Salvation's Song

by Pearl Love

  Jeremy shook his head slowly. “Not that hard? I’ve been playing for years, and I’ve never seen anyone who can just pick up an instrument and play everything perfectly by ear. No, trust me, you’re one of a kind.”

  Jeremy’s praise settled over Tyrell like a warm blanket. He prayed his dark complexion would hide the surge of heat that rushed to his cheeks. “Uh, thanks,” he mumbled to cover his sudden discomfort. “You know, it’s funny.”

  “Hmm?” Jeremy replied as he finished the remainder of his Frappuccino.

  “Mr. Crabtree said something kind of strange to me when I auditioned. He said I should be sure to foster my talent and not let it go to waste.”

  “He’s right.”

  “Yeah, but his exact words were, ‘Some people hear music, some people play it, and some people feel it in the deepest, most secret part of themselves. I think you’re one of those people. It’s a rare gift that shouldn’t be wasted.’” Tyrell shifted in his seat. “I don’t know, it was kinda weird.”

  Jeremy shrugged. “I pretty much agree with him. That’s certainly how I feel about music anyway.”

  “Except, it was almost identical to something my grandmother told me when she was encouraging me to try out.”

  Jeremy looked at him expectantly, but Tyrell knew he was just being paranoid.

  “It’s not important,” he said, ready to get their conversation back on track. He was convinced they’d shared enough personal revelations for one day. “What are we going to do about our little problem? Do you think your mom might know something about your pendant?”

  Jeremy looked at him carefully, clearly not fooled by Tyrell’s attempted dodge. This time Tyrell didn’t back down, and Jeremy apparently decided to let him off the hook.

  “I don’t know. She never said anything about it really. Like I said, it was my brother’s before he died. He’d told her he planned to give it to me when I graduated.” Jeremy lifted the stone in his palm and glanced down at it. “I never thought it had any special meaning beyond that until last week. My mom’s into meditation and eastern medicine, all that hippie crap. I’ll ask her if there is something significant about the stone.”

  “And maybe the symbol,” Tyrell said. “What is that? An owl?”

  “I think so. I’ll ask her.”

  “Good. And I’ll see if I can find anything about whether there have been any more strange deaths. You’ll tell me if anything else happens, and vice versa?”

  “Deal.”

  Jeremy held out his hand, his expression one of profound relief as though he were thrilled to have finally been able to share his secret. Tyrell grabbed it in a firm shake, an eager smile stretching his lips as they sealed their nascent pact.

  Chapter SEVENTEEN

  JEREMY WAS still buzzing with excitement an hour later when he let himself in through the front door of his apartment. He could hardly believe the conversation he’d had with Tyrell had really happened. The entire time they’d talked, he’d expected Tyrell to drop his facade of camaraderie and call Jeremy out for a fool. Instead, far from being mocked, he’d actually found a partner in this preternatural mystery he’d apparently landed in the middle of.

  “Jeremy Michalak, don’t you dare break my door!”

  He grinned at his mother’s annoyed bellow. He rushed to the kitchen to find her munching on a bowl of popcorn while reading over some papers.

  “Hi, Monica.” Jeremy bent to drop a kiss on her cheek. “You’re home early. Slow day at work?”

  She pursed her lips in annoyance. “Mrs. Phillips cancelled her appointment. Seems her cats got into a battle royal, so she had to take all three of them to the vet.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yes, ouch on my pocket book. She’d booked a two-hour session, so I cleared my schedule just for her.” Monica shook her head. “At least I’ll get the late cancellation fee out of her.” She peered up at him. “What’s going on with you? Your energy is extremely positive today.”

  Jeremy turned to grab a small bowl from the cupboard over the sink as a delaying tactic. His mother always had been too intuitive for his comfort. He scrambled for an answer that would placate her without revealing things he wasn’t ready to share. “Uh, not much. Just had a pretty good day at school, I guess. We got a really great drummer in band, so I’m hopeful the director will approve my idea for a jazz ensemble.” None of that was a lie.

