What that meant, though, was that she hadn’t sought Cooper out in the hospital or at school since his return, and so had no idea how long he had looked this bad. People normally didn’t get that coated in psychic filth without dabbling in heavy magics. But unless Delilah had seriously misjudged him somewhere along the way, Cooper was no amateur sorcerer. She had to look for another source.
If Delilah hadn’t known what Cooper was normally like, she wouldn’t have felt driven to help him. After all, he wasn’t on the team anymore, he hadn’t called her, and he had snubbed her attempt to be nice. Under any other circumstance, she would have said that if he wanted to huddle in his own mystic mishap, that was his prerogative. However, Cooper was so infested with dark power, he probably couldn’t help being jittery, couldn’t help seeking isolation. He would draw back from those he was close to instinctively, even if he didn’t consciously realize his infection was a danger to those around him.
Delilah sat cross-legged on her down comforter and shut her eyes now, centering her awareness.
She knew from experience that there were beasts in the shadows of the world; they had nearly killed her when she was twelve. They scurryed about intent on nothing more than sating their own hunger. They latched on to the weak to feed, bloating themselves until their hosts somehow shook free of them, or died from the infection.
Sure enough, when Delilah opened her eyes, her attention focused not on the physical world but the paranormal one instead, she saw the hungry shadows pacing around her. Ryan le Coire had told her that those few individuals who could see these beasts all perceived them differently; they always reminded Delilah of some kind of centipede or other vile, multi-legged creature, slithering and grasping at everything they touched. They must have caught her scent when she stopped to talk to Cooper.
The sight of them made her skin crawl. She crossed her arms across her chest and fought the instinct to run. Running would give them an opening.
She walked slowly to the window, which she opened fully. The fresh night air would help her focus. She wasn’t strong enough to banish the shadows completely, but if she was careful, she could keep them from making a meal out of her. Eventually they would tire of stalking prey they had no hope of taking down.
It would have been a wild coincidence if Cooper’s current state was not related to the accident, so Delilah opened her laptop, signed on to the neighbors’ unsecured wireless network—their own fault for not bothering to set a password—and looked up the event she had only barely paid attention to at the time.
She skimmed headlines as they came up.
MAJOR ACCIDENT ON INTERSTATE KILLS TWO, LEAVES FOUR IN CRITICAL CONDITION.
WET ROADS BLAMED FOR EIGHT-CAR PILEUP ON I-90.
She read article after article, starting with national press and then focusing on local news outlets, which had given more attention to Cooper instead of chattering endlessly about the celebrity involved in the crash.
From what she could put together, a patch of fog had turned slightly slippery roads into a zero-visibility death trap. One witness said she thought she saw a deer or some other animal in her rearview mirror. She had passed safely out of the fog, but the driver of the car behind her had slammed on the brakes, and because the drivers of the cars behind it weren’t able to see what was happening, disaster had followed.
Delilah had already known that Cooper’s survival had been questionable when he had first been rushed to the hospital. The doctors who performed the emergency surgeries required to save his life were quoted in the paper, calling Cooper’s recovery “miraculous.”
A little more research revealed that Cooper had been driving the car in front. After he had hit the brakes, his car had spun out, and he had been thrown through the windshield and onto the pavement at seventy miles per hour. One article reported that he may have been hit by another vehicle after that.
He should have been dead. No wonder the shadows were following him. They had hooked their claws into him, ready to feast on the remnants of his mortality once he gave up, but then he had denied them. He had lived.
And he still lived.
That meant the papers had gotten the story wrong. This was not just a jock who survived a car accident. Something more powerful than a mere human being had claimed Cooper and kept him alive. For Cooper’s benefit? Maybe, but unlikely, judging by Cooper’s lack of experience with the occult.
Most people were lucky enough to never know the scavengers existed. Healthy individuals could usually break free of their grasp without even realizing they had been bitten, like fighting off the common cold. Even Brent, Ryan’s golden-boy telepath, was completely blind to them, since he had never bothered to expand his powers beyond his inborn knack for reading minds.
Those who worked with greater magics, however, and struggled to make more of themselves the way Delilah did, attracted the shadows’ attention. They had scared her so much the first time she saw them when she was twelve that she had backed off and refused to do so much as touch a Ouija board—until Ryan le Coire picked her out of a crowd during a freshman field trip into the city, and told her she had a great deal of latent power, which he could teach her how to use.
She believed in meeting one’s potential.
So even though it was already two in the morning, Delilah set her alarm for five. There were rituals she needed to perform in the morning, to strengthen her shields before the school day began, to make sure none of Cooper’s shadows could set its teeth into her.
As soon as school was out, Delilah would confer with her associates, and then she would have plenty to say when she spoke to Cooper again.
Brent was in a full sweat. He had suddenly remembered that he wasn’t enrolled in Q-tech, but had changed to the public school. He had missed the entire first week of classes!
He scrambled to gather school supplies, but his mother had sent his backpack to his grandmother in Japan to repair a broken strap, and he didn’t own a single pen, pencil, or notebook.
