Nine Lives (Lifeline Book 1)

by Kit Colter

  It didn’t matter. Nothing explained the thing coming through the ceiling. Nothing explained the man—who she’d last seen in Phoenix, three hundred miles away, if she had truly seen him at all—now appearing in her bedroom. Nothing explained the certainty she’d felt on the softball diamond, staring into Coach’s eyes, that there was something there, something extra.

  Nothing except the very distinct possibility that she was losing her mind again.

  Erin swiftly changed clothes, packed her things, and loaded her bags into the back of the Honda. She eased the trunk closed, then slipped into the driver’s seat. Without starting the engine, she shifted into neutral and let the car roll silently out of the driveway into the street. Then she turned the key, shifted into drive, and hit the gas. It was already 11 p.m., and Erin wanted be back in Phoenix before her parents woke up and found her gone.

  * * *

  It was still dark when Erin pulled into the parking lot of her apartment building. She angled her car into the first open space, jammed the shifter into park, and killed the engine. Then she just sat there, staring up at the building, wondering how to send her parents a text that would make them feel better rather than worse about her disappearing in the middle of the night after another one of her freak-outs.

  Erin picked up her phone and sent: Back in Phoenix. Call later. Sorry.

  She had several new texts. Two from her best friend, Isaiah. Three from her Not-Boyfriend, Andrew. One from her Sorta-Friend Stephanie, who probably just wanted help with classwork. She gazed down at Isaiah’s Caller ID photo, a picture she had taken before he cut his hair. Braids curved across his scalp in smooth, black arcs. She’d never told him how much she missed his braids. She’d never told him a lot of things.

  Erin frowned and tossed her phone into her backpack. Then she opened the glove compartment and fished out a bottle of pills. She hadn’t taken them for months. She’d believed she was better. Over it. She’d desperately wanted to be. Her mother was right, though. She had to take responsibility for this, for her problem. It didn’t matter what Espy thought, or what grandma thought, she wasn’t going to fix this with smoke and some old Indian songs.

  Erin unscrewed the lid, shook a single pill into the palm of her hand, and swallowed it dry. Fighting her gag reflex, she dropped the pill bottle into her pack and took a deep breath. She stepped out of the car, hoisted her pack onto her shoulder, hit the lock button on her key fob, and made her way across the parking lot. The instant Erin touched the door to the building, she felt the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. She peered over her shoulder and saw nothing. Just the lifeless parking lot and the vacant street beyond it. She could hear the sounds of the city in the distance, but everything within sight was silent and still.

  Erin pushed through the door, took a single glance at the elevator, and headed for the staircase instead. She listened for the sound of the door opening behind her and heard nothing, but tension coiled in her stomach and her palms felt clammy. When she reached the second flight of stairs, she stopped and listened. Her left hand slid into the pocket of her denim jacket, resting on the knife she’d carried for the last two years—a four-inch folding stiletto blade borrowed from Espy.

  Silence.

  She took two more steps, and then the lights went out on the flight below.

  Erin ran. Before she could register what she was doing, she had shrugged out of her pack and sprinted up the next flight of stairs. If it was Coach following her—and it had to be—then what was he doing? Did he finally want revenge after all this time? Erin hesitated next to the exit to her floor, but then the light bulb directly above her head flickered and died. Could she make it to the end of the hall—to her apartment—before he saw where she’d gone? How long would it take him to break through a locked door?

  She kept running—up another flight, and another, with the lights dying out beneath her—until she pushed through the door to the roof of the building. She slipped into the shadows and waited, one hand fisted around the knife in her pocket. Erin told herself she could lock him up here and then call the cops and tell them everything. Or stab him—just bad enough to make him back off. Either that, or push him off the building.

  Could she do that? Try to kill him? Again?

  Cool night air wisped over her face. Shadowed buildings towered in every direction. The sky was dark and glinting as it stretched over her. The silence was unbearable.

  In her mind, Erin could feel a presence forming on the other side of that rusted steel door. Creeping. Stalking. Getting closer. She could feel her body struggling to react, muscles tensing, breath quickening. A tingling sensation coiled at the back of her neck as she fought the urge to run.

