Paranormal After Dark: 20 Paranormal Tales of Demons, Shifters, Werewolves, Vampires, Fae, Witches, Magics, Ghosts and More

by Rebecca Hamilton

  “Owen, I-“

  “Just believe it, Cresta. Believe we’re not here. They won’t see us, because there’s nothing to see.” He took my hand. “You can do it.”

  Merrin grabbed the back of my neck harder, pinching it between her fingers. “Ow!”

  “Sorry,” she said, her eyes flickering to Owen’s hand in mine. “My hand must have slipped.”

  Aside from the stinging in my neck, I now felt a different sensation. I felt breathless, like I had ran five miles uphill with a boulder on my back. I started panting. As we neared the crowd, a pressure started to build in my head, like I had drank a five gallon milkshake too fast and now had to deal with the world’s worst ice cream headache.

  “We’re not here,” Merrin whispered again.

  To her credit, the crowds did not seem to see us. They were dressed in flowing black robes holding rocks over their heads for some reason.

  Breakers, gotta love the crazy.

  And there was Echo and Dahlia at the head of the largest circle. He spoke in muffled words and the circle repeated in kind. No one, it seemed, noticed the $90,000 sports car rolling slowly by them.

  “How in the world…” I mused.

  “It’s what we do,” Owen smiled.

  Owen pressed a button near the roof and the gates of Weathersby opened as we neared them. No one noticed that either.

  “Who wants to dare me to moon them?” Casper grinned.

  The gates closed slowly behind us; quietly to us, invisibly to everyone else. There was no siren, no flashing lights. No one had seen us. It had worked. Weathersby was fading in the rearview mirror and, other than an aching head and a red spot at the back of my neck, I was no worse for the wear. This was going to work. I was going to-

  “What the hell?” Owen veered off of the road. He slammed into a ditch. I jerked forward and hit my head against the dashboard. “Is everybody okay?” He asked.

  “Drive much?” Casper asked shakily.

  “There was…something in the road,” Owen answered.

  I looked up. The headlights shone vibrantly against the sprawling woods that cut Weathersby off from the rest of the world, and illuminated exactly what it was that had gotten in our way.

  It wasn’t something. It was someone. Standing on front of our car, staring at us with white colorless eyes, was the Girl in the Tower

  She was different than I had remembered her. Watching her from a distance as she stood in her hidden tower, the girl was a force. Here though, standing in the middle of the road, staring at us unblinkingly, she was just-Well, just a girl. She was shorter than I expected, with a thin frame and arms and legs that were more twigs than actual appendages.

  “Owen, look at the eyes,” Merrin gasped. “She’s a seer.”

  Her eyes were empty. Where my irises were green, Merrin’s were almost black, and Owen’s were that electric blue that took my breath away on the daily, this girl’s irises were white. That is, if they were even there at all. It was possible, I supposed, that her eyes were just black specks swimming in twin oceans of white.

  “She’s Echo’s daughter,” I answered. “The Girl in the Tower.”

  I stepped out of the car and walked toward her. It was the first time I had actually been outside in days and the crisp night air felt prickly against my bare arms.

  “Cresta, no!” I heard Owen say and, like a flash, he was out of the car and beside me. “We don’t know what she wants,” he whispered.

  “She wants me here,” I said doubtlessly. “It’s why she left me those notes. It’s why she hid the key inside the floor board. She’s been guiding me. Haven’t you?”

  She tilted her head. Black bangs hung over her expressionless eyes. Her skin was so pale it hurt to look at her.

  “You are mistaken Cresta Karr,” she said in a voice so light I had to strain to hear it. “The key was not my doing. It waited years for you to find it.”

  I felt Casper at my side and, from the corner of my eye, saw Merrin beside Owen. “What does she want?” Merrin asked; close enough to Owen that I flinched just a little.

  “I don’t know,” he whispered back, before turning to the seer. “We just-“

  “You will be captured,” the Girl in the Tower said without blinking. In fact, in the entire time I had been watching her, I couldn’t remember her blinking once. “If you continue on this path, you will soon be captured. Cresta will be confined in a cell until she is no longer deemed a threat, and her mother will die. The rest of your fates will be less desirable.”

