Текст книги "Elegy"
Автор книги: Tara Hudson
Соавторы: Tara Hudson
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Chapter
SEVEN
No.” I tried to speak firmly, but my voice came out edged with hysteria. “No, no, no.”
My nerves vibrated as though they’d been strummed, echoing back anger, excitement, uncertainty, and even a touch of betrayal. I felt a sudden flush of heat, like my glow might break free and cut a path of fire across the road.
When Scott took a step forward, I held up both palms as a warning.
Come any closer, pardner, and I’ll blast ya.
I heard someone choke out a strangled laugh and then realized it was me. In an effort to control myself, I took a few deep breaths.
“No,” I repeated, locking eyes with Joshua again. “No to all of it.”
In the past when I’d been so clearly shaken, Joshua had approached me cautiously. Almost like I was a wounded animal. But tonight he rushed to my side, unafraid. He stood as close to me as he could, brushing one hand through the air above my shoulder.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “Jillian asked him to pick me up. Apparently he already knows—”
“I already know a thing or two about the afterworlds,” Scott interjected.
I blinked back, stunned. Not because Scott had just interrupted his friend—something I’d never heard him do—but because of what he’d said. His casual use of the word “afterworlds” was particularly interesting. It wasn’t a term that the average teenage boy threw around lightly.
The average Seer boy, however, was a different story.
I raised my eyebrows at Joshua, signaling him to let me work through this, and then turned back to Scott. Slowly, tentatively, I took a step forward.
“What do you know about the afterworlds?” I asked softly.
“Probably not as much as you guys.” Scott gave me another sheepish smile. “But enough to help.”
That answer didn’t satisfy me. I narrowed my eyes and moved one step closer, all the while keeping my gaze trained on him. “How? How do you know enough, Scott?”
He held up one hand in a motion of caution and, with the other, pulled something from his pocket. He raised the object into the light of a nearby streetlamp so I could see it, and then took his own slow steps toward me. When we were within reaching distance, he handed it to me. It looked like a thin, cheaply made wallet, its fraying edges held together by duct tape.
“Flip it open,” Scott urged. “To the pictures.”
I did so gently, opening to the small plastic sleeves that held a handful of wallet-sized photos. Scott pointed to them.
“Go to the third one. It’s a group shot.”
I flipped to the one he indicated and examined it, frowning. The photo was tiny, almost too small for me to make out the individual features of the seven or eight people seated in it.
“It’s my whole family,” Scott explained. “At least, all of them that live in Oklahoma. We took it a few years ago, during my freshman year. See? That’s me in the front row.”
He smiled shyly and pointed again. I peered back down at the photo and saw a younger version of Scott, with shorter hair and a few less inches of height, smiling up from the first row.
Then my eyes trailed to the back row, where the elders of his family stood. On the far left, standing a few feet apart from everyone else, was a white-haired woman with thick glasses and a broad smile. She looked strangely familiar, though I didn’t know why.
Noticing my stare, Scott leaned closer and pointed to the old woman.
“That’s my gran. She was on the decorating committee at First Baptist. The same church Ruth Mayhew used to attend.”
Suddenly, I knew where I’d seen her face before. She’d been in the church the day Ruth marched me outside and threatened me with exorcism. More importantly, this old woman had been at my cemetery, standing in a circle of Voodoo dust, the night Ruth called off my exorcism so that I could save Jillian’s life.
The woman in the photograph was a Seer. And Scott’s grandmother.
Which means that Scott is . . .
“How long have you known?” I whispered aloud, still staring at her picture. “What you are?”
“Not long. My gran never told me about this stuff, and she didn’t raise me with the superstitions, like Ruth did with her grandkids. But I know Gran believed in ghosts. And I know she had some pretty creepy after-church activities, judging by all the jars of weird crap she kept in her house.”
“‘Kept’?” I asked, catching his use of the past tense.
He shrugged, but I could see a glint of sadness in his eyes. “Yeah, she passed away this January.”
“I’m sorry,” I said softly. And I was, even if the woman had tried to end my afterlife. Loss hurt, no matter who it was you lost.
