Death and the Girl Next Door (29 page)

Brooke sobbed into her mom’s jacket, then stopped suddenly, as though she’d had an epiphany. She glanced at Cameron and socked him on the arm.

He rubbed it, pretending it hurt, then said with a frown, “What’d I do?”

“That’s why my aura’s different, isn’t it?”

“Her aura?” her mom asked.

Cameron shrugged. “Yeah, but it’s not a bad different. It’s just a different.”

“Do you remember what it was like?” Glitch asked in awe.

She shook her head. “I don’t. I can’t remember a thing about it other than having bad dreams and being prayed over.” She turned to my grandparents. “You saved me.”

“No,” Grandma said, “your mom and dad saved you. If they hadn’t brought you here, you wouldn’t have survived much longer. You were barely alive as it was.”

“Unlike demons,” her dad said, “dark spirits don’t have much of an agenda other than causing pain and wreaking havoc.”

She hugged them again as I stewed in a numb, soupy kind of silence. Brooke was possessed when she moved here? I couldn’t help but wonder if she was saved before or after our throw down.

“We have maps,” the sheriff said to Jared. “We think we know where the majority of the dark spirits went. They left quite a trail to follow.”

Jared nodded. “I’ll need them.”

“Wait,” I said, putting a stop to the strategic planning committee. “We can prepare for World War Three later. What happened to Mom and Dad?” I gave my grandparents the once-over, trying very hard not to be bitter. Had they known all this time? And they let me believe they’d just disappeared?

“We’re not absolutely certain, honey,” Betty Jo said when they didn’t answer right away.

Was everyone in Riley’s Switch in on this? I felt like a complete idiot.

“From what we’ve been able to piece together,” she continued, “your father tried to close the gates while your mother tried to protect you from the dark spirits coming through. And then they were just gone.”

“That’s when it stopped,” Grandma said. “Everything stopped. And as far as we can tell, you haven’t had a vision since.”

“Are you kidding?” Glitch scoffed. “She has visions all the time.”

“What?” Grandma’s surprise quickly turned to hope. Her face brightened with it. But she was wrong about me. Everyone was wrong. They had to be.

“I have visions,” I admitted, vowing to stab Glitch later, “but they’re stupid. They don’t make sense.”

Grandma and Grandpa smiled at each other. They were going to be so disappointed.

I took in Jared from underneath my lashes. He still had a death grip on my hand, and I knew this wasn’t over. I sighed aloud and tried to fill in the blanks. “What about me?” I looked up at Grandpa. “I was taken too, wasn’t I?”

His breath hitched, and he hesitated. Then, with his posture wilting, he whispered, “Yes.”

My lids slammed shut. I knew it. Deep down inside, I knew I’d been taken just like Brooke, only I didn’t remember being prayed over like she’d been. I didn’t remember the release of freedom, the purity of being cleansed.

“We tried for a year,” Grandma said, her face despondent, forlorn. “We did everything.”

“It was like you’d absorbed it,” Grandpa said. Then he stabbed me with a look of encouragement. “You were stronger than it, pix. It never controlled you. You always controlled it.”

I took a mental inventory of everything I’d learned, including the gates of Hell opening, the impending battle, the possession. But still Jared clung to me, waiting, anticipating.

And then the truth dawned.

I closed my eyes, took a soft breath, then whispered, “It’s still in me.” When nobody argued, I opened my eyes and let reality sink in. “I’m still possessed.”

Every gaze in the room suddenly had somewhere else to be. I stood and placed my free hand over my heart, fear suddenly gripping me to a blinding degree.

“I want it out,” I said, losing the fragile hold I had on my sanity. “I want it out, now.”

“It’s too strong,” Jared said, speaking at last, his voice airy with regret. “If we exorcise it now, it will kill you. It will fracture your soul and leave you for dead. If your grandparents had succeeded, you would not be here today. And they probably wouldn’t be either.”

“But they got one out of Brooke. I don’t…” Then it hit me. The looks of despair. The air of hopelessness. I focused on what Brooke’s mom had said and stared at everyone aghast. “The man who opened the gates of Hell had the power to summon demons.” I swallowed hard. “It’s a demon. I was possessed by a demon.”

Again, no one argued.

I stumbled back, remembering the vision I’d had of Jared, the one in which he’d been fighting a demon. A huge beast with razorlike talons and sharp, shimmering teeth. “The man summoned Lucifer’s second in command to be taken by him, but he took me instead.”

