Tattoo #1: Tattoo (10 page)

Spider. End. Soul. "What if you combine the combinations?" Delia was the first to recover her voice. Lionel looked at her, surprised. "I hadn't tried that," he said, "but with six combinations there and with the number of archaic languages possible, it could take quite a bit of time" I scratched my fingernail lightly over the tattoo on my back. Life and death, death and life. "What if you just combine life and death?" I asked. Lionel did as I asked, and there, all four of our symbols sat on top of each other. Lionel opened a book and started flipping through it. "Tathuvian? Nalagasi? Honduit?" He rattled off the nonsense-sounding words. I was guessing they were more obscure archaic languages, though it honestly sounded like gibberish to me. "Balance" Lionel closed the book and slumped over on his desk. "It means balance" "Balance," Delia repeated. Time runs thin. "No time," I said out loud. The other three looked at me. "It is getting kind of late," Zo said. "And we do have that thing with needing to be in before dark" "We have time," Annabelle said. "Not a lot, but plenty to get home and then some to spare" Time runs thin. Sheesh. Persistent little voices, weren't they? Did they think I didn't realize that we had less than twenty-four hours until the dance of doom? No matter how hard I laughed or tried to forget about it, I couldn't. The very conspicuous sound of snoring broke me from my thoughts. There, in the middle of a stack of papers, Lionel had fallen asleep, and somehow, he was managing to make more noise asleep than he had awake. Very sweetly, Annabelle leaned forward and pressed a small kiss to his cheek. "Thank you, Lionel," she said. The rest of us took that as our cue to exit. "The battle of life and death ends the spider soul" Zo tried out variations on the words. "The spider battles the end of life and death" "You forgot soul," I said. Zo snorted. "Fine. The soul spider battles the end of life and death," she said, sticking "soul" in at random. "No," Delia corrected with a weak smile. "The soul spider battles the end of life and death in bed" For a split second, there was silence, and then I felt the giggles pouring out of my mouth. It made no sense. The prophecy that was supposed to solve all of our problems made no sense. It shouldn't have been funny. And yet, it was. "In bed," Zo agreed with a grin, and just when she was starting to return to her normal self, her head was flung back against the wall. Her eyes glazed over, and another vision took hold of her body. Moving quickly, Annabelle grabbed her cousin's shoulders, steadying her while the premonition ran its course. I gritted my teeth, watching Zo's body shudder with the power of what she was seeing. Was it me, or were these things getting more and more violent? When Zo's body finally stopped trembling, she met me with eyes on the verge of tearing over. "A little boy," she managed. "Eight or nine. He was taking a bath, and then he lifted his eyes to the ceiling and just stared" She paused. "He was think- ing about Little League and sloshing water over the side because he was mad at his mom, and the next second, he was humming and staring, staring and humming, and " Delia took a step toward Zo and grabbed her hand. Zo held on tightly. "He just hummed and stared and went under" Her words hung in the air. "And he stayed under, staring up through the water with these horrible blue eyes until he drowned" First our entire school falling to the floor (dead?) with no warning, and now this--a little kid, hum- ming and staring like Amber. I couldn't shake the image of the smoky gray tentacles from my mind. Were they there in the bathroom Zo had seen, pulling the boy out of his body? Were they in the auditorium, pulling our classmates out of their bodies? For the first time, it occurred to me that maybe Zo had been getting premonitions about Alecca from the start. Amber. The dance. Now. "Where?" Annabelle asked the question quietly. "I need a map," Zo said, "and I need one now" She turned away, but I saw her drag the back of her hand across her face, roughly brushing off the single tear running down her cheek. Time runs thin. Right now, that was the last thing I needed to hear. I looked out the window. The sun was still large- ly visible on the horizon, but I knew that we only had about forty-five minutes of sunlight left. Without a word, I followed Zo in her hot pursuit of a map. Right now, there was only one thing that mattered, and it wasn't time. Onbekend The glare on Zo's face was starting to take on a life of its own. Any second now, I expected it to rush to the front of the bus and throttle the bus driver for daring to slow down and pick up more passengers when we were obviously in a hurry. "That's it" Zo charged up to the front of the bus. "What's she doing?" Delia asked warily. Without a word, Zo stomped down the steps and off the bus. "But we're still two stops away," Annabelle said. "She can't possibly think we'll