Bone Dry: A Soul Shamans Novel (Volume 1)

by Cady Vance

  I held out my palm, and his fingers weaved through mine. My breath caught, and I tried to focus on the rune I drew on the parchment instead of Nathan touching me. The heavy charcoal slid across the parchment, and once the drawing was complete, Nathan glanced down at his hands expectantly. I flipped down the visor and gasped when I saw my reflection—or the lack thereof. It was a strange combination of shadow and light, and it hurt my eyes to even look at my reflection. Like I wasn’t supposed to know I was there. Nathan mimicked my actions and let out a low whistle.

  “I think it worked,” he said softly.

  We slipped out of his car and hurried down the sidewalk, back toward the part of town we’d just driven through. I felt like we were out in the open, even though no one could see us. My pulse quickened. Our feet shuffled in a hurried beat. Neither of us said a word as we approached the building. I slowed, looking for any sign of life.

  The mailbox sat at the street, door hanging open, flag up. I looked inside. Empty.

  We walked slowly up the short sidewalk to the house. Overgrown bushes and grass sprouted up on either side. I pulled my hoodie around me tighter as if it would protect me from the stale scent, like old unwashed bedsheets, pressing in around us. This place felt…wrong. A heavy pain settled in my forehead.

  I shuddered, thinking of the last time I’d had that same feeling. I’d found a dead body, gotten arrested, and thrown behind bars. I really didn't want a repeat of last night. I didn’t think I could handle sitting in a jail cell two days in a row. And I really didn’t think it would help my case any with the breaking and entering. Plus, I didn’t have time for that. If I was going to save Mom, I couldn’t get caught.

  Too bad the stupid demon on my shoulder was telling me to go inside this building.

  I twisted the rusty doorknob, rough under my fingers. It turned, and the door swung open with a loud creak.

  Yeah, like that didn’t bring to mind every Wes Craven movie I’d ever seen.

  “Come on,” I whispered to Nathan, who squeezed my hand.

  We stepped inside. The room was empty, hardwood planks dirty and covered in dust. I walked forward, running my fingers along walls that looked like they’d been painted over a hundred times.

  My hair prickled on the back of my neck, and my head throbbed. I froze. Things were wrong here besides the brown water dripping from the yellowed bulbous ceiling and the stream of ants spilling in through a broken window. I jumped when the crash of thunder shook the floorboards. I curled my toes and gritted my teeth, still clutching Nathan’s hand. Then, the moment passed, and even though I knew there was something wrong about this place, I also knew, instinctively, no spirits were here.

  “Everything okay?” Nathan asked when I let go of his hand and paced the empty hallway.

  My eyes darted to every crevice. Fingers of cobwebs reached out from shadowy corners. “I don’t know. Let’s take a look around.”

  We explored the entire bottom floor, and I was disappointed to find nothing but more dirt, dust, and grimy substances caking the floor. Not even a small part of me wanted to find out what the black gunk on the peeling kitchen counter was. This place smelled like our refrigerator when I forgot to pour out milk that had gone bad.

  Nathan found the stairs and we moved to the second floor. I didn’t expect to find anything there either. I was starting to think this whole trip was another dead end, another disappointment, another detour to fixing mom.

  But we had to keep looking and searching the house. Because if we didn’t, I’d always wonder what if. Even though I doubted the shaman was hiding out on the top floor of a very bare and abandoned building, I still had to look.

  Maybe he’d left behind a scrap of paper detailing his exact location. Or a vial of his blood.

  That would certainly come in handy.

  The second floor was just as vacant as the first. Nathan and I split up, searched every room, and opened every closet door. I even took the back lid off the toilet to see if anything was stuffed inside. I looked anywhere I thought someone could possibly hide something. And, in every single place, my heart would skip a beat with a little bit of hope, and every single time, my stomach would drop when nothing turned up.

  “Find anything?” I asked Nathan when we met by the stairs again.

