A Quarrel Called: Stewards Of The Plane Book 1

by Shannon Wendtland

  I threw my bag on the bed and tossed off my shoes and shirt. After a long day stocking boxes and filling in for the sick bagger at the store, I was sweaty and tired. Time for a shower, and maybe some hentai. Yeah, it had been that kind of day. But things were looking up. I had completed my first set for the gig on Friday night, and I had to admit it was some of my better work.

  The shower was hot and steam filled the bathroom quickly, especially with the humidity being so high. I suddenly realized I had spaced out for several minutes gazing into a fogged-over mirror and I wasn’t even sure what I had been thinking about. Weird. I shook my head to clear it of the fatigue and jumped in. If I was lucky, there would still be enough hot water left for me to wash my hair.

  Feeling much better with the grime washed off, I toweled my hair and wrapped another around my waist and practically collapsed on my bed. I don’t remember if Mr. Smith was out and about or if the owl had eaten him. I forgot about watching hentai. I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.

  I am sitting on the couch again, but it isn’t Melody leaning in to kiss me. Instead, Lily is astride my lap. My hands find her hips and she is busy tugging at my belt. After getting the buckle undone, she moves on to the buttons on her leather vest. Our mouths are locked together, alternately nibbling, sucking, gasping for breath as we kiss.

  Her vest comes free and my hands instinctively slide up from her hips to cup her breasts. I realize with a stir of lust that she isn’t wearing a bra. The feel of her bare flesh just makes me hungrier.

  “Sam,” called a voice.

  I ignore it, too busy exploring Lily’s body to look up and find the source.

  “Sam,” it calls again. “Sam,” more insistently still.

  I tear away from Lily for just a fraction of a second to see Melody sitting next to me. She is turned to face me and her hair is blowing around her head as if she is being buffeted by a great wind. “I can’t hold on,” she says, her eyes closed. Black tentacles begin to stream in from behind her, to bind her as they did before.

  “Baby, don’t look at her, look at ME,” says Lily, and her voice has an edge to it. She cups my chin and roughly turns me back to her waiting, wet, red lips. She ducks down to kiss me, ferociously, savagely. I try to keep my eyes on Melody, but Lily begins grinding her hips against me, and it is all I can do to keep from groaning out loud. My eyes close and I surrender, I can’t care, don’t care to stop.

  “SAM!” I feel Melody clutch my arm and then she is torn away, the black tentacles pulling her into the darkness.

  I jerked awake. It was morning, just barely. Since I didn’t have to be in to work until 9:00 a.m., I had a couple more hours to sleep. But I couldn’t settle down. My heart was pounding and my morning wood was raging. But the dream, the tentacles, Melody crying out at the end kept me from doing anything about it. I threw a pillow over my face and groaned in frustration, and this time, I did it out loud.

  #

  “What do you think it means?” I asked G. He’d stopped in to work for a minute to ask me what I thought about the girls’ hare-brained scheme and instead I wound up telling him about my creepy-erotic dream.

  “I don’t know, man. Maybe it just means you feel guilty for liking Lily. I mean, didn’t you have a crush on Melody for the longest time?”

  “Yeah, maybe.” I thought about it, and what he said made sense. I got a little comfort from that, but there was still something bugging me. “Except…”

  “Except?” he said, tearing into his second protein bar. He took a big bite.

  “Except this is not the first dream I’ve had like this… with Melody and the tentacles. The first one happened right before the Spirit Board thing.”

  “So?”

  “So… sometimes my dreams turn out to be… true.”

  “What, like a premonition or something?”

  “Yeah, I guess. It’s only happened a few times, but it was always about things that ended up being really important. And I’m worried that this might be something important to do with Melody.”

  G. nodded. “I get you. Look, I’m going with them, against my better judgement. I’ll make sure nothing happens to her.”

  I looked at G., his 6’4” frame and his newly lean muscles, and figured he could probably take care of them just fine. But for some reason, that didn’t make me feel any better.

  “Maybe it’s just that hentai you’ve been watching.”

