They talked about the hours she had spent in the hospital, wondering if he would survive, and knowing from the doctors’ expressions that none of them thought he would. Without mentioning the way they had transitioned into real life, he told her in halted phrases about his nightmares. Almost more painfully, he finally described how mentally and physically exhausting the early sessions with his physical therapist had been, back in the days when it seemed like recovery might hurt more than it was worth.
He wished he could tell her about Samantha, too, who was always there, saying things like, “You’ve got a body. It hurts, but it’s yours. Trust me when I say you should be grateful. You might never be a football star again, but that’s not all there is to life.”
They both jumped when there was a tentative knock at the door at almost five in the morning. Cooper went to answer it, and frowned when he saw Brent.
“Brent, it’s not even sunrise.”
“I was going to walk around to your window, since I figured force of habit might have woken you up by now,” Brent said, “but I noticed the light on here.”
“What happened to eight?”
“Brent?” Cooper’s mother sounded concerned. “Come in. Is something wrong?”
The question made Brent flinch. Cooper took a closer look, and realized Brent’s face was pale and his lips were pinched. He was also soaking wet.
“Nothing’s wrong,” he answered, a little too quickly. Cooper could tell his mother didn’t believe a word Brent said, either, but she didn’t object when he added, “I’m an early riser. I know Cooper is, too. I figured it might be all right to stop by.”
“Come in,” Cooper said.
Cooper’s mother stepped into the hall for a moment, and came back with a dry towel from the linen closet, which she handed to Brent. He accepted it with a soft thank-you and tried to dry off a little as she said, “I’m going to head to bed. You two boys can talk.”
She obviously didn’t believe Brent’s assurances that nothing was wrong—neither did Cooper—but knew better than to press the issue.
The instant she had closed the door, Brent seemed to collapse. He barely made it into a chair, and then he leaned forward until his forehead was on the table and took deep, shuddering breaths.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s raining.”
Cooper sat down next to him, confused. “What’s going on?”
Brent shook his head. “I don’t know. I could sense it though, with the same part of me that hears thoughts, for just a minute, and it was …” He put his head back down, and rubbed his temples. “I don’t know. The storm kept my mum awake. I needed to go somewhere else. It’s raining too hard to go to the woods.”
Brent wasn’t making any sense, but Cooper wasn’t going to question him at that moment. He just asked, “Can I do anything for you?”
Brent shook his head. “Just … be quiet a minute.”
The request was made in vain—the phone rang at that moment, making Brent wince as Cooper hurried to answer it. It wasn’t unusual for Cooper to be up at this hour, but why did everyone else seem to be?
“Hello?”
“Cooper?”
He recognized John’s voice, and clutched the phone tighter. No one called at this hour with good news. “What’s happened?”
“Delilah’s in the hospital.”
While Brent curled up to nap on the couch, wearing one of Cooper’s father’s shirts as his own dried on the back of a kitchen chair, Cooper carefully worked his body through the exercises his physical therapist had prescribed. Supposedly, if he did them daily, he would maintain nearly normal functioning.
The fear of ending up off his feet again, however, wasn’t what had driven him to be diligent that day. He was waiting for a phone call. He had been waiting for almost three hours. The sun had started to rise, and the rain had let up a little, but still no more word since John’s call. All he knew was that Delilah was in critical condition. John hadn’t had a lot of details and the hospital hadn’t been willing to give many more when Cooper asked. But Cooper was on the list of people who would get a call when anyone learned anything, most of all if Delilah was going to be okay and when she could have visitors.
He grabbed his cell phone when he heard ringing, only to find it still dark.
Brent let out a grunt and rolled enough to pull his own phone out of his pocket and answer with a sleepy, “Yo.” He yawned. “Hi, Ryan … Yeah, I heard. … No, I don’t know anything you don’t know.” Brent sat up straighter, the last vestiges of grogginess disappearing from his expression. “I heard that, too. What was—”
His eyes widened as Ryan must have answered. Cooper crossed the room, but couldn’t make out what Ryan was saying.
