Insanity

by Susan Vaught

  I had no idea if she heard me over the noise. The shade threw down bird carcasses and jumped at me again. The tomahawk whistled past my face, missing my nose by a hair. I stabbed out with my knife, but didn’t hit him. Cain growled and grabbed the shade’s elbow in his teeth, turning him long enough for me to catch a breath.

  Behind me, Forest started to sing. Then she shrieked. The sound was enough to shatter my skull, and the world started to shake. My skin ripped at my bones, a thousand pains sliced through my soul. I almost dropped my knife on the floor.

  The crazy mountain-man shade threw Cain aside, sending him spinning down the long hall on his belly. He swung that tomahawk again, again, getting closer each time as I jumped away. I could smell the stink of his breath. His eyes had gone wide and wild, and I knew. This one killed just to watch people die. He liked hurting people.

  He lunged, and this time I swung my knife true. The bone blade caught him in the chest and ripped him throat to waist, spilling his guts all over the tile.

  He never stopped laughing as he kept coming at me.

  I swung my knife again and got him across the face, blocking his tomahawk swing at the elbow. Blood spurted down his face and mouth, coating his rotten teeth. His eyes went cloudy. Cain launched himself through the air, a flying black ball of fury. The barghest sunk his teeth into the shade’s ruined side, pulling and ripping and shaking his massive head.

  From somewhere behind me, Forest shrieked again, and I felt a thin spot rip open and drag against me. The willow charm in my pocket started shaking, then burst into flames, scorching through my jeans and burning my leg. My heart hammered, and I backed away from the staggering, bleeding shade.

  He tried to swing his tomahawk again, but fell forward instead. Right when he would have knocked me down, I dodged. He hit the tile, sliding in the ruin of his own insides, and the rest of him started to fall to pieces. Cain stood over him, snarling and chewing the pieces to even smaller bits.

  Forest let out a fresh scream, and this time the whole hospital seemed to shake.

  Energy crashed into my back, shoving me forward. I pinwheeled over the smudges of the shade and tipped face-first into my own hounds. My nose and shoulders hit fur, then bashed into the tile. The dogs whimpered as my knife clattered against the wall, then shot out of my grip.

  I shoved myself up without stopping to breathe or think, but my head was spinning. I couldn’t get my bearings.

  “Forest!” I yelled as I turned and staggered toward the curtain of whirling darkness that had opened in the middle of the hallway.

  My heart almost stopped beating when I saw her.

  She was on the other side of that curtain, lying in the arms of a mountain man much bigger than the shade I had just brought down. Massive. He loomed over the hallway, his furred and feathered cap throwing shadows in every direction. The guy’s white face was painted with red slashes that looked like bloody handprints. He had Forest clenched against his buckskin-covered chest, but didn’t seem to notice the blisters rising on his hands.

  Behind him, in dusky moonlight, I could see a crossroads. There was a pole there, and something on the pole.

  It might have been a head.

  “Cain!” I yelled, and the barghest scrabbled across the bloody floor, trying to reach the thin spot.

  Forest turned her head to me as I lurched toward her, and her eyes met mine. She looked scared. And mad. And—something else. She was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t read her lips. What did she want me to do? Charge the shade? Grab her? Find my knife and cut the bastard’s face off?

  The rest of my hounds followed Cain toward Forest, and the few geese who hadn’t been torn in half flew at the shade’s head. The mountain man let out a growl and dropped Forest. He held out his hands and stared at his smoking fingers, finally realizing he was burned everywhere he’d touched her.

  I tried to move faster, but my legs buckled and threw me offbalance. Cain slipped and slid, careening into the rest of the dogs.

  The mountain man’s lips curled as he batted geese out of the air. Then he kicked Forest so hard I felt the hurt in my own ribs.

  “I’ll kill you!” I shouted as I crawled at him.

  Forest didn’t make a sound as she collapsed to the ground. My fists clenched, and I managed to pick up speed. A hundred feet to go. A littler farther, and I’d be there. Cain was right beside me.

  Forest gave me a sad look—and this time I knew what she said.

