by Susan Vaught
Behind me, the patient on the unit started gibbering in his room. Sharon broke away from us and headed toward him.
Darius kept his eyes on me. “What’s happening, Trina? What are you seeing?”
The man in the corner took a step toward us.
My heart stopped beating. I jumped forward. Power blasted through me, and a bolt of blue-white fire exploded from the center of the cross.
It slammed into the thing in the bedroom, and his eyes flared crimson as he took even more solid form, like he had pulled himself through a membrane of darkness and popped out whole. He was tall, over six feet, and wore old-fashioned black pants and a black jacket, plus a black hat.
But his face ...
I shuddered.
It was long and thin, topped with dark hair. A little boy’s face—with the coldest black eyes I had ever seen. He grinned at me, and my insides twisted. That smile was evil and mean.
My bolt of energy hadn’t hurt him at all. I had an awful feeling I had only made him stronger.
He giggled, then licked his lips. “Come closer, witch girl,” he said in a voice that sounded like a little boy’s pleading. “Just another step or two.”
Darius finally heard the voice and wheeled to face the man. “What the—”
And then Forest—or her ghost—appeared beside me.
She held up both her hands and shrieked at the man. He reeled backward, snarling, as Darius fell to his knees and covered his ears.
“Forest,” I called above the growling and yelling. “Forest!”
My stomach lurched and my senses spun. Forest vanished. I fell beside Darius, vomiting as my vision went black.
My palms hit grass.
Light flashed.
Rain ...
I forced my eyes open.
Lighting slammed into a tree not a hundred yards away from us, searing its branches into my consciousness.
Trees everywhere.
“We’re outside,” I mumbled, taking hold of my charm again.
We were in the woods. Another fork of lightning lit up the hospital bell tower. I couldn’t tell if it was right beside us or a mile away.
The wind beat against us, and branches cracked and snapped.
Darius jumped to his feet and grabbed my arm, looking over his shoulder.
My head absolutely refused to turn in that direction. I was dizzy. My mouth had gone from bitter and tingly to dry. I could barely open my eyes against the hard rain, or figure out which way was left or which was right, but Darius wasn’t having that problem.
“Run, Trina.” Darius yanked me forward as he barreled into the trees, heading toward the bell tower. “Run now!”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Panic drove me forward, dizziness and all.
“Run!” Darius was almost screaming.
Wet branches smacked my face as he jerked me into the trees surrounding us. Lightning split the darkness. Leaves and twigs seared into my awareness like photo negatives. Thunder boomed as rain blinded me completely.
The man bashed through trees behind us. I didn’t want to look at him. I didn’t want to see that unnatural kid’s face on that grown body.
“Run,” Darius kept chanting over the roar of the rain. “Run. Run. Run!” He battered through the brush and pulled me with him.
The man reached for me and missed. Chills exploded across my shoulders. Oh God.
I wished my father were here.
Stupid.
But he would know how to kill this thing.
“Daddy!”
I hadn’t meant to yell it out loud, but I couldn’t help it. Tears stung my scratched cheeks as I stumbled after Darius, my willow charm burning as I gripped it tighter. My thoughts jabbered and babbled and made no sense. My shoulder hurt where Darius was pulling it, and only the pain kept me sane as my feet tangled with each other and with branches and rocks. I wanted my father’s strength.
The man behind us growled like an animal. I squeezed my willow charm and willed him to explode.
Nothing happened.
We kept running, five seconds, then ten, then fifteen. I swatted at the branches trying to poke out my eyes. Pain flared across my back. I surged forward, staggering, almost pulling Darius down with me as I fell.
Darius didn’t stop running. He dragged me until I got my feet under me enough to get up and follow. My shoulders felt like they were on fire, and heat washed down my back. Blood. The man had tried to grab me again, but cut me open instead.
We’re going to die.
