“Wow.” He shook his head. “You must’ve had a hell of a night. I can’t even imagine.”
“She’s up there, sleeping like a baby now. The doctor says she can go home in a few days.” I paused. “How’s Cassie?”
“She’s worse.” He looked down at his shoes. “Like five hundred times worse. Last night was a nightmare.”
“What happened?”
“She just went berserk. Put both hands through a bathroom window, cut her arms and face. They had to bring a doctor over so she could get stitched up.” I winced behind my sunglasses. “She’s still on the third floor. My dad … had to tie her up with rope because she kept ripping herself out of the restraints.” He coughed once behind his hands and then pressed his fist against his lips. “I don’t think it’s my grandmother’s spirit in there.”
“What do you mean?”
“It can’t be. It’s … whatever it is … is trying to kill her. Literally. It’s got to be some kind of demon inside her, Marin. Some kind of evil. My grandmother would never do these things to her—dead or alive. And look.” He shoved a hand inside his pocket and withdrew a slip of paper. The number eight was drawn on the front in black marker. “You know the carving on Cassie’s face? The number eight? I looked it up. Eight is the symbol of infinity, eternity.” He turned the paper to the right so that the number was on its side. “But when it’s on its side, like this, exactly the way Cassie has it, it turns into a symbol of evil.”
“Evil?” My chest tightened.
“Yes.” Dominic shoved the paper back inside his pocket again. “Any form of purity that’s corrupted or turned on its side like that becomes a symbol of darkness. Like the upside-down cross. Or the Star of David with the circle around it.” He shook his head. “It can’t be a coincidence. It just can’t. There’s too many things that are all adding up now. It’s got to be a demon doing all this shit to her. It’s got to be.”
My skin prickled at his words and my mouth felt cold. “If you really think that, then you should tell your parents. Or a priest. Listen, Dominic, I talked to Father William last night. At the hospital. He came to see Nan. He told me that he would look into finding a real exorcism priest to come examine Cassie.”
His eyes lit up. “He did? When?”
My heart sank. “I don’t know when, exactly. He just said he’d look into it. Apparently, these kinds of priests are hard to get ahold of.”
But Dominic was already shaking his head. “We don’t have time. I have to try the conjoining exorcism as soon as possible. Like in the next day or two. Once I get everything together, it’ll work. I know it will.”
“Listen to me!” I protested. “Father William said we shouldn’t be messing around with this stuff! I’m serious. You don’t have any kind of experience with this, okay? Please don’t stand there and tell me that you’re really going to do some kind of ritual on a demon!”
“The ritual Cassie did brought it into that room.” His voice was determined, unswayed. “Which means that the one I do can take it out again.” His eyes were pleading. “I’ve got to at least try. You don’t realize what bad shape she’s in, Marin. No one does but us.”
Did I dare? Even though the stakes had just been raised, the bar of fear inalterably heightened? I chewed on the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood, studying the tips of my shoelaces.
“Marin?”
I lifted my head, aligned my gaze with his. “I think I know where to get an invisible trinity.”
His face blanched, but his eyes lit up. “What?”
“I think I know where to get an invisible trinity,” I repeated. “We’ll have to go downtown, but I’m pretty sure I’m right.”
“What is it?”
I winced, not willing to divulge my secret just yet. Without tangible proof, he might laugh. Scoff, even. “Get in the car. I’ll show you.”
Nineteen
Dominic darted toward his side of the car so fast that I almost flinched. I got in on the passenger side, fastening my seat belt, hoping beyond hope that what I was about to show him would suffice, that at the very least, he wouldn’t dismiss it outright. And yet, I didn’t want it to work, either. Leading him down this road, plying him with false hope, wasn’t only dangerous, it was also stupid.
