Unnatural Occurrence (An Anna Morgan Novella (Part 1))

by Peggy Martinez

  My mind slowly cleared and the dizziness became bearable. I hadn’t even known that I was able to siphon off of someone else’s aura. Luckily, Christopher’s energy seemed open to me borrowing a little. I’d worry about the connection that was implied later. I opened my eyes as Christopher held me and glanced over his shoulder to take in the room. It looked like what I would imagine any frat party would have looked like, with the exception of the presence of so many different masks. People danced, played stupid games, talked on the edges of the dance floor, and they all did it without anyone noticing the darkness that swirled around the room or that their auras had all but been snuffed out as soon as they’d entered the building.

  An odd movement in my peripheral vision caught my attention. I squinted against the darkness in time to see a girl with platinum blonde hair corner another girl. She didn’t grab her or hurt her, but the way she angled her body screamed dominance and anger. The girl—whose white mask was identical to the one the blonde wore—shrunk back, her eyes going wide as the blonde said something in her ear. My hand tightened in Christopher’s hair. He grunted before I loosened my grip and apologized. Everything about the situation screamed “popular girl drama” to the casual observer. But, I wasn’t a casual observer. I could read a person’s every move, the tiniest hint of body language, from years of living with my extra-sensitive perception. Even with the lack of colorful auras present in the room I could tell something wasn’t quite right.

  I pulled back from Christopher, but kept both my hands resting on his waist. He adjusted his mask before meeting my eyes.

  “Thought we were going to have to make out there for a minute,” he grunted. I hoped my mask hid the majority of the blush I felt working up my neck and across my cheeks.

  “You wish, Professor,” I mouthed the word Professor at him and he threw his head back and laughed. Several people were staring at us. We were obviously not very good at this “fitting in” thing. I didn’t think it was possible to find the one other person in the world who was more awkward than I was in a social setting. Just my luck, Christopher outranked my awkwardness as a Jedi master would outrank a Jedi padawan. Just great.

  “We should probably mingle. Maybe even dance.” I grimaced. “I saw someone I want to talk to, so if you’ll pretend like you’re getting me a drink, I could find the bathroom and look around a bit.”

  “I’ll be glad to get you a drink,” he answered, already scoping out the drink and snack area. I already molested him and made him extremely uncomfortable. No wonder he was ready to run across the room to get away from me. I nodded and searched the room for the girl I was going to try to talk to. I finally spotted her making her way down the hallway, glancing over her shoulder nervously before turning the corner in the back. I needed to move. “Be careful.”

  I smiled. I was going to try to be. Once Christopher was off on his beverage mission, I began wriggling my way through the throngs of people and over to the long hallway that I watched the girl go down. I made it down the corridor and successfully avoided several groping couples before coming to the bend in the hallway. It was much less crowded here. There was a single guy heading back to the party from a small bathroom and then a couple halfway to consummating their relationship right in the hallway. They yanked each other into a door that I sincerely hope led to a bedroom. Ick.

  I followed the red-carpeted hallway several more feet before realizing that I had no clue which door the girl had gone into. There were four doors past the bathroom and the door the couple had stumbled into. I stood outside of one and, judging by the grunting and little sounds of pleasure coming from behind it, I could safely deduce that wasn’t the one the girl had slipped into. One door down, three to go.

  I walked over to the next door and put a hand on the door knob. If someone found me, I could always say I’d gotten turned around and was looking for a bathroom. Yeah, that sounded good. I turned the knob on the door and slowly pushed it open. The room was dark, but from what I could tell it was a small library. An empty library. I glanced around the room a final time, a little uneasy, before closing the door and walking across the hallway to check another door. A bedroom that looked like a true dorm room, but a bit nicer. Empty.

  By the time I checked last door only to find the same thing, I was feeling aggravated and tired. I put a hand out and steadied myself on the wall. I held my arm in front of myself and saw what was left of Christopher’s aura beginning to dissipate very quickly. I had no idea what my own aura looked like. For some reason, I’d never been able to see it, but I felt different. Lighter somehow in the corporal sense, and yet slower and more sluggish, like I was having to pull myself through the muck and mire of the blackness and evil that clung to this place. I was past ready to hightail it out of this god-awful party.

  As I stepped past the door to the little library that I opened just a few minutes before I paused. On a whim, I opened the door once again and quickly stepped inside. The darkened room wasn’t menacing, but if it were at all possible, the malevolence that coated the air thickened—an almost tangible thing. I closed my eyes and breathed in through my nose for a few seconds. Once I opened my eyes, I took in the sights and sounds of the room again, this time allowing myself to tap into my extra awareness. It took me a moment to figure out what I was looking at. Even though I saw the same darkness, the same blackness swirling in the rest of the house, it was more concentrated here. Not only that, but it also seemed to move in a pattern. The smog swirled and twisted together and it all seemed to move toward a particular spot in the room.

