“Okay, but seriously. It’s not like I can go through the drive-thru at Souls-to-Go and pick you up a snack. Whether or not you and Haden have an uncomfortable relationship, you know he’ll help us. And he might not even be there, in which case Varnie is the next best thing.”
I nodded. She was right.
Haden would know what I was going through because maybe he really did need to feed. Maybe that was what was happening with Brittany and the others.
* * *
We went straight to Varnie’s. Haden wasn’t at the house. I alternated between fear, anger, and numbness. It was the numbness I tried to hold on to since it seemed to dissipate my unnatural cravings. Thankfully, my eyes returned to normal and I wasn’t drowning in a vortex of emotion any longer. The pangs of hunger subsided, and the whispers faded into silence. I was still very wary, though.
Gabe had a final in third period, so we sent him back to school, even though he didn’t want to leave us. He was really the only one of us with direct access to the sneetches anyway, so his job was “recon.” Donny’s nervous energy got the best of her, so she went for a drive to scout for Haden’s truck. Ame stayed with me and insisted on holding my hand even though I asked her not to touch me. I didn’t want to accidentally absorb her essence. She patted me and told me I was being silly.
How awful to be afraid of being alone with my best friend.
My heart hurt too. I was really trying to hold it together, but I was scared that the last band of my control was about to snap. I concentrated on centering myself, something that Amelia always talked about. I used to ignore her ramblings—what did I care about being “grounded” or “centered” metaphysically? Now it was a lifeline.
She suggested that I imagine a place where I was at peace, and my mind immediately pictured my favorite spot at the riverbank in Under.
The underworld was my happy place?
I loved that riverbank. The water reflected the rock bed beneath it—a crystallike stone that reminded me of highly polished lapis lazuli. The river flowed contentedly, never rushing, never stagnating . . . just a steady current around bends and turns. On the bank, a proud willow tree stood guard. And comforted me . . . literally. It never spoke, but I knew there was a gentle entity of some kind inside it. I spent a lot of time there, beside the tree, playing my violin while the breeze feathered the leaves gently. For those moments I was happy in Under, a thought that shocked me now.
Happy. In Under.
Just thinking about my river spot soothed me, though. I smiled at Amelia. I almost felt whole for a minute.
I remembered the unread note I’d stuffed back into my bag when everything fell apart at school. The paper had been torn from a spiral notebook, but it felt ominously heavy in my hand. I didn’t want to alert anyone yet, so I waited until Ame went to the bathroom to read it. I opened it slowly.
Be careful. You’re too trusting.
Who would have given it to me? Mike? He’d been talking to me in the hall before I found the note—but why would he warn me secretly? It made no sense.
Was someone trying to mess with me? Play games with my head? Maybe it was one of the girls who wanted Haden for herself. I balled it up and thrust it back into my bag. It didn’t matter who wrote it, or even why. They weren’t telling me anything I didn’t already know.
Varnie finally opened his office door, ushering his client gently towards the front door. His eyebrows shot up when he noticed us. “Oh, hello, dearies,” he said, his voice a terrible imitation of Mrs. Doubtfire. “What a lovely surprise.”
Varnie did most of his psychic work in drag as Madame Varnie because his clients seemed to trust him more when he was a middle-aged woman than when he was a young surfer. Today he wore a red muumuu and a matching turban. His face was under layers and layers of thick makeup, and the bodice of his dress was stuffed full of who-knew-what to give him huge, pillowy breasts.
“Hello, Madame Varnie,” Ame said in a singsong tone, teasing him.
Varnie glared at us from behind his client’s back. Then to her he said, “Same time next week?”
As soon as she was out the door, he swept the turban off and slid down the back of the door to a sitting position on the floor. “Duck my life.” He banged his head on the door to punctuate every word.
“
Duck
your life?” I asked.
He gestured to Ame with a chin nod. “Miss Amelia doesn’t like it when I swear.”
