Token of Darkness

by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

  “We’re definitely talking about the same girl,” Brent agreed, good humor in his voice now despite the rings of exhaustion under his eyes. “But she seems to care about you.”

  “She’s nice,” Cooper said. “Not big on privacy, but I think mostly it’s that she’s lonely. I’m surprised she isn’t here yet, actually. She normally chats all through the morning.”

  “Huh,” Brent answered. Then he blinked and shook his whole body. “Sorry. Did you say something about coffee? I’m not used to being awake at this hour.”

  “Sit down. I’ll get you a cup. How do you take it?”

  “Just … coffeelike. Black. I’m a Dunkin’ Donuts guy,” Brent said by way of explanation. “Complicated coffee confuses me.”

  Cooper’s father emerged from the back as Cooper poured Brent a cup of their house roast. “If you want to hang out with your friend, I have things under control,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “You’ve been a bit of a menace this morning, anyway,” he pointed out with a chuckle.

  Cooper agreed and led Brent to a table in the corner, as far away from the counter—and his father—as they could get.

  “So,” Cooper began, once they were seated across from each other.

  “So,” Brent replied. “Since I’ve seen her, too, I’m going to work on the assumption that you’re not crazy. I think that’s a good place to start.”

  Cooper nodded. “You’re responding to all this a lot better than I did at first.”

  “My life’s been pretty weird for a while now,” Brent explained. “I’ll tell you all about it when we get to that. What else can you tell me about Samantha and … um, yourself?”

  Cooper wondered if Brent had almost asked something else, but he decided it didn’t matter.

  “You said you saw her?” Cooper asked, curious. “No one else has been able to see her before now.”

  “I don’t think I normally can,” Brent said, “but right after whatever you did in the library—and we’ll get to that, too—I saw and heard her for a second or two. Last night I saw her when I was dreaming.”

  Dreaming? Dear God, it was bad enough when she showed up while he was getting dressed or something. If that girl showed up in Cooper’s dreams—

  “Calm,” Brent said softly. “Wherever you’re going right now, it’s not a good place to go.”

  Cooper’s eyes widened as he focused back on Brent, and not on the nightmares. “What are you, some kind of shrink?” he snapped.

  “Not … exactly,” Brent said, his voice smooth and careful. “But I know your mind goes somewhere bad sometimes. It’s somewhere you don’t like to think about. It hurts. My guess is it has something to do with Samantha and your ability to see her. But I’m better with computers than with human brains, so I’m not going to try to figure out what the issue is with yours. What I can do is recommend a witch I know.”

  “A … witch?” Cooper repeated. First ghosts, now witches. Why couldn’t this get less weird instead of more?

  “Call him a witch, a sorcerer, a psychic, whatever makes you comfortable,” Brent answered. “The point is, he knows more about this supernatural stuff than anyone I’ve ever met. He helped me, and I’m sure he can help you.”

  “What did he do for you?” Cooper asked. If Brent hadn’t mentioned that he had seen Samantha, Cooper probably would have brushed him off as a quack already.

  Of course, Brent hadn’t exactly described Samantha. And Cooper had been the one to volunteer her name.

  He didn’t want to be cynical. He really didn’t want to be cynical, because he desperately needed to be able to talk to someone about all this. But until Samantha showed up to confirm she had spoken to Brent in a dream the night before, Cooper couldn’t help remaining a little suspicious.

  “Well …” Brent hesitated, staring at his coffee. “I was hearing voices. Which turned out to be thoughts. At first I figured I was going crazy, but people kept saying or doing things I had just heard them think. It got so bad that I couldn’t hide that I was having problems. Starting at Q-tech helped, since I could focus on more hands-on projects instead of just sitting in a classroom all day, but by sophomore year it got to be too much. I collapsed at school, and they sent me to the emergency room. I spent the next couple of months going to doctor after doctor as they did a million tests. I wasn’t about to tell them I was hearing voices, so eventually they prescribed me medication for migraines, which didn’t work, of course. I spent summer vacation checking out psychics, anyone in the area who said they had power. Most of them are complete charlatans, but last fall I met someone who passed my name on to Ryan. He walked up to me as I was in the middle of dismantling a hard drive and just asked me outright, ‘What am I thinking?’”

