SHATTERED: SECRET SOCIETY OF SOULS, BOOK 1

by K. C. RILEY

  The muscles in my jaw twitched as I took the paper. If Mom was trying to tell me something, couldn’t she have done it in another way? It was all too much to digest.

  “If you have any questions or want to talk about any of this stuff, give me a call. I mean it.” Kai handed me his business card. “And that’s my personal line, so I’ll answer.”

  “Sure. Thanks.” I think.

  I spent the rest of the day working at the café a nervous wreck—mixing up orders, spilling things. I was a mess. At least, Mrs. Ellington had already called Vye to tell her how well everything went and even hired her for another event, one I would not be volunteering for.

  The Destroyer is coming. Not much time...ascending...water and fire.

  I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. Did Kai actually channel my mom? Or did he make the whole thing up? And if so, how could he have known to use the exact words from her note? The Destroyer.

  By the time I got home, I had a pounding headache.

  I traded Kai’s supernatural psychobabble for a hot shower, cozy PJs, and an old black and white movie, Sabrina with Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart.

  I snuggled up into my bed and pressed play on my laptop. Twenty minutes in and I couldn’t keep my eyes open.

  At some point, I drifted off to sleep and had the weirdest dream.

  It was nothing like the nightmares of the beast, the door, and symbol that typically haunted me. This was different, like a blanket of warm light wrapping itself around me. I had felt it before. But where? I couldn’t say. Either way, it gently woke me up.

  I yawned and closed my laptop when something buzzed at my hand, a dragonfly. It looked like the same one from Zander’s party. Then again, I supposed all dragonflies looked the same.

  “So you’re back,” I whispered.

  The dragonfly buzzed its iridescent wings like it understood me. The warm smile on my face was disrupted by the sudden sound and movement of something outside my window. The dragonfly took off when I got up to investigate. Nervous, I grabbed the wrench from the drawer.

  “Who’s there?” I whispered.

  With my arm raised and ready to attack, I held my breath and peeped outside. No one was there. Just the wind.

  Out on the balcony, I felt the same presence of light that had wrapped itself around me only minutes before. I sighed deeply in the cool night air and held myself tight. I was about to go back inside when I caught a glimpse of something flash across the yard. It was dark. But I could have sworn I saw someone that looked like…Jake. Anyway, I must have been wrong because when I looked again, it was only the wind rustling through the trees.

  What was it between me and Jake? And why couldn’t I get him and his lips out of my head?

  I woke up Sunday morning and stared at the box on the floor for who knows how long.

  Inside was the creepy lion’s head knob, Mom’s note from the night of the accident, and Kai’s doodling of an amulet from the morning before. According to Deidre, one of the counselors at Crown Hill, I needed to face the things I was afraid of, sit with everything that went bump in the night until I could see that it was all a part of my wonderful imagination. It some ways she reminded me of Cassie.

  The entire day was mine, and I decided to do just that, face my fears. What was the alternative? Another breakdown and a white padded room? Been there, did that. No thanks.

  After getting dressed, I dashed over to Griffin Library where I spent most of the morning looking up whatever I could find on ghosts, hauntings, mediums, and people who claimed to have come back from the dead. Who knew there was so much on the supernatural at a school library? As I placed the growing pile of books on the desk, I noticed Camilla and Abby hovering around Meghan and her phone down on the first floor. Meghan looked up and crocodile smiled. Nothing unusual there. I half smiled back for the sake of keeping the peace, but all three of them felt wrong.

  The lights glitched on and off. Weird.

  For the next three hours, I flipped through books and real-life paranormal testimonies from people like me—people who thought they were crazy. A lot of the stories rang true to the stuff Kai talked about from the day before.

