Doll Bones by Holly Black Read Free Book Online Page B

had a vague memory of the place from some late-night British rock documentary his mom had been watching. “That’s where the Beatles are from—in England. There’s no way we can go there. I guess we’re going to have to find out if ghost girls really can curse people, because—”
    “That’s what I thought at first,” Alice said, and pointed to the markings. “But look again. It says East Liverpool. In Ohio . So we could get on a bus and be there by morning.” She paused. “And we are. We’re going. Tonight. Well, technically, it’s morning, so we’re going in the morning.”
    He looked from the doll to Alice and then to Poppy. “This is why you brought me out here?”
    “We tried to explain yesterday,” Alice said. “I told you it was important.”
    Poppy reached down and turned the flashlight beam on her watch, then shone it at him. “There’s a bus stopping in town at two fifteen in the morning. It’s coming from Philadelphia and going to Youngstown. One of the stops is East Liverpool. Alice said she’d come if you would too.”
    Zach thought about the ghost story that Poppy had told on their last walk home, the one about holding your breath when you passed a cemetery. Was she trying to play a different kind of game? A game that she was making out of their real lives? But Poppy didn’t look gleeful, the way she did when she had a thrilling idea. She looked pale and nervous, like she hadn’t been sleeping well.
    “You’ll really go?” he asked finally, looking at Alice. Her grandmother wouldn’t like a single thing about this: not the ghost, not the bus, definitely not Alice being out at two in the morning with a boy—even if the boy was just him.
    Alice shrugged.
    Zach’s parents wouldn’t like him going either, but that was a point in favor of the plan, as far as he was concerned. And if he decided that he never wanted to come back, well, at least he’d have some company while he figured out where he was going. In stories, orphan boys became assistant pig keepers and magician’s apprentices. In real life, he wasn’t sure there were any equivalent jobs.
    “You still haven’t looked in the bag,” Alice said, pointing to the burlap sack he was holding. “It’s pretty weird.”
    With trepidation, he pulled the drawstrings so that he could peer inside. Poppy handed Alice the flashlight. She held it up high, pointing it down at him.
    For a moment, Zach didn’t know what he was seeing. The bag seemed to be full of something that looked a little bit like dark sand with chunks of shells in it. Then he realized that the bag was full of gray ash, and what he’d thought were shells were actually sharp, pale pieces of bone.
    Of course. The leftover ashes. The remains of a ghost. Of a girl. Of the Queen.
    A nameless primal terror washed over him. He wanted to drop the bag, wanted to race out of the shed and go back to bed where he could shiver under his own covers. But he didn’t move. His hands started to shake, and he drew the strings tight so he didn’t have to look anymore.
    “Poppy thinks we can catch a bus back in the afternoon and be home by dinnertime. It’s only a three-hour ride, but there aren’t a lot of buses from here to there—just this one early in the morning, and another in the afternoon that gets in too late for us to ride back in time. We left a note for her parents.” Despite her words, Alice’s voice grew a little uncertain. Zach wondered if she’d balked at first, before she’d apparently promised Poppy that if he went, she would go too.
    “If these bones are real ,” he began, “shouldn’t we tell someone? A girl died. Maybe Eleanor’s father murdered her. Maybe it’s some kind of cold-case file.”
    “No one’s going to care about some old story,” Poppy said. “And even if they did, they’d just take the doll away from us—put her in a museum or display her somewhere—and then her spirit would be angry.”
    He paused, considering everything