Chest of Bone (The Afterworld Chronicles Book 1)

by Vicki Stiefel

  “Yes. Not often enough.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He chuckled. “I was a reckless kid. Gave my mother plenty of heartache. She was a good, good woman, and I terrified her with the stuff I pulled. I didn’t understand what that meant then, not until later. Later.” With a rock-steady hand, he traced my cheek, my jaw, slowly, as of memorizing me, moved his thumb back and forth across my lips. “Yeah, I finally got it. But it was too late, way past time.”

  he house was quiet when we made it back. Mutt, Jeff, and Gracie did their exuberant thing, but soon curled up near the woodstove. I expected another call from an apoplectic Bob. Lately, the old man had been acting with such damned inconsistency. So unlike himself. I chewed my lip.

  It was six. How could it only be six o’clock?

  At least, Bernadette was safe. I’d called, and the doctor said she might be released tomorrow. No stroke, no concussion.

  After I fed the animals, I started to nuke us leftovers, but Larrimer pushed me out of the kitchen, insisting he’d make froufrou veggie burgers with chutney.

  “We don’t have any chutney.”

  He started searching the cabinets.

  I pointed. “What about—”

  “No Worcestershire!” He ended up using salsa, and he looked at home in the kitchen, movements economical, hands efficient. The burgers were delicious.

  After I cleaned up, I hunkered into the red leather chair, tipped my head back against the smooth leather, and lowered my lids.

  “Da! Da! Look what I did! Help, Da.”

  Kitty floating on the ceiling. How come? I stamp my foot. “Come down now, Kitty!”

  My calico kitty doesn’t come down. No, she is stuck up there, and Mam will not be smiley at me when she gets home from taking Apol to the doctor. No, she will shake her finger and say, “Bad, Artie.”

  “Da! Da!”

  Kitty floats, up high, legs going all which ways, like when I take my swim lessons. She is making that mew sound, the scared one.

  “Da! Da!”

  Where is my daddy?

  I walk, bold like a Jedi. That’s what Da always says. Maybe in his room, where he reads smelly old books that I cannot touch. Forbidden, he says.

  Precocious, Mam calls me.

  He is not in the room with the fuzzy carpet.

  But, Kitty.

  Yes. I must find Da.

  Maybe in Mam’s office. I run to the door, reach high, turn the knob. Locked. Shucks. I giggle. Funny word.

  I thump down on my bum. Think. Feel. Da’s always telling me to Feel. Okey-dokey. I take a breath and push out my feelies. Da says to push hard.

  He is not in the kitchen, where he makes yummy… Stop.

  Focus, Mam’s always, always, always saying that.

  Da, too. Focus, focus, little Mage. And feel.

  Feel. Ohhh, they’re smooth, soft, like Kitty’s fur. I push the feelies all over the place to… Da!

  I leap up and run, fast as I can to the living room. “Kitty!”

  Da’s looking out the window. Doesn’t see me. He needs to look at me. He has to get Kitty down.

  “Da!” I say. “You need to—-”

  Da scoops me up, opens the door under the stairs, puts me inside! The no-go place. “No, Da! Mam will—”

  “Hush. Hush. Not a word, love.”

  He shuts the door, and it’s dark, and there are scary things in here. Things that prickle and bite my skin with Power. I cry. Cry, cry, cry. I do not want to be in here, and Mam will be unhappy. No, mad, that I’m in the No-Go Room. I cry more, a storm inside me. Da doesn’t like it when I storm. Why did he plop me in here?

  Hush, Hush, in my mind.

  I get all quiet, for Da. Now I hear them. Voices. Da and another. Climbing. Louder. Bad. I know they’re saying bad things.

  I Feel, pushing feelies…

  Oh! Bad. A Bad. Talking to Da! Oh, bad. Bad. BAD.

  I touch the door handle. It burns!

  Da! I say in my mind.

  Hush. Hush. Stay.

  No, no, NO. Have to get to Da!

  I kick and kick and…

  A BOOM outside the door!

  I kick more and more, and oozy goop beneath the door, on my hands, my underpants. Smelly. Yuck.

  The door boings open. The Bad Meanie! Scooching down to me. Big teeth, grinning teeth. Red teeth.

