The Mortal Sleep (Hollow Folk Book 4)

by Gregory Ashe

  Drawing in a breath, I focused on the motel room, with its ultra-saturated scarlet that marked the throb of strong emotion. Defeating Urho was a problem for another day. I just needed to find the kids. And I had to find them fast.

  I reached out into the darkness around me, beyond the motel, across the high plains with the rangegrass doubling in the wind, the tender stalks of spring growth bending under the same force that sent tumbleweeds rolling and snapped out the dusty silver leaves of sage into streamers. Hannah had contacted me. She had been watching me. She was fixed on the other side, fixed in a way I hadn’t ever encountered before. Like a ghost. Urho had managed to silence her—his ability over the other side was incredibly strong—but I wasn’t a lightweight either. If I could find her, if I could brush up against her mind even for an instant, I might get a glimpse of where she was. Or the name of a road. Or a landmark. I’d done this before; I’d glimpsed the Widow’s Pyre, a rocky outcropping on the Bighorn Range, and it had been enough for Austin to lead me to the cabin where Mr. Big Empty—Luke, I told myself—where Luke had murdered Samantha Oates. All I needed was a clue. Just one. Just the barest hint of one.

  It was like drawing a net through black water. I caught nothing.

  I tried again, harder. Around me, the other side faded until I floated in darkness. I tried again, reaching farther. Nothing. A part of me was aware of my body’s labored breathing. A part of me was aware of the burn of fatigue as my body tried to fuel the demands of my ability. Again and again my psychic grip trailed through dark waters and caught nothing. I tried again, farther. I tried again, harder. I tried again.

  I had never stretched myself this way. Exhaustion bled through the thin barrier between body and soul; I was aware that part of me still lay on the bed, tangled with Emmett, trembling as though I was running the last stretch of an Ironman. But I could also feel . . . something. That image of the net trailing through black water came to me again. Yes. That was close to what it was. I had cast a psychic net over—what? The county? Three counties? My mind felt stretched and raw and burning. Half the state? At the edges of consciousness, where the net was thinnest, the faintest ripples came back to me like minnows slipping between the webbing. I tried again. Harder. Farther.

  That burning stretch grew hotter, the feel of friction, of skin on the point of tearing. Those ripples splashed across the surface of my mind: Jim Spencer like a pillar of golden fire, his face bruised and scabbed over as he stared at himself in a dingy mirror, the faintest hint of grunge and porcelain under his fingers. Not his bathroom. It looked like a public restroom. At a convenience mart? A truck stop? A rest area? He looked worse than he had in the hospital. The fire inside him columned in a great whirlwind, and I glimpsed the ancient stainless steel cross-handles droop like hot wax, watched the faucet bend and snake like a falling candle, and then Jim’s flicker of surprise, his eyes widening in the reflection, the cinders stirring at the back of his gaze like fireworks, and a single word: Vie?

  Then he slipped from my net, and my mind continued to grab at the ripples. The next one was a dark place. A few low lights flashed out numbers and charts. A machine beeped. The air smelled like sickness and liniment and a sponge air-drying. Get out! It was Temple Mae’s voice, furious and raised to a shriek that I’d never heard her use before. Get out, get out, get out! And then something hit me with tremendous force, and I caromed out of her mind and into the darkness again.

  Another flutter of movement, I seized it, felt the edges of the psychic lacework I had cast out across the night draw tight. I was in another room much like the last one, with the steady drone of a machine, with that identical smell of wet sponge, with cinnamon burning my tongue and Drake pounding away at my inner ear. One hand held a phone, and the screen displayed a series of messages. One-sided messages. Messages sent by the phone in my hand. At the top of the screen was Austin’s name, and then a series of blue bubbles: I’m sorry. No reply. I really messed up, Aus. Will you please talk to me? No reply. Look, I just need to tell you something in person, ok? No reply. Will you just tell me you’re ok? No reply. I know you’re mad. You’re totally right to be mad. But will you tell me when we can talk about this? On and on, those blue bubbles marking Kaden’s texts to my ex, his unanswered pleas getting more and more desperate.

  That lit a fire inside me. It wasn’t some match-and-kindling kiddie stuff. It was bigger and brighter and hotter than that. Like something chemical. Something burning hot enough to make what I’d seen in Jim Spencer’s mind, with stainless steel dripping to fall in beads on the cold porcelain, look like the Antarctic.