The last time he was in the public high school building was for pre-freshman orientation, and he had no idea where his classes were or even what he was signed up for. He found the main office finally, and they gave him a schedule, but his first class was all the way on the eighty-fifth floor and the elevator was out of order. By the time he got there, class was over, and he had to go downstairs again.
The second class was studying relativistic physics. After making an apple explode by dipping it in nitroglycerin and throwing it at the window, the teacher distributed the first exam, worth thirty percent of his final grade.
He couldn’t even read the test. It had only been a week! How could they already be talking about these things?
He stood up, and only when people started laughing did he realize he was completely naked.
“Oo, cute,” a girl said.
He turned, blushing, and the dream—for, upon standing nude in front of the class, he had gratefully realized it had to be a dream—shifted. The classroom and his classmates disappeared, replaced by a white room full of streaks of lights and sharp, clanging sounds. There were windows of various shapes and sizes around the room, and all he could see beyond them was pouring rain. Many of the windows were open, so rain cascaded down their sills and water pooled beneath them, seemingly as deep as a lake.
And of course there was the girl, her long blond hair clipped back with oversize hairpins with pink rhinestones. She was wearing a black tank top and a green skirt over black and blue striped stockings. She sat perched upon a white stool in the middle of one of those swirling pools, while dark shadowy figures reached for her.
The figures gave Brent a chill, but he made himself look away from them. This was just a dream, after all; he wouldn’t let it become a nightmare. Instead, he looked down, focused, and brought pants and a T-shirt into the dream.
More suitably dressed, he asked the girl, “Are you here to lend me a pencil?”
She tilted her head, looking curious. “You know you’re dr
eaming?” she asked.
“I lucid dream a lot these days,” he answered.
“Do you see ghosts a lot, too?”
He straightened up, now intrigued. “Are you Cooper’s ghost?”
She frowned. “His? I’m not a new kitten or something. I’m just … me. Samantha. It’s totally not my decision that he’s the only person who can see me. But you saw me for a little while, too. How did you do that?”
“How did Cooper do whatever he did to me?”
“There isn’t time to explain everything,” she said, shaking her head. “And I don’t know the answer to that one anyway. But you’ve got to come see us. Can you help him?”
“I was going to call,” he lied, unable to admit to her that he had kind of planned to foist the entire problem off on Ryan without ever getting personally involved.
“You can come by the coffee shop! The one in the center of town. Cooper works there every morning before school, starting at four-thirty, and then on the weekends until noon. He’s shy, but I’ll make him talk to you. And let you in if the shop isn’t open yet.”
“I don’t actually know a lot about real ghosts,” Brent admitted. “I know a lot of stories and legends, but none that are like the way he described you.” Wondering if he might have better luck with Samantha than with Cooper, he asked, “Do you know what happened that triggered his being able to see you?”
She paused, chewing on her lower lip.
“There was an accident,” she answered. “He doesn’t talk about it. But he was in the hospital a long time. I only harassed him about it because I thought maybe … you know … it would be relevant to me? But we looked into it. It wasn’t how we … you know … met.”
“Accident?” Brent asked. “Like a car accident, or something weirder?”
“Car,” she responded tersely. “It freaks him out to think about it. And he’s the only one I’ve got, really, so I don’t like to think about it, either.” He was just thinking that he could probably look it up in the local paper when she added, “Please don’t tell him I told you. And don’t tell anyone else.”
“Even if it means I can help him, or you?”
“Do you really think you can help?” she asked. She stopped again, looking pensive. “Even if you don’t know about real ghosts, maybe you could help with research? Books aren’t Cooper’s strong suit.”
“I can probably do more than that,” Brent answered. “I kind of have an unusual ability. There’s a guy who taught me how to use that ability without it hurting me. He’s the one who taught me how to lucid dream, for instance, since I need to be able to do so in order to keep out of other people’s heads while I sleep. He might be able to—”
This time, Brent knew he was awake, as he slammed the snooze button on his alarm clock before realizing the offensive sound was coming from his neighbor’s car alarm instead. His clock and a pile of books tumbled to the floor.
“Sorry,” he said out loud, in case Samantha was still there, listening.
He lay back down, but sleep eluded him. It was only 3:47 in the morning, but now that he was awake, the images from his dream felt more threatening, not less. He remembered the worst part of Cooper pushing him in the library—not the sensation of losing control over his body, of maybe even losing his flesh entirely, but the sight of the hungry darkness that had come for him during the instant he had been in that helpless state.
If Cooper’s ghost was real, then those things were real, too.
The dark, which hadn’t frightened him since he had been a little kid, suddenly seemed menacing, and it wasn’t until he stood up and turned on the light that he could get his heart to stop pounding.
He leaned back against the wall, trying to feel under control. He could hear it in his ears, the beat of his heart and the swish of frantically flowing blood. He bowed his head, dizzy, and then lifted it again as he heard someone say, Damn neighbors. That car makes a ruckus every night. Someone should do something—
No, that wasn’t out loud; that was someone across the street, thinking angry thoughts as he tossed in bed.