  “Da! Da!” I scream.

  I kick the man hard as can be, hit his penie place! And he tilts over like my roundie toy, and I’m fast, scrabble out, hands and knees zooming over the sticky and…

  What…? I stop.

  Da’s head, eyes big, mouth big, neck all jagged and red and gooey. Ugly. All wrong.

  Da? I say in my mind.

  No Da. Humm.

  I scoot to Da and pick up his head and cuddle him, hair so soft. The Bad Meanie rolling around, grunting. Good! And by the sofa, Da’s other parts? So still. Red glop on them, too. Why? Why is he over there, too, wearing the jeans Mam hates, the ones with the hole in the knee?

  Focus.

  I cuddle Da’s head. Have to put him back together. I’ll do that. Yes, I will.

  The Bad Meanie, laughing. Laughs, laughs, laughs.

  He’s evil. I know Evil. Da and Mam taught me.

  Trust your feelings, Da always says.

  I scrunch my face tight, clinging to Da’s head, fingers playing with Da’s pretty gold earring. I know what I’ll do.

  I look, higher and higher, up to the Bad Meanie.

  He’s mad, growling, licking red teeth with a big pink tongue, hands, claws reaching, reaching for me. Oh! For Da!

  No! No! NO! NEVER!

  I raise my hand, all red and icky—hug Da with my other. Raised hand, palm out, just like we practiced. And I picture that pretty knitting thing Da taught me, the one he called “arrow,” to help against the Bad Meanie.

  The Bad Meanie walks funny. “Mage bitch.”

  My flickery lights in my hand. Yipeee! I Gather… Gather… Gather…

  The Bad Meanie growls. “What the…”

  My swirly lights! Wheee… on my hand… arrows… Da’s head… my body… out bigger and bigger, more and more and… A big, fat storm of swirly! The best ever! And…

  Dark. So dark. Warm. Feels good. I sit up and rub my belly. I’m hungry, sitting on my bum out here. Where?

  Mr. Moon shines down. I squish my eyes, try to see better. Dust. All over me, around me. I wiggle my fingers in a pile. Sneeze. Scratchy funny dust.

  A meow. A kitty walks toward me. Calico. Silly word. Whose kitty? Maybe I can keep her. I reach for the kitty and hug her close. She purrs. Nice. She’s got that icky dust on her, too.

  Meow.

  Where am I?

  Meow.

  Can I keep her?

  Meow.

  Who am I?

  “Clea!”

  Reeling from that dream, that incredible, terrifying dream, I blinked. His Pacific blues on fire, squeezing my shoulders, warm, caring.

  I stuttered in a breath, ran shaking hands down my cheeks. “What?”

  “You wouldn’t wake up. You were moaning.”

  “As long as I wasn’t drooling.” I offered a jaunty smile. A dream. Just a dream.

  But not.

  He didn’t smile back.

  Well, why should he. I probably looked like a corpse. I unfolded myself from the chair and stood to face him, my fingers laced together so as not to touch him, when all I wanted was that.

  We looked at each other, two stick figures numb from the day’s events.

  He reached for me, iron arms drawing me close, slowly, so very, very slowly. He was warm comfort and hunger in a way I understood. My fingers dug into his broad back, aching to obliterate the day’s agonies, the dream, the memory, aching, aching.

  He surrounded me, erasing everything.

  “You could have been shot today,” he growled.

  “I wasn’t.”

  He brushed a finger across a scratch on my face.

  �
��It’s nothing.” On tiptoe, I tilted my head up, but couldn’t reach his lips. “Kiss me, you stubborn man.”

  His lips twitched, then met mine with violence. We devoured each other. My arms around his neck, his banding my waist, wrenching me impossibly closer, one hand stealing to my throat, the other clenching my hair.

  My phone bleeped, and again, and he stepped away so fast I got whiplash.

  I stared at him, the demanding phone—background noise. “I don’t get it. Not any bit of it.”

  Cheeks flushed, chest heaving, he said, “If we don’t stop, I’ll have you on the floor in seconds.”

  I slapped my hands on my hips. “Well hell, Larrimer, what’s wrong with that?

  “Just about everything.” He notched his head toward the phone. “Speaking of that, you better answer.”

