“What kind of name is Alva, anyway?” Kinsey asked, loudly sucking phlegm from his throat and spitting it.
“Just do your goddam job, Kinsey, so we can get the hell outta here,” Tina growled.
Sebastian and Abby waited, breath held as the three cops moved around the woods. The radio crackled again, and this time, Tina responded.
“Yes, Chief, we’re just wrappin' it up. See you in ten.” The static disappeared. “Chief says to pack it in,” she told the others.
The forest was hot. Abby pulled the tank away from her skin, but its tightness made fanning herself impossible. Sebastian looked hot as well. His gray shirt was like a Rorschach Ink Blot Test. She could distinctly see a butterfly on his shoulder blades and a swan in the center of his back. She wondered what those perceptions said about her personality.
“I think they’re gone,” Sebastian whispered after the sound of several car doors slamming.
“Now, what?”
“Now, we investigate.”
“Investigate, how?”
“I don’t know.”
She walked beside him as they moved around the perimeter of the vine wall toward the clearing, where police had hacked away bushes.
Abby did not have high hopes. The ground had been razed almost to the earth; pockets of dirt, cleared of all leaves and twigs, greeted them. Her eyes trailed the barren floor and, though it looked different, immediately recognized the spot where Devin’s body had been. The decaying stump still stood nearby, its surface scraped heavily.
She shuddered as Sebastian walked directly to the dead tree, dropping to his knee and brushing his fingers over the soil. He picked something up.
Abby moved next to him and saw that he pinched a single red hair between his thumb and forefinger.
“Useless cops,” he muttered.
The hair was foreboding, and Abby wished that he hadn’t found it.
“So, what do we look for, Sebastian? I’m feeling pretty lost here.”
“Look for markings in the dirt or weird materials, you know, like rope or something.”
Abby nodded but did not feel confident. She squatted down and peered at the dirt, occasionally picking up a rock or branch that looked strange.
She wanted to help find Devin’s killer, too, but why would the police arrest Danny if he didn’t do it?
“Any chance we’re beating a dead horse here?” she asked Sebastian, who had dropped onto his belly and stared at the ground from only centimeters above it.
He jerked his head toward her, and she recoiled. His face was scrunched and angry, his eyes narrowed at her like she’d punched him in the back, not asked a simple question.
“You can leave any time you want,” he snapped.
Abby paused - surprised by his tone. Forget it, she thought, but as she clambered to her feet, she remembered Sebastian’s sister.
“Hey, listen,” she said, returning to the ground on her knees, hoping that she didn’t tear a hole in Sydney’s pants. “I understand why this is so important to you…”
He shuffled along the forest floor, propelling himself with his pointed toes and shooting her a cold look.
“No, you don’t, but that doesn’t matter because we’re both here, aren’t we?”
“Fine,” she said, standing and wiping her hands on her pants. “You’re on your own.”
She started to walk away.
“Bingo,” he whispered.
“What?” She turned as he scrambled to his feet.
He walked over and held open his hand where a small piece of worn leather, no more than an inch in length, lay.
“What is it?” She tried to keep the annoyance from her voice. It didn’t look like much.
“It’s a clue.”
“To what, though? I mean how can you find significance in this when you haven’t even been investigating?”
He stared at her funnily and then blinked hard.
“I have been, without you.”
She shrugged; he might have told her as much the day before.
“Well, let’s go bust this guy, Pinkerton,” she joked.
“It’s not funny.”
“Fine, it’s not funny, Sebastian. What do you want me to say? Eureka, you found a tiny piece of leather that might have been lying in these woods for a century?”
“We need to continue, Abby.”
She rolled her eyes and settled back on the ground. They searched for another half hour, sweating and not speaking. The normally cool forest held the heat; even the leaves drooped miserably. After a seeming eternity, Sebastian stood and announced that they should leave.