  There was one account of a woman who was being haunted by her ten-year-old son months after he died from an illness. One evening she was driving in bad weather, skidded off the road, and flipped over. She woke up to the smell of gas and the realization that she was pinned underneath the car. She swore her son’s ghost pulled her out from the vehicle before it burst into flames. After that, she never saw him again. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that maybe the word haunted wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

  Another account I read was about a veteran who saw his best friend blown to pieces right in front of him. Geesh. He never got over it. Forty years later, he was in his apartment asleep when an electrical fire from the unit below spread throughout the entire building. He swore his best friend came into the room, picked him up, and carried him through the flames outside to safety. There he was, safe on the grass, without a burn or scratch on his body. Everyone else in the building died. When the police questioned him, he told them the guy who saved him had wings, large white ones that glowed as bright as the sun. I wondered why they didn’t lock him up for telling the truth. According to him, the ghost of his best friend was an angel.

  For some reason, Sister Clara’s story on The Codex Rose came to mind. I decided to take a break from ghosts and angels to see if I could find anything more on it. There was nothing in the library or online.

  A little discouraged, I flipped through some other books on how to protect yourself from, well, evil. I thought about the thing that was on the other end of Mom’s phone the night of the accident, the shadow that was across the road that tried to kill me.

  I had spent six months getting over it, convincing myself that the doctors were right. It was all a nervous breakdown. And yet, here I was opening the wound. But with good reason.

  I took a deep breath to keep my mind from spinning out of control. Aside from crosses and holy water I didn’t find much on protection and took my search to the internet.

  There I found stuff like salt, mountain ash, and red brick dust. There was even more on charms, symbols, and incantations. It was all overwhelming and, in some cases slightly questionable. I mean, could I really depend on Madame Maroo’s homebrewed recipe for demon-busting-lemonade and devil-chip-cookies to work? I think not.

  I looked up as the lights glitched again. It felt like I had been sucked into The Twilight Zone when the sound of a small child laughing came from everywhere and nowhere. It was the same giggle I had heard in Zander’s bathroom, the same sensation of playing hide-and-go-seek. Something about it was all too familiar.

  I followed the sound of the kid past several aisles of books until I came to the last. There was nowhere else to go. It sounded like the giggling was coming from the other side of the wall. I pressed my hands against it, but it didn’t budge. Frustrated, I was about to leave when I turned and stepped on the stuffed rabbit I had thrown in the trash. The room got hot. My first thought was I was being pranked again, but after everything I had read, I was almost sure that maybe I was being haunted. And why me?

  I had already learned my lesson twice on going into hysterics. The first with the paramedics and police at the accident, and the second in Zander’s tub. I needed to stay calm, take a different approach, and more importantly...breathe.

  As I stood back up, something caught my eye, a shimmer that brought my attention to a row of books on the shelf next to me. 480, 481, 482...484. No way. 483 was missing. Mom’s number.

  Another faint shimmer rolled across the empty space. I reached my hand toward the empty slot when a shimmer rolled to reveal a book. Electrical currents flowed at my fingertips as I pulled it from the shelf.

  It was the same book from the portrait of Sir Isaac in Mrs. Ellington’s library. The only difference with the one in my hand was a weird keyhole where the lion’s head should
have been. It had to be a lock because the book wouldn’t open.

  The lion’s head knob that was lying in the box in my room was the missing key. At least, I hoped. The air tingled with an aliveness at the thought of finally having a clue to what happened the night of Mom’s accident.

  My phone rang loud scaring the hell out of me.

  I could have sworn I turned it off earlier. It was Josie, and I hit send to voicemail. It buzzed again. This time it was a text from Cassie.

  Heads up. Wanted to warn u.

  A link followed to a video of me in Zander’s tub. I should have known better than to think it would have gone away. My blood pressure rocketed at the thought of someone waiting a whole week to freaking post it when I was finally pulling it together. It felt calculated.

  I told myself it didn’t matter even though it did. I hated this place.

  I went and gathered the other books I wanted to check out when the sound of my own voice coming from below stopped me in my tracks. I looked over the banister onto the main floor. Meghan was playing the video of me flailing and gasping for air as though I was drowning. All three girls snickered and cackled like the wretched goats they were. Then they rewound it and played it again. And again. And why was no one telling them to turn it off, let alone to be quiet. I mean, we were in a freaking library.

