Smart questions. She’d been thinking about this intelligently, as he’d hoped. “Nothing too bad,” he said. “You don’t have to give up your soul or anything like that. But you may give up some safety. And you have to start keeping a heap of secrets.”
“So if I say I’ll come, then what? You pick me up and we go to this…afterlife place? To see Grandpop?”
“Right.”
“And you’ll bring me straight back afterward.”
“Yes. But…”
“But what?” she countered.
“You’ll have a couple more choices to make on the way.”
“Such as?”
“Um…” He leaned against a tree trunk. Kiri loped toward him and circled the tree, sniffing the ground. “I’d rather show you in person. It’ll make more sense.”
“And you swear I won’t be in any danger.”
“Well. No one can ever promise that, can they.” They were both silent a second, then Adrian added, “I promise I won’t hurt you. And I’ll do my best not to let anything else hurt you either.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“No good reason. Except that you’re curious. Aren’t you?”
Longer silence. Then she said, “Fine, come get me.”
“Tonight? Now?”
“I’m not busy. Might as well.”
He began breathing faster. “Fifteen minutes, at the spot where I saw you last?”
“All right.”
“Oh, and Sophie—dress warm.”
“Fine. I’ll be there.” She hung up.
Tingling with excitement, Adrian shoved his phone into his coat pocket. You can’t swoop in and kiss her when you pick her up, you know, he reminded himself. Not today, likely not even this month.
Nevertheless, he jogged back to the bus’s parking spot beneath the swaying fir trees, and dug through his stuff to find his electric razor to get rid of his scruffy three-day beard. Least you could do when going to meet a girl.
I’M CRAZY, SOPHIE thought. This is incredibly dangerous. Going off some inaccessible place with a guy she barely knew? It was not her usual style and not an activity she’d recommend to anyone she cared about.
Then again, several people at tonight’s campus parties were probably hooking up with strangers too—though in a more sexual and less supernatural fashion. Risky either way. So maybe this was Sophie’s method of going wild at college.
She jogged back to her dorm room to change into jeans and fetch a zip-up hooded sweatshirt, then ran across the quad to their meeting spot. It was a dead-end corner off a breezeway, beneath a tall building with restaurants on the street level and student housing on the upper floors. Only the planter with the ivy and a few faded flyers tacked to a utility pole shared the space with her.
She bounced up and down on her toes in nervousness, pretending to read her texts as an excuse for standing alone in a dark corner. It surprised her when a new message crystallized before her eyes.
Coast clear? Adrian texted.
She glanced around, and answered, Yes. Then she kept her gaze fixed on the phone, hardly daring to breathe.
A gust of wind swirled around between the walls. A pair of black boots, their edges and laces mud-splattered, materialized a yard from her feet. She moved her gaze up the dark jeans, past the thigh-length hem of a black wool coat lined with plaid flannel, to the solemn face of the young man standing there. The loose curls of his black hair stirred in the wind. His jaw looked tensely set, and his dark eyes glimmered from their shadowed hollows. The red neon light in the nearest shop window cast a glow across the planes of his forehead and cheeks, making his skin look perfectly smooth and strangely beautiful.
Her memory hadn’t failed her. He was one of the hottest guys she had ever met. But unlike Jacob or the other boys she had found “hot” in her life so far, Adrian was attractive in a different way—a more mature way. More like a man than a boy.
He stepped closer, sliding his hands around her waist cautiously. “Hi.”
“Hi.” She looked aside as he hugged her tight for a moment and performed that trick where the civilized world vanished. They wobbled in the tall grass, clutching each other for balance. Sweet forest-and-meadow air blew across Sophie’s face, and swirled up a whiff of Adrian’s scent too—the enticing and healthy smell of a young man who’d been walking in the fresh air. Uneasy, she wriggled her arm to get free.
He let go of her. A camping lantern sat on the ground, its LED bulb illuminating the orange-flagged stake. His dog sat next to it, tail wagging.
Sophie stretched out her hand to let the dog sniff it. “Is your dog a he or a she?”
“She. This is Kiri.”
After receiving a calm lick on the fingers from Kiri, Sophie folded her arms and looked around. “No lions tonight?”
“None that I’ve seen. Saw some mammoth-type things earlier.”
“Mammoths?”
“Yeah. They took off when they saw Kiri and me.”
“Do they keep away because of your ‘abilities’?”
“I assume so. We must smell strange to them, is all I can figure.”
“If this is the ghost world, why are there living animals?”
“Same way there are living plants, I guess. They evolved here. Differently than they evolved in our world—that’s why the weird species.”
“Then why didn’t people evolve here?” she asked.
“Maybe they did, long ago, then died out. Or maybe the only humans meant to be here are spirits.”
“And people like you.”
He shrugged, looking away.
Beneath the starry sky lay the same wilderness she remembered from the day Nikolaos nabbed her, or what little she could see of it in the dark. The trees and grasses bent in gusts of wind. A streak of greenish light shot from one horizon to the other, like a long-lived meteor or an extremely fast plane.
“What was that?” Sophie asked.
“A soul. Someone on their way to the—the place where they go.”
“You mean someone who just died?”
