The Possessed

by L. J. Smith

Chapter 7

 

  "No," Gabriel snarled. "We will not tell Rob - anything. "

  Kaitlyn was bewildered. "But - the others have to know - "

  "They don't have to know. They're not my keepers. "

  "Gabriel, they'll want to know. They care about you, too. And Rob may be able to help you. "

  "I don't want his help. "

  It was said flatly, and with absolute finality. Kaitlyn realized that on this issue Gabriel was inflexible, and there was no use in arguing.

  He went on anyway, just in case she needed convincing. "Of course, I can't stop you from telling them," he said, releasing her arm and giving a sudden disarming smile. "But if you do I'm afraid I'll have to leave this little expedition. . . and our group. . . permanently. "

  Kaitlyn rubbed her arm. "All right, Gabriel. I get the point. And," she added with sudden conviction, "I'll still help you. But you've got to let me help. You've got to tell me when you're feeling - like you did tonight. You've got to come to me, instead of wandering around looking for girls to attack. "

  Gabriel's expression was suddenly bleak. "Maybe I don't want your help, either," he said stonily. Then he burst out, "How long do you think you can keep this up? This donation? Even a psychic doesn't have endless energy. What if you get weak?"

  That's why I wanted to tell Rob, Kaitlyn thought, but she knew better than to start debating again. She simply said, "We'll deal with that when we come to it. " She tried to hide the flicker of unease inside her.

  What would they do - if Gabriel had one of these fits and she was too weak to help him? He'd kill an ordinary person, drain him dry.

  Think about it later, she decided. And then pulled out the old hope, the one that had been comforting her since they'd left the Institute.

  "Maybe the people in the white house can help," she said. "Maybe they'll know a way to cure you - undo what the crystal did. "

  "If it was the crystal," Gabriel said. With a faint self-mocking smile he added, "It seems to me that we're expecting a lot from these people in the white house. "

  That's because we don't have any other hope. Kaitlyn didn't say it, but she knew Gabriel understood.

  She and Gabriel sometimes understood each other too well.

  "Let's get this girl back. What car did she come from?" she asked, turning away from those ironic dark gray eyes.

  They put the girl back in the Cadillac. According to Gabriel, she'd been alone, which was fortunate.

  Nobody would have noticed she was missing, or called the police. And Gabriel said that she'd never seen him - he'd come up behind her and put her to sleep with one touch of his mind.

  "I seem to be developing new talents by the hour," he said and smiled.

  Kaitlyn wasn't amused, but she had to admit to some relief. The girl would just think she'd fallen asleep and would drive away never knowing what had happened to her. Or at least that was what Kait hoped.

  "You'd better get in the van with the rest of us," she said. "You need sleep. "

  Gabriel didn't object. A few minutes later he was settling down in the other bucket seat, while Kait was creeping into the back of the van again.

  I need sleep, too, she thought, snuggling in beside Rob's warm body with a feeling of gratitude. And, please, please, I don't want any more dreams.

  When Kaitlyn woke again, it was daylight. Rob was sitting up, and all around her were the noises of people stirring and yawning.

  "How is everybody?" Rob asked. His blond hair was tousled and he looked terribly young, Kaitlyn thought. Young and vulnerable when you compared his sleepy golden eyes to the dark gray ones she'd seen last night. . .

  "Kinked up," Lewis moaned from the front. He was wriggling his shoulders. Kaitlyn had a few kinks herself, and she saw that Gabriel was stretching cautiously.

  "You'll be fine," Anna said and got up. She opened the side door and jumped lightly out, with no sign of stiffness.

  "I feel like I swallowed a fuzz ball," Rob said, running his tongue over his teeth. "Does anybody - "

  Oh, my God. What is it?

  The exclamation came from outside the van, from Anna. The four inside immediately broke off what they were doing and started for the door.

  What's wrong, Anna? Kaitlyn thought even before she got out.

  I've never seen anything like it.

  Anna's grave dark eyes were wide, fixed on the van itself. Kaitlyn turned and looked, but at first couldn't quite grasp what she was seeing. It looked almost beautiful at first.