  “We have to go. I’m going to save my mom. I don’t care what you say,” I answered, sick of being told all the reasons this plan, or more aptly, lack of plan, wouldn’t work.

  “Your stubbornness on this matter is as admirable as it is predictable. It is also the variable which will lead to your downfall. On the other hand, if you bring me with you-“

  “You must be out of your mind,” Owen said.

  “That is an integral part of any seer’s identity, yes,” the Girl in the Tower answered.”Be that as it may, my presence will greatly increase your chances of survival.”

  “Survival?” Casper gulped.”Maybe we should, I don’t know, listen to her?”

  “No!” Merrin threw her hands. “She’s a seer; a seer, Owen! Do you have any idea what will happen to us if we steal a seer?”

  “I do,” the Girl in the Tower cocked her head again. “And it is much more lenient a future than the one you will endure if you do not take me with you. Now come. There isn’t much time before the others see through the rouse I’ve created and realize you’ve left the premises.”

  “Y-you’ve created?” Merrin stammered. “I thought I-“

  “Do not despair. You’re abilities are more than admirable, and they will prove useful in the road you’ve chosen to go down. But you are not up to these tasks alone.” The Girl in the Tower(who was out of the tower now, but I still didn’t know what to call her) had a way of speaking that sounded clumsy and foreign, even when compared to the rest of the Breakers. It was all too formal; no contractions. She used cannot instead of can’t, did not instead of didn’t. It was like she didn’t know how people actually talked; like she learned it from a book or an old movie or something.

  “None of you can,” she finished, looking directly at me. “But we must hurry. It will not be long before Papa and the others realize what we have done. They will come for me because of what I am.” She looked to me. “They will come for you because of what you might one day become.” Then she turned to Owen. “And they will come for you for the wrong reasons entirely.”

  She took a step forward and, looking at Casper, finished, “Rejoice, for you are of importance to no one.”

  “Yay me,” he mumbled.

  “You can’t seriously be considering this,” Merrin said to Owen, whose face had taken on a pensive tint.

  “She might be right,” Owen said, without looking at her. “This is dangerous. It could go very badly.It’d be good to have a seer in our pocket.”

  “As good as a noose around our necks. The Council of Masons will- If we take her with us, if we do this, then there’s no going back, not ever.”

  Owen turned to her, put a hand on her cheek and, with almost enough strength to keep the crack out of his voice, said, “Oh Merrin, there never was.” Blinking, he continued. “I say we take her.”

  “And I say we don’t,” Merrin answered.

  “No,” I said flatly. “This isn’t a vote. My mom, my future, my plan, my decision.” The Girl in the Tower looked at me, her pale vacant eyes shining in the moonlight. In so many ways, she had brought me here. Not to Weathersby, but here, outside of it. She guided me to her tower. She warned me about the phone call, and helped me escape. I didn’t know her reasoning, or even if I could trust her. But I knew, staring into her eyes, the decision I’d have to make. “She comes with us.”

  “Unbelievable!” Merrin answered. “You can’t just-“

  “She can Merrin, and she
did,” Owen said, already walking back to the car. “Now you heard the seer. There isn’t much time. Let’s get a move on.”

  “I hate it when you use Americanized vernacular,” Merrin said, moping back toward the car.

  Casper was about to follow, but the Girl in the Tower grabbed his arm. He turned to her, his eyes narrowed. “Ya need something?”

  “I have waited for you. I have waited for so long.” Then she leaned onto the tips of her toes, and kissed him full on the mouth. “And now you are here,” she said. Pulling away from him, she got into the car.

  Casper looked at me with the same bewildered look he had worn for weeks now.“These people are so weird.”

  Chapter 17

  Angel at My Back

  WHERE ARE WE going?” Casper asked from the backseat. We had been driving for an hour or so, but I still couldn’t tell Owen which direction to take. Allister Leeman told me that once I got out of Weathersby, he’d give me everything I’d need to find my mother. But, so far, all I had gotten was a ninety thousand dollar sports car stuffed beyond capacity with assorted Breakers, and a headache that threatened to split my skull into about a million pieces.