  Then, seeing through Kaden’s eyes, I watched a single drop of blood spatter on the phone’s screen, and then I heard him thinking, My head, Jesus Christ, my head, my head, oh Christ—

  And I fled.

  What caught me next wasn’t a ripple or a tug or a flick of movement at the edge of consciousness. What caught me next was a riptide dragging me across the high plains like I was riding the wind, the buffalo grass rustling under me, the clouds scudding above me, the moon peeping out to cast cold gray radiance across the Bighorns like klieg lights turned up from backstage. And then the darkness dragged me down.

  I sat up in a bedroom that wasn’t mine, but I recognized it. I’d spent a lot of time there: a room that always had old plates and cups stacked on the dressers, a grease-spotted napkin tenting the remains of a grilled cheese, a trail of socks and underwear and t-shirts meandering to the bed. Where the sheets had fallen back, powerfully muscled legs rode up to the powder blue jock I had given him because it looked like his eyes, their brightest blue when he was happy, and his pale skin glowed almost as bright as the white elastic straps. So sexy.

  Austin’s breath stuttered in and out, but inside, his mind wasn’t afraid.

  Vie? Are you ok? Where are you? I’m sorry, I’m really sorry I didn’t just—

  I ripped myself out of his thoughts. Something gave inside me, like a stitch pulling loose, and it hurt. It hurt bad. And I fled, limping, back to my own mind, back to my body, back to the bed and Emmett’s legs warm between mine like velvet brushed against the grain.

  I was shaking. Sweat stippled my chest, with a ruby glow where the clock radio's light curved along the drops. I wiped my face, and my face was wet; just sweat. I worked the pillow out from under my head and laid it over my face. I held it down tight, breathing the smell of other people’s hair and industrial laundering until my hands weren’t shaking as bad.

  Calm. Austin had been so calm. Why couldn’t I ever feel like that? Even with Emmett, it was always fire and ice, always the shuddering draw of the chain pulling me higher and higher until the roller coaster dropped and my head felt like it was coming off. But never calm.

  The drugged-out jerk of his voice: You’re my shit.

  And then the clarity in his eyes: I’m not good for you. We’re not good for each other.

  I peeled back the pillow, and I was right. There was no Austin waiting for me. Just the darkness, and the rough ridges of the scars on Emmett’s chest as he shifted against me.

  At some level, I knew what had happened. I had reached too far. I had tried too hard. I had exerted myself to the point of losing control, and as I had lost control, I had lost focus. Instead of Hannah, I had started picking up the emotional signals I was most attuned to: Jim Spencer, Temple Mae, Kaden, Austin. They were broadcasting at a frequency that I felt day in and day out.

  For somebody else, it probably would have been family. You hear stories about it—somebody having a vision when something bad happens to a spouse or a parent or a child, even if they’re hundreds of miles away. Or just a gut feeling that something was wrong, and then you learn hours or days or weeks later that there had been a car crash or a fall or an illness.

  Not me, though. I didn’t have those kinds of family ties. I had my friends. Even Kaden, asshole that he was. I had the people who had fought by me.

  I rolled onto my side, away from the scarr
ed ridges of Emmett’s torso, needing just a moment of cool linens and space to myself so that I didn’t go out of my mind. No matter how bad it had gotten for me, I’d never picked up on even the most remote psychic connection with my dad, much less with my mom—The thought hit me so hard that I had my feet on the floor, the filthy carpet clammy under my soles, before I had fully processed it. I hadn’t ever reached out to my mom because she was the one I was trying to get away from.

  For me, psychic distress drew me toward the people here, the people in my life, the people I cared about. It was so strong, in fact, that in one case, it had dragged me down like a whirlpool, pulling me straight to Austin.

  But I wasn’t like most people.

  I was so stupid. I wanted to crack a fist against my head. I wanted to shout. But I just sat in the darkness, the bed creaking with every minor shift of my weight, my toes curling in shag carpeting shiny from traffic and bad shampoo jobs. Shay had told me. Shay, Hannah’s mom, had told me when she came to ask for my help. She had told me why she was so worried. She had told me why it had to be me instead of the police—the real reason it had to be me, and not the weak excuses she had given her mom.