Amelia grinned back at him, her dimples on display, and she was positively beaming. I looked back at Varnie, who had dipped his head and was smiling shyly back at her. They were absolutely adorable. How could Ame still be blind to the chemistry they shared?
“Not that I’m not happy to see you, but what are you two doing here? Shouldn’t you be at school?”
“Theia’s having an exceptionally bad day. Have you seen Haden?”
He shook his head. “I thought he stayed with Theia this weekend.”
Ame and I shared a look. “They broke up,” she said, so I wouldn’t have to.
Varnie looked shocked. “Are you sure?” he asked me.
“I was there,” I said blandly. “The kids at school say he spent the weekend with”—I couldn’t say her name—“sneetches.”
Varnie grimaced. “That makes no sense. He doesn’t like those people you call sneetches. He says most of them are boring because they all try to be like each other. He says Gabe is the only one he’ll voluntarily spend time with.”
“And Gabe hardly hangs out with them anymore,” Ame said.
I tried to rub the chill off my arms. “Brittany and Haden haven’t been seen since Saturday night.”
“What’s really going on?” Varnie wondered. “You sound jealous. . . . Are you jealous?” He looked at Ame. “Is she jealous?”
“No!” I protested, a little too loudly. “I’m worried. That’s all. And . . . just worried. I should go to the hospital to check on my father.”
Amelia yanked my sleeve. “Not so fast. You have your cell. If there is a change they will call you. Right now we need to figure out how to keep you from wanting to eat your classmates every time you get your feelings hurt, and we need to find your boyfriend, ex-boyfriend, whatever, and figure out why the sneetches are all zombified lately.”
I bit my lip. “Do you think something is happening to them? Other than being knackered?”
Varnie squinted in a look of confusion.
“She means tired,” Ame explained to him. Then to me she said, “It’s a little coincidental that the people you dislike the most are suddenly shambling to class with pasty skin and bruised-looking eyes.”
“Wait. You think
I’m
draining their essence?”
Amelia looked at Varnie nervously. He quirked his eyebrows at her, but didn’t say anything. “Well, you have the ability.” She winced. “I mean, maybe it’s not you, but it’s possible, right? You don’t have much control over your demony urges, and you
are
jealous of Brittany.”
“I am certainly
not
jealous of Brittany. I can’t believe you’d accuse me of that.”
“Hey, now,” Varnie broke in, “nobody’s accusing anyone of anything.”
My temples throbbed. “It’s not me.”
Amelia put on her best super-sunshine smile. “You’re probably right. I’m sure you are—really, I am. But it would be really foolish of us not to look at all the possibilities.”
“Fine. What are the other possibilities? Let’s look at some of those.”
I should have told them right then about the Lure and the little girl’s nightmare. I just couldn’t say the damning words. They would think that I was like Mara then . . . and they wouldn’t believe me that I wasn’t the one taking souls.
The front door opened an inch into Varnie’s back and he groaned.
“What the hell?” we heard Donny say from the other side as she continued to shove the door into Varnie.
It went on for another few seconds until Varnie moved away so she could get in. “How come you don’t get mad at Donny when she swears?”
Ame shrugged, and just as Varnie sat back against the door it opened another inch into him. “Ducking A,” he moaned. “Nobody knows how to knock?”
“Sorry, dude,” said Gabe.
“Gabe, tell us what’s going on with your people,” Donny said as she plopped onto the couch.
“They’re not my people.
You
are my people,” he told her as he popped a kiss on the top of her head and sat next to her.
“Don’t get all sweet with me. You know I don’t like it.”
“Whatever. I know for a fact that you do. Anyway, you guys aren’t going to like hearing what I learned. Maybe we should just wait until we find Haden and let him explain. That seems fair.”
Donny rolled her eyes. “We’re not concerned with good sportsmanship. The entire school is saying that Haden is cheating on Thei and now he’s gone MIE.”
