by Jo Holloway
Several staff members interacted with young patients around the room, looking after anything they needed. Shelves of books, games, and puzzles looked well picked over. A girl a few years younger than her picked a puzzle off the shelf and approached the table closest to where Cara sat. The girl glanced at her, muttering under her breath. Cara smiled and then looked away.
The sound of puzzle pieces being dumped out of the box got her attention again. The girl had missed the table with about a quarter of the pieces, and they cascaded to the floor, skittering in every direction. A handful slid over to Cara’s feet. None of the staff appeared to notice, so she bent down to pick up the pieces and carried them to the table.
The young girl stopped her quick movements and muttering long enough to look at Cara and say, “Thank you.”
“Sure, of course,” Cara replied, and bent down to pick up more of the spilled pieces. She brought back another handful and set them carefully on the table.
She stepped away, intending to sit back in her seat. But before she turned, an older girl near the window caught her eye. There was something familiar about her. The longer Cara stared, the more elusive it was. How did she know her? She didn’t recognize her from school; she was sure about that, although she was the right age. The girl sat perfectly upright in her chair, one arm slightly raised above the armrest with her hand in a fist. Her hair hung lifeless around her face, and she wore no expression at all. Cara couldn’t place her.
As she watched the girl sit motionless, a new feeling stole through her body. Quiet desperation. Something about seeing this girl so close to her own age brought back all the old fears from over a year ago. She was trapped. The bright, open room closed in around her, threatening to plunge her into darkness.
“Cara? Ready?” Her mom’s voice at the door jolted her from her singular focus on the girl by the window, and she rushed gratefully from the room.
She breathed easier once they reached the elevators. “How’s Lydia?”
“Not herself.” Sandra’s shoulders were as tight as her voice. “But I don’t want to turn my back on her.”
Her mom’s guilt chilled her. The elevator bell chimed. Focused as she was on making her escape from all the feelings swirling through her, she almost didn’t notice him in time. The doors opened, and Rhys Whalton stepped out. Cara took a quick half step behind her mom, letting her hair fall across her face. There was little chance he’d remember her from the brief moment when he’d accidentally brushed by her arm at the diner over a year ago. Still, her chest squeezed tight and her breath hitched. It must have been the surprise at seeing him again out of the blue like this.
Crap. Don’t overreact.
But what was he doing here? Her heart raced as she stayed hidden behind her mom while they boarded the elevator. Sandra gave her an odd look as they turned around, but didn’t say anything. Rhys rounded the corner to the hallway they had just come out of. The elevator doors closed, and she fought to breathe normally.
He was going to the psychiatric unit too. But why? Cara remembered the rumors about his mother, Elizabeth. Could she still be a patient here? After three years, surely she would have been moved somewhere more permanent than the hospital. Maybe he was here to see his father, although it was the wrong floor if that was the case.
Maybe he’s checking himself in. He obviously needs help.
Even a flippant comment from her dark side didn’t make her feel better. It only added to the churning feelings from everything that had just happened. The unease from seeing the girl so close to her age in there clung to her like cobwebs, making her feel hollow and alone.
SHE GLIDED THROUGH the darkened room. Gloomy walls closed in around her. Everything was blue . . . like she was underwater . . . like she was drowning . . . The pressure in her chest grew. Her feet wouldn’t move, but she drifted, trying to see the things around her. She reached out, looking for anything to hold on to, trying to stop her aimless floating. Desperation mounted with each passing second.
Finally, an object came into focus ahead. A long dresser, blurry around the edges. Now she recognized the room from the mansion, from their frantic search for Thomas. She kept drifting with no control past the dresser where a covered glass terrarium sat beside a silver-framed photograph. Faint voices floated in the currents. She tried to concentrate.
“What are you saying? Who’s there?” Her voice came out muffled.
Her arms still reached, looking for something to grab to anchor her in the endless sea of gloomy shadows all around her. The dresser faded farther away the more she tried to grab ahold of it.
