I still considered him on probation though. And he knew it.
“Walter, that’s fine. You don’t have to ask me.” I smiled. “It’s a good plan. Keep the kids together. That’s the whole point of having you here anyway, right?”
Molly climbed up next to him and patted his shoulder. Her voice was soft and a little scratchy from crying. “The children need to be tucked in, and I don’t want to be away from Susannah longer than I must.”
They were trying so hard to keep things normal for the other kids—to keep from falling apart in front of them. But I could see it. I felt it, too. I shared their grief and fear. It hung above us all, soaking everything it touched.
He put his hand over hers and they pressed their foreheads together. “Maybe they’d like a story.” He pulled her hand to his lips and kissed her fingers. “I’ll be up as soon as I’m done, love.”
For the next few minutes, my quiet, cozy home was like the lobby of a hotel. The kids giggled from the bathroom. Rene yelled at them to quit spraying water and finish brushing their teeth. Maurice and Sara said good-night and disappeared into the master bedroom. Rene shoved all four kids out into the hall and shut herself in to get dressed for bed.
Once the noise and movement died down with everyone in their room, Riley and I were alone. At least, we thought we were.
“So, do you think I should stand in the room all night or stay outside in the hall?” Gris, in his man-sized body, loomed over us with his arms folded. I had to admit, Bernice was excellent at what she did. Tiny hairs lay across the fake skin of his arms, and his chest moved up and down when he stood still, as if he were actually breathing. “I’m more inclined to stay outside. Nobody wants someone to stand over them and watch while they sleep.”
I shivered. “No. Nobody wants that.”
Riley’s arms tensed around me. “In the hall is good. Then you can watch all our doors, including the linen closet. We’ll keep the door to the kids’ room open a little so you can see all of them at once, though.”
“Agreed.” He dropped his arms to his sides. “Well then. I’m off to play guard dog.” To my surprise, he saluted us.
I tried not to look startled.
Once everyone else was settled, we checked in with Kam over at Mom’s, then crawled into bed ourselves. Or kind of fell into bed. I was too tired to crawl. I didn’t remember closing my eyes, let alone falling asleep. I was out in seconds.
I’d never been able to sleep in complete darkness, even before I was five years old and the scary closet monster terrified me half to death. With the windows covered up to avoid being watched by a cricket-carrying lunatic, I had to have something on in the room or I’d be downing caffeine pills and chanting in the dark like a victim in a Freddy Krueger movie.
Nine, ten, never sleep again...
Riley, always the hero, had gone through some boxes in my garage and emerged holding my old lava lamp aloft, as if it were a trophy for Best Dumpster Diver. To my surprise, it worked when he’d plugged it in, so each night since, I slept bathed in a soft, flickering blue light.
That was how I was able to see Shadow Man standing over me when I woke up.
I tried to scream. I tried to move. I tried to breathe.
Nothing on my body seemed to work except my heartbeat, which worked overtime to compensate.
His orange eyes were dull and flat as they gazed down on my helplessness. His hideous slash of a mouth turned up in a chilling grin, and he raised one spidery finger to his lips. “Shhhhhh.”
Screaming really would have been a nice option at that moment. Breathing. Breathing would have been nice, too.
He leaned close over me, grinning impossibly wide, and brushed my hair away from my face. I couldn’t move to avoid him, and his cold fingers touched my cheek. An involuntary shudder ran through me.
I so wanted Riley to wake up, but his breathing was still regular and deep. He wasn’t going to be any help.
Shadow Man leaned even closer. His breath was rancid, and his puckered mouth hovered over my ear. “First I take your children. Then I come for you.” The lava lamp blinked out, leaving me in absolute darkness.
I jerked to life and sat up, taking in a ragged breath, then screamed with everything I had in me. Riley yelled and sat up, flipping the light on.
He put his arms around me and held my shaking body against his. His heartbeat felt as fast as my own. “It’s okay. It’s okay. Just a bad dream.” He rocked as he whispered soothing words to calm me. “Just a bad dream.”
I let him cradle me for a minute while I caught my breath, doing everything in my power not to burst into tears like a frightened child. Finally, I gathered myself together enough to let go and sit up. “I—”
Someone screamed from another room.
We scrambled from the bed and ran to the hallway. Rene stood in the doorway of Kam’s room. The door to the linen closet stood open, and Molly stood on the edge of the shelf with Susannah in her arms and Walter by her side.
Both women were sobbing.
“No.” It was the only word I could pull from my dry, constricted throat, and it came out in a raspy hush.
I ran past Rene and into the room where she and the children had been sleeping.
The two large and two small makeshift beds lay undisturbed on the floor next to Rene’s rumpled bed, almost as if their occupants had never slept in them, though I knew that wasn’t true. When I checked on them before I went to bed, the kids had all been snuggled in and listening to Walter tell them a story about a singing coconut tree named Max.
The kids were gone. Shadow Man had lured them away right out from under everyone’s noses, and for some crazy reason, he’d had them make their beds first. Even stranger, a small candy cane wrapped in cellophane rested on each pillow next to the indentation of a cloven-hoof print.
