As they hurried in the direction her arm had indicated, Liana opened her purse, reached inside and removed three necklaces with crystal spheres the size of marbles dangling from silver chains. “Here,” she called to the men. “Put these on.”
“Maybe we should worry about accessorizing later,” Barrett said.
But Gideon had noticed something in her tone. “Do as she says, little brother.”
“Fine,” Barrett said brusquely, snatching one of the necklaces from her hand and slipping it over his head with his free hand. “Happy now?”
“Ecstatic,” Liana said, flashing her tongue at his back.
Gideon chuckled as he put on one of the necklaces. “I’d prefer the implant.”
“These are important, too,” Liana said, slipping the third necklace over her own head. “Maybe more important.”
“Amulet. Right?”
“Got it in one.”
At the corner, Barrett pointed. “There he is. At the—”
“Bus stop?” Gideon said.
Logan stood in front of a bus shelter decorated with movie posters beside an elderly woman with an oversized black pocketbook, wearing a blue and white print dress, opaque white stockings and flat black shoes. He glanced around expectantly, his head moving slowly left to right and back again, but with the slightly lost look in his eyes that Liana recognized as his dousing mode. Despite the risk of breaking his trance state, she called his name.
Logan’s gaze focused instantly on her.
At that moment, a New Jersey Transit bus rolled up to the shelter and stopped between them with a hiss. She heard the creak of the doors opening and knew without question what was about to happen.
“Let’s go!” she shouted to Barrett and Gideon. “We need to be on that bus.”
Chapter 36
Logan followed the old woman onto the bus and paid his fare after her, in effect paying a toll for what he feared was certain doom. He had no choice. Though he could often sense impending supernatural mayhem, he was sometimes captive to its pull. When every instinct for self-preservation told him to run in the opposite direction, he entered this altered state of consciousness where his body could not follow the safe course. Like an exhausted swimmer caught in a riptide, he was pulled inexorably toward danger. It wasn’t a question of courage or even family duty, but rather a matter of his skewed Walker genetics.
His consciousness surfaced briefly when he’d heard Liana call his name, but the NJ Transit bus interrupted their line of sight and he slipped back into autopilot. Despite the imminent danger, a deeper part of his being insisted that he step onto the bus. He prayed that his more capable siblings would follow, but that was out of his hands.
The bus driver, a burly middle-aged man with a receding hairline and a meticulously trimmed mustache, had a large Phillies button affixed to his sun visor. Logan directed a friendly nod his way, but the driver seemed too bored to notice subtle greetings.
Now that he was on the bus, Logan’s legs had become wobbly, his stomach nervous. The center aisle divided each row of four high-backed brown cloth seats into pairs. The old woman took a seat behind the bus driver, but Logan proceeded down the narrow aisle to the back of the bus. The faces of twenty strangers seemed pallid and indifferent under the fluorescent lights. Most pointedly ignored his fleeting gaze, as if he would interpret the slightest hint of acknowledgment as an invitation to sit beside them.
The majority of the bus riders were in the post-fifty demographic, with a smattering of middle-aged women and a few older teens, probably college students. Opposite a rail-thin, elderly black man working the New York Times crossword with a stub of a pencil sat a coed with frizzy red hair, wearing a Rowan University T-shirt and frayed jeans, listening to an iPod as she highlighted key points in a chemistry textbook.
Then, in the time between one eye blink and the next, all the faces and bodies transformed, flesh and limbs torn away, disemboweled and beheaded, one body indistinguishable from the next, blood dripping and pooling everywhere, bits of flesh and bone clinging to the cloth seats or oozing down fractured windows. Logan gasped and stumbled briefly, before regaining his balance. That quickly the vision ended. He was in the present again, with his fellow passengers. And they remained oblivious of the approaching danger, while he trembled at the memory of what might happen.
Logan sat across from a large Hispanic woman flipping through the pages of People magazine as if she’d read every article and photo caption at least twice but hoped to discover something she’d missed in her previous passes.
