Ghost Heart

by Ripley Patton

  GHOST HEART

  The PSS Chronicles: Book Three

  RIPLEY PATTON

  First published in the United States in 2014 by Ripley Patton.

  Copyright © 2014 by Ripley Patton

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including the condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Cover design by Scarlett Rugers of The Scarlett Rugers Book Design Agency

  Cover © 2014 by Ripley Patton

  Edited by Lauren McKellar and Jennifer Ingman

  Typesetting and Formatting by Simon Petrie

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014915556

  ISBN 9780988491052

  Publisher’s website: www.ripleypatton.com

  DEDICATION

  For my lovely readers and all the dedicated bloggers who have spread the word and fed my heart.

  Without you, I’d still be whistling in the dark.

  OTHER BOOKS BY RIPLEY PATTON

  The PSS Chronicles:

  Ghost Hand (Book One)

  Ghost Hold (Book Two)

  Ghost Hope (Book Four, coming in 2015)

  Novellas:

  Over The Rim (Young Adult Fantasy)

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  1

  THE MAGIC EIGHT BALL

  In the early morning after the Eidolon, dark clouds scudded in, gathering menacingly over Indiana’s Shades State Park. The air grew thick, a few fat, distinctive drops plopping into the swirling Sweet Water River. Then, without warning, the world was nothing but a wall of wet, all individuality lost. The sky was the air was the water was the river. It was all one.

  The river swelled, kissing its banks, then ravishing them. Blue water churned to white and brown. The sun rose, but no one saw it, and the river valley that ran through the park became a raging flood, every visible surface slick and wild.

  Beneath the turbulence, sitting on a stone shelf three feet below the water of a deep pool, something lurked, unmoved by this grand display of nature.

  It was a black, round ball, and the ledge it was perched on was narrow, but it balanced easily, resting on its one flattened edge. On its top, a white circle encompassed the symbol for infinity, stamped in black, bold script.

  The ball knew nothing. It did not know what it was or why it was there. It did not remember the girl named Olivia Black who had yanked it into existence and tossed it aside. It did not know what to do, or even that it could do anything, other than sit on that submerged rock covering its answer-window ass.

  But then the pool at the bottom of the cliff known as Devil’s Drop began to swirl. The current grew deeper and stronger, buffeting the ball and nudging it closer to the edge of its ledge. Something groaned and creaked and crashed above it, and a huge logjam plummeted into the pool from upriver, displacing everything in its path.

  Water surged against the ball, pushing it off its shelf, sending it end over end, roiling in a tumultuous wave of questionless answers.

  It is certain.

  Don’t count on it.

  It is decidedly so.

  Slowly, slowly, gravity and the current carried it into darkness, toward the calm nether regions of the deepest part of the pool. And the ball sank, still flashing its vague banalities.

  Ask again later.

  You may rely on it.

  Better not tell you now.

  Past gleaming grey-green walls of stone and silhouettes of sunken trees.

  Yes definitely

  My sources say no.

  Reply hazy try again.

  At last, the ball landed upon another shelf, but this one was not made of rock. It was made of flesh.

  The flesh belonged to a young man, his shirt torn to ribbons that floated around him like kelp, revealing a gaping hole in his chest. From the hole, a jagged branch jutted, rising up and through the man from the log he rested on.

  The ball rolled gently toward the sloping cavity of the man’s chest, its answer window flickering a sweet blue sigh of YES.

  A shadow passed overhead as a log, like a giant lumbering pool cue, plunged down, cracking into the end of the log the man and the ball sat upon. They both bounced, the ball careening into the man’s gaping chest even as his body rose just above the top of the branch skewering him.

  There was a flash of light, bright and cerulean.

  It washed over the ball, filling it with wonder, as it slipped down through the hole in the man and under him.

  The man settled, returning to his stick, his weight pressing the ball against the log’s slimy surface and shooting it out into the stronger currents.

  Outlook not so good

  My sources say no

  Don’t count on it

  Help me. I am Marcus.

  The ball, propelled closer to the surface of the pool, rushed downriver, leaving the man on the stick far behind it.

  Mostly.

  2

  PASSION

  “It’s stopped raining.” I turned from the dirty window pane and the grey dripping forest beyond, looking at Jason. “We have to go back.”

  “Passion,” he said, his voice hard but his eyes tinged with understanding. “There’s nothing we can do.” He was sitting on the edge of the yellowed mattress and rusty metal bed that dominated the one-room cabin we’d stumbled upon as we’d fled downriver last night.

  I hadn’t wanted to stop here, despite the fact that we’d both been soaked to the bone from our fall into the river, our clothes plastered to our skin. I’d been running on pure adrenaline and the certain knowledge that if the CAMFers took us, they would kill us. They would shoot us and leave us in pools of our own blood just like they’d done to Yale and Nose. All I’d wanted to do was run as fast and as far away from the Eidolon as I could.