Darius pelted ahead and we broke from tree cover, finally spilling onto one of Lincoln Psychiatric’s mowed lawns. I fell again, and Darius snatched me off my feet and threw me over his shoulder without breaking stride.
My breath left me in a wheeze. When I lifted my head to get a gulp of air, I was staring straight back at the man chasing us.
He had metal in both hands. The pieces were long and dull, like scrap iron. He was less than five feet behind us, and he was giggling and giggling and the sound made me want to scream. I watched him swing his iron shanks, seemingly in slow motion. The tips were coated with blood.
The man laughed louder and louder as he swiped at my face and missed, swiped and missed.
“Go faster!” I yelled as I pounded on Darius’s back with one hand. With the other, I held out the willow charm. Terror pumped through me, so cold my teeth chattered, so strong it finally fired the oily well of anger way down inside my soul.
“You freak!” I shouted, lips pulled back from my teeth. “Get away from me!”
The man stabbed at me. Screaming without taking a breath, I got the charm high enough to aim it at his face. Fear and rage mingled inside me, and on either side of the man, trees exploded.
I barely noticed, barely processed that I might have done that. Colors danced out of the darkness, brighter than black, then brighter than sunlight, and I shouted one of the few Latin words I knew—the one my father had used before to kill evil things.
“Percello!”
The noise of the bells completely drowned my spell, but lightning blasted again, right above us, around us—
Into us—
Into me.
Electricity snapped and popped through my body, crackling down my neck and blasting heat through my belly. I saw nothing but golden glare as it swept through my arms and into my palms, then into the willow charm. The charm bucked in my grip, but I held it.
Fire flashed out of the tiny willow strands, arcing at the man’s chest. The blast struck him square under the throat and knocked him backward.
Chunks of dirt flew as Darius chewed up turf with his shoes, carrying me as if I weighed nothing. The man hit the rainsoaked grass, skidded, got up, and charged at us again.
Darius grunted, and I realized he was climbing steps. Steep ones, narrow, made of stone—the bell tower. He had gotten us to the bell tower!
Hope flared through my entire body, giving me new strength. The world sharpened around me. The bells rang and rang, screaming and screeching, like the metal was pulling itself apart.
The man reached us in two big leaps, shanks extended, boyeyes wide and insane. He bared his teeth.
I yelled, holding out my willow charm hoping it would keep me from getting sliced to bits.
Darius slammed us into something, crushing my legs against wood once, then twice. The wood gave. We fell through a doorway into a dark, tiled hallway, and a blur of motion swept past us out into the rainy night.
Fire whipped across my vision right before Darius pulled me to my feet. He pushed me farther into the building, his glasses gone, his bad eye glowing ivory white. Colors spilled out of the scars on his face, and his normal pupil expanded until he didn’t look human at all.
Then he wheeled, fists clenched, ready to fight.
Imogene was suddenly between Darius and the man. She gave off a maniacal silver light, and her long gray hair floated upward as she raised her hand. Pressure popped my ears and crushed into my cheeks.
“Darius!” I shouted, and energy lurched into me. The charm twitched. Something yelled above me. I ducked as Levi arrowed past me, straight down from the ceiling. Blackness darker than night hung around him as he rocketed forward, knocking Darius aside and joining Imogene in the doorway. When he saw the man, Levi let out a feral growl almost as scary as the deep snarls of his monster dogs.
The flicker-flicker-flicker of the constant lightning turned the whole scene into a bad old movie as Imogene let Levi go by. His big dog followed, and more dogs and geese burst out of the bell-tower walls and pounded along behind them.
The man shouted, and the sound turned to a screech, then a little kid’s scream. He started running. I heard his shoes smack the stone as he fled, the dogs and birds right behind him. Levi stormed after them, the rain closing behind him like gray curtains as he went. Darius had gotten his balance again and charged forward, intending to join Levi, but Imogene held out her arm like a traffic gate and stopped him.
“Let it be,” she said in a voice as hard as granite. “You’d just get in the way.”
