A warm wind rippled my hair, and a chill flickered up my back. I guess it wasn't exactly the Grand Canyon, but it was still a pretty sight. Great example of pure and perfect nature, free of parking lots and shopping centers.
Except it wasn't so pure and perfect anymore, apparently.
"Can you feel it?" Laurel frowned and crossed her arms over her chest. "The emptiness?"
Closing my eyes, I reached out with my mind. Let it seep into the ground under my feet and flow outward in all directions. I felt nothing unusual—just the structure and pressure of dirt and rock. The interplay of forces acting upon it from within and without, from the heat of the sun to the sighing of superstrings at the quantum level. All as it should be.
I shrugged and opened my eyes. "Feels normal to me."
"You can do better than that," said Laurel. "You know how to read ley lines, don't you?"
I shook my head. "No, I don't."
"Come with me." She grabbed my hand and led me along the rim. We stopped twenty feet away, and she suddenly dropped to her haunches, taking me with her. "Here." She pressed my palm to the ground and held it there. "Focus on this spot. Tell me what you feel."
I did as she told me, aiming my mind at that single spot on the rim. Reaching down with all my strength, with all my sensitivity. "Still nothing."
Laurel's other hand flashed out and made contact with my left temple before I could duck. "I'll help you."
I felt a familiar tingling and warmth in my head, like the start of her reading the night before. Then, suddenly, I felt something new—something deep below me. A distant vibration, a faint buzzing under the ground.
She pushed me toward it, through the strata of the earth. Close up, I heard and felt a weak crackling underlaying the buzzing, like the snap of static electricity.
In my mind's eye, I saw the source of the buzzing and crackling: a pale node of energy pulsing in the rock. Barely pulsing. Dimly glowing tendrils branched out from the node in all directions, fanning out like a network of roots or nerves. Branching and rebranching, crisscrossing everywhichway...fanning out through the distance and the depths.
As I watched, the dim glow and the buzzing faded. Some of the tendrils here and there winked out completely, creating zones of darkness in the underground web.
And as Laurel held me there, I sensed something else. A cavity, like a hole in the world...not a physical hole, but an absence of spirit. A vast emptiness where something had been, marked by the faintest trace of an echo of what had once filled it. More like the silence that follows the last note of an echo, the dead air moving in the wake of something you've just missed, something that's gone forever.
Then, suddenly, Laurel brought me out of it. Pulled me back to the surface like a lifeguard bringing up a drowning swimmer. "Now do you see?" she said.
I blinked hard against the bright sunlight. "Yes." I nodded, not fully understanding what had been lost here but aware of the fact of its loss.
"Ley lines are the channels through which geomantic energy flows," said Laurel. "Poison those channels, and you poison Landkind."
"And one of your own kind could do this?" I said as she helped me to my feet.
"It's been done before," said Owen, who was standing nearby. "Very rarely, though. We tend to settle our feuds without resorting to violence. We're steadier, remember?"
"The lights are still going out down there." I pointed at the ground. "Does that mean the canyon still has some life in it? Could we question it somehow?"
Laurel sighed and shook her head. "You felt the emptiness, didn't you? The soul of Cousin Canyon is long gone."
I looked at Briar, who was over beside Owen. "There must be something, don't you think? Some kind of evidence."
Briar shrugged. "This is the first time I've investigated the murder of a canyon. I'm not sure where to look."
I walked to the very edge of the rim and gazed out at the canyon sprawling before me. Watched the two hawks still wheeling around the thermals, awash in golden sunlight. Wished I could be one of them.
"What happens to this place?" I said. "Now that its soul is gone?"
Laurel joined me at the edge. "Something else will fill the hole. Something wicked, most likely. Nature abhors a vacuum."
I glanced at her, realizing she was talking about her own fate, too. She was getting a preview, up close and personal, of what was in store for her. Like having terminal cancer and standing on the grave of a dead cancer patient.
In that moment, my heart went out to her with a force that shocked me. I wanted to do everything in my power to help her, even if the only thing I could do was find and punish her killer.
I turned to her. "Does this place have a heart? A core?"
Laurel nodded and pointed into the canyon. "Down there, yes. As close to a heart as you'll find in a place this big."
"Okay." I put my hand on her shoulder. "Will you show me the way?"
*****
Chapter 20
Owen and Laurel led us down along winding trails to the floor of Cousin Canyon. It took about an hour to get there, counting a break we took at a waterfall halfway down.
When we reached the bottom, we walked onward, following the bank of the skinny green river. Owen had tears in his eyes half the time; he kept pointing out favorite fishing and camping spots. Even showed us a boulder in the water carved with his name in Gothic letters: Owen Harkins.
"I'm gonna miss this place." He ran his fingers through the grooves of the letters. "Had a lot of good times here with Cousin. She was really something special."
I was surprised he'd called Cousin a "she." For some reason, I'd been thinking of the canyon as a male. "Maybe we can help her rest easy." I patted his back. "Get her some justice."
"I don't care about that." Owen swiped away tears and smiled. "I'll be joining her soon enough."