“Yeah.”
Chilled, she turned to scan the rest of the sky. “So that’s the direction we go if we want to visit Grandpop.”
“Yes. But it’s kind of a long flight.”
She looked at him. “Flight?”
He picked up the lantern. Pale blue beams forked upward onto his face. “Come see.”
He led Sophie across the field, swinging the lantern between them. She picked her way carefully through the long grass, which covered an uneven ground on which you could easily twist an ankle. Adrian rounded a stand of trees, and stopped.
A team of four ghost horses waited there—or at least she assumed they were ghosts, as they were glowing green and translucent the same way Grandpop had in the video. The horses were harnessed to a small rusty bus, which looked as if it had been recently borrowed from a junkyard. All its window glass was gone, and nothing was left of its paint except a few flakes of green and what seemed to be the remains of a letter X in blue. The three tires she could see from this side were completely flat. The horses’ harnesses were entwined in vines of some kind, with a few dried leaves still hanging on in spots. Where the harnesses met the bus, thick metal cables took over, so heavily welded that they had melted into the bus’s exterior and become a part of it.
After taking in this strange contraption, Sophie looked at Adrian.
“So your first big decision is,” he said, “are you willing to climb into this bus with me and fly across the world at incredibly high speeds?”
She gave a laugh of half-panic, half-disbelief. She walked around the back of the bus, touching its dented exterior. It felt solid enough. “What is this thing?”
“Something I built, to attach the horses to.”
“Is it safe?”
“Well, it’s held together so far.”
She circled to the other side, finding those tires flat too. “Is there any other way to get to the afterlife place?”<
br />
“Not realistically. This realm isn’t set up for living humans. We’d have to walk across the continent, then build a boat to cross the ocean, all of which would take months and be far more dangerous, so—yeah, this is it. This or ride directly on one of the horses.”
Circling around to the front, Sophie examined the horses. She approached one and reached out slowly. Her hand slipped straight through its glowing neck, but stopped upon the solid harness that secured it to its team. She tried it again, watching her hand glide through the animal as if it were made of mist. Fascination was starting to push out uneasiness, at least for the moment.
“It’s not as comfortable, riding the horses for that long,” Adrian added. “Especially if we’re both sharing a saddle. The seat in the bus is nicer.”
She kept passing her hand through the horse’s body. “So it’s across an ocean? What part of the world?”
“I’d rather not say yet. I don’t want to plant ideas in your head.”
His answer didn’t make much sense, but she was growing used to that. “How long is the trip?” She tried stroking the animal’s nose, but her fingers went straight through that too. The horse twitched its ears and whickered patiently.
“About three hours each way,” he said. “So, if you want to sleep on it, you can go back to bed tonight, and we’d take off tomorrow morning. Or—”
“Let’s go,” she interrupted. She moved to the open door of the bus and peered up into it.
“Now?” Adrian’s pitch rose in surprise. “You’d be up all night.”
“I’m not tired. You wanted me to come. Let’s do it.” Though fear fluttered again in her belly, she felt a bit steadier when she took control. She climbed into the bus. The horses’ glow lit the vehicle well enough for her to see its interior. The door was missing, and none of the original seats remained inside. Instead it contained two mismatched bench seats, looking like they’d been pinched from other cars, one bench in the region of the driver’s seat and the other behind it. Some bundles and bags were strapped under the seats. The rest of the bus was empty, its floor rusty but more or less clean.
“Okay.” Adrian walked around to the door and climbed in too. Kiri leaped in after him, taking the steps in one bound.
“Just going to let my friends know I’ll be out tonight.” Standing beside the seat, Sophie tapped a text that she copied to Tabitha, Jacob, and Melissa: Staying with some people from the party tonight. M, don’t expect me till morning. All is fine though. See you.
Tabitha and Jacob, of course, were in different cities and wouldn’t know if she slept in her dorm room or not, but it felt safer to let a few various people know where she was.
Not that she was telling them the truth about where she was.
Sophie watched the text whoosh away, then glanced around at the dark landscape. “How come you can text and call the regular world from here, but can’t see it? Or hear it or touch it or anything?”
“Certain frequencies of electricity or radio waves get through to here. Just another oddity.” He buttoned up his coat to the neck, then handed her another bundle of black cloth, which looked to be a wool blanket when she unfolded it. “You’ll want that,” he said. He sat on the driver’s seat, gathering up a riding whip from the floor. Behind the seat, Kiri turned around in a complete circle, then lay on the floor, chin on her front paws.
Sophie sat next to Adrian, the blanket bunched up on her lap.
“Buckle up.” He fastened his seatbelt, and nodded to hers.
She found the two ends of the lap belt, which was the kind you’d encounter in an old pickup truck, and clicked them together over her lap.
He hooked his arm into hers. “The seatbelts are old and don’t work terribly well,” he explained, “especially at the speed we’ll be going. So it’s really important you hold on and stay near me. Ready?”
Suddenly terrified, she only nodded.
Adrian snapped the whip out the empty windshield, saying the word “Home” as he did so, evidently a directive to the horses.
They launched off, shooting up into the sky like rockets, pulling the bus with them.