Brent nodded as he said, “Yeah, we’ll be there.”
He clicked the phone shut, and then looked up at Cooper.
“I have good news and bad news,” he said. “The good news is, Ryan says Delilah is probably going to be okay. She nearly drowned—no, I guess she actually drowned, since the paramedics had to resuscitate her. The bad news …” He hesitated. “Ryan says she left his house with Samantha. So, either the force that overpowered Delilah—probably the same one that nearly put me out of commission—was Samantha, or it was something else Delilah summoned. In which case Ryan says, and I quote, ‘A little fish of a power, like Samantha seems to be, may not have fared well.’”
Cooper had to sit down as he felt himself pale. “I haven’t seen Samantha since Ryan’s house.”
“Ryan recommends we go to the hospital and see if Samantha is with Delilah. He’ll meet us there.”
“Brent—” How could he even begin to express the way his heart was pounding in his throat at the thought of driving down that road … the one he had been on months ago … to the hospital where he had spent weeks. …
Of course, he didn’t need to say it out loud.
“You must have been on that highway since the accident.”
Cooper shook his head. “I was nearly unconscious from medication when I came home from the hospital, and my physical therapist is local. And …” He looked out the window. “This doesn’t look like good driving conditions.”
“Listen. Delilah and I didn’t part on the kind of terms where I’m inclined to go racing to her hospital bedside, and I can’t check on Samantha without you,” Brent said. “I’m willing to drive you there so you can do both those things, but only if you have the courage to get in the damn car. Otherwise, Ryan will just deal with Samantha as he sees fit.”
That was enough to motivate Cooper, even if Delilah’s condition hadn’t been. Two people he cared about were in danger, one of whom had been at his bedside when he woke from nightmares of hell and had stayed with him as he struggled back from it.
Samantha couldn’t be evil.
Once Cooper was determined to go, there was still his mother to convince. She looked like she wanted to lock them both in the house, despite Brent’s repeated assurances that he would practically crawl down the highway, and Cooper’s promise to call when they reached the hospital.
“If the rain gets heavy again, you’ll pull over instead of trying to bear it out, right?” she asked Brent.
“We’ll pull over and we’ll call you to let you know we’re delayed,” he said for perhaps the fifteenth time.
Cooper and Brent left the instant she nodded, before she could consider changing her mind.
“We’ll only be on the highway for fifteen minutes or so,” Brent said as he backed out of the driveway. “If you can’t handle it on your own, I’ve got half of my mother’s medicine cabinet in the glove box. We can always pass you off at the hospital as grieving and distraught, even if you’re drugged out of your mind.”
“I’ll manage without,” Cooper said, looking doubtfully at Brent. The casual offer made Cooper realize that, if it weren’t for Brent’s telepathy and Cooper’s extraordinary circumstances, there would probably be more reasons for their not associating than different schools.
br />
Fear took hold as they approached the highway, where other cars were streaming past at disconcerting speeds despite the weather.
“Breathe,” Brent whispered as he checked his blind spot, and merged onto the highway. Cooper pressed his palms to the dashboard, and drew deep breaths, closing his eyes tightly and wishing he could drown out the rapid whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of Brent’s wipers struggling to keep the windshield clear.
Summer vacation. Delilah’s parents had a time-share down Cape, and had offered it to the team for a weekend. With summer jobs starting and some parents’ nervousness about sending their kids off even under the strict supervision of Delilah’s mother, only a half dozen of them were able to go. Cooper was looking forward to it, despite the dreary weather as the trip began.
“Calm, Cooper,” Brent said. “It isn’t happening now.”
Cooper pulled in another deep, rattling breath.
“This was a bad idea,” he said.
“Pills are in the glove box,” Brent replied.
