Текст книги "Elegy"
Автор книги: Tara Hudson
Соавторы: Tara Hudson
сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 17 страниц) [доступный отрывок для чтения: 7 страниц]
Chapter
NINE
No amount of reassurance from Joshua could dispel the leaden ball of guilt in my stomach. Almost three pitchers of coffee and nine Mayhew Bakery day-old pastries didn’t do the trick, either, although they had officially proved that I was a nervous eater. During our drive from High Bridge to the Mayhews’ house, I’d felt strangely calm. Impassive, even. Now, I just felt overstuffed with food and foreboding.
I pushed my half-eaten, stale palmier away in disgust and looked around the kitchen. Across from me, Jillian and Scott had fallen asleep on each other’s shoulders, slumped awkwardly in their dining chairs. On this side of the room, Joshua leaned with me against the counter of the kitchen island. He still watched me warily, as though he thought I might try to blow up his parents’ house, too.
I raked one hand through the ends of my hair. “I’m not going to do anything crazy again, Joshua. I promise.”
“I know, Amelia,” he said, keeping his voice low. “That’s not what I’m worried about.”
“You’re not worried that I tried to detonate a weapon of mass destruction tonight?”
Joshua shook his head. “Even if I don’t like how you did it, I don’t blame you for trying. And I don’t think this is your fault, either. It’s not like you invented demons and made them evil.”
In response, I held my hands up in a pose of surrender. “But does that matter? Will that matter to the person who dies tonight?” Then I peeked at the kitchen clock. “Or this early morning, I guess?”
I dropped my palms to the countertop in defeat. As he’d done since we arrived home, Joshua placed his own hand comfort-close to mine. I stretched my fingers toward his, aching to tangle both sets together.
“I don’t know the answer to that, any better than you do,” he said softly, running his thumb across the granite counter, near the length of my wrist. “All we can do is wait out the night, and then spend the next six days coming up with a better plan.”
I laughed mirthlessly. “You mean: a ‘better than last-minute, ineffective demolition’ plan.”
He smiled sadly but said nothing. Frowning again, I looked away from him and motioned to the view outside the wide kitchen window, just behind Jillian’s and Scott’s slumped forms.
“Well, fortunately or not, we don’t have much longer to wait out the night.”
Through the newly leafing branches in the front yard, we could see the first traces of sunlight. Without taking his eyes off the window, Joshua walked over to another counter and removed a fresh pot of coffee from the maker. Once he’d poured it into our mugs, we waited in silence, drinking and watching dawn break over the Mayhews’ front garden.
Only when the sunrise shifted fully into early morning did Joshua set down his cup and stretch his arms high above his head. Then he settled back against the countertop with a wide yawn.
“Well,” he said, stifling the last bit of his yawn, “the demons haven’t attacked the house, and we haven’t gotten a tragic phone call from one of my friends. So . . . no news is good news.”
“Maybe,” I murmured. I took another long sip of coffee and kept my eyes trained on the brightening sky. As I watched the colors shift from pink and peach to pale blue and gold, I let myself hope. Just for a few, indulgent minutes.
Maybe Joshua was right. Maybe the demons were bluffing. After all, Eli had told me that demons weren’t omniscient. They didn’t innately know the identity of everyone I’d ever met; the demons merely targeted those unlucky people who happened to be in my proximity. A simple glance around the kitchen showed me that all my companions from last night were very much alive, if thoroughly exhausted. And Joshua had already checked on his parents—more than a few times, actually. So it looked like I could claim the night as a victory.
With one important exception.
Although my mother hadn’t been anywhere near our ill-fated grenade attack, I couldn’t help but worry about her. She was the only other person I’d visited lately, which made her a possible victim. Not a likely one . . . but still. I’d feel much better after a quick, invisible peek in her living-room window.
I laced my fingers and reached my arms forward, across the island, in an attempt to stretch away some of my cramped tension. Then I turned back to Joshua.
“Feel like driving me to my mom’s house again?” I asked him. “Just for a quick check?”
In response, he pulled his car keys out of his pocket and began twirling the ring around his index finger. Seeing the exhausted lines around Joshua’s faint smile, I briefly considered plucking the keys from his hand and giving the whole driving thing a try. But I doubted a wrecked pickup truck would help anyone, especially Joshua. I kept my hands to myself and followed him outside, stifling my own yawns as I climbed into his truck.
