter fluid on it, then struck a match and let it fall.
There was a whoosh of flame as the liquid ignited. The paper and kindling went up next. The bag melted so quickly I barely smelled it. The skull was another story. It was old, so there wasn’t any flesh to “barbecue.” When I first found out about burning bones, I did a lot of reading on cremation, and it’s not the same thing. It can take about two and a half hours for a body to burn when cremated, but when you had bones, and old ones at that, it didn’t take as long. Skulls are pretty brittle and can come apart during burning, especially if debris—like the top of an old coffin—falls on it.
In my experience, the bones didn’t have to burn for long to send a ghost on its way. I had no idea what this would do to Noah, but I hoped it hurt.
I hoped it hurt a lot.
WREN
I’d just left the cellar when I heard the screams.
Everyone was in the dining room. I had to push my way past those clustered in the door.