Ghost Hold (The PSS Chronicles, Book Two)

by Ripley Patton

  “No.” Marcus shook his head. But if he hadn’t been pissed off before, he was now. “What about you? Were you just going to rape Olivia in the woods and then go back down to the parking lot and call her mom with a clean conscience?”

  “Rape?” Grant said with surprised disgust. “It was a kiss, and it wasn’t like that at all.”

  “For you, I’m sure it wasn’t. But why don’t you ask her?” Marcus nodded at me.

  “Olivia, tell him. It wasn’t like that,” Grant said, looking at me.

  I didn’t want to hurt him. I truly didn’t. But I also never wanted him to kiss me like that again.

  “I didn’t want to kiss you,” I said. “And I clearly said ‘no’ when it started.”

  “Maybe your mouth said no,” Grant said mockingly. “But your body definitely said—”

  And that is when all hell broke loose.

  Marcus charged at Grant, grabbing him by the robe and smashing him against the rock face closest to us, pinning him there.

  Jason had the barrel of the gun against Grant’s cheek before I could even squeak out a protest.

  “Listen to me, you college prick,” Marcus said, his voice dripping with rage. “If you ever touch her again, or any other female, for that matter, without their explicit consent, I will fucking hunt you down and hurt you in such a way that you will never be able to do it again. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  Grant’s eyes were bulging out of his face. Marcus’s arm was across his throat, so I’m not even sure he could speak, but he nodded his head. Vigorously.

  Jason lowered the gun and Marcus let go of Grant, who stayed plastered against the rock looking truly terrified.

  I was appalled. And I was thrilled. But I also had enough sense to know this wasn’t just about me. Marcus had watched his sister get raped while he was handcuffed to a police car. It wasn’t surprising he had a very low tolerance for that sort of thing. But I wasn’t Danielle. And Grant hadn’t raped me.

  “You’re fucking crazy,” Grant rasped, rubbing his neck and looking from Marcus to Jason to me. “All three of you.”

  “Maybe a little,” Jason quipped, shrugging, his gun still pointed at Grant.

  “Take him up,” Marcus said to Jason, nodding at the ladder. “But don’t let him out of your sight.”

  “Let’s go,” Jason said to Grant, gesturing at the ladder. “Ladies first.”

  And Grant went, without any argument, up the ladder and into the dark without even a fleeting glance back at me.

  Well, that friendship had completely tanked. And what would Emma think when she heard the circumstances? Would she side with Grant? Even if she believed me, Grant was her brother, and I was just her friend. Would I lose her too?

  “Are you all right?” Marcus asked, coming to my side and wrapping his arms gently around me. “I never should have left you behind with him. I thought you might need some space. But when I noticed that the two of you hadn’t come up the ladder, I got a bad feeling in my gut. God, I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said, wanting to comfort him as much as he wanted to comfort me. “He’s normally not like that. I think it was the shock of seeing me or something.”

  “I don’t fucking care what it was,” Marcus said. “He does it again, and I hurt him. Badly.”

  “I’m okay.” I tucked my head under his chin, feeling him tremble. “Thank you for coming back. I almost stuck my hand into him.”

  “Hmm. Then maybe I came back a little too soon,” he said.

  “No,” I scolded. “Don’t say that.”

  “You’re right,” he whispered, kissing the top of my head. “I will always come back for you.”

  We stood for a moment, embracing in The Devil’s Punchbowl. “Come on,” he said, taking my hand in his and tugging me toward the ladder. “Let’s get to this Eidolon and talk to Samantha.”

  32

  VIVA LA REVOLUTION

  Jason and Grant were nowhere to be seen on the trail above the ladder, but there was only one direction they could have gone. Marcus and I glanced up at the steep sides of the box canyon, rising a hundred feet above our heads. I’d had no idea there was landscape like this anywhere in the Midwest, and it was both beautiful and eerie, the way the shadows and frigid air gathered in those deep cuts in the earth, secreted in pockets, caves, and crevices carved into the limestone by eons of trickling water. I was beginning to understand where Shades had gotten its name.

