Read S.P.I.R.I.T Online

Authors: Dawn Gray

S.P.I.R.I.T (6 page)

“Take it easy, Sam, you’ll make yourself sick,” he pointed out, as he sat beside me, his knees pulled up so he could rest his arms on them. I sat back, wiped the water from my chin. “I think your power output may be why you feel so parched.”

“It’s not easy controlling fire.” I smiled and watched as he reached over and held my hand. “What the hell kind of training exercise was that?”

“I don’t know,” Zander said, shaking his head. “But, it worries me. Everett wouldn’t ever place a civilian in danger like that, especially without knowing the extent of your gifts before hand.”

“Hell, we don’t even know the extent of this thing, how could they?” I rubbed my eyes and looked up at the sky, the cloudless, unending blue, and sighed. “I think we know what I can do, but it might be time to see what you’re capable of.”

“I don’t know, Sam, it doesn’t seem like a safe idea. Besides, without any electrical stuff around, it’s possible that I can’t do anything.” He stared at the side of my face for a moment, as I looked out over the ocean, and then smiled. “I’ve always wanted to make it rain.”

I smiled at him, and then turned in his direction, supporting my head with my hand, and watched the mischief cross his face. He stood, moved to the center of the sand and raised his arms to the sky. The sand began to swirl around him, as he stared up into the heavens, and the smile slowly disappeared from my face as I watched the storm cloud form above his head.

Lightening whipped out in every direction, hitting the ground around him. As the cloud began to grow faster, I could see the look of exertion on his face.

Let it go, Zander!
I pleaded, as his nose began to bleed, and suddenly a bolt of lightening streamed from the cloud and hit him in the chest. His hands dropped, along with his body, to the ground as he fell back limp in the sand.
Oh, shit!

I scrambled over to him, on my hands and knees, trying to avoid the heavy droplets of rain that pelted down upon us. The storm grew out of control, as lightening sparked the sky. Gently, I cradled his head in my hands, his brown eyes wide with wonder, as if he was uncertain that he had just taken a lightening bolt to the heart, and his gaze shifted over to me, the rain drenching my hair. He smiled widely, reaching up to place his hands on my cheeks, and I jumped at the shock I felt, as if static was passed between us.

He brought me down to him, kissing me with as much passion as he could muster and then laughed against my lips.
“We’re getting soaked!” I complained and helped him sit up.
“There was a small cave over in the corner, where the cliffs meet the inlet.” Zander pointed out.

With help, the two of us moved, weaving in an out of the sporadic lightening until we reached the dark cover of the cave. Zander pilled twigs near the entrance and placed his hand against them, letting the electricity arch away from him. The twigs caught quickly and soon a fire burned before us, warming the coolness of our skin.

“Ok, so now we know some of what we can do.” I laughed, rubbing my arms as I looked up at him. He glanced over the flames at me and smiled. “So, any guesses as to how we got the way we are?”

“That part I’m still working on.” He sighed, putting down the stick he played with. “Tell me more about your home, about your past before we met.”

“There isn’t much to tell,” I whispered, the smile slowly fading. “Like I said, I work as a tutor. My home life is really quite quiet. My parents still live in the small town I grew up in, but I don’t get up that way very much. It’s too long of a drive, to many strange memories.”

Zander moved closer to me, sat behind me and wrapped his arms around mine to warm me up as I shivered. He pushed my damp hair away from my neck and rested his chin on my shoulder, watching the fire with steady eyes.

“I hated it there.” I sighed. “When I was ten, I was swimming, the lake dropped out from underneath me and I couldn’t come up for air. I know I was struggling underwater, but all I remember seeing was red, as if blood distorted my view. No one knew I was out there. I remember closing my eyes, thinking that the water had won, and then there was this hand….”

“What’s the matter?” He whispered, turning me to face him.
“Have you ever spent the summer in northern Vermont?” I asked, and watched him shake his head.
“I went up there to visit my cousin once.” He shrugged, and suddenly took in a deep breath.
“What is it?”

