Insanity (8 page)

Levi’s voice dropped even lower, and he seemed to be chanting. Whatever held me turned me loose, and I found myself walking. All I could see was beauty in the darkness. Voices started to sing, sweet and soft and achingly haunted, and I had to get closer. I had to see the singers.

Keeping up his chant, Levi moved Sally and Decker to the edge of the darkness, which turned misty and spread into the hallway. Black fog spilled toward my feet, and when it reached me, I heard the singers more clearly.

Yes. That was right. I needed to keep walking.

Levi joined Decker’s hand to Sally’s. “This is for Forest,” he said, and eased them into the breach together.

He followed them, palms on their shoulders.

I followed him.

Stardust blended with midnight and nothing. Obsidian mist chilled my face, and still the singers called to me. How could anyone hear that sound and not answer? I wanted to sing with them until I laughed and cried and forgot everything I had ever known. I wanted to dance until I couldn’t dance another step.

Black became light, and light sizzled into blackness. I smelled pine and honey and fresh river water rushing over smooth gray rocks. I heard the daylight and the moon, smelled tomorrow, and felt yesterday’s breath on my neck. My bracelet grew thorns that stabbed deep into my wrist, and the pain tasted like sunshine.
Nothing dissolved into everything, and I walked into a meadow with blue-green grass that tickled my fingertips as I bled on the soft brown earth.

Decker and Sally ran ahead of me, laughing and holding hands, until they vanished into the weeping branches of nearby willows. I had a sense of life all around me, life and death and everything in between. There was so much beauty here, and so much darkness. The grass, the dirt, the rocks, the trees—they all seemed to be aware of me.

They all seemed to be reaching for me.

“Forest!” Levi’s shocked voice snaked beneath the songs in the fresh, warm air. Then he was standing in front of me. He was taller here, and too handsome to believe.

Grass wound around my ankles. Leaves drifted down from branches and landed lightly on my cheeks. Vines seemed to grow where I stood, stroking my legs and filling me with their joy. Birds and squirrels came closer, to stare at me. Deer and wolves, too, and stuff I didn’t recognize.

“Forest,” Levi said again.

This world seemed to know me. It was waiting for me, and had I been waiting for it? I felt completely alive and totally at peace. I didn’t even care about the darkness at the edge of my vision.

I wrapped my arms around Levi’s neck and held him close, feeling his warmth and his terrifying power cover every inch of my skin. He smelled better than anything. He wasn’t hurting me and I wasn’t burning him, not here in this perfect moment, in this perfect place.

A storm was coming. It charged toward me from far out on the edges of my awareness. I felt it, I knew it, and I didn’t care. It was death, and I was life. I wouldn’t allow it to touch us.

Levi cradled me like a fragile thing, binding me to him and setting me free forever, until he broke the embrace and broke my heart, pressing his lips against my ear and telling me in a voice like distant thunder, “You can’t be here. It’s not safe.”

He pushed me away from him, away from the onrushing storm, and I fell backward.

I fell into darkness.

I fell forever.

And I landed alone in a dark stone hallway, bleeding from a dozen holes in my wrist and listening to the sound of my own sobs.

The bells were still ringing.

Leslie wept as she held my bracelet out of the way and bandaged my wrist.

It was too much for her, losing Miss Sally and me in the same night. She told me so—two or three times—and she never seemed to hear me when I said I was sorry. She kept looking at the pink slip on the bench beside me and shaking her head, saying it wasn’t right. The ghosts in her braids kept smiling at me, and I tried not to look at them. The line between real and not real wasn’t so clear to me yet.

I wasn’t sure if it ever would be again.

Through the open door of the nurse’s station, I saw the
gurney go by with its pitiful cargo, the sheet pulled tight and tucked over Miss Sally’s head and feet.

“The bells rang from the time she died until the minute I found you,” Leslie said. “Two solid hours. Where did you go, girl? And where you goin’ now, without this job?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted, tears slipping down my cheeks. Had I really dreamed about a field with singers and lovers and a handsome guy with the blackest eyes I’d ever seen?

I couldn’t quite settle on my memories. They kept changing. One second, Levi’s appearance and Decker Greenway’s meeting up with Miss Sally seemed solid and right and real. The next, I lost the details, and everything turned to black fog and haunting songs.

“Something happened to you,” Leslie said. “I know it did.” She pulled me to her and kissed my forehead. “Let me take you home with me. See to you ’til you come back to yourself.”

My heart leaped at this suggestion, but my bracelet tingled above the thorn wounds, and the beads started to burn.

Going with Leslie wouldn’t be right, maybe not for me, or not for her—but the bracelet was giving me a clear message, so I hugged her, and I said no, and she cried.

My last night as a Lincoln employee felt like both the worst and best moment of my life.

I gave Leslie my badge and keys and left the geriatric ward without waiting for Security like I was supposed to do. I didn’t travel in the normal way, though. I moved ... to the left a bit. Somehow. I stepped to the side of what was supposed to be and
what had always been, moving into the world that ran just under-neath and beside the one I had grown up knowing.

Doors unlocked when I touched them. Nobody noticed that but me. And nobody even glanced in my direction when I crossed the campus to Tower Cottage, pressed my palm against the griffin door knocker, walked inside, and climbed up the stairs toward the painted sky. If I kept going up, I knew I could walk into somewhere else. But I didn’t, because Levi had told me that the other side wasn’t safe for me. Going there once had already changed me in ways I didn’t understand. So I stopped at the bells and sat staring out at Never, Kentucky, until night went away and sunlight covered my cheeks with warmth.

Time passed, but it passed outside of me. I had no more part in it. I didn’t know how or why, but I knew I was separate from time now, still human, still myself, but more ... aware. I couldn’t put it into words, but I knew that going to the other side had awakened something deep inside me, some kind of power. I couldn’t describe it except to say that I was living outside everything I had ever known.

