Token of Darkness

by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

  “No, just color-challenged,” Cooper mumbled, recalling Samantha’s outfits.

  “What?”

  “Never mind. No, she isn’t angry, but she’s frustrated that she doesn’t have a body.”

  “So she knows she’s dead?”

  Cooper nodded. “Oh yeah, she knows. She’s annoyed about it.”

  “Young or old? Unfinished business? Maybe a tragic death, murdered and dumped somewhere, and no one’s found her body and she desperately wants to make sure she gets a proper burial. That’s a little cliché, though. Maybe she was the murderer or she kidnapped someone, only then she died, and her victim is trapped somewhere and she can’t rest until the victim dies—or is rescued. That would be a cool story.”

  “Do you write?” Cooper asked.

  “Nah, I’m not creative,” Brent replied, straight-faced. “But your ghost—”

  “Doesn’t remember who she is or how she died,” Cooper said, before Brent could come up with another dozen scenarios. “But I think she’s young, our age, and from around here.”

  “Huh.” Brent paused again. “Amnesiac ghost. Trauma can bring on amnesia, and death has to be pretty damn traumatic. I wonder if a ghost could get psychotherapy? Or hypnotized?”

  “Let’s not go that route,” Cooper said, trying to derail what looked like it was about to lead into another list of possible plotlines.

  “Well … I’d check obituaries,” Brent said. “You need to figure out who she is and why she might be hanging around.”

  “And if she’s not in there?”

  “Check missing persons. There are lots of places online that have officially listed missing people, especially if she’s a kid. Or if you’re really brave, you—I mean, your character, of course—can go to the police station and say something like ‘I saw this girl the other day, and she looked a lot like someone I think I saw on a missing-person flyer in Boston,’ and see if they recognize the description.”

  “And if that doesn’t work?”

  “Well … psychics, I guess, would be your next stop,” Brent said. “A real psychic would be able to tell if your character is psychic himself, or if your ‘ghost’ is really a ghost. She could be something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “Anything. It’s your supposed book,” Brent said. “Maybe she’s an alien, existing on a slightly different plane of existence from us, and the passage to Earth was so traumatic she lost her memory of it and thinks she’s human since she’s surrounded by them. Or maybe she’s a fallen angel, and all her memories of Heaven were taken as punishment for her transgressions. Or maybe she’s actually some kind of demonic figure, sent to torment your protagonist, and she’s lying about not remembering who she is.”

  “Um … I think she’s just a regular ghost,” Cooper said. “Though those are interesting ideas,” he added, mostly to be polite.

  “You’ve pretty much admitted you don’t know a thing about ghosts, so how can you be sure she’s just the ‘regular’ kind?” Brent challenged. “She doesn’t sound like a regular kind to me, not if your character can see her and talk to her and she isn’t angry or anything. Maybe you should stick to writing football stories.”

  Cooper decided not to be offended, if only because Brent had said the words with a quirked smile, the jibe meant in good humor.

  “There’s nothing in here about ghosts like that?” Cooper asked, waving to all the books around him.

  “Not really,” Brent said. “Most ghosts tend to be location-specific. They’re rarely seen. Even ghosts who haunt people tend not to be very communicative outside of a séance or something. You’re sure your character hasn’t desecrated any graves lately? Maybe an Indian burial ground or an ancient pagan temple?”

  “Pretty sure,” Cooper answered, smiling despite himself. It was the longest conversation he had had with anyone but Samantha since the accident, and even if it wasn’t remotely helpful, it felt good to joke around with another living human being.

  Brent regarded the guy next to him in a vaguely clinical fashion. He had recognized Cooper Blake pretty quickly as one of the receivers from the public high’s football team. They had actually met once, at a New Year’s Eve party last winter, but Brent wasn’t surprised that Cooper didn’t remember. He had been introduced to Cooper, but they hadn’t talked long.

