Ember Burning

by Jennifer Alsever

  “Holy crap, Trinity is a black vortex.” A wave of numbness and defeat slips over me. We are like the Inuit people, the captains of the ships, the people on the pages of my notebook. Vanished into space-time warps.

  Tre nods slowly, clearly stunned. “If this is right, then yeah. Shit,” he says quietly.

  We shouldn’t be surprised. This place defies all laws of earth, and it has some sort of strange energetic power. But I still don’t get what the deal is with rebirthing and Zoe knowing my secrets. Even the fancy dinners confuse me. There is no Trinity grocery store.

  Tre turns to me quickly, frowning. The frustration in his voice whirs like a blender. “How did your mom know about all this stuff? And why do you even have this notebook? I mean, why didn’t we look at this a long time ago?”

  All this time, the answer, the key, was just below my nose. Following me. But I ignored it. I assumed this was Mom’s Crazy Woman Notebook. That’s the truth. Yet I kept it for some reason. I took it with me here for some reason. Until now, it never occurred to me to look at it. Really look at it and take it seriously.

  My throat closes some. The answer was right under my nose this entire time. The key. But I turned away, pushed her notebook to the bottom of my bag. Just like I turned away from Mom. I’ve run away from understanding her, trying to know her, because I didn’t want to be like her. But maybe I am.

  My face feels hot. “I just assumed she… I don’t know.”

  I pause for a moment and wave my hand and shake my head. “It’s just her theories about Trinity Forest. We don’t know that this is truly accurate.” Though I have a feeling they are indeed accurate. I pause, remembering Gram’s comment when we sat in Principal Pake’s office after I came home from Trinity the first time. “You know, though… I did hear my grandma say that my mom disappeared for a while in high school and she talked about Trinity Forest.”

  Tre’s head cocks to the side, like a dog seeing a treat. He’s wondering why on earth I didn’t mention this. As he should.

  “I should have remembered that. Taken it seriously. But yeah… maybe she came here. Maybe she got out. Maybe her notes will lead us to find a way out. And I guess I’m just stupid for not looking—really looking—at this notebook before. Knowing all this. But, Tre, you’ve got to know that everyone in town called my mom crazy. Maybe I started believing them. We didn’t exactly see eye to eye.”

  Without a word, Tre wraps an arm around me. And in the dim light, we devour the rest of the pages in the book like starving prisoners. Mom drew confusing and elaborate pictures of constellations, including one called Venus Friday. She wrote long lists of weird words like magnetite, ferberite, and siderite.

  “Those are minerals. They’ve got magnetic properties,” I say.

  The rain comes in sideways now, pelting us with wind, flipping the pages and spraying them with drops of water. The overhang isn’t protecting us. The ink begins to bleed at the top of the page, and I grasp the fluttering pages tightly, using my body to protect them from the storm.

  The next few pages talk about witchcraft—the idea that ancient sorcerers could convert nonliving things and images into the living and make them act the way they wanted. They made storms, hurricanes, and disease.

  The use of spells, Mom wrote, extends back to the ancient Egyptians, who used ritual tools and magic circles, symbols, and rites. Beneath that passage, there’s one scribbled, underlined word: Xintra.

  “What’s a Xintra?” I whisper.

  “It’s a name,” Tre says. “Same as my sister’s.” He points to the page and we read: Xintra is among the eighth generation of the Annunaki race that’s harnessing the earth energy to build a one-world government. Then, the strangest part: Lodima saw through her. Xintra was my world, my friend. Now she’s hungry for power.

  “Mom’s friend?” I whisper aloud. “Mom knew Lodima—the lady I met in the forest!” I am so freaking confused and excited all at once. Tre nods and then continues reading.

  Freemasons. Secret meetings. Power positions. Genocide. Mass slavery through mind control of music, media, technology, and government.

  “This sounds pretty heavy,” I say, shaking my head. My head and body feel so full just reading all of this that I can’t take in any more information, any more revelations.

  The notebook shows me a vastly more complicated Mom than the one who made me turkey sandwiches and ran knee-high into streams to catch water bugs with me. How could she keep this world from me? I try to imagine her my age, tromping through the forest, coming across these canyon walls. I wonder why she came. I wonder how she escaped.