A motorcycle roared by on the road. They couldn’t see it, but its engine created a tunnel of noise around them. When it was gone, the silence was thick, and despite the sun streaming through, vaguely terrifying. Abby felt her skin prickle again, sensing something watching them. Sebastian paused and then spun around, his eyes narrowing in on the woods.
“Do you see someone?” Abby whispered.
“No, but I feel someone,” he said gruffly. “We’ll take the road back.”
This time, he walked behind her, turning circles to scan the trees around them.
* * * *
Abby slipped on the one-piece swimsuit from the previous night, still damp, and plodded across the lawn to the beach edge. The hot sand burned the soles of her feet, and she sprang on toes to the water, relieved at the coolness and relishing the soft swells that broke over her ankles. She walked waist deep and then dived, closing her eyes and allowing a wave to crash over her head. The public beaches would have Red Flags flying today because of the rough waters, but Abby didn’t mind. She always swam when the waves were high.
She felt the undertow, strong, liquid hands grasping her ankles, but swam against it, staying close to the shore where her knees scraped the sand. She thought of Sebastian’s find but still could not make sense of it. A hair and an old piece of leather did not seem like much, though Sebastian seemed transfixed by his discoveries. When they'd returned to Sydney’s on foot, he’d complained of a headache and disappeared into the guest bedroom upstairs. Abby wondered if he faked the headache, but didn’t say as much.
As she stood, a large swell overcame her, and she sucked in a mouthful of water. She pitched to the side and was thrust beneath the surface. The liquid hands took hold and pulled her out, scraping her body along the lake-floor. She panicked and gulped another mouthful of water, her nose and throat burning as it raced down her trachea and into her lungs. Her hands reached the bottom, fingers clawing the sand and stone, but found nothing to grab hold of. The undertow continued to pull, holding her body below the surface and spinning her wildly around.
The sun streaked into the lake, and she kicked and heaved upward, but could not break from the cyclone. Her breath was gone, and she sucked in more water, her limbs going slack beneath her.
* * * *
Abby opened her eyes heavily and stared into nothing. The darkness was suffocating, and she spun in a circle ready to flee the death that had descended upon her. She moved left and struck a rock wall, slippery on her face and hands. Breathing, counting back from one hundred, she waited, and, finally, her eyes adjusted. An outline emerged. She was standing in a cave. Solid, slimy rock rose around her, and she stood too deep for any natural light to penetrate. Still, gradually, she could see. The air was gelatinous, but her body felt light, as buoyant as a soap bubble. The dim tunnel focused - still dark - but increasingly visible. She was definitely in a cave, and though brain damage crossed her mind, she dismissed it. She expected confusion or fear, but they did not come, only a longing to move forward, deeper into the darkness ahead.
She sensed a cold dampness but could not feel it on her skin. In fact, she felt almost nothing, no rapid heartbeat or sweating palms. She was an observer in her body.
The jagged rock walls spread out beside her, and she advanced. The cave shifted to a downward slope, and she picked up speed. Was she walking? No, not exactly, more
like floating, swimming without movement. The tunnel narrowed, darkness stooped to meet her with low ceilings and close walls. Psychological claustrophobia threatened her, but again it could not find a place for its frantic fingers. The cave descended like a spiral into the center of the earth; she followed - mesmerized.
The tunnel forked into three passages, each glowing as if lit from a different source. She chose the path on her right where long, orange shadows sliced along the craggy walls like serpent tongues. The path tightened, barely more than an arm's length across, and appeared to end abruptly, but as she drifted forward, she saw that it was an illusion. The tunnel turned sharply. She continued around the bend where the cave yawned into a massive round room, ceiling-less. A black vacuum of night sky, stars like fireflies buzzing in its face, gaped overhead.
