by A. P. Wayne
Ilya pulled back.
She found a car heading down the intersecting road.
Suddenly she was in the driver’s seat, her reflexes taking over. She looked into the passenger seat and saw Jenkins having some kind of conniption fit.
She wondered what kind of mistake she’d made a second before she smashed into the ambulance.
Forty-eight
Hunter saw the ambulance pull into the intersection right in front of them, lights blaring. He briefly wondered if a person having a heart attack should shout, “Look out!” but it was too late. The car smashed into the ambulance, the driver’s side taking most of the force. That was probably a good thing for Hunter. After breaking through the windshield with his head, it left him to fly unobstructed into a ditch on the other side of the road. His elbows took most of the shock and, before he could even think about what he was doing, he stood up and ran into the cornfield. He didn’t make it very far before he collapsed into a shaking heap on the ground. It crossed his mind to wander back to the scene of the accident but he quickly dismissed that thought.
Forty-nine
When the car slammed into the ambulance, the back doors popped open and Jordan’s gurney tipped over and slid halfway out. She was unconscious and had no idea any of this was happening.
Fifty
Tony Blevins was the name of the old man driving the car. He died upon impact. Ilya escaped his body the second before. A cop car was on its way. There was probably at least one more ambulance on the way, too. Ilya hovered above the cop car. She slipped into the one in the passenger seat. She wasn’t going to let Jordan breathe through this. The cop car slid to a halt at the scene of the accident. The man driving said something but Ilya wasn’t listening. She saw Jordan on the gurney, almost like she was propped there to provide a clean target.
Ilya stepped out of the car, withdrew the gun from the holster, and began shooting.
Again the man driving yelled something and then he pulled his gun and started shooting at Ilya.
She quickly left that body and hovered there just long enough to make sure Jordan had been hit. The front of the sheet covering her was red. That was good enough for Ilya.
She headed back to the house.
She needed to get to Neverly.
Fifty-one
Hunter heard the gunshots and staggered back to the scene of the accident.
He had no idea what had just happened.
An EMT stood talking to a cop. Talking was too tame a description. There was a lot of shouting and arm flapping. Hunter crossed the road, unseen behind the car he’d been riding in. He glanced toward the ambulance and saw a very bloody girl on the gurney. He wondered if this was who he’d called about. If this was who he’d “saved”.
Before he could stop himself, he approached the gurney. He saw a dead cop lying on the road. He unstrapped the girl from the gurney and slung her over his shoulder.
He wasn’t really that far from his house. He disappeared into the woods with the bleeding girl.
Fifty-two
Walker was so busy thinking about what he had just done that he was nearly unaware of what was happening to him.
He was sure he’d entered someone’s thoughts and been kicked out when they had awoken. From what he saw there, he didn’t think it was Melanie. Or maybe he just didn’t want to think it was Melanie.
He’d seen her.
He’d entered her head.
Who else would it be besides Melanie?
Unless there was already someone else there.
He decided he wanted to try it again.
It was almost like he didn’t care what was happening around him. If he’d been more aware, he would have noticed they had taken him into the church. According to Linda, this was where bad things happened. But he was convinced there were just too many of them and there wasn’t any stopping what they were doing.
He closed his eyes again, imagined that house. No, more than imagined it. He made it real, closing out everything else around him. Felt himself drift into the house until he saw Melanie again.
And she was still there.
Still asleep.
No. Not asleep.
More like catatonic.
Her eyes were open but they stared straight ahead.
Walker wasn’t sure if this would work or not.
What was he thinking?
He didn’t know what the hell he was doing last time and didn’t feel a whole lot more experienced now.
He just repeated the process. Moved closer and closer until he saw nothing but that expanse of forehead. Then he took a deep breath and pushed.
And then he knew what Linda meant by the white room. There wasn’t anything here.
No thoughts. No images. No anything.
And when he opened his eyes, he looked through hers.
This felt almost like being in his world.
He reached into Melanie’s pocket and discovered her phone. If he was here and able to use her body as some kind of puppet, then he could check on Jordan before returning back to that other place.
But maybe he needed to be there.
No. He needed to check on Jordan.
He tapped her name on Melanie’s phone and let it ring. No one answered it. A voicemail prompt came up and he ended the call.
Maybe she was at his house.
He would check and, if she wasn’t there, he would hope he could make it back to his own body.
Fifty-three
Ilya sensed what was happening in Neverly. It made her alternately happy and filled with panic.
They had Walker.
Now all she had to do was be there to finish the deed and the gateway between the two worlds would be open.
But she needed a body to go there. All the residents of Neverly, being dead, were uninhabitable. Maybe she’d been too hasty at the scene of the accident.