  He silently shook his head. I could see the sympathy in his eyes, and I wanted to tell him not to bother feeling sorry for me, that we just had to find something, that we had to find the shaman who hurt my mom, because I couldn’t admit we’d failed yet. I couldn’t accept that I’d lose her. But even Nathan’s mossy green eyes and silly Robin patch couldn’t cheer me up right now.

  I trudged up the last flight of stairs behind Nathan, trying to figure out what my next steps would be. If anything, I could demand Anthony give me more information. Someone had to know something about what had happened to my mom. What good did the shaman community do if they didn’t help those who got hurt?

  As soon as my feet hit the top floor, my skin burst with goosebumps underneath my gray hoodie, even though I wasn’t cold in the stuffy air. A hammer banged against my forehead. Warning. Warning.

  My heart raced an Olympic sprint in my chest. I tried to keep my breathing steady and quiet as I tiptoed down the hallway, motioning for Nathan to follow me. I peeked in one door after another until I finally came to one at the end of the hall. I stepped inside, and the rotting milk stench suddenly got a hell of a lot stronger.

  I gagged and covered my mouth with my hands, backing into Nathan. My entire body prickled with alarm. He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me close, whispering soothing words into my ear.

  Flies buzzed around the room, lighting on the floor by a disturbing dark stain—a large oval shape with smaller splatters of dusty red scattered out from the center. The floorboards were bowing against thick nails, like they’d been pulled up and then hastily hammered back down. I stared, vision blurring, knowing without a doubt what was underneath those boards.

  I heard a strange squeaking noise that sounded like a sad puppy and realized it was coming from me. I was whimpering. Scared.

  “You’re okay,” Nathan said. “You’re fine. I’ve got you.”

  The hysteria ebbed, and I took a few deep breaths to get control of myself again. I was a little embarrassed I’d lost my cool in front of Nathan. “I need to look…” I pointed a shaking finger at the red floorboard still staining my eyes.

  “You sure you want to do this?” he asked, chest rumbling against my back.

  “No.”

  “Okay. We’ll do it together.” He let go, and I stumbled toward the wooden planks. He fell in beside me as I searched for some way to pull up the boards, fingers hovering over the wood in uncertainty. Nathan gripped a board that hadn’t been nailed down well and pulled. His muscles strained through his polo. It barely creaked up, but he just kept pulling. I wrapped my fingers around the board and let my adrenaline take over, putting all my strength behind it. Suddenly, the board gave and we pulled it from the floor.

  I kept my eyes closed and counted to ten. Then, I opened them.

  Body.

  I stumbled away and heaved with the urge to vomit. I leaned against the wall to catch my breath and tried not to look at the body under the floor. My vision blurred, tiny stars dancing around the room.

  A few feet away, Nathan held his hands over his mouth, horror in his eyes. He saw me gasping for breath and stumbled toward me. I fell into his chest and breathed, hoping the scent of cookies would drive the stench of death away.

  It didn’t.

  After a few moments, I coaxed myself back over to the body. I didn't want to get a better look, but I needed to see what was there.

  I groaned when I realized there was more than one corpse. Three bodies were crammed into the tiny space under that floorboard, and I had a strong suspicion there were more under the other floorboards. But I wasn’t going to pull them up to find out.

  “What are you doing?” Nathan asked.

&nbs
p; “Looking for something. Anything.”

  He made his way over to me and looked down at the bodies. “Okay, I’ll help you look.”

  Right then, my heart hurt from how amazing Nathan was. He was here, beside me, crouched above dead bodies and doing whatever he could to help me save my mom. I wasn’t sure I deserved someone who would do that for me.

  I held a hand over my mouth and ignored the bugs crawling across the face of a guy who looked like he hadn’t been there long. He looked my age. Young, face screwed up in fear. He was also a shaman. Just like the two bodies crammed beside him. I heard another whimper coming from me, and I took a step back.

  “This is it.” I shook my head hard and felt a tear slide down my cheek. “This is all we found.”

  “Maybe your mom was attacked because she found out this shaman guy was killing people,” Nathan said.

  “Killing other shamans,” I corrected. What was a shaman doing killing others of his own? And why hadn’t he killed my mom, too? Why had he stuck her in the Borderland?

