Beautiful Dead

by Eden Maguire

  “No—what?”

  “Those contractors at Government Bridge—they’re not even there anymore. It turns out the surveyor’s new report said there was no need to strengthen the bridge after all.”

  “All those nights out in the cold!” I laughed. This time our kisses were light-hearted: smile—kiss—smile. “And I bet Hunter knew that would happen—he was the one who played around with the surveyor’s mental state, remember.”

  Speaking of mental states…I kept from puckering up long enough to tell Phoenix what I’d found out about Raven Taylor’s illness, plus how I’d been along to Mike’s Motors, spotted Arizona’s SUV, and got booted out by Kyle Keppler. “So much weird stuff,” I finished with a shake of my head. “Arizona told me she didn’t even know the name of the car repair place, but it turns out that’s where her boyfriend works.”

  Phoenix stretched out his legs and lay back on the bed. “You want to know something else?”

  I snuggled beside him, resting my arm across his chest. “Do I? The truth is, I wouldn’t care if we didn’t talk too much right now.”

  He cupped his hand over my mouth and made me listen. “It was earlier tonight—Hunter let me and Lee off the hook and said we could go back to the barn to rest up. That was OK by me. The first person I saw when I got back was Arizona. She was out in the meadow, standing under the moon and stars, not looking at anything, not listening, like she wasn’t really there. She heard me but she didn’t turn to look.”

  “You think she was angry?” Maybe with me for failing to move forward.

  “Not angry,” Phoenix murmured. “More sad.”

  “Sad?” I didn’t connect the emotion with the Arizona I knew. “Tears and all?”

  He gave a low laugh. “We don’t do tears.”

  “Oh.” The Beautiful Dead didn’t do heartbeats either. They were bloodless, cold, and pale, and now I knew they couldn’t weep either. “Did you tune in and read what was going on inside her head?”

  He propped himself against my pillow and shrugged. “Arizona’s powers are strong,” he admitted. “But until tonight in the meadow I didn’t know how way ahead of me she is. I mean, I tried to tune in, but there was a force there stopping me.”

  “She blocked you so you couldn’t do your telepathy thing?” I guessed this was totally against the rules and wondered what Hunter would say.

  “So then I reached out. I wanted to tell her it was OK, she wasn’t in any danger, but she pushed me away and told me that yes, she was in danger, and I should go ask Hunter about it.”

  “So you did?” The story was getting through to me. I thought of Arizona standing cold and alone in the meadow.

  “OK, this is the really weird part. I found Hunter in the house, up in the bedroom, sitting with his head in his hands, ignoring me. I waited until he was ready to look up. He asked me, ‘Phoenix, did anyone ever betray you?’ and I said, ‘No, not that I know about.’”

  Phoenix’s low voice ceased. I waited.

  “If it was possible, I’d say the guy had aged,” he went on. “He looked weighed down and confused.”

  “This is Hunter we’re talking about?” I checked.

  “It turns out he’d had a confrontation with Arizona.”

  “Wow. The girl’s either brave or crazy.”

  “Hunter spelled it out to me. Arizona accused him of not working hard enough to sort out her mess. She told him there was no way you would break through the walls of silence out there without more help.”

  “She challenged the overlord?” This didn’t happen—ever! I was amazed Arizona was still on the far side.

  “Worse. She said, how come he was so sure he was right? Didn’t it occur to him that things didn’t always happen the way he saw them?”

  “And Hunter told you this?”

  “Yeah. Arizona must have been crazy by this point, because she asked him if he was sure about the way he died, defending his wife. Was it possible that Marie hadn’t been fighting off her attacker, that she’d actually betrayed him with the guy…”

  “Peter Mentone.”

  Way back at the beginning of the twentieth century, Mentone was Hunter and Marie’s nearest neighbor. He’d called when Hunter was out. Hunter had gotten back early and discovered the two of them together.

  “You can’t say that to Hunter!” I gasped. The shock made me sit up.

  “Arizona did,” Phoenix insisted. “You think the guy’s made of steel, but you should’ve seen the way he looked when I walked into the room. He was a broken man. That’s why he asked me the stuff about betrayal. And then he stood up and tried to shake it off. He said he had something he wanted me to do.”

