Taylor wakes with a jerk and a scream, sitting bolt upright in her bed with her teddy clutched to her chest and tears wet on her cheeks. "She's got Mattie! She-she's got him!" Sobs make her throat hurt, jerking her shoulders until a comforting hand presses against her back.
"It's alright, little one," Edward murmurs.
"No, the witch of the wood—!"
"Will do your uncle no harm now that she's had a taste of him." Taylor looks up at the ghost, grateful that his eyes are brown instead of pits in his face. "They've struck up a bargain of sorts, a few days of protection for a night of entertainment." Her gasping breaths begin to slow and she can feel sleep tugging at her, drawing her back down until her cheek is resting on her pillow.
"What about the rest of us? How will we be protected?"
"Worry not, Taylor. I'll watch over you tonight." And that's all she really needs, to know that she has someone she can trust that will guard her while she sleeps. Like an angel, dressed in silk clothes with a funny wig.
When Taylor wakes up the next morning, Lee is gone and a stranger is sitting in her place at the kitchen table. She glares up at him past a veil of her hair, chomping angrily at her cereal until he gets the hint to move. She takes the seat with a prim little sniff, shoveling another spoonful of Apple Jacks into her mouth.
"Who're you," she asks, milk dribbling down her chin.
"Elias Cunningham."
"Crazy dude from that movie in the basement, right? I thought he was fuzzier." She gestures at the neatly trimmed beard the guy's sporting, no longer looking like he's been living in the wild.
"Yes, that wasn't the best time period for me."
"You're weird."
"Yeah, I know." He frowns wandering into the living room where the others are sitting. Taylor follows after a moment, tired of being left out of conversations just because she's little. She plops down on the floor in front of the coffee table, still chomping away as Shelby looks up.
"Earlier, when you got that pig man to leave us alone, you shouted Croatoan," she says, slow, like she's still figuring out what needs to come out and what needs to stay in her head. "Cricket said it too when the Butcher was blowing out our windows. What does it mean?"
"It's a word of dark power and blood magic." Elias settles down on the couch near Shelby, a glass of booze in his hand. It can be used to bind people or banish them, whichever way you wanna use it."
"The Butcher used it as a binding spell," Taylor says, swirling her spoon through her milk. "That's why all those people are here."
"You've been doing research."
"I can't even Google Roanoke because I don't know how to spell it, but I do know how to get grown ups to tell me stories. They might be dead, but I'm still really adorable." She shrugs, having accepted that as fact a long time ago. With her puppy eyes and pouty lip, she can get just about anything. "How'd you survive when everyone else bit the dirt?"
"I slept in the root cellar for a while and got a little apartment when I was able to. If I hadn't lost my tenure at BU none of you would have been able to move in here." He knocks his drink back and rises to get more, still talking. "I did extensive research before I moved in, mostly about those nurses—"
"They wanna gut me like a fish."
"—and nobody, not one person, has ever been able to walk away from this place alive before me. The owners either die or go missing somewhere around October. I was lucky to get out at the tail end of September before things got really fucked up. Actually, I have proof hidden in the basement. C'mon."
"Are we really gonna believe that nutjob," Matt asks, gesturing with his hand in the direction Elias has gone in.
"We don't have much of a choice," Nico grumbles, resigned now. "I did my own research and couldn't find anything. If he has proof of other residents, then I say we give the guy a chance. If he turns out to be completely bonkers, then you and I can haul him to the cops ourselves." Taylor begins to sneak away as her daddy talks, Shelby hiding a smile behind her hand.
"Fine, but I think Taylor should stay up here."
"That's a good— She's already at the basement door." She throws them a cheeky smile over her shoulder and then races down the steps after the creepy guy, jumping down to the cement floor from the bottom step. Elias glances up from where he's shoving a table out of the way, raising his brows.
"I wanna see your secret hiding place and my daddy wasn't going to let me," she explains.
"So you snuck down here before he noticed," Elias asks, and his brows creep just a little further up his forehead.
"Yup." There's the sound of footsteps and then the other three are downstairs, Nico picking Taylor up and depositing her on a low shelf next to a battered suitcase. Elias barely notices them, prying open a fake panel in the wood siding to reveal a dark hole that would stop at Taylor's chest. He pulls out a thick folder of documents, setting them on the leather case on Taylor's right.
"Hey, no touching." Matt's hand snaps away from the papers so fast that he might have been burned. "That's a solid decade of my life right there, it covers all the paranormal activity on the entire property that the house sits on. I'm gonna write a book one day, if my writer's block ever takes a nosedive off a cliff."
"No you won't." Taylor isn't sure how, but she knows. The same way she knows that everyone in this room, maybe even herself, won't make it to see 2018. Elias glowers over at her before bending down to grab two small, thick journals and gathering up the folder, resting it all protectively against his chest.