She swooped into the house and noticed Melanie was gone.
This filled her with even more alarm.
What if Walker had somehow inhabited Melanie and taken her back to Neverly to defend him.
Could he have learned things that quickly?
She thought he could. She’d been in Melanie the last time he’d entered. He shouldn’t have known how to do that. It had taken her much training from her master. Of course, training was as much about not doing something stupid as much as it was about just knowing how to do something.
She needed a body quick.
And not surprisingly discovered Jenkins walking through the woods with Jordan slung over his shoulder.
She hesitated before plunging into him. Knew that him becoming a hollowed out vegetable would only draw attention to him. Not to mention if she just abandoned his body in Neverly, which is what she’d like to do. But, maybe, since he’d drunk of her blood and was an idiot to begin with, the results wouldn’t be the same.
She plunged in.
The initial thoughts were such a swirling morass of stupidity and filth she almost wanted to escape immediately.
She walked him back to that house. Dumped Jordan on the floor. Noticed the stupid bitch was still breathing. Now would have been the perfect time to finish her off but Ilya thought an author killing a teenage girl would have the same attention grabbing effects as an author going insane or an author disappearing.
Maybe it didn’t matter. Jordan didn’t seem in any condition to protect Walker anyway and, at this point, with the opening so imminent, maybe it didn’t matter anyway.
Ilya closed her eyes, Hunter’s eyes, and took herself to the church in the center of that beautiful, decaying town.
Fifty-four
Just the sight of this house filled Walker with an almost overwhelming sense of familiarity. It had been a very long time since he’d been away from it for this long. That familiarity was shattered when he opened the door. He nearly stepped into a pool of blood. There was more blood spattered around the living room and what little furniture there was was in disarray. Not smashed and tip
ped over or anything. Just not where he was used to seeing it. His first thought was that whoever had left the offerings had found him absent and decided to have fun with him.
But Melanie was the one most likely leaving the offerings and he was in her body right now.
That had only been for the past few minutes, though. Who knew what she’d been doing before, what?, taking a nap in that creepy abandoned house?
This was just rationalization. He was great at convincing himself of things and that was all this was. Him trying to convince himself the bloody chaos in his house didn’t have anything to do with Jordan.
Deep down, he knew the chances were pretty good this did have something to do with Jordan.
He saw her phone lying on the ground and picked it up. He opened the text messages and scrolled through them, looking for some clue as to what might have brought her here. Most of the messages were just exchanges between her and Melanie. Walker felt himself grow angry until he remembered something horrible had probably happened to Melanie, too.
Still, the end result was that there weren’t any easy answers and he needed to leave.
He wondered if it was as easy as closing his eyes.
He sat down on the couch and closed his eyes. He kept thinking of the blood, thinking of Jordan. Anxiety swarmed around him.
Concentration wasn’t going to come here.
And maybe here was not where he needed to be anyway.
Quickly, he stood up and began walking back toward the abandoned house.
Fifty-five
Ilya slid into that other world with only a momentary lapse in consciousness and then a brief electric crackle. As always, it felt like coming home. Now she needed to get out of the woods and to the church as soon as possible. The person she was inhabiting was being remarkably quiet. She took off running and quickly realized this Jenkins guy was wildly out of shape, but the basic genes were pretty good. He was a large guy and seemed like he had been muscular at one point in his life. So she just had to put the rasping lungs, throbbing liver, and stitch in her side out of her head.
She ran through the graveyard, through the streets, and burst through the doors of the church.
She was quickly restrained before being able to make it to the altar.
“Who are you?” Drew Benson asked.
“I am Ilya,” she said.
“And who is Ilya?” Drew asked.
“I am the one who walks between worlds.”
“And what is Ilya’s purpose?”
“To make the worlds into one.”
“And why should the worlds be made into one?”
“So it can be our world.”
“You are Ilya. You may pass. The sacrifice is prepared.”
The sight of Walker’s body laid out and silent nearly took her breath away.
It felt like it should have been more ceremonial, but the Fangs had never really been one for ceremony. Many of them had been here for a very long time. They just wanted out. For them, there was only this town. They were trapped.
And Ilya was partly responsible for that.
She slowly approached the altar. She saw the whole thing in her head. She wished she had been able to keep Melanie’s body. It was so much like her original body. It would have looked so much better, the beautiful young woman bending over the powerful young man, biting down, not with the intent of turning but with the intent of killing, of draining the life from him.
If there had been any breaths in the room besides her own, there would have been a collective holding of them.
Toward the front of the group, a little girl looked at her. Her name was Linda Jennings. Ilya knew all of their names.
In a way, they were her reason for existence.