  “I thought you were supposed to rest up?”

  “He changed his mind. He said I had to bring you up to Foxton right away.”

  My heart gave a leap—Phoenix was here to take me back with him. I jumped up from the bed and grabbed my jacket.

  Phoenix made me wait. He hadn’t finished what he had to tell me. “Only, Hunter didn’t say, ‘Get Darina’; he said, ‘Get Marie.’”

  I gasped. Why did this slip of the tongue make me tremble and send a shiver down my spine?

  “Summer says you look like Marie, remember.” Phoenix took my hand and led me to the window. “She saw the old photograph.”

  “Don’t. This messes with my head. In any case, you knew what he meant, so here you are—to get me. Did he tell you why?”

  “Because of Arizona,” Phoenix explained. “There’s more stuff she’s not been saying. Hunter found out she’s been holding out on us big-time.”

  I wasn’t so shocked by the revelation as Phoenix thought I would be.

  So now Hunter and the Beautiful Dead knew what I’d felt all along—that Arizona hid important truths for her own reasons. In other words, she was one of them but you couldn’t always trust her. “So now you know,” I told Phoenix as he got ready to dematerialize me.

  “And now I’m not fighting a lone battle. Hunter will force the truth out of her, won’t he?”

  “I have no idea. This is new territory,” he admitted. “OK, Darina—Hunter needs you there sooner than we could get in your car and drive out, so we do it the Beautiful Dead way.”

  “I’m ready!” This was also new—me getting to travel through space their way—and I couldn’t hide my eagerness to experience it.

  “It won’t hurt,” Phoenix promised. “Just remember—don’t let go of me.”

  I nodded, excited by the beating wings that had descended around us, raising the light silk drapes in a flurry. They caused a breeze that sucked the fabric out through the open window.

  Phoenix faced me and took both my hands. “Close your eyes,” he murmured, “and don’t open them again until I tell you.”

  I did this, a little nervous now that the wings beat louder and their energy was more threatening. “I’m holding tight,” I promised, scared too by the moving patterns imprinted on the inner side of my eyelids—zigzags and darting shafts of orange and purple. “How long does this take?”

  Phoenix didn’t answer. He kept hold of me amid the wings and the weird shapes, his hands cool but steady. I felt a strong wind, cold as death, a dizzy, floating sensation, almost as if my brain was loose inside my skull—totally disorienting—and finally a bright white light penetrating my closed lids.

  “OK, open your eyes,” Phoenix said at last.

  We were in the barn below Foxton Ridge. It was dark and there were no oil lamps, only slender shafts of moonlight falling across the floor.

  “Crazy!” I kept hold of Phoenix’s hands until I found my balance and was able to look around. “So where is everyone?”

  We walked outside, where it was still pitch-black. There was a light on in the house, so we walked across.

  “Hey.” Iceman heard our footsteps and opened the door. He smiled at me. “Are you OK, Darina?”

  “That was so weird,” I told him. “But, yeah, I’m cool.”

  Phoenix stepped inside th
e house ahead of me. “Where’s Arizona?” he asked.

  “Gone,” Iceman replied.

  “Gone where?” I demanded. The answer shocked me. I thought he meant she’d finally angered Hunter so much with her attitude that he’d sent her away from the far side for good.

  “No one knows. Wherever she went, Hunter took her. He said for you two to wait here.”

  “How long will he be?” Phoenix had told me he had to get me out to Foxton in a hurry—hence the magic trip. Now it seemed that something even more important had come up.

  “As long as it takes.” Iceman sighed and turned to Phoenix. “I never saw Hunter act this way before.”

  Phoenix nodded. “I never saw anyone disobey him before.”

  “Yeah, you did,” I reminded him. “We overstepped the mark on Monday night, remember. But I guess that was nothing compared with Arizona.”

  “In any case, we wait,” Phoenix sat on the edge of the table, his long legs stretched toward the stove. “Sit,” he told me, pointing toward the rocking chair. “Try and get some sleep.”