  She had told me that she heard Hannah screaming.

  THROUGH THE YELLOWING SCRIM of the curtain, light from the parking lot gave the motel room a snuffed-out glow. I stared at the window sheers, which looked thirty years old and like they’d spent the entire time absorbing steady blasts of smoke off Pall Malls and Pall Mall Reds and Marlboros—just the Marlboro Blacks—and Pyramids. Those were the brands that populated the images in my head; they were the ones Mom smoked. In the hem of one of the sheers, someone had burned out a series of crescents.

  I wasn’t really seeing the curtains, and I wasn’t really thinking about the nicotine stains or the brands or who might have lain in this bed, sheets kicked down, chain-smoking until the room floated in its own clouds. All of that was happening on the surface of my brain. But deep down, I was trying to remember everything about that night with Shay.

  Kneading the quilt, I tried to put the pieces together. She had been waiting for me. She had wanted to talk. I remembered the rain, and the look on Austin’s face like he was watching me step into oncoming traffic, and the way her hands had ripped at the gimp that trimmed the upholstery on Sara’s chair.

  I dropped the quilt, and it fell, scratchy against the backs of my calves. If only I hadn’t been so angry. If only I hadn’t been angry at Shay for neglecting Tyler and Hannah, if only I hadn’t been angry at Austin for interfering, if only I’d listened, really listened, and heard what Shay had been trying to tell me. She had heard Hannah screaming. After the kids had disappeared, when she had assumed they were still with their dad, she had heard Hannah screaming. At the time, I had barely registered the claim. I already knew that Shay suffered from what was, as far as I knew, a unique form of mental distress: something incredibly evil had taken control of her by shattering her chakras and moving into her fractured, broken soul, and then I had killed that creature while it was still inside her head. The invasion, the battle, the death—they had damaged her brain in a way no psychologist or psychiatrist would be able to remedy.

  So I had dismissed her words as either some sort of psychic residue, a kind of echo left by the shrapnel of Luke’s mind imploding, or as a fluke. Even after I’d sensed someone watching me, even after I’d found Hannah’s spirit in the Hunt Public House, I’d never put two and two together.

  And I’d managed to endanger just about everyone I cared about by being such an idiot.

  Emmett spooned up close to me, his body a loose question mark on the stained sheets, the stiff ridges of collagen that marked half his body throwing a labyrinth of shadows across the rest of his smooth, golden skin. It was another of those moments where the asshole who normally rode on the surface was buried—or maybe evaporated—and he looked like the boy that I knew was inside: broken, hurting, desperate for love, but also kind and funny and caring. Maybe that was what was so intoxicating about him. Maybe that was why I kept coming back. He just cared so damn much. And it hurt him—that was obvious—it hurt him to care that much. But he kept doing it. And how could I not love someone who put his hand in the fire again and again, not to try to pull me out like Austin, but just to hold on for a minute or an hour or however long I was burning?

  I stretched out next to him; springs creaked, and Emmett moved with them. His eyes flicked open, and the asshole was back.

  “You weigh like a fucking ton.”

  “Go back to sleep.”

  “Are you ok?”

  I closed my eyes.

  His fingers, callused from the guitar, touched my ear lobe, my jaw, the corner of my eye.

  “I’m trying to sleep.”

  His breath was warm and soft as he exhaled heavily. “Goodnight, tweaker.”

  “Night.”

  “If you get up again, remember the bed isn’t a trampoline.”

  “Goodnight.”

  “You can just lie down. Slowly. Quietly. Softly. You’re not trying to bounce to the moon.”

  “Goodnight, Emmett.”

  He laughed softly, and those callused pads traced the shape of my mouth, and his breathing softened into sleep.

  I stepped out of my body again, but not into the other side. If I had kept my relationship with Tyler and Hannah strong, if I had visited them, spent time with them, involved myself in their lives, I could have found them on my own. The distance between us, though, was too great now. Instead, I stepped into the darkness, the place where I had cast my mind onto black waters. And I cast my mind out again. Exhaustion made the action sloppy, graceless, and I knew I had to hurry before I passed out.

