Among the Shadows (The Ash Grove Chronicles)

by Amanda DeWees

  Steven stopped making chalk marks and sat back on his heels, either because of the temptation to lecture or just to give his middle-aged back a break. Maybe both. “It’s the dialect spoken in some parts of the country by the Aniyunwiya, the people we call Cherokee,” he explained. “Cherokee or Tsalagi is an Iroquoian language and is still spoken in parts of this state as well, although it’s endangered now, of course, thanks to the punitive measures of the white government. When I was in Oklahoma I consulted several distinguished Cherokee scholars who were able to teach me a great deal about their tribe’s ceremonies and relationship to the spirit world.”

  Tanner and Joy had wondered why he had chosen such a far-away location to seek cancer treatment. Finally it was starting to make sense. “Oklahoma is where the survivors from the Trail of Tears ended up, right?”

  “Correct. Next to North Carolina, it’s where the largest concentration of Cherokee people today are settled. I thought I would have a better chance of succeeding in bringing Anna back if I used rites connected to the people indigenous to this area.”

  “Why didn’t you just stay in North Carolina, then?” It would have made a huge difference to Joy to have her father near.

  “I had already done as much research as I could do here. The remaining scholars I wished to consult were in Oklahoma.”

  “Did they know you were picking their brains about raising the dead?”

  “Well, no, as a matter of fact.” For the first time, Steven sounded uncomfortable. “I let them believe I was just interested in the symbolic aspect of their lore.”

  “So was there anyone you weren’t actually lying to?” Tanner demanded. “Here Joy was worried that your life was on the line, and you were hanging out in a sweat lodge—under false pretenses, at that.”

  “I didn’t lie to Joy,” said Steven huffily. “I had been getting chemo. I just chose to stay on in Oklahoma after the course of treatments wrapped up and spend some time on research. If you’re through asking judgmental questions, why don’t you light that bundle of sage and begin smudging the room.”

  “Smudging? Like smearing the burnt part on the walls?”

  He gave a short sigh. “No, Tanner, it means walking around the area and making sure the smoke reaches every part of the room to cleanse the atmosphere. You remember—we did the same thing to safeguard the house after the shapeshifter invaded it. Raven, I mean.”

  He remembered now. He did as Steven told him, but kept peering over to see what else his father-in-law was doing. Some of the chalk symbols looked like the Greek alphabet, some looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics, and some could have been tribal symbols. He saw that small objects were placed at intervals inside the circle: a bundle of feathers and bird claws, a gold ankh, a candle that gave off a smell like bacon fat. “So is this, uh, technique something you came up with? It looks kind of like a hodgepodge. Not that I’m criticizing,” he added quickly, as Steven gave him a steely glare over the top of his glasses. He needed to stay on his good side until he got Joy and Rose back. “Whatever gets the job done, right?”

  “This ritual is of my own invention, yes. It draws not only from Cherokee lore but also from different magical traditions across time and from different countries and peoples. I extrapolated from what seemed to be the most effective portions of…”

  Tanner didn’t mean to tune him out, but his mind wandered all the same. Did that mean Steven had tried lots of different rituals before he arrived at this one? Had any of them worked, if only partially? The idea gave him the creeps. Who knew what kind of interference into reality he’d already caused?

  But the guy had been heartbroken; he wanted his wife back. And Tan, after not much more than a week of being without Joy, could sympathize with that. He still felt like there had to be a safer method, but it would have been hypocritical to condemn him; after all, he was here, helping Steven mess with history again.

  If only they weren’t having to bring the succubus back.

  “Did you find a way we could remove Melisande from a different point of history and still keep Anna here?” he asked, without much hope. If he had, Steven would have told him by now.

  “I’m afraid not. Not anything I’m confident enough to try at this point, I should say. Perhaps, though, without her chief accessory she will do less damage.” Steven had found a photo of Raven online and placed a printout of it inside the circle; at the opposite place was a framed photo of Anna. “And perhaps, with Anna present in my life, I will have been able to concentrate more of my efforts on safeguarding Ash Grove.”

