I won’t find salvation. That much I’m sure about.
Ava lowers her violin from her chin and gapes at me. “What do you mean you’re going to meet our great-grandma?”
“I told you, she might have answers.”
“Well, I’m not going.” She actually looks a little nervous.
I study her. “It shouldn’t be more than an hour or so.”
“Whatever.”
“No spells while I’m gone,” I say. “And stay inside.”
She gives me an annoyed look. “Don’t worry.”
“And if you feel like you might manifest, just play your music.”
“I know. I’m not an idiot.”
I give her a peck on the forehead and grab my hoodie. “I mean it, Ava.”
She growls.
“Love you, Peep.”
“Right back at you, demon dork.” She touches her violin back to her chin and lifts her bow. “Tell the grams I said hi.”
THIRTY-NINE
Kara, Sid, and I walk down a pathway through some overgrown tropical plants and past a small greenhouse to the front door. The house is old, the pink paint weathered, the wood trim rotted from the salty air. Waves crash in the distance. I know we’re high above the water, but from here you can’t tell how far away the edge is. All I see in the direction of the sea are neglected tropical plants.
Sid knocks on the door. He’s acting like we’re really here to see a client.
Seconds tick by before someone comes to greet us. It’s a large Samoan woman with a very bright, flowered dress on—it looks like the garden behind me threw up all over her. “Hello. How can I help you?”
Sid gives a wide grin and a slight bow. “I’m here to talk to Mrs. O’Linn. She’s expecting me.”
“The missus is resting now—”
“I am not!” comes an affronted voice from the shadows of the house.
The woman turns and addresses a small figure in a wavy pink robe. “Laura, you should be lying down. Your blood pressure.”
“Stop fussing, Fa’auma.” The older woman waves her tiny hands in the air, shooing the larger woman off. “You go back to your knitting and soap operas and hush now. Let me take care of these things. You don’t know how to speak properly when people come calling.”
“Whatever you say.” Fa’auma gives us a wry grin and heads into the darkness of the house, saying over her shoulder as she goes, “I’m here if you need me.”
The pink woman grumbles something under her breath about being able to do things for herself and then turns her attention to us. Her delicate frame looks even smaller in the tall doorway. Wispy white hair floats around her head. A pink barrette dangles to the side, hanging on by only a few strands. There’s a stubborn set to her birdlike shoulders, and I can see something in her that’s so familiar, as if my mom is standing in front of me in older skin.
“What’s your business here?” the woman asks. Her focus is on Sid. She barely seems to notice that Kara and I are there.
“I’m Mr. Siddhapati, Mrs. O’Linn. From LA Paranormal. We spoke on the phone about—”
“The ghost man! Yes!” She nods and barrels past us, heading toward the garden. “Follow me.” She waves us on before she slips through a bush.
She’s fast for a frail old thing.
The bushes are thick and smell like unripe bananas. Stiff branches and monster-sized leaves block the path, but I walk forward anyway, praying I don’t end up falling off a cliff because I can’t see where I’m going. I fully comprehend right now why those explorers on TV walk through the jungle dramatically whacking at leaves with three-foot-long machetes. I never thought I’d need one in LA.
“Over here, Aidan,” comes Sid’s voice.
A hand reaches out. Kara’s on the other end, her hair mussed.
“Quite the yard you have here, Mrs. O’Linn,” Sid says.
Mrs. O’Linn is digging around in a bin beside the greenhouse door. “Yes, my husband was a botanist. He traveled . . . all over.” She waves her hand at the sky and digs some more. “I don’t have the head for it.”
“What was it you did before you retired?” Sid asks.
“This and that. Mostly I was an actress, I suppose. But a woman needs to be practical.” She pulls something from the bin with a triumphant grunt. It looks like a rock. “Plus, there were children to raise.” She flashes a grin at Sid, and her eyes find me. She goes still, blinks, holding the rock loosely in her hand. “I had a daughter,” she says, pensive as she stares at me. “Her name was Deirdre. She was reckless. Died very young. So reckless.” Her voice cracks a little.