  “Ha ha funny.” I waited for a heartbeat, then did.

  I paced as I talked. The SAR dogs had found nothing. With full dark, they’d stopped the search. They’d take the dogs out again in the morning, but the handler wasn’t optimistic.

  How had Lulu’s kidnappers gotten her off the lake after the gunfight?

  I climbed back into the chair, heat burning my eyes, panic skittering across my shoulders. And fury. At Special Agent James Larrimer, a man who was making me ache. Damn his mercurial nature.

  Well, I was done. I stomped down the hall to my office and pounded on the closed door.

  “Larrimer, you let me in!”

  Nothing. He made me feel things for him. Wormed his way inside. I cared for him. Well dammit, I was not some faucet you could turn on and off.

  “Open up!” I said.

  Silence.

  That was it! I punched open the door.

  Empty. The room was empty.

  He’d flown, yet again.

  I awakened the next morning stiff and cranky, having slept all night in the leather chair. I assumed Larrimer had reappeared at some point, since the afghan covered me, and I hadn’t pulled it on. James. That was so him.

  I checked my phone. No calls. The FBI had set up their command center at the police station downtown in Midborough. They had no news on Lulu, promised to call if anything broke.

  It was late, almost 8:00 a.m. I piled on the clothes and stepped into a crystalline blue morning. I breathed deep, letting the dry air cleanse me. Ordinarily, these were my favorite days, the ones after a mad storm, the sky so bright, the cold so bitter, the air snapped with energy.

  The barn was deliciously fragrant with animal smells. I peeked in at Nott and Delling, amazed at their lack of verbal abuse given the lateness of the hour.

  They’d been grained up, their water replenished, their stall tidied. I walked down the row. All the animals fed, all the stalls pristine.

  Larrimer. Again.

  I inhaled deeply. The fresh barn scents eased my heart that squeezed tight. Too tight.

  Back inside, I found him warming his hands by the woodstove.

  “You need a decent pair of gloves,” I said, almost finished with knitting him mitts. “Not just those thin leather ones. You wear them or don’t at the oddest times, too.” That wasn’t what I’d wanted to say.

  “I feel more alive without them.”

  He wasn’t going to talk about last night, damn him. “Were the barn chores an apology for your disappearance or a thank you for the kiss?”

  He turned to me, a large man more distant than the coldest moon. “Maybe a little of both.”

  No way would I put myself out there. Say things that couldn’t be unsaid. Feel things that couldn’t be unfelt. Coward. “Are we ever going to talk?”

  A battle raged inside him and burst over me. Yet it showed neither on his aloof face, nor in his relaxed stance. “Words. I’m not sure I have them.”

  “I hope you’ll find them.”

  “Not really an option.”

  Downstairs in the cellar, I tugged on my gloves and pounded the heavy bag hung from the ceiling. I punched and kicked and punched some more.

  I’d saved those kids with fireflies of power. That power. The feeling. Insane. Intense. Glorious. Boy, when Dave said I was the magic, not an overstatement.

  Then again, there was my cotton ball fail.

  Magic was useless if I couldn’t help Lulu.

  My mind twisted and turned, but I couldn’t find a way in. Punch, kick, punch, kick, kick. I ran a mental data scan. Dave’s words, “take the chest.” Dave’s secret calligraphy. Punch, kick, twist, kick, punch, punch.

  He had to have a case for his calligraphy tools. Lulu would have cherished that case of her father’s. Sure, why couldn’t the case be the chest?

  So where was it? If it had been at his home, it was long gone. At the Feed and Seed, or maybe in Lulu’s room?

  After a quick swipe of the towel, I trotted up two floors to her bedroom, with a detour to grab a pair of nitrile gloves and a couple of small baggies. I’d be invading the girl’s privacy. I’d live with it.

  I shut her door behind me. My breath caught. Everything looked so normal. Stuffed bear on the bed, PJs crumpled at the foot, running shoes tossed near the closet. A picture of Ronan tucked into the dresser mirror. Pens and a pad and an Ilona Andrews paperback on the bedside table, with a pair of tiny silver post earrings shaped like stars atop it.

  That necklace in the snow. How cold it had been yesterday.

