Downcast (31 page)

No, my first time had been a teeth-clenching, sheet-gripping, try-not-to-cry experience. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't have traded it for anything, and Haley was as gentle and considerate as he could be under the circumstances.

We touched and talked in the afterglow until enough time had passed, and we were ready again. Once again, Haley made sure I was blissed out before anything else happened. This time, I was raw and sore, but it didn't hurt nearly as bad as the first time. We agreed that practice would make perfect, and that we were both perfectionists.

When we finally drifted off, we had rolled apart on the bed, too hot and sweaty to be too close. Yet, we still found a way to touch with my hand on his shoulder and his fingertips brushing my hip.

"You don't know how much I've wanted to see you just like that."

Haley's voice from the doorway startled me out of my reverie.

"Like what?" I asked.

"Sleepy, satisfied, and smiling," he replied. "All because you love me, and you let me love you."

I looked down, pleased but a little embarrassed. He came over to the bed with a towel and a pile of my clean clothes.

"I’m sorry to make you get up, my love," he said, growing serious again. "But, we have to go. The situation has worsened."

"How?" My stomach did a flip-flop of dread.

"In so many ways," Haley replied with a frustrated growl. "I woke Helen and Zack, and they are getting ready."

"Ready for what? Do I want to know that answer?"

"We have to go back into town."

"Katie Jones?"

"Yes, but that's not all."

"Wait, that’s right. You said something about the Furies. What are the Furies?"

"Get ready, and I will explain everything on the way. I'm sure Helen will want to know as well."

Nasty reality came like a bucket of cold water, and I was beginning to feel the numbness I now knew was associated with panic. Every which way my thoughts turned, I hit a brick wall. I couldn't think through anything to a solution, or even a next step. Every problem only had a worst case scenario for an ending.

Haley kissed me and went downstairs, leaving me to shower and change.

Downstairs, I noticed the clock on the wall said it was all of 4:20 a.m. Awesome. Not only was my world crashing down around me, but it was happening at the ass-crack of dawn.

"Pop Tarts?" Helen sniffed as she rifled through the kitchen pantry. "Is that all you have for breakfast food?"

"Uh, there's some bacon in the fridge, I think." Zack replied, hanging back at a safe distance as Helen tore through boxes and cans in search of anything else. Cerberus was curled up on a giant leather ottoman, snoring softly.

Haley turned on the television.

"Nothing," he snapped flipping through the local channels and then the cable news. “The news doesn’t have anything about Darbyfield.”

"How can that be?" Helen demanded, tossing me a pack of strawberry Pop Tarts.

“I don’t know, and that worries me. A lot.”

“Nothing online either,” Zack added, scrolling through his phone.

“Has anybody tried calling Morris?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Helen answered. “No luck. I tried the restaurant and his apartment. But, I figure the flood messed up his cell phone. It probably also screwed up all the electricity in town, too, so the phone lines won’t be working.”

“Did you reach your parents?” I hated asking that question because I knew she’d hate answering it, but I couldn’t help worry about them a little bit. After all, I had grown up around them.

“Dad’s still at the hospital,” she replied curtly. “Davy said he and Mom are still at home.”

There was an awkward silence as Zack squeezed her shoulder, and she shook it off and gave him a defiant glare.

“So,” she said, changing the subject. “Anyone want to tell me why the hell we’re up at dawn?”

"The Furies have left the Underworld," Haley said.

Helen stared at him. “The Furies are real, too? And, how do you know they’ve left the Underworld?”

"I am the ruler of the Underworld, which is basically the space that exists after life ends. The Furies belong to this domain. I can feel everything that happens in that realm, who comes, who goes—few do, but that's beside the point. The Furies are some of the only creatures that can come and go at will between the planes of the living and the dead."

"Is this a good time to ask what the Furies do?" I piped up nervously, abandoning my untoasted Pop Tart, my appetite totally gone.

"I read about them yesterday," Helen answered. "They are avengers. People go to them for vengeance against oath-breakers and specifically ungrateful children. Oh."

