Читать книгу Elegy - Tara Hudson, Tara Hudson - Страница 12

Chapter SEVEN

No.” I tried to speak firmly, but my voice came out edged with hysteria. “No, no, no.”

My nerves vibrated as though they’d been strummed, echoing back anger, excitement, uncertainty, and even a touch of betrayal. I felt a sudden flush of heat, like my glow might break free and cut a path of fire across the road.

When Scott took a step forward, I held up both palms as a warning.

Come any closer, pardner, and I’ll blast ya.

I heard someone choke out a strangled laugh and then realized it was me. In an effort to control myself, I took a few deep breaths.

“No,” I repeated, locking eyes with Joshua again. “No to all of it.”

In the past when I’d been so clearly shaken, Joshua had approached me cautiously. Almost like I was a wounded animal. But tonight he rushed to my side, unafraid. He stood as close to me as he could, brushing one hand through the air above my shoulder.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “Jillian asked him to pick me up. Apparently he already knows—”

“I already know a thing or two about the afterworlds,” Scott interjected.

I blinked back, stunned. Not because Scott had just interrupted his friend—something I’d never heard him do—but because of what he’d said. His casual use of the word “afterworlds” was particularly interesting. It wasn’t a term that the average teenage boy threw around lightly.

The average Seer boy, however, was a different story.

I raised my eyebrows at Joshua, signaling him to let me work through this, and then turned back to Scott. Slowly, tentatively, I took a step forward.

“What do you know about the afterworlds?” I asked softly.

“Probably not as much as you guys.” Scott gave me another sheepish smile. “But enough to help.”

That answer didn’t satisfy me. I narrowed my eyes and moved one step closer, all the while keeping my gaze trained on him. “How? How do you know enough, Scott?”

He held up one hand in a motion of caution and, with the other, pulled something from his pocket. He raised the object into the light of a nearby streetlamp so I could see it, and then took his own slow steps toward me. When we were within reaching distance, he handed it to me. It looked like a thin, cheaply made wallet, its fraying edges held together by duct tape.

“Flip it open,” Scott urged. “To the pictures.”

I did so gently, opening to the small plastic sleeves that held a handful of wallet-sized photos. Scott pointed to them.

“Go to the third one. It’s a group shot.”

I flipped to the one he indicated and examined it, frowning. The photo was tiny, almost too small for me to make out the individual features of the seven or eight people seated in it.

“It’s my whole family,” Scott explained. “At least, all of them that live in Oklahoma. We took it a few years ago, during my freshman year. See? That’s me in the front row.”

He smiled shyly and pointed again. I peered back down at the photo and saw a younger version of Scott, with shorter hair and a few less inches of height, smiling up from the first row.

Then my eyes trailed to the back row, where the elders of his family stood. On the far left, standing a few feet apart from everyone else, was a white-haired woman with thick glasses and a broad smile. She looked strangely familiar, though I didn’t know why.

Noticing my stare, Scott leaned closer and pointed to the old woman.

“That’s my gran. She was on the decorating committee at First Baptist. The same church Ruth Mayhew used to attend.”

Suddenly, I knew where I’d seen her face before. She’d been in the church the day Ruth marched me outside and threatened me with exorcism. More importantly, this old woman had been at my cemetery, standing in a circle of Voodoo dust, the night Ruth called off my exorcism so that I could save Jillian’s life.

The woman in the photograph was a Seer. And Scott’s grandmother.

Which means that Scott is . . .

“How long have you known?” I whispered aloud, still staring at her picture. “What you are?”

“Not long. My gran never told me about this stuff, and she didn’t raise me with the superstitions, like Ruth did with her grandkids. But I know Gran believed in ghosts. And I know she had some pretty creepy after-church activities, judging by all the jars of weird crap she kept in her house.”

“‘Kept’?” I asked, catching his use of the past tense.

He shrugged, but I could see a glint of sadness in his eyes. “Yeah, she passed away this January.”

“I’m sorry,” I said softly. And I was, even if the woman had tried to end my afterlife. Loss hurt, no matter who it was you lost.

I closed the wallet and handed it back to Scott carefully, making sure that our hands didn’t touch. He took it from me and slipped it into his pocket. Then he shrugged again, more awkwardly this time, and cast an uncomfortable glance at Joshua.

“Jillian and I have been . . . hanging out a lot lately. She needed someone to talk to after everything that happened at Christmas, and when we put together all the different pieces about my gran—”

“Jillian realized that she had a new Seer boyfriend?” Joshua concluded bitterly. “One who was willing to listen to all of Amelia’s secrets?”

“No, no!” Scott flapped his hands desperately in the air. “Jillian never bitched about Amelia, not to me. She just warned me that something bad might happen again, and that we needed to be ready with a plan to fight it.”

“Like the ‘something’ that happened an hour ago,” Jillian added forcefully. She gestured to me emphatically. “Tell them, Amelia. Tell them about your little truth-or-dare disaster.”

I startled, surprised that I hadn’t done that yet. I’d been too wrapped up in the shock of another person knowing what I was, and why.

With a shudder that had nothing to do with the cold night air, I repeated my conversation with the dark visitor in the mirror. As I spoke, I saw Joshua’s jaw tighten and his fists clench reflexively.

Scott trembled too—with fear, not anger. But somehow, he found the courage to interrupt the end of my story.

