Secret Worlds (36 page)

I clutched my bag and glanced around. It’d been clear. Distinct. Not tangled with the mess of voices usually in my head. But, as quickly as it’d come, it was gone, sinking back into the pits of my mind.

Something wet struck my lip. Clouds gathered above, threatening rain as dusk closed in, the moon already visible. Absorbed in the book, I hadn’t noticed daylight slinking away.

A family of raccoons darted across the clearing, straw-like grass crunching beneath their paws. As they ticked across the field, my gaze followed them until a soft breeze picked up and muffled voices crept from the shadows.

I scanned the glade. Nothing. “Anyone there?”

The evening wind changed direction, carrying a moist chill and the stink of death.

I tossed my books into my bag and hurried down the path. As I stepped over a fallen tree, the thicket of silvery peeling aspen trees clustered together and obstructed the remaining light. The darkness sent tingles up my spine, just like in my childhood.

I will not panic. I am not afraid of the dark.

If I told myself enough times, maybe I’d believe it.

Tugging at my jacket sleeves, I waited for my eyes to adjust, then plowed through the underbrush and made my way over the knobby roots of the forest path. A squirrel scampered in front of me and perched on a cluster of burgeoning mushrooms
.

I jumped back. Squirrels aren’t nocturnal, and there was something wrong with this one. Its eyes were lucent and the color of green apples. I’d never seen eyes like those—not in people or animals. I leaned forward to get a closer look, but it bolted into the brush.

A saccharine odor weighted the air. A dead raccoon, its body twisted and bloodied, slumped against a tree. Newly dead, too, if the blood still smelled sweet and only a little rusty. Beyond the raccoon was a pile of several more discarded animals, torn apart, blood matting their fur.

Unable to catch my breath, I stepped back. Something crunched beneath my boot.
Don’t look
. But I couldn’t stop myself. I’d stepped on a raccoon’s head. Its tail twitched by my foot. Nearly getting sick, I covered my mouth.

What would cause this? A mountain lion? How had it gotten so many animals all in one place?

Okay, Sophia, don’t panic. Don’t be like that idiot girl who ran and got herself killed by some wild animal.

I tried to remember what to do. Back away and keep eye contact. Keep eye contact with what? And I wasn’t supposed to turn my back to the mountain lion. I
could
throw rocks or sticks to scare it away, but now that I thought about it, that made no sense. How could I pick up rocks and sticks if bending over would make it easier for the mountain lion to lunge for my neck?

I scanned the spaces between the trees, looking for any sign of life.

What if it wasn’t a mountain lion?

Footsteps fell behind me. I glanced over my shoulder. A dark figure, running away from me, turned back, and I glimpsed a man’s face before his shape bled into the shadows between the trees.

I ran for the main trail. My foot caught on a tree root, and I shot forward, my bag tumbling from my shoulder to the ground. Wet soil dampened my palms and knees.

Two feet away, several more dead animals were piled beside a tree. I looked down to my palms, realizing the soil was not wet from rain or water but from blood. As I tried to back away, something pulled at my scalp. My curls had tangled in a branch.

Shaking, I wiped my hands on my skirt and carefully untangled my hair. I climbed to my feet and looked at my hands. The darkness and my trembling made it impossible to see straight, but my stomach lurched when I spotted the cut bleeding on my palm, near my wrist.

Please don’t tell me any animal blood got in there.

I bolted the rest of the way down the forest path, slowing to glance back as I neared the trail’s entrance. A dark shape moved between the trees.
What the heck is—

I stumbled into something.

It moved.

I shrieked and jumped back, my hand fanned over my chest as I sucked in a large gulp of air. “Shit, you scared me.”

Ivory, my friend from college—not the boogieman—stood in front of me. She grabbed my shoulders and held me at arm’s length. No wonder I hadn’t seen her. She was dressed in a black sweater and dress pants, with a black cable-knit beanie pulled low over her ears.

Sleek bluish-black hair brushed her shoulders as she leaned to look past me into the woods. She shifted back, crystal blue eyes on mine. “Are you okay, Sophia? Why were you running?”

“Is everyone hell-bent on sneaking up on me?” I snapped.

Her eyebrows knitted together and the moon cast a pale glow on her milky skin. “What’s gotten into you?”