  Rage consumed me as the lights flickered on and off. Meghan and her friends looked around to see what was happening as the anger continued to surge through my blood. It kept building and building like a pressure cooker until something dark escaped from within. Something that felt...good.

  A huge chandelier snapped and crashed down to the coffee table in front of them. There were screams as people ran to see if they were all right.

  The girls were shaken. Trembling. So was I. Meghan looked up at me with a strange look on her face. Fear, confusion, intrigue? I wasn’t sure, and I wasn’t hanging around long enough to find out.

  By the time I got down the stairs, my hands were still shaking. The librarian dashed off to see what all the commotion was about. There was no time to wait. I reached over, grabbed the scanner, and checked the books out myself.

  I couldn’t shake the feeling of the chandelier snapping like I was the cause of it. And I couldn’t shake the feeling of something dark inside of me that liked it. But what was I saying? It was just a coincidence, one eerie creepy coincidence. That’s all there was to it. Anything outside of that was just impossible.

  Like mom magically trading places with you the night of the accident.

  I tore through the front door and picked up the pace when I bumped into someone. Hard. I was getting good at that.

  “Excuse me. Sorry.” The guy reached down to pick up the books and the plush rabbit that fell from my arms. He handed them back to me one at a time. “Lizzy? Cute rabbit. But, you probably want to get that eye fixed.”

  When Kai wasn’t channeling my dead mother, he was pretty easy on the eyes. I brushed the hair out of my face. “Yeah, thanks. It’s Kai, right?”

  “Looks like someone’s doing some light reading on the classics. Ghosts, witches, and goblins.” The calm in Kai’s voice was centering, grounding.

  “I don’t know about goblins, but there’s a slight chance you might have inspired me.”

  He held onto the last book turning it frontward and backward. “I would say eighteenth century, maybe older. I’ve never seen anything like it. The binding is still in good shape. And how odd...” He examined the weird keyhole in it. “Isn’t that the—”

  “The symbol from your sketch. Coincidence, huh?”

  Kai smiled with his eyes and handed the book over. “You know, I don’t believe in coincidence.”

  “So, what are you doing here?” I asked, breaking his gaze.

  “Just some research. They open the library to the public on the weekends.”

  “Wow. I didn’t know that.”

  “Yeah. It’s one of the best in the country for...Hey, uh, any chance you might want to grab a coffee? Maybe some breakfast? We could talk more about those goblins you’re not studying.”

  I thought about what just happened to Meghan and the girls. I then thought about the knob waiting for me in my room, what I might find if Book 483 did open. It felt like I was only digging myself deeper into a world I knew nothing about. But perhaps, Kai did. What better way to learn about the supernatural than from an expert?

  “Sure,” I said. “Where did you have in mind?”

  Of all the places to eat. And to make matters worse, Jake was on duty.

  “So you work here, huh?” Kai opened the door for me.

  “Yes sir, welcome to Vye’s.”

  The sound of dishes crashing in the back echoed through the café. I had a bad feeling about this. No one was up front to greet us, so I grabbed a couple of menus, and we sat ourselves.

  “So what do you recommend,” Kai asked. “I love breakfast for lunch and dinner.”

  “That’s crazy. So do I,” I said, smiling.

  Kai grinned. I knew exactly what he was going to say and tried to beat him to the punch line.

  “There’s no such thing as coincidence,” we both laughed.

  Kai was sweet. I felt lighter around him, like I could relax, especially after what happened back at the library with the chandelier.

  A deep voice sliced through the laughter. “Welcome to Vye’s.”

  Jake addressed me with the same clenched jaw and coldness as always. “I’m Jake, but you already know that.” He then turned to Kai. “And you are?”

  “Kai. Nice to meet you, brother.”

  “Wait. Aren’t you that guy from Mrs. Ellington’s party?” Jake asked. “The psycho?”

  My face warmed beet red with embarrassment.

