The Mortal Sleep (Hollow Folk Book 4)

by Gregory Ashe

  “I had a theory.” Emmett’s chin rested on my ribs, and he spoke into my chest, the words muffled by the thick cotton of the sweatshirt. “It came to me after everything that happened at Belshazzar’s Feast. After you told me about that video, the one with the politician that they had kidnapped.”

  “They hadn’t just kidnapped him. They were torturing him. They were breaking him down so Mr. Big Empty could get inside him and wear him like a puppet.”

  “Right. That’s what got me thinking: why?”

  “Because they wanted power. They could have used him to do all sorts of nasty stuff. They could have gotten access to law enforcement officers at the top of the chain. They could have used him to subvert laws, or to propose new laws, or just to take bribes and funnel the cash back. They could have—”

  “I’m not talking about that. That’s the wrong way to look at it, the totally wrong way. You’re thinking about why.”

  “That’s what you said.”

  “You’re thinking about why like it’s a purpose. The end result. I’m asking why that method. Why did they have to break him down? Why did they have to torture him, hurt him? With that girl, the one working for the Biondi, the torture had been so bad that it left a kind of psychic stickiness, and you could still feel it. When Mr. Big Empty was wearing that girl’s body, he had to hide all the damage—he couldn’t let anybody see that her body had been brutalized.”

  He lifted his head then, those fallaway, bottomless eyes finding mine, inviting me to drop—forever, really, to just drop forever into those eyes. Like heroin. Love? What the fuck was love when you could fall forever? If you fell forever, really forever, then it wasn’t any different than flying. And love wasn’t shit compared to flying.

  “Hey.” A finger jabbed my ribs. “Focus.”

  “I’m thinking.”

  The memory was right there, clear and red like an Exit sign. Sneaking into Jigger Boss, Vehpese’s only nightclub, and finding my way to the back room. A secret room. A torture room. And the residue—the stickiness—of the psychic horror that had occurred there. The pain. The screams. The duskfall realization that no one would hear her, no one would come for her, no one would save her. My breaths stitched together in short succession, one-two-three, and Emmett rubbed a circle above my heart.

  “Ok,” I said. “But that question isn’t really a question. There’s no why. Mr. Big Empty told me that much; that’s just how his power worked. He had to break them to get inside their heads. That’s why they kidnapped those people. That’s why they tortured them.”

  “Tweaker,” his hand continued its smooth, slow caress. “You’re still not thinking. Why?”

  I bit my lip to keep an answer from shooting out. I let my hand feather his hair again. I stared up at the ceiling with its web of cracked plaster. Why? Why did he have to break their bodies and their minds to take control of them? Why did it even matter?

  “I don’t know,” I finally said. “You think it’s not just some . . . I don’t know. It’s not some arbitrary psychic rule. You’re saying it’s not like that?”

  The circle of skin under Emmett’s caress was a warm, red disc of pleasure. His voice went into my sweatshirt, muffled again. “That’s what I started thinking. I started thinking about the people that disappeared. I started thinking about why they wouldn’t talk about where they’d been or what had happened to them. Have you ever talked to Temple Mae about the time she spent with them?”

  “She’s never even told us that’s what happened.”

  “Don’t play dumb. You’re too big and blond; it’s too easy to believe.”

  “Ok, so I guess she must have been taken to Belshazzar’s Feast. But she doesn’t want to talk about it. She doesn’t even want to admit that she’s got an ability most of the time. It’s . . . it’s like she’s angry when she has to admit that she’s different. I think the only reason she helps us is because of Jake.”

  “What about Mr. Spencer?”

  “Jim—” I caught myself.

  “Jim?” Emmett’s head came up off my chest. “You guys are buddies, huh?”

  “He won’t tell me anything. He won’t talk to me about it. He’s like Temple Mae: as much as he can, he wants to pretend that part of his life doesn’t exist.”

  “Jim treats you like you’re invisible,” Emmett said, “unless you’re in class, and then he treats you like a normal student. I know. I’ve been watching.”

  “That’s so creepy.”