  We were hiking quick, trying to catch up with the pack, and we didn’t really talk, conserving our energy for the rough trail. But Marcus held onto my hand, guiding me and helping me over some of the bigger pools as the creek increased in girth and volume.

  The next time I glanced ahead, it looked like our path just ended, blocked off by a wall of rock. But then I saw the stairs to the left and Grant and Jason moving up them, other dark forms above them, and the faint echo of voices drifting down to us. We were catching up.

  A few minutes later, we arrived at the foot of the wooden stairway, and I read the sign at the bottom. Devil’s Drop, it said, with an arrow pointing upward. Great. And my mom thought I was obsessed with morbidity. I had nothing on the Satan worshippers who’d named all these park features.

  The steps in front of me went straight up the side of the ravine, attached to it with huge rusty bars embedded straight into the rock. The staircase tacked back and forth, disappearing into the darkness above.

  I started trudging up and Marcus came after me, our feet pounding out a rhythm together. As we climbed higher, we began stopping at every landing to catch our breath, but we finally came out at the top, winded and leg-sore.

  We were standing on the top of a rounded plateau or tableland which ended on all sides in rocky jagged cliffs. The landscape was flat with low shrubs and only a few smaller trees poking out between the cracks of rock and boulder. Groups of robed teenagers dotting this strange landscape, milling around and talking excitedly. Beyond them was the vast backdrop of the night sky spread out before us in an incredible display, the moon hanging there, a mere sliver of silver laced with clouds. And the stars were amazing, stars upon stars upon stars, overpopulating the universe with points of light mixed in dark milky galaxies.

  As my eyes drank it all in, I noticed Grant and Jason standing to the side with Nose and Yale. Jason’s gun was tucked back inside his robe, but it was obvious he’d enlisted the help of the other two to keep an eye on Grant. And it must have been obvious to Grant too, the way he was standing with them, sullen and resigned.

  Jason saw us and came over, a worried look on his face. “This is a shitty location,” he said to Marcus. “It’s completely indefensible. We’ve got a flight of stairs at our back and that at our front,” he finished, pointing at the cliff.

  “You’re right,” Marcus said, addressing Jason’s concern. “But we haven’t seen any sign of CAMFers, and if they were here, they would have taken us in those canyons, not waited until we had the high ground.”

  In all the mess with my mom, and my dad’s paintings, and Grant, I’d almost forgotten the real threat to us, the one we’d been running from for weeks. Mike Palmer, a CAMFer, had warned us not to come here. It still made no sense that he’d leave us a message at all. But my dog tags were completely silent, which meant there probably weren’t CAMFers anywhere in Shades.

  “Maybe,” Jason said, but it was obvious he didn’t agree with Marcus. “Unless they’re waiting for something.”

  “Stay in the trees then,” Marcus said, nodding toward a stand of scraggly hemlocks. “They’re not coming up the cliffs, so keep your eyes on the stairs. We’ll make this as quick as we can.”

  “Got it,” Jason said, turning back to join Nose, Yale, and Grant, and motioning them back into the shadow of the trees.

  “Welcome to the Eidolon,” Renzo’s voice cut through the night air, silencing the chatter of the crowd. He had climbed up onto a flat boulder toward the edge of the cliffs, and everyone was gat
hering around him.

  As Marcus and I moved to join them, I looked for Samantha. Where was she? I’d thought this Eidolon was her thing.

  “Far below us, at the bottom of this cliff,” Renzo began, like an actor on a stage, “is the Sweet Water River. And upriver, only a hundred feet or so, is a rock formation known as The Devil’s Backbone.”

  What was he, a park ranger? I thought this was some kind of religious ritual, not a geology lesson. I glanced at Marcus and he shrugged.

  “Where’s Samantha?” he asked softly, searching the crowd.

  “I don’t know,” I whispered back in frustration. “But Passion is up there.” I pointed. “I can feel her. So, Samantha probably is too.”

  “Are you positive she’s even here?” he asked.

