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THE SKY WAS A DAMP, cold shade of gray, a hint of the storm to come. I peered at the fat clouds in the distance, just over the water’s dark lip of dirty froth, and guessed we had maybe an hour before the storm rolled in and we would need to take cover. I leaned back against the bleached, gnarled corpse of an old tree perched on the beach. I held the green plastic water bottle I’d retrieved from my car to my lips, hoping it would slow the frenzy within, a storm of its own that threatened to burst forth at any moment.
“Day drunk,” my best friend—well, former best friend—Sloan, who was perched to my left, teased, though she had her own canister and hers was twice as full as mine.
“I’m not the one who had the bright idea to bring sangria,” I argued, relishing the sweet tartness on my tongue, trying to keep the irritation from my voice. I wasn’t particularly feeling the camaraderie she was going for, but now wasn’t the time to hash things out. “It’s the middle of November; who drinks sangria in November?”
“Apparently you do, you lush.” Sloan grinned, then her face turned serious. “It was all he had in the kitchen, and I didn’t want to linger, so...”
“It’s fine.” I pulled the scratchy black sweater tighter around myself, the goosebumps on my arms not abating. The morning was chilly and all-around gray, and our motley crew was assembled on Driftwood Beach, all of us freezing our balls off. We’d been assembled here with our quickly gathered blankets, pillows, and canisters of booze since three a.m., and now it was nearing on lunch time. My stomach rumbled painfully, but I couldn’t fathom the thought of eating—not after the work I’d done just a few short hours ago. I did a quick scan of the beach, mentally counting to make sure everyone who had come here with me the night before was present and accounted for. I’d done the same mental scan a dozen times at least, and they were all still here on the beach.
All of us but one.
“Is he ever going to come out?” Sloan asked, mirroring my thoughts. Her lips were a cross between red and purple from the sangria; the bright stain lined her lips comically, making them look bigger than they actually were. She’d die if she knew how clownish she looked, as vain as she was. A week ago, I would have told her. Today, I just smiled. “Some of us live people are fucking freezing.”
“Here he comes now,” I said, my eyes moving back to the water.
The figure emerging from the gray-black water was tall, stooping slightly, bending down to take his cascade of dark, wet hair in his large hands. He turned his head to the side, stepping out onto the shore, wringing the hair in his hands, water pouring from it in a long stream. His hair was much shorter now, after an impromptu haircut, but it was still thick, and I could see the droplets flying off his jet-black strands from yards away. He was naked save for a pair of black cargo shorts, and his lean, muscular frame was peppered with tattoos, his broad chest pale in the milky light. He shook his head like a dog, droplets flying from his dark hair, and I could see the grin splayed across his fine features as he sauntered towards me. His legs and feet were coated with a blanket of dark mud, and his eyes met mine from across the beach, flashing and wild.
Phillip Deville, my favorite dead rock star, emerged from the gray sea after a cold November swim like Swamp Thing, some mysterious, dark sea monster, a goth Poseidon. He had sprung from the dirty water newly baptized and cleansed of his sins, despite being inches deep in muck. Despite the tumult inside me, I grinned back, unable to help myself, catching his eyes across the yards that separated us as he began to jog to me, sand flying up from the beach as he made his way across it. My body filled with heat as I watched him, a tether of warmth that was electric and raw and held us fast.
“You guys are gross,” Sloan said, tipping back her drink.
“I know,” I said, my smile reaching across my face. “Jealous?” I hoped she was. I hoped she was eating her heart out.
Ω
Much as I want it, this can’t be my happily-ever-after, though. Phillip and I can’t just ride off into the sunset and leave all this behind us. Not yet.
I still can’t make heads or tails of what even happened, honestly. How so much went down so fast. I think of that night—Guthrie’s sinister plan blowing up in his face and him biting the dust—or more accurately, biting a bullet and taking Phillip’s bandmate Jason Langley with him—and I can’t believe it’s really real. The part that came after—me bringing Jason back, my third successful attempt at raising the dead—seems even less so.
