The Conduit (The Gryphon Series Book 1)

by Stacey Rourke

  “Thank you.” I continued toward the house without waiting for his response.

  As soon as I stepped inside, my breath caught. It looked like a tornado tore through the living room. Grams’ glass coffee table had been shattered. The wrought iron base of it ripped in two, the sides strewn to opposite corners of the room. Grams’ curio cabinet leaned precariously against the arm of her leather chair, all its contents broken and embedded in the cushions. The ceramic angels that lived on a shelf above the couch did not survive the fall. Their ceramic limbs and assorted body parts were scattered around the room. Framed pictures of our family lay on the floor, crushed beyond recognition. The wall that divided the foyer and the living room—where Grams measured us when we were little and marked our growth with a pencil slash—sported a deep hole in the plaster. I cringed at the dimensions of the hole. It matched a human body. I prayed that was a coincidence.

  Uniformed strangers milled around. They dusted for prints, took photographs, and collected evidence in little baggies, jotted down notes and all that other CSI stuff. A grey-haired man in a tan sport coat stood in the middle of the room, barking orders.

  “I want this entire place dusted for prints. Mess like this, he couldn’t have been careful about what he touched.” The crunch of glass under my shoe spun him toward me. His moustache matched his hair. A hefty paunch around his middle strained the buttons on his shirt. His thick eyebrows drew together when he saw me. “Why isn’t anyone patrolling the perimeter? I got people just wandering in!”

  “Captain Cooper, my name is Celeste Garrett. I live here with my grandmother, Gladys.”

  His expression softened. He pursed his thick lips and inhaled deeply. I followed his gaze as he glanced around for a place for us to sit and talk. The living room window had also been demolished. There wasn’t an inch of the room that wasn’t decorated with glass shards.

  Captain Cooper noticed my pained expression. “Why don’t we go sit out on the porch?” He placed his hand on my shoulder and steered me back out the door.

  Robotically, I sat in my usual rocking chair and gazed around at the vastly different scenery. It looked like one of those cop shows Grams loved so much. Gabe played the role of the angry family member. He took out his frustrations on a rookie cop that held no answers to Gabe’s bombardment of questions. Kendall sought solace in the arms of a former love. Keith comforted her, our tragedy reuniting them. Alec, the steadfast reporter, nosed around eager to get to the bottom of this. The gawkers watched out of equal parts concern and morbid curiosity. The rocking chair next to me squeaked under Captain Cooper’s weight. This was no show. I couldn’t change the channel or turn it off. Like it or not, I had to sit here and wait for the good captain to tell me if my grandmother was alive or dead.

  “Celeste, someone broke into your grandmother’s home today. We think it started off as a simple robbery. A rarity here in Gainesboro, but sometimes people get desperate.” He paused for a moment and took a deep breath. “It seems the intruder didn’t know your grandmother was home. Realizing she was must’ve startled him, and he panicked.”

  “What do you mean he panicked?” I asked somberly.

  He ran a hand across his mustache and then over his mouth. Beads of perspiration dotted his forehead. “She was attacked.”

  The way he was tiptoeing around the details grated on me. “How bad is it?”

  His bleak expression caused a lump in my throat I had to choke back. “It’s bad. He roughed her up pretty severely. I don’t know to what degree just yet. But we put her in an ambulance and rushed her to Nashville General. The last update I got was that she was slipping in and out of consciousness. She’s in the ICU.”

  Tears threatened to spill from my eyes. I fought them back. I couldn’t cry. Not here. Not now. Instead, I rose from my seat and started down the stairs, headed for my truck.

  “Wait, Celeste!” he called after me. “I have a couple of quick questions for you.”

  “I have to go,” I barely got the words out. He nodded, the possibility I may never see Grams alive again loomed between us.

  “Just tell me,” he pushed on. “Did your grandmother have any enemies that you know of? Anyone that would want to hurt her?”

  Besides the three hundred year old demon hell-bent on killing me and destroying the world? Nope, that’s about it.