  “I didn’t watch any last night. I was going to, but I fell asleep before I could even pull over the laptop.”

  G. finished off his protein bar and tossed the silvery wrapper in the nearby trash can. “I don’t know man, but this is one weird town. Ever since I’ve been here, there’s been some freaky weird shit happening almost every week.”

  I didn’t know what to say about that since it was pretty much true. Since G. had gotten here, things had been weird. “Maybe it’s you,” I said, mostly joking.

  He grinned, his white teeth blazing. “Maybe. Hey, I gotta go. I have class in half an hour and the instructor likes us to be early.”

  “Oh, yeah. What are you taking?”

  “Kickboxing.”

  I let the air slide out of my mouth in a slow whistle. We bumped fists and he headed out of the store. My break was over anyways. And hell, if he was taking kickboxing lessons, he probably could keep Melody safe. From tentacles? my brain supplied. I steadfastly ignored it.

  30. TARA

  It was good to know that Mel and I weren’t fighting anymore. As she shucked off her socks and shoes to join me in the grass, we locked gazes for a moment, and I smiled at her. We hadn’t sat out back like this all summer – it was something we used to do all the time when we were younger.

  “I’m telling you, Tara, it was incredible. Gramps didn’t even tell me what to expect. He just sort of challenged me to do it. And then suddenly I could feel it again, just like when I was little, only better.”

  “That sounds amazing,” I said. “I wish I could feel it.”

  “He said that most people can, so I bet since you can feel the buzz from your crystal that you can probably feel it too. Why don’t you try?”

  It was so beautiful outside; we were in the dappled shade of the giant live oak in her backyard, and I couldn’t think of a really good reason not to do it, except embarrassment from not being able to feel the “bubbling.” And since when had threat of embarrassment ever stopped me from doing anything? Never, that’s when.

  I took off my sandals and slid my bare feet into the grass. It was nice and cool, the grass a green cushion beneath them. There was an uncomfortable lump in my pocket—my record keeper quartz crystal. I fished it out and put it on the ground next to me. I turned to Melody and grinned, but she already had her head thrown back, a serene smile on her face. Clearly she was feeling the bubbling already.

  “Now what do I do?” I asked.

  She turned to look at me, peeking with one eye, the other closed to the patch of sunlight that slid across her face. “You just sit there, quietly, and pay attention. Or maybe, don’t pay attention to anything else, except for what you feel in your feet. I like it best sitting crisscross with my bare legs on the grass.”

  “Oh, so you want me to kind of meditate?”

  “I never really thought of sitting quietly outside as meditating.”

  I closed my eyes and smiled into the soft breeze. “It is, so is saying a prayer or something done in solitude, like gardening – anytime you are quiet in yourself and your focus is elsewhere, you are doing a kind of meditation. Not all meditation has to be like a trance.”

  “Cool,” she said.

  We were quiet for a while.

  I concentrated on my legs and feet in the grass, but I didn’t feel anything. Then I tried not concentrating on my legs and feet, and that didn’t do anything for me either. Finally I decided that hanging out with my best friend on a beautiful summer’s day was reward enough, and I let my mind wander onto other things, like holding hands with G. an
d going to the movies and the chores I had to do at home tonight before my mom would let me go out and then…

  I gasped. I did feel something. At first it was very faint, like ants crawling around on my skin, tiny little pricks from their feet. Once I noticed the feeling, and became open to it, I felt it bloom into a more intense bubbling / vibrating, very similar to what my hand felt when I meditated with my crystal. My mouth spread wide and I was filled with happiness. The earth really did vibrate. How cool.

  The breeze blew again and I opened my eyes, smiling like a giddy little kid, when a bright burst of light made me squint. The sun had moved just enough in the sky to cast a beam of light between the leaves and branches, and the ray landed on my crystal. The light was dazzling, bright white and gold with little bursts of rainbows in it. I wanted to stop squinting because the light was so bright, and yet I knew that if I looked away I would miss something very special. So I didn’t look away.