  But what came through the door was not her ex-softball coach.

  At first, Erin thought it was a man’s shadow. Her eyes narrowed, distinguishing the three dimensional angles of the silhouette. As she watched, it seemed to darken. She stared as swirling torrents of glistening darkness took human shape. She had the sudden impression she was gazing into a black hole.

  Erin stumbled backwards.

  Then the shadow surged forward. Erin let out a cry of shock as burning-cold sensation flared across her right leg. She looked down and saw smoky tendrils of blackness coil around her ankle and thigh. She felt herself hit the ground. Another tendril wrapped around her wrist.

  Erin kicked free, pushed to her feet, and raced across the roof. She ran to the edge of the building and dropped onto the fire escape. She descended a full story before glancing up to see the shadow creeping down the side of the building.

  Though her mind told her that it was madness, that she couldn’t let herself believe this was happening, her body wouldn’t listen. She rushed down the ladder. The shadow cascaded over the edge and down the wall behind her. It was moving too fast. She wasn’t going to make it to the ground.

  Erin gasped as her foot slipped and her body plummeted downward, fingers raking against metal and brick as she scraped for a handhold. She felt a sudden jolt as her body slammed into something hard. Her head struck the railing, but her fall had stopped. Then Erin realized she was looking at a human arm. She followed the arm to a shoulder, then a face.

  It was him—from the alley.

  With the stranger’s arm wrapped tightly around her waist, Erin found herself suspended in the air—a full story above the street. The man’s eyebrows angled in concentration, but at the same time, he seemed coolly, intelligently ... interested.

  Beneath that, there was something wrong with him. Something very, very wrong.

  Erin pushed herself out of his grasp, falling the rest of the way to the ground and colliding with the pavement. She felt a moment of disoriented pain, heard herself moan, felt her body scrambling to its feet. She thrust her hand into her jacket pocket and snapped out the stiletto blade.

  Erin saw the shadow retreating toward the roof top, then gasped as the man dropped down in front of her. He looked at the withdrawing shadow, then turned to Erin. He stepped smoothly forward. His massive size was overwhelming. Gazing up at him felt like staring up at a wall. Like being cornered.

  Erin took a step back and angled her knife toward him. “Back off!”

  The man took another step.

  “I said BACK OFF!” Erin warned.

  Another step. The light in his eyes was wrong. Too hard. Too bright.

  “BACK!” Erin cried as the stranger closed the distance between them.

  And then she plunged the knife into his chest. Maybe high enough to miss the important stuff, maybe not.

  The man glanced at the knife buried in his chest—Erin’s hand still knotted around the handle—then slammed a fist into her face.

  Chapter 3

  Erin’s eyelids fluttered as her senses drifted into focus. Staring up at the ceiling, she realized she was laying on the sofa in her living room. Her head hurt. She turned to the right, scanning the darkened room, and spotted the clock. 5:49 a.m. Still dark outside. She started to sit up,
and something tumbled off her chest. She looked down, but then it hit.

  Pain. Excruciating pressure wrapped around her head like a vice—an agonizing heartbeat throbbing in her skull. She pressed her eyes closed for a moment, waiting for the pain to stop.

  It didn’t.

  Erin pushed to her feet and trudged into the bathroom. She needed aspirin. Excedrin. Midol. Anything to make this stop. Leaning against the bathroom sink, she flipped open the mirror to reveal the shelves behind. Toothpaste. Floss. Perfume she never used. Aspirin. She grabbed the bottle, swung the mirror closed, and twisted off the lid. Poured four white tablets into her palm and popped them into her mouth.

  Erin’s eyes caught on the reflection in the mirror. She lowered her hand, swallowing the pills dry.

  Her face ...

  The bottle of aspirin fell from her grasp, tumbling to the bathroom floor and showering the tile with little white tablets.

