“And the next day? And the one after that?” she pushed, cocking the gun.
“I don’t know,” I said, quietly.
“Do you know what you’re going to do about anything?”
BANG! I rolled my eyes and tried not to raise my voice. “I still don’t know if I’m staying here or going back. It’s a lot to take in. I haven’t had a chance to deal with it.” I dried my hands on the dish towel and then sat at the table, ready to take my medicine she was dishing out to me.
“So you don’t know if you’re going to make the choice to even be one of us yet.”
“You said last night that you would take care of Lyla. Besides, I’m still not entirely convinced of this while business of ancient bloodlines and super powers.”
She nodded again and put her last dish in the sink to soak. Without looking at me and with all the coolness of a polar bear’s tongue, she asked, “How’s your headache?”
Sly old lady. I pursed my lips. Even though her back was to me, I could feel her smirking. “I’m going to see if Lyla wants to come with me to Carrie’s tonight,” I said, leaving without another word from her, but I could have sworn I heard a low chuckle before I stepped out the door. It didn’t matter. I was just glad to be escaping the inquisition for the moment.
Outside, the sun was incredibly bright, set against a perfectly blue sky. Normally, this is a beautiful sight, but all I could think was how hot it was going to be the rest of the day. It was just before nine o’clock, and I was starting to sweat. Lyla was kneeling in the garden, scooping up cucumbers and placing them neatly into a basket. I knelt down by her, and I saw her stiffen. She continued her work, and I started to help her, but she got up and went to the other side of the garden where the cucumber vines started to tangle around the tomato sticks. I let her be for a moment, trying my best to respect her space. She moved more frantically, pulling the cucumbers as quickly as she could and tossing them into the basket.
“They stay fresher longer if you twist them off the vine,” I said.
She ignored me. I got up and walked over to her. She pulled the last few cucumbers off as fast as she could and got up, staring to walk off. I gently grabbed the basket’s handle, and she came to a stop, whirling around to glare at me.
“Let go!” she commanded.
“Wait, Lyla. I want to talk about—”
“Let go!” she repeated, louder this time. She jerked the basket back as hard as she could, yanking it out of my hand. She fell down and the cucumbers spilled over the St. Augustine Grass that lined the garden’s perimeter. I knelt beside her to help pick them up.
“I got it!” she yelled at me. She scooped them up, two and three at a time, and threw them back into the basket.
“Lyla …”
She turned to me with those fierce eyes that can only be inherited from Clothilde. “Leave me alone!” She frowned, and I saw her struggle to keep the tears in, but she wasn’t strong enough. She was about to bolt. As she started to get up, I grabbed her, hugging her. She struggled, but I held her harder. She gave up eventually and cried her little heart out with her face buried in my chest.
“It’s okay,” I soothed, patting her back. “Is this about what happened yesterday?”
I felt her nodding. “Lyla, it’s okay.”
She picked her head up, eyes wet and red. “No it’s not! I’m a freak!”
I was taken aback. How could she think that? What she had was so incredibly special. I had never seen anything like that before. “No, honey, you’re not a freak! What you have … what you can do is beautiful. How long have you been doing it?”
She shrugged. “Since I was seven, I think.”
“What happened when you were seven?”
Now she was sniffling, the tears momentarily stopped. “There was a deer that was in our backyard. It was shot and bleeding, but it was still alive. I was crying, wishing I could make it better. I put my hands on it, trying to hug it so it wouldn’t feel lonely while it died. And my hands got really hot, and then the deer got up and ran away.”
“How many times have you done this?”
“I don’t know. Lots.”
“Always with animals?”
That got her crying again. “I tried to save momma and daddy, but I couldn’t!”
I hugged her again, tears pricking my eyes now. “Baby, people are a lot bigger than animals.”
“But I tried so hard!” she wailed.
“I know, baby. I know.” Looking down at Lyla and, knowing the danger that possibly awaited her, I wondered if I would be able to save my loved ones if I made this absurd choice to be a paladin. I rocked her in my arms and desperately tried to put my logic aside. Faith was something I needed to work on, and I would do it for her.
* * *
After Lyla calmed down, she and Clothilde and I spent the rest of the morning pickling the cucumbers. Carrie had called me on her lunch break to discuss our plans that night. She decided we were going to have a girls-only slumber party. The promise of ice cream and painted toe nails was enough to get Lyla to come with me. But we had a lot of time to kill before the party. Lucas was at work, and Jonathan was with his sitter, so it was just me, Lyla and Clothilde for the rest of the afternoon.