Ten hours or ten months or ten years might have passed before I came down from the tower. I hadn’t changed on the outside, but other things had. I walked back to the geriatric ward, enjoying the spring flowers and budding trees. Inside, I noticed new paint and different light fixtures. The clothing room sign was gone. A new-looking white plaque read PATIENT BELONGINGS.

The doors didn’t have locks anymore. Instead there were little boxes with red lights that scanned bar codes on badges to let
people through. The lights turned off when I touched them, and the doors opened. Nobody paid me any attention as I made my way to where I knew I needed to be.

Leslie Hyatt was now in the room where Miss Sally Greenway had lived and died. I wondered if Leslie had asked for it. She seemed so tiny now, with hair thicker and whiter than Miss Sally’s had ever been. I gently bathed Leslie and picked her out a gown of spring purple. Then I changed her sheets and made sure her room was spotless. Later that day, when I held the straw for her to drink a chocolate shake, the confusion left her eyes for a moment, and she stared at me and took my hand and whispered, “I always knew I’d see you again. You’re one of those old souls, girl. I know you are.”

I hugged her and kissed her cheek and took care of her until she didn’t need me anymore.

Most people who die, they don’t linger. It’s a good thing.

He came to me the day after Leslie died, or maybe it was the next year. Time didn’t matter much anymore, or at least, I didn’t think it did.

I was sitting with the bells in Tower Cottage again, gazing out at the riot of fall colors spreading through Never.

Levi sat beside me, careful not to touch me, but so close his jeans brushed mine every time he took a breath. He was handsome as ever, and I wanted to slap him, and I wanted to kiss him, and that was okay for now. I was glad to see him.

And I was ready.

“At least we know for sure you’re like Imogene and me,” he said. “Otherwise you couldn’t have gone to the other side and come back.”

“So I’m ... unforgiven,” I muttered.

He snorted. “I guess, yeah. You’re one of us.”

One of us.
That was a new one. I’d never really been part of group before. Now I was officially ... what? A granny-woman?

Yay?

“What does it mean?” I asked him. “‘Unforgiven.’ What did we do to need forgiving?”

Levi shrugged. “Nothing. Our great-greats must have been real pains, though. According to Imogene, until the good Lord decides to give us a pass and let us get old and die like normal folks, we have work to do to make up for their evils.”

“Nice to know.” And not something I really wanted to think about. I glanced at Levi, enjoying the way the light kissed the teardrop tattoos on his cheek. “If I take the bracelet off, can I touch you without burning you?”

“Probably. But don’t.” His hand twitched like he wanted to rest his fingers on my knee. I wished that he would, but I knew he couldn’t. “You might need it someday, and I’d rather you be safe than sorry.”

“When can I go back to the other side?”

He laughed. “Someday.”

I leaned back, letting my head loll against one of the big bells. “Man, when someday
does
show up, I’m going to keep it busy.”

Levi laughed again. I really enjoyed that sound.

“Imogene’s waiting,” he said. “She’s got a bunch of lessons for
you, about Madoc bloodlines and haunts and haints and shades and spooks and stuff. She’s been writing definitions of every spirit she’s seen at Lincoln for most of her life, and she’ll teach it all to you whether you want to learn it or not.”

“Tons of fun,” I muttered. “Can’t wait. I’m still planning to go to college, too, just so you know.”

“Fine with me.” Levi stood. “I like hanging around with smart girls.”

I could tell he wanted to offer me his hand, but he refrained.

I pushed myself up and stood with my lips perilously close to one of his bright-red teardrops and whispered, “Have you seen Decker and Sally since they crossed over?”

He hesitated, just for a heartbeat. Then, “Yeah. I have.”

I grinned. “Are they together?”

“They’re together.”

“And happy?”

“Yes.”

“I’m waiting.”

Levi rolled his eyes. Then he cleared his throat and said, “You were right, and I was wrong.”

“See? I’m not the only one who can learn lessons.”

“And rabbits aren’t the only things I can feed my hounds.”

I wiggled my fingers right in front of his nose. “Ooh. Scary. Why do you act like such a bad guy?”

His grin was wicked. “Maybe I am bad.”

“Not buying it.” I kept my eyes on his, and he looked away first.

“Imogene, she’s all brightness, but me...” He shrugged. “I
was pissed off and sad for a long time. I understand darkness best, I guess. I use it to do what I need to do with the spirits around Lincoln.”

“You can understand darkness without being dark, Levi.” He didn’t believe me, I could tell. And he was through talking, which was okay by me. I could let it go. For now.

Levi slipped around me, ducked under the bells, and stepped out of the tower, moving back to the real world through the painted sky.

I followed him down to the asylum, giving one of the bells a push as I went.

Part II
Hungry

Darius

Chapter Eight

Grandma Betty wasn’t blind when she was born, but she was blind when she died in Lincoln Psychiatric Hospital. Blind, and a whole lot crazy.

Trust me, she had her reasons.

“Darius,” she muttered from her bed on the geriatric ward.

I bent down, and she wrapped her knobby fingers around the pendant she gave me when I was little. It was a petrified wooden thorn, about the length of my pointer finger, black and shaped like a shark’s tooth.

Sunlight streamed through the little windows at the top of the stone walls. It spread through the room, warming everything except Grandma. She was so cold that she could never get warm again, and I took hold of one of her hands. With the one holding the pendant, she used the thorn’s leather cord to pull me down a few inches from those scarred, white patches where her eyes used to be.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m all that’s been holding him
back, but now I have to go.” Her voice shook, but the fire that had burned her face stole her crying, too. She didn’t have any way to make tears.