Ghost (The Halloween Boys #1) (92)
Wolf gave the paper a flick. “Want to come be my editor? It’s just me and a team of old people who don’t even know how to open a laptop.”
“I’ll stick to criminal law whenever this cursed town loosens my leash for the day, thanks.”
I raised an eyebrow at Ames, who accepted a beer from Wolf. “Onyx, you’re a better storyteller.”
“Hey, I’m a journalist,” Wolfgang complained. “My stories are pretty good.”
“I’m superior, yet again,” Onyx boasted. “I’ll tell it. I’m good. I’m not pirate storytelling good, but I manage.”
I was dying to learn more about the pirates but refrained from asking, knowing I needed to pace myself with these easily-distracted guys.
Onyx’s emerald gaze reached mine as I sat cross-legged on the floor across from him. Ames took a seat behind me in the armchair, and I rested my back against his legs, feeling his fingers tangle through my hair. Onyx glanced at Ames then to me. “Are you sure you don’t want to wait until Halloween? Scary stories are better on Halloween, and it’s only a few nights away.”
“I have a feeling there will be plenty of things for me to be scared of on Halloween in Ash Grove.”
Ames’s grip tugged on my hair. “Let’s hope so,” he murmured softly. I felt my core clench in excitement.
Onyx rolled up his newspaper and rested his forearms on his knees. “It’s been a long time, and I try not to think about it, honestly.” He took a deep breath, and I waited. “Ames has probably told you we all met as boys, though my story is a little different than theirs. I was already . . . what I am when I met them. I was older than what my body looked. Let’s just leave it at that for now. We all had our own proclivity toward . . . dark things. Things most would shy away from, we gravitated toward. Most like the heavenly stories at church, the tales of redemption, light, and love. We leaned toward the sinful side . . . fascinated by this Satan character, the Hell mentioned, fire and brimstone, and magic. A need to kill ran through us all for our own reasons, that I’m sure we’ll all share with you at some point.” Ames’s fingers softly petted my hair, and I wished I could turn to see his expression. Onyx continued, “We’d always been a quiet little farming town. When the boys and I were in our twenties, some new guys showed up, men no one knew. Women started disappearing without a trace, one after the other. Ames’s sisters, gone. Wolfgang’s mother, gone. My . . . A woman I knew, gone.”
“Oh my god,” I breathed, my bones chilling. Ames twirled my hair through his fingers gently, comfortingly.
“No trace, no pattern. Some were sleeping in their beds and snatched in the night, while others were out in the fields, or forest, or just hanging washings on the line when it happened. The guys and I . . . We hunted them . . . and we found them. They were these gray men, living in caves at night and walking into town like gentlemen during the day. We thought they were depraved, psychotic. We killed them, one by one, dropping their bodies in the town square each night of October—an offering to the families of the women gone missing. Looking back, we should have suspected. Should have seen the signs . . . but as you probably know, the human mind wants to convince itself of anything other than the supernatural.”
I nodded, remembering my own disbelief and unwillingness to see what was right in front of me with my stepfather chasing me and Ash Grove being, well, Ash Grove.
“They were demons, and not just any. They were sent by a Devil. The women were . . . recruited. Transformed into something . . . else,” Ames said, leaning forward. “Some seemed to have been granted the powers of an Archdemon, while others . . . We don’t know where they went.”
Onyx nodded. “The Devil didn’t like us fucking with his shit, and Devils are notoriously territorial. We were taken to Hell, Wolfgang, Ames, and I, and released on Halloween as . . . what we are, though I was already a hybrid, part vampire and part dragon. We suspect Wolf may have had werewolf in his blood already. Ames was born human. The curse . . . amplified what we are. Some may think it a gift to be immortal, but after a hundred years or so, you change your mind. We cannot die; we cannot leave Ash Grove. Ash Grove has warped and taken on a life of its own. There are others like us, and humans too, who gravitated toward Ash Grove because of its magical pull. They all have the option of death, should they choose it. We do not. Though the humans cannot leave. The ones who come here will find they stay here forever. Either the dark magic reroutes them or somehow, they never feel the desire to move away.”
I sorted through my thoughts a moment before asking, “They say the whole town was slaughtered by The Halloween Boys?”
“Ah yes, that.” Onyx said, remembering. “It probably was. We have no memory of that night. To be honest, we still don’t know all the rules of the curse, another really fun addition. We have yet to find the Devil who cursed us. He scrambled our memories of that Halloween. But yes, the entire town, or rather, everyone who was downtown that night, perished. The ones who didn’t die . . . Well, they’re as stuck as the ones who did. Maybe more so.”
“The ones who died are stuck?”
Ames leaned forward. “There are two sections of the graveyard I took you to. One part holds the good souls who died that night. They’re bound to Ash Grove, unable to move on to death and new lives. Then the other part is, well, the bad people. The ones I don’t let move on.”