“Where are you?” She couldn’t find the voices in the murky darkness. They lurked just beyond the edge of her consciousness.
A resounding crash changed the dream.
Her feet slammed onto the floor and pounded down a long hall. Grabbing the railing, she pulled herself in a sharp turn to dash down the stairs. Already, Jory’s bright blond head lay on the cold tiles at the bottom, his body sprawled out and unmoving. She ran. She kept running. The stairs kept going, stretching forever. She couldn’t close the distance to Jory at the bottom. She ran endlessly down, step after step, never making progress.
Her mad dash was about to be for nothing. Now Rhys stood over Jory, baseball bat in hand. He looked at her with sad blue-grey eyes. He raised the bat.
Her eyes flew open. She sat bolt upright in bed, gasping for air.
“Cara, child, are you all right?” Jenyx asked. Jenner’s silhouette stood at attention in the center of her dark bedroom. He stepped closer until his hot breath tickled her arm.
Her sheets were drenched with sweat. Her whole body shook. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had such a vivid nightmare.
Still breathing heavily, she threw off the covers. “Nightmare,” she whispered, and turned on her lamp.
She stood and shook her limbs loosely, casting off the dream. She checked off items from the room around her the way she used to—normal desk, normal chair, beautiful painting of Jenner. No creepy long dresser anywhere. She started to breathe again, but her throat was dry. Fetching a glass of water from the bathroom across the hall, she tried to forget the drowning sensation. She brought back fresh sheets and remade the bed. By the time she was done, her hands had stopped shaking.
It made perfect sense. She was reacting to seeing Rhys unexpectedly again, and right after the upsetting visit to Lydia and seeing the still girl in the other room. This was just her mind going back over the old memories, mingling them with new ones and adding in details that hadn’t happened. Perfectly logical. She told herself all these things, sitting on the edge of the bed, stroking the silky fur behind Jenner’s ears. It might have been logical, but did it have to feel so real? Did it have to feel so awful?
When she woke up again, the light streaming around the edges of her curtain helped to dispel the last images of the dream. She rose and stretched her muscles, stiff from the tension and shaking of the middle of the night. Throwing the curtain all the way open to let the light flood the room made her feel even better. Besides, Wes and Jory were finally back from their camping trip, and getting together with friends was exactly what she needed to chase off these icky feelings. Today would be a better day.
Downstairs, she could tell her mom was still recovering from yesterday too. Sandra had out the biggest mug they owned, and it was filled to the brim with steaming coffee. She tried with limited success to smooth out the frown lines on her face when Cara walked into the kitchen. Josh sat in the chair beside her at the kitchen table.
“Morning, Cara-biner,” he said with a small smile. “Sleep okay? Your mom was just telling me about your day yesterday . . . about Lydia.”
“Yeah, poor Lydia,” Cara replied. She didn’t bother commenting on her sleep but went to give her mom a hug from behind as Sandra sat staring into her mug. “Are you okay, Mom?”
“Just worried, that’s all. And I’m sorry, sweetie. I shouldn’t have let you come to the hospital with
me. I saw your face afterward.” Sandra’s eyes shone with concern looking up at her.
“No, it was fine. Really.” In truth, the face her mom had noticed had been mostly the shock of seeing Rhys. “Actually, I’ve been thinking about what you said about volunteering. Maybe I’ll call that therapy dog place and see if Jenner and I can volunteer at the hospital. Maybe visit sick kids or something.”
Where had that come from? She hadn’t been thinking about that at all, but apparently the experience had had more of an impact on her than she’d realized at the time. It wasn’t such a terrible idea, even if she might only have said it to make her mom feel better. She did need some sort of résumé for college applications eventually. And maybe helping in some small way would make her feel less inadequate in the face of the abducted Pyx and the horrible feelings she couldn’t make sense of.
“What a great idea, Cara.” Josh clapped his hands once in front of him. “The whole family will be in the business of helping people.”