“Does this mean we can go home again?” Linda asked.
“Yes,” Ilya said. She knew that wasn’t exactly true. They could go back to Lawrence but, for a while anyway, it would feel like anything but home.
And what they would have to do to stay “alive” ... even though for them, life would be nothing more than existence.
Ilya bent over in the body of the hideous man she now inhabited. She smelled Walker’s vitality. Smelled his power.
Now she knew why she’d made Jenkins bite her that one night.
Even a small amount of her blood in his body was enough to forge a bond. It was enough of her to make her force his body toward something more like her.
She felt the fangs grow.
Felt the hunger well up.
She positioned her fangs against his jugular and flexed her jaws, heard the popping of skin and felt the rushing of blood.
And then she felt revulsion.
This was Walker’s body, but Walker wasn’t in there.
She lifted her bloody mouth and screamed.
The crowd began murmuring.
Fifty-six
Walker reached the other house. The decayed door already stood open. The first thing he saw when he walked in was Jordan, battered and bloody on the floor. Without even thinking, he dropped down beside her, lifting her head onto his lap. He stroked her bloody hair. Felt for the faint pulse in her neck.
Then it felt like he was yanked out of his body like a fish on a hook and he was back in that other place. Only his spirit flying through the woods and the cemetery and the town and then he was in the church.
The sight wasn’t as disorienting as he thought it would have been. There was a group of the dead gathered around his body. That was pretty much the outcome he would have predicted when they were parading his body through the town.
The one thing he didn’t understand was why that guy he’d seen in the woods was covered in his blood and shouting at everybody.
The force that Walker had felt pulling him toward this place was now trying to force him into his own body. Part of him thought he should have gone willingly, but a stronger part of him told him that he should get as far away from this place as he could.
“I know you’re here!” the man shouted. “You could be responsible for a beautiful union. Don’t you want our worlds to be joined? You could see your brother again. You could live the rest of your life protected.”
Walker said nothing, but he didn’t leave the church as quickly as he’d wanted to.
“Enter your body!” the man shouted. Walker knew this wasn’t the man he’d seen in the woods. Not really. This was Ilya. A desperate Ilya so close to accomplishing what she’d worked probably hundreds of years toward. “If your body dies without the spirit, there will be no going back to that other world for you.”
Still Walker didn’t leave.
He spotted his brother Elliot in the crowd.
Watched Elliot become insubstantial and wink out.
Walker had his answer.
The man at the front of the church bent to drink the last of his life.
Walker turned to leave. He didn’t know if he would go to the woods or the cemetery or any of the countless houses around here. He just knew he was going away.
Fifty-seven
Jordan felt like she was wrapped in a cloud. And it felt like the cloud was breathing around her. Slow and deep. But the breaths felt too far apart.
She couldn’t remember anything that had happened to her.
There was just this now.
She felt like she should open her eyes. But she didn’t want to. She wanted to stay in her cloud, her now.
She took a deep breath—
her last?
—and opened her eyes.
A man leaned over her and at first she thought it was Walker and then realized it wasn’t. It was his brother, Elliot.
And she felt whatever was essentially her leaving her body and entering him. His mouth was fastened to hers.
She entered him and felt, horrifyingly, nothing.
It was like the complete opposite of her warm, safe cloud.
This was just black, empty space and she felt it to the core of her being.
Then ... life.
Ro
aring through her.
She opened her eyes again.
Again she saw Elliot over her, his mouth covering hers.
Then he stood up and was moving away.
Jordan sat up and looked down at herself.
At first she thought she was looking into a mirror and her heart did a wild, skipping dance in her chest.
She looked so bad. She looked dead. She reached out a hand and felt her neck on her lap.
No pulse.
This girl. This Jordan, was dead.
So who was she?
Slowly, she stood up and looked down at herself.
She recognized the clothes. She thought she would recognize that body anywhere.
Melanie.
Fifty-eight
Once the body in front of her was completely drained of life, Ilya considered using Jenkins’s bulky body to charge after Walker.
But that would have been pointless.
She slipped out of his body and floated high over Neverly.
She could see all the spirits, all the forms, everything.
He was in a house.
She went to him as fast as she possibly could.
Only here could she have the body she actually wanted. Her own. Sure it was only an archetype but the human physique was so ephemeral anyway ...
Fifty-nine
After waking from what had to be his worst blackout yet, Hunter decided he needed to get his life in order.
He stood in the front of the church with a mouth of blood. A dead boy lay on a sacrificial altar in front of him and there was a huge group of people wearing trashy, antiquated clothes staring at him. It felt like his soul had been raped but he didn’t want to think too much about that right now.
