“Maybe.”
“Can they feed on you, like they feed on mortals?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe. I’ve never fought against them on the mortal plane, so I don’t know how things work here.”
“Could you feed on their energy?”
“Like I say—I don’t know. Maybe we can both do it to each other, or maybe only they can do it to me. It would be a gamble trying, but I might have to take that approach.”
“If they become mortal, we could kill them.”
“Yes, Dana—but they’d have to kill three human beings, first. I’d rather not let it get that far, even if it would be the easiest way to destroy them.”
“I hurt Ethan with the scissors. He healed fast, but what if we damaged him worse than that? You know, like cut his head off?” She looked back at Will to see his reaction to this.
His eyes had grown large. “Yuck!” he said. “Dana you scare me sometimes.”
“Well, would that work?”
“Maybe damage that severe would be too much for him to regenerate. He is close enough to mortal, now, from the life force he’s stolen from Sophie and you. It’s possible.”
“Then there’s starvation. Right? If they don’t get any more life force, eventually they’ll die...just fade away. Right?”
“Yes. If they never feed again, they’ll fade away. But we’d have to catch them and lock them up someplace extremely secure. I doubt we could catch all three, and then successfully keep them all prisoner.”
Dana sighed. “How about a stake through the heart?”
“Or a string of garlic?”
“If you don’t feed again, you’ll just fade away,” Dana reminded him.
Will drifted out of the laundry room, over to the pool table. He rolled the eight ball across the green felt. It lightly ticked against the cue ball, which dropped loudly into a corner pocket. “Oops,” he said. “Sorry.”
Dana came up to his side and rested her hand on his arm. “You can feed on my life force again if you have to, Will.”
He wouldn’t make eye contact with her. “No.”
“Would you rather die? Why not, Will? You did it before. Look at me! I’m all right...I’m alive, aren’t I?”
“Mike’s life was at stake. It was an emergency.”
“This is an emergency, too. Your life is at stake.”
“I’d rather fade away than become a parasite like those monsters.”
“Look, if you won’t do it for yourself, do it for the people who could be killed by the Shadow Beings. Do it for me, Will!”
The blond youth let out a long, weary sigh. “If I have to. If there’s no other way. But I have enough energy for now.”
“Let me know when you need my help. Okay?” No answer. “I said, okay?”
Will nodded. “All right. All right.”
Dana squeezed his arm. “You’re not asking me to do it, I’m asking you. So don’t feel guilty.”
“If only I knew a way to open up the Passage. That would solve everything. We could force the Shadow Beings through, and then I could return to my own world, too.”
“Isn’t there any way you can think of to do that?”
“The only way I know of to bridge the mortal world and the Passage is when someone is close to death. They enter the Passage, but then come back here. Like you did.”
“Boy, Will,” Dana kidded him, trying to cheer him out of his morose mood, “you sure didn’t get enough angel training, did you? You don’t have any answers. I think you’d better go back to school to get your wings, Clarence.”
“Huh?” He looked at her.
“It’s a Wonderful Life.”
“Oh. The movie. I wouldn’t really call myself an angel, Dana.”
“We’re No Angels.”
“Huh?”
“Another movie. Robert DeNiro was in it.”
“Who?”
“Man—how long have you been an Immortal, buddy?”
“Dana, are you down there?” called a voice from the stairs.
“Yikes,” she whispered. It was her mother. “Um, yeah...I was just looking for a magazine I left down here! Be right up!”
“Pancakes or French toast?”
“French toast!” Dana yelled.
“I’d better go,” Will whispered.
“I’ll let you out.” Dana went to the bulkhead with him, eased the bolt open quietly. “What are you going to do?”
“Look around the town, see if I can spot your friends skulking about.”
“Be careful. And come see me later. You can come over as my friend from school, then, so we won’t have to sneak.”
“Do you think your mother would drive us back to the hospital today to see Mike?”
“Why? Do you think he needs another power transfusion?”
“No. I think we need to tell him our story.”
“Why?”
“Because the Shadow Beings might go to the hospital to see him. To finish the job they started.”
An icy shiver tingled through Dana like an electric shock. “We have to warn him.”
“Especially because, just like Sophie, he liked what they did to him. He’d no doubt let them do it again.”
“That idiot,” Dana hissed.
“Hey, two pretty girls came out of the woods and started kissing him. Who can blame him?”
Dana arched one eyebrow. “Oh...one girl wouldn’t be enough for you, Will?”
He grinned at her. “I’d better go. I’ll be back in a couple hours, how’s that sound?”
“Fine. Just remember what I said: be careful, will ya?”
“You be careful, too. Angel.” And then he climbed out of the cellar and was gone.
Dana locked the bulkhead door, a strange mixture of feelings swirling in her head like fog.
Part of her desperately wanted to find a way to open the Passage, so that Will could find his way back to his own world.
And part of her wanted him to stay here with her. Forever.
13
As the three of them—Dana, her mother and Will—entered the lobby of the hospital, Dana whispered to Will, “I thought you said before that the Shadow Beings might be afraid to go all the way and kill Sophie or Mike, ‘cause it would send me off the deep end...make me go to the police or something.”