  Monica beamed. “That’s terrific! I know you were really hoping to get that off the ground. I’m glad your band teacher is being so accommodating.” She slid her giant bowl of popcorn toward him as he claimed the seat next to her so he could fish some out for himself. She watched as he scooped out a handful and dumped it into the bowl he’d taken down. “And everything else is going okay?”

  You’re not being hassled? Jeremy could hear the unspoken intent behind her inquiry. “No, it’s good. Honest.” He was glad to be able to relieve her mind on that point. The homophobic catcall he’d received the other day wasn’t really worth mentioning since it hadn’t gone any further than that.

  “Excellent.” Monica’s shoulders relaxed as he gave her the news she’d been anxious to hear. “It looks like you made the right choice enrolling at Winton Yowell.”

  “Yeah.” Jeremy left it at that, not wanting to get her excited about his burgeoning friendship with Tyrell. Or himself, for that matter.

  “Was there something else you wanted to tell me?” Her tone indicated that it wasn’t actually a question.

  Jeremy groaned inwardly. She could be seriously annoying sometimes. Keeping a secret from her was darned near impossible at the best of times, but he had great incentive not to let on what was going on with him and Tyrell. No point in making her worried when he still wasn’t sure what was real and what wasn’t, but maybe she could be useful without him divulging too much.

  “More ask than tell.” He held up his pendant by its chain making it sway slightly where it hung from his fingers. “What do you know about this?”

  “Chris’s pendant?” Monica took the stone in her hand carefully so as not to pull at Jeremy’s neck. “What about it?”

  “It’s kind of unusual, isn’t it?” Jeremy replied. “Pretty but, I don’t know, odd.”

  She peered up at him before looking back at the stone. “I guess, but I’ve always gotten a good vibe off of it from the first time Chris brought it home.”

  “The stone is lapis lazuli, right? Does it have any particular meaning?” he continued after she nodded.

  “Hmmm, let me think.” Monica paused and gazed off to the side. “I vaguely remember reading something about it. Give me a sec.”

  Jeremy stuffed his mouth with popcorn while she pushed away from the table and left the kitchen. She kept a large collection of books on various new age topics at her office, but he knew she also had some at home in her bedroom. She returned after a few minutes with a large hardback in hand.

  “Mystical Stones and Gems,” he said, reading the title. “Really?”

  She stuck her tongue out at him playfully. “You know I’m always prepared for anything, even offbeat questions from my baby boy.” She tugged on his ear in a way she knew he hated, grinning as he tried to squirm away. “Anyway, let’s see. Lapis lazuli….”

  Jeremy looked over her shoulder as she thumbed through the book, steadily depleting her bowl of popcorn since he’d already emptied his own. She shot him a dirty glare but chuckled and resumed her search when he merely returned it with his most innocent expression.

  “Ah, here we go.” Monica stabbed a finger at the page she’d stopped on. “It says that, in ancient times, lapis lazuli was a symbol of royalty and wisdom. In particular, priests dyed their garments with lapis to display their status and relationship to the gods. Apparently, the pharaoh Tutankhamen had his tomb inlaid with the stone.”

  Jeremy raised his eyebrows. “Wow. I had no idea it had so much significance. So it was mainly used in Egypt?”

  Monica shook her head. “No. Says here that
it was revered from ancient Persia to pre-Columbian America. It’s even used by Buddhists as a way to focus the spirit toward inner peace.” She flipped the page. “The stone was used to represent the Sumerian goddess of death, and in Arabia to ward off the evil eye. Heck, even Catherine the Great of Russia used it to decorate an entire room of her palace.”

  Jeremy groaned inwardly. So much for narrowing things down. Whatever connection his pendant had to recent events, he had no more clue about where to begin than he’d had before. He was staring at the stone in annoyance when he remembered Tyrell’s suggestion.

