The Akasha Chronicles Trilogy Boxed Set: The Complete Emily Adams Series

by Natalie Wright

  I began to walk, but Jake grabbed my hand, stopping me in my tracks.

  “We need to stick together.” He forced a weak smile to his face. I nodded my agreement and squeezed his hand.

  “Let’s try to find the others,” I said.

  We began to walk, in what direction (if there was such a thing as direction there), we couldn’t know. But we walked and called out, “Fanny? Owen?”

  We walked and called for a long time, not letting go of each other’s hand. Despite the deep cold that bore itself into the core of me, Jake’s hand warmed me. That little bit of heat kept me from falling over into the brink of despair.

  We called out until my voice started to get hoarse. Finally, I stopped. It was pointless.

  “This is no use. We could spend decades walking in circles here and not find what we’re looking for. We need a different strategy to find them.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “Well, in the Netherworld, I had to concentrate on the thing that I wanted and it would appear to me. Or when I was truly ready to find something, I’d find it. Like when I stopped being needy about it.”

  “Do you think that’ll work here?”

  “I’m not sure where ‘here’ is, but it’s worth a try.”

  Jake shrugged. “Okay, so what do we do?”

  “First, clear your mind as best you can of everything except finding Fanny. Then you concentrate solely on Fanny and seeing her again. If you can do that, maybe you’ll find her.”

  “Me do that? What about you? I think it will work better if we’re both doing it.”

  “Yeah, but I have to find Owen.”

  “Oh,” Jake said as his eyes looked down, his mouth dropping.

  “Well, you don’t expect me to leave him here, do you?”

  “Expect? No. Wish you would? Yes.”

  I playfully punched Jake in the shoulder with my free hand. “Jake! You’re terrible. What has the guy ever done to you?”

  “Gotten into your heart first.”

  I felt my heart drop then, right down through my guts and into the soles of my feet. I didn’t have the same kind of feelings for Jake that he had for me, but he was one of my best friends. The idea that his heart was so broken – and by me …

  “Oh, Jake,” I said as I took his hand. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know how you felt about me. Not until about a week ago. Fanny said you have a crush on me. Is that true?”

  Jake just nodded his head. “If you’d known sooner, would it have made a difference?”

  “You mean, would I have chosen you over Owen?”

  “Yes.”

  His eyes had a happy and hopeful look in them. I wanted to say yes. I wanted his eyes to keep that look in them. But it was no use lying. Jake knew me too well to believe an untruth.

  “No,” I said.

  I’ve never seen anyone look more dejected than Jake looked then, the hopeful look erased.

  “I’m sorry. Jake, I love you – as a friend. I just don’t feel – that way – about you.”

  He kept his eyes averted.

  “I know. It’s okay. You can’t help the way you feel.”

  “It’s just, we’ve been like brother and sister so long. It feels, I don’t know, kind of creepy to think of you like that.”

  “I’ve never thought of you like a sister.” He looked me in the eyes then.

  “I never knew. You never …”

  “What? Came on to you? Looked you up and down like Breen and his ape friends do?”

  “I’m sorry, I just never saw it.”

  “For being so smart, you sure are dense sometimes, you know that?”

  “So I’ve been told.” Jake kept a lock on me with his eyes, our hands still holding each other. I so wished I could tell him something different – give him the answer he wanted to hear. But I couldn’t deny that when Owen looked at me, my heart quickened, and my insides turned into a roiling mess. Jake was just … my friend.

  “Look, we’ve got to find Fanny – and Owen. Are we okay?”

  At first, he didn’t answer. He looked away as if to gather himself. Then he said, “Yeah, we’re good.” He plastered a fake smile onto his face.

  “Good,” I said and smiled back. “’Cause you’re my best friend. I’ve missed you.”

  His smile turned from fake to genuine. “I’ve missed you too.”

  We hugged again, a nice, tight hug.

  “We need to stick together. I’ll go bonkers if I lose you here.”