I closed the wallet and handed it back to Scott carefully, making sure that our hands didn’t touch. He took it from me and slipped it into his pocket. Then he shrugged again, more awkwardly this time, and cast an uncomfortable glance at Joshua.
“Jillian and I have been . . . hanging out a lot lately. She needed someone to talk to after everything that happened at Christmas, and when we put together all the different pieces about my gran—”
“Jillian realized that she had a new Seer boyfriend?” Joshua concluded bitterly. “One who was willing to listen to all of Amelia’s secrets?”
“No, no!” Scott flapped his hands desperately in the air. “Jillian never bitched about Amelia, not to me. She just warned me that something bad might happen again, and that we needed to be ready with a plan to fight it.”
“Like the ‘something’ that happened an hour ago,” Jillian added forcefully. She gestured to me emphatically. “Tell them, Amelia. Tell them about your little truth-or-dare disaster.”
I startled, surprised that I hadn’t done that yet. I’d been too wrapped up in the shock of another person knowing what I was, and why.
With a shudder that had nothing to do with the cold night air, I repeated my conversation with the dark visitor in the mirror. As I spoke, I saw Joshua’s jaw tighten and his fists clench reflexively.
Scott trembled too—with fear, not anger. But somehow, he found the courage to interrupt the end of my story.
“Amelia, we have to do something,” he urged. “Don’t you see that? For your sake, and Jillian’s.”
I wouldn’t have wanted to stand on the receiving end of the look Joshua now gave his friend.
“And who,” Joshua seethed, “appointed you safety inspector for my girlfriend and my baby sister?”
While Scott floundered to explain himself, I shot Jillian a similar glare. She’d betrayed my confidence, in more ways than one. At least she had the decency to look somewhat contrite, but that didn’t stop her.
“Okay, enough,” she ordered. “So I told Scott. So we’ve secretly been dating. So what? None of this is going to help us destroy High Bridge.”
I threw my hands up in the air. “And what exactly would the destruction of High Bridge accomplish, Jillian? Except maybe a little therapy for some of us.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Amelia,” she drawled. “Only close the gate into the netherworld forever. No big deal.”
“That’s . . . that’s not possible.”
Jillian crossed her arms and flashed me a smug smile. “Well, we think it’s possible.”
She signaled to Scott, who turned and opened the back door of the sedan. He rummaged around before pulling out a small, unmarked book.
“My gran’s journal,” Scott said, closing the car door. “It has all these Seer spells in it, and notes about how the afterworlds might work.”
Jillian plucked the book from his hands, rewarding him with a small kiss that made him blush and Joshua wince. Unbothered by the obvious conflict she’d created between her brother and his friend, she thumbed through the notebook until she found the appropriate page. Then she pressed the book flat and carried it over for me to read.
Beneath Jillian’s thumb, I saw the spidery scrawl of handwriting. But other than a few key words—“gate,” “darkness,” “dust”—I couldn’t make out the rest of it. I shook my head, blinking awkwardly from the concentration.
“I can’t read it, Jill—either it’s too dark out here, or she was too old when she wrote it. Maybe both.”
Jillian uttered an exasperated curse. “Well, I can read it. And it says that demons seem to link their gateways to certain structures—particularly those associated with rivers; these structures not only function as lures, but also as sources of the demons’ earthly powers. The journal says if we lace one of these haunted structures with Seer dust and then destroy it, we should be able to stop any harmful spirits from escaping.”
I paused, still studying the page in front of me. Then, softly, I asked, “What about nonharmful spirits, Jill?”
Beside me, Joshua stirred. Probably because he’d already followed my question to its logical answer. I hadn’t intended any harm to Ruth, yet her Seer dust—or Voodoo dust, according to Kade—had limited my movements. Kept me from entering or exiting wherever the dust had been poured.
The same rules applied to all ghosts, “harmful” or not. Intentions meant nothing to a line of gray powder. I couldn’t use something so pitiless, so final, to bar the doorway to and from the netherworld. Especially when a certain few ghosts still resided there.
Gaby, for one, and possibly my father. Even Eli, dark as he could sometimes be. Not to mention all the other souls that Eli and his predecessors had unfairly imprisoned there.