  Good-bye.

  All of a sudden, I knew what she meant to do.

  “No!” I powered toward her, holding on to Cain’s fur for balance as I closed the gap. “Don’t!”

  Not fast enough.

  Forest let out a shriek so loud and long I thought my brain would burst. The mountain man’s wild eyes got even wilder. He bellowed back at her. The hospital shook and bucked, and I fell against Cain as dust blew off the walls and ceiling.

  I had to get to Forest. I got up and crawled again, even though my insides clenched at that world-ripping sound.

  “Forest!” I got my head up to see her one more time, curled into a ball at the mountain man’s feet, eyes closed, mouth open, her scream going on and on and on.

  My dogs got their footing and barreled at the thin spot just as the man kicked her so hard her back probably snapped.

  Cain moved in front me, dragging me forward as the thin spot shivered once, like a ripple across a pond.

  Then it closed with no sound at all, leaving Cain and me alone in the hall.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The world went so still and quiet my eardrums threatened to burst.

  Then Cain howled, and I howled and I hurled myself at the space where Forest had been, digging at the empty air. She couldn’t be gone. Not like that. No.

  “Forest!” I kept calling, but she didn’t answer.

  Voices hollered over Cain’s wild barks. Probably guards or nurses. I had no glamour now. I didn’t care.

  I had lost her. I didn’t get to her in time. My eyes slammed shut as I tried to sense a thin spot, here or anywhere close by.

  Nothing came to me. I couldn’t even catch a hint of the big spot at the top of the tower.

  No. She couldn’t have. I felt sick and reached out my mind again.

  More nothing.

  Forest had shut down all the thin spots in the whole hospital.

  She had made sure that big bad shade couldn’t come through, but now she was trapped on the other side. I had no way to reach her.

  Cold numbness settled in my bones. It took me some time to understand that the voices calling my name were real, that Imogene and Trina were in the hall with me. It took me more time to see that they were waving their hands—and bleeding.

  Cain licked my hand, then nipped it, and the flare of pain brought me back to right here and right now. I realized that Imogene had scratches and holes all over her body. Something had been at her—maybe a bunch of somethings. I stumbled over to my bone knife and grabbed it off the floor.

  When I turned back to Imogene and Trina, I saw that Trina was burned like she had stuck both arms in a campfire. The skin on her hands was puckered an angry pink, and a gash marked her right cheek. I glanced left and right, looking for Addie and Darius.

  “Where—” I reached out with my senses, sweeping through Lincoln Psychiatric Hospital, searching for the familiar flares of energy.

  “They’re gone, boy,” Imogene said as she tended Trina’s wounds with touches and bursts of golden healing light. “Forest and Addie and Darius. All three got taken.”

  “The whole hospital’s going ballistic.” Trina’s voice sounded jittery. She looked jittery, too, until she sat on the tile floor. “They’re counting patients and locking doors—and the arrows! I don’t know who or what shot them. They looked like people, but they weren’t. And they weren’t really here! My powder blew up and burned me when I threw it at them. They took Darius. They took him, Levi!”

  “Shades,” Imogene sai
d, her voice sounding flat and calm compared to Trina’s. “Weak ones, and from a long time ago, by the way they were dressed and painted up like a tribe. They couldn’t come through from the other side, but they shot me full of holes and swiped Addie before the thin spot shut itself.” Her gray eyes blazed, making her look younger. “They’re closed, boy. All the doors in Lincoln. Sealed off tight.”

  My senses swam in circles. Trina’s dark eyes glistened with hurt for Addie and Forest going missing—and Darius. Darius was her heart, just like Forest was mine. She turned that terrible gaze on me, blazing with witch power and a little bit of crazy born out of grief. “We have to go get them back. We have to get them now.”

  “There’s no way to get to the other side,” I told her, feeling that same grief-crazy creeping up on me. “Forest killed the thin spots.”

  “Then you’ll just have to open one,” Trina told me loud enough to make Cain growl.

  My eyes darted to the hall door as people started hollering about earthquakes and cracked walls and broken windows. “Imogene and I always use the thin spots Lincoln makes on its own.”

