Evanescent (28 page)

Once I hit my old room, I’m more than a little
thankful there’s no sign of Hattie Tobias. The results have me
completely confused. And, God knows, I’ve no intention to speak to
Jones or Wes again tonight. It took all of my non-acting skills to
pretend to cozy up with my creepy uncle even if he does come off as
a sweet paternal figure on occasion. Speaking of paternal, what was
with that,
my
children
crack? Either he’s gone off
script or is experiencing an early bout of dementia—to be honest, I
really don’t care.

A soft whimper vibrates through the air.

My hair stands on end, my skin enlivens with
a shrill panic.

I brace myself, in the event the haunted
Tobias circus is about to pop into town. I only have a few more
days to find the rest of their demonic clan before their offer to
get us into the tunnels is null and void.

I pluck the phone from my pocket and send a
text to Coop.

R U OK? I’m so sorry I didn’t go with
you!
If Wes weren’t there, I would have fought my way into that
ambulance.

He texts back.
Already home. Just a few
stitches. Marky says hello. She wishes you were here.

I wish I were there, too.

A sniffling sound emits from the closet.

Do mice sniffle? I seriously doubt Ephemeral
has an infestation, or at least not a common blight of the vermin
variety.

I make my way over, soft-footed, and pull
back the door. The light pours in revealing Hattie the Human curled
in a fetal position bawling her hollow eyes out.

“Hey,” I say it sweetly, heading in and
plucking her to her feet. I lead Hattie to her bed and offer a box
of tissues.

Now that I know she’s only slightly mutated
in nature, I’m far less afraid of her.

“What’s going on?” I rub my hand over her
back and startle when I realize I can trace out every vertebra
running up her spine.

“Flynn is gone.” Her large eyes spray out in
a network of crimson veins. “I’m going to get in trouble.” Her
lower lip trembles as if she were shivering. I hadn’t noticed how
beautiful Hattie was until now with her full lips, her high cut
cheeks with a natural rosy glow.

She brings her hands to her nose, and I
can’t help but note her alarmingly frail limbs. I hadn’t noticed
her thin frame before. She’s been bundled in layers of sweaters and
coats since she’s arrived.

“Why would you get in trouble?” I want to
add, and
why are you so damn thin
but let it go for now.
Amber Garrett, my best friend back in Cider Plains was skinny as a
rail, with no butt or boobs on the hormonal horizon. She could eat
a box of donuts during every meal and have nothing to show for it.
So I decide to take it in stride for now.

She swallows hard and shakes her head as if
she’s said too much already.

A mean shudder races through me, and this
time it’s all for Flynn.

“When was the last time you saw him?” I ask,
carefully slipping my hand over the exposed flesh of her arm,
playing it off as if I were still trying to comfort her.

She squints into me and slides a good foot
away.

She knows—she’s a Celestra after all.

“He said he found them and that he would
bring me roses.”

“Flynn found your family?” I’m not sure how
much of this I believe. She’s still not the Hattie Tobias I thought
she was.

She nods. “He kissed me.” Her fingers
tremble over her lips as if reliving the memory.

Stupid,
stupid
Flynn. I knew I should
have kept a sexual leash on him. Who knew he was into Fems? Or at
least that’s what we believed she was at the time.

“Hattie…” I swallow hard. “I know who you
are.” I say it as a fact.

“You do?” Her brows pitch.

I so caught her. She’s not even trying to
deny it.

“Yes. I had your DNA tested. I know damn
well you’re a full-blooded Celestra.” I want to know
more—everything, but I leave that part out.

Her face loses its affect. All of the fear
and worry dissipate, and she lets out an eerie looking grimace.

“Look.” She points to her ridiculous
expression. “I’m practicing.” She lets out a congested laugh.

“Practicing what?” I reach for my phone in
the event I need to bullet out of here.

“Smiling.” She dulls out again. “Flynn
taught me all sorts of things. I can wrap my arms around you for a
very long time, but Flynn said not to do that to other people. He
asked me to save all my hugs for him.”

“Hattie?” I scoot back on the bed as a
morbid realization sets in. Her skinny body, her flat
personality—she does remind me of the Tobias sisters. In fact, she
sort of reminds me of how they looked in captivity. “Where are you
from? Where did you live before you came to Ephemeral?”

“In the tower.” She says it plain as water,
as if she hadn’t just made a reference to some medieval form of
captivity.

“Was the tower in Trinity County?” Somehow I
think the process of elimination is necessary.

She gazes off with a lost expression—her
eyes, blank as a doll.

“I don’t know,” she whispers. “I only knew
homely rooms, food once a day. But in this world…” she shakes her
head. “Everything imaginable is at your disposal.” It escapes her
lips with breathless wonder. “And you have no pain.” She touches
her chest just shy of her neck.

“Oh my, God.” I heave the words out as if I
had just stumbled upon a map to the den of terror itself. “Do you
know how to get back there? To the tower?”

“I won’t go. Please don’t let them take
me.”

“Who are
they
?”

Her entire body seizes, her eyes widen as if
she said too much already.

“I’m very tired, Laken.” She crawls under
the covers and cocoons herself against the wall. “Please, turn off
the light.”

“Sure,” it bleeds from me almost
inaudible.

My heart beats erratic as my entire body
breaks out in an ice cold sweat. I have a feeling whoever
they
are, is far more important than I think. After all,
they
went through the trouble of extracting a Celestra fresh
from the tunnels and depositing her directly into my room.

But why in God’s name?

Why
?

Whatever the answer is, I’m sure I won’t
like it.

The morning of Halloween, Hattie and I
stroll down to the dining hall together. I’ve taken her under my
wing these past few days for many reasons but the first is to build
a friendship, and it hasn’t been hard at all because she’s so darn
sweet.

