Crystal Fire

by Jordan Dane

  “How will we know if it worked?” Gabriel asked. “I’m not sure I feel comfortable with leaving her here...without knowing for certain that she can’t hurt anyone else.”

  The girl didn’t hesitate. “It will take a little time for the full thing to manifest in her mind, but it’s in there to stay. Believe me. I know this firsthand.”

  “What did you do to her?” Rayne asked.

  At first, Caila only smiled and shook her head. She looked painfully embarrassed for some strange reason. Oliver wasn’t sure she’d tell them anything, but these kids had a right to know.

  “Come on, Caila. Spill.”

  “I made her a Disney character.”

  “You what?” Gabriel grinned. “Which one?”

  When the girl told them, Oliver laughed harder than he’d done in a long time. There hadn’t been many funny things in his life. It felt good to laugh, and hearing the others do the same made him happy.

  He tugged a strand of Caila’s hair, grinned at the girl and said, “Gabe? Promise me that we’re coming back to L.A. to see the doc when she embraces her new life.”

  He helped Gabe cut the woman loose and pulled her from the trunk of the Mercedes. They left her sitting on the curb, staring into the night sky, humming a tune.

  “Yeah, this I gotta see,” Oliver whispered as he climbed into the SUV.

  Twenty minutes later

  With adrenaline still rushing through her veins, Kendra struggled with a warrior nature that kept her on edge and her random need to laugh like the kid she was. Every time she pictured the British-proper Gabriel telling them that he’d forgotten he had a woman in the trunk—a woman who deserved “a little killing” —she had to bite her lip.

  It felt good to almost laugh again, but she knew her nerves were worn to shreds over Rafael. In the shadows of her haunted mind, she saw Rafe staring back at her. She even smelled his skin and felt his presence with her until she remembered she might never see him again. Any smile she had on her face vanished.

  After the doc in the trunk incident, Gabriel had them pack up what they’d taken from Ward 8 in the back of the SUV. Gabe rode shotgun with his uncle driving the Navigator. They wanted to get a safe distance from the hospital and make sure they weren’t followed.

  Kendra kept her eyes on the Mercedes behind them.

  Rayne had volunteered to drive Dr. Fiona’s car and took the new kids, minus one. Noah rode with the Effin twins in the Navigator. Lucas went with them, as the least likely to kill the woman.

  Kendra hadn’t shaken the bad feeling she’d had ever since they left Haven Hills. Boelens didn’t strike her as the kind of guy who would forget...ever. She kept her eyes on the mirrors and caught a glimpse out the back when the Effin brothers and Noah weren’t looking. She didn’t want to make them worry if they saw how paranoid she was.

  But the real reason she’d been on edge sat next to her with Caila—Oliver Blue. He’d promised to do his best to find Rafael. She thought she’d have to wait and every second had been pure agony, but when Gabriel mercifully glanced over his shoulder and met her gaze, Kendra knew what he wanted her to do.

  “It’s time. Give Oliver the infinity bracelet,” Gabe said. “Please.”

  * * *

  Kendra hated being the center of attention. She felt eyes on her in the SUV. They bored holes into her that she felt like heat under her skin. Even Uncle Reginald stared from his rearview mirror. She’d grown to love them all, but they knew too much about her now. She couldn’t hide how she felt about Rafael. She’d let them see into her heart.

  When she unfastened the leather bracelet from her wrist, a duplicate of the one she wore, her fingers trembled. She couldn’t stop them from shaking.

  Oliver sat too close to her. His eyes. They were intense and unrelenting. He was a virtual stranger, yet he had a magnetic pull that made it hard to hide anything from him. He would know she had skin in the game, that finding Rafael was as important to her as breathing.

  “This is his. Rafael’s.”

  Kendra hesitated.

  She wanted to hand him the black leather bracelet with the silver infinity charm, but she had a hard time looking him in the eye. Oliver could break her. If he sensed Rafe was dead—and saw every gruesome detail of how he died—that would kill her. Handing over the bracelet wasn’t only about finding Rafael. It could mean an end to her faith that she’d find him alive. She clutched the leather in a tight fist.

