Better Off Dead (27 page)

But not this night.

This night there came a tap at her bedroom window.   Lucy’s first thought,
Delia…

But both Gabe and Vin had promised her that Delia was incapacitated.    So the cold shiver that passed through her body was just needless worry.  But then she thought of Gabe.  How strong he was, how beautiful (was it okay to think of a guy as beautiful?) and how just looking at him anymore was making her entire body heat up, was even making her heart beat like the wings of a humming bird.

Another rap on the window.  Since Lucy’s room was on the second floor, either someone was tossing pebbles up at her window, or they were floating high enough off the ground they could just knock.  Lucy was hoping it wasn’t someone floating.  Of course, Lucy didn’t know if vampires could float…she hadn’t asked.

Cautiously Lucy slipped out of her nice comfortable bed and padded barefoot over to the window, taking a steeling breath…or three, before flinging the curtains aside.  She hopped back as the curtains fluttered and she saw nothing floating outside her window.   With a heated little thrill she hoped it was Gabe.  Just the thought that it was him made part of her shudder and she giggled as she pulled the window up and looked down to the earth below.

But it wasn’t Gabe, and it wasn’t a psychopathic blonde vampire trying to kill her.  Standing there on her grandmother’s lawn was Abbey Adams.  Her pink and black hair done up into two pompom sized ponytails on the top of her head.  Her pale skin was accented by the dark multicolored eye shadows and blushes that decorated her face.  And as usual she was dressed like a rock star…a punk-rock rock star.  Her lipstick was black and made her smile practically glow up at Lucy.

“I need your help,” Abbey said, fidgeting and switching her weight from five inch platform boot to five inch platform boot.

Lucy looked at her alarm clock and furrowed her brow at Abbey.  “It’s quarter till midnight.”

Abbey shrugged.  “Then we’ve got like fifteen minute to do this.”  She was giving Lucy that look smart people sometimes give her, like she needs to catch up.  But having that look come from Abbey was just funny/cute.

“Do what?”  Lucy asked, leaning out the window and smiling at Abbey.

Abbey looked to her right and then to her left, then she looked back up to Lucy mysteriously.  “A spell.”

~*~

Lucy slipped on a pair of jeans and a UCLA sweatshirt she’d picked up a couple weeks ago, when she’d decided that she would indeed be going to college.  She wasn’t real sure which school she’d pick, but she’d like the sweatshirt the instant she’d looked at it.  It took the place of the Stanford shirt her father had given her.  When the Feds took it with all her other belongings it had literally felt like they were stealing her future away from her. 

She pulled on a pair of Sketchers and took a look at herself in the mirror she’d installed in her room.  Her face was still freshly scrubbed looking, but her hair was a bit bushy from lying in bed.  She ran a quick brush through it and then tied it back with a hair scrunchy.

It might be the middle of the night, but she wasn’t about to go out looking like the monster from the black lagoon. 

Lucy Suddenly wondered if the monster from the black lagoon was real.  After all, so far two movie monsters had turned out to be not only real, but alive and kicking…well, the living dead in the case of vampires. 

Or undead…Lucy remembered hearing someone saying Undead American’s once.   Had it been a book or a movie…or on TV?  Buffy the Vampire Slayer maybe?

Lucy shook the thought off.  No use thinking of dark, slimy monsters when you were about to venture out into the dark shadowy night.

Abbey waited for Lucy outside her back door, sitting on the porch steps, her arms clasped about her like she was cold.

“Do you want a sweater or something?  You look kinda cold.”

Abbey stood and shook her head, making her ponytails shake.  “I’m fine.  We’ve gotta go if this is going to work.”  And Abbey turned and started walking briskly towards the woods behind Lucy’s house.

Lucy jogged to catch up, and then caught the fiercely serious look on her friend’s face.

“Why the dire face?”  Lucy said, falling into step with Abbey.  “And what kind of spell are you going to do?”