“Oh my God, Marin, I can’t believe you’re actually telling me this.” He spoke with a new energy; a light had come back behind his eyes, and his shoulders had righted themselves again. “Just this morning, I was lying in bed thinking that we were going to lose her. And then you tell me you’ve found an invisible trinity. We’ll have both things now! The buried heart and the invisible trinity! We can do it!”
I nodded, wishing he would stop using the word we.
“You’re not going to lose her,” I said as he braked at a red light.
He looked over at me again, the lines in his face softening. “No?”
“No.” I dropped my eyes, pretending to study the back of a Smartfood Popcorn bag.
“God, I hope you’re right.”
I took a deep breath. It was time. It was. I could feel it. “Listen. I have to tell you something else.”
“Okay.”
My heart thudded in my chest; a roaring sound filled my ears. “I can … see things.”
“What do you mean? What things?”
“Pain. I can see people’s pain.” I held my breath.
“Pain?” Dominic’s head flicked back and forth between watching the road and looking at me. “Like, you can tell when someone’s hurting inside?”
“No, I can see it.” I scanned the front of Dominic’s blue T-shirt, his arms, legs, and pointed to the spot on his wrist with two fingers. “Like right there. There’s a bright blue blob there, right inside your wrist.”
Dominic looked down and ran his fingers over the spot I had indicated. “That’s where I sprained my wrist. Just this year, during preseason javelin tryouts. It’s actually been feeling a lot better lately.” A curious expression came over his face. “But you already knew that, right? Someone told you?”
“No.” I shrugged, pushing my glasses up along my nose. “Who would’ve told me?”
He stared at me for a moment and then looked back down at his arm. “And what’s there? What can you see?”
“It’s just a blue shape.” I looked at it again, more intently this time. “About the size of an egg. It’s a little bit darker on the right, and the left side is flatter than the right. Blue usually means some kind of joint or muscle injury or—”
“Wait, usually means?” He sat up straighter. “As in you’ve seen this kind of thing before?”
“Well, yeah. You think you’re the only person out there who’s injured something? I’m not one hundred percent sure that all the blue shapes I see are joint injuries, but …” I stopped, letting my head fall back against the seat rest, realizing how ridiculous everything sounded. “I’m pretty sure they are.”
“So you see other ones?”
“Hundreds. All the time.”
“Shit, Marin.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Have you always had this?”
This. As if it were a disease of some kind, a cancer. “No, it just started last year. Right after my mother died.”
“After your mother died?” His eyes were still round with disbelief. “Do you think the two are connected?”
“You mean do I think my dead mother, who didn’t even leave me a note saying goodbye before she stepped off a cliff, gifted me with the paranormal ability to see pain?”
He didn’t answer.
“I’m sorry.” I ran my thumb over the window lock. “I didn’t mean for that to come out that way.”
“It’s okay. I shouldn’t have pushed.” He paused, maybe considering his next question a little more carefully. “Did you get it checked out by doctors?”
“Four different ones. Three shrinks too.”
“And none of them could give you an answer?”
“About twenty different tests came back negative. The
shrinks were even worse. One of them asked me what kind of scents accompanied my visions. Another guy said I was just trying to get attention from my dad.”
“That sounds like something a shrink would say.” He sat forward on the seat, his eyebrows knitting into a thick line. “Is that why you wear those glasses all the time?” Things were falling into place for him; he was starting to connect the dots.
“Yeah. I’m sorry I gave you the bad eyes explanation. That’s what we’ve told everyone else. I mean, everyone who needs to know, like Father Nickolas and Sister Paulina. No one knows the real reason.”
“What is the real reason?”
I shrugged. “It’s just too hard being there all day at school, staring at everyone’s pain. Everyone has something inside them. Well, almost everyone. And every time I walk down the hall or go into a classroom, it’s like being bombarded with hundreds of different colored stars or something. I wouldn’t be able to concentrate at all if I didn’t have my glasses.”
“They help?” He leaned over a little, as if trying to detect if I were actually human. “Like they make things less bright?”