  Erin leaned closer to the mirror, examining a large, grotesque bruise stretching across her left cheekbone. Moisture from her breath formed on the mirror as she leaned closer. The bruise reached from her temple nearly to her nose, and her skin was bleeding. She lifted one hand and gently probed the injury with her fingertips. She paused, then pushed her bangs to one side, revealing another bruise on the left side of her forehead.

  Erin remembered hitting her head. After she fell down the ladder and that man caught her fall. She leaned toward the mirror and pressed three fingers against the splitting bruise, measuring the pain. The pressure caused the cut to start bleeding again, and a wash of crimson swept over her cheek.

  Then she saw the blood on her left hand. Old blood. Dry and dark.

  She’d stabbed him.

  Erin stumbled back into the living room and saw her knife lying on the floor beside the couch. That’s what had fallen off her chest. Her backpack—which she had left in the stairway—was sitting on the floor beside the front door.

  Erin knelt and picked up the knife, releasing the blade with a quiet snap. The knife was clean, as though nothing had ever happened, but there was blood on her hand. Erin set the blade aside, then walked into the bathroom and looked into the mirror once more.

  Thinking back, she remembered stabbing him. Then he punched her in the face. She gazed at the injury.

  The force of the punch had split her skin.

  Had he brought her back here? To the apartment?

  That didn’t matter.

  It didn’t matter that she’d fallen off the fire escape. That she looked like a domestic violence victim. That she’d stabbed a man. That she’d seen something—something like a monster.

  What mattered was that he’d seen it too.

  She remembered him turning and looking at it, watching the shadow surge back onto the roof and out of sight.

  If he could see it ... Erin’s heart skipped a beat as she realized what that meant.

  She wasn’t crazy.

  The damage to her face was a real, bleeding injury, and if he could do real damage, he had to be real himself. And if he was real, and he could see the things she saw, she wasn’t crazy.

  Erin let out a laugh of shock. She stared at her battered reflection, frantic with awe and disbelief, and felt like every ounce of her body was shaking, tightening, almost fluttering.

  Erin retrieved her backpack and fished out the bottle of sanity pills. She stepped back into the bathroom and glanced in the mirror. She was almost surprised to see the bruise still there. Then she unscrewed the lid, tossed it aside, and dumped the bottle into the toilet. She pressed the lever and watched the pills swirl down the drain.

  She wasn’t crazy.

  * * *

  Erin didn’t attempt to go back to sleep. She just sat on the couch and watched the digital numbers on her clock shift until 8:00 appeared. Then she picked up her phone and dialed. She listened to one ring, two, three.

  “L&M service and support, thank you for calling. What can I—”

  “Espy.”

  “Oh, hey Flaca,” Espy said. “Sorry, but I’m not sorry I got you in trouble with your mom. If that’s what you’re calling about. Those pills are bullshit, and you know it.”

  “Never mind that. I need to talk,” Erin said.

  “Well, it’s a great time to talk since we’re on the phone,” Espy said with a laugh.

  “I will kill you if you mention this to my parents.”

  “Ay dios. Mention what?”

  “I saw something last night,” Erin said.

  “Yeah, we keep talking about this,” Espy said. “You need to go see Grandma.”

  “Can you just listen to me for a second?” Erin asked.

  “It’s getting worse?”

  “Yes—No—I just need you to tell me what I saw, Espy,” Erin said.

  “Alright then.”

  Erin thought for a moment. “It was like a three dimensional shadow. A human shape, but its body was made out of shadow. Only it wasn’t solid. Sort of smoky. Kind of swirling. Damn it, this is hard.”

  “Oh, that one’s easy,” Espy said. “Sounds like a ghost to me.”

  “Just a ghost?”

  “Hmm. Did it do anything special?” she asked.

  “It touched my leg,” Erin said.

  “And you felt it?”

  “It hurt,” she replied.

  “Mierda,” Espy said.

  “What?”

  “I’ve just never heard of anything like that. I mean, sure, all the wimps out there are saying beware, beware, but generally ghosts don’t even notice people, much less want to hurt them. Besides that, from what I gather, it’d take a lot of effort for them to physically inflict pain. Scaring people’s one thing, but hurting them? I don’t know, Erin.”

