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  Forests of the Night

  The Haunting of Grey Hills: Book #2

  Written by Jennifer Skogen

  Copyright © 2016 by Abdo Consulting Group, Inc.

  Published by EPIC Press™

  PO Box 398166

  Minneapolis, MN 55439

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  International copyrights reserved in all countries.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without

  written permission from the publisher. EPIC Press™ is trademark

  and logo of Abdo Consulting Group, Inc.

  Cover design by Dorothy Toth

  Images for cover art obtained from iStockPhoto.com

  Edited by Melanie Austin

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Skogen, Jennifer.

  Forests of the night / Jennifer Skogen.

  p. cm. — (The haunting of Grey Hills ; #2)

  Summary: The Door of the Dead is open, and Macy hones her

  newfound powers destroying the ghosts who emerge. When she meets a ghost

  who reminds her of her dead brother, Macy’s dangerous friendship grows

  stronger leaving everyone to decide, what secrets are worth keeping,

  and what price are they willing to pay for them.

  ISBN 978-1-68076-030-9 (hardcover)

  1. Ghosts—Fiction. 2. High schools—Fiction. 3. Supernatural—Fiction.

  4. Haunted places—Fiction. 5. Young adult fiction. I. Title.

  [Fic]—dc23

  2015932719

  This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

  To Brian, for all of the forests we’ve walked

  together, and the many miles ahead

  CHAPTER ONE

  Macy wore black gloves to Nick’s funeral. They itched. She picked at one of the cuffs while she sat in the front pew, waiting for the last few people to leave. It was stuffy in the small church, and someone had opened a window. Outside the rain fell—a constant hush through the trees.

  The wooden pew was hard, and her left leg started to go numb. Macy uncrossed her legs and stretched them out in front of her, rolling her ankles first to the right, then to the left. Her black tights made her shins look shiny, and her dress was too short, but it was the only black one she had with pockets.

  A little girl sat playing jacks at the front of the church, just a few feet from Macy. During the entire service she had bounced the ball on the hardwood floor and then scooped up four or five silver jacks at a time. Over and over again. The girl had short blond hair tied up in bows, and snowman-patterned pajamas. Every now and then she would look up at Macy and yawn, blinking her eyes slowly, like a kitten. Whenever she yawned, Macy had to yawn too. She hoped no one saw her yawning at her own brother’s funeral.

  Macy wondered if the little girl knew she was dead. She hoped not. That was probably the worst—to actually know that you’re a ghost and that your body is somewhere rotting in the ground. Macy used to think that she wanted to be cremated, like her brother, but after watching all those people in the gym burn she couldn’t stand the thought of someone setting her body on fire. Even if she were already dead. Especially then—when there was nothing she could do about it. Macy had always had a secret fear that after you died, you didn’t actually leave your body, but just stayed in your own rotting corpse for the rest of eternity. At least she now knew that wasn’t the case.

  The little girl bounced the ball again. This time it rolled away from her. Macy bent down and picked up the ball, holding it out for the girl. To anyone else, it would have appeared as if Macy was just looking at her own empty palm. The little girl slowly walked over, limping. When she stood up and faced Macy, it was easier to see the bruising around the girl’s neck and the dark pattern where her shattered cheekbone was slightly sunken in. She smiled shyly at Macy—her two front teeth were broken—and reached out her hand to take the ball back.

  When she first saw the girl, Macy had instantly recognized her from the newspaper, though she had forgotten her name. She felt bad about that. Someone should remember her name. Four years earlier, just after Christmas, the six-year-old girl was found dead in her parents’ backyard. She was strangled and beaten, with a broken leg, the back of her head bashed in. The girl had been killed sometime during the night, and when they found her body the next morning it was covered in frost. Macy didn’t read that part in the newspaper—she could see the white frost that coated the girl’s hair and lashes. There was nothing to indicate that the parents had been involved in their daughter’s death and there were no other suspects or leads. The case was never solved.