  “Ask,” said a voice, deep, velvet and feminine. It was inside my head.

  “What?” I asked aloud.

  “Hmm?” said Melody from very far away.

  “What knowledge do you seek? Ask.”

  My brain felt spaced out, as if it were as big as the universe, and yet at the same time my mind had shrunk down, down, down to the size of a grain of sand. I was both big and small. I could see anything I needed to see.

  “Ask,” said the voice in my head one last time. And then came the chime of a soft, round, bell.

  “How do we stop Orla?” I asked.

  The information came swiftly in pictures and words. There was a golden crown made of light, an image of dusty crossroads and an abandoned building. Melody reaching for her dead brother’s hand.

  “When the golden crown ascends the heavens, then the quarrel must fly. But the quarrel alone is not enough to stop the dark tide,” the voice said.

  My shoulder jerked and I came back to myself. I blinked slowly, dancing lights leaving my eyes, and realized that Melody was the one who had shook me.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I mean, that was weird.”

  Her brows knit together. “What, the bubbling?”

  “No. The voice.”

  “Voice?”

  I scanned the yard and then focused on Mel’s concerned face again. I knew what had just happened, as if the information had always been there in my brain, just out of reach until now. “Mel, I think I just… accessed the Akashic Records.”

  #

  The ice cream was really good—butter pecan had always been my favorite.

  “So let me get this straight,” Melody said as she put the tub back in the freezer, “The Akashic Records is a woman and she answers questions? Like the Oracle at Delphi?”

  I let the spoonful of ice cream melt in my mouth for a second while I tried to think of an explanation. “When Edgar Cayce would do his trances, he would fall into a deep meditative state that was almost like sleeping – except he didn’t remember anything that he said while he was doing it. And when he was asked questions about how to heal certain conditions or something like that, he would always reply in this very formal way, and he always ended the reading in the same way … like the end of a transmission. Like what you would do if you were actually trying to talk to a computer rather than just typing something into a search engine.”

  “So you think the voice was a computer.” She seemed dubious.

  “I think that’s probably too simple an answer, but it’s the best analogy I can come up with. The Akashic Records are like the Encyclopedia Britannica except they span all times, all dimensions. So maybe it’s a computer or maybe it’s more like… asking a question from a collective consciousness? You know they think bees behave in that way, right? Why not something like this?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. But I’m going to suspend my disbelief for now, and just go with your theory.”

  “Okay,” I said, surprised at this new, less skeptical version of my friend. “So what are you thinking?”

  “Maybe you can just meditate some more and figure out what all of those images mean. And for Pete’s sake, what the heck is a quarrel? An argument? That part doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  “I know.” It didn’t make sense, although the little poem about the crown seemed related to the image of a glowing crown she had shown me first.

  “Was there anything else?”

  “Hmm?” I looked up and pretended like I had been thinking instead of listening. I hadn’t told Melody about her reaching for her dead brother’s hand; I felt a little guilty about that. “Not really, no. Just the crown, the poem about the quarrel and the dark tide, and the crossroads.”

  “Great. Just great. All this does is give us more questions that we don’t have the answers to.”

  “I feel ya, Ophelia.”

  31. SAM

  I answered the door shirtless, and as soon as I opened it and saw Melody standing there, I was sorry I hadn’t grabbed something to cover up. Unlike G., who stood a little ways back with Tara looking fit and ready for combat, I had not worked out all summer.

  “Hey,” I said, embarrassed and a little irritated to be caught undressed.

  “Hey,” she said, not knowing where to look, and finally settling on my face.

  This amused me greatly. “So you crazy kids stay out of trouble.”

  “Funny. I was just going to say the same thing to you.”

  “I’ll be good. I have four sets lined up and lots of Gatorade.”

  “Take some pictures. I’ve never been to a rave.”

  I laughed. “Me either, but shh, don’t tell anyone. I’ve watched dozens of videos online.”

  “Okay,” she said, lingering.

  “Okay.”