“I’m terribly sorry,” Sid says.
Mrs. O’Linn shivers and then draws herself up. “Yes, well, it runs in the family, it seems. I’m not sure how I escaped it, really. But here I am, old as Moses. The only one left.”
“You mentioned a granddaughter on the phone,” Sid prompts.
My throat tightens.
Mrs. O’Linn frowns. “Did I mention her? Fiona. Crazy child. I tried my best to raise her, but she had her mother’s ways. All that talking to walls and hiding in caves—oh yes! That’s why I called, wasn’t it? The ghost!”
“In your TV?”
“What? No! Not the TV, the thimbleweed.”
Sid looks at her, genuinely confused. “Thimbleweed? Like, a plant?”
Mrs. O’Linn hugs the rock to her chest. “Oh my, what a thing! You thought I was worried about my television speaking to me? What an old biddy you must think I am.” She seems pleased with the mix-up. “Here, let me show you.”
She waves us through another bush behind the greenhouse. I give Sid a questioning look, but he just shrugs and follows.
“He really thought it was the TV,” Kara whispers to me. “He’s actually a little deaf.”
“Seriously?”
She nods. “It’s a prophet thing. He’s losing his senses the longer he’s out of his own time.” She leans in closer. “When I met him he could tell things about people, like secrets. Or read objects. Now he depends on Connor for that. He could also sense spirits and energy like me, but now he can’t as much. And he could read old writings in weird languages. Now he has to take them to Eric—who I heard was having you read them.”
Those scrolls Eric called me about last May. Was it Sid I was reading them for? “So he was like me. Sort of.”
“I think he used to be.”
That’s why he has that look in his eyes, like he’s always digging into you, looking deeper than a normal person. “So he really is getting weaker the longer he’s here?” I think part of me wondered if he exaggerated that a little. Apparently not.
She nods and starts walking into the bushes. “Yeah. He’s never going back now, probably. He told me he’d never make it; he’s too weak—he’d end up floating in the middle of nothing. That’s why he has to sleep in the shed. He’s put a spell on the walls to keep himself held here mentally and spiritually. And that cane is spelled for when he’s out of the shed. That’s why he keeps it with him all the time.”
“That’s nuts.”
“Well, he believes in what he’s trying to do.”
I follow her, feeling disjointed, wondering what it all means. The plants tangle around my arms and legs as I walk, and I struggle for another few yards before the jungle ends and I stumble into open air.
We found the cliff.
Four feet in front of us the ground cuts off with what must be a fifty-foot drop to the ocean. I walk to the edge and peek over. The water churns in white curls, crashing violently against the rocks below. I feel a sudden déjà vu, as if the urge to walk over the cliff playing at the edge of my mind is a memory.
“This way,” Kara says, motioning to a pathway carved into the side of the cliff. “Looks like they’re down there already.”
We work our way alo
ng, descending to a small beach. Kara slips every few feet, grabbing at the rocks to steady herself.
“Careful,” I say. The air is making me dizzy. Maybe she feels it, too. Could there be a demon nearby trying to make her fall? I glance around but don’t see anything. Just the wild of it all, the turmoil of the sea below and its desperate pull. And then I realize it’s not a demon or a spell. This off-kilter feeling is the same as the shed, the same as the Devil’s Gate, where Sid came through. A place where time is carved out. And it’s coming from the rock wall ahead of us.
We make it to the bottom, and Sid and Mrs. O’Linn (it’s too odd to think of her as my great-grandmother) are standing across a stretch of sand near the mouth of a cave.
A very familiar cave.
And the gravity of it is strong.
It’s just like my mom’s paintings. The golden color of the cliff wall, the dark opening, earth and stone shaping the doorway into a teardrop. The déjà vu comes back like something tapping me on the shoulder—and then I realize that it is a memory. I’ve actually been here. With my mom. If I walk closer, I know that I’ll find a circular stone formation at the entrance to the cave and the carving of a heart in the sandstone wall.