“I said they might be afraid to kill them. They might not be. We can’t take the chance.”
“Then if we’re gonna protect Mike, we’d better protect Sophie, too!”
“You tried to warn her before. Next time I’ll talk to her, too. Maybe she’ll listen to me.”
“I hope she’ll be all right until we get to her,” Dana murmured gravely. “We’ll have to see her soon. Maybe tonight?”
“We can try,” Will agreed.
They had crossed the large lobby and turned into a side corridor. The lighting in the corridor was dark, and Dana hesitated. Will stopped and asked her what was wrong.
“It just reminds me of my dream, a little. The Passage.”
Anne Tower waited at the elevators for them. “Kids, are you coming?”
“Dana,” Will whispered.
“What?”
Will was looking past Dana’s shoulder, back toward the lobby. “Is that them?”
“Is that who?”
“Look behind you. Slowly.”
Dana glanced back casually over her shoulder. “Oh,” she gasped.
On the other side of the lobby was another corridor, and there was a gift shop there. Outside the gift shop door stood two teenage girls, looking into a bag from the gift store. Something they had just bought.
“Yes,” Dana said. “That’s them—Celeste and Vesta.”
“Kids!” Anne Tower called, a little irritably. “Are you guys coming or not?”
Dana ignored her. “Celeste is the blond, and Vesta’s the redhead.”
As Dana and Will watched them, the girls lifted something from the bag they held.
It was a teddy bear. A teddy bear we
aring a purple bow around his neck.
Dana’s blood froze solid in her veins.
“Kids!”
Dana looked over at her mother. “Mom, you go ahead—Will and I are gonna get Mike something in the gift store.”
“I’ll come with you,” Mrs. Tower sighed.
“Can’t we go alone? I have money.”
“Dana, am I supposed to go up and see Mike alone?”
“You know him, Mom. We’ll only be a few minutes—promise?”
“Hurry,” Will hissed. “They’re going!”
The twin girls were walking off down the opposite corridor, in the direction of another set of elevator doors.
“Please, Mom?”
“Go ahead,” Anne Tower huffed. “But don’t take forever, please? I’ll go say hi to Mike, and then I’m going to go get a coffee in the cafeteria. Meet me there when you’re ready to leave.”
“Thanks, Mom!” Dana blurted, and then she and Will were walking back toward the lobby as fast as they could move without running.
“Dana,” Will muttered out of the corner of his mouth as they went, “shouldn’t we have gone with your mother? That way we would have got inside Mike’s room before they do.”
“Trust me...this way is better,” Dana assured him.
They had reached the elevators. The twins had already disappeared. Dana stabbed at the button to bring the elevator back down once the twins had left it. The other elevator arrived first, however, and Dana and Will ducked into it, rudely cutting in front of a woman who gave them a sour look as she stepped into the elevator after them.
As the elevator climbed, Dana felt as if all her guts were crowding down into the floor of her stomach. She glanced at Will, who gave her a reassuring smile. She tried one on for size, too, but it didn’t seem to fit.
The elevator came to a halt, and the doors slid open.
Down the long hallway before them they saw the door to Mike’s room—and Celeste and Vesta were mere paces away from it. Dana and Will started briskly after them, watching helplessly as Vesta entered the room. Dana had all she could do not to shout for her to stop.
A moment later, however, the girl stepped right back out.
“My Mom’s in there,” Dana explained. “They’re afraid to go in.” She and Will picked up their pace to almost a trot.
“Sorry,” they heard Vesta tell Dana’s mother inside, “wrong room.”
Celeste and Vesta turned away from Mike’s hospital room, and Dana’s heart jumped when they began walking straight in her and Will’s direction—just as she had hoped they would. “They haven’t noticed us,” Dana whispered.
But even as she said it, the twins both seemed to recognize the girl coming toward them at the same moment. They had met Dana before, but they had never seen Will. Would they guess correctly that he was the Immortal from the Passage?
The two girls looked very surprised, but then Celeste grinned playfully and waved to them. Then, the two girls spun abruptly around and began walking back the way they had come.
“After them!” Dana husked, breaking into a run.
The girls vanished around the corner at the end of the hallway. Dana picked up speed, Will keeping up with her. They darted past the open door to Mike’s room, then past the nurse’s station.
“Hey!” they heard a voice yell after them from the desk. “No running in here!”
Ignoring the voice, Dana and Will shot around the corner. And there they were: the pretty twins stood at the other set of elevators, prodding the buttons. They turned their heads in unison to see Dana and Will appear.
And at the same time, Vesta and Celeste bared their crooked teeth in ugly sneers, and hissed at them like startled snakes. Their eyes were suddenly glowing an eerie violet color.
Will skidded to a stop, grabbing onto Dana’s forearm to stop her, too. She cried out at the pain that spiked through her still-mending wrist.
The twins could no longer wait for either of the elevators to arrive. They started running off down the corridor, then turned another corner in the hospital maze.
“Let go!” Dana snapped at Will. “Let’s get them!”
“We scared them away from Mike. But now what do we do if we corner them?”
