“My grandmother had a house like that,” I said. “It just felt good to be there. You ever go somewhere and like it right off the bat?”
Helena gave a near-imperceptible head shake that I ignored. That was top-shelf subtlety for me. It probably wouldn’t have worked on someone even a little older than Abby, but she didn’t make the connection between what I was asking and the conversation Helena tried to have with her earlier. I took my win and was grateful for it. Abby thought hard for a minute before she started to nod.
“Yeah, I did. Grandpa took me to this horse farm last summer. I wasn’t too sick then. I really liked it there,” she said, then added, “but maybe it was just the horses.”
I smiled at her. “Probably not. I’ve been to a few horse farms that I couldn’t wait to leave.”
Abby looked up at me with bright eyes. “You ride horses?”
I shrugged. “Ride might be a strong word for it. I know enough not to fall off, if the horse isn’t too excitable and doesn’t move too fast.”
Helena snorted and Abby looked over at her. Helena gave the girl a conspiratorial wink. “I suspect Adrian is downplaying things a bit. He does that. Usually when he’s very good at something.”
“I’m not. Well, not this time anyways,” I said.
Abby looked around the room and got a strange look on her face. “You know, I don’t usually like hospitals. But I like this room the way I liked that farm. It’s bright in here, like there’s something glowing all the time. Makes me feel, well, safe.”
Her hand drifted up to finger the mirror pendant around her neck. I did my best not to stare as I considered the implication. Her subconscious already made the correlation between the enchantment on the pendant and protective power I’d pulled up around the room. It made the correlation and then it drew the conclusion. At least, it might have. If it had, then we were trying to refight a victorious battle. The challenge wasn’t to teach Abby anything or break down false mental constructs. All we needed to do was draw out what she, against all odds, already knew. The thought didn’t track, though. If she already knew, on some level, why was she so ignorant of her own power? It didn’t make sense.
The only possible reason she wouldn’t know would be if… my mind reeled. Mother of God, it would only make sense if all of that power was being used for something else already. It snapped together for me. She didn’t know because she was under attack in one form or another since she was born, and maybe even before she was born. Her psyche, undeveloped, but driven by the most primal need to survive, turned that power toward her defense. In all likelihood, she’d spent her entire life wrapped in a psychic shell. A psychic shell driven by the astounding power Abby possessed could have deflected an awful lot of negative energy being sent her way. Not all of it, obviously, not with such a powerful demon in play, but a whole lot.
Helena and I just happened to be in the room the first time, maybe the first time in Abby’s life, that every ounce of those resources weren’t crucial to keeping the girl alive. Helena did something dramatic, something that would have drawn the mental attention of a powerful psychic. Abby’s abilities, finally free to take a breath and look around, showed her what Helena was up to in the most direct possible way. It let Abby see Helena’s gathered power. It was one hell of an introduction to the world of magic, but it could have been so much worse. I looked at Helena, but her gaze was fixed on Abby. I looked down at Abby. She stared up at me in something akin to horror. I took a step back. What the hell was that look about?
“Who,” Abby’s voice cracked. “Who is Jack Reed?”
For a few awful seconds, my world tilted at crazy angles and my vision went dark around the edges. Hearing Abby say that name out loud disoriented me more than a serious blow to the head. There was no way for her to know that name. Even Helena didn’t know that name. I’d never spoken about him to lovers, to friends, not to anyone. Ever. I started to fall, but Helena managed to get around the bed and grab my arm before that happened. I swayed in place for a moment, trying to reorder the world into something sensible.
I looked at Helena, whose eyes were huge, filled with questions, but mostly startled. I turned my head to look at Abby, but the girl was staring at Helena. Abby still looked horrified, but also more than a little awestruck. The girl’s lips moved, but no words escaped, not at first. When sound issued forth, it sounded like a mantra, but in a language I didn’t immediately recognize. Helena’s face went slack. She and Abby stared at each other, as the mantra spilled forth from Abby, over and over. Abby’s eyes were glassy, her pupils huge. The mantra cut off, like a stereo with a pulled plug.