I move toward it in a sort of trance.
“Oh, I see,” Kara says, disrupting my focus. “Mrs. O’Linn must mean those flowers. I think they’re called thimbleweed.”
I look over to where she’s pointing. There’s a green-and-white trail sprouting from the sand leading to the mouth of the cave. It starts at the shore, even growing in a few spots around the tide pools, on dark lava rock, trailing its way into the cave opening. It looks unreal, impossible; things that green don’t grow in salt and brine.
“Wow, weird,” Kara says as we come up beside Sid and Mrs. O’Linn.
“Yes,” Mrs. O’Linn says. “My thoughts exactly. Very odd.”
“When did this start?” Sid asks. He’s gripping his cane, totally fixated on the cave. He’s feeling the pull, too.
Mrs. O’Linn bends over and plucks one of the white flowers from the ground. “They sprang up about a week and a half ago, the night of the full moon. I know because I was out here for the meteor shower that night with Fa’auma, and instead of watching stars, we watched these little things sprout up like magic.”
The full moon. The same night I got bitten and met Rebecca. And Kara. That same night these flowers grew in the place where my mother lived as a child. The place she’d drawn over and over again since I could remember.
“Thimbleweed?” Sid mutters. Like he’s trying to recall something. “And it leads to that cave?”
“They grow up the walls in there, too. I didn’t go very far into that dank place, though. Far too adventurous for my taste.”
Sid shifts his feet, looking away from the cave, like he purposefully wants his back to it. “You mentioned there was trouble with a ghost. Do you think these flowers are connected with that?”
Her mouth becomes a small o. “Yes, I keep forgetting. The ghost! That came after the flowers.”
“So the flowers grew and then—”
“I watched them!” she says like she’s trying to convince us. “Before my eyes, they just popped right up! I called in a young man who knows about green things—a student of my late husband’s—because I was sure it was some sort of rogue weed. I didn’t want it taking over my husband’s garden. But the young man didn’t believe me. He said I must be mistaken about how they grew. He looked at the plants in the tide pools and sand and told me I must’ve put them there and forgotten. Just because I’m old doesn’t mean I’m senile. Or magical!”
My skin prickles.
“When did the ghost come into the picture?” Sid asks again.
Mrs. O’Linn points a crooked finger at the opening in the cliff. “The ghost stands there, at the mouth of the cave. A wisp of a thing, so pale. I’ve seen it twice. I swear it looked exactly like my granddaughter, Fiona—nearly told her to get something warmer on and get back in the house, it felt so real. I forgot for a second that she’d run off on me all those years back, after she had that baby.” She shakes her head, looking more annoyed than sad. “I raised my granddaughter, you know, after her mother killed herself. No father in sight, so it was left to me to fix the mess. Foolish girl, my daughter, Deirdre. And she’d left me with another foolish girl, Fiona.” She humphs and then continues. “My granddaughter was a fanciful one growing up; always talking about faeries and boys coming out of walls. I tried getting her help—I’d failed her mother, after all—but the child was too wrapped up in it all. She insisted she could do magic. Can you imagine?”
My heart aches listening to the words, the tone . . . as if my mom was a pest. No wonder she always had that look of sadness and longing in her eyes. If this was the woman who was supposed to be loving and nurturing to her, she must’ve been miserable.
“It sounds like Fiona was a troubled girl,” Sid says.
“Yes,” Mrs. O’Linn says with a sigh. “My granddaughter was obsessed with symbols and books about magic. She would collect plants and tie them into odd shapes, setting them on the ground or hanging them on the walls. At first I thought she was eccentric—my husband thought she was a botanist in the making.” She laughs. “But then the child started talking to someone in her room. I’d hear her from down the hall, chattering away, but when I went in to check on her, she’d be alone. Well, that’s when I knew she was going to end up just like her mother.”