  “And?” Cooper prompted as Brent took a slow sip of his coffee.

  “And I was sick of all the BS I had gone through recently, so I looked. I really tried, and I got nothing. With most people, when I look at them, I get babble. Very few people have just one solid thought at a time. I get a lot of background static when I try to read you, though; you have a lot of thoughts you’ve got shoved away, and that makes the rest of your thoughts very focused, which is a nice change. But trying to read Ryan was like looking at a blank wall: you can tell it’s there, but that’s about it.”

  The bit about reading Cooper’s thoughts was a little creepy. When Brent had made a comment earlier about Cooper’s mind going somewhere bad, telepathy hadn’t jumped at him as the most likely explanation. Now he was glad he didn’t have anything to hide except for the haunting Brent already knew about.

  “And he didn’t decide you were a fake right then and there because you couldn’t answer him?” Cooper asked.

  “I looked at him and he stood there completely calm as I got more and more frustrated,” Brent answered. “Finally, I told him the truth, that I couldn’t hear a damn thing. He smiled, and sat down next to me and said he had heard that I was looking for someone to help me learn to control my ability. Then suddenly I heard his voice in my head, as clear as day, saying, ‘I can help you.’ I couldn’t read him because he’s used to spending time with people who can, so he knows how to shield himself. If I’d been a fake, or crazy, I would’ve bluffed and come up with something. When I admitted I couldn’t hear anything, he knew I had to be for real.”

  “That’s pretty intense,” Cooper said, despite still feeling that wriggle of doubt. “And you think he knows about ghosts?”

  Brent hesitated, long enough to make Cooper nervous.

  “I don’t know what he knows,” Brent answered after a minute. “Ryan and I and—well, we got into a conversation about the afterlife once. Ryan doesn’t bother meditating on God or religion, and I know he doesn’t believe in ghosts as solid personalities the way you describe Samantha, or even the way they show up in stories. He says sometimes the dead leave behind imprints on places or things, but those are just remnants of power in the form of emotion or single, key memories or impulses. I don’t know what he’ll make of Samantha.”

  So the miracle witch—or whatever—might not know a thing.

  Cooper’s disappointment must have shown on his face because Brent added, “That doesn’t mean he’ll be useless. Ryan’s kind of like a scientist. He won’t discount what’s right in front of his face just because of his previous beliefs. If there’s one thing he taught me—beyond how to control my own ability—it’s that this world is full of more weird things than we can imagine. Samantha might be something he’s never seen before, but that doesn’t mean he won’t be helpful.”

  Cooper was still skeptical. “Would it piss you off if I asked you what I’m thinking?” To make it fair, he tried to focus on something particular. The number forty-two; that would work. Forty-two.

  Brent shook his head. “You don’t want me to answer that.”

  “Sure I do, or I wouldn’t have asked,” Cooper insisted, his doubts increasing as Brent stalled.

  “Seriously, you don’t. You do
n’t realize how many thoughts cross your mind in a single second.”

  “Seriously, I do.”

  Brent shut his eyes and said flatly, “Forty-two. And cars. Rain. Noise. Where’s Samantha? The cars again. Now the image in the mirror. Scars. Samantha again. Your father’s glad you’re talking to a friend—he’s actually humming in the back room, something from Fiddler on the Roof, which he saw with you years ago. For your eighth birthday. You had strawberry cake with chocolate frosting. It was a Colt Hatchback … 2003. Green … blue. Greenish blue. You argued with your mom over what color the car was. Rain, and—”

  “Stop it!”

  Brent opened his eyes. “I won’t do it again,” he promised. “Calm.”