Varnie decided to sit in a folding canvas chair instead of in front of the door. While he spoke, he removed his turban and unzipped his caftan to reveal a Dead Kennedys T-shirt and board shorts. “What is MIE?”
“Missing in Evil. Gabe, tell us what the sneetches know.” Donny impatiently prodded him with her finger. “Like now.”
“Fine.” Gabe looked at me, then averted his eyes, choosing a spot on the carpet to focus on. “There was a series of parties on Saturday.” He raised his eyebrows at me, but didn’t tell the others he’d heard I had been to one. “Haden showed up kinda late to the last one and while he was there, they say he stuck close to Brittany. She was plastered and they left together. Nobody has seen either one of them since.”
Varnie snorted. “Well, that doesn’t mean he cheated on Theia. Besides, according to Theia, they broke up.” He removed his clip-on earrings. “I agree it looks bad, but he might have a good reason.”
“Dude, your breasts are really distracting me,” Gabe said.
Varnie crossed his arms over his chest protectively.
Ame sat up a little straighter in her chair. “What could possibly qualify as a good reason for cheating on Theia?” Her eyes were shooting daggers at Varnie. “Even if they’d had a fight, he shouldn’t have gone off with another girl the same night.”
Something in his expression softened and then solidified into an almost grim determination. I thought for sure he was about to stalk across the room and kiss her. I wished he would. I think Ame deserved to be kissed really soundly.
And it was past time for Varnie to tell her how he felt.
“Why are you staring at me?” Ame asked him. I wanted to pinch her.
There was a high current of tension in the room. I knew for a fact it wasn’t doing me any good. The air crackled with the weight of all the emotion that was pulling and pushing us in opposing directions. It was like we knew we were just one misstep away from chaos.
Varnie blinked, pulling his gaze from her. “He’s not cheating on Theia,” he argued.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“The guy is completely in love with you. I’d lay odds that you were the one to break up with him, because no way in hell or Under would he ever break up with you. Am I right?” He saw the answer in my eyes. “He’s not cheating. Whatever is going on, I’m sure he thinks that he’s handling it the best way he can to protect Theia and the rest of us.”
Gabe nodded, but Donny folded her arms across her chest like Varnie. “Wow, I feel so much safer knowing Haden is keeping the world safe by sacrificing himself one cheerleader at a time.”
I slammed my eyelids closed and sucked in a breath. The thought of Haden kissing her . . . The sound of glass breaking startled me. Varnie got up and followed the sound to the kitchen. “Huh,” he said, in a characteristically subdued tone.
“What happened?” Amelia asked, following him. “Whoa.”
The rest of us got up to find out what had both of them awed. Varnie stood in front of an open cupboard. Every drinking glass in it was shattered into jagged shards.
“Sorry,” I said. “I think I did that.” I blushed. I could feel it heating my whole face. “I’m pretty sure it was me that blew out the windows at the Salad Bowl the other night too. When I get stressed, glass starts exploding and I see auras.”
Nobody even seemed surprised. That’s how crazy our lives had become. Donny just sighed as if she was getting accustomed to her friends adding strange things to their personality.
“Psychokinesis. Cool,” Gabe said, patting me on the back.
“How do you know about psychokinesis?” Varnie asked.
“Video games.”
“What exactly is it?” I asked, unsure if I wanted to know. I didn’t want any more demon powers.
“Basically, it’s moving or controlling things with the power of your mind.” Varnie rubbed his face, forgetting he was wearing makeup, so he wiped his hand on his muumuu. “There are lots of different manifestations of it. Blowing things up is a pretty cool one.”
“Except I have no control over it,” I added.
“Yet,” said Ame.
Gabe’s phone buzzed and he handed it to Donny after he read the message. “Holy shit. Gabe just got a text from the sneetch party line. Nobody’s seen Haden yet, but Brittany was just admitted to the hospital. Sources say she’s in a coma.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
T
he nurses wouldn’t tell us anything about Brittany’s condition since we weren’t related, and then they kicked my friends off the hospital floor too. Since Brittany was in the same wing in the ICU as my father was, I was able to monitor her condition by the expressions of her family while I sat in the lonely hall outside his room.