On the drive to my mother’s house, Joshua and I agreed that music was a necessity: the louder, the better. We rolled down the windows to let in the cool morning air. As I drummed my fingers against the outside truck door in time to my new favorite song, I felt a twinge of guilt about blasting guitar riffs at seven a.m. on a Sunday. One look at the purplish shadows under Joshua’s eyes made my guilt vanish. On impulse, I started to sing as loudly as possible to keep him awake. Joshua took a surprised, sidelong glance at me, so I added an air guitar, just for effect.
I thought he would laugh, or at least beg me to stop singing. Instead, he joined me, belting out the lyrics in a painful, off-key pitch. While he wailed, he shot me another sidewise glance, smiling a little during a particularly screechy chorus of “baby, baby, bab-eeee.” The performance continued long after I’d dissolved into a fit of tired, giggly snorts.
When we pulled onto my mother’s street, however, my laughter died.
I could see a faint, shifting light in her front window, a sure sign that she’d woken up early to watch the Sunday-morning newscast—a ritual to which she’d strictly adhered for as long as I could remember. That glow, and her brown sedan parked out front, meant that she’d spent the night in the relative safety of her house.
But inexplicably, my stomach began to sour with fear. I pressed one hand to my abdomen, willing myself to breathe normally as Joshua parked the truck a few hundred feet back from my mother’s driveway.
He turned toward me in the cab, his eyes suddenly serious. “I’m coming with you this time,” he said.
Just yesterday, I’d asked him to wait in the car. Although I’d appreciated his support, I didn’t think my mother could take the added stress of meeting her undead daughter’s living boyfriend. But this morning, I wasn’t sure I could make the trip across my mother’s tiny yard all by myself.
Watching the flicker of light in her window, I nodded and, without thinking, reached out to give Joshua’s hand a grateful squeeze. Immediately, my hand slapped against the steering wheel. I looked down to see my hand shimmering, transparent, above his.
“Perfect timing,” I growled, and yanked my hand back.
Joshua sighed, pulled his own hand from the steering wheel, and ran his fingers through the air beside my cheek. An uncomfortable jumble of desire, anger, and fear shot its way through me and came to life as a blush on my cheeks.
“One thing at a time,” Joshua reminded me gently.
“You’re right,” I whispered, shaking my head at myself. “It’s just that I’m . . . I’m just . . .”
When I trailed off, he laughed softly but without humor. “I know. Trust me, Amelia: I know.”
He dropped his fingers and let them hover, a millimeter from the delicate spot above my collarbone. Then, with another heavy sigh, he pulled away and got out of the truck. I waited, fighting the urge to shriek with frustration—about Joshua, about the demons, about what I might view through my mother’s window. After a few embattled seconds, I climbed out of the truck too.
I trudged behind Joshua, dragging my feet through the thick, dewy grass of my mother’s lawn. The yard really needed a good mow, but if I had to guess, my parents’ mower had died sometime after me and my father. I made a mental note to drag Joshua over here, while my mother was still at work, for a day of covert yard cleanup.
If she’s still alive to need it. If any of you are.
The cold, slithery voice in my head was my own, but I jerked back as though I’d been slapped. Shut up, I silently told the other voice. I don’t need your input.
Unaware of my nasty inner dialogue, Joshua glanced over his shoulder to give me a small, close-lipped smile as we stepped together onto my mother’s porch.
You okay? he mouthed.
I just set my lips into a grim line and moved to peer in the front window, praying that my mother had left the curtains parted at least an inch or two.
To my eternal gratitude, she had. Even better, she was sitting on the couch just to the side of them. From that position, I could easily see her profile as she faced the TV.
I gusted out an enormous breath of relief and began to count off each indication that my mother was alive and well: the flick of her ponytail as she moved her head quickly from side to side; the tight clench and unclench of her hands to her closed lips; the almost violent lift and fall of her shoulders. . . .
I stopped counting. Something was wrong. Very wrong.
My mother’s entire body moved as though someone had attached puppet strings to it—she was jerking and shaking on the couch.
Is she having a seizure?
At that thought, I didn’t care if I alerted her to my presence; I practically threw myself against the window to get a better look inside. From that vantage point, I could see that, aside from the heavy crisscross of tears across her cheek, she seemed perfectly healthy. Alert, upright, and in relative control of her limbs. But as she pressed her fingers to her lips and shook her head again, I frowned harder.
TV, I realized. She’s crying about something on TV.
My gaze trailed upward to the program that had affected her so strongly. When I saw what my mother was watching, I froze.
It wasn’t a sad movie, as I’d hoped. Not even a particularly moving commercial. The news played out across her small, outdated screen, just like I’d expected it would. And right now, the news featured a very familiar face.
