Translucent (19 page)

Then silence.

Terrifying silence.

I wanted to stay in his convertible wedged in front of the red leather seat cushions forever rather than face what lay ahead.

His door opened, and a broad back appeared silhouetted against the ghostly trees.

He was wondering,
Now what?

I had to do this.

Taking care not to shake the car, I eased myself onto the backseat and slinked over the door, my body hugging the chilled metal. Another violent shiver. I planted my feet and gradually lessened my weight on the door, drawing out a tiny squeak from the suspension. Then I was free.

He didn’t turn around.

Jaw clamped in grim determination, he peered intently at the trailhead.  “Ashley, where are you taking me?”

I didn’t answer.

Three months ago, around this time of night, I had stood at this very trailhead with Megan, Ashley’s body slung between us. The memory made me sick. A quiver started deep in my gut, spread out inside me, and surfaced in needle-like prickles all down my back.

Soon it would be over.

I stepped up to the trail and peered down it.

A pitch black tunnel receded away from the road, lined with dried stalks and knotted, slithering roots, all lurking in ambush. From out of the forest wafted the earthy smell of decay and the sound of distant crunching leaves. A breeze moaned out of the opening, and it seemed to slice right through me, blowing like ice through my rib cage and sinking icicles into my quivering organs.

What if her
actual
ghost haunted this trail?

Trying not to think about it, I turned around and whispered, “Emooory . . .”

My voice merged with the creak and moan of ancient trees. I clambered off the road into wilderness, where I waited. A troubling thought stirred at the back of my brain.

What if her body was gone?

His cell phone flashlight blazed to life, and he shuffled after me, jerking it this way and that at every skittering shadow. I continued up the trail, staying twenty feet ahead of him.

The riverbed dropped away on our left, dappled in moonlight. It had been a hot, dry summer, and only a few muddy puddles remained, sprouting ferns. Thorny chaparral had taken over everything else. Emory panted behind me.

Every so often I tousled a low branch or cracked a stick or whispered his name.

Just enough to keep him going.

Otherwise, my bare feet made no sound.

Deeper into the wilderness. The trail crossed the riverbed down in a grotto, where the dense canopy plunged us into an even blacker night. Only a ghostly blue glow remained, illuminating piles of dried leaves deep enough to wade through. I hopped from boulder to boulder to avoid crunching them. On my right, a rock face slanted out of view, cut with a deep fissure, on which moss and algae grew in slick, oozing sheens.

The cold numbed my fingers and toes.

Soon, the nightmare would be over. I could feel it now, smell it, the reek of nearby evil . . . which I had planted here.

Its tendrils reached into my lungs, welcoming me back.

Soon . . . soon it would be over.

The distance surprised me. A mile . . . two miles. The trail inched by, way longer than I remembered it. Megan and I had been carrying a dead body between us. We’d been frantic and terrified. The power of fear and adrenaline. At the time, it hadn’t seemed like far enough—they would find it, they would know where to look, they would send dogs.

But no one had found it.

No one had discovered our secret.

We got away with it
.

That was the worst part by far.

But even as I marveled at how far our desperation had driven us, I knew that each switchback brought us inevitably closer to that secret, deepening the pit in my stomach. I wanted to hike forever.

I didn’t want to show him.

A cluster of rocks came into view, and my breathing sped up. I remembered those rocks.

It would be soon now.

I waited for Emory to catch up before I ventured off the trail into the brush, pushing aside dry stalks.

The commotion caught his attention, and he flicked his cell phone left and right, torn between continuing along the trail and following a phantom rustle into the dark woods. 

“Emory,” I whispered. “Emooory . . .”

He swallowed and carefully stepped off the trail, shining his light toward me. I foraged ahead, digging through vegetation and squeezing between branches, then climbed through a clump of barbed sticks, which gouged into the soles of my feet and raked my skin. I barely felt the pain.

Mud oozed between my toes on the other side. Emory breathed heavily at my back, forced to crawl on his hands and knees. He would have an easier time following me now that I had to whack my way through dense chaparral. I imagined what this must be like for him—bushes shaking and parting right in front of him, trying to follow something invisible as it slithered deeper into the forest.

If I were in his shoes, I’d be scared shitless right now.

We bushwhacked another quarter mile, clawing through wall after wall of tangled branches. If you looked closely, there was evidence. A cracked tree limb here, a trampled bush there, an uprooted fern that had long since shriveled into a husk.

But only if you knew what to look for.

How Megan and I had dragged her body this far, I had no idea.

It’s just up ahead
.

My heart quaked deep in my rib cage, like a frightened animal trembling in its burrow. Something dry and sore hovered at the base of my throat, which I couldn’t quite swallow. As we drew closer, I began to feel sick to my stomach.

Just beyond this bush . . .

This was it. My last chance to turn back, to divert him, to lead him somewhere else instead.

Inertia propelled me forward.

I pulled aside a fistful of weeds as my pulse rose into a terrifying crescendo.

And there she was.

Ashley Lacroix.

Wedged in the valley between two spiky bushes, hastily covered in sticks and dried brush. Through the gaps, a white fabric gleamed in the moonlight, her pajamas.

Emory brushed past me and fell to his knees, then began flinging the sticks aside—they had been bushy green branches when we covered her, but not anymore. A fetid, musty smell swirled up from the pile as she came into view.

But most of the rotting had already occurred.

The dirty pajamas clung in ragged, stained strips to her corpse, which sagged like a deflated blowup doll, as if her flesh had liquefied and oozed off her bones. The skin had caved in around her eyes and mouth, forming sunken black pits. Parts of her were just gone, just bones half-buried in what looked like black ash. Parts of her were still there, the leathery skin mummified into something not even maggots could eat.