  Macy wondered if the girl’s parents had moved away, or if they still lived in that house where they could look out their window onto the small square of grass where their daughter’s body had grown cold. What would Macy have done? Probably stayed, she figured, because that house at least still held the girls’ memories. What would it be like if everyone could see ghosts? What if all ghosts just stayed after they died and you could continue that final conversation? If everyone could just keep going and going, like the Energizer Bunny . . .

  In a perfect world Macy would have asked the little girl who had killed her and gone triumphantly to the police or the parents with the information. Macy would have been a hero and seeing her killer brought to justice would have let the girl’s ghost rest in peace. But the world was anything but perfect, and the girl was a shadow of her living self. Just the image of the sun on the back of your eyes after you’ve already looked away from the sky. Dom had explained that these kinds of ghosts couldn’t tell you anything—they weren’t complete. They weren’t strong enough to keep their identity whole. Just an afterimage. An echo. Macy had started using that term in her head for the weak ghosts: echoes.

  Instead of giving the ball back to the girl, Macy placed her other hand on top of her head. Even through the silk glove Macy could feel the blood oozing from the back of the child’s head. She closed her eyes, drawing in a deep breath. Macy pictured a dandelion gone to seed—a hundred stars forming their own perfectly round galaxy. She held the flower up to her lips, then blew. The stars scattered in all directions, dissolving across the sky. Macy opened her eyes and the girl was gone.

  Since the Door opened five weeks earlier, Macy had personally taken care of more than thirty ghosts. She was talented, even Sam agreed. It had come easily to Macy after the first terrifying attempt in the burning gym. But it wasn’t something she got used to—not even as her mind learned how to latch onto the ghosts like a key turning in a lock. Children were the worst. Macy wanted to tell them that it would be okay—that she was sending them somewhere so much better. Heaven, maybe. But she didn’t know that. All Macy knew was that she couldn’t look at that broken girl for another minute. Anything had to be better than her fractured cheek and lost, hollow eyes.

  Macy brushed off her hands, even though there was nothing on them. Her parents were still talking to the funeral director. She could just hear the soft flow of their voices from where they stood by the front door, but not actual words.

  An abandoned funeral pamphlet lay on the pew beside her. Nick’s face was on the cover, staring up at the wooden beams of the church ceiling. Their mother had chosen his senior picture—not his best—and he had a toothy, open-mouthed smile. Nick hadn’t liked that picture but Macy did. It made her brother look like he was about to say something. He wore a suit and tie and his brown hair was brushed back with gel, making him look older than eighteen.

  Looking at the picture, Macy realized that it was as old as he was ever going to get. At some point Macy was going to catch up to him and then keep getting ol
der and older until she was wrinkled with saggy boobs and cankles. And he would still look like that. He would be eighteen forever.

  For the thousandth time, Macy wondered why her brother’s ghost hadn’t come back. What did it take? Didn’t slamming your car into a tree qualify as having unresolved issues? But Dom had said that there might not be any reason to it. The legend that ghosts still had work left to do on earth before they could “move on” might be all wrong. And shouldn’t she wish that her brother was at peace? Shouldn’t she hope he was in heaven, if that existed? But the truth was that Macy just wanted to see him again. Not as he was in his last moments—with his face torn up and his arm missing. She wanted him to come back whole.

  Macy took out her phone. No messages. You’d have to be a real jackass to text a girl during her brother’s funeral, but Macy hadn’t seen Dominick all weekend, and she kind of hoped that he had sent her something. Even just a quick “hi.” Claire and Jackson had come to the funeral, but she didn’t invite Trev, Sam, or Dominick. It wasn’t really something you invited someone to. Hey, I’m throwing this rad party on Sunday and BTW, it’s my dead brother’s funeral. Besides, part of her worried that if they were at the church and her brother’s ghost appeared, they might kill him before she had a chance to talk to him.

  With other ghosts she could think of it as “taking care” of them, but not when it came to her brother. It would be like watching him die all over again.

