Hidden Realms

by Dean Murray

  My body relaxed and he loosened his grip on my arm. He pulled me close in a tight hug. I laid my head on his bare chest and breathed in the masculine scent of him. My arms circled his waist, loose at first, then tighter. Jackson took my shoulders in his hands and leaned me back slightly. Nervously, I tilted my chin up toward his face.

  “Harper,” he whispered.

  His lips slowly descended on mine and I rose up to meet him. He kissed me softly and the room around me felt as if it were spinning. A shiver ran up my spine as his hand moved to the back of my neck, urging me closer. My lips parted and our kiss deepened.

  I pressed my body closer, lifting slightly onto my tiptoes and bringing my arms up around his neck. In that moment, we existed on a higher plane. I kept my eyes closed and felt him melt into me. A low groan sounded at the back of his throat, creating a strange need inside of me I had never felt before. My knees felt weak, my head light.

  When he finally pulled away, I felt that the entire world had changed. I nuzzled my face against his chest.

  “What do we do now?” I asked.

  “We keep you safe,” he said, kissing the top of my head.

  I didn't understand everything that was going on in this strange town. I had no idea if the picture he'd drawn would really come true. But I knew he wouldn't lie to me. And I knew that he would be there for me. Some wall between us had come crashing down.

  There, in his arms, I felt safer than I ever dreamed I could.

  Sit Down, Girl

  Outside, the night air was crisp and cool. Lights were on throughout the main house. I came around the house and entered through the front door as if I had just gotten home. The idea of going straight up to my room and attempting to ignore the fact that I had been questioned by the police was pretty inviting, but in the end, I decided it was better to face Mrs. Shadowford and get the whole thing over with.

  I walked to the door to her suite of rooms feeling like it was a walk to my own execution. How long would it take Mrs. Meeks to arrange a spot for me at the juvenile detention center? A day? An hour?

  I knocked on the thick wooden door and waited.

  “Yes?” Mrs. Shadowford's voice was muffled.

  I leaned close to the door. “It's Harper.”

  “Come in,” she said. She didn't sound excited to have me back, and for the first time, I realized it was strange that no one from Shadowford had come to the police station to support me. Shouldn't someone have come for me? After all, these people were my guardians.

  A sickening dread entered my heart as I opened the door and crossed over the threshold to her office. I hadn't been in that room since my first day at Shadowford. It seemed darker in here than any of the other rooms in the house. And colder.

  Mrs. Shadowford sat behind her desk. She looked up as I entered, her face stern, lips pursed.

  “I didn't hear a car drive up,” she said. “Who brought you home?”

  “Officer Ellis dropped me off.” I didn't explain further.

  She eyed me curiously. “The mayor called me. She told me about what you had to go through today, and I'm terribly sorry they put you through all that for nothing. I told her it's obvious you weren't involved in the death of that poor girl. But I do wonder how she got hold of that necklace of yours.”

  I stood and stared at her, unsure how I was expected to respond. I certainly had no idea how Tori got my necklace.

  “Sit down, girl. Don't stand there staring at me like no one ever taught you any manners.”

  I sat across from her in a burgundy leather chair. Its seat was cracked and worn, and the springs inside squeaked as I sat down. “Are you going to kick me out of Shadowford?” I asked.

  “Did you do something wrong?” She narrowed her eyes at me.

  “No. But I thought—”

  “If you didn't break any rules, then I don't see a need to let you go,” she said. “Calm down, girl, and have some water. You look like you're about to pass out.”

  She had an ivory teacup on the desk in front of her and filled it with water from an open water bottle in her desk. She pushed the cup toward me and nodded expectantly. With trembling hands, I took the cup and raised it to my lips. The water tasted sweet and smelled faintly like rose-petals. I took only a slight sip, then set the cup down.

  “Thank you.”

  “Fine, fine,” she said. “I'm sure you're exhausted after such a tough day. Why don't you go on upstairs and get ready for bed. We can talk about this in the morning. It's possible the authorities will want to talk to you again, but I feel confident that they have ruled you out as a suspect.”

