All My Darkest Impulses (House of Crows), Lisa Unger [top 10 novels .txt] 📗

the state. And he was like: In New York? That’s not too far from me. But she hadn’t answered, and he’d never brought it up again. He was cool like that. Picking up on boundaries and respecting them.

Lurch and her parents stopped and turned back toward the house for a second, her mom pointing at something. Then they disappeared inside the barn. At just that moment, she heard something. A slam. Then the sound of something heavy being dragged across the floor. She’d heard it before; they all had. Its origin was unknown, and it freaked her out every time. Old houses, said her dad, they just make noises. Did they, though?

Her phone pinged: You still there?

She kept her eyes on her open door.

Have you ever seen a ghost?

No. I don’t think so . . . Have you?

I think this house is haunted. Or, like, it’s alive or something. There’s an energy.

Okay. Cool.

Yeah, maybe.

Are you scared?

Sometimes.

Maybe you should call an exorcist. That’s a real thing, you know.

That seemed like kind of a creepy thing to say, didn’t it? Was he making fun of her? She wanted to go suddenly.

So she typed: gtg ttyl

See ya.

Which he probably wouldn’t. They might never see each other in the flesh. That was the beauty of the internet. Relationships without the real-world complications.

Jewel dropped her phone on her bed and headed down the grand winding staircase, past the portraits of a younger version of her father, the grandmother she’d never met, her grandfather. Oil paintings, the subjects stiff and odd looking, shooting for grandeur but falling somewhat short of that. The eyes, though. Whoever the painter was, the signature illegible, had a gift for eyes that seemed to leap off the canvas. She made a point not to look back as she walked through the tall foyer and out the front door.

She was headed to the barn, but then she saw someone standing at the edge of the woods.

A girl, a teenager in jean shorts and T-shirt and a pair of red Converse sneakers, stood in the trees. Wow. Did she look vaguely familiar? Maybe she was cool. Jewel lifted her hand in a tentative wave.

When the stranger disappeared, Jewel followed. A bird chirped in the tree above her, and she looked up to see a little sparrow tilting his head quizzically.

Into the woods.

She’d been tromping around here since they’d arrived. She liked the quiet, how the trees went on forever and ever. She’d grown up in a neighborhood where houses were right next to each other, always a neighbor outside washing the car, or skateboarding up the street, or at the mailbox, or dropping by. There was a bustle, an energy to that life—block parties, coordinated holiday decorating, kids playing kickball in the street, on the corner waiting for the school bus.

Here there was no one. Ever. Just the weird groundskeeper, Peter, whom she’d barely seen, but who spent long hours in conversation with her father. So it was a novelty to see someone who looked roughly her own age. She didn’t realize until that moment how lonely she was. Desperate, in fact, for a real-world conversation that didn’t involve her parents.

“Hey,” she called out when she caught sight of the girl again. There was something odd about her. It was late autumn. She must be cold. Her skin was so pale it seemed to glow.

Jewel kept moving through the woods, feeling the chill, wishing she’d put on her jacket. The girl was fast, obviously trying to get away.

And finally she was gone.

Where did she go?

Jewel was alone in the woods. She kept walking in the same direction; she could still see the high roof of the house to her right.

Finally she came to a clearing where there was a small graveyard, really just a tilting collection of stone crosses. Beyond that was the overgrown, tumbled-down walled garden with the big iron gate that stood open like an invitation. The last time she was in there, she’d come out with poison ivy. She’d wanted it to seem magical. But instead it was just a wreck, neglected and wild, borderline dangerous—like everything here.

She stood, the wind whipping around her.

At the edge of the graveyard, she felt like an intruder, as if she’d trespassed where she didn’t belong. But she did belong, because this was her family home, and most likely she was related to many of the people in that graveyard. The names and dates were worn down to illegibility. She wondered about the people buried there; she knew a little.

There was quite a bit on the internet about Merle House, the land it was on, its history, some other abandoned old place deep on the property, which she hadn’t found yet and didn’t really think was real. She’d been doing lots and lots of reading about it all, and the town. She knew more than her mom did, for sure. And way more than her father knew she did.

“What do you think of this place?”

Jewel spun.

The girl was right behind her. She wore a tattered 4-H T-shirt, and she was tall and stunning in the way of supermodels, her beauty something strange and luminous, almost fearful. She had a beauty mark under her right eye in the shape of an almost perfect heart.

Jewel found she couldn’t answer, only stare into the depths of the girl’s amber eyes. She looked so familiar. Where had Jewel seen her before?

The girl leaned in to whisper, “I never liked it here.”

Then there was a man walking up behind the girl.

He seemed to leak out of the darkness between the trees. He moved easily, his gait long and elegant. The sun dipped behind the clouds, and a fog descended, falling as suddenly as a curtain. It wrapped around the girl like smoke, drawing her away, her eyes growing wide.

“Welcome home, Jewel,” said the man with the long dark hair and eyes as black and beady as a crow’s.

The girl started to scream, and the sound filled Jewel with terror, and she