Elegy (4 page)

Chapter
SIX

I
must have figured out a way to black out but stay conscious. That was my only explanation for why I suddenly found myself sitting in a theater chair, staring blankly up at Kaylen.

A very angry version of Kaylen.

“What do you mean, a pipe burst?” she demanded, crossing her arms and giving me a glare that bordered on murderous.

I shrugged. In my semidelirious state, I must have dragged myself out of the hellish bathroom
and
conjured up an excuse for the sopping mess. Excellent work on my part, all things considered.

“I don’t know, Kaylen,” I heard myself saying. “It’s
your
plumbing.”

Most of Kaylen’s guests snickered. But from the corner of my eye, I saw Jillian shift forward ever so slightly. Judging by her clenched fists, she knew something had gone wrong. At the very least, she knew a pipe hadn’t burst.

“I’ve got to go,” I said abruptly, pushing myself up from the chair. Without looking at the other girls, I moved toward the pile of overnight bags at the back of the room. “Jillian, can you take me home?”

“What?” Kaylen nearly shrieked. “You destroyed the bath mat, and now you’re making my best friend leave
my
party?”

I hesitated, glancing at Jillian. Thankfully, she looked more than ready to leave, too. I let my shoulders slump and put on my fakest, most embarrassed frown.

“I . . . I didn’t want to admit it, but I
did
get sick playing Bloody Mary. I tried to wash up in the sink, but I kind of overfilled it. I’m so, so sorry, Kaylen. This is just so embarrassing.”

The apology worked . . . a little. Kaylen still looked frustrated, but the rigid line of her mouth softened and she uncrossed her arms.

“Well, after all the wine and the spinning, I figured that could happen,” she conceded.

In a last-ditch maneuver, I decided to ham it up to the fullest. For Jillian’s sake, since she still had to see these people at school on Monday.

“I don’t want to ruin the party. And it was so important for me to make a good impression. But I feel kind of awful now. Like, I might get sick again.” I wiped the back of my hand across my forehead, as if the gesture would prove . . . something. Clamminess, maybe?

“So how about I mop up all the water,” I finished. “And then just go home?”

Kaylen’s eyes widened and she waved her hands frantically. “No! God no. I don’t want you puking on the
floor
, too.”

“Okay,” I said, hanging my head in fake dejection. “I’ll just go then.”

Evidently my pathetic but determined charade had thoroughly spooked Jillian. “I’ll get our stuff,” she chimed in, a little too eagerly. She practically dove for our bags, digging them out of the pile and then using them to usher me toward the door. Like I needed any additional prodding to get out of there, and soon.

After a perfunctory good-bye to Kaylen and her guests—all of whom looked a little dazed by the scene I’d just made—Jillian and I raced out of the room, down the stairs, and through the front door.

Neither of us spared the Pattons’ McMansion a backward glance as we drove away. We didn’t say it aloud, but I’m pretty sure we were thinking the same thing: we couldn’t move fast enough to escape the house that had gone from creepily gaudy to just plain creepy.

Jillian and I hadn’t been on the road for more than ten minutes before she swerved the car onto a shoulder and stomped on the brakes. She stopped so abruptly that I had to slap my hands against the dash to keep myself from slamming into it.

Jillian shifted into park and turned sharply toward me.

“What
happened
back there?”

I shook my head, frowning as I settled back into my seat. “I’m not entirely sure. An ultimatum, I think.”

Her brow knitted in confusion—an expression that reminded me so much of her brother.

“Explain, Amelia,” she said. “Please.”

And so I did; picking absently at my sleeve, I described my strange meeting in the mirror. When I finished the story, Jillian turned away from me. For longer than I’d expected her to, she just stared out the darkened windshield.

Finally, in a hushed voice, she asked, “Do you think they mean it?”

I raised one eyebrow. “Which part?”

“The
death
part.”

I studied her face for a moment, and then nodded. “Yes, I think they do. I think they really will kill people if I don’t come to them.”

Jillian flinched but still didn’t look at me. “When are they going to start?”

