Possession (30 page)

I turned to run, but found that I couldn’t.
Oh, Goddess. This is not a good time to lose
control of my limbs.
The god moved closer still, and for a moment, I
thought it would crash over me like a tidal wave. I clenched my eyes shut and
waited for it to wash over me and suck me in, like the demon had devoured my
brother’s spirit.

But there was nothing.

I opened my eyes to see the god stopped just short
of the edge of the cliff. It hovered there in front of me.

Curiosity suddenly replaced my fear.
What
is
it? What does it want?
As if released from an invisible barrier, suddenly,
I could move. I took hesitant steps forward until I was inches from it. This
older thing—this god of Morgana’s people, whatever it was—was
aware.

I can feel it watching me.

I don’t know why, but I started to reach out. I
looked down at my fingers as they slowly extended.
What am I doing?
I tried to pull my hand back, but once again, I
was no longer in control of my body. My fingers stretched until they made
contact with the god’s energy.

And then I felt it, like a bolt of electricity
running through me.

There were sounds. They weren’t human and they
weren’t demon—they were animalistic. There were no words, but more of a
mix of raw emotions roaring through my mind. The roar was followed by the sound
of human voices chanting. The chanting seemed far off in the distance, but then
it grew closer. As it did, energy began to fill me, coursing through my blood.
It ran through my muscles, my mind, through every nerve ending in my body.

And it changed me.

In an instant, I was back before the black abyss,
but this time it didn’t frighten me. Like always, I could hear things calling
out to me from the pitch-black darkness, but then the voices went silent. In
their place I heard snarling and hissing. Within the great expanse, a pair of
red eyes blinked in the darkness
. I know
you
, I thought. The eyes were moving, edging closer.

The air shifted again, a warm breeze blew across
me, and I was back in the forest outside the asylum, lying on my back in the
fallen leaves. As if from a distance, I heard my mother call my name. Confused
by the turn of events, I blinked, trying to clear my vision, and saw
her—her spirit hovered next to me. No bullet hole marked her forehead
this time; no blood dripped down her skin. She wasn’t sobbing for my lost
brother and father. Instead, she was looking directly at me, her form lightly
translucent. I could see Luke, Wendy, and Mildred through her, standing there as
if frozen in time a few feet away.

Blue light bathed my mother’s body. “Colina.”

“Mama,” I croaked. I so wanted to free her from
this prison she was in.

“Colina, baby.” She looked at me with fear in her
eyes. “He’s coming for you. Run, baby girl. Do you hear me? Run!”

She’s said
those words to me before
. In Pagan’s beautiful, renovated barn house, when
the dark mages found Luke and me. She had warned me of the danger then, and
here she was, warning me again. But there was no place to run. No place to
hide. It was either over the electrified fence and into the forest, or back
into the asylum.

We were trapped in a cage with a lion. I knew it
in my bones—we were not going to get out. The killer was coming, and he would
try to kill us all before we had a chance to escape.

Unless we can find and kill him first.

* * *

I opened my eyes. The first thing I saw was Luke staring at
me. I was lying on the ground, my head cradled in his lap. Torrential rain
poured down, soaking my hair and clothes.

“She’s awake,” Luke said. He looked relieved.

Wendy and Mildred stood over me, peering curiously.

Mildred’s eyes filled with concern. “Are you
alive, child?”

“I am.” I sat up, dazed and disoriented. “What
happened?”

“You were with us, and then you weren’t. You fell
hard to the ground in some kind of trance,” Mildred said.

I felt a fierce burning on my forearm. I let out a
small gasp and cradled it against my chest.

“What?” Luke’s face filled with concern.

“Something’s wrong.”

He swung the flashlight down, and I let out a cry
of surprise. There was an outline of a
bear
on the skin of my forearm. Luke asked the question pounding through my head. “What
is
that
?”