  “No way,” I replied, sitting anyway and stifling a yawn. “I’m way too wired for that…”

  Six hours later, Phoenix woke me with a kiss.

  “Do that again,” I whispered. “Or I’ll think I’m still dreaming.”

  He kissed my lips softly, then the side of my neck. “Still no sign of Hunter and Arizona,” he reported. “But come and take a look at this.”

  I followed him out of the house to a world still cast in shadow, with only the molten gold rim of the sun showing on the horizon. We watched it rise, faster than I would have thought, turning the sky a crazy orange, lightening to pink, and spilling itself over the jagged mountains.

  “Cool, huh?” Phoenix whispered in my ear.

  “I have no words,” I told him. Right at that moment, life was too perfect.

  The silence was broken by Summer running down the hillside and across the meadow—golden-haired, longlimbed, beautiful. “There are horse riders up by Angel Rock,” she reported urgently. “I think maybe they rode out early to see the dawn.”

  Her voice brought Donna and Lee across the yard. “Let’s go,” Donna said before I had time to react. “Darina, maybe you should stay here.”

  Quickly the four of them set off in the direction Summer had come from, leaving me dumb and standing on the porch. Since when did I take orders from Donna? I asked myself, setting off at half their pace, but keeping them within my sights. The sun was up and I knew my own way to Angel Rock.

  Phoenix, Summer, Donna, and Lee soon vanished over the ridge. I struggled on after them, making the stand of aspens and the water tower in time to see a horse trailer parked at the end of a dirt road and three riders in the distance.

  The four Beautiful Dead had spread out across the next hillside. Then I felt the familiar breeze sweep down from Amos Peak, pressing the long grass flat, sighing across the landscape.

  The horses heard it too. What was it—wind or wings? Where did it come from?

  This is going to spook them big-time, I realized. I saw Donna and Lee disappear from sight around the back of the granite formation they call Angel Rock, heard the wings beat louder and felt the bright dawn light begin to fade back into darkness.

  Now the three riders fought to keep their horses under control. They turned their backs to the gusts, only to find that the wind had changed direction and was swirling their horses’ manes and tails every which way. One horse—a brown and white Paint—reared onto its hind legs.

  I was still too far away to see or hear the details. The wings beat and raised a force field that terrified the animals, but their equally terrified riders pulled hard on the reins. “Stop!” I called to Phoenix.

  He heard me and yelled at Summer, who nodded and backed off down the hillside. Phoenix too hung back. But Lee and Donna were operating separately, and they were pressing in on the horses and riders, driving them away from the barn and house, farther into the wilderness of rocks and thornbush. “Phoenix, tell them to stop!” I called again.

  It was too late. The rider of the Paint lost her reins and her horse took off. The second horse, an Appaloosa, bucked and kicked out. Its rider fell forward against its neck and let it gallop after the first. Which left the third sorrel horse stranded by Angel Rock with the pulsating wind in its ears and nostrils, making it whinny in panic.

  I saw the horse swing around suddenly and the rider fall sideways in the saddle. The mare reared, the rider was thrown backward. She struggled to get back and there was a moment when I thought she would make it, but no—her balance was too far gone and she was thrown to the ground. Free at last, the horse bolted.

  Summer and Phoenix ran to the fallen rider. I caught up with them as they bent over her and found she was alive but unconscious. She lay on a flat ledge of rock, one arm crooked behind her back, her eyes shut.

  “My God, what do we do?” I gasped.

  Lee and Donna were still raising the force field of terror from behind Angel Rock, the wind was still driving down the slope. In the distance, the riders and horses ran out of control.

  “Don’t move her,” I warned Summer. “Not until we know if she broke any bones.”

  “Go and make Lee and Donna quit,” Phoenix told her. He stayed with me to check the woman’s pulse.

  Then I leaned in close and felt her warm breath against my cheek. “It looks like her arm’s broken. What were you thinking back there? You don’t do your beating wings thing when there are horses involved.”

  “It got out of control,” Phoenix admitted. He stepped back as the woman’s eyelids began to flutter. “She’s waking up.”

  “You four need to get out of here fast,” I decided. “Grab the others—go!”