  I turned back to the window. They were still out there. The men who had massacred my friends in cold blood. Not just my friends; they’d also mowed down twenty or so others up on those cliffs. I had seen them bleeding, wide-eyed, and floating in the river, and I would never forget it. Never understand it.

  I didn’t even understand how Jason and I had gotten away. The woods had been teeming with CAMFers, all descending upon the pool at the bottom of Devil’s Drop. Jason had dragged me into the woods, and I’d followed him. I hadn’t resisted. I’d gone with him willingly, leaving Olivia behind to be taken because she’d told me to. Because I’d wanted to survive. Because I’d become resigned to loss a long time ago.

  The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.

  That was the
comfort my father had offered when we’d lost my sister, as if God were some kind of cosmically fickle Santa Claus. But I didn’t want to believe in that kind of god anymore. I wanted to believe in a good god who did good things.

  After what I’d just been through, some people might think that was impossible, but it wasn’t. God hadn’t mowed anyone down with automatic weapons. CAMFers had done that. Stupid, godless, CAMFers. God didn’t scare me. People did.

  Last night had been the most terrifying thing I’d ever been through, and my life hadn’t exactly been a walk in the park. A walk in the park. Yeah, that had new meaning now.

  Even so, as I stood at the window in the dim light of morning, the instinct to flee for my life had faded to a faint whisper, replaced by the louder internal voices of guilt, grief and devastation. How could we have left Olivia behind? Or Marcus? How many times had both of them risked themselves, against all odds, to save one of us? We should have stayed and fought, no matter what. If they were captured by the CAMFers, I should be too. How could I possibly live with the knowledge I had abandoned them to save myself?

  “Stop torturing yourself,” Jason said, seemingly reading my thoughts. “We can’t help them.”

  “You don’t know that,” I said, facing him, desperation rising up in my throat. “What if Olivia used her ghost hand and got away? She could be out there somewhere, hiding and injured. We can’t just leave her.” I knew what I said wasn’t true, but I wanted it to be. All night, I’d felt the glimmer of Olivia’s presence, the connection we had through the dog tags she wore that had been made from my blades. The CAMFers had taken her. I could tell that by her desperate resignation, but my sense of her was fading. I could barely feel her now; wasn’t even sure if I was feeling her, or if it was just an echo of what I’d once felt. It was possible she was just sleeping or unconscious. The connection always felt fainter then. Or it could be something worse, and that thought made panic rise in my throat. What would it mean when I couldn’t sense Olivia at all?

  “We already left her,” Jason said, the words cutting into me. “And there’s no way, even using her hand, she could have held off hundreds of armed men, especially with an injured knee. They have her now. We have to admit it and move on. Going back just gets us caught, and that doesn’t help anyone.”

  Everything he was saying was rational, and logical, and objective, and I still hated it.

  “What about Marcus?” I asked, my eyes pleading. We hadn’t just left Olivia at the side of the pool; we’d left Marcus at the bottom of it. I had been the one to stop her from trying to save him. If he was down there still, alone in the cold depths—I had to know he wasn’t. I couldn’t leave him like that.

  “They’ve found him by now, or he’s dead,” Jason said, not looking away from me. If saying it bothered him, it was hard to tell. It was always hard to tell with Jason.

  “But he can reboot,” I argued. “If we could get him out—”

  “Well, we can’t.” Jason’s voice plowed over mine, hot and angry, as he stood up. “The pool will be crawling with CAMFers. And even if it isn’t, he’s too deep. It would take a diver with tanks to haul him up. We would die trying and you know it. You think I want to leave him here?”

  “No, I—”

  “Then stop second guessing everything I say. What’s done is done.” He strode to the window to stand next to me, frustration radiating off his body. “What we have to do now is get the hell out of here. We’re only a couple of miles from the kill site. They may still come down this far to clean up any stray bodies and check for survivors. The storm bought us some time, but that time is running out.”

  The kill site. Is that how he thought of it? Is that why he’d been able to lie down on that lumpy bed last night and fall asleep, even in wet clothes, unarmed, with CAMFers all around us? By boxing it neatly in his mind as “the kill site”?

  I hadn’t slept. Every time I closed my eyes, visions of the Eidolon assaulted me. The sounds of screaming. The sting of the tear gas. The rattle of gunfire and the images of bodies strewn everywhere. If that was the waking nightmare, how bad would the sleeping ones be? Then there was the storm raging overhead, battering against our leaky little cabin. So, instead of sleeping, I’d spent the night curled up in a corner of the mattress holding onto my connection with Olivia. She should be able to feel me too, if she was awake or conscious. The connection went both ways. Besides, how could I sleep with her life in the balance? How could I rest knowing she’d feel me do it and think we’d given up, that we weren’t coming for her?