I sighed and began to rub my right temple. “I don’t know. They weren’t terribly specific.”

“How?” she asked bluntly, and then amended, “I mean, how can they
kill
people? I thought you said that they needed someone else to do their dirty work on earth.”

“If Eli and the redheaded girl from my dreams told the truth, then you’re right: the demons won’t do it themselves. They’ll need some kind of ghostly middleman. But as my little visit proved, they already have one, don’t they?”

“Kade,” she whispered, facing me at last.

I nodded again. “Kade.”

Jillian shuddered. Even in the dark, I could see her pale visibly. “That’s not exactly someone I want to see again, you know?” she murmured.

I didn’t blame her. The last time Jillian and Kade interacted, he’d drugged and pistol-whipped her, and she’d subsequently killed him with a mouthful of ground oleander seeds. Not a memory that would make for a very happy reunion.

I turned away from her to stare vacantly out the passenger window. “You won’t have to see him, Jill,” I said softly. “This is my problem. I’ll deal with it, in whatever way I have to.”

Jillian stayed silent for at least a few minutes. When she eventually cleared her throat, I thought she was ready to reply. To agree with me. But instead, she threw her car into drive and swerved back onto the empty road. We skidded, fishtailing wildly between the gravel on the shoulder and the asphalt.

Jillian grimaced as the tires squealed, but she made no move to stop again. Once the car righted itself, she began to speed like hell had already started chasing us.

“Jillian!” I shrieked. “What are you doing?”

“Making it
my
problem, too,” she murmured.

Gripping the steering wheel with one hand, she used the other to pull her cell phone from its little nook in the dash and dial it with one thumb.

“The road, Jill—watch the road!”

Jillian ignored me and put the phone to her ear. I heard the echo of a few rings, and then someone answer with a rough greeting.

“Meet us,” Jillian said flatly, in lieu of hello. “You know where. And who to bring.”

She didn’t wait for a response, didn’t even say good-bye. She simply ended the call and began typing wildly, still using one thumb. I could only say a prayer of thanks that she did so without looking away from the road.

Then, after finishing the text, she popped the phone into its cubby and turned back to the task of driving like a crazy person. Even then, with both hands on the wheel and both eyes on the road, she didn’t speak to me. Each time I demanded to know our destination, Jillian just shook her head and drove faster.

Despite my familiarity with the roads and forests in this area, I had no idea where we were going. I didn’t recognize the side streets we passed, nor did I find any help in the endless rows of indistinguishable pine trees that flew by outside the windows. It wasn’t until Jillian slowed to an almost legal speed that I noticed something familiar in the woods to our right. Something black and glittering that ran parallel to our path.

A river.

“Jill,” I repeated. “Where are we going?”

This time, my question was softer, more urgent. But this time, Jillian didn’t need to answer me. I saw our destination soon enough, when she turned onto another road.

Ahead of us, I saw the hulking outline of High Bridge. We were still a little far away—the route Jillian had taken from Kaylen’s house to the bridge was a strange, twisted one—but I could see the yellow tape and sawhorses that decorated the entrance.

Obviously, the county was in no hurry to take down the condemned structure. It made me wonder what the county officials would do if they really knew what lay beneath that crumbling monster.

Whoever Jillian had contacted had beaten us to the bridge: a green sedan waited on a gravelly shoulder, just above the steep hill that led to the riverbank. Jillian parked behind the sedan and flashed her brights twice before killing the engine.

She put her hand on her door, about to get out, when she thought better of it and faced me in the dark. She didn’t say anything—just watched me until she turned abruptly and exited the car, too fast for me to react. I sat there, blinking and confused. Then, for lack of any better ideas, I followed her.

Here, the night felt colder than it had at the Pattons’ house. I didn’t know whether that had something to do with the breeze now coming off the river, or whether this place just made everything seem chilly and unwelcoming.

