Token of Darkness (18 page)

B
rent wasn’t laughing. He was very far from laughing.

The fight with Samantha was hazy in his memory. All he really remembered was trying to use some combination of his telepathy and Cooper’s power over spirits to try to push Samantha away before she hurt someone. He thought he had succeded, but the next thing he knew, he was flying through darkness.

In the world between worlds lay the shadowy demons of which Ryan had spoken. They had reached for him and ripped at him, and all he could do was flee. He tried to find his own body. …

Instead he had woken up here in a hospital bed.

The fact that he was in a girl’s body—even a paralyzed, weakened body—was a very minor inconvenience, compared to the other facts of the matter.

He felt deaf. The ability to read thoughts was something he had cursed many times, but it was a sense he had grown used to. Now, the entire world seemed flat and silent. When he was alone, not speaking to anyone or answering doctors’ and nurses’ questions, the silence was overpowering. He felt like he could hear those
creatures
in the darkness, beneath the empty air, and it made his heart race. When he did manage to drift off, he had nightmares in which he was lost in a fiery hell, searching for someone very important to him.

A doctor was supposed to be coming later to tell him the details of his condition, but he already knew that there was simply no feeling below his waist, and that was a whole lot better than how he felt above it. He could move his arms, but doing so hurt, and his muscles trembled when he tried. One of the nurses had told him that a lot of the pain and weakness was not a result of injury, but of being bed-bound for months. Physical therapy would help him regain full use of his upper body.

Or, of
her
upper body—the one he was trapped in at the moment.

He hoped it wouldn’t be his very long. Ryan hadn’t been too concerned when this happened to Delilah, but Ryan hadn’t stopped in yet.

He let out a frustrated noise, and hit the nurse call button. Someone appeared almost immediately to ask what was wrong.

He felt stupid even asking, but the silence was driving him insane.

“Is there a radio or television or something, somewhere?” he asked. “It’s so quiet in here.”

She nodded, with a smile, and patted his hand. “I’ll see what I can get for you.”

    Brent had never been so glad to see anyone as he was to see Cooper when he came in the room halfway through some strange anime cartoon show Brent had put on for noise but hadn’t been able to follow. Cooper paused in the doorway awkwardly for a moment before asking, “Brent?”

“Yeah,” he confirmed.

Cooper’s body sagged and he leaned back against the wall with a relieved sigh. “With everything Ryan said about people not being able to survive without their bodies, I was worried you might be—”

“Should I take that to mean you’ve seen where the rest of me got to?” Brent interrupted.

Cooper nodded and looked so guilty Brent didn’t need telepathy to figure out why.

“Samantha,” Brent guessed. He closed his eyes, exhausted from the effort of talking. He had heard his mother yelling at “him,” and so had known his body was up and around, but he had been in and out of consciousness too much since then to track where he had gone. “Where’s Ryan? Is he hurt?”

“I don’t know. I came here first, after I realized what had happened. Want me to look for him?”

“Don’t bother.” Delilah’s voice from the doorway
sounded hoarse. At least
she
ended up in the right place. “He’s pissed at us all.” Brent opened his eyes to find Delilah leaning in the doorway, holding up a gift-shop card with a teddy bear on the front. She read from the inside: “‘When the three of you stop acting like children and make up your minds as to what you want, call me. Until then, clean up your own mess.’ He’s grumpy that Samantha got the best of him.”

“He’s ‘grumpy’ that you nearly got yourself killed again,” Brent replied.

“Do you spend
all
your life kissing le Coire’s—”

“Enough!” Cooper snapped, stepping between them. “Ryan has a right to be upset. Beyond anything we’ve done intentionally, you two have ended up squatting in a body that used to belong to someone he
knows
, remember? Someone who apparently died pretty horribly, because she messed up while using powers Ryan was supposed to help her with. I was an idiot to suggest what I did. Apparently even Samantha agrees. And now I don’t know what to do or what to think about her—” He broke off and had to draw a deep breath. “But I think it’s obvious that Brent has a right to his own body. I get that you two had a bad breakup, but can we maybe focus for just a minute on what’s important?”

Brent nodded. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the one who needed to agree, since Delilah was the only one in the room who had any idea how to handle elementals or the shadow-scavengers.

Delilah was staring at Cooper with a lazy, contented smile that seemed ill-suited to the situation. “Cooper Blake grows a spine,” she said. “I’ll help—or try to—”

“Why?” Brent interrupted, suspicious.

“It couldn’t be out of the goodness of my heart?” she replied sweetly, batting her eyelashes. He didn’t deign to respond, and at last she glared at him instead. “I’m not one of le Coire’s lapdogs, but I respect him. He’s going to blame me for this mess, as usual. I don’t want him to have to clean it up.”

Brent hadn’t thought that Delilah worried about anyone’s opinion.

Then again, she was captain of the cheerleading squad, house director for the drama department, and practiced sorcery in her spare time. That drive for success had to come from somewhere.

“Anyway,” she said, “I’m pretty sure I can summon Samantha. According to Ryan she’s not very strong, and I think she’ll be even weaker now that she’s condensed herself in order to occupy a relatively normal human body—no offense, Brent. That’s kind of like saying she’s a relatively weak hurricane, though. I can get her here, but I’m not going to be able to control her if she fights us.”

“Is it just me, or did she react a little too strongly to the idea of taking Margaret’s body?” Brent asked, recalling the strange scene.

“Maybe she didn’t like the idea of going from an immortal power to a wheelchair,” Delilah suggested.

Cooper shook his head. “Do you know how many times she told me over the last few months that all she wanted was to be
alive?
When I first woke up, the doctors weren’t sure if I would ever be able to walk. It was Samantha who convinced me that my life wasn’t any less valid just because I couldn’t do everything I used to be able to do. I don’t think the possibility of a disability would have kept her from accepting a chance to live, and even if it did, that wouldn’t explain how strongly she reacted.”

