(NO!)
Right behind you! I shouted in warning. But I couldn't be heard, these were images... memories.
A motor boat was closing in on the frog, getting ready to take it with a metal pole and loose net on its end. Caleb heard the frog's thoughts, strange predator must seek cover... noise... hurts...
(NO! NO!!!)
It wasn't the only frog with memories. Every cut my classmates made, a new flood of memories came. I realized through some dim sense that I was on my back on the Biology floor. Carson and Brett in the background wheezed with laughter.
“He bit it over a frog? Seriously?” Carson ranted.
Brett, not to be outdone caterwauled, “He's a total girl!”
Collins was moving his hand in front of my face, holding up fingers, but I was caught in the grip of the death memories, absorbing my consciousness. The last thing I remember was John's anxious face taking turns between telling the dumb-ass duo to shut up and seeing if I was gonna live. My vision became gray at the edges, a pinpoint of black expanding to clear my mind of everything and I knew no more.
CHAPTER 1
Trees surrounding the cemetery danced in the languid breeze of the mild spring night. I looked behind me at the pair of eighth grade boys who'd come to egg me on. They had discovered my secret: that I knew the dead, heard the dead.
Headstones glimmered like loose teeth in the moonlight, the whispering like a steady thrumming of white noise in my head. My hands grew clammy.
“Caleb, show them you're not a frickin' poser,” said Jonesy.
“I don't pose.” My thoughts raged against each other in contrary purpose. Proving to Carson and Brett that I had AFTD wouldn't keep them off my back completely, but it'd notch down their stupidity to something me and my posse could manage. That's where it was, managing their shit behavior.
I took a step through the high, Victorian-style gate, my foot touching its reluctant toe on hallowed ground.
The feeling of being forced pressed uncomfortably against my mind.
Crossing the threshold of sanctified ground, the whispering turned into voices. One voice whispered to me the strongest. I stopped feeling tentative and like an invisible string pulled, was drawn toward one of the gravestones, standing sentinel near the middle of the cemetery, glowing softly in the moonlight. I came to stand in front of the headstone which read: “Clyde Thomas, born 1900, died 1929.”
“Wake me...” it said.
“What?” I whispered.
It speaks.
“Wake me...” it repeated.
“Caleb, who are you talking to?” John asked, lack of understanding clear on his face.
My head swung in slow-motion as if through quicksand, moving in his direction, blood rushing in my ears and my heart beating thick and heavy in my chest. Everything became crystallized in that moment. John's frizzy hair and freckles stood out like measles. A microscopic chip lay like an imperfect shadow on the headstone, shining stark contrast to the white marble.
Something... something... was building, rising up as if underwater, rushing to the surface. I was supposed to finalize something, but what? The whispering of the corpse in the earth was so loud it drowned out John's words. John's mouth was moving but no sound was coming out.
What-the-hell? He was arguing with Jonesy, his teeth a pale slash against his dark face.
Flailing, Jonesy's hand suddenly connected with my face. My teeth slammed into my tongue and the taste of copper pennies filled my mouth. I leaned over and a drop of blood hung tremulously on my bottom lip, falling to the grave like a black gem.
Everything clicked into place, vertigo spinning the graveyard on its side as if it had been waiting for this moment. The ground rushed toward my face and I threw my hands out to brace my fall, fingers biting into damp earth. A clawed hand broke through the ground like a spear through flesh. Searching, it grasped my wrist, the bones pressing in a vise-like grip that captured my breath, the intense coldness of the grave lingering on its dead flesh.
The head of the corpse broke free of the ground, its shadowed gaze meeting mine, the hand releasing me. I scuttled backward, standing up, swaying, overcome with, excitement? Fear? I had done this thing and now, didn't know how to undo it. The corpse moved with purpose, pacing me as it used the undisturbed ground to leverage itself as another drop of my blood fell and landed with a dull plop on the corpse's forehead.
The zombie's gaze fixated on mine, it put a hand on its knee and began to push itself upright. Dull, lank strands of hair hung loosely from a scalp strung together by a tight mask of rotten sinew.
Jonesy had long since run out of the cemetery and was at a “safe” range from what the ground had disgorged.
He better get his ass back here. He couldn't get away with whacking me and not helping me with corpse-boy.
“Why have you awoken me?” The words sounded garbled, maybe there was some tongue in there?
Must not be rude, not my strongest point.
Out loud I said, “You asked me to.”
John was standing at my right, trying to mask a fine, all-over tremble. His freckles stood out on a pale face like beacons of fright.
“What the hell is this?” John asked.
He didn't really just ask that? John... duh.
The zombie looked at me with eyes that clung from threads of sinew; moving wetly in its sockets, sucking like a vacuum.
“Why have you woken me?” it repeated, shambling a step closer. The smell... wow. It rose like a torrent of rotting garbage. John clapped his hand over his nose, taking a step backward.
The corpse took another step closer.