“Yeah. Pretty much.” I looked out of the corner of my eye. He was glancing between me and the road, trying to keep the wheel steady.
“Wow.” He blinked a few times, his lashes so long that they looked like tiny feathers. “Holy shit.”
The sensation of having just peeled back an entire layer of skin came over me then. Once again, I was standing in front of a boy who had flung open the door and stared, trying to comprehend what he was seeing. But, I also realized slowly, he believed me. Given time, of course, the realization might also lead him to conclude that I was just plain weird. A freak, even. But right now, he believed me. I was sure of it.
“Does this …” He yanked on an earlobe. “Does this mean you’ve seen what’s inside my sister?” His voice was soft, as if he was afraid of my answer.
I hesitated. Admitting what I saw inside Cassie would make it that much harder to keep trying to weasel out of everything. I could see the damn thing. Any medical doctor or exorcist priest who examined Cassie would probably want me there next to him, just to tell him what was happening, where in her body it was moving next. And as much as it frightened me, was it fair that I kept relinquishing that right? Did I have a kind of responsibility in a way to be there? It wasn’t Cassie’s fault that something so insidious had slipped inside her. Yes, she’d been terrible to me, and yes, she’d performed the ritual, but she hadn’t wanted this to happen. She was a victim of her recklessness just as much as I was. Maybe even more so.
“I see blackness,” I said. “Around her eyes, and then inside her head, behind her eyes. It isn’t like anything I’ve ever seen before. It’s bigger than pain. Deeper.”
He had stopped breathing and was squeezing the steering wheel so tightly that the knuckles under his skin turned white. “And then what?”
“What do you mean, and then what?”
“What happens to it?”
“I don’t know. It just slips away again.”
“It slips away?” Dominic stepped on the gas. “Why? Because you’re looking at it?”
“No.” I bit my lip, staring back down at my jeans. “I don’t know. I mean, it never even occurred to me that it might … you know, go into hiding again or whatever it does because I look at it. But honestly, I don’t know anymore.”
Or did I? Was it really possible that the amount of time I had spent staring at Nan’s heart last night had something to do with how much better it had gotten? Were the two things connected, even remotely? Even as I watched Dominic plowing through traffic, I could feel something clicking into place. I didn’t doubt anymore that I could see pain inside people’s bodies. So why wasn’t it possible that when I looked at that pain directly, it somehow lessened or that area of the body restored itself? Yes, it sounded ridiculous. Yes, it sounded impossible. But somehow, in some inexplicable way, it had also worked. Hadn’t it?
“There’s so much about it that I still don’t understand,” I went on. “I don’t even know where it came from. It’s just so confusing. I want to do the right thing, but I don’t even know what it is I’m doing.”
“Maybe you don’t have to know.” Dominic put a hand on my shoulder, left it there. “Maybe you just have to go with it. Try to trust it and see what happens.”
“Maybe.” I stared out the window again, watching as two little kids chased after one another in their front yard. They were so little, so carefree, shrieking with joy, their hair blowing back in the wind, that I felt envious of them.
Try to trust it. See what happens.
It sounded so easy.
And yet I already knew it would be the single hardest thing I would ever do in my life.
Twenty
Randy’s Floral was located across the street from Elmer Sudds, a small, pristine shop that smelled of rosewater and mint leaves. It was dark inside, as if someone had drawn the shades, and large white buckets of flowers littered the floor. A large bookcase lined the length of one wall, each shelf decorated with various pots of greenery. I walked past the begonias and sunflowers, the big heads bowing beneath the weight of their thick stems, and moved through an aisle thick with potted pansies, tulips, and Gerbera daisies. Tiny white lights strung in and around the pots gave the impression that they were floating in midair, and every few feet or so, a garden gnome peeked out from behind one of the leaves.
“Flowers?” Dominic asked for the third time. “For the trinity?”
I ignored him, moving toward the back of the store where most florists kept their coolers.