I couldn’t trap them in the darkness, just to save myself from it.
“No dust,” I said, shaking my head. “I’ll agree to do the rest, but no dust. We can’t risk the afterlives of all those trapped souls. Even if it means that the demons themselves might break loose.”
Jillian started to protest, but Joshua waved her silent.
“Amelia’s right—we can’t condemn the other ghosts like that. We’ll just have to do what we planned to do tonight, without the dust. And if anything bad happens later . . . then we’ll deal with it later.”
When he finished, Joshua gave me a small, reassuring smile. I knew what he was doing: asserting a compromise between Jillian’s plan and my own. Between the total destruction of the netherworld, and the total destruction of my soul.
Joshua just saw through me that well. He knew that this situation could end badly for me, if I thought I had no other choice.
Huffing angrily, Jillian stomped over to where Scott stood near the entrance to High Bridge. She started to complain to him, but he took her hand in his and leaned close to whisper in her ear. Instantly, her frown softened and the fury went out of her eyes. She hesitated, just for a moment, before whispering something back. Then she turned to me with a strangely rueful smile.
“Your dad, Amelia. I forgot.”
At that moment, I wanted to hug Scott. Instead, thick tears welled in my eyes. I tried to brush them aside quickly, but a few drops still fought their way to the surface.
“Thank you,” I managed to croak. “Thank you all for understanding why I can’t . . . why I just won’t . . .”
“Write your dad off like that,” Joshua finished gently. “Or Gaby.”
“Or any of them. Jillian, Joshua—you’ve seen part of the netherworld. You should understand.”
Slowly, and a little begrudgingly, Jillian nodded. She may not have liked it, but she knew I was right. Very few souls deserved to spend eternity in that place.
I cleared my throat of the remaining lump that my tears had left.
“So, now that that’s all settled, how do we do this? How do we destroy High Bridge?”
Scott and Jillian exchanged a look—one I couldn’t quite identify—and he grimaced. Then he reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a small, rounded object, and lifted it into the glow of the streetlamp. Light glinted off the object’s metal shell, like some cold, sadistic wink.
No one said anything. No one even moved.
Well, aren’t you just a bag of tricks tonight, Scottie-boy?
I let out a noise that sounded like the offspring of a hiccup and a hysterical giggle. Then, in a bemused voice that I almost didn’t recognize, I asked, “Would someone please tell me that that’s not a grenade?”
Chapter
EIGHT
No one spoke again for a while. Not until Joshua broke the silence with a low growl.
“What the hell, Scott? What is that thing?”
“It’s one of my dad’s hand grenades,” Scott replied evenly. “From his ammo closet. Which is stupidly easy to break into, by the way. This was the best thing I could come up with to collapse the bridge, since I’m pretty sure none of us carries around a spare stick of dynamite.”
Joshua leaned forward to glare at Scott and his sister.
“So you two have been planning this demolition project for a while, huh? Without consulting Amelia and me, even though we’re the ones who have the most at stake. Do I have that about right?”
Clearly unruffled by her brother’s harsh tone, Jillian snorted. “Well, it’s not like we could have told either of you—you would’ve just said no.”
“Damn straight,” Joshua hissed. “We would have told you both to go to—”
“Actually,” I interrupted softly, stepping around Joshua, “I think it’s worth a shot.”
From the stunned looks on all their faces, you would have thought I’d pulled out my own grenade. To be honest, I surprised myself. But the longer I watched that tiny bomb glitter in Scott’s hands, the more this plan made a terrible, wonderful kind of sense.
The end of High Bridge? The end of a place that had taken my life and so many others? Wasn’t that worth the risk?
Of course it was, especially if the burden of risk fell squarely on me.
Before Joshua could talk me out of it, I strode over to Scott. Then, with one hand held up in a signal of extreme caution, I used the other to take hold of the grenade. He relinquished it with surprising ease, probably because he was still a little shocked that I’d agree to this plan at all.
I took a few steps closer to the bridge, handling the grenade delicately, turning it over in my palm so slowly that my movements probably looked comical from the outside.