  It was weird that he could speak so calmly about having his life rewritten. But it brought up another question. “Steven? Why do you have this office here on the square, if you didn’t get thrown out of Ash Grove for… uh…”

  “For doing this?” Steven smiled ruefully. “It’s a paradox. If I’d had Anna with me, I wouldn’t have needed to change history. But without changing history, I wouldn’t have Anna with me. I don’t have an answer for that, unless the paradox protects itself, or if this is still part of the old timeline that hasn’t caught up yet with the new alterations.”

  He spoke so calmly, but it was a deeply freaky thought—that every second their world could be changing around them, deleting pieces of their lives, adding others. What if he turned around in thirty seconds and Steven had gone, before they could complete the ritual?

  Darkness had fallen; the windows had turned to opaque mirrors that showed Tanner back his own tense face. When he went closer and peered outside and upward, he could see the bright pinpoints of stars. It was a clear night.

  Inside, he and Steven lit more candles. Nothing electric should be used, Steven said, so they unplugged the laptop and desk lamp. Steven was checking the inscriptions against various books and papers, occasionally making a tiny alteration with the chalk or a fingertip. Tanner sat on the floor with his back against the wall and read through the passage he would need to recite, but his mind kept jumping around. To Joy, but also to his past with Melisande. To Gareth Godwin and Melisande’s other protégés, who hadn’t had Joy to rescue them from the succubus. I’m sorry, guys, he thought. But he’d made his choice.

  At last Steven seemed to think they were ready. “Take off your shoes and socks,” he said, doing so himself. “We must be connected to the earth.”

  “But this isn’t earth. It’s floorboards.”

  “Cut from trees, so still part of the natural world,” said Steven patiently. “Now we take turns reading the incantation.”

  “For how long?”

  “That remains to be seen. Perhaps until midnight; perhaps until dawn.” Seeing Tan’s confusion, he said, “That’s why it’s such a great help having you here. By myself, it would be exhausting.”

  “Well, how long did it take last time?”

  “Only about an hour, but the alignment of the pertinent stars was different. All right now: are you ready?”

  “As ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.”

  “Good. Then step into the circle—careful, don’t rub the marks!—and we’ll begin.”

  Tanner obeyed, but he was more nervous than he wanted to admit. His hands and feet were perspiring; he left damp footprints when he stepped into the circle. He reminded himself that he was doing this for the right reasons. He was only helping to correct what had gone wrong. There was no reason that his breath should be so shallow or that the image of Melisande’s soulless green eyes should keep coming into his mind.

  Tomorrow I’ll be with Joy, he thought. No matter what happens, tomorrow I’ll be with Joy. And, holding that thought, he began to read the incantation aloud.

  * * *

  Maddie spent the last night of the old year in the lobby of her dorm, watching zombie movies. All the shooting and screaming soothed her and kept her thoughts from driving her crazy. She had the place to herself; the few other girls who were staying on campus over the break were at the concert, as were the Brodys. They had pressed her to go with them, but she pretended to
be coming down with something and claimed that an evening on the sofa would be better for her than the concert.

  Earlier that evening she’d had a surprise visit from William. She opened the door of her room to head down the hall to microwave popcorn in the kitchen, only to jump when she found him on the threshold, hand raised to knock.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. “Doesn’t the concert start in about an hour?”

  “Yeah. Mo let me take the shuttle back here to pick up something I forgot.” He looked so serious; before a show she would have expected him to be vibrating with excitement.

  “What’d you come back for?”

  You, was what she wanted him to say. But he said instead, “The shirt I wanted to wear. So I take it you’re definitely not coming.” He meant her pajamas and slippers.

  “Yeah, I’m going to skip it.”

  “Maddie, I wish you’d change your mind and come tonight.” For a second her hopes rose, but then he said, “It might look weird to the Hardestys if you’re not there.”