  Trying to sense Olivia wasn’t all I’d done. I’d also shivered a lot. And prayed. I’d prayed for Samantha, that she would be safe, and for Olivia, that she would be strong. I’d prayed for Marcus, that he wasn’t dead, or that even if he were, he’d rise up like Lazarus again. I’d prayed for all the souls lost at the top of that cliff, and all the evil men who had done the deed. And of course, I’d prayed for Nose and Yale, though that had been the hardest prayer of all. “Why?” was the only word I’d come up with for that one; just an empty, pain-filled “Why?”

  And had God answered me?

  Maybe he had.

  Sometime near morning, the paralyzing fear had left my mind and body, replaced with a calmness I did not understand. The grief was still there, an eternal deep hole I’d learned to dance around long ago. Grief was a constant I was used to. People died. People you loved. And yes, it sucked, but that was just how the world worked. It was also why I had to believe in heaven. Otherwise, none of it made sense.

  Nose had once asked me how I could still believe in God after the way my parents had treated me. That was when I’d first realized I believed in Him because of the way they’d treated me. There had to be a better love than that. A truer Father. A different way than all this nastiness.

  “I’m going to get the trunk open,” Jason said, turning away from the window. “There might be something we can use.”

  The trunk was more of a wooden crate with a padlock on it that someone, long ago, had slid under the bed. Last night it had been too dark to see it, but this morning, when we’d first woken up, Jason had made a thorough search of the cabin. He hadn’t found much. There was the locked box under the bed, some trash, including three empty, plastic water bottles, a rusty bucket we’d put in the far corner of the cabin, now reeking of urine, and an old short-handled ax, probably for chopping kindling for the cabin’s small, black, pot-bellied stove.

  Jason grabbed the ax and crossed to the crate.

  “I hope there’s food,” I said, my stomach growling in unison with my words.

  “Don’t count on it.” He raised the ax and pounded on the lock. It only took about five whacks before it fell away. He lifted the lid, the hinges creaking, to reveal some clothes, mostly camo in men’s size large, which pretty much confirmed his theory that this was an old hunting cabin just beyond the edge of the state park’s boundaries. There were also two pairs of long johns, still wrapped in plastic from the store, and under them some beef jerky, a large can of mixed nuts, and some dried fruit.

  “We should wait to eat until we have water,” Jason said. “This stuff is salty. It will only make it worse.”

  “We could eat the fruit, though,” I said, hopefully.

  “Yeah, okay.” He popped open the sealed bag of fruit and handed me some.

  As we chewed, he continued to dig, revealing matches in a small watertight tube, water purification tablets, and a fishing kit, complete with a collapsible pole, hooks, lines, lures, and a sharp fillet knife. Last but not least, under the kit was a rifle next to a box of ammo.

  “It’s a .22,” Jason said, picking up the gun reverently. “So, mostly for hunting small game, but it’s better than nothing. And everything’s in decent shape. This is probably someone’s bug-out box.”

  “Bug-out box?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “You know, for a natural disaster, or the zombie apocalypse, or whatever. You have a place like this cabin and this box. If
you can hunt and fish, it’s all you really need to survive.”

  “Unless someone takes it,” I pointed out, popping another handful of fruit into my mouth.

  “Survival of the fittest.” Jason shrugged, setting the gun down on the bed. “We should put on some of these dry clothes and get the hell out of here.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I don’t know. Back to Indy, I guess. We’d have some protection from CAMFers there.”

  My heart soared at the thought of making it to Indy and maybe seeing Samantha, of knowing she was okay. Olivia and Marcus had said Samantha had made it off the cliff to safety, but how could they have been sure in all the chaos? Still, I comforted myself with the fact that I hadn’t seen her, or Renzo, or any of those closest to her around the pool. They must have gotten away.

  I had to see Samantha again. Our last moments together hadn’t been great. We’d fought about the Eidolon. She had completely dismissed my fears, and I’d called her crazy. That’s when the truth had come crashing down on me; we barely knew each other. Had I crushed on her so hard simply because she was the first girl who’d ever shown any interest in me? Even now, just thinking about her, the way she tilted her head when she was listening, the curve of her ass in her jeans, it made my face flush and my body feel heavy, something I had never felt for any guy. Ever. Like I was a magnet that had finally found true north after seventeen years of facing the wrong direction.

  Jason was right. There was protection in Indy as well. Mr. James, Samantha’s father, had promised us all safe haven and a future if we joined The Hold. He would take us in.

  But Indy, and Samantha, and her father were a long way off. “Indy is fifty miles away,” I pointed out the obvious. “How are we going to get there?”

  “We follow the river downstream and look for a bridge or road to lead us to civilization. Then we either walk or hitchhike. Walking would be safer. Less chance we’ll be spotted.”