  The entire van was swathed with glittering ribbons - as if someone had painted stripes of shining stuff all over it, even over the windows. In the crisp morning light the stripes took on rainbow colors. There were hundreds of the bands, crossing and recrossing.

  And yet it wasn't beautiful, really. It evoked a feeling of revulsion in Kait. When she looked closely at one of the stripes, she saw it was tacky. . . slimy, almost. Like. . . like mucus. . .

  "Slug trails!" Rob said and pulled Kaitlyn away from the van.

  Kaitlyn's stomach lurched. She was glad she hadn't eaten more for dinner last night.

  "Slug trails - but it can't be," Gabriel said, sounding angry. "Look around you - there's no sign of a trail anywhere but on the van. "

  It was true. Kaitlyn swallowed and said, "I've never seen a slug big enough to leave a trail like that. "

  "I have, in Planet of the Giant Gastropods," Lewis said.

  "I have, too, in my backyard," Anna said. She nodded when the others looked at her. "I'm serious. In Puget Sound there are slugs that big, banana slugs. Some people eat them. "

  "Thank you for sharing that with us," Kaitlyn whispered, stomach lurching again.

  Gabriel still looked angry. "How did they get there?" he demanded, as if Anna had put them there personally. "And why aren't there any on those cars?" He pointed toward a gray Buick parked nearby, and the middle-aged couple in the Buick looked at him curiously.

  "Leave her alone. She doesn't know," Rob said before Anna could answer.

  "Do you?"

  Rob slanted a dangerous golden glare at Gabriel and started to shake his head. Then he stopped and looked thoughtful. He turned to the van again, frowning.

  "It could be - "

  "What?" Kaitlyn asked.

  Rob shook his head slowly. In the early sunlight he looked like a ruffled golden angel. "Oh, nothing," he said and shrugged.

  Kait had the feeling that he was suppressing something, and the next minute he gave her a half-laughing look, as if to say she wasn't the only one who could hide things in the web.

  A nasty stubborn angel, Kait thought, and Rob grinned.

  "Come on, let's get out of this place," he said, turning to the others, who were looking displeased. "It's just slug stuff. Let's find a car wash. "

  Until that moment Kaitlyn had forgotten her dream about the colorless people. The episode with Gabriel had swamped it, somehow, driving it back into her subconscious. But now, suddenly, she remembered, and she looked at the van sharply.

  "Heads up!" Lewis hissed before she could say anything. "It's the law!"

  A police car was cruising into the rest stop. Kaitlyn's heart gave one thump, and then she was following the others in a quick but orderly retreat into the van.

  Just keep your heads down and stay calm, Rob told them. Pretend you're talking to each other.

  "A lot of good that's going to do," Gabriel said acidly.

  The police car drove past them. Kait couldn't help glancing sideways at it. A uniformed woman in the passenger seat glanced up at the same moment, and for an instant their eyes met.

  Kaitlyn's breath stopped. She only hoped her face was as utterly blank as her mind felt. If that policewoman saw her terror. . .

  The car cruised on.

  Kait's could feel her pulse in her throat. Somebody start driving, she thought. Fast but casual. Rob was already sliding into th
e driver's seat.

  Kaitlyn was still terrified the police car would turn around, or follow them when they left. But it didn't. It seemed to have stopped at the other end of the rest stop.

  Where the white Cadillac was, Kait's mind supplied, and she tried to squash the thought and the memories it evoked instantly. She didn't dare look at Gabriel or let herself wonder if the curly haired girl had remembered something after all.

  "Don't be scared," Lewis said when they were once again on Highway 5. He'd felt her turmoil even if he didn't know the reason. "We're okay now. "

  Kaitlyn gave him a watery smile.

  They found a do-it-yourself car wash in a town called Grants Pass, and Kaitlyn disbursed ninety-nine cents from their funds to buy paper towels. She also paid for breakfast burritos and coffee at a McDonald's, since none of them could face peanut butter this early in the morning.

