Homecoming by Amber Benson Read Free Book Online Page B

Eleanora’s call. The only way she could describe it was like someone was keeping tabs on her, biding their time until they could pluck her like a ripe fruit.
    Paranoia is a sign of exhaustion, right?
she thought.
I’m just so damn tired, I can’t think straight.
    She lay down across the mattress, stretching out like a cat, her head sinking into the welcoming heft of the overstuffed pillow. Above her was the Cure poster she’d taped to the ceiling when she was fifteen, the carnival of pink-and-orange-swirled Tim Burton–esque lettering spelling out the word
Lullaby
. She stared up at the poster as the candlelight from Saint Anne made squiggly shadows dance across the ceiling.
    She felt her eyelids grow heavy with exhaustion, her body tingling as sleep fought to overwhelm her, until finally she gave up and let her eyes close. She began to drift, and, before she was even aware she’d fallen, she was dreaming—
    It seemed impossible she could’ve ever forgotten the nightmare she’d had all throughout her adolescence, but not once since she left Echo Park had the dream come to her. In the recesses of her mind, it was a faded thing. Like an upholstered chair left in view of a window until it became threadbare and bleached from time and sunlight, and was banished to the attic.
    The dream never varied: It was October—Indian summer—but windy and chilly and crisp once the sun had set. It was a few minutes before the witching hour, but how she knew this was unclear—though she didn’t question it.
    She was in a clearing in the woods, a place she’d never been in real life, but during the dream it felt familiar, and she intuitively sensed it was a safe place, consecrated to protect those in search of sanctuary from the darkness—just thinking the word
darkness
left her numb and scared. It was more frightening than any spoken word had a right to be.
    She looked up and saw the pumpkin-orange harvest moon sitting low on the horizon, a runny egg yolk melting into the dusky, cloud-filled sky just above the tree line. Outside the clearing—where it was definitely not safe—the tree trunks grew in a dense pack, their shadows crisscrossing one another in the moonlight.
    She heard the crunch of dead leaves under fast-moving feet, the sound echoing in the air and overpowering the hollow rustle of the wind as it streaked through the naked tree branches. The sound intensified—whatever was out there in the darkness was getting closer—and the temperature dropped in response, turning the air arctic. A chorus of dead leaves somersaulted across the ground, the wind blowing them helter-skelter until they disappeared inside the shadows, their desiccated brown bodies smashed into smithereens by unseen feet.
    The crushing footfalls gained speed as the thing—she knew it wasn’t human—crashed through the underbrush, moving faster and faster as it closed the distance between them, its breathing ragged. It was running now, moving at an inhuman speed, snarling toward her, its movements building to a heart-throbbing crescendo that stopped just shy of the edge of the clearing. Whatever had come tonight was afraid to cross the boundary the tree line had created.
    And then the creature burst through the boundary line, the protective spell broken. The beast, all smoke and darkness and dread, descended on her, ripping at her torso and burying its cold teeth into her gut with feral intent, tearing away the flesh from her body in bloody chunks—
    â€”and she woke up.
    Only she was not in her old bedroom anymore. She was in her great-aunt’s room, but Eleanora wasn’t there. Instead, she saw Saint Anne, the woman from the candle, but then the image dissolved and another woman—a giantess, really—stood at the foot of the long, quilt-covered bed. She was smiling down at Lyse, whose body lay on top of the mattress, stiff as a board, hands crossed over her