  “Me too. We better get to finding them before something terrible happens to any of us.”

  “Okay, how about this. We’ll work together to find one and then the other. That way we won’t lose each other in this horrible place.”

  “Which one first?”

  “Don’t make me choose between the two. You pick,” I said.

  Jake didn’t say anything at first, his face wearing a thinking look. Then he said, “We should find Owen first.”

  “Really? That’s a surprising pick, coming from you. Why Owen first?”

  “Because between the two of them, Owen seems more likely to have gotten himself into some kind of trouble already.”

  I couldn’t disagree with that. I squeezed Jake’s hand and instructed him to clear his mind and think only of finding Owen. He bent to sit down on the ground to meditate, but as he went down, he screamed in pain and said, “What the hell?”

  “What? What is it?” I said as I helped him up.

  “Something sharp just poked me in the butt,” he said. He rubbed his right butt cheek.

  The mist was starting to curl back over the ground where Jake tried to sit, but before it totally covered the spot, I could see a large, twisted bramble with thorns at least two inches long. The stems of the low-lying bramble bush were about three inches around and curled and twisted back and around so that it looked like thorn-covered knots lying on the ground.

  “It was a gnarly-looking bramble thing. I’ll conjure us some chairs,” I said. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the thought of two comfortable chairs to sit on. After a few minutes, I opened my eyes. I expected to see two chairs, exactly as I’d imagined them, but I saw nothing but the scarlet mist.

  “Do you see any chairs?” I asked Jake.

  “No.”

  “That’s weird. Maybe I’m out of shape,” I said.

  “Or maybe that doesn’t work here,” Jake said.

  The Netherworld was a dimension of pure potential and positive energy. If this place wasn’t like the Netherworld, what was it like?

  “Well, we’ve got to try it with Owen and Fanny anyway,” I said. “I don’t see what else we can do.”

  “You’ve got a point.”

  “Just stay standing this time,” I said. Jake and I took each other’s hands, closed our eyes, and entered our own minds, trying to focus on the single-minded task of finding Owen.

  I began thinking about Owen’s face – his eyes like two pools of mocha. His lips, full and soft. His cheek, with its small dimple when he smiled. His deep, husky voice saying, “Miss Magic,” with just a hint of smiling sarcasm. And his warm lips brushing my neck, his wet tongue in my ear. Just imagining Owen made my insides warm, a bit of the incessant chill gone.

  And then I started thinking about how horrible it would be if I never got to have my first, real kiss with him. Never have that kiss because I brought him to a place that killed him.

  My longing to see Owen again – to feel his arm thrown casually across my shoulders or his hand resting on the small of my back – was so powerful, I thought he’d appear to me any minute. I was so lost in my Owen dream world that I began to phase-shift a little. I was barely aware of my feet planted in the red dust of the strange world. Then I felt my body spinning and tumbling like when we had gone through the portal. I heard a bloodcurdling scream that sounded like it was coming from a faraway place.

  I opened my eyes and was fully back in my body and back in the present with Jake. And he was the one sc
reaming. As soon as I saw where we were, I joined him in screaming like a little girl.

  6

  There was no up, no down. Only the complete blackness of a night long before civilization. Of a night before time. Of a night with no stars and no moon.

  Spinning, tumbling and falling into the void, Jake and I held onto each other tightly. I wasn’t about to let him go, afraid that this time, I would be lost in this nightmare for all eternity. I didn’t want to do it alone. I screamed for him to hold on, but I couldn’t even hear my own words. Jake’s grip was as tight on me as mine was on him. Maybe he was thinking the same thing I was.

  As suddenly as we started spinning, we stopped with a painful thud. We dropped from the nowhere back into some sort of somewhere, complete with the nasty briars, one of which was lodged now in my hind end. Jake and I still had our fingers dug into each other’s flesh.

  “Thank the Goddess I didn’t lose you,” I said as I hugged him to me.