  I wondered if I could find out who owned this building. I could report this to the cops. They could get that kind of information. But, if I did, and they arrested him, it would mean I couldn’t get to him, couldn’t get his blood.

  “What do I do?” My voice sounded weak.

  “You said these are shamans? Maybe…” Nathan pointed at the kid and cleared his throat. “Maybe he has a wallet.”

  Realization dawned in my throbbing head. “If he’s a shaman, his parents are shamans. They’re probably connected to the community, and they’d know their son’s friends, right?”

  “Exactly. So they might have an idea of who did this to him.”

  I knelt down and held my breath as I stuck my fingers into the kid’s pockets. I felt like I was violating him, but I knew he would have wanted me to do this if he’d been able to tell me it was okay.

  I sent up a silent thanks when my fingers touched leather, and I pulled a wallet out of his pocket. Nathan watched over my shoulder as I flipped it open and found his ID. He was only sixteen years old. And his address was right there.

  It was almost too easy.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to his empty eyes before standing to go. Nathan helped push the wooden plank down, covering him back up, hiding him from view, although I didn’t know how anyone would miss the warped board if they walked inside.

  Something niggled at the back of my mind, but I just brushed it aside and chalked it up to being nervous in the presence of so much death. It was hard to think straight knowing I was walking over dead bodies.

  We had to get out of here.

  It wasn’t until we were back in Nathan’s car that I realized I was still clutching the shaman guy’s wallet. I felt bad about taking it, like he’d still need it in his afterlife. I opened it again and looked through the pictures he kept in the little plastic covers. A girl with reddish-brown hair stared back at me, smiling and happy, with her arms thrown around him.

  He looked so alive there, so different from the slack face I’d seen under the floor. It made me think about my mom again, how her face resembled a dead person’s now, and how she used to look just like he did in that picture. I tried to imagine what he’d been like, and I wondered if he’d tried to fight back, if he’d suffered at all, if he’d been stuck in the Borderland for a year.

  “Holly?” Nathan asked, snapping me out of my thoughts. “Are you okay?”

  I shook my head. “No, but it doesn’t matter.” I glanced at the glowing clock on his dashboard. It was already eleven o’clock, and my mom only had a few hours left to live.

  CHAPTER 28

  Nathan pulled into the drive of a pale blue paneled house with wicker chairs rocking on a small porch. A yellow striped birdhouse hung from the low overhang where a red jaybird flapped its wings. Flowers burst up in wild bunches on each side of the walkway and stoop, and the front door was open, letting the cool breeze waft in through the screen.

  The place looked warm and welcoming. Cheery even. My stomach boiled with unease. I wondered how worried these people were about their son and if they had any idea he was in trouble. Dead.

  “I don’t know if I can do this.” I pushed my still un-brushed hair out of my eyes.

  “We can. Team Awesome.”

  I gave him a weak smile and followed his lead as he slipped out of the car. Thunder rumbled overhead, and I looked up into a sky full of thick, dark clouds rolling across the sun. Great, it was going to storm again. This gloomy fall was a perfect match for my mood.

  Nathan and I made our way to the porch and rang the doorbell, a jingling happy tune that made me cringe. I couldn’t stand the thought of any sort of brightness in the midst of all this darkness. It made me feel detached, distanced somehow, from the real world. Like I was walking through clouds of cotton candy.

  A woman appeared behind the screen door, lined face surrounded by light curls that bobbed on her shoulders. She seemed like such an opposite of Mom from Before—Mom and her straight brown hair, her only domestic interest the cinnamon snickerdoodles. Instead of the pressed khakis and collared light blue shirt this woman wore, Mom would always don her charcoal army jacket when she wasn’t dressed to impress in a class black suit. I felt a pang somewhere deep inside me, missing Mom.

  “Can I help you?” the woman asked. She gave us a smile and opened the door. Her eyes were kind, her smile warm, but I saw a hint of suspicion in them.

  She didn’t know. She didn’t look like a mother who had just lost a son.