  Unless, perhaps, she went through rebirthing. I shake the thought. I don’t know if Mom even came to Trinity, or if this is some notebook filled with random thoughts or stuff she found in weirdo books she read. I don’t know what any of this means.

  I think back to the séance room and Laurie Parker. That was real. This is real, Ember. Pay attention.

  Thunder rolls deep and loud, a bowling ball rolling across the sky, followed by a crack and blast of light so powerful it feels as if the world broke in half. I wonder if this is the kind of sorcery Mom mentioned. I wonder if this Xintra causes weird manufactured storms.

  I sink into Tre, the smell of fresh rain filling my nose. Sanity. Safety. Our faces are just inches apart.

  I turn the page. More. There is freaking more.

  Written at the top: Hitchhiker Souls of the Dead. Through holes in the energy chakra of the body, a spiritual entity attaches to a person in rebirthing. The individual no longer remembers their identity as their own, but rather as some other entity. A dead malevolent spirit can enter the body, and the sorcerer can then command control of the body.

  “This explains rebirthing!” I say, tapping the page. This is what was happening downstairs to that girl Laurie Parker. I’m alternately thrilled to discover answers but terrified that this could be our fate. I wonder what Lilly and Pete would say if they knew this stuff.

  “You give up your body to a dead spirit, an evil spirit,” Tre says, drawing out his words like syrup. The sound appears as fat brown orbs in my vision. Then I see something else: a flash of a chanting crowd of people at a loud, dark concert. The view is from a stage. I shake my head.

  I consider Zoe playing the trickling song on the piano and my vision of her shooting up in that decaying room. When I mentioned it, she seemed to be stunned, her body language truly different for those few moments. She was different. Maybe she has gone through rebirthing. Maybe a dead soul plays that mournful song on the piano and now, it manipulates our fate.

  I feel like ants are crawling across my skin. I shiver and scratch my arm with my chin.

  Tre’s gaze drifts out to sky. A melancholy expression blankets his face. “Why us? Why are we here?”

  I bite my lip, letting myself admit what we all have in common. A leaden sensation floods me. We’re all broken in some way, beat down, ready to give up. We want a second chance, and Trinity gives that to us. Tre says he felt like a freak and that curiosity drew him here, but he doesn’t appear as damaged as the rest of us. Unless, perhaps, there are secrets he’s not sharing. Like me.

  “I don’t know,” I whisper.

  I turn a page in the notebook and read a passage about the bloodline of those ancient beings’ ancestors and how they passed along gifts: The secret of seeing the unseen. Seeing people’s dreams. Hearing people’s thoughts. Tapping into third dimensions. She writes about indigo children, psychics. Empaths—the word is underlined.

  “So she’s talking clairvoyants, fortune-tellers, people who talk to ghosts, move stuff with their minds, right?” Tre asks.

  I nod slowly, thoughtful. “Maybe.” My brain flips through thoughts like a fluttering magazine in the gathering wind. I wonder if Lodima is some sort of empath. Maybe even Mom was, too. Lodima was certainly a hippy freak. But if Mom was special and could really paint the future like she claimed, why did she get in the car with me? Why didn’t she stop that wreck?
>
  I can’t help but also wonder about my own weird visions. And then there’s Zoe—or whatever Zoe is. She might be an empath. She knows my thoughts. My deepest secrets. I think of the coin and how the redheaded lady found me. Invited me. Picked me.

  A gust of wind thrusts me sideways, and electricity fills the air. I gaze out at the canyon below. The tall cliffs. The threatening clouds. The power of this place is enormous. Overwhelming. It’s centuries old and it threatens to control not just me and Tre, but the entire world. Dread floods me, wild like an icy rushing current that can suck away a branch—or a person, drowning them, holding them beneath the surface of the water until their breath and their life disappears.

  A nasal sound breaks through the storm. Conk-la-ree! I poke my head out from the overhang and see that funny black bird again. The good one. Not my alarm clock bird. The sound is shimmery silver. Beautiful, and completely surprising in this wicked storm.