  “What about Ginny? Or Kaden? Or Makayla or Hailey or the rest of them?”

  “Leave Ginny aside for a minute. What happened with Kaden at Belshazzar’s Feast?”

  “They took him away. They did something to him.”

  “And?”

  I swallowed. “He started screaming.”

  “Have you seen him naked?”

  I thought of the kiss between the bars, that detonation of a kiss with a boy who was supposedly straight. “God, no. Why would I?”

  “I have.”

  This time, my head came off the pillow. “What? When did you—what were you—I mean.” I dropped back and tried to moderate my voice. “Oh. And?”

  “Oh God, now you’re going to have wet dreams for a year. I didn’t sleep with him. If anybody’s going to pop his little cherry, it’ll be Austin, judging by the way those two like to play grab-ass. But one night we were partying, only I let Kaden party a little harder, and I held back, and eventually he was so stoned he passed out on the couch. I stripped him down and took a look.”

  “What did he say when he woke up naked?”

  “Nothing.” Emmett smirked. “I loaded his phone up with gay porn and left it in his hand. He’s probably spent the last three weeks desperately trying to convince himself he really is straight. For all I know, he actually is. But that’s not the important part. The important part is that I found two wounds. Mostly healed, but still visible. And they’re going to scar, tweaker.” Emmett rolled away from me and sat up. He touched his bare chest, a few inches below his heart. Then his hand drifted lower, to his navel, and skidded right another inch. “And don’t try to tell me he got hurt during the fight. Austin carried him out of there while the whole place was coming down. Kaden got two specific wounds. Two.”

  “Just tell me what you’re trying to tell me. I’m tired. We still haven’t even gotten to the part where you went to see my mom, and that’s going to be a real bitch of a fight, so I’m saving up. I don’t want to waste time going in circles like this.”

  Emmett got on his knees and shuffled over to me. His arms came around me, as though he were going to embrace me, and then his finger lighted on my back. On the scar. The first one. From the birthday candles.

  “Here,” he said. Whispered, really. A low, throaty noise that was barely a word, more just the hot gust of his breath on my neck. His finger found another scar, his touch unerring even with the sweatshirt covering my back. “And here. Here. Here. Here.”

  The cold was back, drawing the skin tight at the center of my chest. I shivered. Then, as delicately as I could, I laid a hand on Emmett’s chest and forced him away from me.

  “How did you do that? At your house, when you were showing me off to Lawayne—”

  “When I was saving your life.”

  “—you knew. You knew the order she—you knew the order they happened. And now, without even looking, you know where they are.”

  “Chakras.”

  “What?”

  “Chakras are like these points of spiritual energy that map onto the body—”

  “I know what chakras are.” I glared at him. I squirmed until I was sitting against the headboard—I wanted something at my back—and then I said. “Ok. I mean, I’ve heard of chakras.”

  His lopsided smile looked so much like the old Emmett that it yanked on my heartstrings. “Well, tweaker, I’ll give you the benefit of my research.” He began touching himself, marking a line from his crown to his crotch
. “The big chakras, the ones that get the most attention, especially the way people in the U.S. have picked up on the idea, are the seven.” He marked them out again for me, slower, his hand lingering at his crotch and his eyebrows arching into giant fuck-mes. Then, with a laugh, he said, “They’re a big deal if you’re into that stuff. Meditation. Holistic healing. Tantric sex.” His smirk sizzled again; he was half hard, and those dark, bottomless eyes told me he was thinking of ways to distract me.

  “Save it. You want to show me a million ways you can make me come, that sounds like a great way to spend a weekend.”

  A weekend, Emmett mouthed, his eyebrows still shot into those fuck-me peaks.

  “But for now, stay focused. None of my scars line up with those chakras.” I tried to visualize my back; it was disorienting, thinking of my body from the outside. “They’re not even close.”

  All of the smoldering-coal energy went out of Emmett, and he drew himself together, arms hooking his knees. For a moment, he struggled with something, the effort showing in his face, and then he said, “Mine do.”