“You said your daughter killed herself, though,” Sid says, a weight in his voice. “Did Fiona kill herself, too?”
Mrs. O’Linn shakes her head, her shoulders sagging a little. “I’m sure she did, eventually. It’s in the blood. My own mother did. And my daughter, Deirdre, of course. You see, she was always talking about invisible creatures too, saying something was in her room, something in her closet. She said things whispered to her, told her to do bad things. She was far into her insanity by age ten. I’m sure that’s why she eventually jumped off the cliff that night. Those voices . . .” She points to the rise up by the house, to the spot where I felt the odd gravity begin. “It was three years after my granddaughter, Fiona, was born—on the child’s birthday, actually. Unconscionable.”
I’m shivering now. I clench my fists tight at my sides to stop the shaking.
“Truly a sad tale,” Sid says.
“Yes . . .” She sighs. “Fiona was such a sad, pretty little thing, too.”
“I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. O’Linn.” He moves closer and touches her on the shoulder in a consoling way.
I feel like taking her in my hands and shaking her, asking her why, why she couldn’t have been loving and kind and understood all the horrors that come with being able to see those things? Why did she have to be heartless and cruel? Maybe it would’ve changed things, kept the darkness back a little.
Instead I choke out, “Why did Fiona leave?”
Mrs. O’Linn looks at me like she forgot I was there. “It was a few months after her baby was born, the week after her seventeenth birthday. She’d been coming down to the beach, to that cave, for days.” She nods at the opening of the dark teardrop. “Even sleeping here, baby and all.”
My heart speeds up, realizing she’s talking about me. I’m the baby.
“We got into a fight,” she continues. “Fiona was yelling and crying, asking why he hadn’t come, over and over, like I would know the answer. She was distraught about some boy. She’d started talking about him after her twelfth birthday, said he was her best friend, her only real friend, and that he came from the cave.
“I thought she was making him up, like she made up everything else—until the day I saw the two of them down there, walking in the surf, throwing stones into the waves. It was her fourteenth birthday.” She points to a spot down the beach. “And every year on her birthday, she came here to this spot. Even after she ran off with
her baby, she’d come back for the day of her birthday, and I’d see her down here, staring into that cave like she could will the thing to give her what she wanted. I don’t believe for a second that boy came from the cave. I think some young man was tricking her and eventually took her innocence, leaving her pregnant. Then he ran off—as men tend to do.” She shrugs. “But Fiona believed. That’s why I think her ghost came back here. She’s still looking for him.” For the first time she sounds like she might care.
“That’s possible,” Sid says.
I’m stuck on the vision of my mom and the boy who must have been my father. Every year on her birthday, he came through that crack in the cliff, through the doorway in time. She would scramble down here before sunrise and wait for him, her heart anxious until she saw him in the shadows. And then she’d run to him, hug him close, and it would be like they’d never been apart, the year of space between their visits completely forgotten. They would walk for miles up and down the beach, play in the surf, collect sea glass, and talk about each other’s worlds.
Until the year they created me inside those cave walls. Then he disappeared into the void and never came back.
But my mom didn’t understand. She waited, she wanted to show him—share what their love had created: me.
Years later, she made a deal with a demon . . .
All the personal, intimate details of Fiona’s story flood my mind, even though they aren’t part of what Mrs. O’Linn has shared.
I see my mother’s tragedy just like I saw what happened in that apartment where the ghost was protecting the boy, Marcus.
It always happens this way when I’m near a ghost.
I look around, past Sid and Mrs. O’Linn, to the mouth of the cave.
And I see her.
My mom. Fiona.
The world around me blurs. My breath falters.
She’s there, standing at the entrance to the cave. The white thimbleweed flowers brush at her bare legs with the breeze. A blue summer dress covers her thin form, her bare toes curl in the green at her feet, her white-blond hair whips across her neck and face. She’s so young, so vibrant.
Darkness Brutal (The Dark Cycle Book 1) Page 27