Of Delicate Pieces (12 page)

Why would you think that?

I think Liv Frank can see us.

Right. You told me she could see spirits. It’s not surprising at all, knowing her.
He circled his finger around his ear to indicate Liv’s craziness.

No, I mean she can see us in the dream.

Chase placed an elbow on the table and shifted in his seat to look at her.

Humor me. In my last dream, when we were walking along the beach she was staring right at us
.

Oh, yeah?

She could tell he didn’t believe her at all.
Fine. Next time it happens. Next time we’re there, watch her. Okay?

All right
, Chase agreed.
I think you’re forgetting that Banyan isn’t talking about dreams. He is talking about real life.

What if Liv did really see us that day, and we never knew it?

You mean when we were actually alive and sitting right next to her, you think she saw us walking on the beach as ghosts?

Could happen, right?

That’s a whole new level of psychedelics.

Not if I’m projecting us there.

Back at the podium, Banyan stood stiff as a statue, his eyes shut, and his short arms dangling lifelessly at his sides.

What is he doing now?

The room was so silent they could hear Madison scribbling notes with her pencil.

I bet he passed out from all the Ex sniffing
, Chase murmured in her thoughts
. Anyway, do you remember what we were taught about the Havilahs?

Of course she remembered. There was an entire day dedicated to them every year in Parrish.

Do you remember why they built the town? Why they built the Eskers?

Yes, she knew. Esker Havilah’s name was chiseled so flawlessly on that family tree. No mistakes. Disciplined, like him. He molded the town to obey and furthermore preach the behavior he thought was necessary.

Who would have thought those Havilah ghost rumors were real? When Pax Simone showed me my family tree, she said that it was one of the first ones. It was as old as Brigitta and Broderick Cinatri’s tree. The Havilahs were friends with the founders of Eidolon.

SNAP
.

Alex yelped as Banyan’s face appeared in the space between her and Chase. She gawked at the luminous image, separating their conversation.

“What the … ?” Chase shot back in his chair.

At the front of the room, the actual Banyan stood lifeless. The specter of the doctor grinned. “Just making sure you’re paying attention.”

Several newburies began to clap. Others had their hands over their mouths in shock as the fake doctor disappeared, and the actual Banyan awoke at the podium. He bowed. “One day we may not need to physically travel at all if we can figure out how to make it last. We could use meditation and abolish those burdensome wormholes. But that opens a whole new can of debatable worms.”

Madison took her pencil from her mouth. “Is it safer to exist that way?”

“Our projections are nothing but memories. We meditate with our minds, but we exist in our minds as memories, and those can be stolen, captured, manipulated, destroyed. So no, it’s not safer.” Banyan tossed stacks of cards onto their tables. “On to the interactive part!”

He ordered the class to break into pairs with their cards. Alex saw this activity last year. One person held up the card with a picture facing away from the partner. The partner guessed the image by trying to envision themselves using the other person’s eyes. It was a watered down version of meditation, but the hall buzzed with excitement.

Alex and Chase finished in two minutes. With access to each other’s thoughts, the activity was ridiculously simple.

Chase reverted back to their conversation.
All the rules the Havilahs made. You remember, right?

No drinking, dancing, any sort of fun. I know, I know
, Alex thought to him.
It was all banned
. She also knew it was a scapegoat for what the Havilahs really hated. Back then, they called it devil worship.

Witches
.

The gifted,
Alex corrected.
If they were such good friends with Broderick and Brigitta, I wonder if they had anything to do with the way the dead treat the gifted.

She didn’t need to open the door between their minds to know he shared the same thought as she did. If the Havilahs created a town dedicated to impeding any action related to witchery, it only became all the more strange that Alex, their last living relative, was the spitting image of the sort of person they hated.

***

Alex regretted her neglect for the ghost girl. The day felt so long that it was difficult to believe it had only been a few hours since they found her. Alex rushed across the courtyard and into Brigitta Hall, walking too quickly for anyone to have a chance to stop her.