  He had been surprised to be invited to the party in the first place; he and Delilah had been involved since that September, but she had shown absolutely no interest in including him in the rest of her social life before then. He hadn’t been thrilled by the event, and she hadn’t invited him to any more.

  He would have been happy to see Delilah’s school friends in small groups; he just didn’t deal well with crowds, which pulsed with the scurry of other people’s thoughts, most of them unfocused and indistinct like a constant background whine that only Brent could hear. There had also been a synergy of thought among the team that was deeply unsettling for an outsider, and left him feeling distinctly outside no matter how welcoming the group tried to be.

  Cooper, on the other hand, was hard to peg. The thoughts Brent could make out were almost hyper-focused, with a kind of white noise behind them. It wasn’t something Brent had heard the likes of before, which was why he had gladly engaged in the conversation about ghosts. He was curious, and the noise made by Cooper’s brain wasn’t offensive. Even the zinging background thoughts that shot past Cooper’s more conscious ones were so quickly suppressed that they sounded like the rustling of wind chimes.

  One thing Brent knew for sure was that Cooper was seeing this ghost he described. Whether that meant he was psychic or hallucinating, Brent didn’t know. When Brent had volunteered at the local hospital for a couple weeks over the summer, he had briefly been in a room with a hallucinating schizophrenic, and it had been spine-crawlingly horrible. The things that poor man saw, the voices he heard, were so angry. They befouled his mind and the space around him, so much so that Brent had left the room gagging, his head pounding.

  That was when Brent decided to finish his mandatory for-graduation community service at the library instead. It was quiet here, especially in the summertime. People were so trained to keep their voices down in the presence of the towering stacks of books that they even instinctively kept their thoughts small, so they were like little fluttering moths in the night.

  “You okay?”

  It took Brent a moment to realize that Cooper had said something.

  “Oh yeah, sorry, man,” Brent replied. “Um … oh. You haven’t said when this guy started seeing his ghost.”

  “Does it matter?” Cooper asked.

  To Brent, the static at the back of Cooper’s mind seemed to get louder, as did all those rapid background thoughts.

  “Sure it matters,” Brent said, drawing back a little from his examination of Cooper’s thoughts and trying to pay attention to the words he was saying, too. It was difficult, because thoughts weren’t really comprised of any one sense, which influenced the way Brent experienced them; he tended to use words like hear, but he could just as well say he saw thoughts, or felt them—or maybe it was a combination. “If he hasn’t messed up a grave or something else to get a particular ghost attached to him, then he’s either seen ghosts all his life, or something triggered it.”

  Cooper shook his head. “It’s a recent thing.”

  “How recent?”

  “Couple months.”

  More static.

  “When, specifically, did it start? I mean, what precipitated it?”

  Even louder. Brent started wondering if he should back down, but he wanted to know, and that meant pushing a little harder and dealing with the headache he would have later.

  “He saw her for the first time after a nightmare,” Cooper answered hesitantly.

  “About what?”

  The static rose to a roar and those gentle wind chimes became a screeching, slamming cacophony of noise, flashing lights, and panic emanating from inside Cooper’s suddenly tensed
body. Overwhelmed by the impact, Brent bit his lip so hard he tasted blood as he tried to tune it out.

  He reached to put a hand on Cooper’s shoulder, trying to calm him. “I’m sorry, man,” he said. “I didn’t mean to—”

  Wham.

  Brent couldn’t begin to describe what happened next. He had just touched Cooper’s arm, when Cooper looked up, his hazel eyes suddenly an eerie silver color. Without moving, without doing a damn thing, it felt as if Cooper shoved him backward, so hard he was flying through the air.

  Brent tried to curl, to brace himself for the fall, for the crash of his body impacting the shelves behind him, but it didn’t come.

  Instead, he found himself sitting exactly where he had been, only coughing so hard he felt like his lungs had forgotten how to inhale. His whole body was shaking as if he was coming out of deep hypothermia, and Cooper was drawing back, looking horrified, his face gray-pale with sweat beading on his brow.