  Of course I couldn’t say that out loud. Instead, I told him what he already knew. “This is a small town, Captain. I’m sure you know my grandmother almost as well as I do. You already know that everyone loved … loves her.” My voice broke when I accidentally referred to Grams in the past tense. He gave no further protests as I walked away.

  Back on the other side of the yellow line, Kendall rushed toward me with Keith at her heels. Her eyes asked a million questions. A flush-faced Gabe pushed through the crowd to tower over me while he waited with barely concealed anxiety. Alec’s face belied both his reporter’s curiosity and his genuine concern for Grams and me.

  I laid out the only details that mattered right now. “Grams is at Nashville General and she’s alive. They can’t tell us any more than that about her condition.”

  “We can be to the hospital in about a half hour,” Gabe declared. He and I started for the truck. Kendall paused to say a quick goodbye to her rekindled love.

  “Celeste!” Alec hollered after me as he ran to catch up.

  Slightly agitated that he was delaying my rush to my grandmother’s side, I spun on him. Before I could spout off my annoyance, he scooped me up off the ground in a tight bear hug. It would’ve been a nice moment to squeeze him back and revel in the comfort and security he offered. But I didn’t. Instead I bristled at the act that threatened to expose my vulnerability at a time when I needed to be strong.

  “I’m so sorry this is happening to you and your family,” he whispered in my ear as he returned my feet to the ground. “If there is anything I can do to help, please let me know.”

  “Thank you,” I mumbled.

  He gave me a tight smile that didn’t make it to his eyes. “No problem. Listen, I have to go to Memphis for a little while. Apparently there is some big story there. But if you need me for anything at all, I can be back in a flash. All you have to do is call.”

  “I will,” I lied. His involvement with me would only get him hurt. Grams’ current situation proved that. If I cared about him and wanted to keep him safe, I needed to stay far, far away from him.

  “Good. Now go!” he prompted. I turned and dashed to my truck.

  Gabe and Kendall were already buckled in waiting for me. I threw the truck in gear and sped off. My heart ached with my hope that the Nashville doctors could work miracles, but I slammed the gas pedal down in case they couldn’t.

  CHAPTER 25

  We arrived at the hospital in record time. A bored-looking woman at the information desk told us that the ICU was on the second floor. Too impatient to wait on the elevator, we raced up the stairs. We located the nurses’ station and asked for Grams’ room number. A stern-faced nurse informed us her visitation had been restricted and we would have to wait in the waiting room until her doctor could speak to us.

  The waiting room was a drab, depressing place. Someone tried to liven it up by hanging a relaxing seascape painting on the wall. It wasn’t fooling anyone. This could never be a happy, relaxing room. We took a seat in the burgundy, padded chairs and stared numbly at the television mounted on the wall. With the volume turned down low, we couldn’t hear it at all. Not like that mattered.

  “Should we call Mom?” Gabe asked.

  “After the fact,” I said.

  “She’s going to be pissed that we didn’t call her right away.”

  “If we call her now, she’s going to jump on the first flight out to get here. Barnabus could pay her a visit, too.”

  He leaned back in his chair and let his head fall back against the wall. “After the fact.”

  Keni picked at a loose string on her pink cotton shorts. “If I can get in
there, I can heal her.”

  “We would have to figure out how to hide your wings and that glowy thing you do, plus explaining to the doctors how their patient was miraculously healed,” I pointed out.

  “I’m not going to sit here and let her die,” Kendall hissed through her teeth.

  I reached over and squeezed Keni’s hand. “No, we won’t. We’ll wait and hear what the doctors have to say. If we have to get you in there to heal her then that’s what we’ll do. One way or another, we aren’t losing her today.”

  If we haven’t lost her already, my mind added.

  We hadn’t been sitting there long when a short, balding gentleman in bright blue scrubs strolled in.

  “The Garrett family?” he said directly to us. We were the only people with the misfortune of being in the ICU waiting room at the moment. We rose in unison as he approached.

  “I’m Dr. Allyn.” He extended his hand to each of us. “I’ve been treating your grandmother. She is your grandmother, correct?” We all nodded in agreement.