She glanced up from the glossy pages long enough to say, “Beautiful day.”
Logan said softly, “Not for long.”
“Excuse me?”
“No—nothing,” Logan said. “Got a bad feeling about today. That’s all.”
In the past, Logan might have yelled at all of them to get off the bus while they still had a chance to escape, but he’d learned from experience that he would achieve anything but the desired result. They wouldn’t listen. Or they would toss him off the bus. Or have him arrested as a public nuisance. Plus, his abilities were vague enough, often enough, that he couldn’t say with certainty that the bus would be the center of the imminent disaster. A rift might be coming for one of the passengers but cross their path long after they had departed the bus. He was reminded of Chelsea Conrad, still alive despite his vision of her skeleton astride her hybrid bike.
Barrett, Gideon and Liana boarded the bus moments after him. Liana was combing through her small purse to pay their combined fare. As the driver closed the doors and accelerated slowly away from the shoulder of the road, Barrett led the others back to Logan.
Liana sat beside Logan and patted his knee. Barrett and Gideon stayed one row forward, on either side of the aisle. Uneasy in their padded seats, both men scanned the interior of the bus as if searching for stress fractures.
“Trying to give us the slip?” Gideon asked with a lopsided grin.
“No,” Logan said. “I just…”
“Followed his nose,” Barrett said. His hand slipped inside his unzipped duffel bag and his forearm flexed as, apparently, he gripped the hilt of his concealed sword.
Across the aisle, Gideon had assumed a pose of similar preparedness.
“Figurative nose,” Logan said.
Liana spoke softly beside him, “A nose for trouble.”
The Hispanic woman glanced suspiciously from Gideon to Barrett before asking Logan, “Friends of yours?”
“Family,” Logan said quickly.
“Uh-huh,” the woman said skeptically. “Guess I should mind my own business,” she muttered and returned her attention to the glossy magazine.
After a moment, Barrett tapped the floor of the bus and whispered, “Is this it?”
Logan shrugged, noncommittal.
“Figures,” Barrett said, maintaining the same soft tone. He turned to Gideon. “We should split up. Just in case. I’ll take the front of the bus. Next stop.”
Gideon nodded agreement.
Logan glanced at the Hispanic woman, who was now wearing a frown and squirming a bit in her seat. She’d taken Logan’s earlier comment to heart and was imagining, no doubt, that a terrorist plot involving NJ Transit was afoot. When the bus rolled to a stop and Barrett eased forward up the aisle, the woman pulled herself out of her seat and stepped out the back door without a word.
For a brief moment, Logan wondered if she carried doom with her, but he sensed no change in the psychic freight of the bus. She had escaped whatever was coming for the rest of them. If he had spooked her, he was glad. That meant one innocent person out of harm’s way. The bus resumed its course, swaying slightly as it pulled into the stream of traffic. Barrett settled into his forward position, glancing back at them during the next stop, as if to say, “Well…?”
Logan shrugged.
Three more passengers boarded the bus. No one got off.
“Almost forgot,” Liana said. She removed a necklace from her purs
e and gave it to Logan. A small crystal orb dangled from a silver chain. “Put this on,” she said. “For protection.”
Logan nodded and placed the amulet around his neck.
The bus swung back onto Kings Highway, into the heart of Hadenford’s business district, where the lanes widened, with metered parking on both sides of the busy avenue. Most of the passengers were looking out the windows when a shadow rippled across the first three seats behind the driver.
Barrett leapt to his feet, his sword sliding free of the duffel bag.
The old woman who had boarded the bus before Logan toppled out of her seat. Her head and right arm were missing. The two rows of seats behind hers, formerly occupied, were now vacant… and torn.
A woman screamed.
The bus driver’s double take swept over Barrett and the dismembered woman lying in the aisle in a pool of blood at Barrett’s feet. With the driver’s startled reaction, the bus swerved into oncoming traffic. More shouts and screams. The driver yanked hard on the big steering wheel, narrowly avoiding a collision with a florist delivery van.
