She kissed his cheek and then gave a gentle push, sending him stumbling toward the hospital bed.
“I’ll keep in touch,” she said, before the air shuddered again. This time Cooper didn’t think it was his head that was spinning.
When he managed to look up again, Samantha was gone.
What next? Cooper hoped Ryan or Delilah would be able to help, but he remembered how easily Samantha had knocked Ryan down at the start of her hysterical attack on Margaret’s body. Would Cooper find Ryan in another room around here, unconscious or worse?
More importantly, would he find Brent at all?
There was one place Cooper could check for Brent, the only place he could imagine his being able to go. If Brent was there, things were going to be … kind of funny, actually.
Brent 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.
Two 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.”
Cooper resisted the impulse to take a step away from both of them. “So, we’ve got the room to ourselves,” he said. “What now?”
“Now … now,” Delilah said with a shaky breath, “I try to remember that, if something goes wrong, at least I’m already in a hospital.”
Cooper felt alarmed and shamed as he asked, “How dangerous is this for you?” He understood that they needed Delilah’s help to get Brent back where he should be, but as far as he knew, Delilah didn’t need them for anything. Yet she was still here.
Delilah looked nervous, as she crossed her legs to sit on the hospital floor, but she flashed a bold grin as she said, “Like I told you earlier, Coop, sometimes this work requires a little risk. People without the guts to face that shouldn’t get into sorcery.”
She closed her eyes, and tossed her hair back as she lifted her chin rather than bowing her head.
Cooper shifted his weight from foot to foot, wondering what was supposed to happen, and if he should be doing anything in particular. Delilah had promised the nurse that there would be no incense or candles or loud noises that might disturb other patients, but Cooper had still expected a little ritual and pizzazz.
After a minute, he whispered to Brent, “Has she started?”
Brent laughed out loud, though the raspy sound quickly turned to a cough. “I don’t do this stuff, remember?” he asked. “I’d feel a lot better if I had any clue what was happening, or if it were just about anyone but Delilah we had to rely on.”
“If you two would just be quiet …,” Delilah started to say, but trailed off.
Cooper sat back down.
The first indication that anything was happening was the sweat that seemed to gather on his skin despite the steady hum of the air conditioner. The room didn’t get hot exactly, but rather stifling and muggy. He shivered.
Twenty minutes passed without anyone speaking or moving. The air continued to thicken, until condensation built up on all the surfaces. Drops ran down the inside of the window-panes. It was so foggy Cooper had to move his chair inward to keep both Brent and Delilah in sight. He hoped that whateve
r Delilah had done to the nurse would keep anyone else from responding to the change in atmospheric conditions.
He realized Delilah’s lips were moving, as if she were speaking without sound, and it was becoming harder and harder to breathe. Suddenly the room seemed to constrict. He dropped his head, trying to pull air into his lungs as the edges of his sight turned from white fog to black mist. He tried to make it to the door, to get out and somehow break the effect, but succeeded only in falling to his knees on the floor.
Thank God, he thought, as the door opened with a bang.
The sound was followed by Samantha’s petulant accent, coming from Brent’s body, as she said, “I have Brent’s phone! Did it not occur to anyone to call me?”
The fog started to clear, and Cooper drew in deep, gasping breaths. Ryan helped him to his feet.
“Would you have come?” Delilah asked. She sounded winded, but not as badly as Cooper.
Samantha hesitated, before saying, “Maybe.”
“What are you doing here?” Brent said, looking up at Ryan.
“Samantha needed a ride,” Ryan replied nonchalantly.
Brent’s voice was choked as he demanded, “What did you do to my car?”
“Your mother took the keys!” Samantha shouted back. “I didn’t know how to stop her without hurting her.”
Cooper’s head had finally stopped spinning, and the air had returned to normal, when a nurse walked by and looked into the room. “What is going on—”
“We’re fine,” Ryan, Samantha and Delilah answered in unison. The nurse literally rocked back on her heels before nodding, her gaze unfocused, and continued down the hall.
Ryan closed the door.
“Did you even have a plan for what you were going to do next?” Ryan asked.
He looked exhausted, which made Cooper pause. Ryan acted so much older then the rest of them, but it occurred to Cooper that he was probably young enough to still be in college. He had the type of responsibility Cooper hoped to avoid for a long time.