  “How is she?” Gabe shoved his fidgety hands into the pockets of his khaki shorts.

  Dr. Allyn’s face gave nothing away. No shadow of sadness, no glimmer of hope in his eyes, nothing but a strong expression of knowledge and understanding. “Your grandmother has been through quite an ordeal, but we were able to get her stabilized. To start with, she had numerous abrasions to her face and torso that had to be stitched up. Her right arm was broken in two locations. Both were clean breaks, so we set them, and they should heal nicely. With her age, she may require some physical therapy to retain full mobility of that limb. The biggest concern right now is from the blunt force trauma to her head. Very likely she has some swelling to her brain. We don’t yet know the severity of it. We performed a spinal tap and a CAT scan to get some solid answers. She’s conscious now, which is a good sign. But we won’t know exactly where we stand until we get the tests back. Right now things could still turn on a dime.”

  “What are the best and worst case scenarios?” I inquired crossing my fingers behind my back that the word “death” didn’t come out of his mouth.

  “There are numerous outcomes, all having to do with the severity of her injury,” Dr. Allyn explained. “If the swelling is minimal, she could just have a mild concussion and nothing more. Obviously, that’s what we’re hoping for. If the pressure on her brain is at a moderate level, she could have problems with her memory. She may have difficulty with her speech, walking, hand-eye coordination, things of that nature. With a high level of swelling, she’s at risk of slipping into a comatose state. There are measures we can take to try to alleviate the pressure. But it would become imperative we get it under control.”

  “When will we know more?” Kendall’s voice cracked.

  The doctor laid a comforting hand on her shoulder. “I put a rush on the results, so it shouldn’t be long. The minute I know something, I’ll report back to you. You let me do the worrying about her, okay? After all, it is my job.” His warm smile reminded me of my grandfather, which made it only seem right that he was looking after our Grams.

  “Can we see her?” Kendall asked, her eyes red-rimmed and teary.

  “I’ll let one of you go in.” The doctor’s eyes shifted between us. “Just for a little while. Then she needs to rest.”

  “Who should go?” I asked.

  “You,” Gabe and Kendall answered in perfect unison.

  “Why me?”

  “Because Kendall won’t be able to control certain impulses,” Gabe said with the raise of his eyebrow to express his hidden meaning. “And I … don’t handle stuff like this well.”

  “Okay.”

  I followed the doctor down the brightly lit hall to a private room with the door shut.

  “This is her room. Go on in. I’ll give you two some privacy.” He gave me the compassionate doctor face again, then turned and strode to the nurses’ station. I took a deep breath before I pushed the door open.

  I gasped at the battered and bruised version of my much-adored Grams lying on the hospital bed. Deep black and purple bruises covered every inch of exposed skin. Stitches held together a wound on her cheek and another on her forearm. The opposite arm was wrapped from wrist to shoulder in a heavy cast. Tubes and cords plugged into her all over. She looked aged, frail, and not at all like my spry, feisty grandmother. Barnabus would pay for this. He could count on that.

  I hesitated at the door. She seemed to have gone back to sleep. I didn’t want to wake her. I thought about going back to the waiting room and letting her rest. Before I had come to a decision, her sleepy eyes fluttered open.

  “Celeste,” she rasped in a drowsy, medicated voice.

  I put on a big, reassuring smile and approached the side of her bed. “Hey there. How are you feeling?”

  She groaned before answering. “Like I got hit by a truck. But did you see my doctor? What a dish, huh?”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “Yeah, Grams, he’s a hottie.”

  “Hands off,” she murmured drowsily. “I’m calling dibs.”

  “No problem…he’s all yours,” I assured her. Venturing cautiously, I asked, “Grams, do you remember what happened?”

  Her heavy lids fell shut again. Her eyebrows drew together. “It’s just kind of a blur.”

  “Just remember what you can.”