And yet, it’s true; it’s all true. It’s all real, no matter how much I might wish it wasn’t.
The mess that’s been left behind is so much bigger than I ever could have thought. And I’m the one who has to clean it up.
I don’t like my new job, you see. If you can even call it a job. I’m what you call a reluctant heroine. It might be different if my story was only charming and cool, fun and exciting. But this isn’t Practical Magic or one of those hot and hilarious Sookie books (though I’d give my eyeteeth to meet Eric Northman; don’t judge me. I have a type). The truth is I have no idea what I’m doing, even after all this time, and I’m scared.
I’m lost.
I can’t remember.
I’m heartbroken.
I have a mess to clean up.
And I don’t know if I can find my way.
Ω
The trouble all started one drunken night when I was feeling particularly sorry for myself. I was lamenting my divorce from Tess, the brown-haired, puppy dog-eyed good ol’ boy who had betrayed me, and wishing I could go back to a time when we’d been happy. I’d caught Tess knee-deep in both drugs and the woman he left me for, and even though the divorce was final, I wasn’t quite done licking my wounds. To put it bluntly: I was turning into a day-drunk, probably about to lose my job, and trying to find some kind of meaning. Hell, screw meaning, I just needed to stay afloat.
I’m a librarian in small town southern Georgia, and it wasn’t like I was gonna find much. That’s how it felt, anyway. I already knew everyone in town and I still had like, two friends. There were no other jobs to be found, and it wasn’t like I could just up and move to the mountains or the beach for a reboot. My life consisted of shelving books and letting people pay their fines in pennies, and then I’d go home to my singlewide in the woods. I’m snarky, I’m lonely, and for a poor, sad atheist like me, finding meaning meant throwing anything at the wall to see what might stick. You name it, I’ve blown money on it. For all my talk of not believing in the hock and booey, I’d sure fallen headfirst into it. Desperation is expensive. Tarot cards, sage smudging, crystals and incense, the whole nine, and for what? Jack shit.
On the night in question, I was using all my tools—i.e. coping mechanisms—and then some. You see, ever since I was a lusty, stupid teen, my favorite band has been the Bloomer Demons, a goth-metal foursome whose sludgy tunes guided me through the delicate years of my girlhood or whatever. The lead singer, one enigmatic, tall, black-haired drink of water named Phillip Deville, had passed away under mysterious circumstances in the mid-90s, leaving hordes of female fans bereft and hysterical, me most of all. True fangirl that I was, I had every album on vinyl, CD, and iTunes (probably only thirty-something dudes who share pictures of their vintage turntables with pristine vinyl jackets and matching IPAs on Instagram are impressed by stuff like that, but oh well). I’d recently acquired a rare vinyl copy of their album God is Dead that had some special artwork on the back, done by Phillip Deville himself. On reddit, where fans go to flail, a rumor had spread that the cryptic prose hidden in the liner notes was actually a real spell. The lyrics to one of the songs on the album, warbled in Phillip’s strangely accented Italian, seemed to solidify this theory, since they roughly translated to find the spell and bring me back. Fans had tried—and failed—for years to cast that spell.
Until me, that is.
I’d spent years chuckling behind my screen about those conspiracy theorists. People like that were losers. It was all utter hock-and-booey. I lived in the real world, and while I might have spent the better part of twenty years collecting various versions of the same music I’d been listening to since I was a 13-year-old, saving Phillip Deville memes to my phone until I ran out of storage, dreaming about a dead guy in leather pants, casting spells from the album art was just a road too far. Or so I thought.
Turns out there’s a fine line between a fan and a fanatic, between logic and lore, and that fine line is a bottle of cheap-ass pinot grigio you bought at a gas station, paying with quarters, wiping your snotty nose with your free hand while the cashier is averting his eyes, trying not to notice that you’re sobbing in the Quikpik.
Glug-a-dub, and the rest is history.
God, I’m rambling. So, here’s what happened. Sloan was on a blind date. I was jealous and lonely and sad about my divorce. I got drunk, I set up a makeshift shrine with my various new-agey knick-knacks. I did the spell, and the power went out.