  I nudge Tre and point to the bird sitting on a branch above us, puffing up its silky chest with each call. “That bird—I swear it’s everywhere.”

  Tre cranes his neck. “It’s a red-winged blackbird. I wonder if we’re near one of its babies.”

  “Why?”

  “Because those birds are super territorial of their young. They guard them fiercely.”

  “How would you know that?”

  “Just interested in birds and read a couple books in the library.”

  The idea warms my skin. My heart expands a couple inches. Mom. Tre. Hope. When I glance up, Tre’s entire face smiles, crinkling around the eyes, the dimples, all the right places.

  He turns his body to face me, cupping his hands on the sides of my face. He leans into me, resting his forehead on mine, peering deep into my eyes. My breath becomes shallow. His lips, his eyes, his breath, his touch and nearness—they all entrance me. He is all I see, all I feel, and a light explodes in my heart.

  He presses his lips together briefly, like he’s thinking of what he wants to say—or do. “I haven’t felt hope,” he whispers. His voice is smiling and sincerity fills his eyes. “I haven’t felt alive. I haven’t felt anything like this since I got here. Until you.”

  “You just like my weird-ass notebook,” I whisper with a grin.

  “I like that, too, yeah.” He smiles. “But it’s you I really like, Ember.”

  Water drops lace his dark eyelashes. We lock eyes, and the world fades away. His lips press hard against mine. My body arches to reach him, and I clasp my fingers tightly around the neck of his T-shirt. The kiss sends me spinning, cartwheeling into another world. This is like an out-of-body experience. To open your heart and let someone crawl inside, write their name and take a piece of you. You carry them inside you, you take them with you, you breathe with them. This is what people talk about when they talk about love.

  I don’t want this to end. I don’t want us to end. We cannot end. We just can’t.

  49

  Darting beneath trees amid the sky’s bursts of jagged lightning, we hurry back to the house to get the crystals. We make a plan to go back out in the morning in daylight to find some more engraved symbols, using Mom’s notebook as a guide. I’m giddy, thrilled with the possibility of getting out of here. Finally, we may have answers.

  Tre and I stand in the dark at the top of the stairs, facing each other, holding hands. I haven’t felt this connected with another human being in so long. He kisses me softly again.

  For so long, I’ve been my own planet with my own solar system. Now, my world has come crashing into his, and together we turn, rotate, spin, and breathe, merging black and white and sun and moon and perhaps, maybe, even love.

  But a quick glance down the stairs crushes the moment. The terror and dread come screaming back, along with memories of Chris right here the other day and the exchange between Zoe and Pete on the floor below. I think of the virus. The shooting in Boulder. The bombing at Tre’s dad’s office. I forget how to breathe.

  If Mom’s notebook is right, then Trinity’s vortex, combined with this wicked dead spirit witchcraft stuff, holds tremendous power.

  “As much as I want to go look for a way out,” I whisper, “I can’t help but worry what is going to happen to people on the outside world if we keep trying to look for a way home.”

  He nods. “Me too.”

  My body trembles despite his gentle grasp. “But I don’t want to disappear.”

  “We’re going to find a way out.” His words come through an encouraging smile, only faintly visible in the dark. “We’ll use the notebook. Your weird-ass notebook. We’ll be careful.”

  A smile creeps up on my left cheek, but it’s weak. “Yeah.” I nod but I’m not entirely convinced.

  “Let’s clean up and grab a bite from the fridge,” Tre says. “We’ll go out in daylight and find those carvings on the cliff walls.”

  He leans in close and kisses me again, tasting fresh, like a cool glass of water. If only I could stay in this kiss and this feeling forever.

  But it’s not the time. My nerves are frayed. I pull back from him slowly and look up into his eyes. “Okay, right. Tomorrow.”

  He smiles confidently. “Right.”

  “Right,” I mumble, lingering before finally forcing myself to walk away to my bedroom door.

  I quietly close the door and go straight to my bed to retrieve the tin of crystals. I pat my hand between the mattress and the box spring—and find nothing. My fingers pat blindly, at first slowly then, after a few seconds, frantically. The tin is not there.

  With a heave, I throw the mattress off the bed entirely and scan the white box spring. There is no tin of crystals. The rocks aren’t there. Icy panic travels down my skin.