get there faster on foot" Zo put her hands on her hips and stared up, daring us to argue. "Gonna go out on a limb here and guess that she can," I said, and with a sigh, I got up from my seat, squeezed my way down the aisle, and went to stand next to Zo. Delia and Annabelle were right be- hind me. On the horizon, the sun was just starting to set. "Four blocks," Zo said, and that was the only explanation any of us got before she took off running. "The running thing?" Delia said. "It gets really old" I had to agree, but I couldn't shake the image of the gray tentacles pulling the life out of a little boy. Somehow, my antirunning feelings didn't really weigh in. We'd made it about half a block before Delia's eyes lit up. Without so much as a word to me, she wiggled her fingers at my shoes. "Rollerblades" As my shoes morphed underneath me, I started to lose my balance, and by the time I caught it, I was skating at top speed toward Zo, who had at least half a block on me. Moments later, Annabelle and Delia were skating at my side. "You couldn't have thought of this the last three times we were running?" I huffed. "And what about giving a girl a little warning? You almost killed me!" Delia flipped her hair behind her shoulder. "You're welcome," she said pointedly. As I skated, the wind in my face, closer and closer to the address Zo had pinpointed as the boy's lo- cation, the sound of my own heart beating grew louder and louder in my ears. We were skating to- ward something, I could feel it; something I didn't want to see. Something that we weren't ready for. Alecca. Was it really her? Had she attacked Amber? Was she attacking this little boy? As if from a great distance, I could hear Delia prattling on to Annabelle about designer Rollerblades, but soon, my mind drowned out everything except the sound of my own beating heart and the feel of the wind on my face. Under my skin, blood surged through my veins. The blood runs thin. My heart pumped, the blood coursed through my flesh. The wind beat against my face. Blood. Blood. Blood. It's in the blood. Slowly, the sound of my beating heart changed, taking on a new rhythm until, finally, I could hear the soft, sweet sound of low-pitched humming. The eerie, almost intoxicatingly simple tune grew louder and louder with each beat of my heart. It took me a moment to realize that I was skating toward the sound. Two voices hummed in unison: one young and high, and the other so pure and ancient that just the sound of it hurt my bones. Louder and louder, faster and faster, the voices grew, until there was only one voice. That voice. I flashed back, seeing Amber as she'd been on the balcony: eyes looking at something no one else could see, humming a song that no one else could hear. The song rolled over me and got fainter and fainter, until it was replaced again by the sound of my own rapidly beating heart. Blood. Blood. Blood. I could feel my breathing quicken, and as the world came back into focus, I concentrated on not blading straight into a quickly approaching mailbox. My heart quieted, but I could still feel the blood coursing through my veins. Blood recognizes blood. "OMG" Delia's tone was almost flat. "What?" I asked. She didn't respond, and in the next instant, I heard the sirens. As we rounded the corner, I ran smack into Zo, taking her down to the ground with me as I fell. She didn't move, and for the longest time, we just lay there, our limbs entangled and our eyes locked on the ambulance in the driveway. "No," Zo said finally, her voice calm and stubborn. "We can still make it" My whole body numb, I followed her toward the house. She was right. The boy couldn't be gone al- ready. I'd heard him humming; I was sure of it. The humming had only just stopped. How could they have called an ambulance already? How long had I been absorbed in the sound of the hum- ming, the intoxicating rush of my own blood? The moment Zo stepped foot on the sidewalk in front of the house, she skidded to a stop, her feet frozen to the ground and her body stiff. I grabbed her arms and found myself in the middle of her vision. A little boy. Dark hair. Dirty cheeks. Sloshing in the bathtub, water spilling over the sides. Angry. Wanna play ball. Water sloshing. Want. Want. Want. Then he's playing ball, with the guys, and I am him. No water, no sloshing, just the field and the guys, and the bat in his (my?) hands. Come. Come. Come. The song, subtle, starts as the roar of the crowd, but soon it works its way to his (my?) lips. Come. Come. Come. He's humming it, and I'm humming it, and there's another voice, that beautiful, terrible voice, hum- ming to him, to me. Come. Come. Come. I feel the words to the song more than I hear them, the notes themselves bearing no resemblance to anything like language. Just sound. The sound of the crowd, the swing of the bat. Then I'm out of the boy's body, and I see him, sitting in the tub, his eyes aimed upward, looking at something no one else can see. What's he looking