His mouth moved trying to find the words as his eyes flitted back and forth, as if trying to comprehend the visions he was seeing.

“There was a girl.” His voice shook as he spoke. “Long brown hair, bright blue eyes, bright red highlights.” His eyes faded off, living in the memories. Suddenly, I could see what he was seeing, as his mind tingled against mine. “She wasn’t someone that…she seemed out of place. I remember sitting on the beach with my cousin, some of his friends and a crowd of people started gathering at the water’s edge. I got up, like something was pulling me to my feet, and I moved between them, stepped into the water and just swam. I had no idea what I was doing, no idea of where I was going, but when the pull stopped, I was in the middle of nowhere.

“The people on the shore were screaming, something I couldn’t understand, but as I treaded there, something soft brushed my leg. I thought it was a fish, so I swatted at it, but when I touch it with my hand there was…”

“A pulse, like a shock of electricity,” I answered, and watched as his eyes came back, the brightness returned and he was seeing my face once again.

“I dove in, brown swirling around me, and I caught a hand. It was like fire, the heat that I felt, heat that burned me right up to my chest, and I pulled her up. Just as her face came into view, the water weaved and someone reached down and scooped her up.” Zander shook his head, as his memories faded, and he looked down at the fire, unsure of whether or not to meet my eyes. “I never saw her again, they rushed her off to the hospital, and no one even mentioned her name to me. I asked who she was, who would have just stood by and let her drown. No one had wanted to move to help. They all just froze until I jumped in.”

“They said someone saved me,” I whispered; losing my eyes as the tear ran down my face. “They said that a boy had pulled me up so my dad could grab me from his boat, but they wouldn’t tell me who. They insisted they didn’t know.”

I turned to look at him and watched the confusion on his face. Gently I stroked his skin, the warmth of it seeped into my icy fingers and I smiled.

“It’s where I know you from,” I said calmly and watched as he looked up and into my eyes. “Instinctively when we met, I didn’t feel the fear, I didn’t feel alone. I felt you and the heat of you and I knew just who you were.”

“I didn’t want to tell you how familiar you were. It was why I couldn’t stand by and let you get hurt. When I saw you from that window, I had to get to you,” he told me and placed his forehead against mine. “It doesn’t explain the powers.”

“But it does.” I smiled, and watched his eyes open once again. “I felt the pulse when you touched my arm, so long ago, and you said you felt the heat. What was it that started them when we connected? I don’t know, but that was when they started.”

“What about the red light? What about the visions?” He inquired.

“Our link, maybe, the danger of you being in the attic, that creature, maybe it was what brought me here too,” I said, but shrugged at the same time. “It’s all a theory; I don’t think we’ll ever know.”

He wrapped his arms around me, gathering me close to his warm body as the storm outside raged on, fed by the emotions in the cave. I closed my eyes, listening to the sound of his heartbeat. I knew one thing for sure, that in the back of my mind whatever had gone on that summer had triggered what was happening now. I just didn’t know how to say it, and I wasn’t sure that Zander was ready for it.

6

I had finally stopped shivering, and found that despite the hardness of his abdomen, Zander’s tight belly made quite a comfortable pillow. He had gathered some softer twigs and greens from outside the entrance of the cave, making a pillow for himself, and the two of us lay quietly in the cool, yielding sand in the safety of the cave.

We had decided to wait until nightfall to move, wanting to avoid any unnecessary run in with Everett and his band of merry men, and found ourselves staying very quiet in the near darkness of the cavern.

I reached over and ran my hand up and down his thigh, as he lay with his leg bent, and heard the quick intake of breath. Smiling, I turned and looked up at his face as he smiled, a piece of dried grass sticking out from his mouth. Slyly, he looked down at me, giving me a sneaky wink as his hand caressed my bare stomach.

This waiting is driving me nuts,
his cool voice sounded, tingling against my mind.
I’ve never been good at observation exercises. The captain always made me stay behind because of my ‘bounciness’.

Is that a technical term?
I laughed and watched as his eyes flashed, and I realized that what I was seeing wasn’t a trick of light, but the way his emotions related to his powers.