Her parents’ faces were drawn and pinched underneath their fabulous vacation tans. What a terrible way to end a vacation—though they all should have known it was ill-advised to leave Brittany unsupervised. What had they been thinking? It’s not like Brittany and the other sneetches were usually examples of good behavior. They were overprivileged at best and spoiled rotten at worst. Few of them had real responsibilities and fewer had ever experienced repercussions.
I would know—I’d been one of them for a few hours.
Brittany, who now lay comatose, suffering the same condition as my father, was not pregnant. I felt a little relieved at that, but then I felt worse. Yes, I was glad she wasn’t carrying Haden’s baby, but there was no known cure for what she and my father were fighting. The doctors hadn’t come up with anything, and Amelia and Varnie were stumped as well.
Was Haden responsible for her coma? I didn’t want to think it was possible for him to have been draining her slowly all this time—especially since we’d still been together for most of it. I hated doubting him, but I knew firsthand how difficult it was to resist the urge to feed.
I listened for more clues in the hall. Brittany’s family was so different from mine. Her dad golfed with my father sometimes. That was all the two of them had in common personality-wise. Whereas my father was formal and distant, Mr. Blakely was funny and casual. My father worked all the time, seven days a week; Brittany’s family was always going on vacations to expensive resorts.
Mrs. Blakely was an older version of Brittany—their sisterly image most likely helped along with Botox. Under the harsh fluorescent lights, though, she’d aged considerably. She and her husband both had. I tried not to be alarmed by that. Nobody looks good in hospital lighting, and they were under a great deal of emotional stress. I hoped that was all it was. I didn’t see their auras, and I didn’t want to, even though it might have helped me diagnose whether their pallor was related to demon activity or my own anxiety. I didn’t feel strong enough to go
looking
for human essence. None of my friends were around to bail me out of trouble if my eyes turned black like Mara’s and I lost control again.
A doctor came out of Brittany’s room and began talking in hushed tones to Mr. and Mrs. Blakely. Focusing very hard, I hoped for extrasensory hearing, but unfortunately my ears were not affected by the demon curse in my blood and I couldn’t hear a word. I left the uncomfortable plastic chair and meandered slowly past them, making a big show of counting change in my hand as if I was headed to the vending machines.
“She’s in stable condition. We still haven’t isolated the illness that brought this on, but hopefully the lab in San Francisco will have better luck. The courier is en route, but the lab will still need to perform the tests and receive the results,” the doctor said. “Unlike the medical dramas on television, lab work takes time.”
I dropped some of my change as I got just past them so I could hear more.
Mrs. Blakely sobbed into her husband’s shoulder while he addressed the doctor. “I don’t understand. How can she be in a coma with no reason? She’s been sick for weeks and no one has been able to find anything wrong with her. It makes no sense.”
“I understand your frustration, Mr. Blakely. We’re all working very hard to bring your daughter safely out of this. It’s just that every test result has pointed to a very healthy young woman. There is no medical reason that we can find for your daughter to be wasting away like this.”
At his words, Mrs. Blakely sobbed harder, and I had to get up off the floor and go to the snack machine to avoid getting caught eavesdropping.
Though not from the same doctor, I had been given a similar diagnosis for my father. They hadn’t had any luck from the lab in the city either. There was no head trauma, no disease, no medical ailment. My father, and now Brittany, were just withering, like cut flowers in a vase with no water. Their bodies were drying up, not because they were ill but because their souls had been leached out until only the husks remained.
At the machine, I pondered the snack choices absently. I wasn’t hungry. Not even junk food sounded appealing. I just kept turning the last few days over in my head.