*****
We hiked another twenty minutes till Laurel told us we were there. We found ourselves on the edge of a tumble of deadfall—dead and dying trees bent and broken, thrown down like pick-up sticks amid rocks and scraggly brush. Looked like a tornado had touched down there, snapping fifty and sixty-foot trees like campfire kindling.
Laurel led us a little further, picking her way through the deadfall wreckage. Carefully, we climbed over and under toppled trunks, helping each other through tangled branches and splintered shafts like the spears in a punji pit.
When we reached the middle of the deadfall, Laurel gathered us around a huge tree stump, at least five feet in diameter. The wood was gray and rimmed with scalloped shelves of brown and white fungus. The top of the stump was chipped and scored with black bursts where the wood had been scorched. The mark of kids playing with fireworks, I thought.
"This is it," said Laurel. "The heart of Cousin Canyon. This is where her spirit resided."
Owen touched the stump and nodded. "Poor Cousin."
I hunkered down and planted my palm flat on the surface of the stump. "Let's reach in there and see if we find anything. Check the ley lines and energy fields." I looked up at Laurel then, expecting her to join me.
But she just stood there with arms folded over her chest. Met my gaze and tipped her chin at the stump. "Go ahead, Gaia. You don't need me."
"How do you figure?" I said. "I only did it the first time because you took me in."
"I just gave you a jump start," said Laurel. "You can do it yourself. You always could. You just needed to know where to look."
I frowned and drummed my fingers on the stump. I wasn't convinced she was right about my being able to do it alone. "Come with me anyway. I'm still new at this. Make sure I don't miss anything."
Laurel shook her head. "Don't worry, you'll be fine. I'll be here if you need me."
Irritated, I turned my attention to the stump. Wondered if maybe Laurel was getting back at me for swerving the SUV and breaking up her moment with Briar. Didn't seem likely, but hey, you never know.
"All right, all right." I blew out my breath. Put my le
ft hand on the stump beside my right.
Then felt a hand grip my shoulder. "You don't have to do this if you don't want to." It was Briar. "Trail's probably cold by now, anyway."
I didn't dare look up at him, because I felt my face flushing. What was going on with me all of a sudden? "I'll be okay." I liked that it felt like he was siding with me against Laurel. "Don't worry, Dale." Since when did I call him Dale?
"Go ahead," said Laurel. "Just like we did before. Move toward the channels. Reach for the energy flowing through the ley lines."
"And be careful!" said Owen. "The poison that killed Cousin could still be down there."
"I will." I closed my eyes and bowed my head, reaching out with my mind through my fingers. That part was easy; I'd been doing it all my life, reaching into the world around me, testing the parts and forces of the earth. Making them work for me.
But then I had to push past the familiar. Cast about for the new pathways and energies Laurel had led me to. That crackling, buzzing network of nervelike tendrils I'd somehow been blind to for so long.
At first, I couldn't find it. All around me, I felt the same abundance of detail to which I was accustomed, the same multilayered portrait of rocks and minerals and life, all intertwined. Roots of trees and shrubs twisting down into soil...plates of stone grinding together underground, shifting against each other almost imperceptibly...organic matter and radioactive elements decomposing, humming softly in the clay. Molecules and atoms and protons and quarks, whirling in their eternal shivering dance, a zillion jostling gyroscopes flickering in the fizzing quantum foam.
I knew I had to filter the input differently. Change the angle at which I sensed it, the way looking at a hologram from different angles changes its appearance to the naked eye.
Remembering the nature of the energy flow Laurel had shown me, its color and texture and sound, I let my mind drift through the underground. Let my senses turn in a kind of random orbit, fishing for any trace of what I'd found before to home in on.
I found it—the slightest taste of the singed earth around one of the conduits. The faintly acrid flavor of hot clay, toasted by the passage of geomantic current sizzling through its substance.
Grabbing on to that single trace, I dove toward it. Opened my senses up wide and angled them between the crystalline planes of familiar perception. Determined to reach my destination.
Suddenly, it all burst into being around me—the dimly glowing network with its multitude of branching and rebranching tendrils, buzzing faintly. Stretching into the distance in all directions.
Laurel had been right. I'd done it, reached the ley line network on my own. Made me wonder what else I could do that I didn't know about.
Focusing my attention on the tangled tendrils around me, I looked for a sign to point the way. Some clue to who or what had poisoned Cousin Canyon.
The damage, at least, was obvious. There in Cousin's heart, it was much worse than at the canyon's rim. The dead zones of darkened conduits were much bigger and farther reaching. In some places, sections of blackened tendrils had slumped and sloughed off, leaving open ends of mangled channels leaking energy backwash one glowing drop at a time.
The whole place stank like sulfur, like a rotting carcass. Instead of the crackle of flowing energy, I heard the soft crumble of a general slumping and subsidence. The breakdown of strata of dirt and stone no longer supported by vital spirit. Everything slowly caving in now that the heart and soul had been hollowed out.
I slid through the wreckage, touching it with my mind as I passed. Feeling for any trace of a clue. Finding only the dimmest ebbing of the light that once had powered the beautiful place.
