Hidden Moon (27 page)

Nah, I thought, I’m just imagining things. Nothing is wrong, I just have to cheer at the game. Everything is fine.

EMILY RAN STRAIGHT into me. She wrapped her arms around me as soon as I cleared the front door. “Nikki,” she wailed.

“What? What is it?” I asked as I tried to dislodge her from my legs.

“Fred, it’s Fred. I’ve lost him, Nikki.” Tears streamed from her eyes, and she started to hiccup, “I can’t find him anywhere.” At the last word, she bawled, shrieking octaves that only a distraught toddler could reach.

“It’s okay. We’ll find him. C’mon, I’ll help you,” I coaxed. I patted her brown curls until she calmed down. A few errant tears squeezed out of her eyes. She took a deep breath, wiped her running nose on the back of her hand, and then nodded.

Ick, I thought. I grabbed her other hand and took her upstairs to search her room. I dove into the toy chest, shook out the covers on the bed, and searched the closet, but couldn’t find a clue as to the stuffed bear’s whereabouts.

“He’s not there,” Emily said, watching me got ready to crawl under the bed. “I done looked.”

“You mean ‘you’ve already looked,’“I corrected, bending over to search through a mountain of dolls.

“That’s what I said,” she sniffled and wiped her nose again. “And I done looked there, too.”

“Okay.” I puffed out a breath and straightened back up. “Where haven’t you looked?”

She took a long look around the room. “I’ve looked everywhere.” Her bottom lip quivered, and the tears started up again, I bent over and picked her up.

She wrapped her arms and legs around me, then buried her face in my hair, and whispered, “I’ll never find my Fred, Nikki. Not never.”

I patted her back as I carried her back downstairs. “He’ll show up. He’s not lost, just misplaced is all.”

“Who’s lost?” A muffled voice came from the other side of the screen door.

Catching the door with her foot, our mother came in with her arms full of grocery bags. She made her way to the kitchen to set them on the counter.

Emily wriggled in my arms. As I set her down, she ran over and locked her arms around our mother’s legs.

“Easy, honey.” Mom wobbled with the sudden force, nearly dropping a carton of eggs. She peered down into her youngest child’s face. “What’s going on, baby?”

“I’ve lost my Fred, Momma,” Emily said solemnly, as if to make certain she had relayed the seriousness of the predicament.

“Okay, let me finish this up,” Mom said as she tossed salad mix into the refrigerator.

Emily stood patiently, and beamed a smile at me as if she was sure of her mother’s ability to fix any problem, regardless of magnitude. Apparently, big sisters just didn’t cut it sometimes.

“Go ahead and get ready, Nikki. You don’t need to be late. I’m dropping Em off at a friend’s house later, so we may not be here when you get home.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. I would have loved to have the excuse to stay and watch my little sister instead of going to the game.

“Absolutely. We’re fine, and we’ll find Fred, no worries,” she said. “Have fun tonight, honey.”

“Okay,” I gave her my fake-smile and went upstairs to get my cheerleader outfit on.

“Since you’ve checked everywhere else, I’m betting you’ve left Fred in the car earlier today.” I heard Mom’s voice carry up the steps before the front door closed.

As the house went silent, I eyeballed the green and white outfit lying on my bed. “May as well get it over with,” I mumbled, grabbing the top and pulling it over my head. I hoped the Keepers would find Tiffany, and bring her skanky butt back. Then maybe everything would quiet down, and I could find a way to quit the cheerleader squad. For some reason, Tiffany stayed on my mind the whole way to school until I reached the football field.

The evening was cool. I shivered, wondering whose idea it was to start football season on what was the coldest night I could remember. I stood on the side of the field with the rest of the squad and rubbed my bare arms, hopping lightly from one foot to the other. I took a deep breath, watching as it condensed and floated in front of me like mist the second it left my lips.

The game would start soon, and then hopefully I would warm up. A quick glance to either side of me proved that I was in the minority of the group freezing to death. Most of the girls had jackets or hoodies, and were standing patiently as they waited for the game to begin. I only counted three of us that stood with our teeth chattering.

After what seemed an eternity, the doors on the side of the school burst open and a sea of green and white helmets ran out to the field. The Bland Wolves, playing on their own field, were welcomed with a cheering crowd and a few, chattering cheerleaders. The opposing team, the Valley Bears, rallied on the opposite side of the field.

The pompoms swished up and down, as we began our routine and started to warm up.

I felt anxious and I didn’t know why. My heart started racing and my palms started to sweat. One pompom slipped out of my hands and I had to bend over to pick it up. When I straightened up, I swooned and took a step backward, smacking into the girl behind me.

“Watch it,” she warned under her breath.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, I tried to catch up with the rhythm of the routine. I felt clumsy, as if the moves we had practiced for weeks were new to me. I did my best, but still was out of time with the others.

I caught Ronnie giving me a strange looks, as if she were trying to figure out what planet I was from and how she could send me back there.

I tried harder and did a little better, but was still off by a second from the others. I shook my head, trying to focus. I felt terrible, as if something were looming in the shadows to swallow me. Dread choked out my voice, and I gave up chanting with the others and tried to keep moving to the beats of the music. I felt like a robot, moving in short, choppy motions that should have flowed.

I took a wrong step and collided into the girl beside me. Avoiding the disaster of the whole squad, she barely kept from whacking into the girl next to her and setting off a domino effect.

