The Mortal Sleep (Hollow Folk Book 4)

by Gregory Ashe

  I reached out with my mind, and I found nothing.

  I could see him. I could see the thick texture of the other side, the threaded reality of the boy we called the Crow boy, but I couldn’t touch him with my mind. And Jim couldn’t touch him with his fire.

  Leo must have gotten bored because his power spiked again, and he reared back to toss the basketball.

  Jim was faster.

  The blast of fire was narrow, no wider than a pencil, but it punched through the basketball. And the force of that fire was enough to rock the ball backward. It teetered on Leo’s fingertips, and Leo’s expression was comical as he fumbled the ball. For a moment, it looked like his desperate flailing might permit him to regain his hold. Then the basketball fell, and it bounced once down the hallway, away from Jim and me.

  Swearing, Leo threw himself down.

  The basketball exploded.

  Jim turned back the rolling wall of fire, but chunks of sizzling rubber flew through the air, and one of them ricocheted off my jeans and left a greasy black patch on the cloth. The wall of fire lasted a moment longer, pushing against Jim’s invisible control, and someone was screaming. Screaming bloody murder. Screaming like he was being cooked alive. Leo.

  Then the fire collapsed, vanishing as quickly as it had come. Jim gasped. A fresh spurt of blood spilled over his fingers. The flakes of fire tumbling around him in the air hissed and vanished under the heavy spray of the sprinklers. He fell hard against the wall, catching himself with his shoulder, and slid into the ankle-deep water. His eyes were closed.

  Smoke shifted, and I saw the Crow boy. I threw another glance over my shoulder, and he was there too. They were about the same distance from me, so I picked the one coming at me from Jim’s side. I reached out again over the infinite distance between minds, and again I found nothing. It was like dragging my fingers through air. There was a hint of resistance, of substance, but nothing I could grab. I breathed in the smell of smoking basketball and tried again. Nothing.

  He was five yards off. I glanced back. The other one was about five yards too. I’d have to charge. Going up against a knife was stupid, about as stupid as you could get, but letting the Crow boy walk up and plug me with it would be even stupider.

  I set my feet and hoped the deepening water wouldn’t mess up my blitz. Then, closing my eyes, I tried one last time.

  A fist crashed against my nose, and I rocked back. That was impossible. He wasn’t close enough to hit me. But those thoughts flashed like lightning and went dark. I made them go dark.

  Emmett. That name flashed like lightning too. It burned me. Bad. And then I made it go dark too. But the lesson I’d learned was there, at the surface, where I needed it.

  Emmett had hit me like this too. Right when I’d been about to use my ability on him, he’d clocked me. And it had messed up my flow, and he’d gotten a knife against my throat. He’d made a good point, and I hadn’t forgotten it.

  Instead of reacting to the punch, I slipped out of my physical body and let it fall. From my projection to the other side, I took in everything through my inner sight: the two Crow boys that had worked their way from each end of the hall, and a third one who now stood in front of me, still dropping his hand from the punch he’d landed. Three of them. How in the world were there three of them now?

  I watched as my body dropped into the water. With my luck, I’d manage to drown myself. But I could deal with that later. For the moment, I had to deal with the Crow boy. With three Crow boys. Jesus.

  And he could see me. The one I had in my sights, the one in front of me, he brought up his head and looked straight at my projection.

  “Hi, motherfucker,” I said.

  What I had done to Krystal, ripping every stitch of her soul across to the other side, that had been instinct. I tried now to do it consciously. I reached for the Crow boy, but instead of trying to slip inside his mind, I grabbed at the shimmering threadwork of his soul.

  I caught nothing.

  The Crow boy just stared at me, sloe-eyed, neither curious nor afraid nor angry. He slapped at me and caught air, but I still danced back. Thank God. That was the only thought I had. Thank God he couldn’t touch me here.

  But he could still get to my physical body. And the same thought must have occurred to the Crow boy because he swatted at the air again, his dark little mouth twitching with frustration. Then he turned his back on me. I glanced left and right. The other Crow boys were still there, standing, waiting.