“Got any brilliant suggestions?” I asked John, my eyes steady on the zombie, hoping like hell John would lend an intellectual hand.
“Do not have the Zombie Handbook handy,” John said, his eyes a tad wide.
Not helpful.
The corpse looked at me, head tilted, “You're just a boy... how could you know for what purpose you have disturbed my slumber?”
Uh-oh, coming up with an excuse, so not my thing.
“I didn't... mean to wake you up...” I fumbled out. I wasn't usually this tongue-tied but meeting a corpse in the flesh (ha-ha) stole my speech.
“You do not know what you would have of me? You use your life-force to waken me and yet... without purpose? Put me back,” he said thickly. His clothes hung in tatters and the smell was definitely old, dark coffin, not that I knew what that smelled like.
John's look clearly said, do something! I guess what I hadn't told my friends was that I had never thought that I could actually raise the dead. But here he was, standing before me in all his rotting glory.
Looking out amongst the teenagers collected outside the cemetery, “To whom much is given, much is expected. Put me back,” he said.
Adults were all the same, even dead, lecture, lecture.
“How?” I asked.
“You are the necromancer, boy, not I.” Again that quizzical brow over rotting facial countenance.
Interpretation challenge... but I was managing.
“A what?” I asked, surprisingly calm, for the first time, there were no whispers. Perfect, blessed silence filled my head. It was the most natural thing in the world; talking to the dead. Looking at the corpse, its eyeballs like inky marbles stared back at me with uncanny devotion.
“A diviner of the black arts, magic...” he replied.
All that time with the star in my basement, huh, right.
I could still taste distressingly metallic blood in my mouth. I was connecting dots here, but I had an epiphany, I could put it back with blood! Things had only gotten über-weird when I had my lip busted open by Jonesy. I looked back at the corpse, Clyde-- no longer feeling that sense of swimming power just underneath the surface. Now was not the time to get queasy with the dead. I needed to regain that essence, fast.
“Ah... hang on a minute,” I said to the corpse, who stared blankly back... ah-huh.
“John, give me y
our blade.”
“What the heck Caleb? What are you planning to do with this...” John said pointing his finger at the patient corpse, “...thing?” who was as immobile out of his grave as in.
“I figure my blood made it jump out of its grave, now I need some to put him back and you're going to help me,” I said in a one sentence rush.
John's face got paler, if possible. “Ah, we're good friends and all but no, not a good plan! We don't know that for sure anyway.” The logic-master was not feelin' it. Couldn't say I blamed him, me holding a knife and all.
“... here's the deal, let's do a little 'friendship blood bank' just for the sake of putting the dead guy back in his grave, eh?” I began tapping my foot on the disturbed mess of the grave. John would ante up the blood or this was gonna be a long damn night.
“What?” strained trust crowded his eyes.
“Just here, give me your forearm.” I placed the side of the blade on his forearm where it shone black in the pale moonlight. My left hand wrapped tight, steadying his flesh for puncture.
John took a deep breath,“Okay, but you're going to owe me, big time.” The whites of his eyes bulging.
I pressed the point of the blade against his arm until the pressure broke the skin. John sucked in a lungful, blood welled and I let up the pressure. The zombie's head jerked at the sight of the blood, causing the disturbing sound of neck bones popping.
Would I ever get used to that noise? I repeated the process with my own arm. Our identical wounds pressed together, I offered it to my zombie. I could feel somehow that he was mine, I knew it.
A vibrating tuning fork of trembling power welled up inside me. A strange mixture of fear, dread and excitement paralyzed me. My teeth throbbed with the intensity of it. The zombie's hand snaked out, taking hold of the offered forearm. It felt cold against my warm flesh, like iced tentacles. I swabbed a blot of blood, inking it with my index and middle fingers on the zombies forehead, like warpaint. It rolled those empty eyes up at me, its dead bones clinging to my fingertips.
We shared a suspended moment in time, a terrible beauty of control balanced precariously. “Go back and rest,” I said, feeling that balance reached, that I was choosing for both of us.
The zombie reluctantly let go of my arm, sand through a sieve, lying down on the disturbed ground while his grave encased him in a shroud of earth.
I was a corpse-raiser, one of two, and it was not a safe thing to be.
John and I stared at each other over the grave for a swollen minute, his face showing a mixture of sympathy and dread. He knew what this distinction would mean for me in the world we lived in.
I was shaking from the intensity of it all, there was no controlling it. This was not the same as Biology experiments and roadkill, this was real, this was huge. Looking outside the cemetery perimeter at two enemies and one friend, I knew it was time to swear the group to secrecy. A trickle of sweat slithered down my back, pooling at the waistband of my jeans, instantly chilling against my fevered flesh. I didn't want the same future as Parker, that loss of freedom was so not a part of The Plan, my plan.
John and I headed out of the cemetery in a wave of uncertain promise.