  She wondered what Dom was doing. He had missed a lot of school after the fire. To be honest everyone had. They shut the whole school down for two weeks while they investigated how the fire started. It had rained the entire time.

  September was sometimes beautiful in Grey Hills: day after day of blue sky before fall settled in for good and brought dead leaves and a constant drizzle. Not this year. It was as though the sky itself was mourning the two dead students. Cassandra Decker. Sean Howard. A senior and a junior—dead from third-degree burns and smoke inhalation. A few other students had horrible burns—one boy went blind. One senior girl had actually tried to kill herself because she felt so guilty about the whole thing, but she didn’t take enough pills and just got really sick. Macy doubted that she really wanted to die—the girl probably needed to do something in the face of so much loss. Macy understood how that felt.

  Although the authorities never found a source for the fire, everyone blamed the senior prank. The most surprising part of the fire was how quickly it was put out and how little damage was actually done to the school. Just like the kitchen fire, there had been a lot of smoke damage, but the structure itself was mostly unharmed.

  Mr. Fitch was fired and then he immediately left town. He didn’t even sell his house first. They needed to blame someone, and it was Mr. Fitch who had argued that they go ahead with the Lock In, even after the lunch lady died. Macy sometimes wondered if Mr. Fitch really did have something to do with it and had been working with Lorna all along. But short of tracking down Mr. Fitch and questioning him as Sam had suggested more than once—and she always held up air quotes when she said “question”—they really had no way to find out. Lorna, after all, was gone for good.

  The families of the two students who died had their own funerals. It felt strange to go ahead with Nick’s funeral after all that time, as if her own loss wasn’t as valid as that of the burned students’ parents and siblings. The students were the elite dead, while Nick’s death was old news by the time her parents finally got around to actually having his funeral.

  Some students had shown up, including Nick’s closest friends, and Claire and Jackson of course. Macy suspected that most of the student body was sick to death, so to speak, of funerals. And Nick had already graduated so most of the underclassmen hadn’t really known him. He’d been in that in-between point of his life—out of high school, but not yet in college. Just kind of waiting for his life to begin.

  Another reason for the low turnout was that the timing wasn’t great. Macy’s mom had decided that Nick’s funeral would be a morning service, because mornings always had “so much promise.” Macy wanted to tell her Mom that it was a good thing Nick didn’t have to go, because he would probably have slept through it. Nine a.m. would have been way too early. But Macy didn’t say that. Her dad would have laughed, but her mom didn’t understand that kind of humor.

  When the service ended at ten thirty, Macy was supposed to go back home with her mom and dad and have brunch with her grandparents. Nick would have rolled his eyes at the idea of a funeral brunch. He didn’t even believe in brunch as a concept. The first meal of the day was breakfast, period. Brunch was for chicks who wanted to sit around and gossip. Did anyone even say “chicks” anymore? Like women were baby farm animals or something? But that’s how Nick talked.

  Macy stood by her mom for a few minutes while she kept going on and on to the funeral director about the flowers she wanted to donate to the hospital.

  “Give them to a new mother—fill her room with flowers.” Her mom’s voice shook as she spoke, and she still held that box of tissues, slightly crushing it with her grip.

  Her mom was a few inches taller than Macy, with dyed brown hair. It had gone mostly gray when she was only twenty-three and Macy had recently begun staring at her own roots in the mirror, searching for strands of silver. She had once read that the gene for hair loss came from your mother’s father—and her mom’s dad was bald—but she didn’t know about gray hair. That was another thing Nick didn’t have to put up with. He wouldn’t have to go bald at forty-five like their grandpa.

  The funeral director nodded. “Of course, Mrs. Pierce. That’s a lovely idea.”

  “It’s what Nick would have wanted,” her mom said, dabbing her eyes.

  Macy almost snorted at the idea of Nick ever having a single thought about the disposal of a room full of white lilies. The flowers were very strong smelling and were starting to make Macy’s eyes water. What new mother would want death flowers in her room?

