The Mortal Sleep (Hollow Folk Book 4)

by Gregory Ashe

  “New student records,” Emmett said. “Smart.”

  “That explains Leo,” Jake said. “But what about the rest of them?”

  “I got lucky with the Crow boy. If he hadn’t been so obvious about watching the school, I probably would have missed him. But you’re wrong about Mrs. McLees.”

  “She’s not the registrar?” Emmett said. “Or she wouldn’t give you the records?”

  “She gave me names, not records. But that’s not what I meant. She’s the biggest gossip in the entire state. Maybe in the West. She knows everybody. And she knows everything about everybody.”

  “She doesn’t know everything.” Emmett’s smile thinned into a white line. “Trust me.”

  “She knows a lot. And I asked her who was new to town.”

  “And she told you? Come on, Becca. That means she’s going to turn around and tell everyone about you and what you wanted. She’ll probably tell Ms. Meehan and the rest of them all about it.”

  “Emmett’s right,” I said. “Why would she tell you? Even if you did pay her, she must have wondered what you wanted.”

  “I told her what I wanted.” Becca’s smile gleamed silver.

  “You told her you were keeping watch for psychic thugs coming into town to form an army for a crazy Indian ghost?”

  “I told her,” Becca said, her smile threatening to break into laughter, “that I was trying to set up a dating website. Kind of like Farmers Only, but exclusive to Wyoming and Montana.”

  “You told her you were coding a Farmers Only knock-off?”

  “She was very interested. She thought it was a great idea.”

  “Of course she did,” Austin said. I couldn’t see it, but I could almost feel him rolling his eyes.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Tell us about the last two.”

  Becca pointed to the fourth photograph. The man in the picture had rough, thick features; he was bald, but his eyebrows were so fuzzy that they almost made up for the lack of hair on top. He was big, too. I mean, I’m big. And Austin’s getting big. But this guy was built like a tank. Like a goddamn Panzer.

  “The driver,” Kaden said. “Last night, he was the driver.”

  “Kyle Stark-Taylor. His mom was divorced and remarried.”

  “We need his life story?” Emmett said, lounging against the tile again.

  “Maybe. This time, maybe. He killed his dad. The biological one. He beat him to death.”

  “He looks like he could do it,” Jake said with a shrug.

  “He did it when he was thirteen. There wasn’t enough left of the dad for a funeral. They cremated him, or whatever they could scoop off the floor. And they sent Kyle to prison—he was tried as an adult.”

  “Take a look, Vie: a real prison-sculpted body.”

  “Why do we put up with this asshole?” Jake said. “Austin, what’s his deal?”

  Austin, his chin wedged in my shoulder, shook his head.

  “It’s not a prison-sculpted body,” Becca said. “Longhollow Penitentiary fell down.”

  “Like, the roof fell in?” I asked.

  “No. The whole prison fell down. Boom. Clouds of dust. Like an implosion.”

  “Only it wasn’t an implosion, was it?”

  “I dug up the structural engineer’s report—”

  “Kickass,” Austin said, his chin burrowing deeper into my shoulder.

  Becca flashed him a smile. “The structural engineer discussed what happened in great detail; she was very thorough. The key phrase in the summary was ‘systemic structural damage consistent with, but not identical to, seismic activity.’”

  “This guy can make a fucking earthquake?” Jake said.

  Temple Mae, wiping at her face, pulled back from his chest long enough to say, “Consistent with but not identical to?”

  Becca shrugged. “A fancy way of refusing to commit to what looked like it was impossible: an earthquake that no seismograph detected, that didn’t affect anything beyond the walls of Longhollow, that didn’t so much as buckle the parking lot asphalt.”

  “How the hell are we supposed to fight an earthquake?” Jake said.

  “Maybe he’s not here for Urho or Vie,” Emmett said. “Maybe he’s just looking to buy a summer home.”

  “According to Mrs. McLees’s sources, he’s come into town twice to buy supplies. He’s staying somewhere up in the Bighorns.”

  “All right, so maybe he’s going to bring down the whole mountain range.” Emmett had that goddamn annoying grin stretching his face again. “You’ve got one more, Becca. How bad’s this one going to be?”