  “Sorry, but I’ve got this sore throat.” Even when he looked her steadily in the eyes she didn’t back down. “Break a leg, though, seriously. I know you’ll be great.”

  He didn’t speak for a moment. Then he took a breath and let it out. “I wish I could change things,” he said quietly. “Believe me, I’d love to make it so I don’t miss her and so I could just get over her. But being here, in all the places I spent time with her, it’s going to take some time, I think.”

  “Have you thought about taking next semester off?” She knew the answer to that before he could even start to reply. He wouldn’t leave Ash Grove, not when Aerosol Cheese and Mo were there. “No, never mind. I think I’m going to, though.”

  “Because of me?” Consternation showed through his eyeglass lenses.

  “Pretty much, yeah.”

  Stay, Maddie. I need you here, Maddie. She hoped with all her strength for him to say something like this.

  But instead he said, “Maybe that’s for the best,” and when her eyes went wide with hurt and shock, he mumbled, “Happy New Year,” and took off down the hallway.

  As midnight approached, she paused Shaun of the Dead and went back to her room to fetch a coat and the 1880 silver dollar she had bought from an antiques store. She had a superstition that real silver might work better than whatever cheap crap modern coins were made of, and she thought Cavanaugh might be flattered by the fact that she had chosen the year of his birth.

  She walked over to the statue in the anemic orange glow of the lampposts, hunching her shoulders against the winter air. The stars were fierce points of light in the sky, and she checked automatically for the few constellations she could identify. But her thoughts never strayed from her purpose.

  It was a couple of minutes shy of midnight when she stood in front of the statue and looked up into the benign face of the school founder. She pictured William, his face strained and unhappy, heard him say again Maybe that’s for the best, and shut her eyes for a moment. When she checked her phone and saw the time change over from 11:59 to 12:00, she reached into her pocket with chilled fingers and drew out the coin. Maybe she should have made some kind of ceremony of it, but it was too late now.

  “I wish Sheila Hardesty had never been born,” she said distinctly, the words emerging in visible puffs of breath, and tossed the dollar.

  It dropped into the metal hat with a noise so surprisingly loud that it made her jump. Then all was quiet. Nothing happened; there was no sign that her wish had been heard. The statue didn’t wink at her or move its bronze lips in a creaky conspiratorial grin.

  Tears of self-pity pricked at her eyes, and she turned and almost ran down the brick walkway. Maddie, my girl, you have reached a new low.

  Not as low as trying to barter William’s soul for a ballet career, though. At least she had that much going for her.

  Great, she could feel morally superior to a dead girl. A dead girl William was still in love with. The night breeze against her face seemed colder now, and when she let herself into her deserted dorm, the lobby door shut behind her with a hollow, final bang.

  * * *

  After the show at Young Harris, Aerosol Cheese and assorted girlfriends, boyfriend, and fans gathered at McCloskey’s. The mood was boisterous despite the sucky performance. The other guys were cheering themselves up, maybe, or it could have been general New Year’s Eve cheer.

  Whatever the reason, William wasn’t taking part in it. He had found a seat in the far corner booth, where he intended to sit until the guys were ready to return to campus. His beer sat undrunk on the table, and William traced patterns in the condensation on the sides of the glass. Big X’s and O’s, not for kisses and hugs, but for the way he’d canceled out his career, the big zero that he’d become.

  “William! Why’re you hiding?” It was Jeremiah, whose spiked Mohawk was starting to sag a little in the heat of the bar. He slid into the seat across and reached out to clap him on the shoulder. “Join the party, man! It’s almost midnight. You should be scoping out which chick to kiss. I’ll bet some of them are even wasted enough to settle for a keyboardist.”

  William didn’t have the heart to exchange insults. “You don’t have to cheer me up. Go have fun with Tasha.” She was looking gorgeous tonight in a red getup that was attracting stares from other guys besides her boyfriend. “If you’re not careful, someone’ll move in on her.”

  “It was one bad performance, man. They happen.”