I did a frantic mental search for a story that matched the clues he’d left. “Krampus,” I said. “He thinks he’s Santa’s dark alter ego this time.”
A cricket chirped above my head, and I ducked as it leaped from the top of the doorframe. A second cricket responded from over by the covered window.
A third joined in from my room.
I leaned against the wall and slid to the floor. “How could he get in here?”
Maurice and Sara had come out of their room, too, and Sara sat on the floor next to me. “Honey, Gris was watching the whole time. He couldn’t get in.” She craned her neck to look over her shoulder. “Right, Gris?”
His Adam’s apple bobbed a few times and clicked, then his head swung open, and the real Gris sat behind the controls, a stricken look on his face. “I swear. I was right here. Nobody came in or out. Nobody made a sound.”
He hadn’t come through the window. It was locked, and Rene’s bed was in front of it. They hadn’t left that way, either. The window was still locked. It didn’t make sense. Sure, only a few of us could see Shadow Man, but everybody could see the kids. We’d chosen Gris to stand watch specifically because he wouldn’t need to sleep. Even if Shadow Man made it past him, Gris would see the kids leaving.
Except he hadn’t. Somehow, Shadow Man had messed with Gris’s perceptions.
Baby Susannah, held in the arms of her crying mother, began to cry. For her tiny size, she could make a lot of noise. Walter took her and rocked her back to sleep, while Rene and Molly did their best to console each other.
And I, like a fool, couldn’t seem to do anything but sit there in my ridiculous Rainbow Brite nightshirt, idly wondering if I’d flashed my underwear when I slid down the wall.
Because none of what was happening could be real. He could not have come into my home and stolen my kids. Shadow Man could not have stood over my bed and spoken to me.
I shivered. “First I take your children. Then I come for you.” I spoke the words out loud to see i
f they sounded any more real when I said them. They didn’t. They sounded like something I’d half heard in a crowded bar or from an obscure movie. The words weren’t real.
Except they were.
Sara leaned closer to me, frowning. “What did you say?”
I repeated the words, and they echoed with a little more truth this time. “That’s what he said.”
“That’s what who said, honey?” She frowned and squinted at me.
I rubbed my arms to warm the chill from them. “Shadow Man. He was in my room just now. That’s why I screamed.”
Rene sniffled from the hallway, then came in and sat on the bed. “If you hadn’t screamed, I might not have realized the kids were gone until morning.”
Maurice stood in the corner with haunted eyes. His phone rang, and he picked up the call on the first ring. “Hey.” He listened for a moment, his eyes growing larger. “Hang on, Kam.” He took the phone from his ear and regarded the room filled with anxious faces.
“Oh, God.” All I could think about was whether Mom was okay. And I couldn’t get the words out to ask.
Sara squeezed my hand. “What did Kam say, Maurice?”
“Nobody saw anything over there, but...” He trailed off and bit his lip.
“What?” Sara, despite having turned gold and silver and growing horns, still had the same no-nonsense sharpness about her when needed, and her face said spit it out, already.
“There are crickets everywhere in the house. It’s an infestation.”
Chapter Sixteen
With all those people in the house, you’d think somebody would have been able to grab me before I ran out of the house in my nightgown and bare feet in the middle of the night. Into the dark.
I’d nearly hit the woods before Riley caught up to me.
He grabbed my arm and spun me around. “What the hell are you thinking?”
I blinked at him in the brightness of the huge flashlight he’d grabbed from my kitchen junk drawer. “I have to check on Mom.” Despite being out of breath and in a state of near terror, my voice came out calm and matter-of-fact, as if it were three in the afternoon, not three in the morning, and I was off to have a cup of tea with Mom, not check to make sure she was alive.
To be honest, I’d completely lost it the minute I saw those tiny beds all made up. Something snapped. My brain wasn’t clicking into place, and my actions were those of a lunatic.
On some level, I knew that and didn’t give a damn.
Riley squinted in the light and gave my face a long, even look. Apparently, he saw something in my expression that told him not to argue. He lowered the light to the path into the woods. “Fine. We’ll go to the cottage and check on your mom.” He grabbed my hand and led me into the trees.
Three steps in, I realized how stupid it was to walk in the woods in the dark in bare feet.
“Shit!” I bent to grab my foot and rub the spot that had been stabbed by a pinecone. Now that I’d stopped, the reality of where I was and the state I was in crept in. It was freezing outside, and the wind whipped my hair around my head so I could barely see. What the hell had I been thinking?
Riley grunted in the dark and swung the light around to shine on my foot. “Can I convince you to go back for shoes?”
I lowered my bruised foot and shook my head. “I have to check on Mom.” I stepped forward, and Riley stopped me.
He bent in front of me, facing away, and waved his hands at me. “Come on.”
I jumped on his back and locked my arms around his neck like a kid. Part of me thought it was ridiculous, but the weird, disconnected part of me didn’t care.
“Hurry,” I said. I sank into the warmth of him, my teeth chattering.
The light from the cottage was warm and welcoming, and reached through the trees to guide us in. At the door, Riley set me down, and I ran into the kitchen without knocking.