Jillian stood a few feet ahead of me, facing the other car and rubbing her bare arms furiously against the cold. I closed the distance between us warily, still unsure of how Jillian intended to make my problems hers. The fact that High Bridge obviously played some part in her plans didn’t help my mood.

Nor did the fact that Joshua stepped out of the sedan’s passenger seat. He saw Jillian first and gave her the barest of acknowledgments. Then his eyes caught mine. Through the darkness, I could see the apology in them.

I tilted my head to one side and frowned. I had no idea what warranted the Mayhews’ strange behavior. At least, not until the driver stepped out of the sedan.

Scott Conner—Joshua’s good buddy and Jillian’s newest crush—had no business here. Yet there he stood, his shaggy hair sticking up in peaks and curls, as if someone had recently woken him up from a deep sleep. Which, I realized, had actually happened.

Although we’d never technically met, Scott gave me a shy, close-lipped smile. It was a kind look, gentle, but it was far too familiar. Too knowing.

I took an involuntary step backward, away from Scott. I was afraid of him, then—afraid of the boy who shouldn’t be smiling at me in a way that suggested he knew my secrets, and felt sorry that I had them.

Joshua confirmed my suspicions, speaking quietly although no one else was around to hear us.

“Scott knows, Amelia. About you, and what you are.”

Joshua gave me a few seconds to process this news. Then he turned and pointed to the ugly heap of metal and concrete behind him.

“Scott knows, and he’s here to help us bring High Bridge down. Tonight.”

Chapter
SEVEN

N
o.” I tried to speak firmly, but my voice came out edged with hysteria. “No, no, no.”

My nerves vibrated as though they’d been strummed, echoing back anger, excitement, uncertainty, and even a touch of betrayal. I felt a sudden flush of heat, like my glow might break free and cut a path of fire across the road.

When Scott took a step forward, I held up both palms as a warning.

Come any closer, pardner, and I’ll blast ya.

I heard someone choke out a strangled laugh and then realized it was me. In an effort to control myself, I took a few deep breaths.

“No,” I repeated, locking eyes with Joshua again. “No to all of it.”

In the past when I’d been so clearly shaken, Joshua had approached me cautiously. Almost like I was a wounded animal. But tonight he rushed to my side, unafraid. He stood as close to me as he could, brushing one hand through the air above my shoulder.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “Jillian asked him to pick me up. Apparently he already knows—”

“I already know a thing or two about the afterworlds,” Scott interjected.

I blinked back, stunned. Not because Scott had just interrupted his friend—something I’d
never
heard him do—but because of what he’d said. His casual use of the word “afterworlds” was particularly interesting. It wasn’t a term that the average teenage boy threw around lightly.

The average
Seer
boy, however, was a different story.

I raised my eyebrows at Joshua, signaling him to let me work through this, and then turned back to Scott. Slowly, tentatively, I took a step forward.

“What do
you
know about the afterworlds?” I asked softly.

“Probably not as much as you guys.” Scott gave me another sheepish smile. “But enough to help.”

That answer didn’t satisfy me. I narrowed my eyes and moved one step closer, all the while keeping my gaze trained on him. “How?
How
do you know enough, Scott?”

He held up one hand in a motion of caution and, with the other, pulled something from his pocket. He raised the object into the light of a nearby streetlamp so I could see it, and then took his own slow steps toward me. When we were within reaching distance, he handed it to me. It looked like a thin, cheaply made wallet, its fraying edges held together by duct tape.

“Flip it open,” Scott urged. “To the pictures.”

I did so gently, opening to the small plastic sleeves that held a handful of wallet-sized photos. Scott pointed to them.

“Go to the third one. It’s a group shot.”

I flipped to the one he indicated and examined it, frowning. The photo was tiny, almost too small for me to make out the individual features of the seven or eight people seated in it.

“It’s my whole family,” Scott explained. “At least, all of them that live in Oklahoma. We took it a few years ago, during my freshman year. See? That’s me in the front row.”

He smiled shyly and pointed again. I peered back down at the photo and saw a younger version of Scott, with shorter hair and a few less inches of height, smiling up from the first row.