Abby started to talk. “The pursuit of material gain and the dependence upon relationships are illusory attachments and cannot coexist with the pursuit of enlightenment. To achieve Buddha Nature, to achieve freedom, one must renounce attachment. Along the path of enlightenment, many transitory powers may manifest and become attachments themselves. The enlightened being acknowledges the appearance of such powers and releases them as merely another illusion.”
Abby’s pupils contracted and her mouth closed. I was certain that Abby had never thought about anything even remotely like Buddha Nature, let alone read a treatise on the Noble Eightfold Path. As I had listened to her talk about it, my creep-o-meter went to a hitherto unknown eleven.
“Abby,” said Helena, her voice little more than a whisper, “are you alright?”
“Him,” said Abby, pointing at me. “He is your attachment.”
“What?” I asked.
Helena’s face went perfectly blank. “No. He is not.”
“You can’t save him,” continued Abby, her face ashen.
“I’m not trying to save him,” insisted Helena, her face locked in that creepy blankness.
“You cannot save him. No living hand can save him,” Abby looked at me again, “but he might yet be saved.”
As the creep-o-meter moved up to the also unknown level twelve, I started to ask what that meant. I never got the chance. Abby shuddered. It was an ugly, violent thing. She squeezed her eyes shut and started to shake her head back and forth.
“Too much,” she gasped, her voice edged in deep pain. “Too much noise. So loud. Oh my God, it’s so loud!”
Helena made the connection first. She grabbed my arm in a vice-like grip.
“Veil your thoughts,” she ordered.
It took a second to process. Why would I veil my thoughts? The hamster lurched into motion. Right. Abby. Powerful and inexperienced psychic. We were the closest. We’d be the loudest. I slammed a wall of total silence around my consciousness. I presumed Helena did the same, because Abby’s gasping, shaking, violent head thrashing slowed considerably. Tears were running out the corners of her eyes.
“Why is it so loud?” said Abby in a tiny voice.
She sounded like a small child then, one in the middle of her first experience with bone-deep pain. I didn’t really understand what she was going through. My own psychic abilities being only marginally better than your average tarot card reader, I had no experiential frame of reference. I had spoken to a few hard core psychics over the years, people who might have been on a level with Abby, and they had given me an idea of what it might be like. One man described it as like having ten symphony orchestras in your head, only every instrument was out of tune, out of time with every other instrument, and all ten orchestras were playing different music. In short, it was deafening, discordant and agonizing. It was also something Abby had no practice shutting out.
Helena went over and grabbed Abby’s hand. “Abby, listen to me.”
“So loud, so loud, so loud,” said Abby, lost in the noise in her head.
Helena bowed her head. She reached out and placed her hand over Abby’s eyes. Power gathered around Helena. The same impression of cool mist I’d felt before washed over me, only several orders of magnitude stronger.
“Abby,” said Helena.
There was something different about her voice, a strange timber
, and a kind of authority I’d never heard there.
“Abby, listen to me. You need barriers, here, and here, and here. You need to build them. I know it hurts. I know. You can do this.”
There was a long pause and I realized my hands were clenching and unclenching in helpless frustration.
“No, that’s good,” said Helena. “That’s very good. You’re most of the way there. You just need to focus a little longer. I know, child. I know it hurts. It will pass.”
I stood there watching for the better part of a minute. Abby went still on the bed. Helena sagged. I let out a breath I’d been holding. Abby curled into a ball. I walked over to the bed and gave Abby a look. She was staring into the deep, deep distance. I helped Helena to a chair. She looked like she was in as much pain as Abby had been in moments before. I crouched next to Helena and took her hand.
“Helena? Are you alright?”