He wasn’t planning to take any, but Cooper used the offer as an excuse to snoop into Brent’s life, and to distract himself from what was going on outside the car—namely, movement, road, water, and other cars. “Why do I get the impression you have a very different life than I’m used to?” he pondered out loud as he looked through the collection of prescription drugs. Brent had said they were from his mother’s medicine cabinet, but several bottles had Brent’s name on them. “Please tell me you do not take this crap when you’re driving.”
“I don’t even take it when I’m sleeping,” Brent answered. “When the telepathy got strong enough to be a problem, and I kept ending up in the hospital, doctors always gave me more migraine prescriptions and sleeping pills. I didn’t take them because they only made the voices worse, but Mum kept filling the prescriptions if I didn’t and—Damn it, Cooper, stop it!”
Cooper wasn’t sure what he was doing at that exact moment to cause the outburst. “Stop what?”
“Stop … thinking, asking questions,” Brent replied tightly. “All I have to do is hit the brake or swerve a little to give you a heart attack, and I swear to God I will if you keep prying.”
The words, coupled with the shout, were nearly enough to cause the threatened reaction on their own.
The gray sky had started to drip the moment Cooper got on the road, a fine drizzle that suggested a damp weekend. Hopefully it would pass. This was Massachusetts, after all; the weather was rarely the same from hour to hour.
“Cooper. Cooper!” Brent’s words jerked him out of the memory. “I’m sorry. I’m tired, and it takes enough concentration to drive without being swamped by your flashbacks that I say stuff without thinking. I don’t like to talk about myself, and I really don’t like to talk about my family, so do me a favor and keep off that subject.”
Cooper nodded. If Brent’s mother was as unstable as Brent made her seem, Cooper could understand why Brent didn’t want to talk about it. He could also guess why telepathy might come in handy.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I won’t ask more about your family, but would you talk about something? Please. I’m just trying not to think.”
“Well, that’s kind of you,” Brent replied. He paused a moment, and then said, “How about Delilah? There’s an interesting girl for you. Doesn’t date jocks. Practices black magic in her spare time. On an unrelated note, she likes to dance naked outside on the new moon.”
That image was enough to distract Cooper momentarily from his memories of the accident.
Brent laughed, and then said, “For someone who has never dated her, you have a remarkably accurate image of her, down to the tattoo on her left hip.”
Cooper felt himself blush, as he stammered some kind of excuse about teams and traveling and parties and occasional lack of privacy. “And you two dated?” He still couldn’t picture it.
“Yeah, for a while, but then there were some basic ideological incompatibilities. None of that neo-pagan earthy no-personal-gain stuff for that girl,” Brent said. “I’m not sure she fancies the ‘harm none’ principle, either.”
“So she is a witch?” Cooper asked. “I thought maybe she was like you or something.”
“She doesn’t like to be called a witch,” Brent answered. “She says that gets her confused with the Wiccans and stuff. She plans to become a registered member of the C.O.S. when she turns eighteen.”
“C.O.S?”
“Church of Satan.”
“Now I know you’re messing with me,” Cooper said. He leaned back, shaking his head. Brent was probably making stuff up to distract him. Probably.
“The Church of Satan isn’t the way it’s portrayed in movies, with human sacrifice and killing kittens and that Hollywood crap,” Brent explained. “A lot of it has to do with personal power, which I’m fine with. However, they do not believe in being kind to those who have ‘wronged’ them, so I imagine Delilah might have some choice words to say about me, since I kind of implied she was a sociopathic freak when I broke up with her. I think she expected me to be a whole lot more grateful that she passed my name on to Ryan, and she didn’t expect him to be more impressed by the abilities I got by accident than he is by the ones she worked on for … oh, never mind.”
Cooper looked up at the road—which was a mistake. He knew this stretch of highway. He had seen it in his dreams so many times. The road crested in a hill, and over the hill—
“Stop the car,” he gasped.
Brent responded promptly, putting on his hazards, checking for other cars and easing onto the shoulder as quickly as he safely could.
