by Edie Claire
I exhaled loudly. “Oh. That’s a relief.”
“Still. Those swimsuits they were wearing, I have to say, were totally—”
“Zane!” I warned, even as I smiled. He was clearly teasing me now.
“I was going to say totally decent!” he insisted, managing to sound unjustly accused. “As was everyone’s sleepwear, by the way. But I’ve got to tell you, I am totally disillusioned now. I was led to believe that when girls had sleepovers they ran around half naked snapping towels at each other.”
I snorted. “Where do guys get this garbage?
“Hard to say,” he speculated. “Seems like a middle school impression. R-rated frat-boy movies, maybe?”
I cracked up laughing.
“So set me straight!” he cajoled. “What else do I have wrong?”
“Not my problem,” I said with a smirk. Then I wondered, uneasily, if he could see me smirking.
Yikes.
This was difficult. Despite our being able to laugh about it at the moment, I was not at all looking forward to confessing this conversation to my friends. Zane was right. His uncontrollable spy-vision was going to creep them out. And who could blame them? But they had to know. Telling them was the right thing to do. Besides which, we needed their help.
“Listen, I’ve got to talk to them about this,” I explained. “I’ll call you back a little later, okay?”
“Okay,” he returned. “Sorry. Again.”
“I know you are,” I assured. We said our goodbyes and hung up.
Kylee and Tara had given up their prime spots closest to the blowhole to more newly arriving tourists, but they were still enjoying a killer view of the coast from a spot a little further up on the lookout. They were laughing and pointing, no doubt watching the bodysurfers do their thing at Sandy Beach. The surf might be flat on the North Shore, but here on the other side of the island it was kicking up nicely for August, and Sandies was booming.
I suspected I should take them to a more private place somewhere, butter them up a bit, and then carefully plan a way to explain everything so it didn’t make my favorite guy in the world — who I wanted desperately for them to adore — sound like some kind of pervert. But I was better at winging it. So I just opened my mouth and started talking.
“Whenever Zane thinks about me he gets flashes of wherever I am,” I announced before they’d even realized I was standing behind them. “He knew we were eating nachos last night and he knew we were at the pool and the spitting cave and he knows we came here. He can’t see me for some reason but he can see you, although he swears he hasn’t seen anything embarrassing. And he says he feels bad about it and he’s trying not to encourage it, but he feels like if he wanted to, he could see a lot more.”
Kylee and Tara turned around. They stared at me with their jaws slack and their faces unpleasantly colored.
“Oh, that’s not right,” Tara said after a moment, her tone grim.
“I know,” I agreed miserably.
They were both quiet for another long while. The blowhole spewed again, but nobody looked at it.
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Kylee argued, staring at me. “He can’t constantly be popping in and out of his body all day long, whenever he thinks about you. He wouldn’t be able to function. Besides, if any part of his spirit was actually present here, you should be able to sense it, just like you did before.”
Her words struck me. I hadn’t thought about it quite like that. “I… I don’t feel like he’s been with me, no. I certainly haven’t seen anything.”
“This is too weird!” Tara said defensively, her eyes getting the glazed look they always got when she overloaded on woo-woo. “I’m going to go contemplate some nice, tame fluid dynamics for a minute, okay?” She took a step back towards the blowhole.
Kylee caught her by the arm. “Be a man!” she hissed. “This is physics! You’ve said so yourself. What we all need to figure out is—” She breathed in sharply. Her lids fluttered and her dark eyes swam with thought. “Wait! Kali, you said he can’t see you? Like, ever?”
I shook my head. “That’s what he says.”
“Will you let go of me?” Tara demanded as Kylee’s nails dug into her wrist.
“No,” Kylee replied offhandedly as she flashed a smile at me. “I think I get it!” she gushed. “You’re a beacon!”
“I’m a what?”
“A beacon for remote viewing! Zane isn’t leaving his body at all. At least not with these flashes. I was thinking OBE or astral projection, and it still sounds like that with the beach scene and the car accident thing, but this sounds different. It’s—”
“Will you talk English instead of psychobabble please?” Tara ordered.