  Oliver locked eyes with her.

  “I’ll find him,” he said. As if he’d read her mind, he whispered, “If you’re ready for the truth.”

  Kendra slowly nodded. When a tear rolled down her cheek, she gave him the leather strap and held his hand in both of hers, knowing she had to trust him.

  Whatever had happened to Rafael, Oliver would know—and soon she would too.

  * * *

  Oliver had seen the look in Kendra’s eyes before. Anyone that came to him, looking for someone, always dug into him with that same desperation for answers. Not knowing what happened to Rafael was bad, but finding out the truth could make things worse—and final. He understood that better than most. Not every vision carried good news. It didn’t for Zack.

  Some people say that the truth sets you free. Well, those people should shut the fuck up and mind their own business.

  “This won’t be like me watching a video of what happened to him.” Oliver clutched the bracelet and felt the heat of a stirring fire in his belly. “I get...glimpses of stuff. Sometimes it won’t make sense to me, so I may need your help. You good with that?”

  Before Oliver heard what she said, his insides got yanked into a twist. It felt as if he’d been gutted like a fish. “Ah, shit. I can’t...”

  Kendra, Gabriel and Caila, they all got swallowed by an ominous shadow that covered them in inky black. He couldn’t see anything, yet he felt his body drift end over end. He flailed his arms but couldn’t stop the feeling that he was falling.

  Being inside Gabriel, he’d sensed the serenity of his Indigo soul and had seen dazzling colors that looked like the Aurora Borealis strafing the night sky. But in this dark place where he’d gone looking for Rafael, he felt mired in a thick viscous existence, without hope.

  I can’t be here, he screamed. Get me out.

  He felt as if he were drowning. Breathe! I can’t breathe.

  Death surrounded Rafael. It clung to him. It possessed him. Oliver got battered with images he didn’t understand. They slugged him like brutal fists, one more savage than the last.

  Pictures flooded his mind. Some he could sense. Others he saw as if he were there. A bloody tiara. An old Spanish mission in the hills was awash in the fire of the sun. He didn’t know what any of it meant. He only knew he had to remember everything. He could smell the stench of gasoline and saw a car wrecked in a ditch. And the ear-piercing shriek of an elephant in a circus suddenly switched to the calming peal of six bells at an evening church service. A baseball bat in the grip of a drunken old man made him flinch until he got swept away in a rushing river that cut deep into a canyon. The cold water felt like ice.

  Under the flashes of memory, there was a steady unrelenting pounding that haunted him, like something he didn’t want to remember. He listened harder, yet couldn’t make out the muffled sound.

  Whatever it was, it felt important. He shoved aside everything he pictured to feel it, to understand what he heard. When he realized what it could be, the eerie throbbing grabbed him by the throat and squeezed until he couldn’t breathe.

  Just like with Zack, Oliver listened to the beat of a heart. It had to be Rafael. Oliver sank into a never-ending darkness that he’d never seen before. After the memories stopped, all he felt was empty.

  North of L.A.

  10:10 p.m.

  When Boelens called O’Dell, he expected to be the
one with news, but the guy sounded pissed and let him have it.

  “Where have you been?” O’Dell’s voice grated on his nerves, especially over his cell. “Didn’t you make a stop at the hospital?”

  “Yeah, but wait’ll you hear—”

  Before Boelens finished, the guy butted in. He only caught bits and pieces, but he’d heard enough. He knew something bad had happened inside Haven Hills, but nothing like what O’Dell told him.

  “You don’t sound surprised,” the guy said.

  “I’m not. I was there. I saw who did it.”

  “What?” he yelled. “Why didn’t you stop them?”

  Boelens didn’t know how to explain what happened to him, so he didn’t. “There were too many of ’em, but I did you one better. I’m following them now.”

  He smiled when O’Dell yammered on with one question after another, before he got quiet.

  “Where are you? At least tell me that.”