There was a moment of weighty silence as we all looked at each other.

"The Furies are known for being three things," Haley said. "They are unceasing, grudging, and bent on vengeful destruction."

After a moment of consideration, Helen asked, "Is there a way to stop them?"

"No," Zack and Haley replied in unison.

Helen and I looked at each other. My brain was full. She looked pissed.

"I'm going to wake Cerberus," Helen announced. "I'll meet you guys at the car."

"You're bringing the dog?" Zack whined. "Why?"

"I just have a feeling," Helen replied.

She went over to the dogs, and I turned to Zack and Haley.

"Helen has never just 'had a feeling' before," I stated grimly.

"So?" Zack asked.

"That means she has no clue what to do, which means we're screwed."

"Oh."

Haley shook his head and led us out the door to where the two stolen cars sat under a light blanket of snow. The golden light from inside the house cast long blue shadows around us in the pre-dawn.

"Which car should we take?" Haley asked with a curl of distaste to his lip.

"We're going down for grand theft auto whichever one we do," Zack replied.

Cerberus bounded out of the house ahead of Helen, all three of him doing their business and then proceeding to romp and roll in the clean snow, tongues hanging out to the side in three identically ridiculous grins.

I looked at Helen with a skeptical eyebrow.

She shrugged, and I guess I saw the sense of it as we drove away.

Why not bring the dogs? Things couldn't get much worse.

Scratch that. They probably could and would.

THERE'S A MOMENT
when the Earth's rotation crests in the night and finally begins another spin toward the sun. You can only tell if you're really paying attention because there's just the smallest shift in the intense dark blue of the night sky.

I noticed it that morning because not only was I reluctantly wide awake, but also because the drive to Darbyfield was completely silent, with everyone's emotions stretched tight. There was nothing to do but watch the sky.

I sat in the back seat with Helen and Cerberus. Haley drove, and Zack sat shotgun. Zack and I would have traded places except for the fact that Cerberus tried to bite him when he got in next to Helen.

Pausing in her absent petting of the three sleepy black heads in her lap, Helen sniffed, frowned, then sniffed again.

"Do you smell something?" she asked, her best I Smell Something And You Had Better Smell It Too expression wasted on Haley and Zack since they didn't turn around to look at her.

I sniffed, but then I had to take a much longer, less ladylike sniff to get a hint of what Helen was talking about.

"Something's burning," Zack said. "Smells like wood."

"There's smoke up ahead," Haley said.

"I can't see anything," I remarked. "Are you sure it's not the mist we came through going down the mountain?"

"I can see better in the dark," he replied with a ghost of a laugh in his voice.

"Wait, I think I can see it, too," Zack said.

"I wish my cell phone hadn't died in the flood," Helen snapped. "Not knowing what's going on is completely aggravating."

"You're beautiful when you're aggravated," Zack said smoothly, turning around to smirk at her, only to be met with three mouthfuls of teeth, fully-bared and not holding back on the growls.

"I like your dog, Haley," Helen said absently, scratching the dogs who trampled back into her lap, turned in three synchronized circles, and curled up.

"Is that a glow up ahead?" I exclaimed, reaching between Zack and Haley to point.

"I don't see anything," Haley said, frowning.

"It's totally there," I insisted. "I can see light better than you can."

That may not have been totally true, but in any case, it got wan smiles from everyone.

"The smell is getting stronger," Helen pointed out. "There must be a forest fire."

"We're also getting close to the town," Haley added, fiddling with the controls to recirculate the air inside the car.

I dug my fingernails into the worn velour of Zack's seat back and leaned forward to look out the window. Within just a minute or two, all we could see was smoke, and the air in the car started to look a little hazy.

There was a deafening crack, a shower of sparks, and the impact of something hitting the roof of the car.

The rear window shattered, and a giant burning branch punched a hole in the roof of the car, impaling the seat between me and Helen. We screamed, even as Haley and Zack yelled our names in panic. The car instantly filled with smoke, cutting off our cries as we now had to work just to breathe.