  Her words weren't comforting. There was an impersonal edge to her voice that made me feel uneasy.

  I managed to avoid the other girls on the way up to my room. As soon as I was closed inside, I wedged my shoe under the door and went into the bathroom to wash my face. I let the water run in the sink until it was hot and steam poured into the room. I was so tired all of a sudden. My legs felt like jelly and the light was brighter than I remembered it. Shaking it off as best I could, I leaned down to splash water on my face. When I came up, the world went fuzzy.

  I steadied myself against the sink and closed my eyes. I was just tired, that was all. It had been a long day. An emotional day. I just needed some sleep. But when I opened my eyes again, my vision was worse. I could barely make out my own image in the mirror. I reached over and rubbed at it with my hand, wiping away the steam, but I lost my balance and stumbled backward against the wall.

  Panic seized me as my legs gave out. I fell to the floor. My face smacked against the cold, hard tile. My eyelids were so heavy. I fought it as hard as I could, but the darkness won out, pulling me into its arms and dragging me under.

  I Must Be Dreaming

  My entire body burned with fever. I curled into a little ball and begged for it to stop. My eyelids felt like they were glued shut and sweat slid down the back of my neck. Inside my head, my thoughts swam around in circles, never finding a clear focus. I couldn't tell if I was awake or asleep and every time I almost climbed up into consciousness, the darkness would pull me back down.

  Where was I?

  My eyes fluttered open slightly, then closed again. It was dark. The sound of water dripped in the distance, almost echoing in my head as though I were inside a cave. Or a dungeon.

  I must be dreaming.

  There was no sense of time. There was only the endless trembling of my body against a cold, hard surface.

  The sound of chanting jarred me awake. A light rose up in the darkness. A single flame. Someone took my hand and it was so warm. I opened my mouth to ask them for a blanket, but I didn't have a voice. I tried to swallow but my mouth felt like a sea of sand.

  I saw the glint of silver overhead, then felt a searing pain on my palm. I tried to jerk away. To sit up. To cry out. But I was powerless and weak. Warm blood trickled down my hand and onto my wrist and the chanting continued. In the dim light, a woman with flowing black hair stood over me. Her face was covered with a shiny black mask. Her eyes glowed a deep crimson.

  “She is the one,” the woman said. “The Prima has finally come home.”

  The chanting grew louder all around me. It took every ounce of my strength to open my eyes wider and lift my head. Dark shadows swirled around the room like bats and I cried out in fear.

  The woman put her hand over my eyes and my world went black. A flash of events passed behind my darkened lids, pulled from within me. Mrs. Shadowford's rattling teacup. Screams in the middle of the night. Fainting near the statue. Losing my necklace.

  Panic reached up to tear at my throat. I wanted it to stop, but had no control. Tori at the stadium that night. Being questioned at the station. Meeting Lark's mother. And Jackson. His kiss was warm on my lips, then gone in an instant. Each memory slipped through my brain like water through my fingertips.

  Is this what it's like to die?

  I felt the cool comfort of my sapphire pendant as it was placed around my n
eck. I lifted my hand to the stone, then surrendered to the shadows.

  I Wasn't Supposed To Forget

  Light streamed in through the open curtains, and I pulled the comforter over my head to block the pain of it.

  “Harper? Are you awake?”

  Reluctantly, I pushed aside the fabric and squinted up at the figure above my bed. “Agnes?”

  “You're awake! How are you feeling?” Agnes didn't wait for an answer. Her footsteps clattered across the room toward the door. “Ella Mae? Harper's awake!”

  More footsteps on the stairs. I closed my eyes. Simply opening them made me tired. The inside of my head felt dense and fuzzy, as if someone had stuffed a thousand cotton balls inside.

  “Harper, honey, how are you feeling?” Ella Mae this time. Her worried face appeared as she sat down in a chair next to my bed. She placed a cool wet cloth on my forehead.