Lyla helped me pick figs and the three of us canned them in Mason jars. I then got Lyla to help me cut the grass and wash the porch. We stopped a couple of times an hour for fresh sweet tea that Clothilde served us from the porch steps. By the end of the day, we were both a little sunburned and sweaty, but the house looked a lot better than it did when I drove up on June first.
“You sure you don’t want to come with us? Carrie invited you, too,” I said to Clothilde as Lyla as I headed out the door, our overnight bags slung over our shoulders.
She waved us away. “Y’all go. I have company coming later. Father Ben wants to go over a few things.” She saw the concerned look on my face. “It’s nothing to worry about. I promise. Y’all have a good time and I’ll see y’all tomorrow.”
“Sure you’re going to be okay here by yourself?”
She chuckled. “I’ve been living by myself for twenty years now, and I’ve managed pretty good.”
“Okay,” I said, hesitating before I walked out the door.
I wasn’t expecting Lyla to talk much on the way to Carrie’s, but I was soon surprised at how animated she was. “So, what are we going to do first? Watch a movie? Do our nails? Or eat?” she asked.
I smiled. “I don’t know. Can’t we do them all at the same time?”
She giggled. “No! How can we eat and do our nails at the same time?”
“I guess you have a point. What color you looking to do your nails, anyway?”
“Pink. Pink. Pink. And, oh yeah. PINK!”
I laughed. It was good to see her happy again and, better yet, happy with me. I supposed my reaction to her secret gave her relief. And I think that the bonding the three of us did over the pickling and canning helped, too. It was too much to hope for that Lyla and I could be buddies again, but it looked like it was moving in that direction.
I had allowed myself to be hopeful while we drove to Carrie’s, but the conversation with Clothilde last night was soon threatening to tear away the veil of brief happiness that hung over me for that short trip. I was glad Lyla didn’t notice my slight shift in mood. I let her babble all the way to Carrie’s. When we arrived, Lyla eagerly hopped out with her overnight bag and ran up to the front door, barging in without knocking. I took my time, forcing myself to let go of my worries for the night. When I walked in, Carrie squealed and wrapped her arms around me, crushing me with the force of her exhilaration.
“Hi,” I managed to choke out.
“Hi!” she squealed again. She let me go, and I gasped for air. “I was trying to decide what to watch tonight and I thought, since Lyla’s never seen it, we have to watch the one, the only, the classic …” She pulled a DVD case from inside her entertainment center and held it up like it was the Arc of the Covenant. “D
irty Dancing!”
Lyla’s mouth gaped open as she ogled the movie in Carrie’s hands. “Oh, MY GOD! Oh, my God. I have been dying to see that movie since forever!”
Carrie and I laughed. It was funny to hear Lyla already talking like a teenager, even though she was three years away from that. She held the movie out for Lyla, who took it and was instantly intrigued by the pictures on the cover.
“Okay. I have three different kinds of ice cream. I have about twenty different colors of nail polish. I have Kool-Aid for Lyla …” she leaned in closer to me, whispering, “… and wine for us.” I grinned and nodded my approval. She straightened up and brought her voice back to the excited pitch it was a second ago. “And tons of junk food. What do we do first?”
Lyla was glued to the screen while Dirty Dancing played. Carrie and I had seen it each a million times, so we exchanged girl talk for most of the movie. The conversation gradually steered toward what I’m sure was Carrie’s main reason for wanting me over in the first place.
“So,” she began, coyly, “what’s up with you and Lucas?”
I rolled my eyes. “Nothing.”
“C’mon! It is so not nothing. Everyone sees the way he looks at you.” I rolled my eyes again. “And the way you look at him,” she edged. I pursed my lips, but a smile worked the corner of my mouth. “You’ve been back for like a week, and you’ve already got him wrapped around your finger.”
“I don’t.”
“Yes you do. And given the fact that y’all use to date—”
“We never dated,” I whispered, annoyed.
“You dated Uncle Lucas?” Lyla asked, mesmerized by Patrick Swayze’s intimate dance with Jennifer Grey.
“No I didn’t!”
“What do you call it, then?” asked Carrie.
“He took me to cotillion one year, and he was miserable the whole time.”
“That’s not what I remember.”
“You make things out to be more than what they are.”
“A kiss is a kiss, Leigh.”
“You kissed him?” Lyla managed to pull her eyes away from the TV, and she was staring at me, excited.
I wanted to say no, started to say it even, but then I remembered. I remembered Lucas slow dancing with me. Couples all around us were making out on the floor. It was late in the evening and the song was one of the last to be played. We danced into a corner and, out of left field—
“They made out at our Junior Cotillion,” Carrie told Lyla.