I am so dead. The first night they let me take the car and now it’s hours after curfew. Maybe I can tell them I had to be the designated—
—never going to let her take the car again. Grounded for the rest of her—
—maybe I should just call. I don’t even care if I wake him up. I should break this off now, before—
—nothing rhymes with that. I’m never going to finish this—
Brent collapsed to his knees, squeezed his eyes shut, and pressed his hands to his temples as if warding off a headache. He struggled to pull his mind inward, and push everyone else out.
He could do this. He had spent months with Ryan learning how to do this. He just needed to focus.
What is all that noise? Banging at all times of night and day.
He struggled to his feet as he picked up on his mother’s waspish thoughts. The combination of the clock falling and his knees hitting the floor must have woken her. If he was lucky, her sleeping pills still had enough of a grip on her that she would roll over and fall back asleep, but Brent had learned better than to trust his fate to luck.
He made it to his bedroom door, which he locked before grabbing clothes and almost falling through the first-story window and out of their tiny house. Woods. He wanted to be away from people for a little while. Mum could pound on the door and cuss at an empty room for as long as she liked.
He fought back the onslaught of strangers’ and friends’ thoughts long enough to make it under the cool canopy of the forest.
As he finally managed to breathe again, he looked up and realized he had come to the same spot where he had first met Delilah last fall. He had stayed away since they had broken up in March, partially in an attempt to avoid her, and partially because he hadn’t needed to come to the forest since she had introduced him to Ryan. It was a nice spot. Quiet. It was Delilah’s private ritual space, and she had wrapped it in magics that blocked out other, invasive powers. She hadn’t specifically warded it for telepathy, a power she lacked, but it helped a little, anyway. Now, it also kept the voices that tormented him at bay, and allowed him to clear his head.
It was probably also designed to keep out the shadowy forms he had seen in the library and in his room. Delilah hadn’t talked to him much about the dangers witches faced when they did magic, but he knew there were things she was afraid of in the dark, no matter how much she tried to pretend otherwise.
It was time to leave. Delilah came here enough nights that he was risking a run-in.
Maybe he should try to catch Cooper, as the ghost had suggested. He could always go back to sleep later, after the other kids were at school, and his mother had given up on him and gone back to bed. After the sun was up, when he could stand to close his eyes.
Cooper had managed to avoid dreaming again, but that mostly just meant he hadn’t slept long enough to get to that stage of sleep, which meant he hadn’t slept long enough, period. The third time his father caught him staring into space at the espresso machine, he had been told to go to the front and set up, and leave anything hot, sharp or complicated alone.
He jumped at the sudden banging now, only to realize that it was just someone knocking on the door. He glanced at the clock—still half an hour until they opened—and called, “We’re closed!”
When the next round of knocking started, Cooper dropped coffee grounds all over the counter. At least he had just rewashed that counter for the day, and dried it, so he could sweep the grounds into a filter instead of having to throw them all out.
“Oh, for the love of …,” he grumbled as the knocking grew louder. He was now in sight of the door, so he looked up with a disgruntled glare.
Oh. Him. They made eye contact, and Brent gave a self-conscious wave before shoving his hands in his pockets.
“Who’s pounding on the door?” Cooper’s father called.
“Someone I know, apparently,” Cooper answered. “Sorr
y. I have no idea what he wants. Mind if I let him in?”
“A friend?” he asked.
“I guess,” Cooper replied. Brent hadn’t run screaming, at least, and Cooper had promised Samantha he would try to look him up. …
“If he’s a friend, open the door and get him a cup of coffee,” his father said a little too jovially.
Cooper unlocked the door with a strange, fatalistic feeling. For a few moments, he and Brent stood there, looking at each other, neither sure what to say.
Cooper noticed that Brent kept a good distance, and did not offer to shake hands. That was fine. Cooper wasn’t anxious to risk tossing him across the room again, anyway.
Awkwardly, Brent said, “Your friend told me I could find you here.”
“What friend?” Cooper grumbled. Some of the guys from the team knew where he was, but he had trouble picturing them talking to Brent about Cooper. Or about anything.
Very quietly, Brent said, “I think she was probably your … you know.” He glanced past Cooper, where his father was standing in the doorway with flour on his hands, obviously wanting to make sure Cooper invited Brent in instead of telling him to go away.
“Come inside,” Cooper said as goose bumps ran up his arms. It was one thing for Brent to enthusiastically make up fantastic stories in the library, as if for his own amusement; it was another to find him here, subdued, serious, and seeming to truly believe Cooper’s tale. “I’ve got to finish setting up the front, but I can get you a coffee or something.”
“Thanks.”
As Brent stepped through the doorway, Cooper said, “Her name is Samantha, by the way.” Saying it, admitting out loud that she existed to another person, seemed like it lifted a weight off his shoulders.
“Yeah, she mentioned,” Brent repeated. “She’s … interesting, isn’t she?”
His father had finally ducked back into the next room, at which point Cooper relaxed some. “Yeah. Kind of painful sense of color.”