“Amelia, we have to do something,” he urged. “Don’t you see that? For your sake, and Jillian’s.”

I wouldn’t have wanted to stand on the receiving end of the look Joshua now gave his friend.

“And who,” Joshua seethed, “appointed you safety inspector for my girlfriend and my baby sister?”

While Scott floundered to explain himself, I shot Jillian a similar glare. She’d betrayed my confidence, in more ways than one. At least she had the decency to look somewhat contrite, but that didn’t stop her.

“Okay, enough,” she ordered. “So I told Scott. So we’ve secretly been dating. So what? None of this is going to help us destroy High Bridge.”

I threw my hands up in the air. “And what exactly would the destruction of High Bridge accomplish, Jillian? Except maybe a little therapy for some of us.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Amelia,” she drawled. “Only close the gate into the netherworld forever. No big deal.”

“That’s . . . that’s not possible.”

Jillian crossed her arms and flashed me a smug smile. “Well, we think it’s possible.”

She signaled to Scott, who turned and opened the back door of the sedan. He rummaged around before pulling out a small, unmarked book.

“My gran’s journal,” Scott said, closing the car door. “It has all these Seer spells in it, and notes about how the afterworlds might work.”

Jillian plucked the book from his hands, rewarding him with a small kiss that made him blush and Joshua wince. Unbothered by the obvious conflict she’d created between her brother and his friend, she thumbed through the notebook until she found the appropriate page. Then she pressed the book flat and carried it over for me to read.

Beneath Jillian’s thumb, I saw the spidery scrawl of handwriting. But other than a few key words—“gate,” “darkness,” “dust”—I couldn’t make out the rest of it. I shook my head, blinking awkwardly from the concentration.

“I can’t read it, Jill—either it’s too dark out here, or she was too old when she wrote it. Maybe both.”

Jillian uttered an exasperated curse. “Well, I can read it. And it says that demons seem to link their gateways to certain structures—particularly those associated with rivers; these structures not only function as lures, but also as sources of the demons’ earthly powers. The journal says if we lace one of these haunted structures with Seer dust and then destroy it, we should be able to stop any harmful spirits from escaping.”

I paused, still studying the page in front of me. Then, softly, I asked, “What about nonharmful spirits, Jill?”

Beside me, Joshua stirred. Probably because he’d already followed my question to its logical answer. I hadn’t intended any harm to Ruth, yet her Seer dust—or Voodoo dust, according to Kade—had limited my movements. Kept me from entering or exiting wherever the dust had been poured.

The same rules applied to all ghosts, “harmful” or not. Intentions meant nothing to a line of gray powder. I couldn’t use something so pitiless, so final, to bar the doorway to and from the netherworld. Especially when a certain few ghosts still resided there.

Gaby, for one, and possibly my father. Even Eli, dark as he could sometimes be. Not to mention all the other souls that Eli and his predecessors had unfairly imprisoned there.

I couldn’t trap them in the darkness, just to save myself from it.

“No dust,” I said, shaking my head. “I’ll agree to do the rest, but no dust. We can’t risk the afterlives of all those trapped souls. Even if it means that the demons themselves might break loose.”

Jillian started to protest, but Joshua waved her silent.

“Amelia’s right—we can’t condemn the other ghosts like that. We’ll just have to do what we planned to do tonight, without the dust. And if anything bad happens later . . . then we’ll deal with it later.”

When he finished, Joshua gave me a small, reassuring smile. I knew what he was doing: asserting a compromise between Jillian’s plan and my own. Between the total destruction of the netherworld, and the total destruction of my soul.

Joshua just saw through me that well. He knew that this situation could end badly for me, if I thought I had no other choice.

Huffing angrily, Jillian stomped over to where Scott stood near the entrance to High Bridge. She started to complain to him, but he took her hand in his and leaned close to whisper in her ear. Instantly, her frown softened and the fury went out of her eyes. She hesitated, just for a moment, before whispering something back. Then she turned to me with a strangely rueful smile.

“Your dad, Amelia. I forgot.”

At that moment, I wanted to hug Scott. Instead, thick tears welled in my eyes. I tried to brush them aside quickly, but a few drops still fought their way to the surface.

“Thank you,” I managed to croak. “Thank you all for understanding why I can’t . . . why I just won’t . . .”

“Write your dad off like that,” Joshua finished gently. “Or Gaby.”

“Or any of them. Jillian, Joshua—you’ve seen part of the netherworld. You should understand.”

Slowly, and a little begrudgingly, Jillian nodded. She may not have liked it, but she knew I was right. Very few souls deserved to spend eternity in that place.

I cleared my throat of the remaining lump that my tears had left.

“So, now that that’s all settled, how do we do this? How do we destroy High Bridge?”

Scott and Jillian exchanged a look—one I couldn’t quite identify—and he grimaced. Then he reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a small, rounded object, and lifted it into the glow of the streetlamp. Light glinted off the object’s metal shell, like some cold, sadistic wink.

No one said anything. No one even moved.

Well, aren’t you just a bag of tricks tonight, Scottie-boy?

I let out a noise that sounded like the offspring of a hiccup and a hysterical giggle. Then, in a bemused voice that I almost didn’t recognize, I asked, “Would someone please tell me that that’s not a grenade?”