  “That feels nice,” I said. My voice didn't sound like my own. It was scratchy and hoarse. What the hell happened to me? The last thing I remembered... I couldn't even figure out what was real and what wasn't. Thinking about it too hard sent a stab of pain through my temple.

  “We were so worried about you. You have no idea,” Agnes said. She sat at the foot of the bed and placed her hand on my covered feet.

  “Here, drink some water.” Ella Mae propped me up on a bunch of pillows, then handed me a small glass of ice water.

  The water was so cold on my throat it almost burned. “Thank you,” I said. Some of the raspy sound was already gone. I cleared my throat and drank some more.

  “There is so much to tell you,” Agnes said. She bounced a little on the bed and the room went temporarily spinning.

  I pressed my hands against the mattress, trying to make it stop.

  “Agnes, stop bouncing. You're gonna make her sick,” Ella Mae said.

  When I opened my eyes, I noticed Courtney had joined Agnes at the foot of the bed. She smiled shyly up at me, her blonde hair falling into her face. Mary Anne stood silently in the doorway. When I looked her way, she turned and left.

  “What happened to me?” I asked.

  “You've been sick with the flu,” Ella Mae said, replacing the warm cloth on my head with a fresh cool one. She put a thermometer in my mouth and told me to keep my mouth closed. “You've been in here running in and out of sleep for the past five days.”

  “Five days,” I mumbled, talking around the thermometer. How could I have been sleeping for nearly an entire week? I suddenly felt very hot. Almost claustrophobic. Why couldn't I remember what happened? I threw the covers off my legs and tried to stand up.

  “Calm down,” Ella Mae said. “You don't want to wear yourself out when you just woke up. Agnes, go down to the kitchen and get some juice and toast.”

  The room spun violently and I fell back onto the pillows. Ella Mae lifted my legs onto the bed and covered them back up. I was so incredibly tired, but I knew it was important that I remember. But remember what? I closed my eyes and tried to think. School. Something terrible happened. Tori Fairchild was dead. I remembered sitting in class when the news came about her death. But then what? Everything grew dim after that. I lifted my hand up to touch my mother's sapphire pendant.

  For a moment, I was worried it wouldn't be there. But that was silly, right? I always wore her necklace. At the back of my mind, though, a memory tugged at me.

  But the necklace was there where I expected it to be. I curled my fingers around it and ran the pendant back and forth along the silver chain.

  Ella Mae took the thermometer from my mouth and shook her head. “You've still got a fever, but it's not as bad as it was before. I think you're still going to need a couple of days at home before you go back to school. I'll talk to Mrs. Shadowford about it. You just rest up, okay? Agnes'll bring you something to eat, and I want you to try and get something down. You need to start building your strength up again.”

  I nodded and closed my eyes. Sleep threatened to suck me back down, but I knew there was something more to remember. Something important that I wasn't supposed to forget. But it wouldn't come to me.

  Behind my eyelids, all I could see was the glowing light of a single candle. I heard voices chanting. A silver knife sliced into my hand. I gasped and sat up in bed, eyes wide open. The room was darker now that the sun had gone down. Agnes had left the juice and toast on the side table by my bed, but that must have been hours ago. Had I been dreaming?

  I lifted my hand. A fresh bandage was taped around my palm. With my other hand, I pulled off the tape and unwrapped the gauze. There, in the middle of my palm, still throbbing slightly, was a diagonal cut that ran the length of my hand.

  Claire

  I spent the rest of the weekend in bed. On the following Monday, the other girls were at school during the day and Ella Mae had stuff to do around the house, so I stayed in my room or went downstairs to play games on the laptop. My body slowly recovered from the illness. With each day, I could feel my strength returning.

  By day three, I was bored out of my mind. I started to roam around the mansion, looking at which books they had on the shelves and what paintings were on the walls. Since I had first come to Shadowford, I hadn't spent much time looking around and really paying attention to the house itself. It was by far the most beautiful place I had ever lived. And it was huge.