  “What the hell was that? Do you think we’re going to keep going through this?”

  “I don’t know. This place isn’t anything like the Netherworld. I don’t know what’s happening.”

  “We didn’t find Owen,” Jake said.

  His face broadcast a look of almost relief at not finding Owen.

  “But for some reason, we went someplace different.”

  Well, sort of different. We were still planted on a ground of red dust, swirled with the thick mist and fog. There were still the awful brambles from hell. And the air of the place still burned my lungs and felt like it would singe off my nose hairs.

  “Emily, we’re in a graveyard,” Jake said as I was preoccupied with pulling the bramble-thorn out of my butt.

  I looked around me and realized quickly that he was right. Rising up out of the rusty mist were treelike things that looked like monstrous, dead coral with sucker-like things up and down each trunk and strange, curled and twisted branches. These trees looked like they’d once been alive, but were now dead and withered, shades of black and grey. I’m not sure if they’d ever been alive, and I wasn’t sure they were plants at all. They gave the general appearance of something that would reach out and grab you then use those sucker-like things to siphon the life from you.

  Beneath these dead, coral trees were gravestones. They were plain headstones, nothing ornate, no mausoleums here. It was dark, almost perfectly black.

  “Why do you think we transported to a graveyard?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Were you thinking about a graveyard?”

  “No, not even close. Were you?”

  “No.”

  Suddenly a horrible thought gripped me. Jake had no love lost for Owen. What if Jake had horrible thoughts about Owen?

  “Jake, what were you thinking of before we got transported to this graveyard?”

  “I was thinking about Owen, like you told me?”

  “Yeah, but what were you thinking about him?”

  “I know what you’re thinking, but I swear, I was thinking only pleasant thoughts.”

  Jake, having pleasant thoughts about Owen? That seemed unlikely.

  “Really, I swear. I was just playing a reel in my head about him playing football. I have to admit, the guy is a talented football player.”

  “Okay, I believe you.”

  “Wait. What were you thinking about Owen?”

  I didn’t want to answer that question. Jake and I had made up and we were on our way back to things being normal – or close to it, anyway. I was pretty sure that me telling him about my meditations on Owen’s luscious lips would bring us back to the brink of friend disaster.

  “Well, to be honest, I don’t want to share it with you. But you have to trust me, it was nowhere near a bad thought of him.”

  Jake went silent and didn’t ask me to elaborate. I think he could read between the lines and, like me, didn’t want to go there.

  “Well, if you weren’t thinking negative thoughts, and I wasn’t thinking negative thoughts, then why are we in a graveyard?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we should explore around here a little, see if we can find out why we landed here.”

  “Okay, but we’re not splitting up. I don’t want to lose you in this blasted fog.”

  Jake just squeezed my hand into his and nodded.

  We wandered around slowly, trying to feel with our shoes before we stepped to see if we were stepping onto a bramble or not. The headstones were spread out pretty far from each other, each made of worn limestone, no names or dates visible on any of them.

  After a while, we began to feel like we were in some kind of cartoon background loop. We kept moving, but the scenery felt unchanged. In every direction, it looked exactly the same.

  It reminded me of being in the deep, dark wood of the Netherworld. I had walked in circles until I found the reason I was there in the first place. Maybe there’s something we’re supposed to do here.

  Jake stopped so abruptly that I ran into the back of him. “Sorry,” I said.

  “Let’s turn around,” he said.

  “Why? Where are we going to go? The other side of the graveyard that looks exactly like this one?”

  “I’m not kidding, Emily. You don’t want to go this way.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  Jake was standing facing me, trying to block me from going the direction that we’d been moving. His blocking my path only made me want to go that way more.

  “Move,” I commanded.

  “Emily, you don’t want to see this,” he said with the most serious look maybe I’ve ever seen on his face.

  “See what? Move, Jake,” I said as I pushed him aside.

  As soon as he was out of the way, I realized why he didn’t want me to go any further.