I jumped out of the line, apologized to her, and then started toward a nearby bench.

“Are you okay?” Ronnie asked over the music as I walked by.

I nodded. “Dizzy,” I mouthed and pointed to the bench.

She gave me a quick nod and I plopped rather ungracefully onto the hard wooden bench, backed by the speakers. I breathed in long gulps of cool air. My heart was still hammering, so I focused on the field, and the school band that marched across.

Suddenly, I was staring into my little sister’s huge, terrified brown eyes. I glanced down to a big hand covering her mouth as her own small hands tried to pry it free. Terror seeped inside me as I watched her fight.

“Emily,” I screamed, and suddenly was back again at the football field, standing near the bench. With all the noise, no one had heard me. The cheerleaders kept with their routine while the music blared beside me.

A flash of opal-white skin caught my eye across the field in the bleachers. She sat at the edge, and her blue, fathomless eyes were fixed on me.

Wynter had heard me scream.

She looked at me with such a sorrowful expression, that I felt as if my own heart were breaking. She lifted her hand towards me and said a single word, and then disappeared as if she had never been there. I blinked.

Emily’s brown head popped up in my vision again. The tight corkscrews of her hair bounced as she was carried around a set of bleachers, toward the dark edge of the forest.

She was here at the game. Those bleachers were on the far side, where no one sat on account of the poor view. I ran around the side parking lot, to the far side of the grounds and the trees came into view.

Beware…Beware!
Wynter’s warning whispered in my mind.

All sense of caution left at what I saw lying on the ground. Near the trees, Fred, Emily’s cherished bear, lay sprawled in the dirt. I started sobbing and bent to pick him up. I was too late. Someone had taken Emily. Hysterical, I turned to run for help.

I sensed him behind me a second before pain exploded in my head. Everything went black.

I WAS COLD. Shards of ice seemed to be running along my bones, chilling my blood. I stretched, trying to feel my legs. One thing was certain, I wasn’t dead. It hurt too much. But where was I?

I lay still, trying to get my eyes to focus in the darkness. My eyes adjusted on a small crack of light that was shining down from high above. My head was laying against something hard and slick, propping me up at a weird angle as if I were a marionette with no strings. Uncomfortable, I lay still and tried to take a mental inventory of my body. Everything from my chest down ached in a surreal way, as if it wasn’t really my body, but someone else’s. The back of my head, by far, felt the worst. It felt as if my heart had decided to move there and work at thumping its way out of my skull.

Calm down
,
I thought, take deep breaths.

Getting my wits about me, I tried flexing my feet. Nothing broke there, just numb. A small current lapped up, splashing cool and wet against my neck.

It’s okay, it’s just water.

Forgetting any attempt at being calm, I sat up. The dark, murky water reached my waist, baring my chest to cold, stale air. I sucked in a startled breath. I sat motionless, resisting the urge to sink back into the water, which seemed a few degrees warmer.

It’s okay, I told myself. Adam will come for me soon.

Heartened by this idea, I focused all my energy on finding him. Surely, he would know I needed him. He always knew where I was.

Adam, please. I need you.

I couldn’t hear him, I stretched my thoughts out farther, seeking any link I could find. Everything was quiet. Getting worried, I tried to send out feelers for the others and took down all my mental blocks that had been keeping everyone out.

Erik. Ed. Michael, Tommy?

The darkness answered me in silence. Where were they? My mind hadn’t been so alone in months.
I
hadn’t been so alone in months. And I didn’t like it. Wherever I was, something had to be blocking me, or maybe I was just too far away to hear them.

Silently, I prayed I wasn’t in a Deadland. But even if I were, I knew that I had to do something. That meant I was going to have to get moving and find a way out of there.

When I moved, something other than water brushed my hand. A faint sparkle glimmered eerily a few inches from the surface. Moving more out of fear than curiosity, I pulled up the small disc shaped charm out of the water between my thumb and forefinger.

The small golden chain was hung on something. I took a better grip and gave a quick tug.

A bloated, white hand popped up to the surface, palm up. I shrieked and jumped to my feet, sending water flying in every direction. The hand floated back down, the charm bracelet sparkling like a homing beacon. I backed up against a wall, the sudden contact with cold stone knocked my breath out in a quick whoosh. That lack of air was the only thing that kept me from screaming when I saw the rest of her.

She lay on her side, her lifeless eyes stared at me. She looked like a broken, discarded doll. Long, blonde tendrils floated like snakes as her head swayed gently back and forth in the water, as if her neck were broken. A gaping hole was all that remained of her throat. I shuddered as I remembered the doe Adam had hunted, as his jaws clamped around the slender, delicate neck and tasted the gush of warm blood and the crunch of bone.

I gulped.

All at once the air was putrid and vile, thick with the scent of death. My stomach heaved and I ended up throwing up everything I had eaten for the past decade. Finally, with nothing left to lose, I looked back over at her.

The familiar green and white outfit, identical to the one I wore, was shredded, leaving her shoulder and chest bare. The short skirt was pushed up around her waist. One strong, once graceful, leg was lying at an odd angle behind her. Her feet were bare. Long, shallow cuts in the shape of a giant claw furrowed her pale flesh from shoulder to breast to stomach. Her killer had not left her pretty. My eyes welled and spilled over as I looked at her waxen face.