  “Does that mean it wasn’t a ghost?” she asked.

  “Either that, or you were so afraid it was going to hurt you that when it did touch you, your mind made that pain real,” Espy replied.

  Erin thought it over.

  “Then again, this may be way over my head.” Espy was silent for a moment. “You have to go see Grandma, Erin.”

  Erin frowned into the phone. “I can’t. My mom ... I don’t want to make things worse than they are already.”

  Espy sighed. “Tell you what, if you won’t go to Grandma, I can give you a number. Ask for Marissa. She’s been all over the place and knows a lot about this stuff. Call tomorrow night. Just tell her I gave you the number. Ready?”

  “Yeah.” Erin grabbed a pen from the kitchen drawer and wrote the number on her wrist.

  “Let me know what happens. And think about it—about going to the Rez before this gets worse. Bye, Prima.”

  “Wait!”

  “Um, okay?”

  “Well, what am I supposed to do until then? You can’t tell me anything at all?”

  “I’m not really sure, Erin. These things are all pretty hit and miss.”

  “What would you do?” Erin insisted.

  “If I wasn’t going to do the totally obvious thing and go to Grandma?”

  “Yes,” Erin bit out.

  “I’d contact a psychic, probably. And get some sort of protective talisman.”

  “What’s a talisman?”

  “You know, like a charm. And maybe some sage.”

  “Well, where do you get one of those?”

  “There’s a store here in Alamogordo. Home-made ones can work if you know what you’re doing. There should be someplace in Phoenix, too.”

  “There’s a store for magic charms?” Erin asked, incredulous.

  “Sorry, but I gotta go. I think Sid just figured out I’m not talking to a customer,” she said.

  “But—”

  “Adios!” Espy said, then hung up.

  Erin stared at the number on her right wrist. Maybe she should have told Espy she saw the man from the alley again. But somehow she thought not even Espy would believe the whole truth: that he’d seen the shadow, too; that she’d stabbed him; that she’d woken up with the proof, the evidenc
e, written across her face in black and blue. Espy was Erin’s last tie to the Rez, the one connection her mother couldn’t sever. Espy’s mother, Ruth’s sister, had died in car accident ten years ago. Before that, Espy had spent half her summers on the Rez with Grandma and the other half in Mexico with her father’s family. She’d grown up knowing Apache, English, and Spanish—blending three languages and cultures with an easy confidence that Erin both admired and envied.

  Erin took a deep breath and wrote the name Marissa on her arm, right under the number, to make sure she remembered who to ask for. Then she took a deep breath and told herself this was something she could handle. Something she had to handle.

  Erin snapped several pictures of her battered face—as evidence that she wasn’t crazy—then showered, dressed, and drove to Wal-Mart. She purchased a gallon of water, some new pens for school, three apples, and an instant camera. She loaded her groceries into the trunk of the Honda, then slid into the driver’s seat and locked the doors. Erin opened the web browser on her phone and ran a search for the first series of words she could think of: magic charm sale Phoenix AZ. She scrolled through the results, muttering titles, then stopped at Ye Old Spirit Shoppe.

  Maybe. Just maybe.

  Erin started the engine and headed for the west side of town.

  Apparently, Ye Old Spirit Shoppe sat between a privately owned art museum and a pet grooming service. Erin spotted it on her third pass and eased into a parking space. She stepped up to the double doors and peered through the tiny square glass windows. The lights shone dim, and the air swirled with incense smoke. Erin smoothed her hair and crept inside, gazing from wall to wall in bewilderment. The shop was cramped and overflowing, the shelves and glass cases stuffed with glistening gem stones, swords, tablets, scrolls, tarot cards, incense burners, statuettes from every religion, and hundreds of other items, most of which Erin had never seen before. A woman dressed in a flowing turquoise skirt and a wraparound shawl walked over to her. Beads hung from her hair, and a chain dangled between the piercings in her nose and ear. Her necklace bore an amulet with the name Lauren etched into the metal.