  “I don’t know,” I said for what felt like the hundredth time.

  “Is there maybe a Burger King on the way to ‘I don’t know’, ‘cause I’m starving,” Casper asked, looking out the window.

  “We had dinner an hour before we left. You’re hungry again?” Owen asked.

  “I was under the impression this car was a ‘no judgment’ zone.”

  The Girl in the Tower, pressed so tightly between Merrin and Casper that it was wonder the poor thing could ever move her arms, dug into her pocket, and pulled out a Hershey’s cookies and cream bar; which also happened to be Casper’s absolute favorite junk food. She handed it to him silently.

  “Thanks,” he said, grabbing the candy. “I’d ask how you knew, but I’m afraid you’d tell me.”

  “There is very little about you that I do not know,” she answered without looking at him.

  “Well look at that. You told me anyway,” he grimaced, biting into the chocolate.

  “Do you have any idea where we need to go?” I asked, looking at her through the rearview window. It wouldn’t be long before Echo and company figured out that we were gone, if they hadn’t already. And, when that happened, we needed to be well on our way toward my mother; not driving around aimlessly in what very well might be the wrong direction.

  “Mind the ring,” she answered.

  “I know,” I sighed. “I remember that from your note. I already minded the ring. That’s how we got this far in the first place.”

  “What is the phenomenon that occurs when a televised image is recirculated in order to save costs and stabilize revenue?”

  “Um, a rerun?” Casper answered.

  “Correct!” The Girl said. “This is one of those.

  My phone rang again just as the words left her mouth. I picked it up and looked back at her, not sure whether I found her habit of telling me things about thirty seconds before they happened cool or aggravating. I flipped the phone opened and answered. There was no need to check the caller I.D.. Only one person had this number.

  “Hello,” my voice was met with a series of loud tones. It was like somebody was pressing down on the buttons, just like what I heard from Owen’s phone when it said Merrin was calling. The tomes rang against my eardrums, and I pulled away from it.

  “Mind the ring,” the Girl in the Tower said to me; her pale eyes reading me in the rearview mirror.

  Reluctantly, I leaned back into the phone. The tones rang out like piercing music but, as I listened, something strange happened. Just like when my mind started opening up after my faux asthma medication had left my system, the tones seemed to be blasting through more mental walls, or at least downloading new information into my brain. When it stopped; the melody melting into a standard busy signal, I understood what Allister Leeman was talking about.

  “Stop the car!” I yelled.

  “Is everything-“ I jerked the wheel; which probably wasn’t Owen’s favorite thing. He cursed under his breath and pulled the car to a stop alongside the road. The highway was dark and empty as I ran out into it. We were somewhere in South Georgia or maybe Alabama. Either way, the night sky was as clear as I had ever seen it, which was exactly what we needed.

  Like the letters in all the messages the Girl in the Tower sent me, the stars started to glow. They popped out in the sky, bursting with sparkling blue and red energy. It was like they were diamonds hanging in the sky.

  “Cresta, what is it?” Owen was beside me, following my eyes into the sky. He couldn’t see it.

  “It’s a map,” I said doubtlessly. I knew it instinctively, as though I had always known it, as though I could always see it. The stars were guiding me. They were showing me where my Mom was. “We have to go North. She’s North.”

  “Cresta, are you-“ But he didn’t finish. Looking in my eyes, Owen set his jaw. “Then we go North.”

  The stars called to me as we drove, like a map spread out in my head. First one would ping and, when we started going toward it, another would light up. They were breadcrumbs, and we were following them, like Jake and Jill.

  Owen drove until the sun was almost up, following my directions as we pinballed across interstates and back highways.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked. “When the sun comes up, I mean?” Everyone else was asleep, but Owen had been behind the wheel since we left, and me- I was too worried, or wired, or something in between to even think about sleeping. That left me plenty of time to worry though. “If I can’t see the stars-“

  “I know,” Owen answered. His eyes looked tired and raw; circled with dark bags.