“I’m so sorry, honey,” Grandpa said, his voice cracking with sorrow, “we tried everything.”

But I barely heard him. The idea of having something so heinous inside me, so incredibly evil, reminded me of the nightmares I used to have of being covered in bugs. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get them all off.

“And now you know all there is to know,” Jared said, regret thickening his voice. “You know my trespasses. If you had died, Lorelei, if you had gone to Heaven, you would have been freed. But I brought you back. I broke the law. And now you are the one who has to pay the price.”

I stood and tried to leave, suddenly unable to breathe in the cramped, crowded space, but Jared stood as well and placed a hand on the back of my chair, blocking my path.

“I told you she didn’t need to know,” Cameron said under his breath. “It’s not always better knowing the truth.”

I placed a hand on Jared’s chest. “I just need some air.”

“Lorelei,” Brooke said, her eyes saucers of shock and fear, “we can figure this out.”

Her concern crushed me. What could they do? What could any of them do?

I ducked under Jared’s arm. He didn’t stop me.

“Wait,” Glitch said. “You’re not alone, Lor. We’re in this together.”

I looked back at him. “Not this time.” When I got to the door leading to the store, it wouldn’t budge. I felt a surge of energy, as though Jared had released it, then slid it open.

“Lorelei,” Grandma said, but when I turned back to her, she wilted under my pleading stare. Clearly, she had no healing balm for demon possession.

“Don’t just let her go,” Glitch said, jumping to his feet. “Why did you release the door?”

“I didn’t,” I heard Jared say.

With hurt and despair pushing me forward, I strode through the store to the front door. As I shoved it open, I heard Cameron arguing with Jared. “Just let her be alone for a while,” he said to him.

For once we were on the same page.

THE DEVIL INSIDE

How could I not know? All this time, all these years, and I knew nothing of supernatural beings, of prophecies and secret meetings going on right under my nose. How could I not know that Brooke had been possessed? That I was still possessed? From what I’d gathered, if a dark spirit possessed someone, it could be exorcised. But if a demon possessed someone, the odds were apparently in its favor. Which sucked.

I’d planned to walk around the store and go into the woods to think, to breathe, but I made it as far as our dirt parking lot when I began replaying the past in my mind. I remembered seeing it, the gate, like a bolt of lightning that had been split down the center, hovering in the afternoon sky while night seeped out of it. Only it wasn’t night. The oily thick blackness that leaked into the bright sky was in fact hundreds of dark spirits escaping onto our plane.

I sank to my knees as the memory took hold, as I saw it from my six-year-old eyes. The bright edges of the gate, the rip in the fabric of reality. I didn’t know what it was. I remembered being utterly confused by what I was seeing and the look of panic on my parents’ faces when I described it. My father, so handsome and strong with his red hair and scraggly stubble. And my mother, so absolutely beautiful. She had long cinnamon hair. I would play with it for hours, brushing it, braiding it.

While Dad would grill his famous hot dogs or whistle a tune as he watered the grass, she would read fairy tales to me. Only they weren’t fairy tales. I realized now my parents were preparing me, telling me story after story of the legends that had been passed down for centuries, cultivated through the lineage of the prophet Arabeth. Stories of heroes and champions. And they believed I would join the ranks of such adventurers. As though it were that simple. As though I were capable.

I recoiled inside myself as my parents’ last day on earth materialized in my mind. With a burst of light, I saw us by the ruins of the ancient Pueblo missions outside Riley’s Switch. My father stood reading from a book as a gale-force wind tossed him to his knees, his strength minuscule in comparison.

“He’ll do it, pix,” Mom said as she held me tight behind a clump of bushes. “He’ll close the gates, don’t worry.”

But I was completely focused on the dark shadows that darted past us, each one nothing more than a blur before it disappeared over the hills, slithering along the ground like a vaporous snake.

Mom began chanting something, but I didn’t understand the words. She closed her eyes, clutching me to her as her hair whipped around her head in a frenzy. Then everything stopped. The wind. The noise. Mom lifted her head and looked back for a split second. An instant later, we ran. She stumbled to her feet, her hold like a vise around my waist, and headed for the car.