A couple of hospital employees wearing scrubs got behind me, so I pushed a random button and took the trail mix it offered me back to the plastic chair. The Blakelys were no longer in the hall. They’d either gone home or were in Brittany’s room. I thought about going back into my father’s room to sit with him for a bit. The nurses said it was fine for short periods, but seeing him that way frightened me, and the tubes and machines made me uneasy. I wished I’d fought harder to keep at least one of the girls with me. They’d let Haden stay with me that first night, but maybe he’d used the Lure to convince them without my notice.
It was getting late and I’d promised Muriel I would be home before eleven. I allowed myself a count to ten and then I crossed the hall and pushed back the curtain that had been acting not unlike a portal between two worlds. On the one side, I could only speculate about what damage might be done, might still be being done, to my world. On the other was confirmation I didn’t want to face. My father’s condition couldn’t be explained away or looked at with rose-colored glasses.
I’d already lost one parent and I feared very much that I’d lost the other.
I hated the smell of the room—sickness and disease, and not just from my father. It was as if every infection that had ever been in the room had left a trace of odor behind. My father’s skin was an aberrant shade of gray. It wrinkled unnaturally and was mottled with spots that seemed to lack the energy to be any color at all—more like shadows of blemishes. Challenging my fear, I focused very hard to see any light surrounding him. There was none, though whether I could see it on command had yet to be determined.
I walked slowly to my father’s side, remembering that Amelia had told me to try talking to him, because maybe on some level he could hear me. He appeared shrunken, almost brittle. “Hello, Father,” I said. I had to clear my throat. “It’s me, Theia.”
I winced. Of course it was me. Who else would call him Father?
“I just wanted to say that I’m not giving up hope.” I blew out a long breath. “And I love you.”
I wished it had been easier to say that to him when it mattered more, when he was healthy. I stared at the stranger in the hospital bed, wondering if he could hear me, wondering if the specialists would deem his medical condition beyond repair. My father had a living will—there were going to be some difficult decisions to be made. I doubted I would have the authority to make them, since I was just seventeen—and I was glad for it. That kind of responsibility was too much for me to handle.
Funny how a few months ago I’d argued that I was old enough to make my own choices. Seventeen had felt like
almost
eighteen,
almost
an adult. Standing at the hospital bed of my dying father, seventeen felt aeons closer to childhood.
I pulled up a chair alongside his bed. I was afraid to touch him. I inched my hand across the stark white sheets but never made contact. He looked so brittle.
Sitting back in the lumpy hospital chair, I tried to think of more that I could say to him, if he really could hear me. Did he understand that Mara had done this to him? Did he know that I was the one who had brought her into his life?
I closed my eyes. What a mess. A few minutes later, I felt myself tumbling into the place between sleep and awake. I fought it, despite how tired I felt. I didn’t want to be vulnerable at that moment. I patted my cheeks and blinked briskly. I should go. Muriel had made me promise to take a taxi home, but a walk would do me good. Clear my head. Wake me up.
A movement caught my eye. The tubes running in and out of my father’s body jumped. I leaned closer to see if they would do it again. Had he moved his arm? Hope filled me, stirring my heart. If he moved his arm, he could be waking up. What I wouldn’t give to see him open his eyes.
There again, the tubes moved. Only my father was still . . . still as death. It was just the tubes. They began to ripple, morphing suddenly from clear to shiny black. From the ends of the tubing grew sharp metallic pincers and thorny, gruesome-looking attachments. I gasped as little needles dug into my father’s flesh, lancing and lacing his flesh in crisscross stitches of black thread. I screamed, but no sound came out. No matter how hard I yelled, nothing happened.
To my disbelief, the ventilator and monitors grew into a hulking, demonic machine and I could feel its sentience and malevolence as it sewed itself onto my father’s body.
“No,” I cried, reaching towards it until one of the black tubes lashed back at me.