Kylee frowned at the word choice, but she did let go of Tara’s wrist. “Remote viewing isn’t the same as actually traveling someplace else. It’s getting impressions about a distant target in some other way. Like telepathy.”
Tara rubbed her arm. “So what you’re saying is that Zane is able to see whatever Kali is seeing? Like he’s seeing through her eyes?”
I stiffened. Seeing through my eyes was way too close to being inside my brain.
“Not exactly,” Kylee said, looking at me with concern. “It’s not like he’s inside your head looking out. But if he’s focusing on you, and you’re his beacon, then he’s picking up on whatever you’re focusing on, if that makes sense. He’s getting visual images that are like snapshots of your day, in real time.”
I processed that information slowly. I decided I didn’t like it. “And what if there are things I see, like when I’m alone,” I stressed, “that I don’t want Zane — or anybody else — to see?”
Kylee blinked back at me uncomfortably. “Oh. I guess that’s… awkward.”
“Awkward?” I practically choked. “Are you kidding me?”
Her brown eyes swam with sympathy, making me feel a whole lot worse. I whirled away from both of them and headed… somewhere.
This was too much. Really. All of the other psychic stuff was annoying. It made me feel like a freak, it intruded on my otherwise normal life. But giving my boyfriend unlimited access inside my eyeballs was taking the concept of personal intrusion to a whole new level — and I wanted off the whacko bus. Now.
“Kali! Where are you going?” Kylee called after me.
“I don’t know!” I fled across the parking lot, then stood gazing out to the south. Beyond the overlook and far below me lay a protected cove with a small, sandy beach. The rock walls surrounding it were steep and forbidding, but nevertheless a narrow, unauthorized trail led down to it from the corner of the parking lot, and a dozen people were swimming in the aqua shallows and frolicking on the sand.
Kylee caught up with me. “Kali, I’m sure Zane can learn to control this thing. It’s the same with all these abilities, isn’t it? He just has to learn how, that’s all.”
I didn’t look at her. It was a nice thought, and Zane was a nice guy. But he was a guy.
I really didn’t want to think about this anymore.
Tara caught up with us and stared over my shoulder at the cove below. “How did those people get down there?”
“Tara!” Kylee protested, “Can’t you see that Kali is upset?”
Tara drew back and looked at me. “I’m sure you can keep it under control, Kali. You’re good at that. What are you so worried about? He said he hasn’t seen anything embarrassing yet. And now you know. Right?”
“But it’s not under my control!” I practically shouted. Dangerous heat rose up behind my eyes. I would not cry.
Tara looked from me to Kylee as if she were confused. “Sure it is,” she said gently. “I mean, if some form of Zane’s own energy were actually present in this place, like when he was a wraith, that would be one thing. He could see you like anyone else here could see you, and you couldn’t do anything about that.” She looked at Kylee as if for confirmation, and Kylee nodded slightly. Then Tara looked at me. “But if Zane and all of his
energy is physically located on the North Shore right now, and he’s getting whatever info he’s getting by tapping into his emotional connection to you, then it seems to me like the ball’s in your court. Somehow or other, you have to be letting him in. Ergo, you should also be able to—”
“Block him!” I shouted for real, throwing my arms around Tara’s neck in a spasm of happiness. “Yes! Of course!”
“Damn, Tara,” Kylee said approvingly. “I think you’re right. And you say you don’t have a sense for this stuff. Been reading up behind our backs have you?”
Tara had gone beet red. “No!” she protested, detaching me. “I just… Well… isn’t that common sense? It does follow… well… scientifically.”
Kylee smirked.
Tara rolled her eyes. “Oh, shut up.”
I laughed out loud and group hugged them. “Thank you,” I gushed. “Both of you. Surely I can figure out how to block him, at least when it matters the most. I am really good at that now!”