She spoke words of encouragement, but I knew they were just as much of a lie as the calm was. I’d looked over her shoulder. I saw what she’d seen. The splinter in the sky was now circular, the clouds around it swirling like an angry tornado. With a loud crack, the wind picked us up and threw us to the side.

Mom lost her footing and we crashed to the ground. But she didn’t give up. Crawling on her knees, she fought the windstorm with all her strength. We were almost to the car, her hand straining for the door handle when she stopped. I heard soft gasps as she disentangled my limbs and tried to literally shove me under the car. I remembered the tears staining her cheeks, her hair falling over her face, her eyes wide with uncertainty. The last word she uttered was a mere whisper.

“Hide,” she said a microsecond before she was ripped away.

I’d been clutching on to her shirt and was jerked forward with the force. I stumbled and fell, the space where she once stood so completely empty.

The winds howled around me when I crawled to my knees and looked up to search for her. But a beast stood before me instead. A monster as tall as a tree. He studied me, waiting, and my hands curled into fists. My teeth welded together as I fought the sting of my hair whipping into my eyes.

Then the strangest thing happened: He dematerialized. He became fog and I breathed him in, his essence hot and acidic. It burned my throat as I swallowed him, scorched my lungs as I inhaled until he was no longer and we were one.

“No!”

We turned and saw a man running toward us. A most curious sight, we thought.

“No!” he yelled over the wind, skidding to a stop beside us, falling to his knees. “No, I summoned you, dammit! Not her.”

He was screaming in our face and we didn’t like it. We looked over, found a stick, and decided to stab him. Part of us was surprised at how easily the stick penetrated the material of his shirt and sank into his abdomen. The other part was pleased. The dark spirits no longer rushed past us. If they got close, they would turn suddenly and head in a different direction, like fish in an aquarium. We watched as the gate in the sky closed. We watched as the wind died down and the countryside settled into complacency. We watched as the man staggered away from us, his eyes wide with fear.

And then we lay down and slept.

*   *   *

I covered my face with both hands as the memory faded. I wasn’t crying. I’d dug in my heels, set my jaw, and held that girlish reaction at bay—and yet my lashes were still saturated, salty tears still ran in rivulets down my cheeks and dripped off my chin as I peeked through my fingers and stared wide-eyed at the gravel beneath my knees.

I sat in stunned stillness. Trying to accept what had happened as reality. Failing. Grasping the edges of reason. Losing my grip. Clawing. Ripping. Sinking.

“The boss wants a word.”

A word. I frowned.

“Now.”

My line of sight slid down to land on an expensive pair of men’s shoes planted a foot apart in front of me. It traveled slowly up dark pants; a light blue shirt, half-tucked; sleeves rolled up to the elbows; and a red tie. The same red tie he wore that night in the forest.

John Dell scowled at me. “I’m sick of this place and I’m sick of you. Get in the van.” He pointed to the official Tourist Channel van parked a few feet away, sliding door open, like a mouth waiting to swallow me.

I blinked back to him. “Go to heck,” I whispered, my voice breathy and tired. It seemed all I could manage. I felt more drained now than I had when Brooke and I decided to stay up for two days straight. If there were ever a time for an energy drink, now would be it.

Before I could even think about standing up, my head whipped around and a blinding pain exploded in it. I spun and fell to the ground as the world tumbled beneath me. After taking a moment to orient myself, I struggled onto my hands and knees, then watched in awe as blood dripped from my head onto the powdery earth below.

And quite frankly, I’d had just about enough of it.

I crawled onto one knee and turned on him. Slipping into my best glower, I lowered my voice, controlled the tone and inflection of every word, every syllable, striving to make myself sound menacing, as I had only days earlier with Glitch. “Do you have any idea what I’m capable of?”

His eyes widened a fraction of an inch before he caught himself and narrowed them on me in suspicion. “Besides painting your nails?”

He’d hit me with the butt of a knife he had wrapped within his meaty grasp. The knife looked old. Ceremonial. Which couldn’t be good.

“Please,” I scoffed. “Why do you think the boss wants me? Wait, he didn’t tell you, did he?” When the man hesitated, I continued. “How do you think I survived a two-ton truck slamming into me, you idiot?” I started to stand, but the world tilted to the left, so I stayed put and continued the menacing bit. This could actually work if one of two things proved true: I had some really cool superpower I’d never known about or John Dell had an unnatural fear of short pixie chicks with unruly hair.