She looked at me and shuddered. “The noise. I can’t even…I got it secondhand. It hurt.” Helena took her hand back and wrapped her arms around herself. “I just need a minute. Check on Abby.”
Helena closed her eyes and her body shifted between shivers and shudders. I frowned at her, but did as I was told. Abby was still curled into a ball. Her eyes were wide and she was breathing in fast, shallow breaths. Even without medical training, I figured hyperventilating after an episode like that was bad. I put my hand on Abby’s arm. She jerked, but it came across like a reflex action. I made my voice as soothing as I could.
“Abby.”
She didn’t react.
“Abby, can you hear me?”
She blinked.
“Abby, can you look at me?”
I waited to see what would happen. It took the better part of ten seconds, but her eyes flickered up to me, then away. I nodded.
“Abby, you’re breathing too fast. Can you take a couple deep breaths for me?”
Her eyes flickered to me again, but she kept breathing at that same hectic pace.
I tried again. “Abby, I need you to take a couple of deep breaths for me. Okay? I’ll do it with you. In,” I took a deep breath in, “and out,” I breathed out.
I kept that up for a while and, by barely discernible increments, her breathing slowed to something a little less frightening. After five minutes of deep breathing, Abby looked exhausted, but she wasn’t hyperventilating. She was even blinking again. I didn’t really think about it at the time, I just reached out and smoothed her short hair.
“Jesus,” I said. “You poor kid. You can’t catch a break.”
Abby closed her eyes and I felt her building up to something. I should have expected it, but I didn’t.
Abby opened her eyes, gave me a blank stare and said, “Who’s Jack Reed?”
Chapter 31
I closed my eyes. That question was the exact kind of thing that made people so afraid of real psychics, the exposure of secrets, hidden pain, of unvarnished truth. It also made me a little ashamed. I didn’t regret what I did. I knew I didn’t, because I’d do it again. I was ashamed because Abby had to confront and live with what I did. It wasn’t something she ever needed to know or carry. I doubted she’d ever hated anyone enough to understand why I did what I did. How could she? I was tempted, for a second or two, to lie to her.
The uselessness of that hit me immediately. She might not know everything. It was anyone’s guess how much she gleaned in the middle of all that psychic noise, but she gleaned enough to pluck that name out of thin air. It stuck with such force that she hung onto it though all of the pain. In all likelihood, she knew the general shape of what I did. I opened my eyes and met her gaze.
“Someone who caused me a great deal of pain. He killed someone I loved.”
Abby didn’t look away, but I saw how much her new, unwilling knowledge ate at her. “You did things to him. You,” she stopped and did look away that time.
“Yes,” I admitted to the girl. “I did things to him. I took vengeance.”
It’s tough to watch a hero fall. What most people didn’t get was that it was even tougher to be that fallen hero. To stand there and watch the incomprehension, the pure disappointment, seep into someone’s face was enough to kill you. At least, it sure felt that way. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t actually failed or that the reason for her disappointment was ancient history in my life. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t set out to be some kind of hero. All Abby knew was that she had believed in me, had thought me better than I was, and I proved her wrong.
“How could you do that?” she asked, not looking at me.
My hand was still stroking her hair, as steady and rhythmic as a metronome. Don’t ask me how I pulled that off. By rights, my hands should have been shaking.
“I guess I could tell you that it’s complicated. Someone else might tell you that you’ll understand when you’re older. But it isn’t complicated and you don’t need to be older to understand. I just,” and then I paused.
I’d never put it into words before. Oh, sure, I’d thought about it a lot. Reed was never far from my thoughts, but thoughts have a liquid quality, taking shape without necessarily giving words to those shapes. I think that I never put words to the thoughts because it meant giving them a concrete reality. Maybe I knew that it would tell me things about myself I didn’t know or, barring that, didn’t want to admit to myself. I think that we’re all cowards about self-knowledge. Plus, it’s hard to be the hero of your own story when you know that you’ve been the villain in someone else’s story.