  “You can track my GPS in the van. They’re playing it cagey, but they haven’t spotted me.”

  Boelens gripped his steering wheel and glared at the Lincoln Navigator and the Mercedes he’d been following since West Hollywood. They’d made evasive turns and strange stops to be sure no one had followed them, but all he had to do was hang back and stay patient.

  “Call the boss man on your Bat phone and tell him I recognized Lucas Darby, Kendra Walker and that little prick, the British rocker.” He described the others too. “You tell him I’ve got ’em in my crosshairs and that I’ll need backup.”

  “This shit went down on his watch. If anything goes worse now, he’s gonna be looking for someone to hang. Those kids hit the ward hard.”

  O’Dell told him more about the attack.

  “He can’t pin anything on me. You tell him these little bastards got into Ward 8 on their own. That’s a secured facility. He can start by asking how they did that. Check the card reader security logs. They got in after visiting hours.”

  Boelens knew the church would do everything in its power not to become a headline. To cover up the attack on Ward 8, they’d have to call in favors to keep it out of the news. The last thing they needed was an investigation from the legit police or a reporter with too much curiosity. What went down was worse than he thought. The freaks hadn’t just freed other kids. According to O’Dell, they’d annihilated the ward and maybe even stolen secrets that the church couldn’t afford to have leaked out.

  But to Boelens, this attack went down under his nose. This was personal.

  “You tell him who I’ve got hooked. This little traveling freak show isn’t getting away from me a second time,” he said. “I know they want the Darby kid, but I’m not making any promises. If I get him in my sights, I’m taking him out. This time I want all of them. We gotta end this.”

  “I’ll call you as soon as I talk to him. Wait for orders.”

  Boelens didn’t care about any orders. He didn’t give a shit. He was the guy with his boots on the ground

  Minutes later, he had O’Dell on the phone again.

  “The boss is tracking your GPS signal,” the guy said. “He wants you to keep following them, but don’t stop them. He thinks he knows where they’re going.”

  “Is he sending backup?”

  “He says if he’s right, he’s got that covered.”

  “If he’s right? What the hell is that? My ass is on the line and he’s flipping a coin.” Another armchair quarterback. Boelens hated getting second-guessed. “I don’t know about this. He’s not telling us something.”

  O’Dell surprised him by chuckling before he said, “He’s talkin’ bonus money, but he wants this thing to go down his way. All you gotta do is not lose ’em. Can you handle that?”

  Boelens almost didn’t answer. “Yeah, money works.”

  He ended the call and clenched his jaw until it hurt. O’Dell and his boss thought that money solved everything, but some things went beyond the almighty dollar.

  If these mind freaks wanted a war, they’d started one.

  20

  Outside L.A.

  It took all Kendra’s willpower not to touch Oliver when he collapsed into a strange trance that left him mumbling peculiar words. With his knuckles white and his hand shaking, he clutched at Rafe’s leather bracelet as if it were his lifeline back. In seconds, his thrashing was over. He fell into a deep sleep and didn’t move. Now his head lay on her shoulder, but she didn’t dare wake him. Visions were tricky. She was afraid that interference from another Indigo could screw things up or taint what he’d seen. She’d never witnessed anyone scry to find someone before.

  Caila must’ve had the same instinct. She shoved back from Oliver when he tensed his body, even though the girl looked in agony at having to watch him suffer. Gabriel kept his eyes on the road, and the Effin brothers and Noah were deathly still and didn’t move.

  Gabriel watched the rearview mirror. When he shifted his eyes to her, Kendra only shook her head. He looks rough, she told him. I hate this. Gabe only nodded.

  When Oliver finally cracked his eyes open and sat up, he stared through the front windshield in a stupor, as if he were mesmerized by the headlights. He looked as if he’d awakened from a deep sleep. No one spoke.

  Once Oliver had something to say, he finally opened his mouth.

  “I’m hungry.” He blinked. “I could eat. I mean seriously chow.”

  “Help us find Rafael and I’ll buy you anything you want,” Kendra said.