  "And now we should cut over to the coast," Rob said when they were done eating. They'd washed themselves as well as the car at the car wash, a novel experience that Kait wasn't sure she wanted to repeat.

  "Well, you have two choices," said Lewis, who had by default become the Keeper of the Map. "There's a road that goes through the Siskiyou National Forest, and then a little north of that there's a regular highway. "

  After a short discussion they decided on the highway. As Anna said, the white house might be surrounded by trees, but it wasn't in a landlocked forest. It was someplace where the ocean came between two wooded arms of land.

  "Some place called Griffin's Pit," Lewis said, his eyes crinkling as he looked at Kait.

  "We might try looking that up in a library somewhere," Rob said, steering the van back to the freeway.

  "That and all the other variations we can think of. "

  "Maybe we'll just find the place first," Kaitlyn said wistfully.

  But at Coos Bay, where the highway finally reached the coast, she slumped and shook her head.

  "Not north enough," she said and glanced at Anna for confirmation.

  Anna was nodding resignedly. They all stood around the van, staring down at the ocean. It was vast and blue and sparkling - and wrong. Not at all like the water they'd seen in the dream.

  "It's way too civilized," Anna said. She pointed to a large freighter loaded with logs that was passing through the bay entrance. "See that? It's putting junk in the water - oil or gasoline or something - and the water we saw wasn't like that. It wasn't traveled like this. It felt clean. "

  "Felt clean," Gabriel repeated, almost sneering.

  "Yes," Kaitlyn said. "It did. And look at those sand dunes. Did anybody see sand in the dream?"

  "No. " Rob sighed. "Okay, back in the van. Yukon ho. "

  "Can't we eat first?" Lewis pleaded. It had taken them until noon to get to the bay.

  "Eat while we drive," Rob said. In the van Kaitlyn made and passed out peanut butter sandwiches.

  They chewed on them apathetically, looking out the windows. The view as they drove north up the Oregon coast was not inspiring.

  "Sand," Lewis said after half an hour. "I never knew there was so much sand in the world. "

  The dunes seemed endless. They were huge and rolling, sometimes blocking off the view of the ocean.

  In places they were hundreds of feet high.

  "How horrible," Kaitlyn said suddenly. In the sand she could see distant trees - buried trees. Only the top third of their trunks emerged from the dune, standing but quite dead. It was as if the dunes had swallowed a forest. . . and digested it.

  "Jeez, there's even vultures circling," Lewis said, eyeing a large bird.

  "That's an osprey," Anna said almost unkindly.

  Kait glanced at her, then sat back, relapsing into silence. She felt depressed, and she didn't know if it was the dunes, the prospect of endless traveling to an unknown destination, or the peanut butter sandwiches.

  Everyone else was silent, too. There was a heavy feeling to the air. Oppressive. Laced with something Kaitlyn couldn't quite put her finger on. . .

  "Oh, come on," she said, half aloud. "Cheer up, everybody. This is only our second day. " She groped in her mind for an interesting topic to distract them. After a moment she found one, not only interesting but slightly dangerous. Oh, well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

  "So, Lewis, about this chi stuff," she said. He glanced at her lethargically. "So, I was wondering, how much can somebody afford to lose before they get sick?"

  She could see Gabriel stiffen in the front passenger seat.

  "Um," Lewis said. "It depends. Some people have a lot - they generate it all the time. If you're healthy you do that, and it just kind of flows freely inside you, without any blocks. Through strange channels. "

  Kaitlyn laughed. "Through what?"

  "Strange channels. Really. That's what my grandfather called some of the arteries the chi runs through.

  He was a master of chi gong - that's the art of manipulating chi, kind of like what Rob does when he heals. "

  Gabriel by now was deliberately not looking at Kait, all the while willing her fiercely to shut up. Unable to send a reassuring message, Kaitlyn ignored him.