  Shit. No, I wasn’t sure. Samantha had invited me. She’d told me she’d be here, and everyone else had told me she’d be here. But they could have all been lying. I pulled my dog tags out and clutched them in my ghost hand, getting an instant flash of Passion and an impression of giddy happiness.

  “She’s here,” I told Marcus.

  “The unique positioning of that feature,” Renzo was saying, “has carved out the river bed directly below this cliff and made the water extremely deep. Which is why, throughout history, people have come here to cliff-dive. That is how it got its name, The Devil’s Drop, and that is exactly why we’ve brought you here tonight. We are going to dive this cliff.”

  “What do you mean by ‘we?’” someone called out nervously as chatter and murmurs of excitement broke out amidst the group.

  “If you came here for the Eidolon,” Renzo answered, quieting the crowd, “then you came here to dive.”

  “I thought we came here to party!” someone hollered, eliciting a few cheers of agreement.

  “This is not a party,” Renzo corrected the heckler passionately. “We didn’t drag you all the way out here to get drunk or wasted, and if that’s what you came for then you might as well take the stairs back down to the parking lot. This,” he said, gesturing toward the cliff behind him, “is about claiming our power and what belongs to us. We are the first generation of The Hold. Our parents don’t have PSS. They aren’t marked. They are Fleshmen, and yet they run everything for us. Why?”

  “Because we’re underage,” someone suggested timidly from the crowd.

  “Exactly!” Renzo said, pouncing on the answer. “Because they consider us children. Because we have no rights. Because nothing can legally belong to us. But that time is coming to an end.”

  Now I was really lost. What did jumping off a cliff because Renzo said so have to do with the unmarked parental control of The Hold? This was getting weirder by the minute.

  “How many of the Marked here are no longer underage?” Renzo asked.

  A handful of robed figures raised their hands, but Marcus didn’t join them. He was scanning the crowd again, searching for Samantha.

  But Renzo continued to run the show with no sign of her. “This year, many of us turned eighteen,” he said. “Next year, even more of us will. Soon, enough of us will be of age to take The Hold for ourselves. It is time we grew up. It is time we grasped what is inherently ours. But, to do that, we need two things. We need power. And we need a leader. Not an unmarked adult who doesn’t even understand who we are, what we are—but someone from our own generation. It is time to put the fate of The Hold into the hands of the Marked!”

  The crowd went wild, cheering and cat-calling in agreement.

  Samantha had better show up quick, because I was pretty sure she had a mutiny on her hands. Renzo was talking about overthrowing her father. He was talking about generational revolution within The Hold. And it sounded like he was grooming the crowd to jettison him straight into the position of The Hold’s new leader.

  This didn’t make any sense. If Samantha was at the Eidolon, wouldn’t she be speaking up against this? Not only that, wouldn’t she have heard Marcus’s PSS the moment we arrived at the top of the stairs? Hell, I’d kind of been expecting her to be waiting for us. She’d certainly heard Passion and me easily enough in a school practically crowded with PSS. But, she’d only heard mine after I’d taken off the tags. The tags I was currently wearing while holding onto Marcus’s arm. Shit. I was blocking him. Had I been touching him this entire time? Probably.

  I quickly let go of him, breaking contact and stepping away.

  Renzo had stopped talking and was pulling someone up onto the rock from the crowd.

  Marcus glanced at me, puzzled, wondering why I’d moved.

  The new figure on the rock turned, Samantha’s beautiful face revealed to everyone in the crowd as she swiveled her head, staring directly at Marcus, her mouth falling open.

  The night filled up with silence as the crowd waited for Samantha to speak, their new leader, the one Renzo had been amping them up for. He wasn’t the new Messiah. He was just the prophet paving the way. Samantha was the one setting herself up to replace her parents. She was the true leader behind this little revolution. And I had not seen that coming. Not at all.

  But I obviously wasn’t as surprised as she was.

  The silence expanded, her eyes blazing into Marcus, her ear turned toward him. Her glance flicked to the glimmer of his chest, and her mouth opened a little wider. Then she looked at me, standing next to him, then back to Marcus, realization dawning in her eyes.