Several bus passengers rose from their seats with a variety of indignant protests, most concerning the erratic driving. Someone noticed the dead woman and screamed.
Gideon, sword in hand, walked toward the front of the bus.
Liana’s gaze darted around the interior of the bus, seeking the darkness.
Logan was overly conscious of the floor beneath his feet… a rumbling.
One of the bus seats trembled and collapsed, tilting into the aisle. The rail-thin black man let out a startled cry as he pitched sideways into the aisle.
A wet, serpentine shape, coiled in a reverse S, rose above the seats with an elderly man impaled on its glistening barb. With a sideways flick of its upper loop, the tentacle flung the man against the broad, tinted windows. His ruined body collapsed between seats, leaving the cracked windows sticky with his blood.
By now, almost everyone was screaming and shouting.
A woman wearing a yellow scarf over her hair, with a shopping bag clutched to her chest, ran down the aisle of the bus for a moment, then simply dropped out of sight, as if she’d stepped off a hidden precipice.
Gideon worked toward the tentacle’s last known position, while shouting over the roar of the crowd, “Stop the bus!” He tried to wave off Barrett, who approached from the opposite direction, but Barrett shook his head.
“What’s Barrett doing?” Liana said to Logan. “He’s in a better position to stop the bus.”
“He won’t let Gideon face the rift alone.”
“That’s stupid! He can’t—”
A bloodcurdling scream filled the bus. Smoke wafted up between the seats, bringing the acrid tang of burned flesh to the cabin. A charred body, coiled into the fetal position, spun through the air toward Gideon, who dodged at the last moment. Perhaps sensing the threat Gideon posed, the tentacle had hurled the body at him. Logan noticed the undamaged iPod and headphones attached to the charred body and recalled the red-haired coed and her chemistry text. Wherever the darkness had taken her, only her flesh had burned.
Kneeling in the aisle, the old black man wailed, “I’m blind! Lord help me, I’m blind.” His hands trembled before his face, but Logan saw that his eye sockets were bloody ruins.
The bus swerved again, and clipped a parked car with a sound like an explosion.
The darkness blasted through seat after seat, racing forward, away from Gideon’s position. Barrett tracked its progress, pulling and shoving people out of the way, but it reached the bus driver before him. Out of the pitch black shadow, the tentacle lashed forward and coiled around the man’s thick neck. The driver shook as if overcome by a terrible fever. Rather than simply trying to strangle him, the tentacle was trying to separate his head from his spinal column.
“Too late!” Logan shouted.
He grabbed Liana’s arm as the bus swerved out of control.
Barrett severed the tentacle but not before the bus driver’s death throes steered the bus into a hard left turn. A midnight blue Dodge pickup truck traveling in the opposite direction struck the front of the bus and veered off to the side.
In the next few moments, Logan tried to fight gravity. The bus rolled over with a crunching, cracking, screeching inevitability. Lights popped, glass shattered, and bodies—the living and the dead—tumbled end over end. Logan felt himself crushing Liana, but even before he could pry himself off her, she was over him and flung aside in a flutter of white cloth. One side of the bus crumpled inward as it met an immovable object with destructive, if not unstoppable, force.
The transit bus’s momentum finally played out. It lay on its side, hissing and smoking, its hazy interior also filled with the weeping and moans of its injured occupants.
Light flickered in the bus, but Logan’s eyes swept the devastation, seeking the unfathomable darkness that stalked the passengers, a deeper darkness—
—and there it was!
Sliding through the smoky air, a rip in reality, seeking its next victim.
With his aching back pressed to a crumpled seat, Logan lay in its path, too stunned to move. He’d had the wind knocked out of him. An empty black leather shoe pressed against his cheek. Nearby, Liana stirred.
Gideon called, “Liana? Logan?”
“I’m… okay,” Liana said. “But—Logan?”
“Been better,” Logan said. “About to get a lot worse.”
Behind the approaching blot of darkness, Barrett crouched, creeping forward, gauging his position. He caught Logan’s eye and winked.