In the center of the room, a group of figures surrounded a blazing fire that crackled, sending flaming embers into the dark space overhead. A figure broke from the group and advanced towards her. The woman, Abby saw, had a single pale arm stretched from beneath her black cloak. Two glowing, green eyes peered from the pocket of darkness beneath the woman’s hood, and her hair, as black as her cloak, danced on her shoulders electrically. In her palm, Abby saw a small, swirling ball of blue light. It spun and contorted, gradually forming a shape. The blue fell away, and an object emerged - an intricate silvery castle with turrets stretching upward like arrowheads.
Abby reached forward, overwhelmed with a desire to touch the castle, to feel the tangible body of an object conjured from nothing. Before her fingers could settle on the tiny fortress, it shimmered and then faded, like a hologram losing its light source.
The other figures detached from the fireside and moved around her, forming a circle. Abby felt a twinge of fear and a graying in the edges of her vision.
The figures began to chant and sway. A sea of black cloth billowed around her. Unconsciously, Abby tilted with them - her body drifting to their rhythm. Hands reached out from the cloaks and grasped her - flesh, but not flesh - embraced her, and then she began to dissolve into them. They all did, their cloaks fell to the floor as they merged into a single blue ball of energy, growing as they faded into her, became her, and she became them.
Chapter 10
Lips, wet and warm, pressed against her. A mouth, soft and giving, pushed in and then breath, fast like a balloon that’s popped, exploded into her mouth and lungs. Abby choked, water spewed from her mouth, and then hands, rough on her shoulders, forced her sideways. Sand dug into her right bicep, along her hip and down her leg. She coughed and choked and opened her eyes to the beach, blazing in the midday sun. Sebastian’s face hovered above hers, terrified.
He lifted her to his chest, her wet face on his hot, bare skin.
“You’re okay, you’re okay,” he murmured again and again, a mantra. He lifted her, like a child, over his outstretched legs and slapped her back. More water trickled from her mouth. Her nose and throat felt like she’d snorted battery acid. She swallowed once, but it hurt too much to try again.
“Water,” she croaked, and Sebastian turned her back over, his eyes moving to her face like she might die anyway. “I’m okay.”
“Holy shit,” he whispered finally, realizing that Abby was conscious, that she was alive.
He stood and grasped her firmly, pulling her to her feet and then half carrying her, with his arm around her waist, back to the house.
Inside, she gulped two glasses of ice water on the couch, where he’d propped a pillow beneath her feet.
“You shouldn’t have been swimming,” he muttered, more to himself, than to her. “Those waves are huge today.”
“I think I died,” she said flatly, the vision of the cave coming back to her fully. She could feel the energy of the blue light, her energy, but not only hers, the others as well.
“Why?” He looked concerned and not at all skeptical.
“I was in a cave with all these figures, but it was so real, and then I turned into this blue energy, and we all became, like one entity.”
He stared at her and said nothing.
“It didn’t feel like a dream, it felt real.”
She massaged her throat, sore and still burning, but less so than on the beach.
“Maybe it wasn’t death,” Sebastian said, finally.
She thought about what else it might have been: a dream, a hallucination, perhaps a journey to another dimension. It felt too heavy for her brain. She didn’t have the energy to go there.
“You need to rest.” He grabbed a blanket from the couch-end.
She stretched out, and he tucked the blanket around her. She shivered in spite of the heat and nestled her head into the pillow that he’d been using the previous few nights. It smelled like him, and the scent comforted her.
* * * *
Sebastian closed the guest bedroom door quietly - not wanting to disturb Abby, who, he hoped, slept soundly downstairs. He felt nauseated, and the headache he’d faked earlier had come on passionately. He popped four painkillers in his mouth and chased them with a cup of green tea, propping the glass on his bedside table.
Had she nearly died? He didn’t think so, some gut instinct told him, “no.” And her vision, her near-death dream, rang all too familiar. He knew that he had read about it before, that Claire had written about something similar in her journal.