And then my world turned upside down.
You might think you know how you’d act if your favorite rock star of all time, the guy you’d lusted after since you were barely old enough to lust, showed up on your doorstep after being dead for twenty-three years. You might imagine yourself leaning sexily against the door frame, taking a long drag of your cigarette—excuse me, your vape—and saying with a bemused, sultry smirk on your pouty lips, “Well, hello there, stranger.” But what’s probably closer to the truth is that you’d take one look at that not-dead, tall, lanky motherfucker and drop like a hundred and thirty pounds of potatoes onto the front stoop of your singlewide. Which is exactly what happened to me.
The rest is…well, it’s a lot. Turns out Phillip Deville and I had someone on our tails from the jump, before I could even acclimate to my new normal, living with an undead rock god. One Lee Courtenay, who is the worst liar ever, pretending to be a detective looking for an escaped convict, along with his super-terrifying (and really dumb) henchman Shank, started sniffing around, being creepy and whatnot. Sloan—as I’ve formerly stated, my bestie, like my best, best best bestie—started acting all weird (even for her). Phillip and I fell in love (insert heart eye emojis here). That love, which was ignited in my teeny-tiny bathtub, the result of a salt-bath gone wonderfully awry, was finally consummated to the sound of a clunking, on-the-fritz air conditioner outside of a motel room in Boston. Romantic, huh? (It was.)
How did we get to Boston? Phillip and I decided to get away from my tin-box in Brunswick, Georgia and head to his old stomping grounds, in part to see what we could shake out in terms of money, but mainly to find Guthrie. Who is that, you ask? Occasionally known to those who loved and/or loathed him as “Guth,” he was the guy who had given Phillip the spell all those years ago. We hoped to track him down and find out what on earth to do now. Once in Boston, we met up with Phillip’s old bandmate Jason, who was living in Phillip’s old house, and his other, stupid-hot bandmate Nate. We didn’t find Guth, but we did find someone else. Guthrie’s estranged—and very, very odd—wife, Lydia.
How best to describe Lydia? Well, cross Carol Kane’s character in The Princess Bride with Kathy Bates’s character in Misery, and you’re on the right track. Short with frizzy gray hair, wearing housecoats and smoking cigarettes longer than your forearm, she’s half waify-witch and half pure, unadulterated malice. She seems to have trouble deciding which. Which witch? Who knows.
For an hour, Lydia spoke to us in riddles, then cast a spell that rendered both Phillip and me immobile. She stood idly by while Lee Courtenay and Shank kidnapped me. Yeah, I’m still not quite over that.
I escaped with Lee’s help, who, turns out, was fostering both a conscience and a small crush on yours truly. Shank came to our motel room to attack us and Phillip was shot (the wound healed immediately because apparently he’s immune to everything but a visit to the salon—more on that in a second); after escaping from the hospital and the police, we went to see Lydia again, and found out that not only was Lee Courtenay her and Guth’s son, but that he was like Phillip—someone who had been brought back from death—and that the only way to break the spell was to cut Phillip’s hair, which he promptly did without even consulting me first, the jerk. I brought him back a second time, because as it happens, I’m a powerful fucking witch even if I don’t know anything about my powers; Phillip was furious, but we talked it out, then made up, if you catch my drift (winky face emoji here). Lee dropped the bombshell that every move I’d made since doing the spell was carefully orchestrated by Guthrie, and that both Phillip and I were still in danger; I left Phillip behind for his own safety, dragging my heartbroken, weeping self back to Brunswick, where I discovered that my supposed-bestie, Sloan, had not only being seeing, but working for, Guthrie the entire time (and so had my ex-husband Tess, the bastard). It all ended with a showdown at Guth’s house, where he wanted me to sign a contract binding myself and my powers to him in exchange for letting everyone else off his long, evil-ass hook. He didn’t have to ask me twice. I was standing there, pen in hand, when Phillip burst through the door, furious and ready to kill Guthrie with his bare hands.