"Apart from myself, one of the most recent family to live here was the Chen family. They immigrated here from Taiwan in 1973 and wanted the American Dream that they saw on television. They got American names, ate TV dinners, the whole shebang." He moves further into the room with the others following, dropping down into an old rocking chair. "Of course, no one was very welcoming to immigrants back then, kind of like how they are now, so they never learned about everything that happened in the house."
"The butcher killed them on the first night of the Blood Moon, didn't she?"
"Yes. That's why I'm lending these to you all. I need to know that at least one family had a fighting chance in this place." He hands the folder off to Shelby and she flips through it slowly, shaking her head in disbelief.
"These go back to the 1700s," she murmurs, smoothing down the pages with her hand.
"Technically, everything started in the late 1500s, but nothing was documented until this house was finished in 1792."
"Edward," Taylor says, nodding. She rubs her hand over where his name is written on her cast, elegant and ostentatious over her elbow. "He was going to live here with only his servants for the rest of his life, far away from society." It started off like a fairy tale and it ended like a Rob Zombie Halloween special.
"That's right." He opens another folder and Matt's eyes go wide, jabbing his finger against a black and white newspaper photo of two women in nurse uniforms. Taylor flinches away from the picture, vividly remembering the night they had drug her out of bed and threatened to cut her wide open.
"I dreamt about them one night," Matt says, rubbing a hand over his jaw. "I dreamed that they shot an old lady in my dining room."
"The Jane sisters were total psychopaths. They could be ranked among the worst or the worst, but even they were terrified by the ghosts in this place. They told me how the haunting began for them, how they were terrorized for an entire month until Miranda was torn apart and Bridget was beheaded. There were others, too; three hunters spent a night here and turned their guns on each other."
"Always during the Blood Moon," Taylor adds.
"Yes, the same lunar cycle in October. The killing starts on the first quarter moon and ends on the actual Blood Moon. Any other time, the spirits can only scare you, but they can skin you alive if that's what they feel like doing during those six days. The first quarter moon is tonight, so we need to head out before it gets dark.
"Nope," Matt says firmly. "I can't leave without my niece." Elias rolls his eyes, gathering up his research and practically sprinting upstairs, making a beeline for the front door.
"I saw that on the news, and you have my condolences, but she's as good as dead if the Butcher has her."
"It's not the Butcher," Shelby argues. "It's a little girl named Priscilla!" Elias stops just four feet from the door, turning around to look at the others. Taylor is resting on her daddy's hip, his strong arms keeping her up without much problem.
"Did you say Priscilla?" Matt nods, desperation bleeding into his gaze. "Come on, I think I know where's she's hiding Flora." He's off like a shot and Taylor's wiggling to go after him, but her daddy walks into the living room and drops her down on the couch.
"You're staying here," he says in his no-nonsense tone. Lawyer Voice, no point in arguing. "I'm gonna lock that door behind me and if anyone you don't know comes in here, then I want you to throw Eve at them and run."
"Yes, sir," she mumbles, kicking the arm of the couch.
"Even if…. Even if they're dead, it should distract them long enough for you to hide yourself in my car." Taylor nods sullenly, eyes on the ceiling where Amy Chen is perched. She's a year older than Taylor, dark hair done up in pigtails and sweater torn near the shoulder. "What are you looking at?"
"One of the Chens. They like to hang out in here." Nico's slow to look up, reluctantly following where Taylor's gaze had been focused until he's letting out a sharp breath. He can see her, can see the way sunlight makes her skull too vivid through her skin, her hands curled up like claws.
"Will she hurt us?"
"I don't know, Daddy." And she doesn't know, there's not that feeling like a string pulled taunt in her chest, fraying or whole or just broken. Death is easier to guess than just being hurt, it's more final, clearer in her mind.
They sit on the couch for two hours after that, holding each other and watching Amy as she watches them. Edward is nowhere to be found, probably brooding in the basement since he doesn't trust Nico to leave him alone. Taylor doesn't either most of the time, she's an acquired taste, but she also spends most of their time together listening to him prattle on about art. All she took away from that is that Michelangelo is a gay Ninja Turtle.
It's the sound of tires on gravel that draws them out of their own heads, Nico rising from the couch and looking out a window before running his fingers through his dark hair. It's almost black and Monica used to love playing with it at nighttime.
"It's Cricket."
"What's he want," Taylor asks, sitting up and swinging her legs over the edge of the couch.
"Probably more money." They wait in silence for Cricket to come inside, automatically finding them without even having to wonder. He's psychic, always has a voice whispering in his ear, so it doesn't surprise Taylor when he comes in with sweat shining on his brow. He looks so pale, so world-worn and haggard and it's easy for Taylor to peek at his thoughts.
Elias is dying and Cricket's next.