Darius hesitated, but then turned toward me and flicked on the lights in the belltower entry hall.
His mouth fell open.
“Trina,” Forest said from behind me, just about the time I realized that there was blood all over the tiles around me.
Forest put her hands on my back, and golden light filled my eyes, my senses. I could taste it like dandelion fuzz, and hear it like singing, and smell it like honey. It burned.
Darius pushed gently against my arms, pressing them down so he could get to me, and Forest was drowning me in molten honey, and Imogene was glowing silver.
Something square-shouldered and tall stepped out of the night, knocking Imogene’s arm aside and grabbing her around the neck, and I—
I—
I blinked.
My knees started to buckle.
“What did you do to her?” a deep voice demanded, jangling every nerve in my body. “I’ll kill you all!”
“Daddy,” I whimpered as Darius caught me against him before I hit the floor.
The last thing I saw was my father coming at us, dragging Imogene with him.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sunlight broke into my dark mind.
Sunlight and pain.
And Addie’s face. “Don’t you touch her, Xavier. You haven’t earned that right yet.”
Agony blazed across my shoulders, claiming my back, my spine, and I couldn’t breathe. The voices and faces went dim, until ...
My father’s sad expression flashed into view. He was looking at me. Pleading. Maybe praying. His face seemed a little dented on one side.
“It’s a strep infection,” Darius’s mother told someone. “Severe. Yes. She’ll return as soon as possible. Your field placement is very important to her.” The sound of a phone hanging up.
More sunlight.
“Careful, Forest,” Imogene said. “You’ll wither like a picked daisy.”
Blackness took over again, and from somewhere far away, my father said, “I need to understand.”
I dreamed about flashing knives.
Men were chasing me, packs of them, laughing and howling and stabbing, and I couldn’t run fast enough, and they wanted my blood, and I was sweating and screaming and I knew I’d never, ever get away.
Pain blasted through me as I fell. They cut me. They never stopped cutting me.
Forest floated across my awareness, only it wasn’t her. It was the shadow-Forest from the hospital, washed out and transparent, barely even there.
“They eat you,” she whispered, looking sad.
And I died.
“I made him stronger,” I said as I sat up on the couch in Darius’s living room.
Then I tried to get to my feet.
Addie and Jessie grabbed my arms at the same moment. It took me a few seconds to process that Addie really was there, gazing at me with concern as she and Jessie tried to get me to lie down again. I took in every detail, from her perfectly trimmed hair to her black blouse and the tiny strand of pearls at her neck. She smelled like almond lotion, and she looked alive again, healthy—nothing like the last time I had seen her, after she took down my father—
My father.
I dropped back onto the couch and looked around. “Dad. Is he—”
“He’s here,” Jessie told me, fluffing the pillow closest to him. “He’s out in the back garden with Darius and Ms. Hyatt.”
I tried to get up again, but Addie stopped me with firm pressure on both my shoulders. “Whoa, there, Trina. Easy. We have an understanding—for now.”
Addie’s face was only inches from mine, her dark eyes wide and honest. “Think about it,” she added. “Would Jessie be in here if Darius needed protecting?”
“We’re good,” Jessie assured me.
I eased back to the couch, my head swimming. “Why am I so dizzy?”
“Short version,” Jessie said. “You and Darius got pitched through a corner of the other side and chased by some psycho guy with knives. He sliced your back, and the cut got infected really fast. Levi and Imogene couldn’t heal it, but Forest has been doing a good job.”
I sat up straighter and tested myself by stretching out my arms. A twinge of pain made me wince, but my skin felt solid enough, and my muscles still seemed to be attached. I didn’t feel like I had a fever, either.
My attention shifted to Addie, and I lowered my arms as she sat in a chair beside the couch. Her expression was gentle, and she looked calmer and more at peace than I had seen her in a while. Heat and tension filled my chest, and tears welled in my eyes. Just looking at her ... I hadn’t been sure I’d ever get the chance to talk to her again.