  I forced my feet to move in the direction of the flowing darkness across the room even though I felt on the brink of unconsciousness. I stopped in front of the wall on the far side of the room, raising a hand in front of me to touch the spot. I ran my fingers along the wooden paneling, feeling the cool wood beneath my palm as the darkness swirled around my arm. Nothing felt out of the ordinary to me and yet I still pressed and prodded the paneling, unsure of what it was I was even looking for. When my hand stilled, I could feel a buildup of energy in the spot where it rested. I immediately applied pressure to the area. A panel shifted and groaned as a small opening in the wall appeared. If I ducked, I’d be able to go through the passageway easily. I swallowed and moved forward. As soon as I stepped inside the interior of the passageway, the paneling shut behind me with an ominous click.

  I glanced over my shoulder as I moved along the narrow opening. The wraith of Julie Reese was still there, but she seemed quieter, subdued really. Her face had once again become terrifying, her mouth and eyes just gaping holes of nothingness, but the heavy sorrow that cloaked the ghost was the most chilling of all. My breaths echoed in the space, reminding me how much I disliked enclosed spaces. When I came to a small turn in the passage, I moved slowly not knowing what I might find.

  I turned and found a small door standing open that revealed a set of stairs leading down. Down into more darkness. Maybe an unfinished basement? While staring at the door, I wondered what I was thinking coming into the passage at all. Did I plan to just confront whatever was at the end of the hallway? Did I think whatever was going on in this dark house was going to be a big misunderstanding or a figment of my imagination and the people I encountered would be playing spin the bottle or Twister? What scenario in my mind justified entering a secret passageway in a house that was suffocating dozens of auras at the same time? Obviously I’d lost my mind and when I felt, rather than saw, movement I knew I was in big trouble.

  I tried to turn quickly, to think of an explanation, but I didn’t have time to get a single sound out of my mouth. Pain exploded in the back of my skull and everything went black as I fell into oblivion.

  “This has gone too far, Amy.” The voices drifted to me on a cloud of pain.

  “What was I supposed to do? She knows something. How else would she have known about the passage?” Arguing voices boomed inside my splitting skull.

  “We can’t just go around knocking people out. Haven�
�t we messed up enough already?”

  “We are so in over our heads.”

  “Shut the fuck up, all of you! We are all in this together now.” My eyelid twitched as I tried to open my eyes and even that little bit of motion shot needles through my head. Nausea washed over me as my eyes fluttered open and the low candlelight filtered through. Against my own will I moaned in pain.

  “Oh crap, she’s awake.” The voice sounded scared, but I was pretty sure I was the most terrified person in the room.

  “Who are you? What do you want?” Someone barked at me from above. I felt around the ground I was laying on and slowly pushed myself up on wobbly arms. The room spun, making my stomach do flip-flops. I didn’t throw up easily, but I don’t think I’d ever been hit quite that hard on the head before either. I lurched into a sitting position on the floor before I could crack my eyelids open once again.

  “I said, what are you doing down here and how did you know about the passage?” I blinked once, wondering if I were hallucinating or if the figures standing before me were real. I put my hand out and gingerly touched the sticky wound on the back of my head. Jesus, I was surprised I woke up at all. I’d nearly been bludgeoned to death.

  I glanced around the room, counting six figures wearing black hooded robes standing around me in the stone room. There were old fashioned candelabras around the room, lighting the small, damp space and casting misshapen shadows across the walls.

  “Who are you people?” I rasped out, my voice rough and dry. How long had I been knocked out? Had Christopher been looking for me? It didn’t take long for me to notice the evil smog in the room. It didn’t infiltrate every space like it did in the rest of the house, instead it coated the stone floors, caressing them like a lover would. The darkness was most concentrated near the front of the room where some symbol had been painted above a small stone bench. The bench itself was completely covered in the pulsing blanket of blackness. It moved and writhed around it and I was sure if I reached my hand out and touched the bench, I could have easily been consumed by it. No one else noticed it.

  “Hello? We asked you how you knew where to find the passage to get down here?” I glanced over at the leader of the robed group. I swallowed hard.

  “I don’t know how to explain it. I was in the office upstairs and leaned up against the paneling and the door swung open. I didn’t think about it, I just followed the passage.”

  “I don’t buy it,” she said after a moment. “You just happened to lean up against the paneling in just the right spot?”

  “She said she found it on accident. It makes sense. How else would she know?” A girl nearby put in, her voice sounding more than a little panicked.

  “I don’t buy it either. She knows something,” someone else added. More arguing. The darkness pulsed on the ground, a living thing, at least a foot thick. I cringed and pulled my legs to my chest, trying to move as far away from the mass as I could. It was impossible.

  “What is she looking at?” someone asked. I swung my head back to the group and away from the crude, stone bench. “She’s looking right where it happened,” the voice whispered from the far right of the room. A chill swept up my spine. The girl who seemed to be in charge stepped forward and I realized she was holding something tightly to her chest. A book, maybe?