“I just hated him, Abby. I hated him for what he did, what he took from me. I hated him more than I’ve ever hated anyone in my life.”
She glanced at me. The disappointment didn’t evaporate, but it looked like it went down a notch or two in intensity. She started to say something, but I held up a hand. It wasn’t hard to guess the direction of her thoughts.
“I’m not saying it was the right thing to do. Acting on hatred is stupid. It’s dangerous. But that kind of hate, it…” I fumbled for the right thing to say. “It blinds you. You may know in your head that something is wrong, but it doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t feel wrong. All you feel is hate and all you think is that if you don’t do something about it, that hate will kill you.”
She blinked at me a few times, her eyelids sliding closed and open slowly. The physical toll of all that pain and fear were catching up to the girl. She wasn’t quite done, though.
“But you aren’t,” she said, the confusion evident on her pale face, “I saw, you aren’t a bad person.”
A deep tide of pain, relief and gratitude threatened to swallow me whole. I’d spent a lot of time wondering what kind of man I was at my core. I’d more or less concluded that I wasn’t a particularly good man. Everyone I met seemed inclined to believe the same thing. That sort of belief and reinforcement tended to warp a person’s self-image. To be told I wasn’t, by someone, anyone, sent a wave of hope through me.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “You aren’t a bad person, but you…”
Her breath caught and she stared off into nothing. It looked like she was trying to push away a painful mental image. I felt a stab of guilt. Odds were good it was an ugly memory from my head.
“Yeah,” I muttered. “Yeah, I did. Life isn’t always, well, it’s not always clean. I’ve done some bad things. Maybe I’m not a bad person, but I’m as flawed as anybody else. I make the wrong choices sometimes.”
Abby’s eyes closed then opened again, but only halfway. Fatigue was winning the war. I tried to smile at her. Maybe it looked like one.
“Get some sleep, kid,” I said, my voice hushed. “You’ll be okay.”
She mumbled something and then her eyes slid shut and stayed that way. I stared down at her for a long time. My head was the last place I’d wish on anyone, and Abby got an economy-sized dose of it. I hoped I told the truth about her being okay. I turned and came up short. I’d been so focused on Abby that I’d forgotten Helena was there. She was staring at me.
Helena wasn’t stupid. She knew enough about me to draw the lines between the dots Abby made, but I couldn’t tell what she had made from those revelations. I just knew she was staring at me with an expression I couldn’t identify.
I jerked my head toward the door and walked out of the room. We rode the elevator down in awkward silence. It was awkward for me, at any rate. Helena just kept looking at me with eerie intensity. I bought myself a little time by feeding coins into a vending machine. In return, the machine spit out an obscenity masquerading as coffee. I handed the first cup off to Helena and got one for myself. She sipped at the liquid, winced at the taste, and powered-gulped the rest.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
Helena shook her head a little. “I’ll be alright. I don’t know how Abby did it. Putting up those walls. I couldn’t have done what she did.”
I raised an eyebrow at her.
“You don’t understand. The sheer,” Helena’s voice trembled, “size of that noise. The potency of it. It was like a living thing. Psychic lava pouring into her head.”
I gritted my teeth. “If there is someone in charge out there, they’ve got an ass backwards sense of justice.”
She gave me a pained look. “You know it isn’t like that.”
“All I know is that what’s happening to that girl is wrong.”
Helena continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “I think that all of this is something coming home to roost. A chain of choices and decisions that’s been building for a long time.”
“And that makes it okay? That makes it okay for Abby to suffer? What fucking choice did she ever make to deserve what’s happening to her? Cancer,” I dropped my voice. “So much psychic power that the second it’s off the chain it all but blows a hole in the back of her head, and no training to deal with it. You know what kind of decisions she’s going to spend the rest of her life dealing with, and you can’t possibly tell me that’s fair.”
The Midnight Ground Page 20