Hell's Hollow

by Summer Stone

  Hell’s Hollow

  By Summer Stone

  Copyright 2013 Summer Stone

  Cover Design by © Okay Creations

  Photography by © Olena Chernenko

  http://summerstonebooks.blogspot.com

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of this author. This book is a work of fiction. Resemblance to any person, living or dead, or to any place or occurrence is purely coincidental.

  About

  When Seraphina was younger, she healed her best friend’s injured hand. Terrified by the inexplicable cure, the girl shunned her. From that day on, Seraphina found herself without friends, a freak and an oddity. And so she obeyed her mother’s rule to refrain from using her innate ability, heeded her mother’s warning that its use could land her in the local mental health facility alongside her aunt and grandmother.

  But when sixteen-year-old Seraphina finds a mysterious, wounded boy hiding in the hollow in the woods behind her house, she can’t hold out against the overpowering urge to help him. She is drawn to him each night, and as they come to know one another, their irresistible attraction blooms.

  She longs to uncover his secrets — where he comes from and why he’s hiding and how he came to be so wounded — and to share her own, though she knows it’s forbidden. And while her healing touch seems to be helping him, it’s hurting her. When the symptoms of psychosis — experienced by the women in her bloodline who used their powers — begin to plague Seraphina, she is faced with the unbearable choice of saving her sanity or the boy she’s come to love.

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  About

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Contact

  Dedication

  Hell’s Hollow is dedicated to those special people who always believe in me and to the ones who believe in you, too.

  And, to Lauren Blakely — for getting me here.

  Chapter One

  The first time I saw the black-haired boy lurking in the moonlit Hollow, I thought he was a ghost. Maybe it was his pale skin, or the haunted look in his eyes, or the terrifying scars that totaled one side of his face. Or maybe it was the fact that I’d never seen a stranger in The Hollow even in daylight, much less in the eerie dark of night.

  I crept toward him, freaked out by the image of his whole, perfect face flickering in front of his damaged one. It shocked me that he couldn’t hear the insane pounding of my heartbeat — that he didn’t realize he was being watched. I should’ve turned and run home. But I had to get a closer look at this guy who could sit in the heart of The Hollow without it messing with him — as if it were nothing.

  “Hello?” I said, my voice cracking.

  He jumped up. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to…” He pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his head. Tall and skinny, with straight dark hair, he looked like Victor from Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride.

  “It’s okay,” I said, unsure why he was apologizing.

  He turned his face from me. “I’ll go,” he replied, scrambling up the hillside toward the little western town of Hell’s Hollow.

  “You don’t have to,” I called, which seemed like a weird thing to say to a stranger, a guy no less, in the woods in the middle of the night. But it didn’t matter, he was gone.

  I looked at the spot where he’d been sitting, the center of the energy spiral. It had been years since I’d tried what he’d done. Cautiously, I placed one foot into the depression in the ground, felt the buzz. If he could do it, I could.

  I sat down in it. The energy of The Hollow whirled into my body. Like a twister rising up, it battered me from the inside out, as if in another minute it would blow out the barrier of my skin, and I would explode into a million pieces in the sky. I scrambled away from the ravine and the twisted juniper trees that surrounded it, retreating to my giant sequoia, where I imagined roots growing from my feet and spine into the earth, planting me, grounding me, draining the excess energy from my body.

  How had he sat there as if it were nothing? Most guys couldn’t even stand to be in this forest, much less the center of The Hollow. Something was strange about him. Besides the scarring on his face, his hands looked messed up — rough and ridged like tree bark. And he’d been wearing clothes that made no sense — a turtleneck and sweatshirt, jeans, and socks without shoes — while I wore a nightshirt and shorts, a light hoodie and flip-flops.

  Where did he come from? Where did he go? My thoughts distracted me from the reason I’d found myself down there during the night yet again. I closed my eyes, breathed in the crisp mountain air, and soaked in the mellower part of The Hollow energy. Calm settled over my body, replacing the fears that had run rampant while sleep had played hide-and-seek with me.

  As a raccoon hobbled toward me, I held my breath. Without my permission, the energy of The Hollow raced through my system. I could see the animal’s wounded paw and superimposed on that I could see the same paw whole and healed. A tug from deep inside pulled at me to place my hands on the poor thing, to relieve him of his suffering. But Mom’s voice rang out in my head: Forbidden.

  Through my mind passed the images she’d shown me over the years of all the horrifying diseases I could get from touching wild animals – rabies, Lyme disease, hookworms, roundworms, ringworms, leptospirosis, tetanus, scabies, encephalitis, tularemia … Enough! And she wonders why I have trouble sleeping at night.

  I struggled to clear my mind, reminding myself that I didn’t touch anything, that I didn’t succumb to the pull to let the power use me, that I would not end up sick, or worse, at Meadowland with Gran and Auntie MK, hearing voices or staring at the ceiling.