  I started with the bed. Felt the bear, smoothed the coverlet, looked under the mattress. Nada. I trolled her pink Bean backpack and her suitcase, found more teenaged girl stuff.

  No surprises in the nightstand drawers.

  I walked over to the dresser. Atop it sat a small, plastic jewelry box, the one Larrimer had rescued. I lifted the lid. Inside the box lined in pink velvet, a ballerina twirled in a voile tutu as it played Swan Lake. A few trinkets lay in the small compartments on the top level, earrings, two rings, an amethyst pin.

  She wore an amethyst pin.

  The room dissolved.

  I stand in a bedroom, have to look up to see my mother in a tweed suit bent over my brother, maybe three-years old, pale and ill beneath the covers, one of his small hands scrabbling on the crocheted comforter, blue veins and bones a roadmap of sickness.

  My mother, a tall slender woman with an auburn pageboy, taking him to the doctor.

  I smell camphor and Witch Hazel and…

  A whisper from far, far away. Clea.

  I blinked, looked around. No one there.

  I’d always had these brief fugue states, where I’d drift off into memory, my ADD and all that. But never about things that didn’t exist.

  I had no brother.

  shook myself, the way a dog does when it’s soaking wet, and got on with it.

  Shoes lay on the closet floor, and a dress, a few skirts and shirts hung on the bar. I ran my gloved hand along the shelf above the bar, acquiring a nice clump of dust in the process.

  On the floor, I found two boxes of shoes, and in the deep hidey-hole in back, a lighter box. I pulled it out, said a little prayer, and lifted the lid.

  Letters. From Dave and Ronan and an old one that smelled of the attic. From her mother.

  My own mam. Was that a true vision of my mother? A long-ago brother? Had he died with them in the accident? Except my Da didn’t die in an accident. A stupid tear landed on the envelope. I wiped it away, replaced the letters, and snugged the box into its original spot.

  A breeze. I glanced over my shoulder. Larrimer, arms and legs crossed, leaned a hip against the door frame. “Digging for treasure?”

  “Why don’t you help?”

  “Because there’s not enough stuff in here to warrant it.”

  I moved to the bookshelves that held so little of Dave’s epic library. “At least I’m doing something.”

  “I am, too. Watching a beautiful woman acting crazy.”

  He thought I was beautiful? “I am not crazy. And get that smirk off your face.”

  The muscles in his jaw bunched, then broke. He burst out laughing.r />
  I whipped a book at him, which he easily caught, his eyes dancing.

  “Damn you, Larrimer.”

  “Crazy has its appeal. So, get on with whatever you’re doing.”

  “I’m looking for Dave’s calligraphy case.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s important.”

  And eyebrow raise was all I got in return.

  After my not-unexpected failure to find the case, Larrimer accompanied me to the Feed and Seed, which we scoured, and, again, no joy. If the calligraphy case was the cause of Lulu’s abduction, I doubted they had it, either.

  As I locked the store, SAR called. The dogs found no scent of Lulu and ten inches of last night’s snow obliterated any trail across the ice.

  Larrimer and I stood in the cold, he with no hat, no gloves, statue still.

  “Ronan,” he said. “Let’s go talk to the kid.”

  We parked on the white farmhouse’s gravel drive and walked up the small path.

  “I called him,” I said as we approached the door. “He knows about Lulu.”

  “The kid’s tough.” Larrimer gave a decisive nod. “He’ll do okay.”

  “Geesh, guy, they’re in love. You must remember what that felt like.”

  He chuffed out a breath, but said nothing. After I rang the doorbell, long minutes passed before Ronan’s dad cracked the door and invited us inside. Today, he wore jeans held up by suspenders and topped by a neat blue sport jacket, his sparse hair tidied in a comb-over. I hadn’t taken him for the Sunday churchgoing type.

  I asked after Ronan, and, apparently a man of even fewer words than Larrimer, he led us down the center hall to the back of the house and pointed to a window. Outside, a group of kids played pickup ice hockey on the pond.

  We slipped and slid down the icy path, crossed a field, and walked onto the ice where the kids batted their puck. Only Ronan, the largest player by far, seemed to have that Bruins ferociousness.

  “Ronan!” I shouted.

  The boy looked up from where he was guarding the goal, notched his head at us.