Chapter 1: Cemetery Confrontations
The smell of candle wax—black, beeswax, and something rotten beneath—would forever mean panic. Max’s lungs burned as he sprinted between the leaning headstones, the world a blur of granite and shadow. Dani’s shout had been cut off minutes ago, swallowed by the oppressive quiet of the cemetery. Alison was gone. He was alone.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he muttered, each word a puff of frost in the cold air. He’d been the one to light it. A joke, a dare, a desperate attempt to feel something other than the grinding monotony of his life. The flame had tasted the air and then the screaming had started.
He skidded to a stop behind a massive, moss-eaten angel, its stone wings chipped into cruel points. He pressed his back against the cold marble, trying to quiet his breathing. The graveyard hummed. Not with insects, but with a low, vibrational thrum that seemed to come up through the soles of his sneakers.
A shadow passed over the gibbous moon. Not a cloud. Something riding a stick, silhouetted against the silver light.
“Brave little virgin who lit the candle…”
The voice was a melody, a syrup-sweet promise that dripped directly into his ear. He spun.
She floated just beyond the iron fence, straddling her broom, her long blonde hair cascading over her shoulders like spilled cream. Sarah. She looked exactly as she had when he was eight, and yet completely different. Then, she’d been a caricature, a Halloween ghoul. Now, the centuries sat lightly on her, a haunting knowledge in her blue eyes, a cruel curl to her full lips. She was terrifyingly beautiful.
“I will be thy friend,” she sang, her head tilting.
Max’s brain screamed at him to run, but his feet were roots, sunk deep into the grave-soil. The traumatic wiring from his childhood fused with a newer, more dangerous current—the sheer, stunning force of her presence.
Her hand lifted, palm facing him. She began to move it, a slow, deliberate gesture up and down in the air. A hum vibrated from her throat, a wordless, ancient lullaby that wrapped around the thrumming of the earth.
Max’s breath hitched. It started as a warmth in his belly, a confusing, unwelcome heat that spread outwards. Then it wasn’t just warmth. It was pressure. A firm, unmistakable grip where no hand could be. He gasped, his head thudding back against the stone angel.
“What… stop…”
But the words were weak, diluted by the humming that was now inside his skull, softening his thoughts. The invisible touch moved, a masterful, teasing rhythm that ignored the fabric of his jeans. It wasn’t pleasurable. It was violation, but his body, traitorously, was responding. Arousal and revulsion twisted together, a nauseating cocktail that made his knees buckle. He was a puppet, and his own nervous system was the string she’d found.
Her smile widened, seeing the conflict in his eyes—the fight fading, replaced by a glazed surrender. The panic was still there, but it was drowning in a honeyed sea.
“Shhh,” she cooed. “’Tis only magic. ‘Tis only me.”
The pressure intensified, clever and insistent. A moan escaped him, one of utter shame. He was hard, aching, completely under her control while she watched from twenty feet away, her hand still pumping the air. Her mission was in her eyes—a desperate, hungry need. This was her sustenance. His degradation was her key to existing for another night.
“Follow me,” she commanded. The hum shifted, the pressure becoming a guide, a tether.
His mind fought.Dani. Alison. The cemetery is safe. She can’t cross the boundary. But the thoughts were whispers in a hurricane. His body, humming with her forced, artificial bliss, took a step forward. Then another. He walked like a man in a dream, around the angel, toward the break in the iron fence where the path led out.
Sarah drifted backwards on her broom, leading him, her humming never ceasing, her hand never stopping its vile pantomime. He passed the black candle, still burning in a hollow of dirt, its wax pooling like a black, weeping eye.
He stepped over the low, crumbling stone wall that marked the consecrated ground.
The second his foot touched the ordinary earth of the woods beyond, her broomstick dipped. She landed gracefully in front of him, the humming softening to a satisfied purr. The invisible hand vanished, leaving only a throbbing, shameful echo.
She reached out and took his actual hand in hers. Her skin was shockingly warm.
“There now,” she said, her voice a whisper of night-blooming jasmine. “That wasn’t so very bad, was it?”
Max looked into her endless blue eyes, his own vision hazy. The part of him that was still Max Dennison, the skeptic, the survivor, was screaming, locked in a tiny vault in the back of his skull. The rest of him, the part she had tuned to her frequency, simply nodded.
She smiled, all promises and sharp, white teeth. “Good lad. We’ve ever so much to do before sunrise.”
She turned, tugging his hand, and he followed without resistance into the dark embrace of the trees. Behind them, in the graveyard, the black candle guttered and went out.