I couldn’t find words for the hundred questions I needed to ask her, so I went with, “My father. The short version?”
Addie closed her eyes, then opened them, and nodded. “I cracked his head pretty good. It took him three days and all my healing spells to wake up. The second his eyes opened, he panicked about what was happening to you, and we went searching.”
“Three days?” That didn’t add up. I had only been at Darius’s house for one day when we went to Lincoln.
“You lost a little time when you passed through the other side,” Jessie said. “Forest and Levi went wonky trying to find you when you vanished out of the hospital, and they almost didn’t get you in time.”
While I was trying to digest the fact that what had lasted minutes in my perception took days in everyone else’s, Jessie continued. “Did you know that your father knows tae kwon do? Should have seen him trying to bust Darius’s head when he thought they were hurting you.”
I put my hands over my face to fight off a fresh wave of dizziness, and the image of my father going Jackie Chan on my boyfriend in Lincoln Psychiatric’s bell tower. For a split second I heard the bells again, so loud they made my bones shake.
“Stay with me, honey.” Addie gave my leg a pat.
I nodded and looked up at her.
Addie’s frown eased, then came back again. She twisted her hands in her lap like she did whenever she was nervous.
When I twitched and started twisting my own fingers together, Addie met my gaze. She took a breath, then let it out very, very slowly. “He’ll want to know you’re awake, Trina.”
Jessie cleared his throat and made a point of staring out the living-room window, leaving me to make my decision.
“It’s not like I can avoid it,” I said, my voice sounding so small and young it pissed me off.
Addie and Jessie didn’t say anything, and neither of them looked at me.
I twisted my fingers together a few mo
re times.
My father had intended to hurt me when Addie hit him. I knew that. But he had been blinded by rage and maybe other feelings I didn’t understand. When he woke up, his first thought had been for my safety instead of his injured face.
Had he really gotten into a fight with Darius and Levi and Imogene to save me? Had I really seen him praying while Forest tried to heal me? My vision blurred, part from emotion and part from dizziness.
I didn’t hate him, and I wasn’t angry with him. I felt hurt. Confused a little bit. But it wasn’t all about me, was it?
“I’ll talk to him when I talk to everybody else,” I said.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
About an hour later, Imogene stood on the brick patio in Darius’s backyard and handed me a brittle yellow newspaper clipping. It was from the Cincinnati Enquirer. The headline and date were too worn to read, but I could see that the year was 1929, and I made out the words, “Boy free.”
There was a picture of a woman holding tight to a boy in her lap—a boy with a cruel face and dark hair and a mean little smile. Just the sight of him made me shiver in my lounger, even though the sun was hot on my cheeks.
“That him?” Imogene asked.
I handed the clipping back to her, not wanting to touch it a single second longer. “Yes.”
“Who is he?” Ms. Hyatt asked. She was sitting in her wheelchair on my left, and Darius sat cross-legged on my right, handsome in his sunglasses and jeans and black T-shirt. When he reached out to take my hand I let him, even though my father was only a few feet away, directly across from me in one of the folding chairs Darius had fetched from his garage.
Addie sat at my father’s right hand, with her big bag of potions tucked underneath her chair. Forest was on my father’s left, and Levi was standing next to Forest, of course. Jessie stood between both groups, ready to intervene if we came to blows or spells.
“Name is Carl Newton Mahan,” Imogene said. “He was from up around Paintsville, in eastern Kentucky.”
“That sounds familiar.” My father reached for the clipping, and Imogene let him have it before she went and settled herself on the low brick wall holding back a bed of azaleas. It was the strangest thing to see my father in one of his best brown Sunday suits, sitting next to folks with Madoc blood—and not just any Madocs, but Forest and Levi and Imogene, probably the strongest he had ever run across. I couldn’t stop looking at his face, his sad, nervous expression, or the way the right side of his head seemed out of line, like Addie hadn’t been able to get the bones all back together again.