  Her dad stood beside his wife, but didn’t say anything. With his lost expression and patches of stubble on his neck that he had overlooked while shaving that morning, he resembled someone who had just woken up on a bus and hadn’t yet figured out that he’d missed his stop.

  Finally, when it looked like her mom was just going to keep bothering the funeral director, Macy gave a little I’m-leaving wave and walked out the front door. She would text her mom a little later and tell her that she went over to Claire’s.

  The thought of sitting through brunch with her weepy grandparents made her feel nauseous. They were staying another night so she’d see them at dinner.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Dominick’s house wasn’t that far from the church—maybe ten blocks. Macy didn’t have an umbrella, but the rain felt nice on her face. It was like walking through a cloud.

  On the way to Dom’s she saw three more ghosts. The first was just another echo—a middle-aged man who kept stepping out into the street and covering his head with his arms. Then he would vanish. He did this two times before Macy took care of him. Macy didn’t even need to touch him. She just closed her eyes and imagined the man’s body melting with the rain.

  The second was another child—about eleven years old. He sat on the sidewalk and looked up at Macy as she walked by. She might not have even known he was dead except for his hair—it wasn’t wet, even in the rain. And his clothes looked old, like something you would see in a museum. Lace-up boots and a wool coat with wooden buttons. At a quick glance Macy couldn’t tell what had killed him. He just sat with his chin in his hands and watched her walk by. When she tried to place her hand on his head, it just passed right through. She snatched her hand back as the boy frowned up at her.

  Some of the ghosts were stronger than others—that was something Macy had learned in the past five weeks. The little girl in the church had been strong. Macy could have picked her up and held her battered body to her chest and rocked her. She could have carried her home. But she was still an echo, and when Ma
cy willed the girl’s body—her ghost—to disperse, it had been so easy. This boy was something less, just a true shadow. Macy couldn’t even touch him. It was even easier than the middle-aged man. Sometimes taking care of ghosts was like sweeping up cobwebs.

  The third ghost was hiding behind a tree just a block from Dominick’s house. When she walked past, the ghost threw herself at Macy, grabbing her hair and pushing her down onto the sidewalk. Even though it all happened so fast, Macy recognized her—Andrea Ivers. Andrea had been a friend of one of Nick’s girlfriends. She had OD’d three years earlier. They found her body in the backseat of a car. Her friends had left her there to “sleep it off” and she had choked on her own vomit.

  The ghost had long, stringy blond hair and she smelled terrible—like stomach acid and beer. “Fucking bitch!” Andrea screamed in Macy’s ear. She was on Macy’s back, still holding her by the hair.

  Macy struggled against the ghost, pushing herself up onto her hands and knees. “Get off!” Macy hissed. Her knees stung from hitting the pavement and she was pretty sure her tights were ripped. They had cost twenty dollars and were the kind that sucked in your stomach and made you look skinny. Now they were ruined. Bitch!

  Andrea pulled Macy’s head back and laughed. “I know you,” she said in a sing-song voice. “I know you.”

  Macy wanted to tell Andrea that she didn’t know jack shit about her. That she was Nick’s little sister and was only thirteen when Andrea died in the back of an old Toyota. But there was no point. Whoever the ghost thought she was, there was no talking her out of it. Ghosts were like cats—very single-minded.

  Starting from the moment the ghost tackled her, it took Macy seven seconds to come up with a plan. She bet that Dominick or Sam would have already had a plan before a ghost jumped them, but she was still learning. And Trev might have been able to talk his way out of it. First, Macy let herself fall back onto her stomach. Her scalp screamed as she wrenched her head down too, taking Andrea with her. Fuck, fuck! She ground her fingertips into the pavement from the pain. Then, with Andrea unbalanced, Macy reached up with both hands and grabbed her nasty hair. Macy’s burned hands stung as she pulled the ghost’s hair as hard as she could, flipping her over the top of her head. Andrea landed hard on her back and let out a loud “ooph!” As if she had any breath in her lungs.