  The silence that came after prickled the skin across my chest. I shivered, and Austin squeezed his arms around my waist. Becca wouldn’t look at Emmett. She wouldn’t look at any of us. She lifted the final photograph, turning it in her hands. Her silver eyes flicked on and off like klieg lamps. She was about to cry.

  “That bad?” Austin said.

  Emmett took two steps and snatched the paper from her. He studied it against the light and then clapped it against my chest hard enough to hurt. When I raised it to my eyes, it showed a blond girl, the dark roots revealing how long it had been since the last dye job. She was cocaine pretty, so thin a good sneeze would break her, and in five years, maybe less, she’d look a lot like the girls I saw going into Slippers, the local strip club.

  “What’s her story?”

  Becca shook her head. She was looking at the grimy tile, and her sneaker traced an arc in front of her.

  “Becca, come on. It can’t be that bad.”

  “What’s her ability?” Emmett slouched between the hand dryers, arms across his chest, shoulders drawn up to his ears.

  “How’d you find her?” Jake asked.

  “She’s been showing up around town. Mrs. McLees thought she was an out-of-town girlfriend.”

  “Whose?” Emmett snapped.

  I glanced at him. Purple slashed his cheeks. He glared at me and gave me the finger.

  “What the hell’s gotten into him?” Austin murmured in my ear.

  “Whose girlfriend?” Emmett asked again.

  Becca shook her head. “I don’t know. Mrs. McLees didn’t say. Anyway, I don’t really—”

  “What’s her ability? You put her picture there for some goddamn reason. So what’s her ability?”

  Becca drew herself up. Silver flashed around her eyes and mouth. She took the picture from me and smoothed it on the counter, and then she met my eyes, and I saw what she’d been afraid to show me earlier.

  She was sorry for me. I’d seen pity in her eyes before. Becca had seen me in some pretty dark places. But what I was seeing there now, it made me want to tie my laces, head out to the highway, and run. Run until I ran out of highway. Or run until my heart exploded. Either would be better than what I was seeing in her eyes.

  “You’re freaking him out,” Austin said, his arms tightening around me. “Just spit it out, Becca.”

  “She’s been arrested a couple of times, although she’s under eighteen, so I think they’ve been short stays in a juvenile facility.”

  “Arrested for what?” Temple Mae must have sensed the change in the air too because she had finally turned to face us. Jake’s arm was around her, and I knew he’d die to protect her, but I also knew that Temple Mae would do a lot more than die to keep Jake safe. And something in the room, something right then, was making Temple Mae look the way she did when she’d thrown a pickup truck through the air with her goddamn mind.

  “Both times, they were drug possession charges. But I called her old high school. She’s from Evanston. I talked to her teachers.” Becca blushed and smiled. A small smile. Very small. “I told them I was the principal here and that I wanted to know what had happened with her. And they told me. Two of them were really eager to talk about it. Fighting in school. Boys. Lots of problems with impulse control. She did every stupid thing that came in
to her head. She kicked a teacher’s computer to pieces one day because he told her to put away her phone. I asked about drugs. I thought maybe she’d been using. Or dealing.”

  My gaze flicked to Emmett again; he didn’t notice me. The purple stained his cheeks even more darkly now, and he was staring at Becca, biting down on his busted lip, unaware of the blood spreading across his teeth in tiny red fissures.

  “And they told me it wasn’t dealing. She had a boyfriend. And he was a big deal in Evanston. In terms of drugs, I mean. He had distribution. And he had supply. He was growing weed in an abandoned warehouse on the edge of the city. And when the police picked him up, they picked up Krystal too—that’s her name—and they only laid on the possession charges because she was a minor.” Becca took a deep breath. “They said there was no water. No lights. The woman who told me all this, she said it like she wanted me to know that Krystal and her boyfriend almost got away with it. Like they were pulling up stakes when the police got there. But I don’t think that was it.”

  “She’s a magical drug maker?” Jake said.