He pulled a box, one of many, across the floor, and peeled back the cardboard flaps. Claire had kept several journals, all in cheap dime-store notebooks, which were tattered from his overzealous searches through their pages. The words, mostly written in pencil, were smeared in some spots, and he’d tried to touch them up with pen. He intended to type it all, at some point, but there was never time.
He found the green notebook, one of her first, and carefully turned the pages, touching only the corners to keep the oils from his fingers from tainting the loopy cursive of Claire’s hand. He had read most of the journals, though not all of them. After her death, it took months to even get them out, to look at the words without tears splattering and ruining her carefully documented experiences.
He found the excerpt:
'Adora gave me a wonderful gem of knowledge yesterday and put to rest a concern that has plagued me for months. The dream that I had, the dream that acted almost as a catalyst to this newfound power, was an initiation of sorts. Adora called it 'The Majestic Rite' and said that we all experienced it at the onset of our powers. She said that, during the rite, three things occurred: suffering, death and rebirth. She asked about the dream, and I told her that it happened when I was very ill. I had a high fever and thought that I was dying. Sebastian was worried sick. I thought that the dream was a result of my fever, but the cave had been real. I woke from it knowing that I was more than this, more than this physical body, and that the light, the blue light, made me one of them, the figures around the fire. Adora said that I was right and now I have a name for it: 'The Majestic Rite'.
Sebastian closed the journal and leaned back against the bed, resting his head on the wood frame. He closed his eyes against the pain of remembering Claire, the sharp stabs that arose whenever he looked at her journals and found himself back in the past, when she still lived.
Abby. Now he had Abby, and each passing hour seemed to dump another load of evidence into his lap. Evidence that she was special, that he had found her for a reason. Was she one of them? Or simply experiencing the dreams vicariously through him, somehow? He put the journal back and returned the box to the others.
He needed to think, which meant he needed to drive. The drum of the wheels on the road had soothed him ever since his parents’ death. He used to take Claire for drives. In the beginning, the drives were necessary. She refused to get in the car for months after the accident, but he coaxed her. At first, they just drove around the block - eventually making wider loops until their drives were hours long and they’d visited cities far outside of their own. He taught Claire to drive, and sometimes he napped in the passenger seat whil
e she drove to Chicago or Michigan or just miles into farm country.
He didn’t leave Abby a note, assuming that she would sleep for a while, and pulled out of Sydney’s driveway looking for a long stretch of open road.
* * * *
The phone shrilled in Abby’s ear. Her head, sunk deeply into the pillow, was only inches from the gray plastic as it shook. Abby opened her eyes groggily. Her lips stuck together and made a loud smacking noise when she opened her mouth fully, trying to wake up, but continuing to hang between this world and the last. The back of her eyelids projected visions of the dead girl, the dead woman, the dead thing that wanted to drag her into the lake.
She shook her head and moaned. The phone, louder than ever, shrieked again near the top of her head. Not thinking, or maybe thinking that anything was better than that dead thing, she fumbled, grasped the receiver, and thrust it to her ear.
“H’lo?” she mumbled, almost too quiet to hear in her raspy voice.
“Abigail? Abigail, is that you?” Abby’s mother’s voice came like a sharp kick to the side of her head.
She grimaced, pulled the phone away and forced her eyes open all of the way. Sydney’s living room slowly materialized. Abby stared down at the checkered blanket rumpled across her legs, her white feet poking out. The suede couch felt sticky beneath her, sweat sticky, and she struggled to sit up.
“Mom?” she asked, not really asking, but too fuzzy to say anything else.
“Abigail Daniels, what in the name of the Good Lord is going on? I have been absolutely worried sick about you. Do you hear me, missy? Abigail?
“Abby, mom, okay? Abby.”
“What’s wrong with your voice? Are you taking drugs?”
Abby snorted and covered the phone, too late.
“Are you laughing at me, Abigail Daniels?”
“No, mom, I sneezed, and I swallowed some water in the lake, that’s why my voice is scratchy.”
Ula (Born of Shadows Book 1) Page 8