“Nothing.” I dug through my bag for my car keys. I thought she mumbled something else, but when I glanced back, her lips weren’t moving.
Stupid, crazy, unintelligible voices
. “What are you doing here, Ivory?”

She pointed to my Jeep. “I passed by on the way to Lauren’s and saw you parked.”

“Lauren’s home from Cali?”

She vacationed there every August to attend the Nihonmachi Street Fair in San Francisco and Nisei Week in Los Angeles.

“You’d know that if you answered your phone,” Ivory said. “No one can get a hold of you.”

“I left it at home.”

Part of me wished I’d gone with Lauren this summer. The year before, she’d taken me to see the pageants—the ones she refused to participate in because some people there didn’t think ‘
haafus
’
should enter.

It wasn’t the first time Lauren was shunned for her heritage. Lauren’s dad, after learning his parents weren’t thrilled he had married and impregnated an Irish woman, stopped speaking Japanese, changed his daughter’s name from Yumi to Lauren, and, as she grew older, forbade her from studying the Japanese language.

Now, with her parents gone, Lauren was eager to connect with the culture of her ancestors…while I stayed behind waiting tables.

Ivory grabbed my wrist, drawing my attention back to her. “You’re bleeding. And your skirt is covered in blood.”

“I fell.” I snatched my hand away and rubbed where her fingers had pressed. “Why are you going to Lauren’s anyway?”

“For the love of the Goddess, Sophia. She might not be the illest person on the planet, but it’s not like I hate her.” She was laying heavy into her Boston-talk. Sometimes I wondered if she did that purely for my amusement, or if she’d just lived there too long to shake the slang.

Ivory was still staring at my wrist, and I gave her a pointed look. “I
fell
, Ivory.”

“Yeah.” She frowned and took a step back. “You all set? Lauren’s expecting us.”

Great. Now she thinks I’m suicidal or something.
“I can’t go,” I said. “I have work early tomorrow.”

“You’re a mess, Sophia. You need to…you know, be a normal twenty-two-year-old. Have fun and stop stressing.”

Just being in her presence was rapidly calming my nerves. My reaction in the woods had been a huge overreaction. Dead animals in the woods—really not
that
uncommon. Not even worth mentioning, especially not to Ivory, who would just laugh at my paranoia.

“I’m taking you out next weekend,” she said when I didn’t respond.

“I don’t know if I can. I might have work.” Truth was, the idea of going out in the city frightened me a little. At twenty-two, it seemed I had little more experience with life than I’d had as a teen.

“You’re going,” she said, matter-of-fact. “You can’t use your studies to get out of it like you did in college, and you know Jack will leave you off the schedule if you ask. Besides, it’ll be wicked cool. I’ll take you to that club I told you about.”

It was almost amusing listening to her, because only Ivory could say all that with about as much excitement as someone reading the Gettysburg Address.

“You can meet Adrian,” she said, perhaps picking up that I needed further convincing.

“The guy with the books?” I asked.

“I’m talking drinks and dancing and your mind is on books.” She shook her head, her expression somewhere between amazement and pity. “Yes, the guy with the books.”

Ivory had shown me some of Adrian’s Wiccan spellcasting books before, and they were definitely more legit than anything I’d found in stores. Maybe he would even have something that went more in-depth on the Salem witch trials. I could look into those first,
before
I worried about intruding on the lives of whoever lived at 793 Basker Street.

“Fine, I’ll go,” I said.

With that, Ivory took off in her little red Honda, and I headed back over to my Jeep. I fumbled around the glove compartment for some napkins to dab the blood away from my wrist. My stomach lurched at the bright red on the napkin, and every time I closed my eyes, images of dead animals played behind my eyelids. With my company gone, anxiety crept back in, and my hands got jittery again.

I started the engine and switched on the heater, hoping the heat would somehow calm my nerves. The scent of warmth filled the car long before the chill subsided, but my shaking remained.

There was a flash of green and what appeared to be an owl perched on a nearby fence. When the owl turned its head, goose bumps rushed over my skin. That owl did
not
have the same eyes as the squirrel I saw earlier.

It just didn’t.

Before I could speculate further, the owl flew off, its image becoming nothing more than a lingering memory.