Mom stood at the sink, filling the kettle with water. She glanced up when I came in and set the kettle on the counter. Her face was filled with fear and sadness. I ran to her, a little girl in her nightgown, haunted by the boogeyman, and threw myself into her waiting arms to be comforted.
Within seconds, we were both sobbing and babbling at the same time.
“He was staring down at me, right next to the bed,” I said.
“I felt something crawling up my leg,” she said.
“I couldn’t move or breathe.”
“And then I felt something on my arm.”
“He spoke to me. He said he was going to take the kids, and he did.”
“I pulled the blankets back and couldn’t see anything in the dark.”
“He was so close, I could smell his breath. He touched me.”
“I turned the light on and saw them. The whole bed was alive with crickets. Dozens and dozens of them.”
“I couldn’t wake Riley up.”
“I couldn’t wake Darius up.”
We held each other and cried and talked until we’d chased the boogeyman out of our hearts and minds enough that we could function again.
I was still reluctant to let go of her, though. Wrapped in Mom’s arms, I was five again, and none of this was my responsibility to fix. I knew that, as soon as I let go, I’d have to take control. We had to find our kids.
My cheek rested against her shoulder, and I inhaled one last breath of her. She smelled like the ocean and sunshine and vanilla. I gave her a squeeze and backed away, wiping my eyes.
Behind us the guys appeared from the bedroom, Darius with a broom and Riley with a trash bag.
Riley raised the bag to chest height. “I think we got all the crickets.”
The bag chirped in response.
Darius set the broom next to the old-fashioned refrigerator. “We’ll get rid of them.”
Mom gave him a watery smile. “Thank you.” She returned her attention to the abandoned kettle and continued with preparations to make us some tea. After the guys walked out, she turned to face me. “Zoey, what are we going to do?”
And just like that, I was no longer five and in my mother’s care. I was thirty and in charge of saving the world. Again.
I ran my fingers through my tousled curls and sighed. “Find the kids. Bring them home safely. Defeat Shadow Man before he takes away all our friends and/or kills us.”
She arranged four cups on the counter and measured tea leaves into each one. “That doesn’t sound like a plan, really. It’s a series of goals. How are you planning to accomplish all that?”
I shrugged. “I’ll figure it out. In the end, we always do, right?”
I’m not a very tidy person, but I kept glancing at the broom Darius had left by the fridge. This had been Aggie’s cottage before it was Mom’s, and Aggie didn’t leave things like brooms sitting any old place. I grabbed the broom and opened the broom closet to put it away.
“Wait!” Mom cried out to stop me, but she wasn’t fast enough.
Feathers fell everywhere. Feathers as tall as the ceiling. Feathers as small as my hand. Sharp feathers. Fluffy feathers. Elegant and sweeping feathers, and fat and twisted feathers.
All of them were iridescent and rainbow-hued.
These were not the feathers from our shared visions. Maurice had those. These were different. But they came from the same source.
The two of us stood in stunned silence, her for getting caught, and me for having made the discovery.
“You lied,” I whispered. I took a step back, feeling as if I’d been physically slapped.
“I don’t know what to say.” She spoke in a tiny, hushed voice.
I bent and picked up a feather. “How many times did you talk to the Simurgh, Mom? When were you going to tell me?” I didn’t want to believe what I was seeing. I wanted to believe my mother would never go behind
my back. I’d thought we’d been growing closer, but she’d been hiding the truth from me. Devastation and anger warred inside me.
All those times we’d had simultaneous, matching visions were lies. While I was getting scraps of clues, she was getting daily conversations. Possibly for a long time, judging by the closet’s contents. I nudged the pile of feathers with my bare toes.
My quiet voice shook. “What did she say to you that she couldn’t say to me?”
Mom took the kettle off the burner and shut off the stove. She reached out to touch me, but I pulled away. Hurt flashed across her face and was gone. “Come with me.”
She led me to the library and sat me in a chair across from her. Her hands were steady as she smoothed her bathrobe over her legs, lips pursed, to gather her thoughts. “First of all, I know it looks like I’ve had a hundred conversations with her, but that’s not the case. It’s only been a handful of times. The feathers come whether I talk to her or not. Handfuls of the damn things at a time.”
That didn’t make me feel any better. “Why is she talking to you and not me? What’s she been saying? Does she know where to find Shadow Man so we can rescue the kids?”
Mom rubbed the space between her eyes with her fingertips. I tried not to think about how often I made the same gesture.
Her head tipped forward as she stared at her hands. “I sought her out. It wasn’t the other way around.”
I frowned. “You contacted her. How is that even possible?” I didn’t bother asking why. If I’d thought to do it, I would have. Of course there was a little matter of how to contact the Simurgh. I didn’t have the slightest idea of how that could be done.
She gave me a sheepish look through the curls that had fallen forward over her face. “You’re not going to believe it.” Slipping her hand into her bathrobe pocket, she produced a CD with a beach sunset on the cover and the title Meditation for Mind and Body Awareness. “I used this.”
Phoenix in My Fortune (A Monster Haven Story Book 6) Page 16