Chapter 17- Sylvie French, Birthday Ruiner

    It had been a week since Sylvie’s return, and it was finally the week of my thirteenth birthday. I wasn’t planning to do much; just have a sleepover and go out trick-or-treating with Emily, Sara, Tegan (who was apparently no longer mad at me for reasons I don’t know), Roxy, and Jade, who was forced to bring her sister Elena. Jade and I were dressed up as vampires (as an inside joke), Tegan was a piece of pizza, Sara was her older brother, Emily was “Larry The Hydro One Dude”, Roxy was…something with ears and a tail…and Elena was a princess. I mean, I know you’re probably thinking we’re too old for this, but you can’t put an age limit on free candy. We even made a list of Halloween rules:
1: Everyone runs to every house.
2: two knocks on the door and thirty seconds before we leave.
3: no stopping to look for where we are.
4: no stopping to check the time.
5: no trying to find rich neighborhoods where they give out bigger candy, because bigger doesn’t always mean more.
6: bring other masks so people won’t remember if you’ve been there or not and revisit all houses after people start to go home for the night
7: if you stay behind to tie your shoelaces, we’re leaving you behind.
8: if you stop to talk to an old friend, we’re leaving you behind.
9: if you are slowing us down, we’re leaving you behind.
10: MOST IMPORTANT RULE, use Kieyra’s Birthday as an asset to get more candy.

It’s not like the candy is important to me, because it’s really not, but I don’t know what I would do without all that extra sugar to bribe Nathen with.

After we had each filled two bags of candy (except for Elena, who had three because she acted cute) we went to bring Elena home. Then we went back to my house to get all of the makeup off our faces so we could go take a “haunted walk” at Ryan’s house.

Apparently, once Ryan and Chris were walking in the forest when they saw the ghost of a farmer who told them to run away and never come back. I’m not sure if it’s true, but for the last few years they’d been inviting their entire grade over to take a haunted walk every Halloween late at night.

Ryan lived in the outskirts of Carleton Place, a few doors down from Sam. Every now and then he got out of school to go “chain sawing” with his dad, and he told stories about things that happened at his house all the time. I was kind of excited to see Ryan’s house, more because it was apparently haunted than the fact that Ryan lived there.

Ryan’s house was an old, huge log house that had been made sometime in the 1950’s. On the inside there were a lot of (literally) stuffed animals. I didn’t stay in there long. There must have been people from Ryan’s sister’s school there too, because there were a bunch of ten or eleven year old girls running around, pretending Ryan and his friends had cooties. After about fifteen minutes, Ryan, Chris and Sam told everyone to follow Ryan to the barn. The barn was old, and the floorboards were creaky. Jade was really excited because she hadn’t been invited to a lot of things, and my other friends were starting to get annoyed with her. I bet this was how Roxy felt when I was around her other friends.

After the barn were the woods, and after the woods was a long, dark trail. I had to admit it, it was pretty creepy. Then something occurred to me. Where was Sylvie? I could have sworn I saw her earlier with Emmy Oldfield, Austin Kane, Allen Perry and Patty Wilkinson. I turned to Tegan.
“Hey, have you seen Sylvie?” I asked.
“I saw her earlier with Emmy and Patty. She said she had to go do something, and I haven’t seen her since then.”
“What were her exact words?”
“Something like ‘I have to go take care of some business’, which didn’t seem like something she would say, but she hasn’t been the same since she came back.”
“Tegan, Sylvie never should have made it back.” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she fell in The Hole.”
“And by ‘fell’ you mean…”
“Pushed. And she should have died. She was supposed to die.”
“Does that mean she’s a-”
“Yeah. And she has powers too.”
“Like what?”
“She can cause searing pain by looking at you. She’s strong, Tegan. Stay out of her way, and if you must talk to her, talk very briefly.”
“Gotcha.” Suddenly something pulled me away from my friends and into the forest.
“I thought I told you to cooperate.” Sylvie glared at me, hitting me across the face. I fell to the ground.
“I don’t want to. I’m not afraid of you.” I lied.
“You’re being stupid to defy me.”
“You’re being stupid in thinking that you’re going to get something out of this.” She laughed evilly.
“Damien has promised that I will spend an eternity as a powerful ruler.”
“He’s using you.”
“Who cares? I don’t care about Damien, I care about Alec. I want him.”
“You can’t have him. People aren’t possessions. You can’t own them. This isn’t your world, Sylvie, this is reality.”
“But it will be my world, and in my world me and Alec will rule together for all of eternity.”
“First of all,” I said, getting up off of the ground, “It’s ‘Alec and I’. And second of all, there is no Alec and You. There never will be an Alec and You.”
“Shut up!” she threw me farther into the forest. There was a sickening crack as my spine hit a rock.
“Leave her the hell alone!” Alec came out of nowhere and pinned Sylvie to a tree.
“Join me, and we could spend all of eternity together. We could rule the world. Come to the dark side.” Sylvie said.
“The only problem with that idea is that I don’t want to spend eternity with you. Quite frankly, I don’t want to spend five minutes with you.” Sylvie chuckled.
“Wrong answer.” Sylvie gave Alec that weird stare and he fell down in pain.
“Alec!” I screamed. Sylvie ignored me.
“Last chance to change your mind. Just remember, you aren’t on the list of people I can’t kill.” She smirked.
“Stop it, you’re hurting him!”
“Your time is running out. Tick, tock, tick, tock.”
“I said, STOP IT!” I picked up a rock and threw it at Sylvie’s head. She started running towards me, but then surprisingly screamed and fell to the ground, face first. My quasi-stepsister Katie appeared, smiling.
“You can thank me later.”