Fade (Paxton Locke Book 1)

by Daniel Humphreys

  You could not have lied so effectively to us if there weren’t some element of truth to what you said. Perhaps you did burn the book, but I think you did bury it, didn’t you? Or what you had left of it.

  My blood went cold and I tried to keep my face still. I’ve always been a terrible poker player. Hopefully that wasn’t a talent the Edimmu had worked on in the past few centuries.

  “Point being?”

  Absolute destruction is far different from a change in state. Something such as the grimoire is not so easily destroyed by fire. It is more than ink and paper, but you should know that, having read it. If it is not destroyed, it might be possible to restore it. So, I ask you again — what do you want?

  I resisted the urge to turn and run. The shadow had spread across the entire breadth of the theater. Arms of darkness surged forward to either side of the room. In moments it would have me surrounded.

  Up on the screen, as the heroes prepared to charge out of the keep in a forlorn hope, a voice-over informs the audience of Aragorn’s moment of recall. At the moment when all seemed lost, he remembered the promise of Gandalf. “Look to my coming at first light on the fifth day. At dawn, look to the East.”

  One way or another, I will get what I want. If you won’t tell me, I’ll rip it out of your mind myself. So, for the last time — what do you want?

  I jerked myself out of my reverie, clenched my fists, and shouted, “I want you out of my head!”

  All at once, the Edimmu rushed forward from all around me. I had a bare moment to brace myself, but it was just enough. As the viscous, tarry matter of the creature’s essence wrapped around me, I kicked and rent with hooked fingers. I don’t know if I did any lasting damage, but it shouted in frustration at my resistance.

  Need to get out, I told myself. Surrounded by the shadow-murk of the Edimmu, I felt as though I was drowning. We were still in the dream theater, but when you’re drowning, you go up. I still didn’t know all the rules here, but whatever the case, I believed that up was out. I pulled with everything I had, focused on that singular desire.

  I jerked awake to find Melanie’s hand clasped around my throat with her bared teeth inches from my nose.

  “Give it to us!’ she snarled.

  My response was both pithy and eloquent, but the pressure on my neck reduced it to something closer to “glurk, ack, argh.” In response, she bore down even harder. My vision started to go red.

  I kicked the Edimmu out of my head for this?

  Annoyed, frustrated, exhausted, and starving, I rolled it all up into a ball of determination and shoved with every bit of strength I had. Now, say what you will about my Mother, but in certain aspects, my parents raised me right. I would never, for example, hit a girl.

  If ever called to the carpet on this one, I hoped that the extenuating circumstances would provide me a pass. After all, if you can’t hit a girl when she’s possessed by an ancient spirit, when can you?

  As I shoved her up and away from me I remembered that I’d also kicked her in the head down in my basement. Hey, nobody’s perfect.

  Possessed or not, she was petite. While I was no Schwarzenegger, I had leverage and strength on her. Melanie went flying and flopped to the ground. Rubbing my throat, I sat up and scanned the interior of the hut. Cassie had pressed herself up against the far side. She looked at me with wide eyes. “You all right?” I managed.

  She nodded and opened her mouth to speak. I missed what she said as something fast and hard slammed into the side of my head. I rolled with it and landed on my feet, but even as I came back upright I could feel the warm trickle of blood down one cheek.

  Melanie crouched not far where she’d fallen. Tentacles of shadow whipped slowly in the air from where they emerged from her palms. Huh.

  “Neat trick,” I grimaced. Couldn’t have read a few more pages and looked for a fireball spell, could you, Pax?

  I made a quick glance around the interior of the hut, but if Cassie had brought any firepower down with her, she didn’t have it now. It was just the three — well, four — of us. If I survived this, I promised myself I’d get a backup pistol and learn how to use the stupid thing. A derringer. A boot knife — something.

  “We tried the carrot — how about the stick?” Melanie hissed. She snapped a hand out in Cassie’s direction. I opened my mouth to shout a warning, but before I could speak the inky blackness spread into multiple points and speared into the other girl’s legs and abdomen. Her sudden cry of agony was no louder than the Edimmu’s shrieks in the dream theater, but they were somehow more painful.