  “What about the owl? Is there some particular meaning in the use of it with lapis lazuli?”

  Whatever Monica had planned to say in response was interrupted by the ringing of the house phone. Jeremy’s sister Anna, had often teased their parents for living in the Dark Ages in their insistence on maintaining a landline. Monica and Feliks adamantly refused to be beholden to “newfangled technology,” as they put it.

  “Hold that thought, kiddo.” Monica hurried to grab the handset off the charger. “Hello? Oh hi, honey. What’s wrong?”

  Jeremy listened with only half an ear to the one-sided phone call. He knew from the endearment that it was his dad on the other end of the line. Monica had long ago established unique appellations for all the people in her life, and none of the Michalaks ever got them confused.

  “Oh no,” Monica exclaimed with a moan. “Okay, give me at least half an hour. Traffic on the Kennedy will be crap this time of day, but I’ll be there as quickly as possible.”

  “What’s wrong?” Jeremy asked when she hung up.

  “Hmm? Oh, I’m sorry,” she answered distractedly. She looked around for a second, then grabbed her purse when her gaze landed on it. “The battery died in your dad’s car. He gave Irina his jumper cables a few months ago, and forgot to replace them, even though I kept reminding him….”

  Jeremy nodded in understanding as she continued to mumble under her breath.

  “Will you be okay for dinner? There’s a frozen pizza in the freezer.”

  “Yeah, I’ll be fine.” He figured Irina wasn’t coming over today, so he’d have to make do. “I’ll see you guys later.”

  Monica breezed out of the kitchen after dropping a kiss on the top of his head. Jeremy glanced down at the book she’d left sitting on the table, wondering whether he should continue his research in her absence. After a moment’s thought, he dog-eared the page and closed the book. She was far more familiar with the subject of mysticism than he was, and he didn’t have the time to go on a research hunt, not with his actual homework assignments looming over his head. The only computer in the house was the ancient desktop in his parent’s bedroom, and the modem had been on the fritz recently. Maybe he’d have a chance to hit the library that weekend to look into the matter further since using the Internet at home would be a crapshoot. Not that he’d be able to speak with Tyrell again before Monday. Hopefully Tyrell was having better luck on the research front.

  Jeremy’s thoughts drifted briefly to Chris’s journals packed neatly in the storage unit in the basement, but they shied away just as quickly. He doubted Chris had any idea that the pendant he’d bought on a whim had any significance. There was no reason for him to go picking through his brother’s private thoughts. No, best to stick with more conventional methods of research. Satisfied he’d made the right decision and ignoring the inner voice that whispered coward in his ear, he grabbed the bowl and retreated to his room to start on his assignments.

  ALL THE lights were off when Tyrell opened the front door, including in his grandmother’s room. He knew he should check on her, but if she was sleeping, there was no point in waking her. After detouring to the kitchen to grab a glass of orange juice, he headed to his bedroom and powered up his laptop. After his surprisingly revealing conversation with Jeremy, he was eager to figure out whether what had happened to them had merely been isolated incidents or whether something bigger was going on. No way the deaths of the girl at the game and the lady near their school had been coincidental, not with him and Jeremy both having such surreal experiences near where the bodies had been found.

  Now that he suspected something had happened to that Kendall student, Tyrell felt bad for simply running away and not investigating further. At the time, though, there was no way he could have known, and if he were being perfectly honest with himself, he’d been scared shitless. Who’s to say he could have even done anything if he had found the girl before she’d died? Accepting the truth of that didn’t make him feel any less guilty.

  Once his web browser was up and running, Tyrell pulled up his favorite search engine. He stared at the empty query box and considered what he wanted to look up. The two women were the only people he was certain had some connection to what was going on. What did he know about them? One had been a high school student on the South Side, and the other had attended UIC. They didn’t seem to have anything in common other than that they were both female.

  “A high school student and a college student,” he mumbled absently.

  He didn’t know how old the girl had been, but she was probably eighteen at most. As for the college lady…. Tyrell reached for his keyboard and began to type.