  “Plants.” Temple Mae passed a hand over her eyes like she was suddenly unbearably tired. “She can control plants.”

  “Something like that,” Becca said.

  Then her eyes cut to Emmett.

  He flinched. If I hadn’t been watching him, if my whole body hadn’t been tuned to him, I would have missed it. And I would have missed the flicker of fear in his face. And the flicker of something else. Something that made me want to run my fingers through the short hair above his ear and tell him it would be ok.

  And then anger burned off everything else in his expression, and he said, “Don’t be a bitch about it. Show them.”

  Becca stared at him. The silver leached everything from her eyes.

  “Don’t be a fucking bitch. I know you’ve got it. So show them.”

  “Don’t talk to her like that,” I said.

  “I can talk to her however I want, you fucking tweaker moron. She’s being a fucking bitch, so I’m going to call her a fucking bitch, and a stupid tweaker moron faggot like you, no matter how big your muscles are, can’t make me do anything else.”

  I tried to take a step, but Austin held me. The flat of his hand pressed against my stomach, rubbing a small circle as he whispered in my ear. I rolled my shoulders and pulled at his wrist.

  “Don’t talk to her like that.”

  “Vie—” Austin tried.

  I knocked his hands away and pulled free from his grip. My first step toward Emmett sent the dark-haired boy backward, and he hit the tile wall.

  “Stop it,” Becca said.

  “Show them. You’re so fucking proud of yourself, so show them.”

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I said. “Why can’t you be halfway decent for—”

  “Vie.” Becca’s voice was so thick I barely recognized it, and when I looked over my shoulder, I saw why. She was crying: huge tears trailing silver eyeshadow down her face in lines. She was holding something, too—holding it out to me, a folded white rectangle that I guessed she had been hiding in her pocket. And a dark voice pointed out that Emmett was right: she had been holding something back.

  My fingertips buzzed as I took the paper. I couldn’t feel the edges. I couldn’t even feel them when one sliced the pad on my thumb and left a red stripe. But somehow I got the page open.

  I knew the bedroom, with its wall of windows. The picture had been taken from outside, from the wild sea of buffalo grass. It had been taken at night. Inside, warm yellow light blossomed around the desk, the TV, the guitar stand, the bed. That same yellow light crowned a figure at the window. And whoever had taken this picture—Becca, the fucking bitch, that dark voice said, you know it was Becca—had used a telephoto lens, and I could see everything like I had my nose pressed to the glass.

  The girl named Krystal stood in front, her blouse unbuttoned, a lacy black inch of bra exposed. A familiar hand—long, strong fingers—slid between the blouse’s buttons, crept under that inch of black lace. Behind Krystal stood the owner of that hand. Emmett was bending down, his mouth on her neck, his dark eyes like collapsing stars in the reflected light.

  “All right,” I said.

  Was it weird that I still couldn’t feel my fingers? Not anything past the last knuckle. Not even a buzz. I bet I could run a table saw and stick my finger right down on the blade and not feel it. And somehow that idea excited me. It made me feel . . . interested. That image of the huge, turning blade, sharp enough to cut me to pieces. Anything sharp would do. Anything at all.

  “All right.”

  Austin grabbed my collar. “Why don’t we take a walk for a minute?”

  “Why? I’m fine.”

  “Because you’re not fine. Come with me. Come on. Let’s take a walk.”

  Laughing, I shook him off, waving the picture at him. “This? This isn’t anything. You think I’m upset about this?”

  “Vie, don’t do this. Please. Jake, help me get him—”

  “Why in the ever-fucking world would I be upset about this?” I shook the paper at Emmett. “You like her, right? So you’re fucking her?”

  “It’s not any of your business, tweaker.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Vie,” Austin said. He settled his hands on my chest and pushed me. “You’re going to do something—”

  “You’re damn right I’m going to do something. Get the fuck off me. Get off, Austin. You’re damn right. Did you hear him? It’s not any of my business. No. Of course not. Because it wasn’t any of my business when he was fucking Makayla—”

  “Don’t say her name, tweaker.”