  Cassie slumped to the ground. Blood had already soaked through the thighs of her jeans. She groaned in quiet, fading agony.

  I’ve known loss.

  The despair, grief, and depression when my dad died might have overcome me if not for the love and support of newfound friends. I grieved the fate of my Mother. Even though she wasn’t dead, the idea of her had died with the realization that she was nothing like what a parent should be.

  None of that compared to the crushing emotion that took me to my knees as I realized what I’d done. The guilt I’d felt about my dad’s death paled in comparison to this. Yeah, Cassie had volunteered, but I’d accepted, hadn’t I? Sure, she’d seen some of my kind of crazy down in the basement, but she hadn’t been walking into the situation with all the information.

  She was bleeding out into the ground and it was my fault.

  Tears spilled down my cheeks. A knot like a clenched fist took hold of my throat. I looked at Melanie and despaired at her victorious smirk.

  “Talk,” she murmured. “Talk and she can live.”

  I couldn’t help it. I broke.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but as I pushed past the despair that had taken my voice, I realized that we weren’t alone.

  The ghosts stood at the rim of the crater. Despite the darkness of the night, the muted and partially translucent figures stood out. It was as if in coming together, their mutual energy revealed them, in a soft blue glow.

  I’ve never seen more than a couple together at one time. Now, I saw dozens. I knew none of them, but the reflections of their clothing told me at least a piece of their stories. I saw sailors, women in party dresses, and children in old-fashioned school clothes. Uncharacteristically, they stood silent and calm, though a few nodded and smiled to me in greeting.

  Melanie and the Edimmu cackled as one as they followed my look and saw our guests. “You don’t even realize how your ghost spell works, do you? You’ve set yourself up as a beacon for them. They can feel your despair. It’s like a magnet. Call in a battalion of ghosts for a ghost-eater. Brilliant!” She bent over and clutched her sides as she was overcome with mirth.

  Confused, I forgot my crippling emotions for a moment and took in the sea of faces. Had they come to gloat at my failure and impending death? Even as I considered it I discarded the notion. If anything, I felt a deep sense of peace and comfort. I didn’t stand alone.

  But what could they do? Like the Edimmu said, it was a ghost-eater. And this was an all-you-can-eat buffet.

  A woman wearing a translucent apron stepped out of the crowd and said, silently, Send us to rest, Paxton. We won’t fight you.

  I think I was the only one that could hear her, because Melanie didn’t react until a grin broke across my face like a cresting wave.

  “What is this?” she demanded as I climbed back to my feet, gathered my strength, and pushed.

  “You don’t belong here,” I told the assembled ghosts, then turned to look at Melanie. “Deus ex machina, baby.”

  They didn’t fight. In this time and place, they had come willingly for release. When Bobby had faded on, the wind of his passage had ruffled the carpet.

  The coterie of ghosts faded away and the screaming maelstrom that followed drove me back to my knees.

  I raised my head to look out of the depression. Down below ground level, the effects of the gale-force wind were not nearly as pronounced. As I looked up I got th
e impression that we were in the eye of the storm. A wall of brown and green stretched up into the night sky as the rushing wind tore and shredded the surrounding terrain.

  “To what end?” Melanie shrieked from across the depression. She flicked her wrists and tendrils of shadow seized me by the throat. A slow, distributed pressure began to build. “You lose!”

  The maelstrom rose in pitch and with the cracking and popping of nails, screws, and chain link, the ground cover that Jimmy and I had worked so long and hard to build ripped off of the hut. The wind took it and pulled off like a scab. Melanie and I stood exposed to the night sky. As my vision began to dim I marveled at the beauty of the stars in the sky that was suddenly barren of clouds.

  How high did that wind reach, I wondered, then everything went white as a million spotlights pierced my vision.

  The light was hot and electric, but it didn’t hurt — it was just more than I could interpret. I wasn’t so much blinded as I was having a visual blue screen of death.