  “UIC student found dead near Madison and Halsted. Bingo,” Tyrell said triumphantly when the search returned the correct news story.

  The body of twenty-year-old Grace Landry, a junior at University of Illinois’s Chicago campus, was found yesterday yards from the busy intersection. She showed no signs of assault, and the police have not stated that they plan to investigate her death as a homicide at this time.

  Tyrell sighed in annoyance as he skimmed down the article. “But how did she die?” He remembered how desperate Jeremy had been to know that particular detail, and after their talk, he was equally interested. “Ah, here we go.” The story had been updated just that morning, and he read the new information aloud. “The coroner reported, based on a preliminary toxicology screen, that no illegal drugs were found in the deceased’s system and determined that Ms. Landry likely died of natural causes, presumably from a heart attack. The family declined further examination of the deceased out of religious considerations requiring early burial of the victim.”

  Tyrell stared at the screen. A heart attack? “Weird,” he said softly. How likely was it that two women under twenty-one had both died in such an unusual way? Or at least, unusual for someone of their ages. He inhaled sharply as something occurred to him. “Sam. Shit, didn’t Cynthia say he’d had a heart attack too?” While the fact had seemed so improbable at the time given what he’d known about Sam, now his death was both unbelievable and suspicious. Then there was Jeremy’s brother, Christopher. Tyrell couldn’t possibly forget about him, not after witnessing Jeremy’s heart-wrenching breakdown that afternoon. Another young person dead of a heart attack. One strange death was a tragedy. Four was something else entirely, and those were only the ones he knew of.

  Sitting forward in his chair, Tyrell typed urgently, pulling up another search. Young heart attack victims in Chicago? Maybe that would work. He clicked enter and crossed his fingers. The string of results, the earliest dated nearly two years prior, made his eyes widen and his mind boggle.

  “Sophomore athlete found dead in the basement of his home. Middle school student dies mysteriously while walking home from school. John Marshall Law School mourns the untimely passing of first-year student, Timothy Craig, who expired of a previously undiscovered heart condition.” Article after article, the stories were the same.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Tyrell whispered aloud to his otherwise empty bedroom.

  He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. How could he have missed the news of all these deaths? Because who would possibly connect deaths from natural causes to a conspiracy? Certainly not him. He’d been content living in his own little mundane world, but clearly it was time he opened his eyes because something insane was happening, and he and Jeremy had somehow become a p
art of it. He reached for his cell phone before remembering he didn’t have Jeremy’s number. It was only Friday, and two days seemed an interminable amount of time to sit on such a huge discovery, but he had no other choice. The sound of the front door being unlocked caught him off guard, and he rushed to close his browser. There was only one person with whom he wanted to share what he’d found.

  “Kevin?” Tyrell called out, making an educated guess as to who had come in. Lucille should still be at work, which left only his brother.

  “Yeah.”

  Tyrell waited for Kevin to barge into their shared room, eager to tell him all about what had happened at school like he usually did. When his brother remained nowhere to be seen, Tyrell frowned. “Kevin?” he repeated. He pushed out of his chair when he received no answer and went to look for him.

  Kevin was sitting on the sofa in the living room, staring down at the floor. His narrow shoulders were slumped, and his face was tight, as if he were on the verge of tears. Tyrell hesitated at the entrance to the room, uncertain whether he should call attention to Kevin’s obvious distress. A hitched sob from the direction of the sofa decided the matter for him.

  “Hey, little man, what’s wrong?” Tyrell sat gingerly next to his brother and bumped his shoulder with his arm. “You okay?”

  Kevin sniffed and shook his head.

  Tyrell waited for a moment before saying, “I won’t know unless you tell me.”

  “My friend, Jerome. He went missing yesterday.”

  Kevin’s voice was so quiet, Tyrell could barely hear him. Tyrell recalled the outgoing boy who always met Kevin at the door of their middle school.