At first, I desperately hoped that she was just a newscaster. That she only appeared on the screen because she was giving a report on a violent car crash, as the headlines indicated. After a few more seconds, however, it became clear that the blond woman on the TV wasn’t smiling prettily from a newsroom. The picture was a head shot, the kind of photo that reporters place on camera when they can no longer show the real thing. When the person in the picture no longer exists to interview.
As if to confirm my fears, the headline beneath the photo shifted. Previously, it had read:
VIOLENT MIDNIGHT CAR CRASH
Now, in two lines of garish, breaking-news red, the banner proclaimed:
FORMER WILBURTON RESIDENT SERENA TAYLOR, 32,
DEAD IN CRASH AT HIGH BRIDGE
I didn’t have the chance to catch any more of the story because the sourness in my stomach finally rose to the surface. I dove to the edge of the porch, just in time to be violently ill off the side of it. Then, without a backward glance at my mother or even at Joshua, I ran away from that house as fast as I could.
Chapter
TEN
I didn’t remember when Joshua stopped me, nor did I remember how he convinced me to get back into the truck without being able to touch me. All I knew was that I went from tearing a feverish path through the wilderness near my mother’s home to sitting motionless in the passenger seat of Joshua’s truck as it bounced us down a roughly paved road.
“What . . . what happened?” I asked hoarsely. I had a bad taste in my mouth, and I had a bad feeling about how it got there.
“You were sick,” Joshua replied plainly. He kept his gaze trained firmly on the road, almost as if his life depended on how hard he could concentrate on the task of driving. I’d never seen him so intent on not looking at me.
“Do you hate me now, knowing that I caused someone’s death?”
My question dripped with self-pity, and I hated myself a little for asking it. But that didn’t mean that I didn’t want to know the answer anyway.
For a long time—an eternity, to someone who’s asked that kind of question—Joshua said nothing. When he eventually cleared his throat, I cringed, ready for something awful. Ready for him to tell me, finally, that I’d put him at too great a risk.
“Amelia, I love you.”
He said it so earnestly, so fiercely, that I leaned back in surprise.
“I love you,” he repeated. “And hell itself won’t stop that. Sorry to put it so dramatically but, well, it’s the truth. And I’m terrified because I can’t keep you or me or anyone we know from what’s coming. From what’s already here.”
I nodded bleakly.
“It must have happened right after we left. I don’t know how they convinced her to drive on that road again.” Then I recalled one image from the night of my death: a young girl with crazed, possessed eyes, watching while I drowned in the river below her.
“Actually,” I amended, “I have a pretty good idea how they did it. But I just can’t believe they would choose . . .”
When I trailed off, unable to finish, Joshua spoke one, low word.
“Serena.”
For some reason, I chose that moment to lose it. I dropped my face into my hands and began to sob messily, not bothering to hide my misery from Joshua. I cried like I hadn’t done in months, letting the full force of what I’d seen on my mother’s TV wash over me in a brutal, guilty wave. And as I sobbed, other things started to seep in along with the details of the morning news report.
Memories.
The image of an eight-year-old Serena on the day we met, beautiful and a little wild in her grass-stained soccer uniform. A whiff of the rancid volcano we’d tried to make together for a seventh-grade science credit. The slight chip on her right canine, from a rock-hard jelly bean we found in her mom’s couch that I’d dared her to eat. The heart she’d drawn around Doug Davidson’s name in bright-red ink, right on the front cover of her Government book, our first day of public school.
Our friendship had been the lifelong kind . . . for as long as I’d lived, anyway. Now, neither of us had a “lifelong” existence. Not anymore.
It was the thought of her, lost and alone and probably tormented in the netherworld, that ultimately made me stop crying. I swallowed back the last of my sobs and wiped furiously at my eyes, smearing the tears away haphazardly across my cheeks. As my vision cleared, I could see that Joshua had pulled his truck to the shoulder of the road, and he now waited patiently for me to work through this outburst of misery.
Yet another reason why I loved him; yet another reason why he deserved so much more from me than self-indulgent misery. He deserved my action, as did Serena, and Gaby, and my father, and every other wrongfully imprisoned soul. I wasn’t exactly sure how, but I knew that I wouldn’t go into the darkness without freeing the people I loved from the demons.
And I wouldn’t go without one hell of a fight.
I kept silent until the force of tears and sickness and loss no longer controlled me. Then, when I felt like my body would better obey my mind, I finally turned to Joshua.
“Please take me back to your house.”
Joshua began moving fast, as if he was dealing with an unstable situation—or person.