Jen is seated all by her lonesome, texting
away as if her life depended on it, but I bypass her and head over
to Carter and Fallon.

“If we went to a normal school”—Fallon takes
a bite of her apple—“they’d let us wear whatever the hell we wanted
today.”

“Ephemeral is anything but normal,” I say it
low in the event someone gets slayed by a serious bout of school
spirit and decides to rip me a new one. In fact, if you want to get
technical, it’s all Halloween, all the time.” I blink a smile over
at Hattie. We had a long talk about Halloween and how freaky it
can, and undoubtedly will, be. She promised not to rat me out to
her “elders” if I promised to show her a good time like Flynn was
busy doing before he turned into a Spectator snack—
God,
I
hope that’s not true.

“So”—I lean in—“what’s on tap for tonight?
Freaky, slutty, or both?”

Carter sits up. “I’m going to be Cleopatra,
and Fletch is going to be Marc Antony.” She leans in and laughs as
though it were absurd.

It’s
totally
absurd considering the
Fletch I know and love would rather jab his eye out with a kitchen
knife than don any ridiculous costume—let alone a
theme
costume that might require a toga and sandals on his part.

“I’m a witch.” Fallon cuts me a dirty look
like maybe she really is, so I don’t push her on the subject. I
know for a fact she’s a “Treasure” which qualifies you as a Count
by proxy, so all other spiritual misgivings are more or less
unimportant to me at the moment.

“How about you guys?” Carter plucks at her
long curls while trying to detangle a knot with her fingers.

“We’re going to be cheerleaders.” Hattie
informs them. She’s got a bad habit of over annunciating her words,
which I’m trying to break her of. It just doesn’t sound natural.
Everything sounds forced as if she’s a robot, reading from a
script.

“That’s lame.” Fallon nods casually as if it
weren’t meant as a dig at all. “I mean Laken
is
a
cheerleader, so it’s not that far a stretch.”

“They’re probably adding blood and shit,”
Carter interjects with her gruesome defense. “You know, like a
cheerleader who just got run over.” She nods into her grizzly line
of thinking.

“
No
.” Hattie objects to Carter’s
macabre rendition of our not so haunted couture. “We’re going to be
pretty. I’m going to wear my hair in pigtails and wear red lipstick
and everything. But I won’t wear a bra. I don’t like them. I don’t
like underwear either.”

Crap. It’s spontaneous admissions like these
that are going to land her a bed in the Flanders home for the
undergarment challenged where I’m sure they have a “no bra, no
underwear required” policy.

Fallon and Carter watch her in stunned
silence before breaking out in a fit of hysterics.

“Did I say something funny?” Hattie asks,
alarmed by their reaction.

Before I can answer, a dark
presence—otherwise known as Kresley and Grayson appears. They choke
us out with their thick scented perfumes, honey and spice and
everything not nice. I swear they create their own brand of mustard
gas, simply by standing in the same room.

“What’s got everyone in stitches?” Kres juts
her neck out like a chicken.

“We were just talking about tonight.” Carter
dabs the tears from the corner of her eyes. “What we are and
aren’t
wearing.”

“Oh?” Kres leans in as if she were about to
lacerate me and was debating where to start first. Her dark hair
gleams as it swoops neatly down the side of her face. Her eyes
percolate as if a storm were brewing in each one. “It looks like
one of you is in costume already,” she purrs. “You’re a slut,
right, Laken?”

“I thought she was the village idiot.”
Grayson spears me with her impotent remark.

I find it ironic that both Kres and Grayson
accused me of being the very things they are—morons.

“Or maybe she’s both?” Kres and Grayson
break out in cackles, proud of their standard-issue insults.
Although I’ll have to give them credit, their two combined brain
cells did have the ability to flush out bargain-basement
mockery—whereas my superior intellect, albeit slow, failed to
report for duty in the comeback department. Per usual.

Nevertheless, they can go screw themselves
and they might just have to because I successfully managed to
highjack both their boyfriends.

Ha!
That’s the comeback! I can
totally feel the inter-synaptic high-fives taking place in my
brain.

They scuttle off as both Fallon and Carter
offer me a silent condolence.

“Why do you let them talk to you that way?”
Hattie shoots them a look that spells out
die bitches
more
than words could ever do.

“Don’t listen to them.” Carter jumps in.
“Just because you’re into two guys doesn’t make you a slut, and we
don’t even
live
in a village.”

My mouth gapes open and I just stare at her
a moment. It’s becoming, more and more, obvious each day why Carter
would be a perfect life-mate for Fletch.

“You’re right,” I say, glancing over at Kres
as she shoots me the middle finger. “Although it doesn’t change the
fact I wish they’d both disappear from the planet. I swear, it
would be doing all of humanity a favor.”

Hattie settles her black eyes over the two
of them and gives a silent nod.

“All of humanity,” she whispers.

Cooper

Before I met Laken, I don’t ever remember
being so punctual to class. She’s reverted me from an impressive
tardy streak to the owner of a nearly perfect attendance record.
Hell, I’d do both my homework and hers—write every report for her
for the rest of her scholastic career if she wanted me to. I’d
rewrite the history of the world in a monolithic manifesto if it
pleased her.

The bell drills through the hum of voices
and still no Laken. Edinger strides into the room, and for a moment
my stomach seizes at the thought of Laken being a no-show, but she
breezes in on his heels with Hattie, her newfound appendage, in
tow.

Hattie takes her seat safely tucked across
the room, which affords Laken and me a tiny window to communicate.
Ever since the sleepovers ended, it’s been touch and go. Laken’s
worried to say too much through texts or even over the phone, so
this is it.