  “No,” I whisper, whining to myself. “No, no, nooo.”

  Trembling and frantic, I tear the room apart, opening drawers, shaking out blankets, emptying my backpack as a rush of something races inside me. Terror. The tin is gone. You can’t hide anything in Trinity. If the tin of crystals disappears, so does my one single hope of getting home.

  After several minutes of searching and panting, I sit on the bed, a deflated balloon, and hold my limp head in my hands. From the corner of my eye, I see a small black lump the size of a sock lying on the carpet by the closet. It takes a moment for me to recognize what it is. Red dots. Smaller at one end. A red-winged blackbird. Its body is limp, and its head is twisted unnaturally. Dead. I suck in a breath of air, and my heart sinks to the floor.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, my wet hair hangs over my shoulder. It’s limp and defeated, just like my heart. The hum of the refrigerator is the only sound in the dim kitchen, conjuring up those jagged brown lines again in my mind.

  The colors linger in my vision and I nearly bump into Lilly, dressed in hot-pink pajamas, by the counter.

  “Lilly, you scared me,” I say.

  She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t even look at me.

  With smudged mascara, dark circles under her eyes, and limp hair, she looks terrible. She holds a piece of burnt toast and chews mindlessly, staring out the window into the stormy night. Blotches of sticky red jam stay pasted to her cheeks. She doesn’t wipe it off. She smells sour.

  Zoe floats into the dark kitchen, too, taking a seat at the far end of the counter without a word. She sits ramrod straight. The sight of her ignites a fury inside me. She must have taken the crystals. She killed that bird. I know she did.

  I think of the notebook and the idea of hitchhiker souls and rebirthing. I wonder if the real Zoe is still there, beneath the willowy witch shell. I wonder if she’s an empath and sees inside my mind. I wonder what she has planned.

  I grit my teeth, push down my boiling emotions, and dig into the refrigerator, scanning the piles of food. Fresh berries. Cheese. Containers of yogurt. Broccoli. A roasted chicken. I can’t help but wonder where this food comes from.

  Tre strides through the darkened room, delivering a sense of comfort to me—a united front against her and this place. “Anything good t
o eat in here?” he asks.

  I shrug, still trembling from anger and frustration, and then aggressively flip open a box of donuts on the counter. I want to tell him about the crystals so badly, but Zoe makes me too nervous. Instead, I will pretend this whole place is normal. I will ignore the fact that our supernatural captor is sitting so close to me in a dark kitchen while unnatural end-of-the-world thunder rumbles in the night sky outside.

  “Hey, Lil,” Tre says. “You have jam on your face.”

  Slowly, she turns her head to look at him. Her fingers graze her cheek, and then fall to her lap. She looks out the window again. Beneath her stringy hair I can make out two long charcoal marks on her right temple, just below her hairline.

  Exclamation points scream in my head, making me wild with panic. It’s the same mark I saw on Chris and, later on, Laurie Parker downstairs. Without even thinking, I lunge forward to touch her face. Maybe I can wipe off the mark and she’ll be okay.

  She screeches, scrunching her shoulders up, and, with a swift movement, elbows me in the stomach. It’s a stab that hits deep, making me howl in pain. I gasp, letting go and holding my belly with two hands.

  “Get off,” Lilly says, her words thick and slow.

  Tre walks around the counter and touches Lilly’s arm. “Hey, Lil, you okay?”

  I’m fuming. We are two planets linked, aren’t we? Yet he expresses such little concern that she just slugged me in the gut. He goes to her first. Of course, logically, I know his concern is legit: Lilly is obviously the next one to disappear. This is what happens to people before they go through rebirthing. They forget. They get spacey.

  Lilly’s lips turn up in a drunken smile and she turns to face him. Slow. Confused. “Sure, I am fine,” she says. “Fine, Tre-la-la-la. Just fine.” She flops her hand to touch his chest, and in return, he places a hand on her shoulder. I watch the two of them move close together and speak in quiet, murmured tones.

  Zoe sits with a stony face. It’s all too much. Like a champagne bottle uncorked, I explode, unloading on Zoe. I don’t care what she is.