Of course, no one was laughing. If anything, Joshua’s frown had deepened and his eyes had grown even wider. Although he was my voice of reason—my heart—I turned away from his horrified gaze; I couldn’t let him weaken my resolve.
“So, now that that’s settled,” I said with forced nonchalance, staring at the miniature bomb in my hands instead of the people around me, “how does this thing work?”
“As . . . as far as I know, you hold the lever down, pull the pin, and throw. Then, you know . . . run like hell.”
Although Scott had cleared his throat before speaking, his voice still hit a few nervous high notes. Judging by his stutter and Jillian’s sudden fidgeting, neither of them had thought we would actually detonate the grenade. Then again, neither of them had seen pure evil in the mirror tonight.
I was still examining the grenade, wondering exactly how I should go about releasing its destructive power, when I caught a glimpse of movement. When I looked up, Joshua now stood less than a foot from me.
“Amelia,” he whispered, “I don’t think we should do this.”
I lowered the grenade so that it wouldn’t hang in the air between us like a threat, and leaned toward him.
“I know, Joshua. And on most days, I’d agree with you. But what if we can stop the demons tonight? What if we can end the threats to your family? To us?”
Joshua shook his head, but I saw his eyes dart involuntarily to the bridge. Although his gaze only lingered there for less than a second, I knew I’d struck a nerve. Joshua hated that bridge almost as much as I did. Still, he wasn’t quite on board with this plan yet. Which meant I needed to give him one last push. . . .
Holding the grenade slightly behind me, I reached out my free hand to brush my fingers against his. Except our fingers didn’t connect. Instead, our hands floated through each other like passing currents of air. Like nothing.
“Joshua, listen to me,” I whispered. “Please. As long as the rest of you take cover, all the risk falls on me. And what’s the worst that could happen? I die, lose my Risen abilities, and get to touch you again? Sometimes, that’s all I really want. So if the three of you are safe, then there’s no downside to this.”
The reluctance in his eyes shifted into something that resembled hurt.
That look didn’t mean I’d hurt him; it meant that he knew I would die again—and eagerly—if I had to. And in that glint of hurt, I saw everything clearly: even though Joshua understood me, even though he might agree with me just a little, he wouldn’t go along with something like this. Not now, not ever.
Keeping the grenade tucked behind my back and out of his reach, I lifted onto my toes. With my eyes shut, I planted a small kiss on what I hoped were his lips. I lingered near the warmth of his skin. Even without a real kiss to precede it, that warmth felt delicious, and I wanted to remember it.
After a slight hesitation, I moved closer, until my lips were only an inch from his ear. There, I said a single, simple word:
“Run.”
I didn’t wait for his reaction; I followed my own orders, spinning away from Joshua and sprinting as fast as I could for the entrance of the bridge.
While I ran, I heard desperate shouting behind me as Joshua ordered Jillian and Scott to dive behind their cars. Thankfully, none of them had tried to follow me.
I skidded to a stop at the center of the bridge and stared down at the dark, incomprehensible thing in my hand. I gripped its safety lever tightly and felt it press against my palm.
What did Scott say? I thought feverishly. After I pull the pin, do I let go of the lever?
No matter how much I tried, I just couldn’t remember how this thing actually worked. After far too long a pause, I thought:
Only one way to find out.
With the lever still held tight, I slipped one finger of my free hand through the ring of the pin. Using more force than I’d thought I would need, I yanked the pin loose. It dangled on my finger, like some macabre ring, and I just stood there for a blind second, watching it.
Suddenly, instinct took over. I felt my grenade arm pull back behind my head and then propel forward. During the forward arc of my arm, I had the briefest flash of memory—a sunny day; my father, adjusting the throwing position of my elbow while I clutched a grass-stained softball.
The memory faded into the darkness and, without another thought, I released the grenade.
I heard a small snick as the safety lever snapped back out. Now armed, the grenade continued on its trajectory above the bridge. I watched, temporarily dumbstruck by how small it looked in comparison to the tall support girders. Then another instinct took over: one of self-preservation.
I spun around on one heel and pumped my arms and legs as hard as I could. Although I moved fast, a fuzzy, molasses feeling sank into my thighs, making me feel as if I had to run harder if I wanted to escape.