  I watched her eyes flicker open, heard her groan. “Go, Phoenix!”

  He gathered Summer, Donna, and Lee, and they sprinted out of sight before the injured rider knew where she was.

  “It’s OK,” I told her as she raised herself on one elbow. Now that I got to take a closer look I saw she wasn’t young—maybe in her fifties. Her dark hair, twisted back into a braid, was threaded with gray, her face was lined, but she was still slender and in good shape.

  “I don’t know what happened,” she told me in a faint voice. “My horse spooked. There was a weird kind of wind—was it a hurricane?”

  “Don’t talk. You don’t have to worry—I’ll get you out of here.”

  As she tried to ease her right arm, she groaned. Then she lay back on the ledge, tears leaking from the corners of her eyes.

  “I guess the arm’s broken,” I confirmed. “You don’t hurt anywhere else?”

  The woman shook her head. “I have to get to a hospital,” she said, grunting slightly.

  “I know. Lie still, don’t try to move. I have to see if I can get a signal on my cell.”

  Taking the phone from my jeans pocket, I called 911. Call failed—once…twice…three times. I tried again—at last it rang through.

  “We need paramedics up by Foxton Ridge,” I told the operator. “I have a woman with injuries. She took a fall from her horse. The exact location is Angel Rock. You guys need to get here as fast as you can.”

  I got it in the neck from all sides.

  “I can’t believe you did this to me!” Laura wailed. “Jim and I arrive back from the movies and go to bed thinking you’re safe in your room. It turns out your bed wasn’t even slept in!”

  “So how come you were up at Angel Rock at dawn?” Logan demanded after Laura had made a frantic call and he spoke to me on the phone. “No, don’t tell me. I really don’t want to know.”

  Before that, I’d been given the third degree by the paramedics. “Did you see what caused the accident? What happened to spook the horses? Was there anybody else at the scene?”

  And the doctors in the hospital. “You’re saying you drove out there alone?” I’d lied about this, naturally. “Did your parents know where you were?”

  Next
time someone gets thrown from a horse I’ll cross the road and walk on by, I thought.

  I left the hospital around eleven and hitched a ride with an off-duty medic. I got home a couple of hours later, trying to come up with an excuse that would satisfy Laura.

  “I couldn’t sleep so I got up early.”

  “Your bed!” she yelled, eyes bulging, fists clenched. “You didn’t even lie on it.”

  I closed my eyes and shook my head. “Please,” I begged.

  “Where did you go?” she stampeded on. “I didn’t hear you leave. I would’ve heard you start the car.”

  “Don’t turn your back on your mother,” Jim warned. “And try telling us the truth for once in your life.”

  That was it—enough! “Quit telling me what to do,” I yelled back at him. I acknowledged the elephant that was always in the room. “You have no right. You’re not even my dad!”

  You’d think that I’d socked Laura in the stomach, the way she gasped and flopped down on the couch. She was still in her nightgown, her pink robe wrapped around her. The mascara from last night was smudged down her pale cheeks.

  Jim cocked his head to one side, his eyes narrow and glittering. “I didn’t hear you say that, Darina.”

  “Whatever.” It was time to get out, I didn’t care where. I stormed out the door and hopped in my car, turning the ignition when Logan’s Honda pulled across the driveway, blocking me in. “Get out of my way!” I yelled.

  He slammed his car door and strode up the drive. “Stop screaming at me. You’re not going anywhere.”

  I jumped out, cutting across the patch of grass and jumping the low fence onto the sidewalk. “Back off, Logan.” The guy was too much. “You told me on the phone—you don’t want to know.”

  Logan refused to be shaken off. I ran down the street; he grabbed me by the arm. “You’re out of line, you hear?”

  Elephant time again. “Logan, you’re worse than Jim. You totally don’t have any right to force your opinion on me. You’re nothing in my life—OK?”

  Now it was Logan’s turn to be socked senseless. He drew a sharp breath and stepped into the gutter. I was free to run on, but I stopped to drive the point home. “You’re not my brother or my boyfriend or my father, you’re my…no, you’re not even my friend.”