Chapter 2

I waited until they were asleep. My mother had taken a sleeping pill, and my father had drunk himself into a stupor. The house was finally quiet.

I crept into Grandma Stella' s room. I wrapped her frail body in her favorite quilt, the one she' d made by hand decades ago. She was so light. It felt like carrying a bundle of sticks.

Using the rusty wheelbarrow from the backyard, I pushed her through the sleeping town. The wheels squeaked with every rotation, the sound echoing in the empty streets. Every noise made my heart pound in my chest.

I didn't go to the industrial lot. I went in the opposite direction, up the steep road that led to the old church cemetery on the hill.

Grandma Stella was a woman of deep faith. She always said she wanted to be buried there, overlooking the town where she' d spent her whole life. She said the souls there were at peace. My parents wanted that spot, too. They believed some stupid local legend that being buried on that hill guaranteed you a peaceful afterlife. They didn't deserve it. She did.

The ground was hard and rocky. It took me hours to dig a shallow grave with a small garden shovel I' d stolen from the shed. My hands were raw and bleeding by the time I was done. I was exhausted and crying, my tears mixing with the dirt on my face.

Gently, I lowered her body into the earth.

I took off the silver locket I always wore, the one with a tiny picture of me inside. It was the only nice thing I owned, a gift from her on my tenth birthday.

I whispered into the cold, dark grave. "Grandma, I'm so sorry. They were cruel. They were evil. But you' re in a holy place now. A place with power."

I paused, my voice dropping to a raw, desperate plea. "If you can hear me, don't find peace. Not yet. Make them pay. Make them feel the pain you felt. I' ll help you."

To seal the promise, I bit my own thumb until it bled and let a few drops fall onto her shrouded form. A blood offering. An invitation.

Then I dropped the locket into the grave with her and began to push the dirt back in.

When I got back home, the sun was just starting to rise. I was covered in dirt and my body ached. I cleaned myself up as best I could and collapsed into bed.

The next morning, my mother saw the empty wheelbarrow, clean and back in its place. She assumed I had done what she asked.

"Good girl," she said, a rare and unsettling smile on her face. She even gave me an extra piece of toast at breakfast.

For a few days, things were strangely calm. My parents seemed relieved, as if a physical weight had been lifted from the house along with my grandmother's body. They were almost kind to me, in their own twisted way. It was a fragile peace, and I knew it wouldn't last.

It didn't.

A week after the secret burial, the bad luck started.

The family' s old pickup truck, the one my father babied more than his own children, refused to start. The engine was completely dead. Then, Matthew, my parents' golden child, came down with a fever. It wasn't just a cold; it was a raging, persistent fever that left him delirious and weak. The doctor had no explanation.

The final straw was the chickens. We kept a small coop in the backyard for eggs. One morning, I found all five of them lying dead in the dirt. There wasn't a mark on them.

My mother stood in the doorway, her face pale with fear. "This isn't normal," she whispered. "This is a curse."

My father, shaken out of his usual apathy, agreed. "It' s that old woman. It has to be."

That' s when they decided to call Reverend Lester.

He was a traveling preacher who had passed through our town a few years ago. He was charismatic and manipulative, preying on the fears of desperate people. He had once looked at me, a sickly child then, and told my parents I was a source of "bad luck" for the family. They had believed him then, and they believed him now.

They got his number from a flyer he'd left at the local church. My mother made the call, her voice trembling with a mixture of fear and hope.

"Reverend," she said. "We need you. Something is wrong in our house."