Rae did not seem to have missed her. Alex found her on the floor, sprawled on her stomach. Surrounding her were no less than twenty sketches and several pencils dulled down to the erasers. Rae sure did have a talent for the arts because with standard number two pencils she’d created several masterpieces of extensive dimension and depth, making the pictures seem real, like black and white photographs. Alex stood transfixed among the stepping-stones of papers littering her room.

Not knowing what exactly to do, she crisscrossed her ankles and wilted to the floor. With so many smudges on her arms and face, Rae looked as though she’d been rolling through soot, but she glanced over at Alex with a knowing smirk.

“You know you’re good at this, huh?”

Rae lifted a finger to her lips and scanned her work. She selected one from the middle. She’d drawn a tunnel with chipped, gray edges, but anger emanated through the dark shading. Alex could feel red through the cloudiness. Rae didn’t like this place. She examined Alex’s reaction through the threads of her fine hair, and Alex stared back, wondering what Rae was trying to tell her. After a few minutes, Rae shook her head, selecting another sketch. This one was a mess of scribbles, but when Alex held it in her hands, the picture filled her with warmth and comfort. It told a story of safety. Love. And the strength of it overwhelmed her.

“Oh,” she murmured. These weren’t just sketches. Rae could somehow
draw
emotions. It wasn’t until Alex set down the paper and saw it from a distance that she noticed an outline hidden in the scribbles. The spirals took form of two arms cradling the chaos. In realizing this, Alex felt two rings of warmth; one tightened around her shoulders and one around her abdomen as though there were arms holding her. She gasped.

Rae smiled.

Lucia Duvall had been alive a long time, long enough that things didn’t surprise her anymore. But Rae surprised her, more specifically, the way Rae attached herself to Alex Ash. She drummed her fingers on her desk, scowling at her thin, bony fingers. It took so much effort, so much mind power, to keep up her appearance. Her mind kept aging and thus it fought to project her appearance accordingly. It wanted to hunch her shoulders, tighten her joints, and wrinkle her skin. If she didn’t keep focus, she’d sag into an old hag. It became increasingly more difficult to remember how she felt during her youth. She always loved a challenge though. Her brilliant mind—with the help of secret herbs and minerals—always came through. She concentrated and watched her skin repair itself.

Now stay that way
, she commanded. With creamy, smooth fingers she held up a glass flask to inspect her tired reflection.

No stone was left unturned in her search for the link between Alex and Sephi. The conclusion, as she suspected, was that the Anovarks were extinguished. Those damn Havilahs had made sure of it. Bastards. That family harbored so much hatred for the gifted.

If there was one thing Duvall learned in all her years, it was that with as much love as there was in the world, there were equal parts hatred. Chalk it up to nature’s annoying need to maintain balance. Sometimes one outweighed the other, good over bad, bad over good, but like an old brass balancing scale they always found their way back to neutral.

She glanced out the window. She could feel the presence of the gifted out there somewhere. Their dissension with the laws of the afterworld grew thicker by the day, and Alex’s death had given them hope. They’d waited a long time.

Surely Duvall would know more if she had the courage to leave Brigitta, but with the exception of the haunted house and the occasional trip to the Dual Towers, she rarely left her office. She created the ABC club because it allowed her to gather the goods she needed without putting herself in the path of hatred, from both the spirited and the gifted. One could never be too careful.

She stretched across her desk and scooped up an aragonite stone, squeezing it in her hand and waiting for something to happen. Few things in life and death were absolute, but minerals never failed. She sensed Rae before the child came trotting in like a pony. Alex strode at her side and not far behind followed her handsome friend. The Lasalle boy, the one who caused so much trouble last year.

This boy never accompanied Alex during her visits, but as they entered the room together, Duvall had to brace herself on her desk. She blinked several times and rubbed her eyes, which could see more than most because she embraced the odd and the impossible. These two had a visible energy undulating between them. Such a thing was rare. And dangerous.

“I think Rae wanted to visit you,” Alex said, holding up a paper. “She kept showing this to me.”