#
DEATH WHISPERS is available now~
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The Pearl Savage
Book One of the Savage Series
by Tamara Rose Blodgett
The Pearl Savage
Copyright 2010-2011 Tamara Rose Blodgett
http://tamararoseblodgett.blogspot.com
Smashwords Edition
ISBN-10: 1463501552
ISBN-13: 978-1463501556
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All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
All rights are reserved.
For Sirena
Prologue
1890
Samuel laid on his back, gasping for air as a fish out of the sea... laboring. They had done all they could, now the burden lay with their descendants. His gaze lingered on the house that he loved, now covered in ash, the sun no longer a bright orb in the sky, but shrouded in gray. A hush fell over the land, the environs a pewter wasteland of nothing, cold seeping into his marrow inch by insidious inch. Many would enter the spheres that had been constructed by the Guardians. They spoke of selective population, which rang false to Samuel, or true, as the case may be, his grandchildren safe and beyond the pale of this time, this world that he was leaving.
He turned his head, rolling limply on its side, where his gaze captured Mae, also prone, a strange contraption with hand-hammered copper and a complex, inky black netting covering the greater part of her nose and mouth, leather thong-like straps braided and wrapped her skull, pushing strands of hair around like lost silver. She made odd, whistling noises as she breathed.
“Samuel, wear it,” Mae said, her voice distorted as she lifted the matching mask the Guardians had fashioned in the few preceding months they had been given.
“No, Mae. I wish to enjoy this fore-night without the chains of their advances.”
Samuel knew his stubbornness would cost him his life. The Guardians who were equal part savior and bearer of terrible news had made concessions for the elders. But those which survived would be the strongest, most virile, agile, smartest and etcetera among them. Samuel and Mae understood at their advanced age of sixty and one years both, they would be excluded from the mercies of the sphere.
With blurred vision, Samuel saw a familiar dimmed figure approach. “Father! Why do you not take rest in your own bed?” Stella asked, her comely face a salve in his approaching death. Her wool skirts swirled as she knelt, setting an illuminated candle beside him, hissing steam from its seams.
Raising his hand, he cupped the loveliness of her face, knowing the time had come to enter the sphere the Guardians had constructed for the select. Her eyes brimmed with tears. “Papa, the Guardians have told you that you might survive... all is not lost.”
Samuel put a finger to her lips. “Silence now, child. This is your place now. Do not forget the things you have been taught. Take this, Dear Heart, hold it safe to your breast, guard it. It is our history.” Samuel handed her a slim leather book bound with a black silk tie.
Stella pressed it to her chest, the tears once held in check, now overflowing down unprotected cheeks. Mae's eyes met hers. “Go now Stella-girl... take the opportunity you have been given.”
Her knuckles white as she clutched the book, misery etched its path on her countenance. “It will never be the same without you both.”
A clear bell-tone pealed, reminding Stella of duty. Her duty to leave her parents behind. While the knowledge of her future, the safe environment of the sphere was a burden laid on her heart.
Stella's face turned to look at the sphere, shimmering in a watery iridescence as a giant cloche. But people were not plants, their future safekeeping a promise of a life with a family, fractured by separation.
Stella bent her head to kiss Samuel and Mae goodbye. Gently unwinding the face mask the Guardians had constructed, she laid a kiss, soft as butterfly wings on the woman who had nurtured her every desire. The skin giving wa
y like tissue-thin silk under the pressure of her lips. Turning to her father, his pale blue eyes watering, she cradled his head while she pressed a kiss to his forehead. She lowered his head and took a last, lingering look, knowing this was the final time she would view her parents in this realm.
Lifting her skirts, she pivoted away, dropping them as she walked...no, as she ran, brushing tears from her cheeks, the book clutched tightly in her other hand, the candle hanging from its copper loop in her squeezed finger. Approaching the doorway to the sphere, she was the last select to be ushered inside, casting one final glance, she saw her parents supine forms, clasped hands held tightly, her mother's mask forgotten beside her.
Stella whirled toward the entrance, losing hold of the book, dropping it on the earth now laden with ash. She picked it up, her last gift from Father. Seeing the title, she peered closer: Asteroid; A History of When the Rocks Fell.
Stella moved forward as the hole closed behind her, a fierce idea blooming in her consciousness to remember... who they had been. As an indeterminate future stretched before her....
CHAPTER 1
One Hundred Forty Years Later
Clara beheld the shrouded exterior as she did each morning, her hands pressed against the pliable interior of the sphere, fingers sinking into its surface, stopped before breaching the Outside. The yearning was the same, she wished to experience the Outside.
Sighing, Clara turned from the misty view outside the molded window. Her petticoats swept together, wrapping her bare legs, stockings laid out for her on the bed.
Olive knocked on the door. “Mistress, may I enter your chamber?”
“Yes.”
The Blood Bundle, Books 1-2: Blood Singers and Blood Song (New Adult Paranormal Vampire/Shifter Romance) Page 52