Then my eyes trailed to the back row, where the elders of his family stood. On the far left, standing a few feet apart from everyone else, was a white-haired woman with thick glasses and a broad smile. She looked strangely familiar, though I didn’t know why.

Noticing my stare, Scott leaned closer and pointed to the old woman.

“That’s my gran. She was on the decorating committee at First Baptist. The same church Ruth Mayhew used to attend.”

Suddenly, I knew where I’d seen her face before. She’d been in the church the day Ruth marched me outside and threatened me with exorcism. More importantly, this old woman had been at my cemetery, standing in a circle of Voodoo dust, the night Ruth called off my exorcism so that I could save Jillian’s life.

The woman in the photograph was a Seer. And Scott’s grandmother.

Which means that Scott is . . .

“How long have you known?” I whispered aloud, still staring at her picture. “What you are?”

“Not long. My gran never told me about this stuff, and she didn’t raise me with the superstitions, like Ruth did with her grandkids. But I know Gran believed in ghosts. And I know she had some pretty creepy after-church activities, judging by all the jars of weird crap she kept in her house.”

“‘Kept’?” I asked, catching his use of the past tense.

He shrugged, but I could see a glint of sadness in his eyes. “Yeah, she passed away this January.”

“I’m sorry,” I said softly. And I was, even if the woman had tried to end my afterlife. Loss hurt, no matter who it was you lost.

I closed the wallet and handed it back to Scott carefully, making sure that our hands didn’t touch. He took it from me and slipped it into his pocket. Then he shrugged again, more awkwardly this time, and cast an uncomfortable glance at Joshua.

“Jillian and I have been . . . hanging out a lot lately. She needed someone to talk to after everything that happened at Christmas, and when we put together all the different pieces about my gran—”

“Jillian realized that she had a new Seer boyfriend?” Joshua concluded bitterly. “One who was willing to listen to all of
Amelia’s
secrets?”

“No, no!” Scott flapped his hands desperately in the air. “Jillian never bitched about Amelia, not to me. She just warned me that something bad might happen again, and that we needed to be ready with a plan to fight it.”

“Like the ‘something’ that happened an hour ago,” Jillian added forcefully. She gestured to me emphatically. “Tell them, Amelia. Tell them about your little truth-or-dare disaster.”

I startled, surprised that I hadn’t done that yet. I’d been too wrapped up in the shock of another person knowing
what
I was, and why.

With a shudder that had nothing to do with the cold night air, I repeated my conversation with the dark visitor in the mirror. As I spoke, I saw Joshua’s jaw tighten and his fists clench reflexively.

Scott trembled too—with fear, not anger. But somehow, he found the courage to interrupt the end of my story.

“Amelia, we have to do something,” he urged. “Don’t you see that? For your sake, and Jillian’s.”

I wouldn’t have wanted to stand on the receiving end of the look Joshua now gave his friend.

“And who,” Joshua seethed, “appointed you safety inspector for my girlfriend
and
my baby sister?”

While Scott floundered to explain himself, I shot Jillian a similar glare. She’d betrayed my confidence, in more ways than one. At least she had the decency to look
somewhat
contrite, but that didn’t stop her.

“Okay,
enough
,” she ordered. “So I told Scott. So we’ve secretly been dating. So what? None of this is going to help us destroy High Bridge.”

I threw my hands up in the air. “And what exactly would the destruction of High Bridge accomplish, Jillian? Except maybe a little therapy for some of us.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Amelia,” she drawled. “Only close the gate into the netherworld forever. No big deal.”

“That’s . . . that’s not possible.”

Jillian crossed her arms and flashed me a smug smile. “Well,
we
think it’s possible.”

She signaled to Scott, who turned and opened the back door of the sedan. He rummaged around before pulling out a small, unmarked book.

“My gran’s journal,” Scott said, closing the car door. “It has all these Seer spells in it, and notes about how the afterworlds might work.”