  “Don’t you tell me to be—”

  “Cool it!” Brent shouted. At least, it seemed like a shout. Cooper didn’t think Brent had actually raised his voice, but the word echoed in Cooper’s mind. “I didn’t do this to you. Someday you’re going to have to square with those memories, those thoughts. For now, though, I just needed you to believe me. Do you believe me?”

  “I believe you.”

  He certainly didn’t want another demonstration.

  Brent waited, sipping his coffee, until Cooper’s agitation had subsided. The coffee was bitter, stronger than he was used to, but it was palatable enough and it gave him something else to focus on so Cooper didn’t feel even more on the spot.

  He didn’t have to make an effort to read Cooper. In fact, even when he made an effort not to, Cooper’s clear, surface thoughts were sometimes hard to tune out.

  “I assume you have to go to school today?” he asked, once Cooper’s thoughts had settled back into something manageable.

  Cooper nodded. “I skipped yesterday afternoon. I don’t intend to make a habit of it.”

  “I could grab you from school after classes are over, and drive us to—” Brent winced as his words elicited a series of pain-filled images from Cooper. “Or we could take the train into the city. We can get to Ryan’s via public transportation.”

  “You said you weren’t going to read my mind again,” Cooper said, but there was a halfhearted quality to his objection.

  “I won’t try to read you intentionally unless I have to, and I’ll try not to prod you with anything I hear, but when you shove thoughts at me like iron pokers through my eyes, I’m going to respond,” Brent said bluntly.

  “Like … iron … pokers? Didn’t you say you mostly got static?”

  “Mostly, yes, but that’s the background. Your thoughts in front can be pretty sharp,” Brent said, reminding himself to watch his words. He had to admit, he had never thought he would be having this particular conversation with the regular-high’s football star, but weirder things had happened. He had stopped believing jock stereotypes after seeing Delilah practice magic in the middle of the woods, and learning a week later that she was also the captain of the cheerleading squad. “Mostly I can control things now,” he added, still trying to convince Cooper to come with him and get help. “It was a lot worse before.”

  “Hmm.” Cooper paused, his gaze going distant. Then he glanced up at Brent, searchingly. He seemed about to speak, then stopped again, and finally said, “It’s really weird talking to someone who can read my mind.”

  “Trust me, it’s just as weird from the other side,” Brent answered honestly. “If it makes you feel better, most of the time, I really don’t want to hear anyone’s thoughts. You’d be amazed how many random and really unpleasant things cross people’s minds. You know how sometimes you’ll get a visual image of something gross or just seriously twisted? That’s the kind of thing I used to pick up from people all the time—mental images I never wanted, because no one wants them. Like the stuff that comes to mind when someone says, ‘I saw your mom buying handcuffs yesterday.’”

  Cooper’s expression at that moment was priceless.

  “Okay,” he said. “I could get why you wouldn’t want to see that kind of stuff.”

  Brent waited patiently for Cooper to decide what he wanted to do.

  At last, Cooper broke the silence by saying, “Tomorrow. I can’t skip school again, but tomorrow would be good.”

  Saturday. Brent’s last free weekend before school started. There was some kind of fund-raiser for the football team, so at least Delilah probably wouldn’t be hanging around Ryan’s when they got there. As far as he knew, Delilah and Ryan had been on rocky terms ever since the mishap that had also ended her relationship with Brent.

  “Sure. Tomorrow’s probably better, in terms of timing. Will you be able to get off work?”

  “Yeah, no problem,” Cooper said without hesitation. “I might have to cover the early morning and opening, but I doubt this Ryan guy would want us to show up at dawn anyway.”

  “I have to check the train schedule, but I think there’s a nine-something. I’ll meet you here around eight?” Brent asked.

  Cooper nodded and glanced over his shoulder at the clock on the far wall. “I should get going,” he said. “We need to open, and then I’ve got to get to school. But I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Sure, sounds good,” Brent said.

  He drove home with every intention of looking at the public police reports, and scanning for any headlines about missing teens, accidents or abductions, but the conversation with Cooper had started a pounding in his head. It wasn’t only for Cooper’s sake that Brent hoped Ryan could help him.