He thought that stating that I couldn’t control my bodily functions would have gotten me in trouble and kicked off the team, so he made it a technical term.
Zander chuckled, brushing my skin with the back of his hand.

What exactly do you do?
It was the second time I had asked him the same question and received the same response, a guard built up within him and he sighed.
Ok, so its one of those ‘if I tell you, I have to kill you’ things, but really, if you don’t tell me, than what’s to say that I won’t get hurt more by being ignorant to the situation.

You’re smart and beautiful! I love it!
Zander replied, smiling once again. “Ok, I can’t whisper like that anymore, its hurting my head.”

I sat up and turned to face him as he lay there with his hand tucked up behind his head. “So, spill it, mister!”
“We are the Special Paranormal Investigative Research and Intelligence Team, SPIRIT for short,” he pronounced proudly.
“Paranormal, as in that creature that attacked you?” I questioned. “You mean he really was a shadow with bright red eyes?”

“Yeah,” Zander sighed, and watched me shake my head, afraid that he had said too much too fast. “That thing you saw through me, that was a target. I was sent up there to scope it out, to see how many there were, it’s what I do. I’m not as susceptible to them as the others are. You see, their eyes are hypnotic, and that’s how they kill you.”

“Like a spider and its web,” I whispered, staring down into the fire. “Do you run into a lot of them?”

“Lately, there have been more of them. See, they’re created by spirits who haven’t crossed over. They’re basically demons, who steal the souls of those who are dying and replace them with their own.” I felt Zander watching my reaction to this, but when I gave him nothing, he continued. “The church’s long time pastor had passed not more than a month ago. Since then, there have been a lot of sightings, not to mention deaths in the small town. So they called us in.”

“I’m going to guess that the late pastor wasn’t the nicest of people.” I shrugged.

“Not our area. You see, we didn’t care how they came to be the way they did, we just cared how to get rid of them,” he said, glancing over into the fire. “I had been feeling strange for days, waking up from night terrors, covered in sweat. Something in the back of my mind was telling me that I was going to have a run-in with the late holy man. See, once I go in and locate him then the other boys come in and clear them out. The way is just too technical to explain, but it’s a basic exorcism with high-frequency machines that send a bolt out and fry the sons of bitches where they stand, or float.”

“So, being that you have to get so close to them, they let you go in alone?” I questioned, shivering at the though.

“I’ve seen ghosts since I was a kid,” he explained and paused again, waiting for some type of reaction. “I guess I grew immunity to their powers, but now I’m thinking it was possibly because of my own powers.”

“I know how it is to grow up different.” I sighed, playing with the bootlace. “I could hear things that others couldn’t.”

“Voices?” He inquired and watched me nod. “Non-corporeal audio communication, it would explain why you were so sensitive to my visions, and why you developed the mental connection first.”

“It wasn’t that fun,” I said, giving him a fake smile and then it faded as I looked at the fire. “They would scare the shit out of me at night, which was when they were more active. My father insisted on buying this large house on top of a hill. The town’s people said it was haunted when we first moved in, it took me all of a day to figure out that it wasn’t just haunted, it was a portal between our world and theirs.”

“Wait, was it that three-story Victorian that sat up on Miller’s Point?” he whispered, as if it were a secret. I turned and looked at him, not sure of how he would know the exact location, but I nodded as my eyes filled with confusion. “It was the first place I looked into when I joined the team. Even that one summer that I spent up there was enough to convince me that something was going on. They had already investigated it twice by the time I was able to get clearance into the files. Once before you moved in…”

“And once when my grandfather passed away,” I finished for him. Zander looked at me and nodded. “I remember that. The man who approached me after the funeral was very scary. He gave me the chills just looking at him.”

“Sergeant Moore, he’s retired now.” Gently, he reached over and rubbed my back, purposely letting the heat spark from his fingers, sending chills over my body. “It’s all right to talk about it, you know. It’s not going to change how I feel about you.”

I swung around to face him, shock in my eyes and he softly touched my face.
How do you feel?

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