“You know”—Sandra finally started to smile—“I think you’re the only person I’ve ever heard refer to lawyers as helpful.”
“Well, the way you do it, Sandy . . . Anyway, I have to go pick up my tux for the gala this weekend. Feel like coming with me, Cara?”
“No, thanks. Wes and Jory are back today. I’m going over there soon.”
“So, Josh, are you taking a date to this fancy ball?” Sandra grinned. “Because I’m sure Marjorie wouldn’t mind a night out.” She was constantly trying to set up her best friend with her brother-in-law.
He laughed. “Nope, no date. You know me—living the bachelor’s life. I was going to see if Cara wanted to come, though, since I do have that extra ticket. What do you say, Care Bear? You want to get a fancy dress and go to a princess ball?”
“Um . . .” Everything about the image made her mind rebel. Fancy dress, yuck. Stuffy rich people, pass. What even happened at those things?
“Hey, just think about it. I was kidding about the princess thing. It’s actually really nice, even though I have to suck up to a lot of people for their donations. But you’d just get to have a good time and a very expensive dinner,” he said with a wink.
“Oh, Cara, you really should. I got to go once a few years ago when Mr. Jackson had food poisoning and couldn’t use his ticket, and it was amazing. We still have a few days to go find you a perfect dress.” Her mom’s face lit up again, reminding Cara of the hopeful look the day she’d brought home the purple dress for Cara to wear to her middle school graduation. It was happening again.
She cringed. “I’ll think about it.”
For now, she was going to run away. She grabbed a granola bar for breakfast and bolted back to her room to get ready. Some time with friends her age was what she needed. There was plenty of time for hanging out with grown-ups when she ended up going to this crazy ball, or whatever. And she was already pretty sure she would. She couldn’t take the dress experience away from her mom right now. Plus, she was eager to see some of her uncle’s real life and spend more time with him.
CHAPTER 10
Evil Can Be Cute
WES OPENED THE DOOR to Jory’s house, and she stepped inside with as broad a smile as she could manage.
“How was camping?” she asked.
“Good. Kaiah brought her new boyfriend. My parents had a great time torturing them.” His dark head gave a small shake. “No idea what he was thinking subjecting himself to our family for three days.”
Jory came around the corner to the entrance. “I’m glad he did. That dude was great.” He scooped her into a tight hug. “We missed you. The lake was so fun. You should have come with us, Cara.” He let her go, grinning.
He was bronzed from the vacation in the sun, and his bright hair was even lighter than usual. It still brought back a flash of the dream, with his head lying unconscious on the floor while Rhys stood over him, looking up at her with sad eyes.
She shook the image from her mind while she took off her shoes. “Yeah, I wish I had.” It was the truth. Camping would have been much more fun than the last day here had been.
“You okay?”
Trust Wes to notice the distress she was trying so hard to cover up.
“I’m fine. Yesterday was tough. A friend of my mom’s had some sort of episode and ran into traffic. She ended up in the psych ward, so my mom’s been dealing with some stuff.”
Both boys stood dumbfounded for a moment. All the joy of the reunion leached out of the air, and the mood fell around her.
“Sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t going to tell you that.”
“That really sucks. Sorry, Cara.” Jory recovered first, putting an arm around her shoulders again and tilting his head to look her in the eye.
“Yeah, it does, but she’s getting help now. So what are we doing today?”
She needed them cheerful again as soon as possible. They were supposed to be cheering her up instead of her bringing everyone down. She definitely wasn’t going to tell them about the girl who’d been haunting her thoughts ever since. And pigs would fly before she’d tell Jory the dream of him almost dying. She should probably tell them about seeing Rhys at the hospital, but the nightmare was still too fresh in her mind, and she didn’t trust herself to talk about it—or him—yet.
“Hey. Why is ‘when pigs fly’ an expression? Where did that come from?” she asked instead, taking a bouncy step toward the living room.