My high lasted only a few seconds. Then an unwelcome memory brought me right back down again.
Pain. A river of red. Sinking. Dropping. No way to breathe…
I had not been able to block the ghost last night. Perhaps I was not as good as I thought I was.
“Where to next, Kal?” Tara asked merrily.
“Yes, I can hardly wait!” Kylee chimed in. “Every view here is more gorgeous than the last one!”
But you ARE good at blocking! I told myself forcefully, refusing to lose my mojo. If I had slipped up with the ghost, it was only because I had gotten lazy having Zane’s comforting presence around. What I needed to do was train myself in blocking, just like I had done with swimming. And what better place to start than with some good, old-fashioned exercise?
I drew in a breath, then blew it out with determination.
“To the Pali,” I declared.
Chapter 10
I had not been back to the Pali, a magnificent overlook of Oahu’s windward coast set in the cleft of a mountain peak, since the day I had first met Matt. He had been taking me on a tour of the island and thought I would enjoy the view, which I probably would have if I had actually managed to reach the overlook. Sadly, however, the plateau was also the site of a horrific battle that resulted in hundreds of men being pushed to their deaths over the side of the cliff, and it was inhabited by the one of the densest, most miserable assemblies of shadows I’d ever encountered. Their emotions of fear, failure, and horror had completely overwhelmed me before I’d learned how to block such feelings.
Not too long ago I had considered going back, this time with a living, breathing Zane at my side, to test how far I had come and how much better I could tolerate the place’s oppressive gloom. But I had never quite gotten up the nerve.
“Are you sure you want to do this, Kali?” Kylee asked me hesitantly as she popped open her bottle of KonaRed. We were standing by my car outside the 7-Eleven in Waimanalo where we’d stopped to buy snacks. At least, that’s why they told me they had wanted to stop before driving on to the Pali. I suspected that what they really wanted was to get the car keys out of my hands before I drove them anywhere near the place. Since they had heard me describe in detail my near nervous collapse on my last visit, I couldn’t blame them.
“Yes, I have to go,” I said stubbornly. “Trial by fire and all that. These abilities only seem to get stronger once they show up. At least that’s the way it’s happened so far.”
Kylee looked back at me with sympathy, even as a flicker of amusement danced across her dark eyes. “Love’ll do that to you,” she teased. “You and Zane definitely seem to have some weird kind of synergy going on. My ba noi says that’s really rare, but it can be super powerful when it happens.”
“Power’s fine, as long as it’s divided up equally,” Tara commented, studying me as she dug into her bag of Maui onion chips. “I think you’re taking the right approach, Kali. As long as you’re careful about it. In fact, I think we should set up a test.”
“Like what?” I asked, intrigued. Sometimes, Tara’s cool, detached way of looking at problems made Kylee and me both want to scream and shake her like a rattle. At other times she was our calm in a storm, and her level-headed observations and careful plotting were priceless.
Tara considered a moment, crunching her chips. “How about this? First, we’ll get you settled where you can feel the shadows. Where exactly do you need to be?”
A shudder rocked my shoulders, and I looked away with embarrassment. Seriously? Was that all it took? Just thinking about how close to the edge of the Pali I would have to walk? How many of the yelling, bleeding, moaning—
No! Did I really need to do this? Today?
Wimp.
“I’m not sure I can go that close to the edge,” I admitted. “It will be too humiliating if I fail and flip out. The shadows are freakin’ everywhere… for a first test, I’ll probably be fine staying in the car. They’re bad enough in the parking lot.”
“Perfect,” Tara said encouragingly. “So here’s what we’ll do. You make yourself comfortable and get your empathic blind in place, just like we all learned in the spring. It should be easy enough to test. You’ll have a gauge for how strong your blind is, because the shadows will be pushing its limits every second, right?”
“Right,” I agreed.
“Once you get to the point where you think it’s pretty solid,” Tara continued, “we’ll run a test for Zane. We’ll put up a flash card that you can see with a message for him.”
