Bone Dry: A Soul Shamans Novel (Volume 1) (6 page)

***

After Nathan and Parker dropped us off at Laura’s house, I headed home on my bike. Once alone, my mind began whirring, and with my adrenaline on empty, exhaustion was really taking its toll. My head felt like it’d been hit with a baseball bat, and every muscle in my body screamed as I pedaled my way home. It took all my concentration to keep my eyes open and my legs moving, especially since my mind wanted to analyze every possible explanation for what had just happened.

Shamans in town. With guns. There was no doubt they’d been behind the spirit summoned into Kylie’s room. And even though we’d gotten away, I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that whatever they were doing here wasn’t over.

I parked my bike against the house and gave Kylie a call to make sure she was okay. She picked up after about fifteen rings, voice croaking as she tried telling me everything was fine. She sounded beat up and tired. But alive. I told her to call me if anything weird happened. No matter what.

Inside the house, I dropped my backpack off in my room and peered at my reflection in the mirror hanging over my dresser. I looked normal enough, other than my ghostly white face and red scratches on my arms. After pulling a long-sleeved tee over my head and making sure there were no other signs that I’d just been chased by gun-wielding shamans, I hurried into the living room.

“I’m so sorry I’m late,” I said to Mom where she still sat in her chair. “I’ll whip up something quick for dinner.”

She blinked a few times, and then smiled. “You don’t need to apologize. You’re sixteen years old, and you never do anything besides hang around this house. It’s good for you to be with your friends sometimes.”

Guilt flooded through me like a tidal wave.

“Stop standing there all mopey, Holly. I’m glad you spent time away from here,” she said.

For a moment, I thought about telling her everything. Thought about telling her the real reason I was late. Come clean. She’d be upset, but she’d know what to do about the shamans in town.

But once that second was gone, so was the plan.

Mom couldn’t do anything about this. She’d told me over and over again that she trusted zero shamans, and that was why she hadn’t contacted any of them to take care of things. She’d never told me exactly what had happened when she’d been attacked, but it had been bad enough that she’d completely severed all shaman ties.

And if I told her, she’d want me stop conning people from school. And if I stopped, I couldn’t take care of us anymore. She had no idea money was so tight, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her. She thought only a few months had gone by since her attack. Not an entire year. She thought there was enough in her account to last a little while longer. Plus, if I stopped, I would have nothing to do with the shaman world ever again, and that meant I wouldn’t be able to find the guy who did this to her…and that meant I’d never be able to fix her.

I smiled and met her gaze. “Okay.”

Dinner consisted of a little concoction I’d come up with all by myself. Egg noodles mixed with a can of condensed potato soup. Not a fancy dish, but it was easy and cheap. Two of my favorite things.

Once the noodles and soup were mixed together, I helped my mom get to our little kitchen table and set a steaming bowl of pasta in front of her.

“Okay, dinner is ready,” I said and watched her blink her eyes and come back into herself. I grabbed my own bowl and started eating before I even sat down.

“So, how is Laura?” she asked in between bites of thick pasta. A little dribbled down her chin. I wiped her mouth with a napkin and tried not to think about the time she’d banished spirits from a nursing home free of charge.

“She’s okay,” I said, like nothing was wrong. “Her dad asked about you again. Said to tell you he misses having you as a friend. Wanted to know when you’d be back in town.”

She nodded absently.

“You really should call him, Mom,” I said, pausing to take a huge gulp of water.

“And tell him what?” She looked up at me, eyes clear. I saw a flash of intelligence and wished it was there all the time. She always used to look at me as if she knew exactly what I was thinking. It made me feel like I could never get away with anything. Now I could probably get away with everything without her having even the slightest clue.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Make something up.”

She sighed and put her fork in her bowl. “Brian and I used to be close, Holly. I can’t lie to him.”

I shook my head and stared at the curly noodles in my bowl. “But I think it would be better for everyone if you just called him.”

“No, it wouldn’t. Not when I’m like this.”

“Mom, what happened the day you were attacked?” I stopped eating and held my breath. I hadn’t asked in a long time, and I had no illusions she’d answer. But I had to ask. I needed to know what had happened to her.

“Holly,” she said with a sigh. “Please don’t bring this up anymore. I’ve told you everything I’m going to. There is a political struggle going on in the shaman world right now, and I got in the middle of it.”

What?
She’d never told me this before. A political struggle? My heart panged, though, at the fact she’d thought she’d told me this already. She didn’t know she hadn’t. The Mom from Before never would have let something like this slip. She might have kept files on all her cases, but she didn’t need to. She kept all the details up in her head.

“What do you mean, Mom? What political struggle?”

When she didn’t answer, I looked up. Her eyes were clouded over by a milky haze. They stared straight at me, and I met them unblinking, trying to see my mom behind the screen that was there. I remembered that for a few months after the attack, she’d been able to make it through an entire dinner with me, even if it had meant storing up her energy the rest of the day.

It wasn’t like that anymore. I didn’t know what that meant.

I ate by myself, the ticking antique clock on the wall the only sound other than my fork scraping the bowl. I spoon-fed my mom the rest of her food, and then walked her back over to her chair, her limp hand in mine.

***

In my room, I sat on the floor, my back against the wall. My favorite spot. My history book sat open on my crossed legs, but I ignored it, staring straight ahead at the blank white canvas.

I couldn’t concentrate on my homework. My mind kept drifting back to the faces of the shamans. To their guns. I kept trying to figure out what they were doing here and what I would do if they showed back up again.

Trying to figure out if I’d done the right thing. What if they hadn’t actually been trying to shoot us?