  The first floor was pretty boring as far as exploration goes. Since I wasn't allowed into Mrs. Shadowford's suite of rooms, that left the same old rooms we all moved around in every day. I glanced up the narrow staircase leading to the third floor and bit my lip. Ella Mae had told me not to go up there, but she was all the way downstairs and no one was home.

  I stepped gingerly onto the staircase and made my way up to the door. One of the stairs near the top creaked and I froze, waiting to see if Ella Mae would call out to me. When she didn't, I kept going. At the top, I pushed open the painted blue door and glanced inside. There was only a single room up there, and it was full of old boxes. Why would they care if anyone came up here? Not finding any big secret, I went back downstairs.

  The second floor was more interesting. In addition to the four bedrooms we girls stayed in, there were four other empty bedrooms.

  In the first empty room, I didn't find anything of interest. Dust. That was pretty much it. But the second room was a different story. At first, it seemed like the other. Dusty and ancient. The floral bedspread was perfectly made up. The windows were shut tight. But when I sat down on the bed, I felt the sudden urge to look under it. I got down on my hands and knees. When I lifted the bed-skirt, little dust bunnies fluttered through the air and I coughed.

  “You okay, Miss Harper?” Ella Mae called up. Man, how did she even hear me from down there?

  “Yes ma'am,” I said back. It was still a struggle to raise my voice too much.

  I lifted the bed-skirt again and peered under the bed. A sliver of light shone through from the other side and there, near the wall, I saw something. A small box, maybe?

  In order to get to it, I had to practically crawl underneath the bed. If anyone had walked into the room, they would have only seen the bottom half of my body sticking out. I stretched my arm and reached forward, finally grasping the elusive object.

  Not a box. A picture frame.

  A small silver double frame with a hinge that let it open and close. I sat on the hard wood floor, covered in dust, and opened the frame. On one side, a young woman with long brown hair piled on top of her head in a complicated twist of knots and braids. It was an old picture. So old that the color had long faded into browns and tans. The woman looked vaguely familiar. But that was sort of impossible, wasn't it?

  In the second frame was a much newer picture of a group of girls in cheerleading uniforms. The uniforms were different from the kind the cheerleaders wore now, but they were still the same blue and black Demon colors. I studied the faces of the girls, then gasped. The one in the middle—the tall girl with blonde wavy hair—was my mother.

  I wa
s sure of it.

  My heartbeat raced. How was this possible? I couldn't wrap my mind around it. I stood and moved to the window, wanting to get a better look in the light.

  “Harper?” Ella Mae's voice at the bottom of the stairs.

  Shit. There was no clear and fast rule about coming into these deserted rooms, but intuition told me they wouldn't want me in here. Not if they knew this picture had been left behind.

  I shoved the bulky frame into the waistband of my sweatpants and quickly made my way to the top of the stairs. “Yes?”

  “Are you all right? I thought I heard you coughing. Do you need anything?”

  I shook my head. “No, I'm fine. Just had an itch in my throat.”

  “You look a little bit flushed,” she said. Her hand gripped the banister like she was about to come upstairs and check on me. But I didn't want her up here. I needed more time to look around. Plus, I didn't want her to find the picture frame.

  “Really, I'm fine. I just heard you calling and ran out here too fast. I'll just go lay down for a bit.”

  She hesitated, then looked back toward the kitchen. No doubt she still had a lot of work to do before the others got home from school. “All right. But you call down if you need anything.”

  “I will,” I said.

  Back in my own room, I sat on my bed and took out the small frame. Carefully, I took it apart, separating the black velvet backing from the frame. The pictures were stuck to the glass inside, so I had to be very gentle with them. After a little bit of prodding, they both finally came loose.

  On the back of the first picture, I could barely make out the hand-written words. Probably a name and date, but it was too smudged and faded to see. The picture of the cheerleaders was much clearer. In neat print, it read: Daneka, Julie, Claire, Mazie, and Audrey. The date was almost exactly twenty years ago.