The force crushed her back against the seat and stole her breath away. This was what G-forces must feel like to jet pilots, she thought as the world blurred past in blue, black, and flashes of reflected starlight. The notion of looking for signs of human habitation became laughable. She could barely distinguish one entire forest from another at the rate the landmarks were flying past.
“So if I die here,” she said, raising her voice to counter the roar of the wind, “do I die in real life?”
“Unfortunately, yes.” He clutched her arm tighter against his side.
As the horses reached their cruising speed, or so she assumed, the force eased, and she was able to move a bit more freely. But the shapes of mountains ahead still approached at a reckless speed. “How fast are we going?”
“The speed of souls. From doing the time-and-distance maths, I’d say it’s a bit over three thousand kilometers an hour.”
That scared her into shutting her mouth and holding still.
The bus tipped up, up, up into shockingly cold air, and skimmed over the snowy caps of a mountain range before plunging down again. Her ears popped with the altitude change. Sophie realized the mountains had been the Cascades, which should have been at least an hour’s drive away by car, yet they’d zoomed over them within a few minutes of take-off.
She stared at him. “How can we possibly be going this fast? I mean, without the wind or the G-forces or whatever ripping us to pieces?”
“Not really sure.” He kept watching the horses, but tilted his head closer to hers as he spoke. “Our best guess is some kind of aura. Either from the horses or from us. Or a combination of both.”
“From you? Who are you guys?”
“We’re on your side,” Adrian said. “Try not to worry.”
“How long have you been doing this? Coming to this other world and flying around?”
“Couple of years.”
“And you’re sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Well. Mostly sure.”
She watched the continent flow past beneath her. The horses kept the bus just above the treetops, but not a single car headlight or street lamp sparkled anywhere around them. It really did seem to be a world free of humans.
She shivered in the cold air. The wind, though not as strong as it should have been, still hit hard and stripped away the summer warmth from above the land. No wonder Adrian had buttoned up his coat. She shook open the blanket and wrapped it around herself. The blanket’s wool felt scratchy against her hands and neck, but it took the chill off.
“So before you started hanging out with ghosts, where did you live?” she asked. “Australia?”
“Close.”
“New Zealand?”
He glanced halfway in her direction, not meeting her gaze, then looked forward again.
The insight sparked to life in her mind with a jolt. “Adrian from New Zealand,” she said. “Kiwi Ade?”
He held his spine stiff. “I was going to tell you.”
“Why didn’t you tell me right off the bat, the other day?” she said, infuriated.
“I didn’t want you to go looking me up, sending police to my house, anything like that.”
“I thought you said the police were no threat,” she accused. “You said you could hide out over here and they’d never find you.”
“I could, and they wouldn’t. But it’d cause a lot of worry for my dad, and I’d rather not have a police record even if no one does find me.”
“So you follow my blog. That’s why you decided to come steal me?”
“No. I—”
“All these months we were posting nice comments back and forth, you were planning on how you’d reel me in with your weird skills?” Why it angered her, she couldn’t say. It wasn’t like he could have explained to her about this other world and his weird skills. But the dishonesty and
sneakiness still creeped her out and made her genuinely angry.
Adrian huffed out a short breath. “You make it sound like I found you on the Internet and got obsessed and decided to stalk you. That’s not how it is at all.”
“Then why don’t you tell me how it is?” She scooted farther from him, and in his agitation, he let her.
“Trust me and wait, all right?” Adrian said.
“Trust you? That’s—”
The bus jolted; possibly the horses were dodging a hill. Sophie’s seatbelt unsnapped itself, and she toppled over, catching a frightening glimpse of dark hills rolling past beneath the open door before Adrian yanked her back up. Even in her terror, she noticed he lifted her with seemingly no effort at all, just as Nikolaos had.
“For God’s sake, stay close.” He sounded scared, if gruff. He held her firmly, this time with his arm all the way around her. The steel grip of his muscles lightened to a warm human hold. The scent of his skin, swirling around her in the wind, somehow made her feel calmer. And, after all, he had just saved her.
She sucked in a deep breath, refastened her seatbelt, and leaned back on his shoulder.
“Is super-strength one of your abilities?” she asked, as her heart slowed down from its mad gallop.
“Yeah,” he answered, but didn’t elaborate.
Stars by the thousands gleamed in the sky. The bus pitched over the next range of hills, then leveled out again over the lowlands.
She stayed silent, still processing the fact that this was her online friend Kiwi Ade, now with her arm close around her, carrying her away in a flying bus drawn by spirit horses.
Adrian seemed to be thinking along the same lines. “You’re important to me,” he finally said, “for reasons far beyond your blog. And I know that sounds insane and stalkerish, but I promise you’ll understand eventually. If you choose to.”
“If I choose to?”
“It’s your next decision.”
One more mountain range passed beneath them, in a bumpy swath and a breath of pine-scented air. Then the land gave way to ocean, and the smell of saltwater drenched her nose. The bus ride smoothed out flat again. They shot forward through the star-strewn darkness like a comet. Adrian stayed silent, his arm around Sophie.
Persephone's Orchard (The Chrysomelia Stories) Page 4