  With visible effort, he opened his legs and leaned back on his arms. The movement was so stilted, so clinically asexual, that even though I had seen him sprawled, erect, moaning as I buried myself in him, this was completely different. It prickled on the back of my neck, the sheer vulnerability of the movement, and the fear on his face.

  And then I saw the symmetry. Or the insane version of symmetry that my conscious brain could only partially process. He was telling the truth: the scars on his face swirled out of the chakra at the center of his forehead like tongues of flame. The same on his chest, like half-finished spokes of wheels radiating out from the chakra down to his crotch, where his mutilated penis lay.

  Emmett’s hand dipped, cupping himself like a fig leaf, and he had a schoolboy blush that looked miles from fitting on his face. “Ok, tweaker. You’ve seen. Now don’t look at me like that.” He paused. “Please.”

  I nodded and glanced away; my face was hot, and my chest was hot, and my belly. My eyes came to rest on a knot in the floorboards, and I directed all my attention to that swirl in the grain so I could control my runaway thoughts, because if I didn’t . . . I was going to lose it.

  “We fucked, Em; it’s not like I didn’t notice—” I was rambling trying to find a way to put him at ease.

  “Please don’t do that.”

  That black knot in the wood drew my eyes again, my breath catching in my throat, and I nodded without looking up. “Maybe you should put on some clothes.”

  The rustle of the quilt, then the slow rasp of his jeans, and the swish of cotton falling over lean muscle. When the bed rocked under his weight again, his smell poured over me: his sweat, his sex, the lingering bergamot of his cologne. His breathing was even, but it wasn’t natural. When he spoke, his voice wasn’t natural either.

  “Obviously this, what happened to me, that happened a lot later. The first clue was the way Mr. Big Empty was taking control of people. The more I started thinking about it, the more I realized there had to be a why. Some reason that wasn’t arbitrary—that’s what you said, right? And it hit me one day. It wasn’t arbitrary at all. For millions of years—well, ok, thousands of years—people have believed that the body and the soul are connected. Purity of the flesh, purity of the spirit. Respect the flesh, respect the spirit. Acupuncture, chiromancy, sexual magic. The chakras. And that’s when I started thinking I was on to something.”

  “So Mr. Big Empty wasn’t just hurting people. I mean,” I paused. My eyes went anywhere but Emmett. They went over and over again to that knot in the wood. “I mean he was hurting them, but the torture was purposeful. Directed. He was damaging specific chakras. Breaking them.” I visualized my third eye, and my hand came to rest against my forehead, mimicking Emmett’s earlier gesture. Maybe it was my imagination. Maybe. But I thought I could feel the pulse of my power there like a silver heartbeat. “But my—”

  “There aren’t just seven chakras. There are seven major chakras, but depending on which traditions you follow, there might be twelve, or there might be hundreds. Or thousands. Or tens of thousands. One line of belief posits eighty-eight thousand.”

  My eyes skipped away from the floor long enough to slide across Emmett’s face: those fallaway eyes with the electric sheen, like a skein of light unraveled over bottomless dark. And then I was back, safe, to the floor. My thoughts kept moving though; more and more of what Emmett was suggesting started to come together.

  “Ok. Ok, but my—”

  “Do you remember when I first saw your back?”

  The whorl of darkness in the wood was staring back at me now; the quilt’s seams bumped up under my fingers. I remembered trying to sleep in the hotel recliner. I remembered the nightmares. I remembered the catch in Emmett’s throat.

  “Do you?”

  I nodded.

  “They found Samantha’s body that day. In my garage. And my whole world was coming apart. I thought for sure they were going to arrest me. I thought it was all happening again. It was like one of those nightmares where you can’t run, or you can’t run fast enough, and whatever’s chasing you just comes faster and faster.

  “Only it wasn’t the same. You were there. And somehow you got me into that hotel room, and you got me into bed, and you looked so goddamn ridiculous squeezed into that chair and trying to sleep. I don’t even know if that’s when it happened, but now, when I look back, that’s when I think it started. I never had a chance, tweaker. Not after that night. And when I saw the scars—”

  I shook my head.