  “I’m sorry,” Cooper whispered. Brent could still hear those jangling noises and lights in Cooper’s brain, but was too shaken to try to tune them out or to focus on them.

  They were no longer alone. A girl knelt beside Brent in scene-style clothing—mismatched and torn, but artfully so. Even if she had come to complain about the commotion they were making, he was grateful for her presence. She looked quizzically at Cooper, who just shook his head, still backing away as the girl knelt and tilted her head as she examined Brent.

  Around them, the shadows seemed to pulse. Cooper’s gaze shot from one dark blur to the next, and the girl shuddered when they drew near enough to touch her. They growled and snapped at Brent.

  “I’m sorry,” Cooper said again. “Samantha, we should go.”

  “Cooper!” the girl shouted, sounding cross and frightened. Brent was still too dazed from whatever had happened to pick up any thoughts from her.

  “Wait!” Brent choked out, but Cooper just turned and dashed the other way, his limp almost hidden in his haste as he shouldered through the double doors to the staircase.

  There was no use going after him, even if Brent could have moved at that moment. Cooper didn’t want to be stopped. That was okay; Brent didn’t think he was ready to deal with the ex-football star again yet. He couldn’t even stand.

  He drew in deep, gasping breaths. He had no idea what had just happened, or if it had been Cooper’s fault or his own. He was a telepath, but unlike many of the people he had spent the last year studying with, he wasn’t good at recognizing or controlling other kinds of power. He had no idea what those shadow-things had been, except that they clearly weren’t good.

  “Can you help me up?” he asked the girl.

  She jumped, and then tentatively offered her hand, with an expression of pure shock. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he answered, “I think so.”

  He reached up, only to have her whole form dissolve when he tried to grasp her hand. Cooper’s ghost? But did that mean Brent had really seen her, or had she just been a lingering image from Cooper’s mind? At least, once she was gone, the shadows started to sink back into the floor and walls around him.

  Brent’s bones felt heavy and his muscles weak. His skin was too tight, and the air he drew into his lungs hurt. He tried to pull himself up by gripping one of the library shelves, but couldn’t lift his own weight.

  As he waited for his muscles to stop twitching and for his body to feel less alien, he attempted to put his thoughts in order.

  Cooper could see something, which he thought was a ghost—probably the girl Brent had briefly seen, after … whatever Cooper had done to him. What Brent was sure of was that Cooper’s actions had been accidental. Cooper had seemed horrified. Brent knew what it was like to have an unusual power, but not be able to control it.

  But that didn’t make it his job to help other lost souls. He wasn’t responsible for this random guy he had just met in a library. Not at all. Cooper had his football friends. More importantly, he had Delilah. This could be her problem.

  As soon as Brent could stand, he was going to go home and forget about Cooper Blake.

  Hey, can you hear me?

  “Huh?” He looked around, but as best as he could tell, the girl’s voice was coming from the picture on one of the books.

  You saw me for a second, didn’t you? Can you hear me? Please?

  “I can hear you,” he answered. His voice was raspy and speaking made him start coughing.

  Yes! The jubilant cry made him wince and rub his temple.

  “Not so loud,” he managed to say.

  Sorry, she said in pretty much the same tone. But the only person I’ve been able to talk to in months is Cooper, and he’s a nice guy but he’s not very bright and sometimes he’s kind of boring, and I just don’t know how I …

  As she spoke, the excitement in her voice never dimmed, but she seemed to be getting farther and farther away. She hadn’t lowered her “voice” but he strained to hear her, until in the middle of a sentence she just faded completely.

  “Are you still there?” he asked.

  No response, except for chills up his arms.

  “Hello?”

  Okay, the afternoon had officially turned into something out of a creepy horror movie. With a monumental effort, Brent forced himself to his feet. He was out of this scene. No more shouting hello at disembodied voices in empty rooms for him, thank you very much. He didn’t like to meddle with dark powers or witchcraft any more than necessary. He had only been researching ghosts as follow-up to a conversation with his mentor; he was perfectly happy to go through his life without ever seeing another one.