Jillian plucked the book from his hands, rewarding him with a small kiss that made him blush and Joshua wince. Unbothered by the obvious conflict she’d created between her brother and his friend, she thumbed through the notebook until she found the appropriate page. Then she pressed the book flat and carried it over for me to read.

Beneath Jillian’s thumb, I saw the spidery scrawl of handwriting. But other than a few key words—“gate,” “darkness,” “dust”—I couldn’t make out the rest of it. I shook my head, blinking awkwardly from the concentration.

“I can’t read it, Jill—either it’s too dark out here, or she was too old when she wrote it. Maybe both.”

Jillian uttered an exasperated curse. “Well, I can read it. And it says that demons seem to link their gateways to certain structures—particularly those associated with rivers; these structures not only function as lures, but also as sources of the demons’ earthly powers. The journal says if we lace one of these haunted structures with Seer dust and then destroy it, we should be able to stop any harmful spirits from escaping.”

I paused, still studying the page in front of me. Then, softly, I asked, “What about nonharmful spirits, Jill?”

Beside me, Joshua stirred. Probably because he’d already followed my question to its logical answer.
I
hadn’t intended any harm to Ruth, yet her Seer dust—or Voodoo dust, according to Kade—had limited my movements. Kept me from entering or exiting wherever the dust had been poured.

The same rules applied to all ghosts, “harmful” or not. Intentions meant nothing to a line of gray powder. I couldn’t use something so pitiless, so final, to bar the doorway to and from the netherworld. Especially when a certain few ghosts still resided there.

Gaby, for one, and possibly my father. Even Eli, dark as he could sometimes be. Not to mention all the other souls that Eli and his predecessors had unfairly imprisoned there.

I couldn’t trap them in the darkness, just to save myself from it.

“No dust,” I said, shaking my head. “I’ll agree to do the rest, but no dust. We can’t risk the afterlives of all those trapped souls. Even if it means that the demons themselves might break loose.”

Jillian started to protest, but Joshua waved her silent.

“Amelia’s right—we can’t condemn the other ghosts like that. We’ll just have to do what we planned to do tonight, without the dust. And if anything bad happens later . . . then we’ll deal with it
later
.”

When he finished, Joshua gave me a small, reassuring smile. I knew what he was doing: asserting a compromise between Jillian’s plan and my own. Between the total destruction of the netherworld, and the total destruction of my soul.

Joshua just saw through me that well. He knew that this situation could end badly for me, if I thought I had no other choice.

Huffing angrily, Jillian stomped over to where Scott stood near the entrance to High Bridge. She started to complain to him, but he took her hand in his and leaned close to whisper in her ear. Instantly, her frown softened and the fury went out of her eyes. She hesitated, just for a moment, before whispering something back. Then she turned to me with a strangely rueful smile.

“Your dad, Amelia. I forgot.”

At that moment, I wanted to hug Scott. Instead, thick tears welled in my eyes. I tried to brush them aside quickly, but a few drops still fought their way to the surface.

“Thank you,” I managed to croak. “Thank you all for understanding why I can’t . . . why I just won’t . . .”

“Write your dad off like that,” Joshua finished gently. “Or Gaby.”

“Or
any
of them. Jillian, Joshua—you’ve seen part of the netherworld. You should understand.”

Slowly, and a little begrudgingly, Jillian nodded. She may not have liked it, but she knew I was right. Very few souls deserved to spend eternity in that place.

I cleared my throat of the remaining lump that my tears had left.

“So, now that that’s all settled, how do we do this? How do we destroy High Bridge?”

Scott and Jillian exchanged a look—one I couldn’t quite identify—and he grimaced. Then he reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a small, rounded object, and lifted it into the glow of the streetlamp. Light glinted off the object’s metal shell, like some cold, sadistic wink.

No one said anything. No one even moved.

Well, aren’t you just a bag of tricks tonight, Scottie-boy?

I let out a noise that sounded like the offspring of a hiccup and a hysterical giggle. Then, in a bemused voice that I almost didn’t recognize, I asked, “Would someone please tell me that that’s not a grenade?”