  The one in front of me, the one closest to me, squatted. The water surged up, darkening the denim to his knees.

  “Oh no you don’t,” I said.

  He grabbed my shoulder. My physical shoulder.

  “Not a chance, you little fucker.”

  With a grunt, he rolled me onto my stomach, and my face went into the water.

  It was my body there. My body, face-down in the water, motionless like I was already dead. Only I wasn’t dead. I was here, on the other side. And my body was still trying to breathe, and I saw bubbles, and then my physical body jerked. A spasm arched my back. And I watched it. I might as well have had popcorn and a soda because I was just watching, the whole thing happening in front of me, and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

  I could go back to my body.

  I might manage to surprise the Crow boy. I might. I could take advantage, maybe get my elbow in his throat, maybe knock him on his ass, take away the knife—

  Catching myself before I returned to my body, I hesitated. The knife. Why hadn’t he used the knife? Watching my physical body drown, watching the thrashing, the spume that rose on the filthy water, the way my hair trailed in the weak current, it was one of the freakiest, scariest things of my life. But part of my brain was still cranking, and that part was wondering: if he wanted me dead, why didn’t he just push that knife into my back?

  Because he was a sadist. Because he wanted me to suffer. Because he was enjoying the thrill of knowing that I was watching him kill me. Because he was a twelve-year-old psycho getting off on this.

  Maybe.

  Or maybe because he was trying to get me to do exactly what he wanted. Trying to get me back in my body. He could knock me out. Hell, he could drown me until I lost consciousness and then pump air into my lungs. He could do just about anything to me once I got back inside my body, and unless I had the best luck in the universe, I’d never have a chance to get away again.

  And I knew one thing: I’d never been that lucky.

  So I stayed on the other side. I watched my legs kicking weakly. I watched the curve of my spine. I thought about tetanus shots and how Joey Hayden had told me in fifth grade that if you got tetanus, you just kept arching your back, arching your back, arching until you snapped your own spine. He told me he’d seen it happen to a dog. And now I was watching it happen, watching my body try to flex its way out of the water, watching the brainless struggle of instinct as it sought air. Would this happen to someone else? The thought flashed through me, morbidly clinical. Or was my body different because it was only my soul that had stepped out, making this somehow different from a coma or another type of unconsciousness.

  I knew what Emmett would say. Emmett would tell me it didn’t matter because I was about to become a human sponge.

  I flailed, reaching psychically again for the Crow boy, and again I caught nothing. It was so strange. Even when my powers hadn’t been under my control, even when everything had happened by instinct or in those cumbersome, intermediary steps—the bridge and the door, I remembered—it had never been like this. There had never been someone standing in front of me, right in front of me, with as much psychic substance as a TV character.

  Trying again, I grappled with the emptiness of the other side. The thickly tapestried overlay of the other side glowed, taking on the crimson of my anger, the sickly yellow-green of my frustration and my fear. The Crow boy’s soul was there, visible, a thread-work of blue and silver and coal-dust. He was rig
ht there. I could see him. And if I could just reach him—

  But again, I caught nothing.

  I wanted to come apart. I wanted to be here, fully on the other side, the way I had been with Krystal. I wanted that total numbness, the dissolution of everything that had mattered until the world refracted and took on crystal clarity. I wanted to be outside myself, completely free, without anger or pain or fear. But no matter how hard I pushed, no matter how I tried, I was tied to my body. And my body wasn’t going to be alive much longer.

  The next part was just pure, toddler rage. It was the psychic equivalent of throwing a fit. An extrasensory temper tantrum. I reached out with my mind, grabbing mental handfuls of the other side, and ripped. I tore at that weave of reality. Pieces began to rip. The colors blurred in long lines, and it made me think that I had seen this before, seen something very similar in the Hunt Public House. But I was furious. I was terrified, and that only made me angrier. I gathered psychic folds of the other side and tore them to shreds.

  And then, all of a sudden, I caught something other than the other side. I caught the Crow boy. Only not the Crow boy in front of me; that one, no matter how I tried, passed through my grip like smoke. I grasped the one behind me. I grasped one that I couldn’t even see. It had been chance or accident, a kind of mental groping in the dark. And I felt his flicker of surprise. And his fear. And then I tore.