  Brent was a little unsteady, but he managed to get to the stairs, and down them. The librarian gave him a worried look, and he heard her think, Bright boy, but so quiet, before he managed to block out anything else. Where did he park his car? He probably shouldn’t be driving in this condition, should he?

  Maybe he should sit down somewhere … maybe get something to eat. His stomach felt all tossed up, but it was the kind of unsettled that solid food sometimes helped.

  Enough ghost stories for him today.

  He found his way to a little nearby bakery, but by the time he had paid for his cup of cocoa and bagel his vision was swimming. He was having trouble keeping his own thoughts focused, which meant he couldn’t keep anyone else’s out, either. He retreated to the courtyard nestled between the library’s old and new buildings, where a bunch of Eagle Scouts had built a beautiful garden almost no one else knew about.

  He sat there, nursing the cocoa and centering himself until it didn’t sound like people were screaming all around him.

  He remembered what it had been like when he first started hearing things other people couldn’t. He remembered how horrid he had felt, when he kept accidentally stumbling across people’s secrets—their wants, their fears. Their lies. Maybe it should have made him think less of other people. Instead, he had lost his faith in himself when he couldn’t stop listening. It was like peering in windows at night, and seeing people’s most private moments.

  Even as a kid, Brent had had a knack for predicting what people were thinking or feeling. It wasn’t until he was fifteen that what he had always assumed was intuition had manifested as outright telepathy, and it wasn’t too long afterward that he had ended up in the hospital, completely overwhelmed. He always felt crowded, even when there were only two or three people in a room, because they were often so conflicted that their thoughts might include five or six voices each.

  He had met Delilah about a year ago, after missing a good chunk of what should have been his sophomore year of high school. She had been the first person who had understood. It had been months before he got past his blind dependence and gratitude enough to question the fact that she seemed to have absolutely no interest in spending any time with him in public.

  Oh, God, was he really going to subject Cooper to Delilah’s brand of help? He remembered all too well coming out of complete, terrified, hel
pless isolation and ending up in her hands. Yes, she had introduced him to Ryan le Coire, but she had also paraded him around like her newest project. She had put him back in the hospital for a while last spring after one of her magic experiments went disastrously wrong. He still didn’t know what she had been trying to do, since she had never attempted to ask his permission or explain. They just broke up, and had rarely seen each other since.

  Brent wasn’t going to push Cooper to confide how or when he started seeing his ghost, and he definitely wasn’t going to put a hand on his shoulder—or anywhere near him if he could avoid it—in the future. But he could at least keep him out of Delilah’s grasp by introducing him directly to someone who would help. Ryan le Coire. While Ryan seemed at first glance like a normal guy, someone who could be a grad student, the twenty-six-year-old was actually a sorcerer. And, as Ryan put it, he was the heir to the most powerful human magics in the Western Hemisphere. Ryan had been able to teach Brent how to tune out some of the thoughts he heard, so he’d be less overwhelmed. Brent knew that Ryan didn’t believe in ghosts, but he certainly would know something useful.

  There was too much pain radiating from Cooper’s body and mind, not to mention the darkness swirling around both him and his ghost, for Brent to just step back and pretend it was none of his business.

  Cooper was still shaking when he reached his father’s shop. What had he done? He certainly wasn’t going back to school. He could barely walk, barely breathe.

  “He saw me! And heard me!”

  Cooper nearly screamed when Samantha suddenly reappeared. He jammed his thumb on the shop door and cussed, shaking his hand, as Samantha continued her joyous exultation.

  “The guy from the library saw me,” she said. Cooper tried to look mellow as he crossed the shop and headed toward the back room. The girl working at the counter gave him a quizzical look, but let him by. “It was only for a moment, and he was pretty out of it, but he saw me, and then he could hear me.”

  “‘Pretty out of it,’” Cooper grumbled, looking around for his father. “Because of what I did to him. I don’t even know what happened, but it was … I mean, what was that?”