“That’s a good idea,” he said hurriedly. “We’ll get you back there so you can rest for a while, have some of my dad’s cooking, and then maybe—”
“No.”
My interruption wasn’t cruel, but it didn’t leave any room for argument, either.
“I’m done resting,” I continued, a touch more gently. “I’ve been resting since Christmas—since Gaby—and look what that’s accomplished. First, you and I love each other, more than ever, but our relationship is stalled. It will be, until something about me changes. Then, the demons are obviously a bigger threat than they were the day we met. And now, another one of my friends is dead.”
“None of that is your fault, Amelia—”
“I know,” I interrupted again. “Really, I do. Like you said: I didn’t create hell. I didn’t invite this evil into our lives. But I’m tired of my loved ones hurting because of the darkness. I’m tired of being its victim too. And I’m ready to do something about it. Now.”
Once I’d finished that pronouncement, I leaned back against my seat and did a quick self-assessment. I felt . . . good, actually. Surprisingly good. Galvanized, even.
But Joshua clearly didn’t know how to respond. As he drove, he opened and shut his mouth several times without saying anything. Finally, after taking more than a few miles to collect his thoughts, he nodded.
“Okay, then. What do we do next?”
Joshua’s question sounded just as fierce, just as determined as his earlier declaration of love. Which meant that both came from the same, good place inside of him. The place I loved most.
Despite everything that we’d gone through, despite everything to come, I couldn’t help but give him a wide, bright smile.
“I think it’s time to gather a coven of Seers.”
It was a good plan. Not to mention, it was the only plan I could come up with on short notice. But that didn’t make it any easier to implement. First, sheer numbers were not on our side, as Jillian wasted no time in telling me.
“It’s just math, Amelia,” she mumbled through an enormous bite of cold fried chicken. “One, two, three.”
To illustrate, she used her cleaned drumstick to point at Scott, then Joshua, then herself. She swallowed her huge bite and added, “Three versus—what?—thousands of demons and their ghost slaves? No offense to anyone at this table, but I don’t like our odds.”
I groaned and let my forkful of potato salad clatter to my plate. Math, I laughed to myself. How quickly Jillian forgot that I’d helped Joshua to an A in Calculus last semester, while she almost failed basic algebra.
Aloud, I said, “That’s why we’re going to get a lot more Seers, Jillian. Because the larger our circle, the greater power we have to open the netherworld. And that’s the most important part.”
“Aside from the killings?” she asked drily.
“That’s not going to happen again.”
I answered so sharply that Jillian actually sank back in her chair, temporarily chastened. She should consider herself lucky that I hadn’t followed my first impulse and thrown my fork at her.
For the second time today, the four of us were gathered around the Mayhews’ breakfast table—this time, with a Southern-fried lunch of the weekend’s leftovers. When Joshua and I had arrived back at the house, Rebecca and Jeremiah were already awake; this necessitated a flurry of explanations about why the two couples were together so early in the morning, instead of sleeping safely apart. Jillian and I crafted some impromptu slumber-party lies that, although thin (nail painting! gossip! chocolate!), convinced the older Mayhews to leave us alone with a few plastic containers of leftovers and an entire afternoon to plan our attack.
“Personally, I think we should talk to Ruth’s and my gran’s old Seer group,” Scott offered.
Joshua and I replied simultaneously: “No chance,” on his part, and “That’s a fantastic idea,” on mine.
Joshua turned to me, blinking rapidly. “What? You can’t be serious, Amelia.”
“I’m very serious. We need them. As your little sister so sweetly pointed out, there’s strength in numbers. And in the old coven’s case, experience. Two newbie Seers and one who hasn’t technically been triggered yet aren’t going to keep the netherworld open for very long.”
“Hey,” Scott protested. “I could, like, hold my breath for a really long time, or something. You know: get ‘triggered’ or whatever.”
I smiled at him gently. “Scott, in a weird way, that’s very sweet. But I don’t think an intentionally failed suicide attempt is what we’re really going for.”
When he grinned back at me sheepishly, I noted, “A-plus for enthusiasm, though.”
“I think it’s a mistake,” Joshua insisted, running one nervous hand through his hair and then resting it on his neck. “We can’t forget that the Wilburton coven wanted to exorcize Amelia. Just a few months ago, actually. I’d bet none of them have forgotten that fact.”
To my surprise, Jillian actually took my side and began to argue with her big brother.
“So what?” she challenged him. “I doubt that would matter, if they knew we were all after the same thing. Besides, they’re probably leaderless without Grandma Ruth, anyway. If we ask them really nicely, maybe bring them a few extra cases of Ensure as a peace offering . . .”