  At once, the pressure on my throat eased and I felt a brush of grit against my skin as I fell to the ground. I cracked my eyes open. It seemed that when I wasn’t looking right at the sky, I could see just fine, though the light rendered the interior of the depression in crystal clarity.

  Melanie stood with her jaw open. The shadow tendrils between us hadn’t so much fallen away as they had turned into something less ephemeral. As I watched, the ends closest to me turned from black to white, then fell to the ground. The cascading lines of white led inexorably toward the possessed girl. Frozen in shock, all she could do was watch. The gritty piles of dust looked for all the world like table salt, but no way was I going to taste it to find out.

  I had the sense of a fading scream in the back of my mind. As the cascading white reached Melanie’s hands, she jerked as though electrocuted, though she was still fixed in place by her shock, or perhaps the light overhead. She met my eyes and whispered, “Help me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and there was no deception in my words. I don’t know if I could have lied to her, under the light, though the desire to do so never entered my mind.

  Melanie’s hands turned a brilliant, crystalline white. She whimpered as the line advanced under the sleeves of her shirt and presumably onward. Within moments, the transition advanced up her neck and over desperate, pleading eyes until she stood before me — a glittering statue where a living, breathing girl had once stood.

  Then, at once, the statue crumbled, bearing her clothing with it into a rough, knee-high pile.

  The light faded into darkness, though the sky remained clear. I followed not long after as I slumped in exhaustion.

  Chapter 18

  I wasn’t out for long. I snapped awake with the vague sense that someone had just nudged me, but when I looked around, I was alone in the depression save for—

  Cassie!

  Desperation pushed me to move far faster than I think I could have without motivation. I reached Cassie and knelt to one side. Her face was calm. For one horrific moment that seemed to stretch out into eternity, I thought that I was too late, that she was dead. But she turned her head and favored my presence with a faint smile.

  “Hey,” she whispered. “Did you see the light? That sure was something.”

  “Pretty hard to miss,” I agreed. I squeezed one of her clammy hands between both of mine. “Hang on, Cassie. It’s going to be slow going, but I’m getting you out of here.”

  “It’s okay,” she smiled. “It doesn’t hurt as much now. Just stay. Just stay.”

  Tears spilled down my cheeks. If this was victory, I would have much preferred the alternative. If only I’d been quicker on my feet, or smarter, or knew more. If I’d kept the grimoire and actually used it to learn something, maybe Melanie and the Edimmu wouldn’t have worked us over like a dollar-store punching bag.

  If only . . .

  I frowned. What had the Edimmu told me about destruction and restoration? Cassie was no magic book, but a fire hadn’t reduced her to a sack of ashes, either.

  Maybe, just maybe, I actually had learned something of use. Cassie’s eyes were half-closed and her breaths were coming short and shallow. If I was going to do something, I needed to do it now. “Hey, Cass. It’s just an infection, right?”

  A ghost of a smile flickered across her face, but it wasn’t in reaction to any knee-slapping humor on my part. She was fading away. Maybe I could do something about that.

  I didn’t know if touch would help me to use the restoration spell on something outside of myself, but I didn’t think it could hurt. I kept holding Cassie’s hand, put myself in the proper mode, and strained.

  It had been a long night. I wanted to do nothing more than down some greasy fast food and put a down-payment on twenty or thirty hours of sleep. If I’d thought that healing my broken fingers and leg had been tough, just trying to mend Cassie’s wounds was an order of magnitude more difficult. By the time that I drove my focus out of my own body — touching, it turned out, was pretty critical — I was shaking with a fatigue so deep it left my vision blurry. I should have, in retrospect, touched her closer to her injuries, but I didn’t dare shift my grip. For one, I didn’t know if she had enough time left for me to make a second attempt. Second, and perhaps more importantly, I didn’t think I’d be able to carry on if I started over. For better or worse I had to do it now.