For a long time, I sat staring at the roots of an old oak that had broken through the earth. I spotted a toppled bird nest, and, a few feet ahead, close enough to the road to be illuminated by the streetlamps, a small bird twitched its wing.

Damn it. I couldn’t leave it there.

After scanning the area until I was certain no monsters were going to pop out at me, I slipped on the winter gloves I kept in my glove compartment, crept over, and gently scooped the bird into my palms. It weighed next to nothing, but it wasn’t too young to be saved. And it was a cardinal, no less, which was odd, seeing how cardinals weren’t common in these parts.

I hurried back to my Jeep, set the bird on my passenger-side seat, and eased the door closed, though I wasn’t so gentle about getting my own ass back in the car. I might have been crazy paranoid, acting like my six-year-old afraid-of-the-dark self, but I was
not
about to spend one second more than necessary out there alone.

Once in my car, I headed for the nearby animal clinic. I’d be able to sleep better if the bird still had hope.

***

MY EVENINGS AFTER THAT were filled with nightmarish sleep: dreams of my ancestor, Elizabeth, and her hanging; dreams of people in town learning of the whispered voices in my head and condemning me next. Sometimes I woke in a cold sweat, chiding myself for letting my subconscious affect me so deeply.

One of these nightmares woke me early on the morning I was meant to go with Ivory to the club. I headed to the kitchen, not realizing the nightmare had been more premonition than subconscious freak-out.

I leaned against the wall beside the birdcage Paloma had given me on loan. It was a charming little thing, the feeders and iron bed painted sage and the wooden top embellished with rose and cream porcelain flowers. The vet who’d set the bird’s wing with green tape said my cardinal should be able to fly again within six weeks.

Not that I was thinking of him as mine.

“I know you won’t be here long,” I said to the bird, “but perhaps you need a name.”

The bird tilted his head and chattered softly.

I crouched to meet his gaze. “How about Red?”

He pinned his eyes on me and made a
whoit, whoit, whoit
sound.

“Red it is.”

So maybe I’d never been very original when it came to naming animals. Bob the bobcat, for example, was my ‘backyard pet’ when I was seven.

I took a small bag of peaches from the fridge and arranged them with vanilla beans and cinnamon sticks in a large metal bowl. The centerpiece filled the room with a spicy-sweet aroma, like freshly baked peach pie.

Things were looking up. Ivory was going to introduce me to someone who might help me find out more about Elizabeth Parsons.

But as anxious as I was to find answers, I would have called and cancelled if I’d known how the night would end.

IVORY PICKED ME UP at eight. Trees rustled outside the car window as she navigated the wind-raked road. I wished I was home, curled up in bed, but Ivory insisted tonight would be fun. Stress-free. A chance to pick up some books that might solve the problems she didn’t know I had.

A blur of crimson and gold leaves and the occasional blip of yellow highway paint raced outside the passenger window. If only I could shed the haunting visions of dead animals and the layers of voices blotting out my enjoyment of the autumn scenery.

The sun disappeared behind a wall of trees, and I pushed away the lurid images, leaning forward to read a green and white road sign: DENVER 30 MILES.

“Where is this place?” I asked Ivory.

“You’ll see.” She hooked onto an exit ramp for Castle Rock then turned onto a side road miles before the city. This wasn’t the Castle Rock I was familiar with; this place was some run-down, off-the-map kind of place. “We’re almost there.”

Several blocks later, she turned down a narrow, garbage-strewn road. The street was a dead end, with a beat-up building backing up to a wooded area. A rickety billboard towered without anything to advertise. Ivory pulled into the lot and parked beside cars I hadn’t noticed from the road.

Soft whispers throttled through my mind. A chill prickled at my arms and goose bumps ran all the way up to my scalp, a tingle burning the back of my neck and along my ears. Taking a deep breath, I fought to push the voices away.

“Guess I’m overdressed?” I asked, motioning to my silk dress.

“You look good all decked out. Black suits you.”

She climbed out of the car and tugged the bottom of her charcoal gray sweater as she walked to my side, while I slicked on some iced-pink-champagne lip-gloss. When I stepped onto the sandy asphalt, my foot slid, but Ivory caught me by the arm.