  “When I saw them, I think that was it. No chance. No fucking chance after that no matter how hard I threw the dice. And it wasn’t because I have a thing for fucked-up pretty boys. It was because I knew you’d been through hell, and somehow you’d come out like this: stomping around and raising hell and making those ugly tough faces you think you know how to make and trying to sleep in a recliner because you were worried about me. Somehow after everything that had happened to you, you were worried about me. I should have just stopped fighting it then.” He touched the fading red print of my hand on his cheek. “I never forgot that. The way your back looked. And I went and started studying. Do you know what I found?”

  He waited. He was waiting for me. I never had a chance. The words pinballed inside my head, and I stared at that knot in the floor until it blurred, and those words just pinballed faster and faster. I never had a chance. I never had a chance. Heroin. I shivered. He was so much worse than heroin. I could try my entire life to get him out of my system, and he’d come back like this again and again. He thought he never had a chance? What about me?

  He was still waiting, and those fallaway eyes were waiting, and I had to clear my throat.

  “Do you know what I found?”

  I shook my head.

  “Nothing. I mean, there’s a million websites about chakras. And most of them sound like they were written by crazy people. And there’s a lot of books written about chakras, and most of those sound like they were written by hippies or by pseudo-hippies trying to make a buck. But I couldn’t find anything that would explain what I had seen. I couldn’t find anything that would explain how damaging the chakras—specific chakras, in specific patterns—would produce the kinds of freaky X-Men powers I’d seen. So I went back to the beginning and tried to think it all out.”

  “Why didn’t you talk to me about this? Why didn’t we work on it together?”

  “Tweaker.” And he said it with so much affection and a light veneer of scorn like I was too stupid to see what was right in front of me. Then he shook his head. “I went through the facts. What did I know? I knew that the Lady had been alive for a long time. I knew that she’d been changing people, giving them abilities. But only sometimes. Sometimes people didn’t come back. And there didn’t seem to be any pattern to the abilities.”

  “Kinetics.” I looked up at Emmett, surprising even myself. “
That’s what Luke—that’s what Mr. Big Empty called them. She kept making different kinds of kinetics. Jim—I mean, Mr. Spencer—”

  Emmett’s mouth quirked, but those bottomless eyes were deadly dangerous at the mention of Jim’s name.

  “—and Mrs. Troutt and Hailey and Temple Mae and Kaden and, well, all of them. They can affect the physical world. But that’s not what she wanted. She wanted a psychic.”

  “You figured that out?”

  “Luke said she needed a real psychic, a full psychic, so she could bring back Urho. But she . . . what’s wrong with your face?”

  “You knew? He just told you? Just like that?” Emmett groaned. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t invited to the secret clubhouse for the meetings.”

  “Jesus. Just Jesus, Vie. Didn’t you think that the rest of us might want to know that? What else did he say?”

  “He said—” My brow furrowed. “Something about other awakeners. Mr. Big Empty thought there used to be others, and that kind of makes sense, I guess, because the Lady made a big stinking deal about how she was given the Montana Territory. That’s what this part of the country used to be called, back before statehood. But he said they were all gone now, and . . . come on, Emmett. You look like you’ve got to take a dump.”

  “You could have saved me—” His jaw clamped shut. He gave a single, vicious jerk of his head. His nostrils flared with each breath. “Vie, why didn’t you tell us?”

  “What are you so upset about?”

  “Everybody we know, everybody that’s got a power, how’d they get it?”

  “Does this have something to do with Lawayne? Does this have something to do with the creepy way he handled me, with him talking to you like you promised him something?”

  Emmett snorted. “Lawayne is desperate for an ability, but he’s not stupid enough to hand himself over to the Lady. I explained my theory about chakras. I told him about you, mapped out what I knew about the scars and what I’d wheedled out of Austin, and that night, he was convinced I was right. That’s why he wanted you—dead or alive. He’s got some batshit idea that he can create powers himself, just by making the right cuts. He’s an idiot, but he was smart enough to play along with Urho and the Lady long enough to avoid getting crushed.” Emmett’s eyes narrowed. “You’re avoiding my question, though, tweaker. How did everyone we know get their ability?”