  “It wasn’t any of my business when he was fucking Makayla, and so it’s not any of my business now when he’s fucking this girl. And it’s the same thing. He didn’t care that Makayla wanted to kill me.”

  “Say her name one more fucking time, and I’ll kill you.”

  “He doesn’t care that this girl wants to kill me. All he cares about is getting his skinny cock wet with whatever cheap piece of trash comes along, just like he did with—”

  “Enough.” Austin shook me so hard my teeth cracked together.

  “You’d better explain yourself,” Jake said to Emmett. I hadn’t realized until then that Jake was holding one of my arms, that Becca had curled up against the counter with her makeup a silver waterfall across her face, that Temple Mae leaned toward us, her eyes narrowed with concentration, and that the laces on my shoes were drifting upward as though some enormous thermal current were trying to lift me into the air. “Start talking. Who is she? How do you know her?

  “Come on, Emmett,” Kaden barked. “You’re being a dick.”

  Emmett shook his head. “You’re all such fucking tools. You know that? You all play at this stupid cops-and-robbers game. You’re all kids, and you think you have an idea about what the real world is like, and you don’t know anything. Not jack shit.”

  “Jesus Christ, Emmett.” Austin’s voice was broken, but his hands on my chest were rock solid. “You’re killing him, all right? Are you happy with that? You’re ripping his goddamn heart out.” And part of me knew I was the shittiest guy in the world. I heard Austin’s soul bleeding out in his sentence. “Just tell us what’s going on. Jesus, do it for him if you won’t do it for the rest of us.”

  “Fuck all of you.” Emmett looked at each of us in turn. “Fuck you. And you. And you. And fuck you, tweaker. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck—”

  I didn’t remember charging. All I remembered was a sudden vertigo as something—Temple Mae—flipped me into the air and sent me crashing back against the closest stall. Jake and Austin stumbled after me, pinning me, but they didn’t need to. I couldn’t have moved a muscle. I couldn’t have blinked or winked or breathed. And that didn’t have anything to with Temple Mae.

  But I could see. I could see very clearly as Emmett shook his head, took all of us in with one final gl
ance, and hit the deadbolt. The lock spun free, and he jerked the door open, and then he was gone.

  I NEEDED TO GO BACK to class. But first, I let Austin help me over to the boys’ bathroom, and Jake and Kaden came after us. Austin wetted some paper towels and ran them along my neck and my forehead. He pressed on the back of my scalp, checking to see if I’d broken my head on the stall—I deserved a broken head, but I was fine—and he asked me the same questions about a dozen times until he was sure I didn’t have a concussion. But I didn’t. I didn’t even have a headache. Temple Mae was strong. But she was also very, very controlled.

  That whole time, Jake and Kaden lingered at the door, faces red and turned toward their sneakers, not looking at each other, not looking at Austin, and certainly not looking at me. I got the feeling they were there for Austin’s sake. In case the crazy tweaker decided to hurt his boyfriend even more, as if that were even possible.

  Because I knew what I’d done. Austin knew I had feelings for Emmett, of course. He wasn’t oblivious. But I’d just exposed how much I cared for Emmett. And I’d done it in front of everyone that mattered in my life. And Austin had seen it, and he’d tried to help me, and now he was here, washing my face with a scratchy paper towel, and I realized I had snot under my nose and my eyes felt like they were the size of eight balls.

  “Oh fuck. I fucked up so bad.”

  “It’s ok.” At some point, my hair had pulled out of its bun, and he ran his fingers through the shoulder-length blond locks. I liked it; he knew I liked it. “He’s going to calm down, and you guys can talk—”

  “Austin, I fucked up with you. Jesus. Why are you here? Why are you putting up with this shit? And please, please, will you tell them to go away so I don’t have to keep making an ass of myself in front of an audience?”

  Jake met Austin’s gaze and gave a short, sharp shake of his head.

  “Maybe you need an audience,” Kaden said. “You’re pretty good at making an ass of yourself.”

  “Go on,” Austin said.

  Jake shook his head again, that single, sharp, vehement no.

  Austin sighed and ran the paper towel under my nose. Again. “Let’s just get through the day, all right?”