  “What do you know?” she hissed, her voice a little different than before, not with a thread of desperation and regret, but with power and resignation. A form materialized near the girl and began moving back and forth in agitation, her eyes and mouth stretched dreadfully wide, her anguish pouring out into the room, pouring out into the space where she must have died. I knew that, knew it like I was there when it happened. I’d never been so positive of anything in my life. I sighed and dropped my head. When I raised it again, I locked my gaze on the girl with the power in her hands.

  “I know Julie Reese is dead. I know she died in this room.” My voice came out steadier than I thought possible, considering I might have just said the one thing to enrage the people who were responsible for a girl’s death. But for some reason I didn’t feel scared. I felt emboldened. Knowing what you say is truth and knowing you are right has a funny way of doing that. In truth there is power.

  “How is that possible?” she gasped. A girl nearby started crying and another started babbling. Only three were standing over me and not panicking. They were the ones I was going to have trouble with.

  “Someone had to have talked,” one of the girls said in disgust. I shook my head.

  “No one talked.” The leader came at me, grabbing me by the shirt and dragging me to my feet. She shoved me against the wall and I just barely kept myself from cracking my head again. She was impossibly strong.

  “Then, how?” she growled.

  “Julie…her ghost came to me.” Some laughed, and one or two were still crying. But not the leader. No, she was silent.

  “It was an accident.” A sniffle.

  “Shut up, Karry!” Someone slapped the girl.

  “What was an accident?” I asked calmly.

  “I doesn’t matter now! What’s done is done and there’s no taking it back! We can only keep it a secret and move on.” The leader was loud, charismatic, drawing the attention of everyone in the room. Her hand clasped around the book she was holding even tighter and the darkness swirled around her robes lovingly.

  “You can’t take it back, but you can make it right,” I shouted. “You can’t let Julie’s life mean so little. She’s not at peace. Her family has a right to know she’s dead. She deserves better.” The girls turned in my direction. I knew most of them realized that what I said was the truth, but they were scared. They were unsure and they didn’t want to get into any trouble.

  “She’s right, Amy,” someone agreed. “What happened was an accident, but what we did was wrong. I can’t live with this for the rest of my life.”

  “I don’t care what any of you feel or believe. We are not going to go through this again, or so help me, I will make each of you pay.” Amy’s voice whipped across the room, ripping a gasp from the throats of the girls she threatened. I could feel Amy’s power flow across my skin, but I could tell it was being amplified, and I was sure the book she was holding had something to do with that. I tamped down my fear and indecisiveness.

  I leapt from my spot against the wall toward Amy. She was only half facing me, but she was busy threatening her friends, so I had a slight advantage. But the three-against-one odds were not in my favor. I rammed into the side of the robed girl with all my body weight, trying to dislodge the book from her grasp as I did. Unfortunately, she had a death grip on it and it didn’t even budge. Amy cried out in pain and anger and turned to me to push me back away from her, but I latched onto her arm, still trying to get ahold of the book. In the back of my mind I had the idea that if I could just remove the book from her grasp, then she’d be more understanding. More reasonable.

  Amy bellowed out her rage and the two girls who, at first, were standing idly by in shock and uncertainty, jumped to their leader’s defense. I felt a shock of pure power, thick and wrong, when all three of them had their arms around me, their hands tearing at me, trying to remove me from Amy and my goal of getting the book away from them. My head was throbbing and I was pretty sure it had begun bleeding again. I realized quickly that I wasn’t going to win this. There was no way I was going to be able to take down all three girls, not with one of them engorged on dark magic. In desperation, I made a final reach for the book. My fingers curled around the spine and before I could even try to yank it free, the book latched onto me. I say latched, because that’s the only word I can think of to describe what happened. No, it didn’t grow arms and make a grab for me, but whatever evil the book contained knew me and it liked me.

  Everything happening in the room faded to the furthest part of my consciousness. I could feel scratches and punches, could here screaming and crying, but nothing was as vivid as the place where my hand touched the book. Nothing else mattered
in that moment. I would have gladly stood there and let them beat me to death with a heavy blanket of rightness cloaked about me if not for what happened next.

  Julie Reese was not like other wraiths.

  Julie Reese was pissed off, in pain, and she felt betrayed.

  The wraith of Julie Reese pushed itself inside my body.

  *~*

  I was standing in the same room, but I wasn’t me. Not really. I couldn’t see the swirling darkness in the room anymore. Everyone was standing in a circle around me and holding a small, black candle with their heads bowed. They were all wearing black robes with hoods to hide their faces. I was wearing a robe, but I was the only one who wasn’t wearing a hood. There was a small bench made of stone at the head of the circle behind me. I shivered despite myself. I didn’t like the bench or the marking on the wall above it. A figure approached me from the circle. I was scared, but I wanted to be in this sorority more than anything. My mother had once been its leader and everything was riding on this initiation. I wanted to prove that I was a Reese through and through, despite how different I felt from everyone since I was a little girl. I wanted to make my mom proud for once. I’d do whatever I had to do to get in.

  “Julie Reese, are you ready to pledge your loyalty to this sorority?” It was Amy. She approached me a few days before and told me I’d been chosen. I was elated, but now I was a bit terrified. Terrified and exhilarated.