  It was like grabbing spaghetti. I caught at him, handfuls of him, and then he would slip away. I couldn’t hold on to him long enough to pop the seams of his soul. I couldn’t hold on to him long enough to shred him and let the tatters smoke away.

  But whatever I was doing must have still hurt like a bitch because the Crow boy screeched. It wasn’t a human sound. It wasn’t even really an animal sound. I think Krystal might have tried to make something like that noise, only I was too fast, and she was dead before she really knew what was happening. But the Crow boy screeched like I was ripping the noise out of him with fishhooks, and his dark eyes got huge, and he whipped his head from side to side, his braids rattling like rain on a steel roof.

  Then two of the Crow boys were gone, and when I looked behind me, the third one was staggering away, feet slipping in the rising water, suddenly looking only twelve years old, small and vulnerable. Good. Small and vulnerable was great. Small and vulnerable was perfect, especially if I could get the middle schooler to hold still long enough for me to put his own fucking knife in his back.

  I returned to my body, gasping and choking as I dragged myself out of the water, hacking up what felt like half a lung. I wiped my face, wiped my eyes, and hacked up some more lung. And then I managed to get to my feet.

  The sprinklers hissed. I still tasted flaming basketball with every breath, but now there was blood too, my blood. My nose throbbed. I breathed through my mouth, but every breath made that throb between my eyes turn star-white. I was pretty sure I was going to pass out.

  Behind me, the woman on the gurney was moaning again. “Be quiet,” I told her. “You didn’t exactly help.”

  Splashing across the hall, I scanned both ways. No sign of the Crow boy. Leo was gone.

  “Wake up,” I said, dropping into a squat next to Jim. His hand had slipped; the wound in his gut looked bad. All that lean muscle, the pale, smooth skin, his nipples. It was just too much of a shame to let a hot guy like that die. I grabbed his hair and shook his head. “Up. Right now, Jim.”

  “Vie.” He licked his lips. “Go.”

  I rolled him into a sitting position, and he screamed. Then he went limp, and his blood floated red-black clouds into the puddled water. I rocked him, got him over my shoulder, and launched up. The worst part was getting to my feet. The whole world went white, and the center of the white was that glittering spot of pain between my eyes. I slapped a hand against the wall, held myself, and after a few breaths I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to fall. Or puke. I got him to the gurney.

  “Move over.”

  But the woman didn’t move. She just moaned. So I dropped Jim next to her, and the two of them were ass to ankles squeezed onto the gurney. I blinked and wobbled and waited for the huge white crisscross at the center of my face to let me breathe again.

  “Wasting time,” Jim mumbled. His hand got my wrist, and his grip was lukewarm. Strong, but not that sizzling heat I had come to expect from him.

  “You teach drama,” I said, putting my shoulder into the gurney and getting it rolling. Water splashed under the wheels. “Shakespeare. That kind of boring old shit.”

  His head flopped when we took the turn. I wasn’t sure if he could hear me.

  “And you’re a big old homo. Hey.” I whapped his leg. “Wake the fuck up. I’m talking to you.”

  “Vie.”

  “You’re a homo. Did you hear me?”

  “Vie, you—”

  That was when I knew Emmett had really gotten into my head. It wasn’t just the punch I’d taken from the Crow boy. It wasn’t just the memory of Emmett trying to help me. It was his snark. It had infected me, lain dormant, and now it was awake, and I was running my mouth just like him. And I was grinning. And I hated how my heart ka-thumped and I hated Emmett, and I hated that grin, but I couldn’t stop running my mouth.

  “You know what that makes you?”

  “Vie, you’ve got to run.”

  “That makes you a drama queen.”

  The gurney squeaked and rattled as I ran. My breath whistled. My nose was about the same temperature as the sun, and it was getting hotter.

  Ahead, double doors opened onto the emergency wing of the hospital. I hit the doors at full speed, praying nobody was on the other side. I got lucky. I didn’t knock anybody flying, although I did clip a nurse who shouted something after me in Spanish. From what I’d heard Miguel and Joel say, I didn’t think she was very happy.