Then it all went awry. Guthrie fired his gun, I jumped in front of it, Phillip jumped in front of me, Lee fired off a round of his own, but…nobody was covering Jason, who took a bullet for Phillip and died. If you knew what a sweet baby cinnamon roll Jason Langley is, you’d cry over the sheer unfairness of it all.
I’d passed out cold from the shock, and when I awakened to Phillip’s large hands cradling my face, I’d surveyed the room to find the bodies of both Jason Langley and Guthrie sprawled out on the floor in twin puddles of blood.
I wasn’t having that. Nope, I couldn’t live with Jason’s death on my conscience. So, I’d cracked my knuckles and gotten to work. I’m quite good at raising dead rock stars, I’ve discovered.
Hours later, I hadn’t really had time to process all that had happened. I’d rushed everyone out of Guthrie’s house and to the beach, where the salty spray and cool, lapping tides made us feel somewhat cleaner. I was glad they were all safe; I was glad I was safe. But even now, with Guthrie dead, I had no idea what lay in store for them, or for me. Dread curled its way into my belly like a snake.
“It’s over now,” Sloan had muttered to me when we’d first scrambled out to the beach, the sky still full dark. She had helped me ease down onto the beach blanket she had laid out in the early twilight hours of the morning, because I’d been too exhausted and in shock to keep my balance. I’d barely glanced at her; the days of implicit trust between us were over, and I honestly didn’t want her touching me. And how could she know if what she said was true, anyway? I couldn’t shake the very real idea that it wasn’t near over, not by a long shot.
Rather than closing the book, I feared I had opened a new chapter to something far darker.
Before Phillip reached me, droplets of water still falling from his dark, newly shorn hair, I scrambled up off the blanket and turned away from him towards the trail, feeling a sudden odd chill.
Off towards a cluster of trees near the trail was Phillip’s bandmate Nate, known affectionately to his friends as “Ollie,” crouched down low in a dry spot of sand, smoking a cigarette. I meandered over to him, biding my time, and smiled. “You shouldn’t be smoking out here,” I said, but my voice let him know I wasn’t really angry. “It’s against the rules.”
“I don’t see any blue shirts,” Ollie said with a smile of his own, looking up at me through dark eyelashes. There were drops of dew in his closely cropped afro. “And it’s been a stressful night, love.”
“So it has.” I sighed, then held out a hand. “Can I have one?”
He shook his head with a reproachful grin. “Not a chance, love. You don’t smoke. Can’t have you starting now.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Don’t give her one.”
I turned, though I knew it was Phillip. His voice, yes, but I also felt his presence, tugging on the imaginary string that seemed to tether us together. When he was nearby, my body vibrated in a feeling that I could only describe as green. I was beginning to wonder if it was his aura. I laughed inwardly at the thought, remembering how just a year ago I would have cackled at the mere suggestion of something so woo.
My heart thumped nervously; we hadn’t been alone since everything happened and I wasn’t ready to be just yet. If we were, he’d be able to read everything I was thinking and feeling without even trying. I shoved my hands in my pockets and ignored the searching look in his dark green eyes as they met mine.
“Hey, stranger,” I said, going for a casual laugh. “Who are you to tell me I can’t have a smoke if I want one?”
“Fine, have one, then,” Phillip said, but he wasn’t angry. His eyes glittered as they trailed over my face. “But you’ll regret it later when the shock wears off and you’ve got sweaters on your tongue.”
I sighed. “As always, you’re right. And you’re annoying.” He had a piece of seaweed clinging to his stomach, which I flicked off with a finger, pleasant shocks going through my skin as I touched him. “You look like something from the black lagoon. You’re knee-deep in mud. And it’s freezing out here.”
“It felt great,” he said. “I wish you’d joined me. Mud is good for the skin.”
I made a face. “I think I’m good out here with the rest of the mortals.”
Phillip’s eyes flickered to the left and I immediately regretted my choice of words. I took his damp hand and pressed it against my own. “I’m glad you feel better,” I said.