There were no messages etched in the earth, nothing left behind by a dying mind to point to the killer. Nothing like a fingerprint—no out-of-place evidence identifying a murderous visitor. Not even a hint of the poisonous energy that had infiltrated Cousin Canyon. All I could find in every direction was the final result, the devastation. The ruined heart within the corpse.
Then, suddenly, I had the feeling I was being watched. Watched by someone or something underground.
A chill rippled up my back. My heart pounded. Slowly, I turned my mind's eye in a circle, reaching out with my senses cranked up all the way.
The feeling of being watched grew stronger. I continued to turn, looking and listening as hard as I could. Wondering in the back of my mind what I'd do if I saw someone down there. Did I even have any power in that state?
Turning further, I realized I was back where I'd started from. I quickly reversed course, whipping in the opposite direction...and that was when I got a look at it.
The thing must have been following my rotation, hiding just out of sight as my field of vision turned from left to right. It seemed surprised when I spotted it, and it clung there a moment, staring back at me.
The thing looked like a bloodshot eyeball perched in the center of a glowing starburst. The rays of the starburst hooked around ley lines, sapping their energy and holding itself in place at the same time.
As I gazed into that eye, I felt a familiar pressure in my mind. It was definitely looking back at me with intelligence, awareness...and intent. Another mind was behind it, staring out through it, driving it. Projecting hints of a towering presence from far away.
It was a presence, a mind, a force I recognized. I'd encountered it twice before—once in Aggie's apartment, once at Secret Valley. There was no doubt in my mind that I was facing the same malevolent being who had reached for me from the ashes of my best friend's body.
Only this time, instead of reaching for me, it ran. Spun and zipped off along a ley line, leaving a twinkling trail in its wake.
I hesitated for the briefest fraction of a split second, not sure what to do. The eyeball and the force behind it were my only leads in the death of Cousin Canyon...and more. Surely, it was no coincidence that Laurel was dying of the same poison, and Aggie had been helping her investigate the murder. Aggie, who had ended up dead, leaving behind a shell of hardened volcanic ash and mud imprinted with the same cruel intellect I again sensed here.
I couldn't stand by and let that thing get away. The presence it channeled filled me with dread, but I had to get over it. Had to go after it like it was just another bad guy waiting to be pelted with rocks and dirt.
So I gathered my strength and shot off after it, propelling my mind along the network in its wake. Vaguely aware of a voice calling out to me as I did so. Laurel's voice, faint and distant, telling me not to do it. Urging me to come back before it was too late.
*****
Chapter 21
The eye bolted through the network, cutting from one ley line to another at a high rate of speed. Swiveling every so often to look back in my direction.
I charged after it as fast as I could, shunting my mind along the maze of channels. Bucking right and left and up and down, leaping gaps and flashing through intersections. Barely managing to follow the ever-shifting trail through the earth.
Wondering how I'd find my way back. I was already lost, and the glowing lines went dark as the eye flew past. How could I retrace our route if I couldn't even see the paths we'd followed?
The eye sped up, hurtling through a mass of tangled lines. Reaching deep, I found the will and strength to keep up, diving along the roller coaster course.
Then, the eye swiveled for another look. I felt the force of the Presence again, seething and solid, sending out waves of malignance. Of penetrating awareness. Even as it darted away, I felt it reach for me, like before.
Suddenly, the eye zoomed off faster than ever and disappeared in the tangle of lines. Bearing down, I found more speed and barreled after it, pouring on everything I had.
I whipped around one hairpin turn after another, swooping through the spaghetti tangle of dead and dying conduits. Flashed through the curlicues like an electron swirling through wild atomic orbits, rolling and banking and diving.
Then, suddenly, I emerged on a straightaway.
One long line with a blazing blur of light at the end. One bright star waving from afar.
Just as I was nearly upon it, it leaped away. Carried by momentum, I whipped through the spot it had occupied...and found myself caught, spinning out of control in a clutching grip of unbreakable force.
It was like being tangled in bungee cords that stretched and twisted and tugged, snapping me in one direction and then another and then another. Flinging and bouncing me with such speed and power, it seemed like I was being thrown in all directions at once.
The speed of my flight kept increasing. I snapped out and back, out and back with so much force, I thought I was going to blow apart. Thought my mind was going to explode from the whiplash.
It was then I felt the Presence all around me, burning hot with hateful pleasure. Pressing in upon me like the coils of a boa constrictor, crushing me. Splitting me open.
I screamed. Felt jagged waves of agony rip through me as the Presence widened and deepened the wound. As it reached in, grabbed hold, and turned me inside-out.
I kept screaming, and the brutal, spasmodic jerking got worse and worse. The Presence flashed images in my mind, snippets of memories or visions racing too fast to see.
Suddenly, I sped up again, a thousand times faster. Such a jump, it was like I hadn't been moving at all before. And now I knew, without a doubt, that I was finished. I was going the way of Aggie, by the very same hand, leaving my life and the world behind. Leaving everyone behind.
As I started to slip away, two things haunted my disintegrating mind. One, the fact that I would die without knowing the truth about the killer. And two, that I would never see Dale Briar again.
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