  “Hey, Jim. Did you hear me?”

  He groaned, rocking with the force of the gurney’s speed, his arms over the belly wound.

  “Jim.”

  “I fucking hate high school.”

  I whapped him again on the leg just so he knew he wasn’t alone.

  They were evacuating the hospital. Nurses directed orderlies, and orderlies wheeled gurneys toward the nearest exit. I didn’t make it more than ten feet before I got mired in the traffic; a big, balding orderly with a fringe of cotton candy hair shouted at me and rammed his gurney into mine.

  “You can have both of them,” I said, slipping through the jam. I caught a nurse’s arm and pointed back at Jim. “He’s got a gut wound. Lots of blood. Something exploded back there.”

  “Wait,” she said, catching at my sleeve. “What—”

  But I was gone. I had to keep moving. I had sloppy drunk steps as I danced through the chaos, and I needed to stop, drop, and sleep for a year. But I couldn’t stop yet. I couldn’t drop yet. And I couldn’t sleep, not yet, because Tyler and Hannah were still here. I could still hear the white-out static of Urho’s ability blocking Hannah’s scream, and I took that as a good sign. That meant she was still trying to talk to me. That meant they were still here.

  I cut against the flow of traffic, moving deeper into the hospital. A man in a doctor’s coat shouted something at me. Another tremor rattled the building. Ahead, the emergency exit sign hanging at the next set of fire doors pulled loose and swung on a frayed wire, snapping sparks into a cascade. I recognized those doors; I cut left.

  And then, between one moment and the next, I was free. The crowd evaporated. Behind me, the hub of voices dwindled, and as I continued forward, the only steady sound was the hiss of the sprinklers. Cold water pelted my face. No more showers. Never again. Maybe I’d take a bath once a year. Maybe. But other than that, I was finished with water. I could see the open space of the emergency waiting area ahead. I was close; I just had to get back to the exam rooms now.

  The hospital lurched; the floor heaved. A crack shot between my feet and zagged up the wall, exposing a shifting supp
ort beam. The smell of hot electrical wire filtered through the wet air. All of the sudden I thought of oxygen tanks. Compressed gases of all sorts. Would they explode? Christ. Even if Kyle didn’t bring down the building, he might still manage to kill a lot of people just with all the incidental destruction.

  As though in answer to my thoughts, a stronger tremor plowed through the building. It knocked me off my feet and carried me into the wall; my head punched through a pastoral painting of a cottage and some sheep. The damn thing fell and hung around my neck, and all I could do was slip and slide and try not to fall on my ass.

  Then the tremor stopped. Ducking my head, I worked free of the ruined painting. Then I froze.

  Someone was shouting.

  “—you damn kids!”

  I took a step. Puddled water splashed underfoot. Another step. The water rilled, sloshed, slopped. I froze, waiting for a sign that someone had heard me.

  Power surged nearby, a psychic signal fire, and a piece of equipment the size of a Prius whipped through the air. The air displaced by its passage rushed down the side hallway where I stood. That air was cold. It was like someone dusting me down with snow. All of a sudden, that white spot of pain between my eyes vanished. A crash came from deeper in the waiting area.

  Now or never. Now or never. I worked my chilled fingertips. I took a step. The splash sounded like King Kong doing a cannonball.

  At the edge of the waiting room, I stopped

  The man I recognized as Kyle Stark-Taylor lay under the massive piece of machinery. When it had struck him, it had carried him back into the wall, and now both Kyle and the machine were buried in the rubble. But Kyle’s big, bald head was visible; his fuzzy eyebrows were visible; the rough, thick features were visible. Something red was spraying across his face, and for a moment, I thought it was blood. Then I realized it was too thin, too glossy, and decided it was coming from the machine. Kyle sputtered and spat and tried to turn his head. On one screen, the machine flashed, ERROR D-187, and I had another of those goddamn Emmett Bradley moments because I wanted to giggle and I wanted to ask who had programmed the error code for being thrown like a goddamn shot put.