  The raccoon whimpered and hobbled away. And guilt crushed my chest until I almost couldn’t breathe. But I had no other choice.

  I didn’t know why the tugs from these creatures had begun nagging me at night in a way they never used to, why it was becoming so hard to ignore them.

  I rested my head against the enormous tree trunk. Now that the raccoon had wandered off, I’d begun to feel sleepy. I should have gone home. But being close to the energy of The Hollow soothed me, brought a peace I could never find anywhere else. And so I dozed.

  The tapping of a woodpecker over my head nudged me from sleep. I woke up hungry, my neck sore from sleeping in an awkward position. There was no sign of the black-haired boy having been there. Could I have imagined him?

  I jumped across The Hollow, avoiding the most intense area, and walked through the juniper trees, past the oaks and up the path toward town.
Like always, I pulled my headphones out of my pocket and plugged in to my music on the way. It helped block the tugs. I knotted my messy hair into a ponytail, so Mom wouldn’t comment on how disheveled I looked.

  Where the path ended behind the library, I noticed a footprint. But I couldn’t tell in the dry dust if it was shoed or not. It could’ve belonged to anybody.

  The one traffic light on Main was blinking red again. Old Myra Clay walked along the sidewalk, stopping every few steps to set down her groceries and shake out her arthritic hands. I went and picked up the bags for her and turned back toward her house.

  “Why thank you, Seraphina,” she yelled, as if she thought I couldn’t hear her.

  I pulled out my earbuds. Mom’s voice telling me it was rude to have them in when someone was trying to talk to me nagged inside my head.

  “It isn’t every young person that would stop to help an old lady with her groceries. I don’t care what they say about you, I think you’re marvelous.”

  Um, thanks?

  “Just because you don’t talk incessantly, and disrespectfully, I might add, like the rest of them doesn’t mean you’re strange, that’s what I say. I think you’re simply well mannered and thoughtful. Nothing wrong with that. Though I will say your clothing seems less than appropriate. If I didn’t know better I would have guessed those were more for sleeping than wearing about town.”

  I carried the bags up the three steps to her front porch, then zipped up my sweatshirt to look more “appropriate.”

  “I’d invite you in, but I’d hate for Old Abe to scare your socks off.” She winked.

  “I wouldn’t mind,” I said. I would’ve killed for a peek inside to see if the ghost she always talked about really existed. I wondered why in the early years after her husband’s death, the spirit had supposedly moaned for months, when now all he ever did was crash around from time to time, as if he and Myra were drunk and dancing. Maybe he’d finally accepted his death and learned to enjoy the afterlife.

  “If you’d like to wait here, I could get you a coin for your troubles,” she said, unlocking the deadbolt. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen anyone other than her use a lock.

  “That’s okay,” I replied, heading back down the stairs. A quarter wasn’t exactly going to make a difference in the savings ‘jar for a car.’

  “All right, then. Just remember I offered. And the next time you see me, don’t be too shy to say hello!”

  My stomach growled as I headed uptown. It didn’t take long for the sun to heat the morning air in the Sierra foothills. So by the time I reached the bakery I was sweaty.

  Stepping inside didn’t help much, the heat assaulted me, like when you open an oven door. My mouth watered at the scent of cinnamon sugar. The tinkling of chimes above the door caught Mom’s attention. She looked up from behind the counter with a smile that brought out the crows’ feet beside her hazel eyes, then scowled when she noticed my nightclothes, as if the sight of me were physically painful.

  “You were out early this morning,” she said, her voice falsely cheerful, hiding an edge of disappointment, or more likely embarrassment. More and more, the strands of gray in her auburn hair were showing. I used to love when people would comment on how alike we looked. When had that changed?

  “Hot enough for you, Seraphina?” George McGraw asked, adjusting his cowboy hat over his thinning gray hair and scratching his bulging belly. “Clarabelle, be a doll and bring me another one of your delectable bear claws, please. You ready for another, Bennett?”

  Mom handed me a plate on which she already had a bear claw waiting. I passed it to George. Then she set a cinnamon bun still steaming from the oven, its icing oozing over the sides onto a dish in front of me.

  Bennett Taylor reminded me of the snakes he handled, long and wiry. He waved George off. “I’ve had my fill fer today. It’s time fer me to be headin’ out anyhow. The church bells are actin’ up.” I couldn’t imagine why Bennett had decided to stay in Hell’s Hollow. I knew he’d gotten stuck here when his car had stalled out on his way from West Virginia to San Francisco. But I couldn’t figure out what would make a person stay here forever when they had the choice to leave. It wasn’t like there weren’t other forms of transportation.

  “You might as well forget about those bells,” George called after Bennett. “They’ve had a mind of their own long as I can remember.”