  His mother had passed out, thankfully, so Brent didn’t need to deal with whatever inflated accusation she would come up with about where he had been. Instead, he crept back upstairs, turned out all the lights, drew the curtains, and crawled under the covers on his bed. In absolute darkness, he closed his eyes. At least the migraine had shut down his mind enough to keep the shadows at bay.

  He was driving through a fine drizzle. The weather was otherwise warm and visibility wasn’t too bad, so he wasn’t uncomfortable. He was driving reasonably. He had his headlights on, and used his blinkers whenever he had to change lanes.

  In fact, he had just put on his right signal, and looked over his shoulder to check his blind spot, when it happened.

  A flash of color in front of him, almost a blur.

  The blare of horns, screaming of brakes, screech of metal against metal—

  Brent woke with a silent scream choking his throat. Oh, hell. It wasn’t bad enough that he was hearing thoughts and apparently dreaming ghosts—now he was sharing Cooper’s post-traumatic flashback nightmares. Spending too much time with that guy was going to end up giving Brent a severe case of anxiety.

  With any luck, he could hand Cooper over to Ryan, and Ryan would have an easy answer.

  In the meantime, he went downstairs and booted up the family computer, which he had built himself and which his mother had taken possession of so she could order prescriptions without looking a pharmacist in the eye. There had to be something online about this girl. Then again, the search could be a little more complicated than Cooper made it out to be.

  Cooper had said Samantha sounded local, but it was more true to say that she didn’t seem to have any distinctive regional accent at all, at least in the short period when Brent had spoken to her. That meant she could be from anywhere in New England, the Midwest, or Northwest, at the least. She didn’t sound southern, and she definitely sounded born-and-raised American … but that wasn’t a lot to go on.

  Searching for deaths in the area in the last few months, of course, instantly pulled up articles about Cooper’s accident.

  Brent swore out loud as he read the details. He had spent most of the summer at Ryan’s or in the library, not watching television, and pointedly avoiding anyone from the regular high school in order to keep out of Delilah’s way. He vaguely recalled Elise mentioning something about an accident one day while he had been helping her stack books, but he’d had no idea the extent of the damage.

  Samantha had to be related to the accident. If she had died as a direct result of the crash, e
ven Cooper would have made that connection, but maybe she was a family member of someone involved? Hell, for all he knew she was a guilty brake mechanic, who blamed herself for the way Cooper’s car handled in the accident. The only thing he was sure of was that it would be too much of a coincidence if Cooper’s ghost wasn’t somehow connected to Cooper’s near-death experience.

  Well, there was one thing more to do.

  He picked up the phone, and called the le Coire estate.

  “Hello?” Brent wasn’t surprised to hear a stranger’s voice. So many people went to Ryan, either to work with him or to learn from him, that Ryan rarely bothered to answer his own phone.

  “Hi,” he replied. He was pretty sure he was talking to a secretary, but for all he knew he could be talking to some kind of super-mystic. “This is Brent Maresh.”

  “I remember you,” the voice on the other end said. “Everything all right?”

  “For me, yes,” Brent answered. “But I have a friend who has been having some weird things happen to him, which I think Ryan might be able to help with. Or at least might be interested in. Could I talk to him, and see if he would mind if we came by?”

  “I think he’s working with someone right now, but I can pass on a message. When were you thinking of coming over?”

  “Tomorrow morning, if that’s all right.”

  “Mmm. Probably. What’s the guy’s name?”

  “Cooper Blake,” Brent replied, though he doubted that detail would matter to Ryan. He wasn’t the type to bias his judgment of someone’s power by doing much background research.

  “I’ll let le Coire know.”

  The line went dead before Brent could say good-bye.

  What next?

  He could call some friends and make plans, but he didn’t feel the urge. He didn’t have a lot of close friends these days; he had pushed most of them away in his search for some peace and silence before his hospitalization, and hadn’t dared make many new ones since. If he hadn’t met Delilah in such intriguing circumstances, he probably wouldn’t have even let her into his life.