  Not to him, they didn’t. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I’m sure you’re thinking it’s a lot worse than it really was.”

  Even if he’d wanted to have a heart-to-heart, this wasn’t the setting, when they were having to practically yell to hear each other, and Jeremiah had half his mind on his beautiful girlfriend. And William was still getting his head around it himself.

  He had frozen up.

  It wasn’t like he’d really been bringing it that night anyway. Maybe he was looking for problems now that he knew Amdusias wasn’t giving the band a supernatural boost, but the crowd hadn’t seemed as enthusiastic as he’d expected, and certainly not as large; evidently a lot of locals had chosen the annual Possum Drop over the concert. And the band’s own level of energy and their timing with each other had been off. It was easily explained, what with the shadow of Sheila’s death hanging over them from the last time they’d been scheduled to perform. She was on all of their minds, he knew.

  But it was William who had—well, had just plain sucked. His concentration was off, for a start. His fingers felt as fat as bratwursts and sounded about as clumsy. His ear seemed off too; when he sang backup he could tell that he was flatting.

  The tribute number was where he’d totally lost it. When the other guys had left the stage and a single spot was lighting him where he sat with his acoustic guitar, he had mumbled a few words into the mike about losing a classmate too young and had picked out the song intro… and had forgotten what came next.

  There was no silence like the silence of two hundred people waiting for you to get your act together. The auditorium had felt like a pit opening at the bottom of the ocean, waiting to swallow him up. He cleared his throat, and the sound was amplified until it had a life of its own, a lumbering creature made of humiliation and awkwardness.

  He had sat there a hostage to the silence, feeling it accuse him, until Blake rescued him, striding onstage as if nothing had happened and leading him into “Mesmerize.”

  “It’s totally understandable,” Jeremiah was saying. “It’s been less than two weeks since she—I mean, you haven’t had enough time yet. And you’re still recovering from the concussion. We shouldn’t have rescheduled the show so soon.”

  William shook his head mutely. The worst part was that it hadn’t been grief for Sheila that had thrown him. Or only about, say, thirty percent that.

  Sure, let’s break it down by percentages. What a cold-blooded thing to do. Run the numbers,
Russell: that might make it more manageable.

  Thirty percent: grief for his dead girlfriend. This was the first time he’d experienced the death of someone close to him, someone his own age, and the wrongness of it still bent his brain. And in spite of everything he now knew about her motives, he still missed Sheila. He still loved her, despite what she had planned to do.

  But what had she planned to do, exactly? That was also one of the things bothering him: his memory of that night was getting worse instead of better. He wanted to ask Maddie to fill in the gaps, but he didn’t quite trust her to tell him the truth about Sheila. And that hurt as much as anything else.

  Okay, back on track. Sixty percent: terror that his musical future was over before it had gotten well off the ground, that refusing to bargain with the music demon meant that his own skill would never be sufficient again. That the reason AC had become so popular last semester wasn’t that they had anything to set themselves apart from the thousands of other bands in the world, but that they had been given a kind of supernatural steroid.

  William couldn’t imagine a future without music. It was like trying to imagine life without air. He had to fight down a wave of panic every time the picture swam into his mind: him grubbing it out as a cubicle jockey in some kind of office job, because he’d lost all ability to play or sing or compose.

  It could happen. That was clear now. He couldn’t take it for granted anymore that music would be the cornerstone of his life.

  The last ten percent was the killer, though. It was so selfish, so insanely inappropriate, that he couldn’t actually believe it was happening. It had to make him the worst—what? widowed boyfriend?—in history.

  He needed Maddie.

  He couldn’t stop thinking of her, of how good it would feel to let her take him in her arms and kiss the horror away, say soothing things in that sexy voice, blunt the anguish with her touch and her scent and her warmth. He had made up that pretext to go back to campus hoping that he could talk her into being there tonight, with some crazy idea that if she was in the audience he’d be able to get through everything okay. That he wouldn’t feel quite so lost.