“We…we’re going to try a spell.”  Abbey led Lucy into the trees.  She tripped on a tree root but caught herself on a tree trunk and kept going.  A moment later they were free of the trees and in a small clearing.  There in front of them was a high iron gate, the kind you see in scary movies—every iron bar of the gate was capped with a sharp looking Fluer di le.  Abbey ducked down and slid through a gap in the rails of the gate.  Lucy looked around nervously, but then ducked down too, squeezing through the bars. 

Once on the other side of the gate Lucy lost Abbey for an instant in the misty fog.  But with a few hasty steps she found herself not only caught up with Abbey, but surrounded by long rows of head stones.  They were in a cemetery.    

This is so turning into a B horror movie. 
Lucy stopped, shaking her head.  “No offense, Abbey, but I’m not up for this whole spooky trip you’re taking me on.  I’ve had a really hard week.”

Abbey turned around but kept walking backwards.   She had her arms held out imploringly.  “I swear, this is so important.  I wouldn’t be asking if it weren’t.”  There were tears in her eyes, making them glisten in the moonlight.

Against the insistent feeling she kept getting that she should turn and walk away—or was that turn and run away?—Lucy took a deep breath and said, “Okay,”  then started to jog through the strange cemetery to catch up with her friend again.  She just couldn’t stand that look in Abbey’s eyes—desperation.  She knew the feeling, unfortunately, and since Abbey was truly her only real friend, she just couldn’t let her down.

It was probably just some chanting thing, maybe an embarrassing little dance under the moon and stars.

It occurred to Lucy that she had actually never physically been in a graveyard.  She was eighteen years old and yet she had never been anywhere near one of these places.  Sure, relatives had died—Daddy’s father, one of his brothers, and an ancient aunt from her mother’s side of the family.  But both her mother and father had always insisted that neither she nor Seth had to go.

Weird,
she thought, now walking in the moonlit night, surrounded by a crush of headstones.

Something…a tingle, or a chill, rippled through her body as if it were coming right out of the ground.  Almost like a weak electrical charge coming through her feet.

She stopped, momentarily dazed, and looked around her.  She could swear something palpable, something almost visible, was rippling outward from her.  Tentatively she reached out her hands, and even though she wasn’t touching the ground, she could feel a cold, dank energy flowing through her fingers with little electric shocks.

Wow,
Lucy thought as she turned around on the spot, looking at the ground and then feeling a pull, something literally tugging at her, pulling at her gut like a cramp…no, not a cramp.  More like that feeling you get when you’re on a roller coaster, and your belly flips over.

“Lucy…what’s the matter?”  Abbey was walking back toward her, eyes worried.  Or was it fear?

“I-I don’t know.”  Lucy touched the spot on her stomach were that feeling of being pulled at was coming from.  It was getting stronger.  And, to Lucy’s dismay, she was starting to feel hungry.  As if whatever was pulling at her was something she was yearning for—and had always been hungry for.

Abbey reached out and took her gently by the arm.  Lucy could swear Abbey jerked, as if she were feeling what Lucy was feeling.  She let go of her, looking at her own hand like there was something clinging to her flesh.

Why does everyone do that?
  Lucy tried to say something, but just then she realized what was pulling at her: the dead. 

She closed her eyes and tried to force out that sickening thought, but that just made the sensation worse.  It was like no matter where she was trying to drag her mind, there was something cold and dead—and inviting—calling to her.  And they were reaching back, trying to pull her to them.

Abbey grabbed her again, this time hard, as she pulled her along with her.  “It’s not far…and time’s almost up.”

“I can’t,” Lucy rasped as she tripped along after Abbey.  “I think something’s wrong!”

“Nothing’s wrong!” Abbey practically sobbed.  “Everything will be fine.  We’ve just got to get there…before it’s too late.”

Moving faster seemed to help, as if the dead couldn’t quite get a grip on her if she was moving fast enough.  “Where are we going?” Lucy said, but suddenly she knew.  Right in front of them a head stone had long, thick white candles atop it, and in the middle was what looked like a picture frame. 