“May I help you?” A small man appeared from behind a wall. Dressed in jeans, a white button-down, and cowboy boots, he looked like a very old John Wayne. “Is there something particular you’re looking for?”
“Irises,” I said. “Do you have any?”
He sighed once, a mournful sound. “All my irises just died,” he said. “Can you believe it? I had a bunch of them, and they must’ve gotten some kind of blight. They just conked over on me.” He snapped his fingers. “Overnight. Boom.”
Boom. Just like that, my hopes were dashed. “Okay,” I said, hoping I sounded nonchalant. “No big deal.”
“You could go to Cosmos,” the man said. “It’s an hour or so down route Ninety-Two, but I’m sure they’d have some.” He rolled his eyes. “They have everything. Thank God they’re not any closer to Fairfield, or they’d run me out of business.”
“All right,” I said. “We’ll try that. Thank you.”
“Irises?” Dominic asked as we got back in the car.
“Irises,” I repeated. “They have three petals on the outside that you can see. But inside …” I paused, cupping my hands and then opening my fingers one at a time. “Inside, there are three more. And then inside that, three more again.”
“A hidden trinity,” Dominic whispered.
I nodded, trying to hide my disappointment. “You’ll have to go to that Cosmos place to get one, though. I can’t go with—”
“Hon?” John Wayne emerged from the store, waving a bouquet over his head. “I just found this wedding bouquet.” He thrust it through the window at me, wiggling it under my nose. “It was for a wedding that was canceled at the last minute. Just yesterday, in fact. Groom got into a car accident or something.” He pointed at the bouquet. “But look. Right in the middle there.”
I gazed at the flowers, a gorgeous blend of white and pink peonies, orange rosebuds, lily of the valley, and lemon verbena leaves. There, off to one side, was a single purple iris, the petals so delicate as to seem transparent, each one curved inward, hiding the treasure inside.
“You want it?” John Wayne pushed it at me again, his eyes wide with excitement.
“Yeah, we want it!” Dominic reached for his wallet. “How much?”
“Oh, keep it,” John Wayne said. “Please. It’s already been paid for anyway, the poor bastards.” He gave us a little wave. “Glad I coul
d help. You take care now.”
“Thank you!” I called, leaning out the window as Dominic backed out of the parking lot. “Thank you so much!”
He gave us another wave, lifting a short arm over his head and wiggling his fingers. I sank back into the seat, studying the intricate flower again. It was perfect. I’d never thought of it in such terms before, but it was exactly what we needed. A perfect, hidden trinity. “Wow,” I breathed. “Well, you’ve got everything you need now.”
Dominic’s hands tensed on the wheel. “You’ve got to come back and do this with me, Marin. Please.” He looked at me for so long that I reached for the dashboard, afraid he might swerve into traffic. “Please,” he said again. “I can’t do it by myself. I know I’m a guy and I’m supposed to be all tough and shit, but I’ve never been so scared in my life. I can’t do this without you.”
I bit my lip, looking out the window. “I just told my father that I was going to the gift shop at the hospital. I’ve already been gone way too long, and I still have hell to pay for sneaking out last night. I can’t. Seriously. I have to get back.”
“Tonight, then.” His chin was quivering. “We’ll do it tonight. Can you get away? Can you tell him something?”
I leaned my head back against the seat. This was never going to end.
Until it did.
“You’ve come so far with me already. Please don’t leave me now.”
I didn’t have to look at him to know that I would say yes, but I did anyway, just to let my eyes sweep over the angles of his face, the wide plane of his cheekbones, the small slope of his chin.
Don’t leave me now.
He’d just said that. To me.
It would be one of the biggest risks I’d ever taken in my life, one I still couldn’t be sure I was ready to take. But did you ever know? Was there ever a moment when the answer came? Whap! Just like that?
“All right,” I said.
“All right?” He reached over and took my hand. “Really?”
Be Not Afraid Page 19