  I opened my mouth, unsure of what to say. I hadn’t worked it out beforehand, and I should have.

  Nathan cleared his throat and gestured to the wallet I still clutched. “We found this.”

  The woman looked down at my hand and gasped, reached out and plucked it from my fingers. “Where did you find this?”

  “In the city.” I shifted in my sneakers. “In Boston. On the street. There’s a driver’s license in there. We were coming back this way so we thought we would return it.”

  She nodded her head, and her eyes went distant. “Thank you. Where in Boston was it?”

  “Um,” I said, grasping for an idea of what to say. I didn’t want to tell her where, but maybe I should.

  “At the corner of Belleview and Lark.” Nathan said, saving me.

  “And is it just a coincidence that you’re a shaman?” she asked me.

  "Actually,” I said, taking the plunge. “I saw in his wallet something about being a shaman, and I was hoping to meet him. I’ve been kind of isolated from the shaman community, but I want to know more about it. Meet some other kids like me.”

  Not a total lie.

  She puckered out her lips. “Well, I’m sorry, but Tyler no longer lives here. He’s run off to be in that shaman community you speak of. Joined some cult or something. I haven’t heard from him in weeks.”

  "A cult?” I asked, frowning, meeting Nathan’s gaze for a moment before turning back to her. He looked as surprised and concerned as I felt.

  “Yes,” she said. “Our family doesn’t practice shamanism, and Tyler wasn’t very happy with me or his dad because of it. He wanted to learn all the voodoo. Someone from that community contacted him a few months ago and said they’d teach him their ways if he’d come away and join them.” Her eyes started watering, making the blue of her irises look like pools. “We tried to talk him out of it, but he just disappeared one day. Anyway, I'm sure you don’t want to hear about this. You say you found his wallet in Boston?” She fingered the leather, face etched in sadness.

  “Yeah,” I said. “So, you don't practice the magic?”

  “Goodness, no,” she said. “Our family hasn’t for three generations now. It’s just too dangerous, getting involved in the spirit world. And now there are cults!”

  “Okay, thanks then.” I shifted on my feet some more and stuffed my hands into my pockets.

  “Why are you looking for other shamans?” she asked. “You don’t want to become involved
in these cults, do you? And bringing a regular boy into it?” Lines formed around her mouth when she frowned at Nathan. “Do either of your parents know you’re looking into this?”

  “No,” I said. “And we don’t know anything about any cults. I was just hoping to talk to someone my age about it.”

  Her frown disappeared. “Oh, I understand, honey. I remember feeling confused about all of this,” she said, waving her hands around, “magic stuff. Even though we don’t practice, we still feel it surging through our veins, don’t we?”

  I just nodded.

  “Well, I have to say that I don’t know any other shaman families since we’ve kept away from all that. Tyler did go to high school with a shaman girl. Her name is Audrey.”

  “Do you think she would mind talking to me?”

  “I’m not sure, hon.” She rubbed her lips together. “She doesn’t practice shamanism either. But she and Tyler were good friends until he left. I know she tried talking him out of going into that cult.” She spit out the word like it was a rotten piece of meat.

  If only she knew how dangerous that cult really was. My heart ached to tell her, but I didn’t know how. I’d call the police….eventually, and give them a tip on the building. It hurt me to think of the look on her face when she found out exactly what had happened to her son. I looked down at the ground and scuffed my shoes on the stoop.

  I think she took my expression as disappointment because her voice softened into a cooing only moms can truly do. “Listen, honey. She might be at church, but I can call to see.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

  She ushered me and Nathan inside and left us sitting on a small loveseat in the entryway of the house. We sat there awkwardly, neither of us feeling at ease even surrounded by the cheerful yellow wallpaper. A pitcher of lemonade was on a table by our side, and I wondered if it sat there only in hopes that Tyler would come back, and when he did, the lemonade would be there ready for him. I opened my mouth a few times to say something to Nathan, but I didn’t want Tyler’s mother to overhear. A few moments later she returned with a kind smile on her face.