This was what I’d done to his sister.

He unearthed half her body before he began to sob.

I cowered to the side and hugged my knees to my chest, something screaming deep in my brain. I’d buried this memory so I would never have to see it again, never have to face what I’d done to her, how I’d dragged her like a piece of meat through the wilderness and left her here to rot. Now it tore out of its hole and reared its hideous head. My abs clenched painfully, driving bile up my throat. I held it in, choking out a pathetic whimper instead.

Not here.

Not in front of him.

I’d showed him what I needed to show him. While he wept over his sister’s body, I crept away through the branches so I could puke out of view, then I put distance between us as fast as I could, heading nowhere . . . just
anywhere
but there. Eventually, I doubled back to the trail.

Then I ran.

It was finally done.

I jogged all
the way home, pushing myself until my feet surely bled. Only when I collapsed on my front lawn, coughing and wheezing to catch my breath, did I process what had happened.

I’d shown him.

I’d shown him her body.

Something I could never
un
show him.

Only a matter of time now before they traced it back to me, arrested me, threw me in jail. Yet I felt a lightness in my lungs I hadn’t felt in months. I breathed easier. Because I had begun the process of atonement.

I had shown someone my secret.

Not all of it, but part of it.

Enough for now.

I rolled onto my back and sighed with relief, gazing up at the stars, the full moon, the vast reaches of the cosmos.

Outer space . . . out of which was delivered my salvation in the form of a meteorite soaked in dark matter.

My salvation . . . or would it be my undoing?

Tonight, the night sky humbled me. Where had it come from?

Curiosity. Another emotion I hadn’t felt in a while. With the weight of Ashley’s death off my chest for the moment, it was like I had permission to be me again . . . curious.

But as I lay naked on the grass, lungs heaving from the run home, my buzz began to wear off. The chill seeped in.

Still invisible, I slipped inside my house, briefly noting I’d accidentally left the door open. Couldn’t blame myself considering how preoccupied I’d been on the way out.

Feeling more like I was floating than walking, I wandered into the kitchen and filled a glass of water, getting a kick from how it appeared to hover in front of me. I chugged the entire glass, quenching my burning thirst. Out of curiosity, I peered down to see if it would pool in my belly.

I couldn’t see it. 

How the hell did this stuff work anyway?

My sweaty back itched after lying in the grass, and I gave in to scratching it, filling the glass again with my other hand. Something nagged at me, something crucial I had been too distracted to think about before.

It came from outer space . . . they were collecting it . . . they were building a ship . . .

My eyebrows drew together. Emory had mentioned something about his dad. His theory about what it would be like if they ever came.

How the war would be over before we even knew what hit us.

The war . . .

Chewing my lip, I continued to scratch. Water continued to pour into the sink.

What had really happened to Sarah? If those weren’t her ashes interred at the Forest Glade columbarium, then where was she?
What
was she?

Help me.

That was the message she’d left. Just
help me.
 

The more I thought about it, the more this all seemed really creepy.

Suddenly, my skin felt dirty, and my fingernails sank deeper into my back, like there were bugs crawling under my skin. I wanted the stuff off me. I reached for my nose and tried to find the seam to pull it off, but hesitated. My gaze flicked to the windows. Blackness outside.

Not here, not where someone could see me.

In my room.

Before I could move, a sound pricked my ears.

A creak of a door on hinges. I snapped to rigid attention. My parents? I quickly set the glass down and shut off the faucet, in case they came into the kitchen.

They didn’t.

Stepping lightly, I slunk back toward the foyer and peeked into the hall. At the end my parents door was shut.

But not my door. My door was open a crack.

A sliver of light spilled from my bedroom into the dark hallway.

Hadn’t I closed it? I crept forward, unease beginning to stir. Now I couldn’t remember. I’d probably forgotten all my normal routines before going to Emory’s house. I tiptoed up the hallway, took a calming breath, and pushed the door in all the way.

There was someone in my bedroom.

A girl.

This time I recognized her.

Her long blonde hair rolled down her shoulders, longer than I remembered it. Her blue eyes flicked to mine, and my heart gave a terrifying jolt. We stared at each other with blank expressions, and for a moment my lungs forgot how to breathe. I forgot all about the dark matter I needed to get off. 

This time I knew.

I knew, because I had knocked
her
picture off the wall earlier tonight.

But this was impossible. I had seen her decayed body two hours ago, she’d been missing for three months, she was dead.

Yet here she stood in my stark, furniture-less bedroom in jeans and a T-shirt, waiting for me. Alive.

Looking at me.

Seeing
me.

Ashley Lacroix opened her mouth and whispered, “Avenge me.”

To be continued . . .

Click here
to begin book two in the
Translucent
saga.

Of Starlight

It has been three months since Leona Hewitt dumped the body of her crush’s younger sister in the woods, praying he would never find out who did it. It has been three hours since she led him back to her rotting corpse.

And three minutes since she showed up in Leona’s bedroom, alive.

The culprit is a living substance secreted by a meteorite that can make people invisible . . . and apparently bring them back from the dead too. But something is terribly wrong with the girl claiming to be Ashley Lacroix. She doesn’t sleep. Sometimes, when she thinks no one is listening, she talks to someone who isn’t there. She says her soul has been eaten. She says Leona must die.

Now, evading an unseen enemy, Leona must dig up the startling truth behind Ashley’s death before an insidious creature claims its next victim. Only the truth may be more chilling than she ever could have imagined. And the next victim may be herself.

Click here
to begin
Of Starlight
, the chilling second installment in the
Translucent
series.