Abbey stopped right before the headstone, pulled a lighter from her pocket and lit the two candles.  Between the moonlight and the dim candlelight, Lucy could make out a handsome couple, not much younger than her own parents, peering out from the frame, looking adoringly into the camera.

Lucy looked down and read the names on the stone.     

James and Julie Adams.  Beloved and Missed. 

They had died two years ago.

“I took this picture,” Abbey said, her hand shaking as her finger caressed the shiny black of the frame.  “We were so happy.”

“I’m sorry.”  Lucy couldn’t believe it.  She’d just assumed Abbey was living with her grandmother because her parents were getting a divorce.  She had never even thought they were dead; hadn’t thought to even ask.

“Don’t be sorry.”  Abbey swiped at the tears that were streaking her mascara.  “Your grandma and mine both couldn’t, or wouldn’t help me.”

“What?”

Abbey smiled bitterly, turning to face Lucy.  “My Gram’s a witch, yours is a necromancer.”

“I-I don’t know where…”  Lucy began to deny it, but the look on Abbey’s face said it all.  The jig was up.  “You know?”  Then another thought crossed Lucy’s mind.  “Did you know before I met you?  Like, is that why you became my friend?”

“God no,” Abbey sobbed.  “I’m your friend.  I just guessed that you had your grandma’s power, though hers is pretty much just a glimmer of what it used to be…nothing much at all compared to yours.”

“I can’t really do anything.”

Abbey rolled her eyes.

“Okay, I have done a couple things, but they were creepy, and I had no control over it.  I don’t think I can actually do anything on purpose.”

Abbey’s head drooped, her chin bending into her chest as a tear formed on her chin and dropped onto her black T-shirt.  Abbey sniffled and then looked back up, shaking her head.  “All you have to do—” she reached out and grabbed Lucy’s hand, something sharp biting into her palm, “Is forgive me.”  

Suddenly the pain in her hand was nothing.  What she felt was like the weight of the world tugging her by the guts down to the ground.  She fell to her knees, one hand still clutched in Abbey’s grasp, the other tried to hold herself up from being crushed to the ground.  Even with the pain, she could feel things.  Somehow she knew, could feel, that her blood and Abbey’s were mingling together, their two powers mixing—and that Abbey was directing Lucy’s horrible power, focusing its flow straight down into the graves of her mother and father. 

Lucy felt Abbey’s parents jerk as their bodies filled with her power…was it life? Was it their spirits?  Lucy couldn’t tell, and before she could look deeper she felt herself being pulled in a hundred different directions.  It was excruciating, and confusing, and made her stomach lurch. 

One moment she realized she was screaming like someone was killing her, the next moment the contents of her stomach were being disgorged through her mouth and splattering on the dried out grass of the graveyard.

“Come back to me,”   Abbey cried out, her voice shaking with grief and terror.  “Mom…Dad…I need you to come back to me…I can’t do this, I can’t live any longer without you!”

And like a tidal wave, Lucy and Abbey’s power burst from them and into the ground, and then it blasted back up at them both, knocking them back five or more feet.  Lucy smacked her head on the cold ground, which was better than on a grave stone, but it still hurt, and the dizzy, blacking-out feeling didn’t mix well with all the other nauseating, gut wrenching pain, and electrical shocks that were still surging though her body and mind.          

Lucy just lay there for a moment, feeling the power wash out of her body and seep into the ground around her.  The earth was cold beneath her, yet she was covered in sweat.  Her mind was still electrified, and she could feel things all around her moving, encroaching toward her.  She leaned up and pulled herself onto her knees, looking around her, expecting to see things running at her.  But nothing stirred, not even Abbey. 

She lay there on her back, not moving, her eyes closed.  Lucy crawled over to her and shook her, calling out her name, though her voice was hoarse.  No response.  She felt for a pulse and thankfully found one, then leaned down until she could hear her breathing.

Thank god.
  Lucy looked around, felt in her pockets for her phone—it wasn’t there!  She’d forgotten it.  Damn it!  She felt the pockets of Abbey’s black cargo pants; lots of pockets, but no bulges big enough to be a phone.