“We’ll figure that out when we get there—come on!” Dana pulled free of Will, and bolted ahead. She turned the same corner…and nearly crashed into the chest of a figure waiting there. Strong hands took hold of her arms, and she screamed.
A man with dark hair graying at the temples smiled down at her. He was Dr. Conte, one of the doctors who had looked after her during her own hospital stay.
“Dana!” he exclaimed, surprised. “You almost bowled me over! What are you doing here?”
Will walked past Dana and Dr. Conte and kept going on by himself. He glanced back once at Dana over his shoulder. Dana wanted to charge after him, but was stuck.
“Um, hi...hi, Dr. Conte. I’m, ah, visiting a friend.”
“Well, you sure seem to be recovering nicely...though I think it’s early to be running around like that. What’s the big hurry?”
Dana was impatient. Normally she would have enjoyed talking with the man; he was very good-looking, with a great sexy smile, but under the circumstances she wished he’d just let go of her arms and get out of her way. She peeked around his tall body. Will was nowhere in sight. “I’m, uh, just looking for my friend who came here with me.”
“Well, don’t strain yourself, okay? Or you’ll never get back to school.” He wagged his finger in her face. “Got it? Doctor’s orders.”
“Got it,” Dana said, faking a pretty smile to satisfy him. As soon as he let go of her arms, she slipped right past him. “See ya around, Doctor!” she called back at him without looking around. She walked down the hall at a rapid pace, forcing herself not to break into a run. He was right, after all; all this running and excitement had exploded a headache bomb inside her skull. The hall ahead of her seemed full of swimming, sparkling lights. It was almost as if she was walking toward the Gate of Light.
She came to the T where the girls and then Will had vanished. She looked down the right branch, then the left.
No sign of any of them, in either direction.
So now what was she supposed to do?
There were directions painted on the wall directly in front of her. Arrows. Ah-ha! An arrow pointing to the left said Elevators.
Dana started quickly down the left hand corridor.
Yet another corner. There were the elevators, up head. And as the doors of one of them began to close, she spotted Will inside. He saw her, too, and blocked the closing doors with his arm. Dana dashed toward him, and plunged into the elevator.
They weren’t alone inside it. There were two nurses, and two teenage girls. The girls were Celeste and Vesta.
Their eyes were back to normal, and they smiled at Dana. “Hi,” said Vesta, the redhead. “How are you, Dane?”
“Just fine,” she replied, trying her best to make her own smile brave and cocky. “You two look good today. Black clothes. Your mother still dresses you alike, huh?”
Both twins smiled. The nurses weren’t saying anything. Maybe they sensed the tension.
“We like black,” Celeste answered. “Anyway—maybe we’re dressed for a funeral.”
Dana shuddered. She didn’t feel cocky at all.
“Who’s your cute friend?” Vesta asked, nodding toward Will.
“My cousin Will.”
“He’s heavenly,” Vesta said.
Dana swallowed. They knew who Will was.
Then the elevator stopped.
The doors parted open. The nurses squeezed past the teenagers to disembark. “This is our stop, too,” Celeste said. “See ya soon.” And she stepped off the elevator, as well.
Vesta began to step off after her sister. As she turned her back to them, Will lunged forward and caught her by the arm, jerking her back inside. He clamped one hand over her mouth before she could cry out.
Cele
ste wheeled around. Purple light blazed to life in her eyes and her lips curled back like those of a snarling dog. She lurched forward, trying to get back onto the elevator, but Dana thrust out her good arm and pushed the girl’s chest with all her strength. Celeste stumbled backwards, lost her footing, and fell down hard on her rear.
The elevator doors closed. Dana hit the button for the top floor.
“Help me!” Will cried, struggling with Vesta. “Pin her arms!”
Dana seized Vesta’s slim wrists, ignoring the pain in her own bad wrist, and held on for dear life. Will shifted around in front of the girl. She was hissing again like a snake. He grabbed her face in both hands to hold her head still.
A strange black mist began to rise from Vesta’s body like steam. At first Dana had thought it was just shadows, but it was getting thicker, darker, like ink spreading from an octopus.
She’s starting to change into her real form, Dana realized, horror gripping her. She saw black smoke start pouring from the teenager’s mouth.
And then, still holding her head from moving, Will pressed his mouth over Vesta’s and began kissing her deeply. He held her face in his hands like a passionate lover.
Vesta nearly ripped her arms free of Dana’s grip. She had all she could do to hold on...and she doubted she could maintain her hold another moment.
And then, suddenly, the fight started to go out of the Shadow Being. Her arms got loose, stopped straining. At last, they were totally slack in Dana’s grip, like the arms of a person who had fainted.
Dana let go of her. Now only Will held her up, wrapping his arms around her in a lover’s embrace. Vesta was as limp as a dummy in his arms. Her eyes had closed, but the black mist was getting thicker...thicker...filling the elevator.
Dana knew it was foolish, but an angry jealousy flipped over in her belly as she watched Will kiss the pretty redhead so deeply. His eyes were closed, too.
And then the black cloud swallowed them, and Dana could see neither of them. It was as if the lights had gone out in the elevator.
The elevator came to a stop. The doors opened, and the black smoke poured out into the hall. Luckily there was no one waiting there to see it.
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