Cooper nearly fell out the passenger-side door, while Brent waited in the car. Leaning over the guardrail, he tried to pull in enough air to keep from passing out as the rain soaked through his clothes. He had nearly succeeded before he lifted his eyes and saw the two white crosses.
He scanned the area, taking in the dents in the guardrails, his mind seeing another day … and suddenly all the memories came flooding back.
He had tried to slow down, seeing the thick, white fog, but he knew there were people close behind him, and that braking too suddenly on the highway was as dangerous as going too fast. He was riding the brake when he barely saw the flash of movement and color out of his peripheral vision.
He put a hand on the guardrail, in the exact spot the girl had been.
Without slowing, she set one foot on the metal rail and vaulted onto the road.
She landed in front of him, and only then did she turn and seem to see him. Her eyes widened and her mouth opened. He jammed the brake pedal into the floor mat, but she was barely an arm’s length away, and nothing could stop the series of collisions that followed.
An enormous crash, and then he was airborne. Shattering glass, and impact.
Had Samantha been the one who leaped in front of his car that day? But there had been no mention of a girl being killed in the crash. Cooper had checked. Unless Ryan was right, and she had never been alive in the first place. In which case the real question was: had she known what she was doing, and the damage she would cause?
Delilah felt like she was drowning, not in rain, but in fire. The world seemed to be ablaze. She couldn’t make sense of it. She wished she was dreaming. If she had been, she could have woken herself. But this was more like wandering, lost.
She remembered the way the skies had split while she tried to figure out how to link to Samantha. The rain that had fallen around her had been so thick she couldn’t draw air into her lungs. With every breath, she had inhaled more water. But this was something different, someone else’s memory of another time and place.
She drew a breath, but it was a futile one. Her lungs were scorched by smoke and heat. She struggled forward despite every survival instinct telling her to run, because she could hear screaming.
Delilah knew she wasn’t some helpless child. She was a sorcerer.
I think, therefore I am, she pondered. If she still existed, then she was st
ill alive, and she did not have to linger this way. And if she was alive, then she could learn.
Instead of struggling toward consciousness, she reached for the memory of fire. She had tried to bind a water elemental, and had found a vision of flames and … something. Pain, yes, but more than that.
She woke in the hospital with a shudder and found herself shouting, “Leave me alone!”
Her eyes were barely open before Ryan began the lecture she had anticipated. “What did you think you were doing?” he demanded, only to answer his own question before she could draw a breath into her aching lungs. “No, I know what you thought you were doing. You thought you were being clever, and bold.”
“No less so than Arabella le Coire once was,” she managed to gasp out. Ryan’s ancestor had bound herself to an earth elemental and set herself up as lady of a great manor—the same manor where she had been imprisoned, awaiting death for heresy and witchcraft before then. Hundreds of years later, the le Coire family still had immense power, all from that ancient bargain.
“One would think you might have learned something after you were nearly devoured by the scavengers when you were twelve, but no! I hoped that, sometime in the three years you’ve worked with me, I would have imparted some actual wisdom. And I prayed you would learn when you sent three other people into howling madness with that trick you pulled last spring—but by then I was a little less optimistic. Now this!”
He stood up and began to pace. Delilah shut her eyes again, exhausted.
“Do you even know whose flesh you’re wearing?” he demanded.
“What?”
That got her attention. She tried to sit up, only to have pain ricochet through her body.
“Her name was Margaret,” Ryan said. “The last time I spoke to her was in May. She told me she had found a way to bind one of the elemental powers. I can only assume it was based in fire, since the next thing I heard was that her entire family was lost in a pyre so hot it melted the steel frame of the car in the driveway. She managed to make it out of the house. Some hikers found her in the forest two weeks later, battered and savaged by animals. She wouldn’t have survived physically if she hadn’t snagged some power from her elemental, but since her mind is completely gone, the fact that her heart is still beating doesn’t make much of a difference.”