I rubbed my hand across the image burned into my
flesh. It looked like a fresh brand, still raw and red, and it throbbed with
the distant memory of burning pain. The stylized shape of a bear was clear and
distinct, striding unhurriedly down my arm toward my hand. It was only a
silhouette, without detail, but it looked different than real bears I had seen.
It was more primitive, with large humping shoulders that tapered down into a
thick neck and a broad sloping head that ended with a round nose.

Mildred reached out and grabbed my arm. Her
fingers rubbed the mark on my skin. “The old gods.” It wasn’t a question.

“I saw Morgana,” I answered. “There were…creatures.
Some kind of…energy sandstorms. Giant things down in a valley. Morgana called
them her gods. She told me to beckon them. She touched me and a light shot out
of me—through me—and one of the creatures came at me. And then it
touched me. No—I touched it.”

Luke looked at me, his expression one of shock.
“You
touched
it?”

I had no idea why I’d touched it. It was as if I
wasn’t in control of my limbs. “It was there, right in front of me. I touched
it and then I was back here, and this…thing was on my skin.”

“Burned into your skin by the gods. It’s a totem,”
Mildred said. She gave a high-pitched laugh. “You’ve been blessed, child.
You’ve been given a gift!”

Luke reached out and grabbed my arm, staring down
at the mark. “A totem?”

Mildred whipped her long wet hair back and looked
out through the rain into the dark. “Many animist religions believed in animal
totems. They say every person has a totem animal, which acts like a spiritual
guide. These guides, when you communicate with them, offer power, protection,
and wisdom. The bear is one of those totems.”

Danger
.
The word screamed inside my head, interrupting Mildred’s explanation.
I’m in danger
. I could feel it—I
could sense it all around me.

My mother’s words came back to me again. “
Run, child. Run!”
I gasped, stumbling
and almost falling to my knees under the onslaught of the warnings crashing
over me.

“Colina, what is it?” Luke demanded.

I looked out into the darkness. “He’s here.”
Weatherton
was out there, watching us. I took in the people
surrounding me. Or is he standing next to me, waiting to pop out and kill
again?
Panic rose inside me. I felt a
wild, desperate terror wash over me. Not a fear of my enemy, but the fear that
my enemy might force me to hurt someone I love. My heart began to pound loudly
in my chest.

With a shock, I felt something besides fear burst
to life inside me; something I had never felt before. A jolt of electricity
shot through my body. The hair on the back of my neck and my arms rose as a
shimmering blue light glided across my skin. As quickly as it came, it was
gone.

I sat in shock, staring at my skin.
Did that just happen, or did I imagine it?

I looked over at Luke. He was staring at my arms,
his eyes wide with surprise.
I didn’t imagine
it—he saw the light, too
.

A howl pierced the darkness. It sounded like a dog,
but I had never seen any dogs on the property. A ten-foot electrified metal
fence surrounded the asylum, and we were inside it.

The eerie howl sounded out again, this time
closer.

“Do you hear a dog?” Wendy asked.

“Not a dog…a wolf,” Luke said, rising to his feet
and pulling me up next to him. I wobbled on unsteady legs for a moment. Strong
arms wrapped around my body, steadying me.

A different howl rang out, this time from the
opposite direction.

Luke aimed his flashlight into the dark woods.
There was nothing out there.

“How could wild animals get through the fence?” I
asked, combing the night for any sign of movement.

Mildred gave a loud, nervous giggle.

I looked over at Wendy. Her eyes were closed, and
she had an expression of concentration on her face.

“Wendy, can you sense anything?”

Wendy opened her eyes and shook her head.
“Whatever’s out there…it’s not alive.”

A grunting, growling roar split the night, closer
by far than any of the sounds before. We all turned toward the noise, and a
pair of yellow eyes glowed on the edge of our small clearing, a full six feet
off the ground.

Wendy edged closer to Luke. “Whatever that is, I
tell you: it’s not living.”

Luke pushed me behind him. “Mildred, these spiritual
guides…what form do they take?”

Mildred gave him a wild smile. “I’ve never seen
one.”

“So they could be spirits?” Luke asked.