  Her eyes remained closed as she began, “I was watching my stories. They were getting really good. Hailey found a cursed necklace that allowed a demon to possess her. Then, I heard a loud thump against the window. At first I thought a bird flew into it. But when I looked up, the whole thing just shattered. I barely had time to cover myself. A man, wearing some sort of medieval costume, jumped through the broken window. He had one normal eye, but the other was solid black. He grabbed my arm and yanked me up out of my chair. He screamed something at me. What was it he said? Something about power. Where was my power, maybe? I told him to check the fuse box or get an extension cord. Then, something hit me. The whole side of my body hurt, bad enough that I think I blacked out for a minute.” My stomach rolled. That explained the hole in the wall. He must’ve thrown her into it. “I woke up on the floor with my whole body hurtin’. The most intense pain came from my arm. It was twisted behind my back. His voice changed. It was like a hiss when he asked me … something. Something urgent. Oh, why can’t I remember? It scared me to death. How could I have forgotten?”

  She scowled as she fought to remember. Then her eyes snapped open wide. She stared at me in horror. “Oh, no! Oh! I remember! Honey, it was you! He knew your name! He was looking for you, Celeste!”

  I knew full well that Barnabus was after me. However, hearing the words and seeing the impact it had on my Grams gave me goose bumps all over. I shook it off and concentrated on comforting my grandmother. “It’s okay, Grams. I’m safe. See? Fit as a fiddle. Nothing to worry about.”

  “You didn’t see this person, Celeste. I know this sounds crazy, but I don’t think he was human. He was too strong. And his face, it seemed to … change.”

  I wanted to reach out to her, to soothe her frazzled state with a hand on her shoulder or a kiss to her forehead. But the battle scars that peppered her skin made me hesitant to touch her. I didn’t want to hurt her more. I settled for patting her hand. “I’m going to be okay, Grams. I promise. I can take care of myself. I’m a tough chick, just like you.”

  “No, you don’t understand, Celeste,” she said sternly. She attempted to sit up, winced in pain, and then settled back onto her pillow. “This is different. You need to run. Do you hear me? Run. This guy is crazy as a bed bug and he will hurt you. There is money tucked in my sock drawer at home. Go get it. Take every last dollar. Grab your Gabe and Kendall and run!”

  I glanced around the room. An extra IV pole sat in the corner. I retrieved it and brought it over by my grandmother.

  “Just watch,” I said softly.

  Grams lips formed a thin, straight line. She looked confused, annoyed, and frustrat
ed, but nodded and waited. I grabbed each end of the metal pole and bent it into a perfect circle. The metal screamed as it gave way to my grip. It molded in my hands like silly putty. I held it up for her to see.

  “Shoddy craftsmanship,” she stated, but doubt fluttered across her face.

  I shook my head. “Solid metal.”

  Confusion drew her smudged, penciled-in eyebrows together as she looked back and forth from the misshapen pole to me and back again. When her gaze settled on me, she peered at me as if we’d never met.

  Shifting uncomfortably, I muttered, “See, I told you I was strong.”

  She gawked at me, a tiny smile playing across her lips. “I’ll say. You definitely didn’t get that from my side of the family.”

  I leaned the pole against the wall then returned to my place at her side. “Like I said, you don’t have to worry about me.”

  “I don’t know what it is that you just did there. I’m sure you and I are going to need to have a conversation about that at some point. But right now, you need to burn rubber. Because strong won’t be enough, Celeste. You need to scram, just steer clear of Memphis. I told him you had left Gainesboro and headed off to college. He took your Rhodes pamphlet when he left. He was going there to find you. Now is your chance to disappear. Go to Florida, Alaska, Timbuktu, I don’t care. Just promise me that the three of you will stick together and get far away from here.”

  “I promise, Grams. We’ll get far away from here.” About four hours away from here, to Rhodes College.

  My grandma nodded. Her whole body went slack against the pillow. She had drained her limited energy reserve trying to get through to me. “Where will you go?” she asked sleepily.

  Before I had to lie again, Dr. Allyn gave a soft knock on the door and then entered the room. “Good news,” he smiled. “Test results came back indicating that the swelling is minimal. You probably have a heck of a headache, but that’s the worst of it. You’re going to be fine. You’re a strong woman, Ms. Garrett.”