  She turned away and suddenly there was a swell of worry that just came up from my gut and out of my mouth before I could stop it. “Hey, Mel? You guys be careful. And don’t go anywhere that G. can’t go. It would really suck if I had to come visit you in jail or watch you eat through a tube or something. Casino people are hard core – at least that’s what it seems like from the movies.”

  The corner of her mouth quirked up. “We’ll be careful. And you too. Don’t let anyone slip you a mickey.”

  “No one uses that phrase anymore, goofball. Besides, at a rave, no one, but no one, gets in the way of the music.”

  They climbed into Melody’s car, her in the driver’s seat, Tara and G. folded into the back. I waved as they pulled out of the driveway, and my stomach did a little flip flop when I switched gears and thought about Lily and what she might or might not be wearing to the party.

  #

  The warehouse was huge, cavernous, dark. The stage was set up at the end furthest from the doors and along the back wall was a makeshift bar area with kegs of beer, giant coolers full of bottled water (selling for $5 each) and boxes of energy bars. Giant banners with bright colors and block symbols hung along each wall, and a giant owl face lit in neon colors dominated the back of the stage.

  I lugged my gear through the doors and headed toward the stage. I didn’t see Lily around, but it was still early, and I really needed to pay attention to what was going anyways so I wouldn’t look like a complete noob.

  Four guys wearing black t-shirts that said ‘CREW’ on the back were stacking up speakers and wrangling cables. I climbed the stairs to the stage proper and found the DJ booth set up and ready to go. Hookups and power outlets for the laptop, two large flat panel monitors, a turntable and microphone were already arranged around a docking station for my laptop. How Lily had known what kind of docking station to get? Then I remembered that she must have seen my rig at the party when she came to see me spin.

  I pulled my gear out of the bag and started arranging things how I liked it. I hadn’t brought very much vinyl along, but there were a few chosen LPs for when I wanted to transition, or especially for when I was ready to spin up the Gracie Slick mix.

  I put my gallon c
ooler full of Gatorade up on the table behind me and the ice made a clunking noise as it sloshed inside. Shit, I’d forgotten to bring a cup. Never mind, I would just drink from the damn spout if I had to.

  “Hey superstar,” said Lily, suddenly lounging in the entrance to the booth. “You ready?”

  Startled, I spun on my heel to give her a flippant reply, but the cat got my tongue when I got a good look at her. Her laugh at the expression on my face was throaty and amused.

  “Thought I would dress up for the occasion,” she said.

  I was agog. I didn’t think girls dressed like that in real life, but holy shit, she was wearing skin-tight black pants with a wide leather belt that had pouches on it and nothing else – unless you call two little red vinyl hearts pasted over her nipples a shirt. I didn’t call it a shirt, I called it dangerous. I think she was wearing shoes, but she could have been barefoot for all I knew. Or have club feet. I dragged my gaze upwards from her faintly sweaty breasts to her grinning face.

  “Yes, you did,” I said, recovering quickly.

  “Sound check in thirty minutes,” she said turning away then. “Maybe I’ll see you after, if you don’t disappoint.”

  32. G.

  The drive went more quickly than I expected. Tara was talking almost nonstop and at first I was starting to get annoyed, but then I realized it was just because she was nervous. Melody seemed to understand this and kept the conversation moving along subjects not related to Spirit Boards, credit card fraud, or prison. I was grateful for this, since I was in serious doubt about what I was doing riding along on what seemed like a bad idea from start to finish.

  The reason was simple: Tara. And Melody, too, but mostly Tara. If anything happened to her, I think I would flip out. She was my girlfriend, true, maybe the only real girlfriend I had ever had if you don’t count middle school (and I don’t), but it was more than that. That big ‘L’ word was looming in the background. And damn, I’d fallen hard. From the moment I saw her Rapunzel hair and her sky-blue eyes, I was done for. I reached across and took her hand, folding her fingers with mine. I caressed the back of her hand with my thumb, and just that little bit of contact was enough to reassure me that I had done the right thing. I needed to be here.