  Astrid West, who’d been sitting at a little white table in the corner poring over a tarot card spread, pushed aside chairs on her way over to me. Her reading glasses magnified her uptilted eyes. “Sera, what have you been doing? Your aura is sparking like lightning!”

  The image of the black-haired boy popped into my head and I blushed.

  “Should I be concerned about where you were in the middle of the night?” Mom asked, pushing my shoulders back to make me sit up straight.

  Astrid rushed back to her table. “I’m going to do a Celtic cross for you. Don’t go anywhere.” She shuffled the deck and started dealing cards across the metal table in a rush.

  “Everything okay?” Mom murmured.

  I nodded while I pulled apart the sticky bun, licking the goo off my fingers, trying to figure out how to ask what I wanted to ask without arousing suspicion.

  “Want to tell me why you’re out here in your pajamas?” Mom asked.

  I shook my head, kept eating. She brought me a glass of water, extra ice the way I liked it.

  Finally, I asked her. “Is there anyone new in town?” I could almost feel George’s ears straining to hear my whisper.

  “No,” Mom said. “Why do you ask?”

  I shrugged. I certainly couldn’t tell her.

  “Oh this is interesting!” Astrid called across the room, pulling a pen from above her ear under her frizzy brown hair. She scribbled notes on a legal pad. “Very, very interesting!”

  “I heard some of the kids are heading into Sonora to catch a movie. Wouldn’t you like to join them?” Mom asked me.

  I gave her a half-hearted smile instead of the normal daughter she wanted, then turned to go as Melody McDowell came in.

  “Hello there, Seraphina,” she said, tossing her bleached bobbed hair. “The kids are loading the truck to go. If you hurry you might catch them. Want me to call out to Mason to wait for you?” She looked at my clothes. “I’m sure they could hold on while you run home and change.”

  I flashed her a fake smile and ducked out. It wasn’t like my nightshirt and shorts were super flimsy or anything. They basically looked like shorts and a T.

  “Still not much of a talker, huh?” I heard her saying to Mom in that way that a pretentious parent of an overachiever might talk to the parent of a local druggie, neither of which fit in this scenario. I could feel her eyes on the back of my head, staring at me like I might be crazy, or contagious.

  In the street, the town’s teenagers were piling into the back of Dakota Larson’s pick up. I stopped to scan their faces, searching for the black-haired boy.

  Sierra Gutierrez caught my eye from her spot between Cheyenne Trilloti and Mason McDowell. Maybe she mistook my looking for the mystery guy for a desire to join. “You could come,” she called. Then, realizing her mistake, she lowered her head, hid behind her long dark hair. My skin got hot as I waited for the fallout.

  Mason laughed. “You!” he shouted, gesturing at me. “Could. Come.” He waved his arms around and yelled the words as if he was trying to communicate with someone who was deaf and stupid and non-English-speaking.

  Sierra covered a smile and slapped him playfully. I hated that it still hurt when she went along with their teasing.

  “Why is she in her pajamas?” Cheyenne whispered. “That girl is such a freak.”

  Sierra’s brown eyes stuck to mine.

  Why should it bother me if they thought I was weird? Friends weren’t such a big deal. Not that kind of friend anyway. I trudged across the street.

  The truck stalled. Dakota cranked the engine until it flooded. Th
e kids hardly noticed. Finally, it turned over and then they were off, screeching down the road. And still Sierra’s eyes held mine, as if she were offering some silent apology for wanting to be like them.

  Astrid came running out of the bakery, nearly tackling me in the street. “Oh good. I caught you. I had to tell you. The cards warned of darkness, of strangers, and … of danger. Be cautious, Seraphina. Keep your eyes open for signs.”

  My stomach did a little flip. Should I be afraid of the dark-haired guy? But there was something about him — this stranger, who could sit in The Hollow without any negative effects. I couldn’t stop wondering who he was and why he’d been down there before daylight.

  The next few nights, I barely slept. The tug from a wounded animal down below refused to let up. Usually it passed after a little while. The animal moved on, or it… I didn’t want to think about that. It’s nature’s way, let nature work it out, Mom always said. But something about the way the tug pulled on me lately was making it awfully hard to wait around for nature to do its thing.

  One evening when Mom had settled onto our old-fashioned couch with a book, I found I could barely stand the feeling of the pull any longer. I tried to ignore it like I was supposed to, turned on the TV to tune out the gnawing need. Nothing held my interest. Nothing could dampen the roar of the pull from down below.

  “That’s some awfully fast surfing,” Mom said with a smile.

  I’d been changing channels without even paying attention to what was on them, trying not to notice that the tugs from The Hollow were becoming harder and harder to resist. It was like if my mom was bleeding beside me and instead of calling 911 or looking for band-aids, I just sat there watching TV. It felt insane.