I darted back and forth, trying to stay out of its grasp and trying to reach my father. His eyes opened in horror and the oxygen tube that had been keeping him alive choked him and he rasped with what sounded like an alarming amount of liquid in his throat. The tentaclelike tubing snapped and coiled around my wrist, drawing me sharply towards the machine that tortured my father. I struggled, but other tubes tangled around my waist and legs, holding me in place helplessly while my father’s tortured gurgles of pain and fear riveted my attention. His eyes were unseeing and full of terror. I don’t know if he even knew I was there.
I thrashed against the evil, trying to pull it off me and get to my father. The stitches were causing his skin to pucker and swell in some places, and in others they were being systematically ripped out, only to be redone. The machine was sewing my father to the hospital mattress too.
I finally got hold of one tube and yanked it violently.
“What the hell are you doing?”
My world tilted as I was pushed to the floor by someone in purple scrubs. I blinked as the rest of the room came back into focus and the hospital machines returned to normal, sounding an alarm. Several other nurses ran in, crowding my father’s bed.
“Get security up here. She was pulling out his IV when I walked in.”
“No,” I protested, my voice raspy as if I’d been screaming. “That’s not how it happened.”
I got back to my feet. My father, though still unwell, had no trace of stitching or wounds. His eyes were closed, his breathing measured and normal, thanks to the tube.
My God
. What was happening to me? To him?
Every time I blinked, I saw his eyes, full of panic. How could I have imagined the whole thing? It had seemed so real. Was I going crazy? Had the nurses been right? Was I trying to yank out the tubes that were keeping him alive?
I used the distraction of the medical crisis to sneak out of his room and then the hospital. When I got outside, I reached into the pocket of my hoodie to turn my phone back on, but something poked my finger sharply.
“Ouch!” I brought the injured digit to my mouth while gingerly using my other hand to find what had poked me.
A corsage?
A black rose corsage with spiny, barbed thorns that circled the stem like teeth. The lace was tied to it with the same black thread that had been stitching my father.
I hadn’t imagined it.
Somehow, I had gone to Under for those few moments. That machine, that torture, was what my father was living every second he was in the coma. I’d been in Under for only a few minutes. My father was still there. I could feel it. And it was up to me to get him back.
* * *
* * *
Everything was nearly in place.
He’d hoped for more time, more stolen moments of a life he should never really have had, but that was over now. Theia had made it clear that they were better off apart. Why he had tried to argue with her was a mystery. It was what he wanted as well.
No, not what he wanted. Never what he wanted.
But for now it had to be this way. Haden felt the screw turning in his heart with every passing minute. Soon she would know what he’d set into motion. She would be hurt and angry—that couldn’t be helped. He’d never meant to betray her, but that was how she’d see it. She should have known better than to fall for him anyway. And he never should have let her. No matter how fast he ran, his destiny always found him.
He ached from a place that didn’t exist before he’d met her.
If only they’d had more time.
* * *
I stole a car.
Muriel’s car.
She was sound asleep when I got home. Nobody from the hospital had called her yet, to let her know that her court-appointed ward had tried to pull the plug on her father’s life support. I had a feeling she wouldn’t have believed them anyway.
When I was younger, I used to wish Muriel was my mother. I’d never told anyone that. She was so warm and my father so cold—she made life bearable in that house. I repaid her in kind by stealing her car.
I grabbed only my violin and her keys from the house.
The road was unfamiliar and poorly lit. I had very little experience driving anyway, as Father had elected not to let me get my license. My hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly that they were damp with sweat but I was too nervous to remove them long enough to wipe them on my pants. I hoped I wouldn’t get lost; I’d been to the cabin in the woods only a few times.
The shack belonged to Gabe and his older brother, and it wasn’t pretty. They’d built it themselves, adding things like rudimentary plumbing and electricity as they grew up. A lot had happened in the cabin, though—it was where I’d been abducted and where I’d been returned. As I turned onto the rocky driveway, I hoped that the remoteness of it would be an asset to me. I needed someplace to go where no one would think to look for me for a while. I left my phone in the car—there was never any cell service in the cabin and I didn’t want to talk to anyone anyway.