He smiled and placed a gentle kiss on my forehead. Then his cold lips trailed down to mine, where he bit me softly. “I’ll shower,” he said, his voice like gravel, “before I ravish you later.”
Normally, my body would have erupted into flames at that. But instead, I shivered. Phillip’s eyes flashed with concern and he placed his large hands on my shoulders, his eyes boring into mine.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I answered quickly. But from the corner of my eye I watched as Lee Courtney, cell phone up to his ear, muttering and cursing, made his way over to where Sloan sat, still upending sangria. He’d been trying to get a call out to his mother—Lydia—all morning, but there was no reception on Driftwood. He could have simply walked down the trail, crossed the street, and gone to his dad’s—Guthrie’s—house, but we all understood that he didn’t want to be there any more than the rest of us did.
We’d all gathered up items and run out to the beach to get away from that house, that scene, as fast as our legs could carry us. We were coping in various ways—Phillip with his muddy, cold swim, Sloan with her booze, Lee with his pacing, Nate with his chain smoking. I watched as Lee sat down beside Sloan, neither acknowledging the other, both of them silent, staring out at the churning, dark water.
“We need to go back,” Phillip said quietly, his voice near my ear. His hands were still on my shoulders, but he seemed to sense not to pull me any closer, to give me some space. He looked slightly wounded and I felt guilty. I pulled back and pasted on my umpteenth fake smile of the day. “We can’t stay on the beach all day. For one thing, there’s a storm coming, and we need to call—”
“I know,” I interrupted. “And we will. But Sloan and Lee…they needed some time. They need to figure out—”
“They aren’t going to figure out anything,” Phillip said gently but firmly. “It’s going to fall on us, Stormy. You know it is. I know what happened was intense, but we can’t ignore the problem and hope it goes away. We’ve got to call the police.”
“I know,” I said again, nerves twisting in my stomach like a knot. “And we will. But first, we should go over our story one more time, just to make sure everybody is on the same page.”
Ollie stood up, crushing his cigarette butt into the sand. “Yeah, let’s do that,” he said. “Then we’ll get the hell out of here. Phil’s right; the cold is settling into my bones and I’m just about sick of the sight of this place.”
Normally I would’ve argued, because Driftwood had always been my happy place, but today they were right. The cold, dreary atmosphere perfectly matched the way I felt, the way all of them must’ve felt. The three of us meandered over to where Lee and Sloan were perched on the beach blanket, and they both looked up at us, dull-eyed and in shock. Sloan’s sangria was gone, and she was helping herself to the dregs in my bottle.
“Are we shipping out?” she asked in an odd voice.
“Yeah, but we want to go over the story one more time,” I said. “Before we call the police.” The snake slithered around in my belly again, and I quivered.
“We’d better get him over here, then,” Lee said, his eyes flat and listless, glancing over his shoulder. “He needs to know our story, too.”
“He’s still in shock,” Ollie argued, but Phillip had already turned and started down the beach to the huddled form crouched against one of the bleached, dead trees.
He was wrapped in a soft blue beach towel, the biggest one Sloan had been able to find in Guthrie’s closet, and his head was down, brown curly hair falling into his blue eyes. He’d been there for hours, staring at nothing, huddled into himself, quiet with the impact of everything that had happened. Every so often, I’d see him hold out a hand and study it, as though he couldn’t believe he was real.
Jason.
We all watched Phillip jog on powerful legs through the sand to his best friend, who had only been alive again for a few hours. It seemed surreal; I almost couldn’t believe I’d done it. And yet I had. Somehow.
“Do you think you did the right thing?” Sloan asked, so soft I could barely hear her.
“Yes,” I said. “Without a doubt.” I forced myself to meet her eyes, to let her see the steely glare in mine.
If she noticed, she gave no sign. Sloan stood up, throwing a sand-covered arm around me. “Well, fuck me sideways.” She pulled my head down and roughly tousled my hair noogie-style, before I could pull away. “My best friend’s a fucking necromancer, and she can’t even do her own eyebrows.”