I flipped through my history book, and the words blurred as my mind raced.

At least one of them would have connections to the shaman world, and they could have pointed me in the direction of someone to talk to about my mother. Okay, so they’d had guns, but maybe we’d misunderstood. A thought had been niggling at me since we’d hopped into the boat. What if they thought
Laura and I
were the ones who had summoned the spirit, and they were trying to stop
us?
They’d said they knew what we’d done. They could have meant summoning the spirit.

I could have been totally wrong about everything.

I sighed and slammed the door on that train of thought when Astral climbed into my lap, right on top of my history book. He snuggled into the crook of my knee and purred, the familiar sound easing some of the tension coiled in my shoulders. As much as I wanted to think I was badass, Laura and I weren’t a threat to those guys. And even if I could have held my own, I doubted they would have thought so themselves.

But then again…

For Kylie’s sake, I hoped they wouldn’t show again, but another part of me wished they would.

CHAPTER 7

I
was up before the sun peeked over the hazy morning clouds. My socked feet shuffled down the short hall from my room to Mom’s. On the peeling wallpaper hung framed photos of Mom from Before. Through the dusty glass, she smiled from the bottom of the Spanish Steps and from the top of the Empire State Building.

I knocked and opened her door. It creaked from where the hinges long ago needed oil. “Time to get up, Mom.”

I helped her out of bed, into the jeans and sweater she insisted on wearing and held her hand as she hobbled past the photos holding ghosts of her past. A photo of the two of us in Disneyworld, the only time she’d let me go with her on a case. Me giving the camera a dimpled smile, my pale skin almost florescent under the Floridian sun. Mom laughing at the Mickey Mouse hovering nearby. She’d banished spirits from Space Mountain. It had taken a long time for anyone to realize that spirits were there in the first place—screams of fright being the definition of normal on a scary theme park ride.

She paused at the Chilean beads, closed her eyes and listened to the foreign wind. These days, they were the only way she could get a taste of the world outside this house.

After breakfast, I wiped down the kitchen counters and got the dishwasher humming, occasionally glancing at my schoolbooks tossed on the kitchen table. Mom sat in the living room staring out the window while she clicked her knitting needles together. Astral weaved through her legs, tail up, body humming. I slid my folder for mom’s attack out from under my history book.

After tearing a paper out of my notebook, I scribbled down the new information Mom had accidentally spilled.

Note on September 22 (NEW info!)

- Political struggle

- Mom was in the middle

- What kind of politics exist in the shaman world?

- ??????????

I tapped my pencil against the paper before shuffling through the rest of the file. I didn’t know why I still read it all, but I felt like it helped. The most important things, I thought, included Boston and summoning runes. Right after the accident, I’d been able to get a few things out of her, other than what I already knew.

She had contacts in Boston. She’d never told me who they were. I’d even taken a couple of trips after the attack, hoping to stumble across something, but Boston is big, and I had nowhere to go once I was there, so I’d come up empty.

I’d known she was on a trip to Boston that weekend. Someone named John No-Last-Name she’d worked with before had called her in for a consultation. The next thing I knew, she was stumbling into our house, eyes blurry and forehead lined in wrinkles…

I shook my head, blinked and pulled my history book back over the file. Ten minutes later, I realized I hadn’t read a word, and I needed to leave for school or I’d be late. On my way out the door, I found a letter that had been shoved underneath the door.

I picked it up and tore open the envelope, eyebrows furrowed. It was a notice from the mortgage company, saying if we didn’t pay within thirty days our home would go into foreclosure. My hand tightened into a fist around the letter. Shit.

Even with the cash I’d gotten from Kylie, we didn’t have enough money.

I stuffed the letter into my backpack, grabbed my bike and pedaled my way to school, trying not to focus on the fact that my world was falling even more apart.

***

Nathan plopped down across the lunch table and grinned, his orange tray piled high with hamburgers and cheese fries. I fought the urge to roll my eyes at how his green polo shirt matched the color of his canvas belt.

“Don’t tell me you bought a Robin costume,” I said between bites of my sandwich, eyeing his cold can of Coke with envy. I’d brought a reused plastic bottle of water with me, and it was lukewarm at best.

“Would you be happy if I did?”

I choked on my sandwich when my cheeks burned, and I pretended to turn my attention to the history book propped against my Justice League lunchbox.

“Cramming for history?” he asked. “I guess you got caught up in something yesterday.”

My eyes slid back to him, and a goofy grin lit up his face. What was he doing? I would have thought he was flirting if I didn’t already know he was into Kylie and that I wasn’t his type. I glanced down at my faded Invader Zim t-shirt and then at his polo. I pictured Kylie’s glossy hair, her dark tan, her classic pretty girl look, when I’d never been called pretty, not even by my parents. Just cute. Like a stray kitten or something. Definitely not Nathan’s type.

“I’ve got a test next period, and I’m not ready. If you must know, I was exhausted last night and fell asleep sitting up.”

His smile vanished, and he held out a hand. “Can I see your book?”

“Why?” I asked.

“Just hand it to me,” he said.

I slid it across the table and watched him flip through a few pages. Then, he pushed it back over, page open to one of the two self-tests in the back of the chapter.

“I had Mr. Brock last year. All of his quizzes are based on the second self-test at the back of each chapter. Not the exact same questions, but if you can answer the ones here, you’ll at least make a B.”

“Thanks,” I said, giving him a half-smile.

“And she smiles. Finally.” He leaned across the table and lowered his voice. “I love seeing those dimples.”