  I smashed my hand against the nearest wall, feeling bones snap in two of my fingers. I didn’t care. It didn’t even hurt, but Cain whined anyway and came to lean against my legs. My bones would heal, and too fast. Since Imogene had brought me back from the other side, it was like I kept her healing inside me, working all the time.

  “Who took them?” Trina demanded. “What do they want?”

  Imogene said nothing. For a few seconds I saw the shades again, the skinny one and the big one, dressed up and painted like pretend Indians, their faces full of all kinds of hate and meanness.

  “They’re killers.” I squeezed my broken fingers so the pain would punish me for failing Forest, but the bones were already starting to heal. That made me twice as mad. How could I be so indestructible when Forest was gone and maybe dead? I wished I could break myself into pieces.

  “If they were bad enough to make the newspapers, or if they came through this hospital, they’ll be in my books,” Imogene said as she limped toward the far hallway door. “Let’s get to looking. We’ll have to walk the whole way, since the thin spots are gone.”

  Trina let out an angry yell, then turned to me again, her dark eyes blazing with purpose. “Forest’s mother could make thin spots. Her ghost could do it—and you’re telling me you can’t?”

  “I can’t,” I said, wishing like anything I could.

  “But if Bridgette could do it, then somebody else has to be able to!” Trina grabbed hold of my arm like she meant to force me to agree with her—and I wanted to.

  Forest ...

  Everything inside me hurt, but Trina didn’t care. She shook me and glared at me, and her stubbornness only made things worse inside. In all the history Imogene had written since she could move a pen on paper, Forest and her mother’s shade were the only folks who had ever been able to make thin spots.

  Trina saw the hope draining out of my face, and she let go of my arm. “What about thin spots in other places in the world? There have to be some, right?”

  “Mayhap,” Imogene said as she opened the door. “Mayhap not. Levi and I, we’re from this place. I don’t rightly know if we could pass through some other place’s thin spots.”

  Trina swore and put her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook, but I didn’t dare touch her. I didn’t know what to say to her, anyway. She hated me now. I could feel it, and I didn’t blame her. I was worse than useless.

  After a time, Trina lifted her face, and her hands curled into fists as she lowered them. “Well, we haven’t searched the whole hospital yet, have we?” Her gaze shifted from me to Imogene and back to me again. “This place is different. It’s not totally normal. Parts of it may be hidden from your senses—like the tunnels, when Darius’s grandfather and his witch tree broke through, right?”

  Imogene held the door open for us and frowned. “They came through a thin spot as was already there. They didn’t make one.”

  The hospital seemed to give up a bit of light, showing me Trina’s tear-stained cheeks and the desperate sparkle in her eyes. She was refusing to give up hope. Maybe I needed to borrow some of hers, and at least try to hold on to some possibility that I could reach Forest.

  I nodded to Trina as I laced my fingers into the black fur at Cain’s neck and gave it a tug, pulling him toward Imogene and the door. “Let’s go figure out who we’re dealing with. Then we’ll decide what to do next.”

  It took a while to get to the bell tower, Imogene was moving so slow. It was like the last attack on Lincoln had drained her near to nothing. When I tried to give her a little healing, it didn’t do much good. The rooms where she stayed and tended her books, they were darker than they should have been, even when we turned on the lights.

  Imogene directed me to some shelves and had me pull down two books marked Before on the spines.

  “These can tell us about stuff I never seen,” she explained. “Things that happened afore my time that I heard about from live folks or spirits. Given how those shades were dressed, we’d best start looking as far back as we can.”

  I sat down at a table with Cain beside me and opened a volume, just like Trina did. I started squinting at Imogene’s scrawl, trying to push away every thought about what might be happening to Forest. My mind kept sweeping back to her being hurt, or maybe dead. I was barely able to read.

  Cain whined at my strong feelings and rested his head against my knee.

  Each page in Imogene’s books had two dates, one for when she heard a story and wrote it down, and one for when the events of the story actually happened. There were lots of paragraphs about Madocs, like the too-tall skeletons found in nearby graves. Each sentence I read made me that much madder. None of this was what we needed.