  I had been in Shay’s mind recently. More than once, in fact. And finding her was easy—not as easy as finding Austin or Emmett or Becca, but easy. I touched her mind, and then I was inside it, and the storm surge of filth rolled up around my ankles—all the oil and tar that marked the remainder of Luke’s mind and power. It wasn’t the crashing storm that I had encountered the last time, but there was a definite chop to the water, a harsh, pounding force that I visualized as waves on an eroding cliffside.

  The next part wasn’t something I had done before, not exactly, but I had an idea. For me, triggering emotional responses in people was like a call-and-response, a sympathetic mirroring in which I found the emotion in myself first, and then their mind responded with memories and passions. What I needed to find in myself was love.

  That wasn’t hard. Here, in this dark place, without feeling like I was center stage, I didn’t have any trouble admitting it. I loved Austin. I loved Emmett. I wasn’t going to grab a mic and sing my heart out for either of them, but I loved them both. And since I didn’t have kids and I didn’t have any really good memories of my parents—throwing stones on Lake Thunderbird flickered at the back of my head—that kind of love was as close as I was going to get.

  Austin came first to mind. He came quickest. And he came with that sharp, jabbing pain under my ribs that made it hard to breathe. He came in a gliding carousel of images: afternoon picnics as he ran his fingers through my hair, the sun hot on my back; the sticky possessiveness of his arms when we slept together, his sweat pasting him against me; the way he held a gun when he thought I was in danger; that kiss, our first one, in the hospital. It made me angry that he came to mind first. It made me angry that he still sprang forward like that, like he hadn’t wanted me the fuck out of his life. Like I was supposed to pretend he hadn’t been willing to cut things off when I made one simple mistake. I visualized him in the parking lot, We’re done. You and I are done. And then I visualized the set of his shoulders as he walked away from me in Western Bighorn Hospital, after throwing those words in my face—if you’d listened to the rest of that damn tape—and then I focused on Emmett.

  With Emmett, it was even harder. I tried to focus on the day he’d pulled me from the river, but then I was caught up in memories of his h
ouse, of the feel of his mouth against me as I wore his too-small clothes, of the chain reaction of explosions his touch set off inside me, and then the way he had told me that we could fuck around but we couldn’t date. I tried to think about when he had learned I loved him, and the thought intruded of him running out into the snow, barefoot, so freaked out that he couldn’t be in the same room with me. I tried to think about him cutting himself, how he had wanted to show me how much it hurt other people to see me hurt myself, and another memory wormed through my mind, his words from just a few hours before: We’re not good for each other.

  Around me, in the black well of Shay’s mind, the filthy storm surge waters rocked and slapped and spat. No image of Tyler or Hannah. No answering echo of love.

  What did that mean? Was I broken? Fuck, that was a dumb question; of course I was. But was Shay broken too? Would this not work?

  Or maybe—

  I was miles past exhausted. I could feel my hold slipping, my power waning, my spirit ready to snap back into my body like a rubber band stretched too far. I just wanted to rest. It felt like it had been years since I’d been able to rest, since I’d been able to sleep without dreams and nightmares and psychic invaders. But it hadn’t been years. It had been—two days? Three? How long since I’d last crawled into bed at Sara’s house, knowing that she was downstairs, knowing—even though she’d never said a word, never even talked a circle around it—that she’d do anything to keep me safe, and that knowledge had been warmer than any quilt or down comforter, it had been stabilizing, it had been—

  The storm inside Shay’s mind parted. It was like the sun coming out in the eye of a hurricane, and her memories reeled by in short, vivid images: Shay rocking Tyler, a lullaby building in her throat, one that she remembered from childhood although the words had gone; Shay catching Tyler as he toppled off a stool in the bathroom, the electric surge of fear still cascading down her nervous system, and then the honeyed wave of relief that he was ok, that her universe hadn’t ended, the sense of relief so strong it was completely disproportionate to the danger, and the realization that her immoderate reaction, her unmeasured, excessive relief, was like a physical manifestation of love. Then she was holding another baby, and this time Tyler sat on the hospital’s window bench, scribbling in a coloring book, and the words it’s a girl, it’s a girl ran like ticker tape through Shay’s mind, and sometimes the words were fuzzy and pink and the size of parade balloons, and sometimes they were cramped black warnings, and then—