  “Deal.”

  Oliver still looked in a fog, but when he shut his glazed eyes as if he had a terrible headache, he started talking.

  “Prom queen Carrie, monks with sandals, NASCAR, Dumbo, Saved by the Bell, seventh-inning stretch and shrinkage.” Oliver narrowed his eyes before he finally smiled. “Yeah, that’s it. That’s everything. In order too.”

  “Shrinkage?” Gabe raised an eyebrow.

  Oliver only shrugged and said, “Yeah. That shrinkage. It’s how I remember what I see.”

  “Your junk shrinks?” Gabe asked. “My condolences.”

  “No.” Oliver ignored the twins giggling in the back. “When I have a vision, I get bombarded with images. The way I remember them, and the order I see them, is with association. I give each one an image that I can remember and I picture them in a familiar setting, like when I go into the warehouses I’ve been living in. The prom queen greets me at the door and she’s been doing the nasty with some monks. You get the idea.”

  “Good Lord,” his uncle said. “That’s...”

  “Bent and twisted?”

  “Brilliant, actually.”

  “Absolutely,” Kendra said. She used something similar—minus the monk perverts—but had never tried to explain her process to anyone else. Oliver’s way was pure genius.

  “Walk us through it.” She shifted in her seat to look him in the eye. “You said you might need our help in deciphering what you saw. Start with the first one, prom queen Carrie. Are you talking about that old scary movie, Carrie?”

  “Yeah. At the end, she gets named prom queen and gets doused in blood,” he told them. “I saw a bloody tiara. The diamonds glittered like they were real.”

  “That means nothing to me.” Kendra shook her head. “Anyone else?”

  No one spoke up, but when she glanced at Gabriel, he looked stunned.

  * * *

  Oliver’s description had shocked Gabe—a bloody tiara could only refer to his dead mother, Kathryn. The blood came from the way she died, the violence of it. The authorities had ruled her death a car accident, but he knew better.

  She’d been run off a cliff. There was evidence of another car’s paint scraped on her bumper, but with the rain and the condition of the road, the authorities took the easy way out. He couldn’t even come forward to
question the ruling. His father had men hunting for him. They still were. He had no doubt his father saw an opportunity to murder his mother and had hired the men to do it, cruel men with pliable ethics.

  “He’s referring to my mother. She died in a car crash. Troopers ruled it an accident, but she was...murdered,” Gabe said. “But what does our search for Rafael have to do with my mother and how she died?”

  Gabe had told the others, but he didn’t know how much to share about his father with Oliver and Caila. He needed their cooperation to find Rafael. If he told them about his father and his connection to the Believers, their cooperation could end. He didn’t want to lie, but holding off on the whole truth seemed like a good idea. At least, for the moment.

  “Monks with sandals,” Oliver said. “In my vision I flashed on an old Spanish Mission in the hills. The adobe walls were lit by the sun.”

  Gabriel shook his head. The guy’s vision was a puzzle with pieces that had to fit together.

  Oliver went on to explain the rest. He’d associated NASCAR with the smell of gasoline and a bad car crash, both strong references to his mother’s death. Dumbo was the image he’d chosen to recall an elephant in a circus. “That part has to do with my mother again.”

  “I have a theory on that, Gabriel,” his uncle said as he drove. “But I’d prefer not to speculate until we’ve heard the boy out. Please, go on, Oliver.”

  “Saved by the bell.” Oliver scrunched his face and put up both his hands. “Please, no Screech jokes. I’ve got a headache.”

  “I’ll try and resist,” Gabe said.

  “I saw six large iron bells. After the elephant shrieked and nearly made me jump out of my skin, the bells did a Zen number on my soul. I think they had something to do with that Spanish mission and the monks, but I don’t know.”

  “The seventh-inning stretch? What’s that all about?” Gabriel asked.

  “Baseball. A bat to be exact.” Oliver crossed his arms and sprawled in his seat. “I saw an old drunk guy with a nasty temper. He unleashed on some poor kid. Hurt him bad too.”