  “How will I know where-“

  “I know,” he repeated. “I mean-I don’t know. We’ll figure it out okay. I promise.”

  “Do you think they’re after us?” I asked; another thing that had been weighing on my mind.

  “Yes,” he answered; eyes on the road.

  “And do you think they’ll find us?”

  “Cresta, we don’t even know where we’re going. I doubt they do.” He smiled, but there was a wave in his voice, like he wasn’t as sure about it as he wanted to be.

  “Owen,” I said, looking back to make sure that the rest of them were unconscious. “Do you think they’re right?”

  “Who?” He asked innocently.

  My hand went to my fathom necklace again, and rested back on my lap when it came up empty. “Allister Leeman. Dahlia and the others. Do you think there’s a-“

  “No.” He wouldn’t even let me finish.

  “But if there’s a chance-“

  “There isn’t,” he said, as sure as if I had just asked him if there was chance it would start raining syrup.

  “But if there is- I don’t want to be the reason the world ends. I mean, if that’s-“

  He jerked the wheel, sending the car skidding off of old route 52 and into the gravel parking lot of a fleabag motel simply called ‘SLEEP’.

  “Get out of the car,” he said, pulling the gear into park.

  “What? You’re kicking me out?”

  “Just get out of the car,” he said, and hopped out himself. He was halfway down the gravel parking lot by the time I got my seatbelt off and had gathered myself enough to follow him.

  “What the hell, Owen? I was just asking a question!”

  The sun had crept out into the sky and was peeking out off in the distance, turning the still night sky an electric blue that matched Owen’s eyes perfectly.

  “You can’t ask that question,” he said, with his teeth gritted. “Ask me anything else you want, but not that.”

  “Why not?” I walked closer. “You said you would never lie to me again. So, unless you think that-“

  “It doesn’t matter what I think! That’s not what this is about.” Owen’s hands were at his head now, grabbing handfuls of hair. “The aura
of the Bloodmoon has been hanging over us since my great grandparents were in diapers. It’s the horror story we tell our little kids to stop them from acting up. It’s like the boogeyman, except it’s real, and they’re desperate to stop it.” His hands moved down from his hair, covering his face. It made his words hard to understand.

  “We didn’t always know as much about it as we do now. Prophecies; they come in pieces.” He moved his hands and looked at me. There was a glint in his eyes; like he was reliving something horrible. “You’re not the first girl who’s been accused of being the Bloodmoon. Others have been-“

  He cleared his throat, and broke my gaze. “It doesn’t matter. None of them survived. The point is, you are not allowed to think of yourself that way; not even for a second. You are Cresta Karr; the most beautiful person who has ever graced my life.” He put one hand on my shoulder and the other brushed against my lips. “I would die if anything happened to you. You know that, right?”

  I kissed his fingers. They tasted like leather, salt, and happiness. “Nothing’s going to happen to me. I promise. I didn’t mean to make you worry.”

  “I’m always going to worry about you, baby,” he answered, taking my hands in his own and kissing my fingers too.

  He called me baby. It sounds so much different coming from him than stupid Allister Leeman.

  “And I’m sorry for snapping at you. It’s just-I’ll feel better after tomorrow.”

  “I will too,” I said, pulling him close. Flashes of me, of Owen and Casper, and of my mother filled my head. I wanted this to be over so much. I just wanted my life back, but looking at Owen, feeling how tense his hand was in mine, I knew that could never happen. Still, it was nice to imagine.

  “I would never think you could be the Bloodmoon,” he pressed his face against mine, letting his mouth rest at my ear. “You could never be anything less than perfect.”

  “I’m not perfect,” I said, prickling as his warm breath tickled my earlobe.

  “You are to me,” he said. “I love you Cresta.”

  Oh my God.

  “I love you too,” I said, and really meant it. I had loved Owen for so long that I could barely remember a time when I didn’t. He was so much a part of me that, even before I met him, it felt like a piece of me was waiting for him to show up. Hearing him actually say he felt the same way and being able to say it back was everything that I had ever wanted. I leaned up, pulled him in, and kissed him square on the lips. It was not our first kiss, but it was ur best one. It was best, because we loved each other.