  As for the crowd, they slowly pivoted as one in their black robes, white faces seeming to float in the darkness as they turned to see what Samantha was staring at, what had stopped her in her hot revolutionary tracks.

  Everyone was looking at us now, and I recognized Passion’s pale face toward the front where she’d been standing with Samantha before Renzo had pulled her up on the rock.

  Marcus didn’t move, but I could feel the tension radiating off of him. If my reunion with Grant had been a little rocky after only a few weeks, what was this one going to be like after ten years?

  “David?” Samantha said, his childhood name slipping from her lips like a strangled cry.

  “Hey, Sam,” Marcus said, his voice breaking as well.

  Samantha leapt from the rock, the crowd clearing an aisle for her as she ran toward Marcus. She didn’t stop or even slow as she approached him, but slammed into his arms at full speed, a sob of joy expressed from her lungs as she did so. “David,” she kept saying over and over again. And then she pulled back and looked at him. “You’re alive,” she whispered, tears painting wet tracks down her face. “They told me you were dead. That the accident—”

  “I was dead,” he whispered, his face wet too.

  “But you aren’t. You aren’t,” she said, as if she were still convincing herself. “I don’t understand.”

  Then she pulled back, and her glance fell to the glimmer of his chest, and she looked at his face again, her eyes swimming with wonder, and he nodded. “You came back?” she asked, incredulous.

  “Yes,” he said.

  It was as if they were by themselves, not standing on a cliff under the moon with a sizeable audience. As for that audience, they were transfixed. Even if they didn’t know what was going on, it was obvious it was something meaningful, and moving, and important.

  “But—what about Danielle?” Samantha’s eyes flicked to me, falling to my ghost hand. “You aren’t—” She turned back to Marcus, confused and desperately hopeful. “She’s not Danielle,” she said, the loss in her voice cutting into my heart.

  “No.” He shook his head. “Danielle is gone. But not at the accident. It was in February.”

  “This February?” Samantha moaned, laying her head into Marcus’s shoulder and openly weeping.

  He held her, and comforted her, and the crowd watched, a few whispered murmurs rippling through them like the wake of a pebble dropped in a pool.

  Renzo was still standing on his rock, and he looked both unhappy and confused, as if he wasn’t quite sure if all this had been staged by Samantha for the sake of the Eidolon, or if o
ur little group was disrupting it once again.

  Finally, Samantha raised her head, pulled herself out of Marcus’s arms, and seemed to become aware again of where she was.

  “Sam, we need to talk,” Marcus said, gently. “I have a lot to tell you, and some of it is going to be very hard for you to hear.”

  “I understand,” she said, nodding, though I seriously doubted she did. “But we can’t postpone the Eidolon. Everyone is here.” She turned toward the crowd. “Everyone is waiting.”

  “Sam, you have to trust me,” he said, “This is more important.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “There’s nothing more important than this.” She stared at him, some hidden message in her eyes. “I need this before you tell me. We all do.”

  Holy crap. Was it possible that Samantha James was aware of her father’s questionable practices and what he’d done to Marcus and his family? That somewhere, deep down, she had always been aware? Did she remember why her cousins and aunt had run from The Hold? Had their influence stayed with her all these years, growing and manifesting itself into this; a young woman determined to overthrow him and lead The Hold in a new direction for a new generation?

  But even if that were true, it was going to take a hell of a lot more than some made-up ritual on the top of a cliff to remove Alexander James from his position as leader of The Hold. He was an adult with money and power and a whole lot of security. We were a handful of teenagers with PSS, and a smattering of groupies without it. If this was the revolution, it was a pitiful one. Still, Samantha might be able to get my dad’s paintings back, so I was willing to hang around and find out.

  “I can hear your people,” Samantha said to Marcus, nodding at the shadows of the PSS guys and Grant standing in the trees behind us. “I can also hear that they haven’t manifested yet.”

  Of course, she could hear Nose, Yale and Jason’s PSS. But what did she mean by that last part?

  And then it hit me. Samantha James had a very discerning ear, and she was saying, that with it, not only could she hear PSS, she could differentiate between PSS that had manifested a power, and PSS that hadn’t.