Once I finally reached the end of the bridge, I threw myself at the shoulder of the road, rolling down the steep embankment toward the river.
The ground hurt me badly each time it connected with my shoulders. But that didn’t hurt half as much as the painful boom that suddenly rang in my ears, or the pieces of blasted bridge that began to rain down upon me. I dug my hands into the ground to stop my rolling and then curled into a protective ball. Just before I tucked my head under my arm, I caught a glimpse of a piece of concrete flying toward me. It was huge—the size of a small car, with bits of sharp wire poking out from its edges—and I knew I wouldn’t survive when it hit. At least, I wouldn’t survive like this.
So here was the moment. The one I’d been dreading and anticipating in equal measure since December. I steeled myself for it as best I could, summoning up my brightest memories to wrap around me when it happened.
By the time I’d relived those memories twice, I knew that something was very wrong. Like the fact that a thousand-pound chunk of concrete was taking minutes instead of seconds to fall, for starters. After waiting a few more seconds, I had to look up.
What I saw made me uncurl instantly and skitter backward like a crab along the embankment.
There, about ten feet above my head, the enormous block of concrete looked just as it had when I first glimpsed it, all brutal rock and shredded wires. Thick and sharp and very lethal. But clearly lighter than air, too. It floated, suspended impossibly on the breeze.
As did every other piece of High Bridge. Chunks of concrete, strips of asphalt, even slices of the metal girders—they hung in the night sky like unnatural constellations.
Apparently, the only things that actually made it to the ground were the smaller rocks that had initially rained on me. Road debris and gravel, by the looks of it; pebbles that had no structural connection to the bridge. Everything integral to the bridge itself—every bit of foundation, of support—remained in its strange stasis in the sky.
Until the rubble did move again. Instead of falling toward the earth as it should have, it started to drift slowly back to where the bridge originally stood. Once there, rock and metal began to link together like pieces of a puzzle, moving of their own will to re-create the structure I’d tried to destroy. Within the span of only a few minutes, the dark outline of High Bridge began to reform.
I watched, openmouthed, as a tangled set of wires straightened and then slipped into corresponding holes in an upright wall of concrete. A girder set itself upon the newly stabilized wall, as if placed there by an invisible carrier.
But not quite invisible, I realized.
If I looked closer, if I squinted just right, I could make out the occasional inky trace of black smoke drifting beneath the individual components of the bridge. Yet the smoke wasn’t insubstantial. Though thin and nearly transparent, this black smoke could evidently carry hundred– and even thousand-pound pieces of construction.
I’d seen smoke function like this before—smoke that moved in ways it shouldn’t. Which led me to the conclusion that the shadowy vapor now rebuilding High Bridge wasn’t smoke at all.
“Wraiths,” I gasped, crawling farther up the embankment on my hands.
As if to confirm, the individual tendrils of smoke rearranged themselves while they worked, taking on thin but near-human forms. During the transition, they never slowed or faltered in their reconstruction project—even when their environment shifted into something cold and ghastly.
All around them, all around me, the riverbank darkened and hardened until the icy purples of the netherworld appeared. The grass beneath my hands frosted over, and I had to jerk my fingers off the ground to keep them from freezing to it.
I only had time for one chilly breath when a slick, unfamiliar voice echoed across the river and silenced me.
“Amelia Ashley,” it hissed. “This was a mistake. Your mistake.”
Although the voice echoed, it didn’t boom; it crept through the netherworld like a whisper, intimate but discomforting in my ear.
“This error will cost you,” the voice continued. “Instead of seven days in your first week, you have one. Agree to stay here now, or someone dies. Immediately.”
I’d been wrong earlier: this was my moment. Now was the time.
I parted my lips to do the only thing I could: say yes, and commit myself to the darkness forever. But nothing intelligible came out—just one strangled syllable that sounded an awful lot like “No.”
Despite my unclear response, the darkness didn’t hesitate. The netherworld seemed to collapse in upon itself, each garish color disintegrating until nothing remained but real trees, a real river . . . and a very real, very intact High Bridge.
And in that cruel, impossible moment, I knew that my little bomb hadn’t freed anyone. It had condemned someone to death.