“What?!” she said.
I didn’t know what to say. I had forgotten most of that night. I just remembered Lucas picking me up in that old truck of his and him sneaking off with some of the guys at the dance. I remembered them laughing a lot. Then I really remembered what happened.
“He was drunk!” I said, burying my head in one of the couch pillows. I heard Carrie and Lyla roaring with laughter.
“I can’t believe you MADE OUT with UNCLE LUCAS!” I kept my head buried in the pillow. I could feel my face getting redder and redder.
“Yeah. They were really getting into it, too!” said Carrie.
I picked my red face up from the pillow. “Carrie!” I scolded. She and Lyla laughed some more. I grew more annoyed by the second. “Always making something out of nothing,” I muttered as I got off the couch and went into the kitchen.
I opened the freezer door for some more ice cream, and I could still hear them howling it up in the living room. I shook my head, trying to let it go. I grabbed a pint of mint chocolate chip and a fresh spoon out of the drawer. I turned around to walk back to the living room and, as I did, I saw something outside, on the other side of the patio doors that opened to the kitchen. At first I thought it was a man, or at least his shadow. I froze, waiting for the shadow to move. It didn’t move, exactly, but it dissipated. It happened so quickly that I wasn’t sure if it was real or not, perhaps my eyes playing tricks on me.
I set the ice cream and spoon down on the counter and slowly walked up to the patio doors. It was hard to see much of anything outside. The light was on in the kitchen, and I mostly saw the room reflected back to me in the glass of the doors. But I could have sworn I had made out something there, behind the picnic table, in between the trees.
Sudden terror swept over me, a shocking jolt that made me freeze on the spot. My rational mind would always take over in these circumstances, telling me It’s just your imagination. This time, what it said chilled me. It’s NOT your imagination. There was something there. My rational mind, for once, agreed with my seemingly irrational instincts. My breath quickened and perspiration started to break through my pores. I had to be sure, though.
I slowly reached for the light switch. I turned it off and the yard on the other side of the glass was suddenly clear. And there, right in front of me, separated by one inch of glass, was the image of the man from Bancker. I gasped, and he grinned. And before my eyes, he exploded into a shadow, and that shadow formed the shape of a crow. It flew up and out of my sight. I started to shake.
“Leigh! Come back. We promise we won’t laugh anymore,” said Carrie, still laughing. I heard her shush Lyla, who was still giggling.
Not here. Not now, I silently pleaded. If the Dark Man came for Lyla tonight, I wouldn’t know what to do. I flashed to the pictures that were left for Lucas in the envelope. The Dark Man was capable of physical harm. I didn’t have time to think. I went back to the living room and said the first thing that came to my mind. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
They stopped laughing, seeing the panicked look on my face. I didn’t do such a good job of pulling it together. “Do you want our permission or something?” asked Carrie.
I shook my head. I smiled sheepishly and ran down the hall to the bathroom. Once inside, I pulled my cell from the pocket of my jeans. I quickly dialed Clothilde’s house. It rang once, and she answered. Before I could say a word, she said, “He’s there.” It wasn’t a question. She knew he was here.
“Yes,” I said. “How did you –”
“Father Ben. He told me you would call. He wants to talk to you.” I heard her hand the phone to Ben.
“Leigh?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Okay. Did he do anything yet?”
“He scared the hell out of me, that’s what he did.”
“Listen to me carefully. Get a candle. A white one if you can. Light it and you and Carrie and Lyla sit in a circle, holding hands. And I want you to say these words.”
“Hang on,” I said. I frantically looked for something to write with and write on. I settled for one of Carrie’s eyeliners and some toilet paper. “Okay. Go slow.” I suddenly heard footsteps on the roof, walking over my head. “Never mind. Go fast.”
“Say: I ask for the White Light of the Holy Spirit to surround us now, shielding us from all darkness. I ask for the angels and saints to stand as sentinels, guarding us from darkness. I ask this in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit and in the name of the Holy Virgin Mary. Amen.”
I finished marking my makeshift paper with the last word. “That’s it?”
“Yes. You should be okay tonight. He’ll get angry, but don’t worry. Now, before you go to bed, I want you to take the mirrors in the room where you’re sleeping, and turn them all around, so they’re facing away from you.
“Um … okay?”
“Dark is attracted to light. If it sees itself in the mirror, it’ll turn away and won’t bother you while you sleep.”
Nancy K. Duplechain - Dark Trilogy 01 - Dark Bayou Page 13