  My awareness of her injuries was not as clear as the sense I could feel of my own hurts, but she knew where they were. The difficulty eased a bit, as though her own body knew what I was trying to do and moved to assist. I had the sense of flesh stitching itself whole as my hands began to shake. I sagged to the ground beside her, but I held onto her hand with everything I had left. The strength I’d been using to hold myself up was something I could pour into her. The pulse at her wrist had been fluttering when I’d first grabbed her hand, but it fairly well throbbed now. As for me, I felt as though I teetered on the edge of an abyss. If my eyes had been open, I’d have seen the color flooding Cassie’s cheeks, but I didn’t. I had committed everything I had to the attempt. I had little strength left, but I poured my grief and guilt and regret into the healing. Somewhere deep inside of me, a part of me was crying out in alarm, but I was too deep into the focus to care.

  With a deep gasp, Cassie sat bolt upright and jerked out of my grasp. With the connection broken, I lay sprawled on the ground and enjoyed the simple act of breathing for a moment before I realized that I wasn’t dying. It just felt that way.

  I cracked an eyelid open and squinted. Everything was a little fuzzy, but I could make out Cassie as she rolled up her ruined T-shirt and poked at puffy red lines of healed flesh on her stomach. Perhaps it was a trick of my unreliable vision — though I doubted it — but it seemed as though the redness continued to fade as I watched.

  “Sorry about your shirt,” I managed, then laughed at my own joke. “I’m starving. And sleepy. Is that steepy?”

  Cassie blinked and seem to snap out of her reverie. She looked over at me and managed, “Oh, man, Pax.”

  She climbed to her feet and took a moment to assess the side of the depression. What had seemed an insurmountable drop to Jimmy and me as children was really only about five feet or so. She leaned over and got one of my arms up and over my shoulder. She heaved with a grunt and I swooned as she pulled me up off of the ground.

  “I’m getting you out of here,” Cassie said. I smiled.

  “That’s my line.”

  She leaned me against the side of the depression, scrambled out, and then reached down to yank me up after her. “You’ve got to walk for me just a little,” she managed. “You’re lucky I’m into CrossFit.”

  That struck me as absurdly funny for some reason, but I kept my laughter down. My head felt too heavy, but I did my best to keep my legs churning even as I rested it on one of her shoulders. You’d have thought she’d have smelled of blood, mud, or fear, but all I could smell was something sweet and fruity. “Nice shampoo,” I slurr
ed.

  “This is why I quit hanging around drunk people,” she sighed. “Almost there.” It was still dark, but I could make out red and blue lights in the distance. Was it Christmas?

  “Can we go to Taco Bell?” I wondered. We almost stumbled as Cassie led me out of the scrub and onto the paved road. She was silent for a moment, then replied.

  “We’re going to the hospital first.”

  “Taco Bell on the way, then,” I agreed. “I could murder some nachos right about now.”

  She didn’t respond. After a moment I realized that she hadn’t heard me. I strained and got my head up, squinting to see what she was looking at.

  My house was on fire.

  If we’d gotten closer, I suppose we’d have felt the blast of the heat, but a wall of emergency vehicles encircled it and would have kept us from getting there. The neighborhood had been silent and seemed abandoned when we’d been fighting for our lives, but the sounds of sirens had called the neighbors out. A throng of onlookers gawked as raging flames consumed my childhood home.

  For the moment, the sight had stunned me into something approaching clarity and I at once discerned the reason for the cordon. The fire had not only spread to take my house, but it had engulfed the Itasca and the sedan parked next to it.

  “Sorry about your car,” I said faintly. Cassie cursed under her breath. For a moment, we just stood there, overcome by the spectacle and the loss.

  Someone in the crowd noticed us and called out. Suddenly half of the onlookers had found something else to stare at. Cassie cursed again and started forward. “Help!” she cried out. She waved a free hand at one of the emergency vehicles. “Hey!”

  The paramedics seemed to come from out of nowhere. I felt like I was floating as two big guys took me out of Cassie’s arms and hauled me over to a waiting ambulance.