“Oh, cool!” Kylee enthused. “And if he doesn’t get it, her blind worked!”
“Well, not necessarily,” Tara explained. “Not if he only sees occasional flashes. But we’ll leave the sign up for a while to increase his chances.”
My pulse sped up with anticipation. This had to work. “But he’s trying not to look, remember? Should I text him and tell him to reverse that?”
Tara shook her head. “Not at first. First we see what happens when he’s clueless. That’ll be our control round.”
“Let’s do it!” Kylee urged.
I turned toward the car, only to find Tara’s outstretched hand in front of me. “Um, Kali? Keys, please. You can give me directions.”
“Right,” I agreed again.
Tara drove us up into the high part of the mountain range in the center of the island, and as expected, the sky grew cloudier as we ascended. The misty shrouds that encircled the dramatic green peaks only added to the air of romance for Kylee and Tara, but I suffered the same feeling of foreboding this stretch of highway always dredged up in me. The feeling only got worse as I directed Tara to turn off onto the narrow lane that led back to the Pali.
“Ooh, it’s so pretty here!” Kylee cooed, unaware of how the dense, jungle-like surroundings seemed to be closing in on me with every inch we drove.
I didn’t know if the effect of the soldier shadows could stretch this far, or if I was really just psyching myself out with memories of the last time, but the cold feeling settling into my limbs was already distinctly uncomfortable.
“I’m going to start working on my blind now,” I told them, closing my eyes as I tried to relax in the passenger seat. “The lot is straight ahead. Just drive up to it and park.”
I couldn’t seem to get the memories of that day with Matt out of my head. Never before or since had I seen so many shadows, so many suffering bodies, all in one place. I didn’t doubt there were worse places on earth, but with the exception of a Civil War battlefield that I had visited when I was little — and not yet as sensitive to emotion — I had not been subjected to them. Nor would I ever, if I had a choice about it. Battlefields of any kind were a nonstarter, including Pearl Harbor. No amount of money could get me to tour someplace like the Tower of London or a concentration camp. In fact, I never wanted to go to Europe, period. The more people that had lived in a place, the thicker the shadows were. And although generally that meant as many happy moments as sad, in some places, the imprint of human
grief could be overwhelming.
The battle of the Pali might be relatively recent and unknown to the history books. But it was definitely one of those places.
“Are you okay so far, Kali?” Kylee asked. “We’re not there yet.”
No, I was not okay. But it was my own darn fault. I had to stop remembering the last time! “I just need to focus,” I murmured.
I tried to clear my mind and start with the simple empath tactics I’d learned. It didn’t help my confidence that the wall I’d thought was so great back at my carport had failed so epically, so I decided to do something slightly different. First I visualized the blind coming down, the way I blocked out the everyday shadows. Then I brought in a layer of… platinum. Yes, why not? I wrapped sheets of platinum — whether platinum actually bent or not, I didn’t care — around and around me like bandaging a mummy. It seemed secure, and oddly, I began to feel better. Then I decided to make my barrier glow.
Awesome.
“Kali,” I heard Tara saying. I had almost forgotten what we were doing. “Are you okay? We’re there.”
“Seriously?” I questioned, not believing her. “Where exactly?”
“Parked in the lot. Right up front, against the sidewalk that leads to the overlook.”
A smile spread across my face. My cheeks warmed. “That’s amazing,” I breathed. “I feel perfectly fine. Really. I don’t feel bad at all.”
I could hear stifled cheers from Kylee in the back seat, then various shuffling noises from Tara. “Hang on Kali,” she said quietly. “Just keep your eyes closed for now.”
I sat back and relaxed in my happy place. I could visualize where we were parked and I knew how I had felt the last time I was here. The shadows weren’t terribly dense this far out, but the bad ones were near enough, and I was more sensitive now. There was no question that without any protection, I would be in misery.
Glowing platinum was the bomb.
“Okay,” Tara said after a moment. “Do you think you can keep your concentration if you open your eyes?”