“Maybe your connection to Samantha
is
actually kind of coincidental.” Delilah paced the room as she spoke. “Does anyone remember a fire around here? Ryan said a whole family was killed. I don’t remember it, but I don’t watch the news a lot.”

Cooper sat heavily in one of the guest chairs next to the bed. “Yeah, it was all over the television, just a few days before … before the accident. My mom was pretty freaked out. She went around checking smoke detectors and bought a second fire extinguisher and a fire ladder for my room. You don’t think Samantha
caused
the fire, do you? And killed all those people?”

“I think we have a sorcerer named Margaret, who was trying to summon an elemental, but burned down her house and then was found in bad shape right around the time that Samantha appeared. A water elemental wouldn’t have started the fire, but they’re drawn to grief and bound in tears. Margaret accidentally slaughtered her entire family. A sorcerer with that much power and that much
emotional pain might have been able to create something like Samantha.”

Delilah’s words made some of the puzzle-pieces fall into place. “Ryan seemed to recognize Samantha when Cooper and I came to his house,” Brent said.

Delilah looked straight at him, with the wide-eyed excitement that had attracted him to her in the first place. “Of course!” she exclaimed as if suddenly everything made sense. “When I was in Margaret’s body, I picked up on some of her memories. They make sense now. In all the memories I picked up, she was trying to get to someone. She didn’t care about saving herself, but she needed to save this other person, who was screaming.”

Brent hadn’t been able to track Margaret’s memories as well as Delilah obviously had, but when Delilah started to describe them, he remembered the nightmares. “Her sister,” he said.

“It had to be Samantha,” Delilah answered, gripping Brent’s hand for a moment before realizing what she was doing and dropping it. “Not
our
Samantha. Her Samantha, her sister.”

“Didn’t we already establish a while ago that Samantha
isn’t
a ghost?” Cooper asked.

“She’s
not,”
Delilah answered excitedly. “She
is
an elemental, but she’s shaped the way Margaret made her. Margaret couldn’t control the fire elemental she tried to summon, but she would have raised so much power to do so that when things went wrong, a water elemental was
attracted to the chaos. Margaret named it, so it took the personality and form of the being she
wanted
to see. It all makes sense!”

Brent and Cooper exchanged a glance. Cooper’s dazed expression said he was equally confused. Brent knew without a doubt that he was right about Margaret’s relationship with Samantha, but he had never understood sorcery and elemental powers. He had to trust that Delilah knew what she was talking about.

One thing still didn’t make sense. “But if we’re right, why did Samantha try to kill her sister?” Brent asked. “Twice.”

“Guilt,” Cooper suggested. “Our Samantha isn’t the real girl, right?” He looked at Delilah, who nodded. “She’s what Margaret created. Margaret had to blame herself for her sister’s death. That guilt—self-hatred even, I’d guess—could have been part of what she put into the Samantha we saw.”

“If we know all that, then now what?” Brent asked. “Samantha’s some kind of baby elemental impersonating a teenage girl. Do we—”

“Not impersonating,” Delilah interrupted. “The elementals are just raw power on their own. They have no memories or senses of
self
until mortal minds create them. What Margaret gave her is all Samantha knows.”

“Ha!” Cooper shouted a little too triumphantly. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “But I was right. She’s
not
evil.”

“She walked off with my body,” Brent pointed out.

“She’ll give it back,” Cooper said confidently. “If she
is
the girl that I’ve known for months—and according to Delilah, she is—then she doesn’t mean to hurt anyone. As soon as we find her, I’m sure I can convince her to do what’s right.”

This time it was Brent’s and Delilah’s turn to exchange a skeptical look. But what else could they do?

“I’ll summon her,” Delilah said with a shrug.

I hope you’re right
, Brent thought, still not entirely convinced. He might not understand sorcery, but he had picked up enough hints over the last few days to know that if Samantha wasn’t on their side, she was more than powerful enough to drown them all.

T
wo hours later, Cooper watched as Delilah spoke to a nurse in low, even tones. She had already convinced Cooper’s mother to go home and take care of his sick father. Now, she had a hand on the nurse’s shoulder. Their eyes were linked, and there was sweat on Delilah’s brow.

“So you see, it’s very important that we’re not interrupted,” Delilah said.

The nurse nodded. “I will speak to the others on the floor.”

“Good,” Delilah said with a nod, finally breaking eye contact. “Thank you, nurse. We really appreciate this.”

“Well. Religious observances are important,” the nurse mumbled, as if struggling to recall what she had just been doing.

“Yes. Thank you.” Delilah patted her hand, and as the
nurse went about her way, Cooper followed Delilah back into Margaret’s room. “I convinced her that we’re doing a Native American healing ritual that is very important to Brent culturally and religiously and we must not be interrupted.”

Curious, Cooper said, “I assume you did a little more than
talk
to her, since she didn’t even question the fact that no one in this room looks remotely Native American.”

“I have some talents.” Delilah ducked her head before saying with obvious pride, “You should see what Ryan can do. I have to work with what people are already thinking and inclined to do. You heard the nurse ask if we were going to be lighting candles or incense? If I had said yes, we probably would have had a problem. Ryan could have convinced her to light
herself
on fire, without even needing to say it out loud. And Brent—”

“Keep me out of this,” Brent interrupted.

Delilah stuck out her tongue at him, though the expression was playful this time, and less hostile than before. “Modesty is not a trait I admire.”

“‘Creepy’ is not a trait
I
admire,” Brent replied. “And thought control falls in the realm of creepy in my book. I only let Ryan teach me what I could do so I wouldn’t do it accidentally.”