  “This is about a flood in 1773,” Trina grumbled. “Not much help.”

  Imogene nodded and kept reading her own book. I went back to mine. Mixed in with stories about witches and bad spirits that plagued Never and the whole South, I found Imogene’s first scribbled tries at sorting out all the spirits she was seeing at Lincoln Psychiatric.

  Spirit Ghost—Sad bit of soul what got lost on its way to the other side. Naught more than fog, trapped around where it got made. May take on a bit of shape if it stays too long. Ghast—Full of mischief afore it died. Probably a kid. It’s got more shape and stays around where it got made, but can move a bit.

  Useless to me right now.

  Forest ...

  Not long after the mention of ghosts and ghasts, I finally hit on something that got my attention:

  Bloody Harpes

  1775—Micajah “Big” Harpe and Wiley “Little” Harpe. Cousins born up to North Carolina. Strong Madoc line. Bad as they come. Burned up farms, defi led women, stole from soldiers.

  1780—joined the redcoats just to kill folks. Took up with a group of Cherokee raiders. Kidnapped women and married them by force. Next ten years, had two kids each, killed by their daddies.

  December, 1798—come into Kentucky to keep killing.

  My eyes focused sharply as I squinted at Imogene’s scrawl. These two freaks, Micajah and Wiley Harpe, had gutted men and stuffed their insides with rocks to sink them in the river—and what they had done to women, it didn’t bear thinking about.

  “These guys murdered their own children,” I muttered, and Imogene and Trina raised their heads. “The Bloody Harpes. And they ran with some twisted Cherokees for a while, which might explain the arrows and face paint, and the weak shades who got Darius and Addie.”

  Imogene closed her book, and my heart started beating faster. “I remember those stories. Over to Russellville, Big Harpe bashed his own baby girl’s head against a tree to stop her squalling.” She shook her head. “They slipped capture a long time, ’cause their Madoc blood gave ’em a sense of when they was followed.”

  “Who were they?” Trina asked. “And what happened to them?”

  Imogene’s
answer came quick. “This country’s first known serial killers. Little Harpe got killed by his own band of thieves for the bounty, but Big Harpe went down harder.”

  “‘Legend has,’” I read from Imogene’s notes, “‘Big Harpe ran afoul of some folks with power down to Natchez, Mississippi, at a place called Witch Dance. They cursed him as he went back to Kentucky, and he finally got caught. One of the posse what took him down got vengeance for his murdered wife and baby daughter by chopping off Big Harpe’s head whilst he was still awake. The posse stuck the head on a pole at a crossroads near Henderson, Kentucky. The place is called Harpe’s Head to this day.’

  “That’s him, then.” I pushed the book away from me, thinking about what I had seen behind the mountain man when he took Forest. A pole at a crossroads—maybe with a head on it.

  “So, Big Harpe’s got her. And he’s got a grudge against witches,” Trina said.

  “A big ’un,” Imogene agreed as she pulled the book out of my hands and started running her finger down the list of Harpe wives and children who hadn’t got murdered, following the bloodline. “If you believe the tales, it was a witch who finally pulled his skull off that pole and ground it to powder for a potion.”

  Trina and I were quiet for a long minute, until Trina said what we were both thinking. “Did the Bloody Harpes come back now because of me? Did they pick me out as a witch when I went to the other side?”

  Imogene got up and walked to a shelf and pulled down a volume, opening it before she even got back to her chair. “Mayhap,” she muttered, but I didn’t hear much conviction in her voice. “We don’t always know what makes a shade strong enough to cross when it does, but those that’s bad are always trying.”

  “It’s a good bet the shade I killed was Little Harpe,” I said. “And the one who took Forest was Big Harpe.” The thought of Forest in that killer’s filthy hands gave me pain in my guts. Had he already murdered her, or made her wish she was dead?

  “Mmm,” Imogene said, and changed books again. She was after something, but whatever it was, she wasn’t letting on yet.