Vendetta(3)

I straightened up. “That’s never going to work. I’m keeping the honey.”

“Whatever,” she said, with an elaborate flick of her poker-straight brown hair. “It’s probably poisoned anyway.”

She stuck out her tongue and flounced off into the darkness, leaving me alone with my hard-won bounty. I slid the jar into my bag, watching the wisps of black ribbon fall away from me.

I crossed the road and paused, trying to decide which way to go. After six shifts in a row, the balls of my feet were throbbing, and because Millie and I had stalled for so long, it was already later than it should have been. The longer way home was usually my preferred option — it was well lit and well traveled — but the shortcut was significantly shorter, bypassing the center of town, winding up the hill instead, and looping around the haunted mansion at the end of Lockwood Avenue.





The moon was full and high but the evening seemed darker than usual. After fifteen minutes with only the sound of my footsteps as company, the turrets of the old Priestly house climbed into the sky ahead of me, peering over the neighboring houses like watchtowers.

Beautiful as it was, the mansion had always reminded me of a child’s dollhouse that had crumpled in on itself. Its whitewashed wooden exterior caved in at strange angles while corners jutted out like knives, piercing the overgrown masses of ivy. A stone wall covered in leaves snaked around the exterior; it was the only house in Cedar Hill that could boast such privacy, but its gothic aura did more to repel intruders than its boundary.

People who knew the house spoke of it with equal amounts trepidation and wonder, and often, to pass the time, would imagine their own stories about it.

When I was seven years old, my mother told me of a beautiful princess who would spend her days high up in the turrets of the old house, hiding herself away from an arranged marriage with a miserable and boring prince. By the time I turned ten, kids in the neighborhood had decided it was the spellbound home of a wily old witch. She would fill the sprawling rooms with cats and frogs, cauldrons and brooms, and, deep in the night, she would fly out into the sky and scour the neighborhood for stray children who should have been fast asleep in bed. When I met Millie, she told me about the vampires, who stood just inside the cracked windowpanes, peering out with glistening crimson eyes.

Then, at fourteen, when I was completing a school history project about Cedar Hill, I stumbled across the chilling reality of the mansion. There were no witches, no princesses, and no vampires — just a story about a young woman named Violet Priestly, a frontline nurse during World War II who had come out the other side as a drastically different version of herself. Traumatic memories haunted her like ghosts until her hallucinations became too strong to ignore. Not long after poisoning her husband and their young son, she hanged herself in the foyer of the old mansion.

Of course, no one wanted to buy it after that.

Nothing could sweep away the darkness that huddled around the Priestly corner. Even during the hottest summer days, when the streets shone with mirages, there was an unmistakable iciness shrouding the mansion. And so it endured for decades, as a beacon from another time and place, resolutely empty, and utterly unconquerable.

That was, until tonight.

As I drew closer to the mansion, rubbing the warmth back into my suddenly chilly arms and second-guessing my decision to come this way in the first place, I realized with a start that the house had changed entirely since the last time I had seen it. Someone had finally done it — really done it. The abandoned Priestly mansion had been dragged into the twenty-first century, and now, it was alive again.

I stopped walking.

The rusted wrought iron gates were wrenched open and pushed against hedges that no longer languished across the garden wall. The weeping willows had been pruned to an almost unnatural neatness, revealing windows on the second story that I didn’t know existed. The ivy had been cut away to reveal sturdy wooden boards and a newly painted red door lit up by a teardrop lantern on either side.

And in the light of the lanterns were two black SUVs parked side by side on freshly strewn gravel.

My phone buzzed against my hip — a text from Millie letting me know she had made it home safe, and an inadvertent reminder that I hadn’t. Reluctantly, I moved to continue on my way, but something inside was stopping me. The Priestly mansion, the frozen heart of Cedar Hill, was beating again, and lateness be damned, I had to know more about it.

And that’s when I sensed something. I shifted my gaze up past the trees and caught sight of a flickering figure in an upstairs window. It was a boy. I couldn’t be sure of his age, but even from a distance his bright eyes were unmistakable. They were too big for his delicate face and as they watched me from what seemed like another world, they rounded into discs that grew unnaturally. He leaned forward and pressed his palms against the glass, like he was about to push the pane from the window frame. Was he waving? Or telling me to go?