Haley jerked the car to one side to avoid another falling tree full of flames, this one visible for a split second, through the smoke, before it smashed into the road in front of us.

He floored it and continued to speed down the road, even with part of a burning tree sticking into the car.

"What are you doing?" Helen gasped as she and I used our jackets to try and put out the smoldering branch between us.

"We'll die of smoke inhalation if we abandon the car and try to make it the rest of the way into town on foot!" Haley called back. "I'm trying to get us as close as possible, as fast as possible!"

"Don't talk!" Zack ordered. "Save your air. Cover your noses and mouths."

Helen and I pulled our shirts over our noses, and Zack gave Helen his jacket to wrap around Cerberus, whose pathetic little coughs were worrying me almost more than my own limited oxygen.

Fires raged openly around us, burning through the trees and eating up the scattering of houses on the edge town. There was no point in looking out the window now because everything was either flame or smoke.

I began to hear sirens and alarms of all kinds, which meant we had to be getting closer to the center of town.

Ironically, in the end, it wasn't the tree sticking out of the car that made us stop. The car simply ran out of gas, sputtering to a halt and rolling a few feet before stopping altogether.

It didn't take more than a second for all of us to get out of the car. The smoke made me dizzy and my lungs hurt, but I recognized the building we had pulled up next to, and I knew we were back in the center of the town.

Or what was left of it.

Darbyfield looked like it had auditioned for the part of “Small Town Destroyed by Aliens” in some horror movie. Buildings were smashed in and crumbled, and flood water still sloshed over the streets. Electrical transformers burned and smoked, and the entire town was dark. No streetlights, no lights in the windows of houses. No dingy backlit signs.

The thing I noticed the most was that the air was blisteringly hot. It made my skin prickle with an uncomfortable burning sensation. I couldn't remember Darbyfield having ever been so hot before. Maybe the fires all around were making it hotter, but this heat felt like it had a searching edge to it, and I was terrified that I knew the cause of it all. I had felt the heat of my mom’s rage before without realizing what it was. Now, I knew that her anger had settled like the unforgiving grip of the August sun over the town.

"We're not that far from Morris' restaurant," Helen coughed out, holding Cerberus in her arms above the water. "Only a few blocks. Come on."

Shakily, I fell into step behind her, Haley looping my arm through his to steady me as we picked our way through the still-smoldering debris and deep, murky pools of flood water.

The Golden Dragon looked like it had been ground zero for destruction, and I guess it was, since that's where I had been when all of this had started. The entire front of the restaurant had been smashed in, and smoke billowed out of the windows from the apartments above it, where Morris and his mother and uncle lived.

"If Morris isn't okay, someone is going to be very, very sorry," Helen announced between gritted teeth.

"Get in line," I replied, my eyes filling with tears of rage and sorrow at the destruction of all that Morris and his family had worked for.

"Let me go in first," Zack said, almost apologetically. "Just in case something is waiting for us inside."

I shot Zack a look, knowing exactly what he meant. The Furies could be waiting. So could my mother.

He disappeared into the smoky restaurant, and a few moments later gave the all clear. Carefully, we followed him through the tangle of dangling, snapping live wires and a thicket of overturned chairs and tables. We went all the way back to the kitchen. I searched the steaming gloom for any sign of life.

"Look!" I exclaimed, pointing at two shadowy figures hunched over on the floor. "In the corner, over there!"

"Morris!" Helen cried out, letting Cerberus jump out of her arms as she ran over to him.

I was right behind her, along with Haley and Zack.

"Oh, wow," Morris gasped, flicking on a flashlight. "It's you guys. I thought it was them, having come back."

"The Furies were here?" Haley asked, his voice steely with anger.

"Yeah," Morris answered shakily. For a moment, it looked like he was going to say something more, but he simply pressed his lips together tightly, and I caught sight of tears in his eyes.

"They came, they left, they got the t-shirt," said a voice from the floor.

Morris turned the light on Katie Jones, who sat crumpled and bleeding against the wall.

"Did you fight them?" Zack demanded like an angry, over-protective big brother.