  "So it's sort of like blood," she said to Lewis. "And if you lose it, you manufacture more. "

  "In the Middle Ages people thought blood was the life energy," Rob said from the driver's seat. "They thought some people had too much - that's what they had in mind when they bled you with leeches. They thought if they could drain some of the extra blood off, it would relieve the pressure; help you produce better, clearer blood afterward. But of course they were wrong - about blood. "

  He looked over his shoulder as he said it, and Kait thought his glance encompassed Gabriel as well as her. Alarm shot through her. Rob wasn't stupid. What if he'd guessed. . . ?

  Gabriel was radiating cold fury.

  "Well, that's interesting," Kait gabbled. She now wanted to find a boring topic to make them all forget this. Even silence would be fine - but Rob was speaking again.

  "Some people think that's how the legends of vampires started," he said. "With psychics that drained their victims of life energy, sekhem, chi, whatever you want to call it. Later the stories got twisted and people called it blood. "

  Kaitlyn sat frozen. It wasn't just what Rob was saying, it was the way he was saying it. His disgust and loathing filled the web.

  "I've heard legends about that, too," Anna said, and her repugnance was equally clear. "About evil shamans who live by stealing power from others. "

  "That's sick," said Lewis. "If a chi gong master did that, he'd be ostracized. It completely violates the Tao. "

  Their abhorrence was reverberating in the web, shuddering over Kaitlyn in waves. Very distantly she could sense Gabriel's stony presence.

  No wonder he didn't want them to know, she thought, knowing that no one else could sense her through the all-pervading horror and aversion. None of them can understand. They just think it's awful.

  She wished she could tell Gabriel she was sorry, but Gabriel was looking out the window, his shoulders tense.

  To Kaitlyn's vast relief, Lewis changed the subject. "And of course there are the people whose energy fields are too strong," he said with a sly look at Rob. "You know, the people you agree with even when you don't know why. The ones that put you under a spell with their charisma - their energy just knocks you out. "

  Rob's eyes in the rearview mirror were innocent. "If I see somebody like that I'll tell you," he said.

  "Sounds dangerous. "

  "It is. You can find yourself fighting evil magicians just because some nut thought it was a good idea. "

  There was an edge to Lewis's voice that showed the remark wasn't entirely benign. Kaitlyn was glad they weren't talking about vampires anymore, but discouraged when everyone lapsed into silence again.

  Something's wrong with us, she thought, and shivered.

  The silence lasted for e
ndless miles up the coast. The dunes ran out eventually and were replaced by black basalt headlands that plunged down to the sea. Huge waves crashed around strange rocks rising like monoliths out of the water.

  At one point they passed a deep fissure in the cliffs, where the pounding sea had whipped the water into a froth like cream.

  "Devil's Churn," Lewis said sepulchrally, raising his head from the map.

  "Looks like it," Kaitlyn said. She meant to sound lighthearted, but somehow it came out grim.

  Silence again. They passed offshore islands, but these were inhabited only by gulls and other birds. No trees, no white house. Kaitlyn shivered again.

  "We're never going to find it," Lewis said.

  This was so unlike him that Kait felt only surprise, but Anna turned sharply. "I wish you wouldn't be so pessimistic. Or if you have to be, I wish you'd keep your opinions to yourself!"

  Kaitlyn's jaw dropped. The next moment she felt a rush of protective anger. "You don't have to be so nasty to him," she told Anna heatedly. "Just because you're so - so stoic all the time. . . " She stopped and almost bit her tongue. What had made her say that?

  Hurt flashed in Anna's dark eyes. Lewis scowled. "I can fight my own battles," he said. "You're always jumping in. "

  "Yes, she's a real little do-gooder," Gabriel said from the front.

  Rage exploded in Kaitlyn. "And you're a coldblooded snake!" she shouted. Gabriel gave her a brilliant, unsettling smile.

  "She got that one right, anyway," Rob said. The van was swerving erratically. Rob was looking at Gabriel rather than at the road. "And you shut up, Lewis, if you know what's good for you. "

  "I think you're all horrible," Anna gasped. She seemed on the verge of tears. "And I've had it, all right?

  You can let me off here because I'm not going with you any farther. "

  Tires squealed as Rob hit the brakes. A horn blared behind them.

  "Fine," Rob said. "Get out. "