at? Eyes. I see them now: blue, blue eyes, humming. A gray cord snakes out in beat with the song, wrapping itself around his body, and more follow, one after another after another. Like tentacles, they move through the air, catching on to his body, weav- ing themselves together until there's a net behind his body, and then they lunge forward. No, not lunging. Someone pulling. Not a net. A web. And he hums, and she pulls, and I can almost see her now, silver white hair cascading past smiling lips as she hums to him, hums to him. And he hums to her, and he's slipping. She pulls the cords, pulls them, and in the next instant, he slips, out of his body, and he's there, floating toward her, and his body's now below, sinking. Sink- ing. And then they're gone. I gasped audibly as I felt myself thrown out of the vision. My feet soared out from underneath me, and I landed hard on the ground. Zo stood motionless next to me, and I wondered how much she'd seen. Over her shoulder, I saw the medic race into the house, thought of the little boy they were too late to save, and knew what I should have known all along. "Alecca" The word escaped my lips. I'd known that she wouldn't stop at taking half a life force. I should have said something earlier. The thought, however illogical, was the first thing that leaped to mind. I'd had my suspicions on my way here. If I'd said something, anything... "Zo?" Annabelle's voice was soft. "We're too late," Zo said flatly. "He's gone. He stared and hummed and hummed and stared until he drowned" I wished she'd swear. When Zo swore, I knew she'd be all right, but she just stood there, her mouth clenched shut. "Alecca," I said again, not bothering to rise from the ground. It was so plain, so clear now. Adea's warnings, Zo's visions, the way the cords pulled the people right out of their bodies. I screamed at myself internally. Why hadn't it occurred to me before now that when we'd saved Amber from those cords, there was someone pulling them? That it was all tied together? And now, a child was dead. I knew, even without Zo telling me that he was gone, that he'd slipped below the surface of the water and hadn't come back up for air. Alecca had killed him. Just like she was going to kill everyone at the dance. It was what I'd been afraid of all along. Maris- sa, Alex, and the others weren't just unconscious in the vision. They were dead. "Don't you understand?" I asked the others, mixing up what I'd said out loud and the emotions surg- ing through my mind. "Amber. This boy. Alecca. The dance" I couldn't seem to make a coherent sentence. "She's doing it," Delia said, interpreting my babbling. "Whatever almost happened to Amber, what- ever happened to this boy, Alecca's doing it" Delia gulped. "It's what she's going to do at the dance" "She pulls them out of their bodies," I said softly. "I don't know how, but she does it. She pulls their ...their " "Life force," Zo said dully, parroting back the term Keiri had told us earlier. "She pulls their life force out of their body and absorbs the power" I looked down at the ground. "She eats it" I knew it was true before I said it; knew it was true when there was no way I should have known. Annabelle spoke softly. "We should go," she said. Without a word, she put her arm around Zo. "It's almost sundown, and there's nothing we can do here" Delia reached an arm down and helped me to my feet. "My house is closest," Annabelle said. Zo shook her head. "Maybe we should all just go home," she said. Annabelle looked at her sharply. "We have things to discuss," she said. "Do you think discussion's going to help him now?" Zo asked between clenched teeth. I wondered if she was seeing her earlier premonition through new eyes, and my stomach rolled at the thought. "Do you really think we can discuss away any of this?" Zo's voice was rougher, lower now. "If we don't figure out how she's doing it," Annabelle said, "how are we supposed to figure out how to stop it before tomorrow night? And what if she comes after one of us beforehand? Keiri said the young have more powerful life forces, and--" "As long as we're home, we're safe, re-mem-ber?" Zo asked, drawing out the last word and fighting off Annabelle's embrace. "Besides, what's to figure out?" Annabelle said nothing for a moment, stunned, but then she turned toward me. "What did you see?" she asked. Zo glared at her. "If we're going to be walking home," Annabelle said, taking the glare as an accusation, "we may as well get the facts straight while we walk. At least that way, we'll all be free to think about it overnight" Zo said nothing, and I knew she'd be thinking about nothing else tonight. "Speaking of walking, maybe we should, you know, not," Delia put in hesitantly. "We'll get there faster blading, and I, personally, don't want to be out after dark when Alecca's girls-with-tattoos radar clicks and she comes to pull her freaky mojo on us, too" Zo set her mouth in a grim line, and Annabelle stopped moving and grabbed