“Barrett, no—!”
Barrett used one of the seats to give himself a boost and then dove, arms outstretched, leading with the tip of his sword, arcing toward the blot of utter darkness and vanishing into it. In a single moment, he winked out of existence.
Liana squeezed past Logan and stumbled. “Suicidal fool!” she hissed. Her forearms were aglow as she traced sigils from her wrists to elbows. Then, in a coaxing, almost pleading voice, she said, “Evaris abesh. Evaris abesh. Evaris…”
For a moment, the predatory darkness became still. But only for a moment. Then the edges began to tremble and ripple.
Liana didn’t hesitate a moment longer. She leapt into the darkness after Barrett. Her golden aura seemed to dissolve in its inky depths. Logan refused to dwell on the possibility that her life had been extinguished as easily.
Metal screeched. The back of a padded seat toppled past Logan’s head.
Gideon scrambled out of a pile of bodies, his clothes torn and matted with blood. He caught Logan under the arm and helped him to an awkward standing position inside the toppled bus. Panting, Gideon looked around, wary of the slightest threat. “Liana? Barrett?”
“Gone,” Logan said with a hollow feeling in his stomach. “Both gone.”
“And the rift?”
“Right after Liana crossed over, the rift….” He shook his head, but despite his best efforts, he could only imagine the worst. “It winked out.”
Chapter 37
Thalia rarely chose the subject matter of her paintings and sketches. At least not consciously. Instead, the subjects and the themes channeled through her subconscious to her brush or pencil and revealed themselves on canvas or paper. Little more than a physical conduit, she selected the medium and awaited the message. And yet, sometimes she believed the choice of materials was not hers to make either, but rather the message’s prerogative. This was not an artist’s conceit to describe the creative process because, for her, art was not a form of aesthetic expression. It was more like a psychic steam valve. A way to purge the prescient images and messages that continually accumulated in her mind, making coherent thought all but impossible.
She had not escaped the dark rift unscathed. Unharmed physically, but scarred psychically. As she imagined it, the ordeal had short-circuited her paranormal abilities. Arising from her psychic wreckage, her art became not a form of rehabilitation, but a means of accommodation. A way
to cope but, unfortunately, not a path toward healing. Because some wounds never healed. Life was a construction riddled with mistakes and imperfections, destined to crumble. A ruin foretold at birth.
Her sanity, she recognized in lucid moments, was similarly flawed. By giving expression to her visions through art, she managed to retain an important part of herself. Even while her mind was adrift, she clung to that vital chunk of her identity and saved herself from drowning in a sea of chaos and despair.
Painting had become a survival instinct. One she no longer questioned. Letting the message, and the visions, flow out of her through brush or pen or charcoal stick was as automatic as breathing. And so, for some time now, she’d been painting a black spiral on her canvas without trying to understand its meaning. The spiral began at the center of her canvas as a wispy thread of gray and became progressively darker, thicker and more ominous with each outward turn.
Then, a sudden realization struck her with the force of a blow.
Liana’s gone!
Her camel hair paintbrush, slathered in black acrylic paint, slipped from her numb fingers and fell to the paint-spattered hardwood floor. “No, no, no,” she whimpered. “Not her. Not Liana.”
Shoving the wet canvas and easel aside with a careless backhand sweep of her arm, she ran the length of the attic studio to the lowered folding staircase. As panic and fear surged within her, tears blurred her vision. Moaning softly, she untied her smock and whipped it off her head, tossing it back toward the collapsed easel and her abandoned painting.
In her haste, she missed the first tread on the folding staircase and almost fell. She didn’t care. She finished her awkward descent, stumbled around the base of the staircase, then raced down the regular stairs to the ground floor, almost wishing for an accident and the quick release of unconsciousness. She was running without a destination in mind. Whether she was chasing something or running away didn’t matter to her.
Ambrose stepped out of his office and caught her arm before she reached the front door. “Thalia! What’s wrong?”
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