Wes got the hint she wanted to move on and indulged her. “Good question. Jenyx? Tomyx? Were there ever flying pigs or something similar?”
It was one of their favorite pastimes these days when they weren’t busy staking out alleys and visiting other Pyx. They’d lounge around asking Jenyx and Tomyx all sorts of questions about the history of life on Earth. They’d gotten through all the normal stuff while they were still at school and had recently moved on to the realms of fantasy.
“Wait,” Jory chimed in, “how have we never asked about dragons? I want to know if dragons are real.”
“He does know about dinosaurs, doesn’t he?” Tomyx said.
Cara’s eyes rolled to the ceiling. “Yes, we all know about dinosaurs.”
Tomyx teasing Jory was pretty unfair for someone who couldn’t hear him, and she and Wes usually breezed over it in translation. “We’re talking about actual dragons. You know, scales, wings, fire breathing, that stuff. Did someone just dream it all up?”
Jenyx replied before Tomyx could say something rude again. “To answer your first question regarding flying swine, no. You humans do make up some strange expressions, and even stranger legends for things you cannot explain. Dragons—well, as Tomyx mentioned, there were enormous dinosaurs, and several with wings. There was a particularly fearsome winged species with scales, though it did not breathe fire. However, if you were close enough to watch it open its jaws, then you were about to die regardless. Still, there is no human record of those, so that is an unlikely origin for your dragon legends.”
“I had a better answer,” Tomyx said.
“Another time, perhaps.” Jeynx stopped him. “As much as we may like to tell old tales of pyxides past, we do have an urgent situation. There are at least two Pyx confirmed missing, and possibly a third if we count the wanderer Tolyx mentioned. Days have gone by since we identified Rhys Whalton as the individual who attempted to take Tomyx. We must track down where he could be hiding them.”
“True,” Wes said. “Let’s sit.”
They filed through the house to Jory’s large backyard. Cara wriggled her toes in the soft grass as they took their usual spots on the patio furniture they had dragged out to the lawn. It might not be the perfect fun day she craved. Not if they were going to spend it talking about rescuing Pyx, again. But it beat thinking about Lydia and the other troubled girl at the hospital.
“I checked out their house,” Wes said.
“Wes! What do you mean? Please tell me you didn’t go over to the Whaltons’ house alone without telling us.” What was u
p with him and his rash actions these days?
“Relax. I checked it out online and then rode my bike past it a few times. I didn’t break in.”
“No, we save the breaking in for deserted, dark mansions.” Jory gave a wry smile. “Way safer that way.” He rubbed the back of his head.
“Okay, how about no more going off on your own, though?” Cara was still glaring at Wes, who just shrugged. She huffed and threw up her hands. Why did she bother? “Well? Did you see anything?”
“It’s huge, but nothing like Whalton Manor.” He glanced at Jory. “There were people around both times.” He waited for her and Jory to stop rolling their eyes at his mention of going by twice. “Staff—I saw a gardener once, and someone bringing in food the other time. There are a lot more people around than out at Whalton Manor.”
“We know they only use the manor on occasional weekends, thanks to Ryx keeping an eye on it,” Tomyx said. “It doesn’t sound like the kid took anything out there on any days that would line up with the disappearances we know of.”
“So he is likely keeping them in town at this other home,” Jenyx replied. “As much as it may not be desirable, perhaps one of us does need to enter.”
“Wait, before we go off on some crazy plan,” Cara said, thinking of the promise to her uncle to leave the Whaltons alone, “is there anywhere else he could be going? Anywhere else he might use?”
“What about the rest of the family?” Jory asked. “Has anyone found out where the mom and sister are now?”
“That’s a good thought, Jor.” She’d wondered about Mrs. Whalton at the hospital but had forgotten about the sister. “If Mrs. Whalton is in some sort of private hospital or care home, Rhys might visit her. I’m not sure it would be ideal for hiding Pyx, but we should try to find out where she is . . . and any information on the sister. We don’t know anything about what happened there.”