  I fell to my knees, a bramble catching the side of my leg and sticking me hard in the thigh with a thorn. But the pain of the thorn in my thigh isn’t what made me scream out. Tears welled in my eyes and ran like a river down my face.

  “No,” was all I could manage to say.

  Jake placed his hand on my shoulder, the warmth of his touch not even making a dent in the icy cold running through my veins.

  As I knelt in the red dust, I looked straight on at a headstone that read:

  Here Lies Owen Breen

  Who Was Never Alone …

  Until Now

  My sobs came out loud and low, interrupted occasionally by a hiccup as I gulped for another breath of the bitter air. I’m not sure why I was so broken up over his death. After all, I hardly knew him – not really. I knew his shoulders were rippled with tight muscles, his stomach smooth and tight. I knew his bottom lip looked juicy and ready for kissing. I knew he had smoldering eyes and a cute dimple, and that all of it was wrapped into a package that made him so physically hot, if you got near him, his body was like a magnet that drew you in. I knew all that, but what did I truly know about Owen Breen?

  His name on a gravestone – dead – permanently gone. I’d lived this pain before with the loss of my mom. And maybe it was all that pain coming back and this fresh pain of the death of a would-be love added in. I hadn’t had the chance to get to know him, but I wanted to. And maybe it was being in that place, maybe forever, or at least until I got so sick of it that I used one of those thorns to slit my own wrists. Maybe it was all that and not knowing where Fanny was, but I felt myself sliding down to that place I’d been to before, that place where I wasn’t sure I’d be able to come back up again. A place all too familiar.

  I felt Jake’s hand on my shoulder gripping me, and suddenly gripping me hard, but it only annoyed me, not soothed me. “Let me go!” I screamed at him, but my voice sounded far away from me then. And I thought I heard him yell my name, but it was more of a memory than a reality.

  For a brief, blissful moment, I was at peace. I was in a darkness, but there was no spinning or falling, just an incredible floating sensation, then my body at complete rest.

  Then I felt the sensation of cl
oth at my fingers. In the absolute darkness, my eyes were no help. They may as well have been closed. And there wasn’t a sound except for my own breathing which, for some reason, felt like it was getting harder and harder to do.

  I smelled the faint odor of something that seemed at once familiar but from what seemed like so long ago. It was a pleasant smell, spicy and warm, and one that I remembered I liked. But I couldn’t place it.

  My fingers felt around me. There was cloth. Cloth covering something. Then I felt … fingers. There was someone beside me in the darkness.

  I used both hands to feel my way in the dark. Within a few seconds, I surmised my situation and tried hard to squelch the panic rising in me. Beneath me and above me and on either end was wood. And beside me was the body of someone that didn’t appear to be moving, even when I touched it.

  I was in a coffin with the body of the boy I had hoped would give me my first kiss. I was in a coffin with the dead body of Owen Breen.

  7

  The only thing that kept me from losing my mind immediately and completely was that I knew that Jake was above me, standing in the spot I’d left him in. Standing there wanting to do everything he could to help me ’cause that’s what Jake does.

  I had to help him find me and get to me quickly before my air ran out. I began pounding on the wood above me, pounding and shouting and screaming at the top of my lungs.

  “Stop shouting. You’re using up all my air.”

  Of all the things that had scared the hell out of me since we walked through that portal, nothing made me almost piss myself more than hearing Owen’s voice – the voice of a dead person – coming out of the dark.

  “Owen?” I whispered. I reached my hand out toward him and found his chest. In the stillness, I could feel his heart beating beneath my hand – barely.

  Then I felt his hand come up to mine. He used his fingers to trace his way up my arm and to my face. He rested his hand on my cheek.

  “Emily?”

  “Yes, yes,” I cried.

  “Don’t cry,” he croaked, his voice weak and hoarse. “You’ll only use up our oxygen faster. Besides, you don’t want to die with tears in your eyes. What will the angels think if they see you with puffy eyes and a runny nose?”