Alex presented Duvall with a sketch of the classroom. It included every miniscule detail, right down to the positioning of the flask Duvall set down and the stray pen on the table in the back right corner. Gray pencil lead streaked Rae’s face, and she wiped the hair from her forehead with a dirty hand. The possibility existed that, yes, Rae wanted to see her, but more than likely she drew the picture because she knew she’d be coming to the room later. Her mind was an open door of possibility.

Rae wasn’t the problem here. Duvall purposely walked in between Alex and the boy. As she suspected, she floated through a levitating pool of pleasant electricity causing her hair to stand on end. This was unfortunate.

“Here.” She opened a drawer at the bottom of her desk where she kept a stash of charcoal pencils for Rae when she showed up.

Rae did a little dance as she took them before wrapping an arm around Duvall’s leg. Duvall felt a tug in her chest where she once allowed a heart to beat.

Alex placed the classroom sketch on Duvall’s desk. “Professor, why will Rae leave if she likes it here so much?”

“You’re attached to her already?”

“It’s hard not to be.”

Duvall glanced down at the fair-haired angel. Rae appeared every few months or sometimes every few years. “She’s too smart to stay. Spirits categorize Lost Ones with the gifted, and the gifted are outcasts in our society. Even if for some reason one of them was accepted, they would be put to use.”

Like me
. Duvall was a prisoner of this campus. She didn’t know which was preferable. Moving every few weeks like the Lost Ones, or being stuck in one single setting forever. She couldn’t complain about her treatment though. She knew of gifted spirits or Lost Ones living under horrific circumstances.

The vials above Alex’s head clanked together. “What would they do to her?”

“You’ll discuss this in sociology.”

Duvall did her best to remain calm, but the energy between Alex and the Lasalle boy disrupted her thoughts. To test her theory, Duvall pretended to rearrange the jugs on the shelf but took the aragonite stone she still carried between her fingers and tossed it into the current as she passed between the two of them. Sure enough, the rock suspended like a secret between them.

She always thought the calm bubble of energy surrounding Alex felt like longing; she should have realized she tasted the same air when she had the Lasalle boy in class. Chase. That was his name. In three hundred years, she’d only seen energy like this once before. The electricity between this pair buzzed in a happier tone than the last two who carried such a burden between them. Sephi and Raive. That didn’t necessarily mean it wouldn’t change, however. Energy, like everything else, was temperamental.

Alex gathered Rae’s hair in her hands and let it fall through her fingers like shiny tinsel. “Why are the gifted treated like outcasts?”

“It dates far enough back that the reason has been lost. People don’t change. The Legacy families felt strongly about the separation between the spirited and the gifted.”

Alex continued to comb her fingers through Rae’s silky hair. “Why would they want to be separate from something like this?”

Being extraordinary is a double-edged sword. Even Duvall herself once wondered what it might be like to be on the other side of normal. Once upon a time, she left her life of gifts and tried to be a common human. And it killed her.

“Because that would be mixing the living and dead. The gifted can make things happen, manipulate reality. Losing the ability to distinguish what’s real and what’s not is terrifying. The gifted can be charming and lovely, but like everything and everyone else, they aren’t always good spirited.”

“What can they do?”

“It’s all tricks of the mind. The gifted are people who are able to use the full extent of their minds even while the body protects it. Most are innocent, but some use their gifts to punish people or scare them by changing the appearance of things around them. Or make them think they’re sick or dying.”

She watched Alex shudder and tried to ignore the fact that a moment before it happened, Rae already placed her hand on Alex’s arm to calm her. Rae died so young, but even back then she already had the weight of the world on her fragile shoulders.

Chase Lasalle cleared his throat. He stood off to the side like an onlooker.

“Professor, it seems to me that the spirited and gifted are more similar than different. Why the separation?”

“It’s funny. People usually have difficulty getting along when the similarities are greater than the differences.” She motioned to the space between Chase and the rest of them. “Why do you stand so far away from us, boy? With the pull between you two, you’re likely to slingshot forward at any moment.”