Emma walked home from St. Anselm's in a daze, Father Callahan's words circling in her mind like something with teeth. It will do everything in its considerable power to make sure you go back to it exactly as alone as it needs you to be.
She didn't have to wait long to see what that meant.
Cassidy Pulls Away
It started small. Cassidy didn't meet her by the lockers the next morning, which wasn't unusual on its own Cassidy ran late constantly but when Emma found her at lunch, her friend's face had a strange, guarded stillness to it that hadn't been there the day before.
"Hey," Emma said, sliding into the seat across from her. "You okay? You look tired."
"Didn't sleep great," Cassidy said, not quite meeting her eyes. "Bad dreams."
Emma's stomach dropped. "What kind of dreams?"
"I don't really want to talk about it," Cassidy said, a little too quickly, pushing her food around her tray without eating any of it. "Actually Emma, I've been thinking. Maybe we should slow down on the whole Hollow Lane thing. I mean, we're just a couple of teenagers poking around in stuff we don't understand. Maybe we should just... let it go. Let your grandmother and Father Callahan handle it, if it's even real."
Emma stared at her. Cassidy had been the one pushing them into the archive room three days ago, the one who'd said we need to go to the library, right now without a moment's hesitation. This flat, tired resignation didn't sound like her at all.
"Cass," Emma said carefully. "What did you dream about?"
Cassidy's hands stilled on her tray. For just a moment, something flickered behind her eyes not fear, exactly, but a kind of distant, dreamy longing that made the hair on Emma's arms stand up.
"There was a boy," Cassidy said quietly. "He said I didn't have to keep helping you if I didn't want to. He said it was tiring, being someone else's friend all the time, always the one who has to be strong for everybody else. He said I could just rest instead."
"Cassidy, that's him. That's Thomas. He's trying to get to you so you'll stop helping me."
"Maybe," Cassidy said, and there was something troublingly reasonable in her tone, like she was repeating an argument she'd been convinced of rather than one she'd thought up herself. "Or maybe he's got a point. I've got my own stuff going on, Emma. I can't spend every afternoon in a library basement chasing down a hundred-year-old ghost story."
Emma reached across the table and gripped her friend's wrist, hard enough to make Cassidy look up in surprise. "Listen to me. Whatever it said to you last night, it wasn't trying to help you rest. It was trying to make me alone. Father Callahan told us this would happen."
For a moment, something like the old Cassidy flickered back into her friend's eyes worried, present, there. "It felt so real, Emma," she whispered. "It felt like it actually cared whether I was tired or not."
"That's what makes it dangerous," Emma said. "It's good at sounding like it cares."
Cassidy was quiet for a long moment, staring down at her tray. When she finally spoke again, her voice had steadied, though Emma could hear the effort it cost her. "Okay," she said. "Okay. I'm not going to just leave you to deal with this alone. But Emma if it can get into my dreams too, even though I've never set foot in that house, that means none of us are actually safe just by staying away from it. It's already further inside our lives than we thought."
A Warning From Home
That evening, Emma found Nana Ruth sitting very still at the kitchen table, the lights off, a single candle burning in front of her an old habit, she'd explained once, from years of praying the rosary alone after Vivian disappeared.
"Nana?"
"Sit down, sweetheart." Nana Ruth's voice was strained. "I need to tell you something, and I need you to actually listen, not just humor an old woman."
Emma sat.
"I dreamed of Vivian last night," Nana Ruth said. "The first time in years. She was standing at the end of my bed, exactly as she looked the last time I saw her seventeen, dark-haired, that same nervous smile. And she told me something, Emma. She said, tell her to stop looking. Tell her some doors are better left shut, even for people you love."
Emma's chest tightened. "Nana, that wasn't Vivian. That's the same trick it tried on Cassidy today using the people I love to try to talk me out of fighting back."
Nana Ruth's hands trembled around the candle. "I know that, in my head. But my heart wanted so badly for it to actually be her, Emma, that for one terrible moment I almost believed it. I almost told you this morning to stop everything the research, the questions, all of it because some small, desperate part of me would rather lose you to giving up than lose you the way I lost her."
"You're not going to lose me," Emma said, reaching across the table to take her grandmother's shaking hands. "Not to giving up, and not to that house either. I promise."
"Don't promise things you can't be certain of," Nana Ruth said softly, though she squeezed Emma's hands gratefully all the same. "Just promise me you'll be careful. And Emma whatever that thing tries next, be ready for it to come from somewhere you'd never expect. It's had over a hundred years to learn exactly how to find the softest part of anyone it wants."
A Text at Midnight
Emma was nearly asleep, the mark on her arm a dull, steady warmth beneath her sleeve, when her phone buzzed on the nightstand.
It was a text from Cassidy.
can't stop thinking about what he said. he sounded so sad emma. what if we're wrong about all this. what if he really is just a lonely kid and were the bad guys for trying to stop him from ever having a friend
Emma stared at the message for a long moment, unease crawling up her spine. It didn't read like Cassidy at all too soft, too uncertain, missing the sharp practicality that defined every text her friend had ever sent her.
She typed back quickly: cass call me right now
No response came.
Emma tried calling. It rang four times and went to voicemail.
She sat up in bed, her heart pounding, staring at the darkened screen of her phone, and felt the mark on her arm pulse once, warm and slow, exactly the way it had the night she'd seen Thomas waving at her from the edge of the fog.
Somewhere across town, she was suddenly, terribly certain, her best friend was dreaming again — and this time, Emma wasn't at all sure the conversation was staying inside the dream.