Although Jillian kept talking, I stopped listening. Not because she offended me with her disrespect, but because of something she’d just said. Something that gave me an interesting, if dangerous, idea. I turned it over in my mind, treating the idea as carefully as I would a delicate seashell with sharp edges. Razor sharp, if past experience served.
But worth it, I ultimately decided. Maybe even necessary to our mission. I mentally rejoined the conversation as Jillian continued to poke fun at her Seer elders.
“. . . you know, throw in some denture cream. Ask them if we can see pictures of their great-grandchildren—”
She stopped short when she caught my determined stare.
“What?” she demanded. “Why are you looking at me like I’m a crazy person?”
“Actually, I’m looking at you like you’re a brilliant person.”
One corner of Jillian’s upper lip lifted in suspicion. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Ignoring her hostile sneer, I flashed a knowing little smile. “It means that someone should give your grandma Ruth a call.”
For a moment, no one responded. Then Joshua and Jillian burst into raucous laughter. Joshua actually started to tear up, and Jillian curled sideways across her chair as if all the cackling had given her a cramp. But their laughter died when they noticed that I hadn’t joined in.
“I’m not joking,” I said evenly, once they’d quieted down. “Ruth Mayhew is the most powerful Seer we know. We’d be idiots to try and do this without her.”
Jillian snorted lightly, reached into the pocket of her dress, and flipped out her cell phone. She used it to gesture meaningfully at me.
“Okay, Fearless Leader. Why don’t you call her, then?”
Again, she wore that derisive sneer. But I could tell from the glint in her eyes that she didn’t actually hate the idea; she was just too afraid to make the call herself. So I glanced over at Joshua. He met my gaze squarely, but like his sister, he clearly balked at the thought of making such a call. I understood this fear far better, coming from Joshua.
To put it mildly, Joshua’s relationship with his grandmother had been strained for the past few months. Because of me—but also because he’d chosen a different kind of Seer life. The kind that included coexistence with the dead, something Ruth staunchly opposed. This opposition should have struck her from our list of possible partners. And yet . . .
“I’ll make the call.”
Thankful that I’d practiced dialing a few times on Joshua’s cell, I snatched the phone out of Jillian’s hand and scrolled quickly through her list of contacts. The photo that corresponded with Ruth’s phone number made me shiver a little, but I clicked Dial before I could chicken out—and before anyone around the table could stop me.
Ruth answered on the second ring.
“Jillian, honey? How nice to hear from you.”
Immediately, I could tell that Ruth had recovered from her poisoning last Christmas. Lucky for her and the New Orleans Seer community, Kade LaLaurie’s serpentwood cocktails apparently didn’t have a permanent effect. She sounded so strong, so imperious, that it struck me mute for half a second.
“Jillian? Jillian, dear, I’m awfully busy—”
“It’s not Jillian, actually.”
My voice came out strained and unfamiliar. But Ruth nonetheless recognized it. After a tense pause, she growled, “What do you want?”
“A chance,” I said weakly. Then, in a firmer tone, I repeated, “A chance, Ruth. I need one, your family needs one—the entire town of Wilburton needs one.”
I heard a faint, rhythmic clicking on the other line, as though she was tapping her fingernails against a marble surface. She stayed silent for so long, I thought she might have hung up on me. But finally, she commanded, “Explain yourself.”
I took a deep breath for courage, and then did just that. It took me a while to go through the whole story—I actually started from the beginning, with Eli, and made my way to the present threat. I only left out a few details, mainly steamy ones concerning me and Joshua; in my opinion, those memories belonged solely to us.
I felt a little breathless as I finished. Checking the clock over the Mayhews’ stove, I could see why: I’d talked for almost thirty minutes straight. I took a quick, peripheral peek at my tablemates. Joshua and Jillian looked far more somber than they had earlier, and Scott looked downright queasy. I guess Jillian didn’t give him the entire story, after all.
Ruth’s voice drew my attention back to the phone call, which, up till now, had been more of a monologue than a conversation. As Ruth continued to speak, it seemed that the call would remain a monologue—she talked ceaselessly for another thirty minutes, telling me exactly what she thought about me and my plan. She even told me when the conversation was officially over, hanging up on me without so much as one word of good-bye.
I stared at the phone in my hand long after the call ended, not really noticing when the screen went blank from inactivity. My tablemates stared at me, too, waiting silently for the bad news. While they waited, I played Ruth’s most important words over and over in my mind. Then I shook my head and raised my eyes to Joshua’s.
“She’s in,” I said. “Ruth’s on our side.”