  “Uh, psychic,” Kai replied.

  “Sure. Well, what can I get you?”

  Kai smiled. “Why don’t you order for me, Lizzy?”

  Jake grunted. “Yes. Why don’t you order for him, Lizzy?”

  He was acting like a jerk again.

  I was about to tell him so when I looked up into his eyes and was once again hijacked by the sensation of his warm lips pressed against mine. This was ridiculous. It was like I had no self-control. Like a nervous confused bird I swallowed. “Uh, sure.”

  “Are you okay?” Kai asked. “You look a little flustered.”

  “Fine,” I lied. I had to get Jake’s lips out of my head.

  Jake took down our orders. “I’ll put those in and let you get back to your date,” he said sarcastically.

  Date? What was he talking about? Wait. Was he...jealous? No. Another impossibility. Jake hated my guts. Right? There was no way. This was the guy that told me to go back where I came from. The dude that told me I didn’t belong.

  Kai gleamed from ear to ear. “Great. Thanks.”

  The bell over the door jingled and thank God.

  Darlene, the other waitress, scurried in. “Sorry I’m late.”

  “All right, I’ve got one spicy ranchero egg sandwich with a caramel Frappuccino.” Darlene placed the plate down in front of Kai. “Be careful. It’s hot.” She grabbed the other plate from her tray and set it down in front of me. “And one veggie omelet with a cinnamon dolce latte. Now, can I get you all anything else?”

  I was close to starvation. “No, this looks great.”

  Darlene gawked at Kai from head to toe like he was a midday snack. I couldn’t blame her.

  I turned my head slightly toward her and gritted my teeth. “You can go now.”

  Kai smirked. After she finally left, he cautiously tasted his Frappuccino. “Wow, that’s good coffee.”

  In spite of whatever weird fantasy was going on inside of my head with Jake, Kai’s smile and demeanor were infectious. He seemed untouched by life. I hadn’t met anyone so comfortable and free with themselves despite the supernatural stuff.

  “So how did you get started in all of this anyway? It’s not every day you meet a celebrity medium,” I said.

&n
bsp; “Ha. Right. I guess you could say I was a sensitive kid. Others might say, strange. Awkward. I could see things other people couldn’t. Like when Meemaw died.”

  “Meemaw?”

  “Yeah, my grandmother. And don’t laugh.”

  “No. It’s cute. Go on.”

  Kai smiled with a twinkle in his eye. “Well, everyone was crying, right. And for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why. As far as I could tell, Meemaw was still there like she hadn’t died at all. But that changed one day when she said she had to go. She said she’d taught me everything she could, and all I needed to do was trust and be myself. Next thing I knew, her door appeared. She stepped inside and was gone.” Kai took another bite of food from his plate. “Before she left, a small ball of light ignited in her hand. She said it was a gift. She placed it in my palms, and the light burst through my whole body. At first, my mom was creeped out by the whole talking to the dead thing. And that didn’t change until I did a reading for one of her friends, a woman who could barely get out of bed after losing her daughter. The session seemed to do the trick, and word caught on. A producer got wind of the whole thing, and here I am.”

  “Wow.” I took a sip of my latte, mystified.

  “Yeah.”

  “So, where are all these souls that you talk to?” I wanted to know. “And, if I’m asking too many questions, just tell me to shut up.”

  “No, not at all. I like you asking questions.”

  Things were getting a little warm in Vye’s.

  Kai put his knife and fork down on his plate. “But honestly, that’s kind of like asking, where’s the internet? I mean, it’s like this place that’s out there that we all talk about, but you can’t go there with a physical body. We can interact with it and communicate with it through our computers. But where is it, actually?”

  Kai searched my face for the answer, and I shrugged.

  “It’s kind of the same concept. When I connect to a soul or souls, I’m sort of dialing into the web and downloading information. That information comes through the form of my senses via pictures, feelings, sensations, sound, that type of thing. Even better, think of it like when you turn on the radio and tune into a specific station. Where’s the music coming from?”