Spirits. Ghosts. There’s something in the air
around us, but I don’t feel the things I normally do when confronted with a
ghost. What’s out there? What’s watching us? “Luke, I don’t feel any spirits.
Do you?” As soon as the words left my mouth, another mighty roar ripped through
the night.

Luke spun around toward the sound, pulling me with
him. We were huddled now, all of us, in a circle. Wendy’s flashlight and Luke’s
moved back and forth across the trees.
There’s
nothing out there
, I told myself. But yet…there was. I could still see the yellow
eyes flashing at me every time the flashlights moved away. They kept staring at
me from the darkness.

And then, suddenly, I was no longer standing next
to Luke. I was floating through the air, rushing through the night. My heart
pounded. Adrenaline fueled my limbs. I could feel the rain pouring down against
my skin.
Not my skin…my fur
. I was no
longer human. I was an animal. I was a wolf. I was running, jumping, and I
wasn’t alone. There were others running with me. Hunting with me. Crashing
through the underbrush, rushing through the woods. Suddenly I could smell it, I
could sense it: evil. It was there, just in front of me, somewhere out there in
the night…

And then I was back in front of Luke. His hands
were on my shoulders. He gave me a hard shake.

“Colina, can you hear me?” Panic filled his voice.

“Luke…what happened?” I whispered. I looked
around, trying to clear my head. Wendy and Mildred were gone. I could see a
light bouncing across the ground ten feet away.

Luke grabbed my arm and started to pull me with
him. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

There was noise in the underbrush. A crunching of
leaves and breaking of twigs. Something was out there, moving around.

I started to run. Luke ran by my side. I could
hear howls fill the air behind us. The rain pounded down, the wind picked up,
and the trees whipped above us. We crashed through the woods, branches scratching
at my face and arms as I ran, but I didn’t care. I didn’t stop. I kept going.
We headed back toward the asylum. The only thought in my mind was getting
inside the building. Something was out in the dark chasing us. There was safety
inside.

We broke out of the trees and onto the cleared
lawn at the side of the asylum. I could just see Wendy disappearing into the
building.

“
Don’t be
afraid
,” a voice whispered in my ear.

With those words, I found myself digging in my
heels.

Luke pulled hard against me, almost hard enough to
rip my arm off. As he looked back, I saw his eyes widen as he realized he was
hurting me, and he let go so quickly that it dumped me on my backside in the
mud.

I climbed slowly back to my feet, rubbing my
bruised wrist and wiping the rain out of my eyes as I turned back toward the
trees. Dark, misty shapes floated along the boundary of the woods.

A vast, shadowy shape rushed out suddenly toward
us, moving with impressive speed.

Luke stepped forward, trying to get in front of me.

The shadow stopped a dozen feet away. The wisps of
gray slowly morphed into the shape of a huge bear made not of skin and blood,
but instead of shadow and mist. Rain pounded through its smoky form. Only its
eyes seemed to have any real substance: they glowed yellow with the light of ancient
power.

I turned my head, and all along the forest’s edge
stood hunters of the wild—wolves and bears. Smaller creatures were barely
visible in the distance. I knew in the very depth of my soul that they were not
hunting me.
They will not harm me. They’re
hunting him.
Weatherton
.
I somehow knew that the
evil I had felt in the woods had been
Weatherton
.
These things—these spirits—were out there searching for him, but
they had lost the trail. The scent of evil had masked itself and fled when it
felt the spirit pack on its heels.

I turned back to the bear and stared into the
yellow eyes before me.
Those sand
creatures were gods, Morgana said. Mildred said the gods gave me a gift.
Had that gift somehow allowed me to call these creatures? I glanced down to the
bear tattoo on my forearm, barely visible in the darkness. My eyes swung up to
meet the spirit bear’s again, and we studied each other. Strangely, I somehow
felt a sense of kinship with this wisp of shadow. It radiated such wild and
unrestrained power.

These things, these spirits, these…animal totems have
come to protect me.

With that knowledge, some closed door within me
opened. I could feel their emotions buzzing around in my mind.
They only want to keep me safe,
I
realized
. To ward off the evil. My fear…my
need brought them forward.