A doctor came out of Brittany’s room and began talking in hushed tones to Mr. and Mrs. Blakely. Focusing very hard, I hoped for extrasensory hearing, but unfortunately my ears were not affected by the demon curse in my blood and I couldn’t hear a word. I left the uncomfortable plastic chair and meandered slowly past them, making a big show of counting change in my hand as if I was headed to the vending machines.
“She’s in stable condition. We still haven’t isolated the illness that brought this on, but hopefully the lab in San Francisco will have better luck. The courier is en route, but the lab will still need to perform the tests and receive the results,” the doctor said. “Unlike the medical dramas on television, lab work takes time.”
I dropped some of my change as I got just past them so I could hear more.
Mrs. Blakely sobbed into her husband’s shoulder while he addressed the doctor. “I don’t understand. How can she be in a coma with no reason? She’s been sick for weeks and no one has been able to find anything wrong with her. It makes no sense.”
“I understand your frustration, Mr. Blakely. We’re all working very hard to bring your daughter safely out of this. It’s just that every test result has pointed to a very healthy young woman. There is no medical reason that we can find for your daughter to be wasting away like this.”
At his words, Mrs. Blakely sobbed harder, and I had to get up off the floor and go to the snack machine to avoid getting caught eavesdropping.
Though not from the same doctor, I had been given a similar diagnosis for my father. They hadn’t had any luck from the lab in the city either. There was no head trauma, no disease, no medical ailment. My father, and now Brittany, were just withering, like cut flowers in a vase with no water. Their bodies were drying up, not because they were ill but because their souls had been leached out until only the husks remained.
At the machine, I pondered the snack choices absently. I wasn’t hungry. Not even junk food sounded appealing. I just kept turning the last few days over in my head.
A couple of hospital employees wearing scrubs got behind me, so I pushed a random button and took the trail mix it offered me back to the plastic chair. The Blakelys were no longer in the hall. They’d either gone home or were in Brittany’s room. I thought about going back into my father’s room to sit with him for a bit. The nurses said it was fine for short periods, but seeing him that way frightened me, and the tubes and machines made me uneasy. I wished I’d fought harder to keep at least one of the girls with me. They’d let Haden stay with me that first night, but maybe he’d used the Lure to convince them without my notice.
It was getting late and I’d promised Muriel I would be home before eleven. I allowed myself a count to ten and then I crossed the hall and pushed back the curtain that had been acting not unlike a portal between two worlds. On the one side, I could only speculate about what damage might be done, might still be being done, to my world. On the other was confirmation I didn’t want to face. My father’s condition couldn’t be explained away or looked at with rose-colored glasses.
I’d already lost one parent and I feared very much that I’d lost the other.
I hated the smell of the room—sickness and disease, and not just from my father. It was as if every infection that had ever been in the room had left a trace of odor behind. My father’s skin was an aberrant shade of gray. It wrinkled unnaturally and was mottled with spots that seemed to lack the energy to be any color at all—more like shadows of blemishes. Challenging my fear, I focused very hard to see any light surrounding him. There was none, though whether I could see it on command had yet to be determined.
I walked slowly to my father’s side, remembering that Amelia had told me to try talking to him, because maybe on some level he could hear me. He appeared shrunken, almost brittle. “Hello, Father,” I said. I had to clear my throat. “It’s me, Theia.”
I winced. Of course it was me. Who else would call him Father?
“I just wanted to say that I’m not giving up hope.” I blew out a long breath. “And I love you.”
I wished it had been easier to say that to him when it mattered more, when he was healthy. I stared at the stranger in the hospital bed, wondering if he could hear me, wondering if the specialists would deem his medical condition beyond repair. My father had a living will—there were going to be some difficult decisions to be made. I doubted I would have the authority to make them, since I was just seventeen—and I was glad for it. That kind of responsibility was too much for me to handle.
Funny how a few months ago I’d argued that I was old enough to make my own choices. Seventeen had felt like almost eighteen, almost an adult. Standing at the hospital bed of my dying father, seventeen felt aeons closer to childhood.
I pulled up a chair alongside his bed. I was afraid to touch him. I inched my hand across the stark white sheets but never made contact. He looked so brittle.
Sitting back in the lumpy hospital chair, I tried to think of more that I could say to him, if he really could hear me. Did he understand that Mara had done this to him? Did he know that I was the one who had brought her into his life?
I closed my eyes. What a mess. A few minutes later, I felt myself tumbling into the place between sleep and awake. I fought it, despite how tired I felt. I didn’t want to be vulnerable at that moment. I patted my cheeks and blinked briskly. I should go. Muriel had made me promise to take a taxi home, but a walk would do me good. Clear my head. Wake me up.
A movement caught my eye. The tubes running in and out of my father’s body jumped. I leaned closer to see if they would do it again. Had he moved his arm? Hope filled me, stirring my heart. If he moved his arm, he could be waking up. What I wouldn’t give to see him open his eyes.
There again, the tubes moved. Only my father was still . . . still as death. It was just the tubes. They began to ripple, morphing suddenly from clear to shiny black. From the ends of the tubing grew sharp metallic pincers and thorny, gruesome-looking attachments. I gasped as little needles dug into my father’s flesh, lancing and lacing his flesh in crisscross stitches of black thread. I screamed, but no sound came out. No matter how hard I yelled, nothing happened.
To my disbelief, the ventilator and monitors grew into a hulking, demonic machine and I could feel its sentience and malevolence as it sewed itself onto my father’s body.
“No,” I cried, reaching towards it until one of the black tubes lashed back at me.
I darted back and forth, trying to stay out of its grasp and trying to reach my father. His eyes opened in horror and the oxygen tube that had been keeping him alive choked him and he rasped with what sounded like an alarming amount of liquid in his throat. The tentaclelike tubing snapped and coiled around my wrist, drawing me sharply towards the machine that tortured my father. I struggled, but other tubes tangled around my waist and legs, holding me in place helplessly while my father’s tortured gurgles of pain and fear riveted my attention. His eyes were unseeing and full of terror. I don’t know if he even knew I was there.
I thrashed against the evil, trying to pull it off me and get to my father. The stitches were causing his skin to pucker and swell in some places, and in others they were being systematically ripped out, only to be redone. The machine was sewing my father to the hospital mattress too.
I finally got hold of one tube and yanked it violently.
“What the hell are you doing?”
My world tilted as I was pushed to the floor by someone in purple scrubs. I blinked as the rest of the room came back into focus and the hospital machines returned to normal, sounding an alarm. Several other nurses ran in, crowding my father’s bed.
“Get security up here. She was pulling out his IV when I walked in.”
“No,” I protested, my voice raspy as if I’d been screaming. “That’s not how it happened.”
I got back to my feet. My father, though still unwell, had no trace of stitching or wounds. His eyes were closed, his breathing measured and normal, thanks t
o the tube. My God. What was happening to me? To him?
Every time I blinked, I saw his eyes, full of panic. How could I have imagined the whole thing? It had seemed so real. Was I going crazy? Had the nurses been right? Was I trying to yank out the tubes that were keeping him alive?
I used the distraction of the medical crisis to sneak out of his room and then the hospital. When I got outside, I reached into the pocket of my hoodie to turn my phone back on, but something poked my finger sharply.
“Ouch!” I brought the injured digit to my mouth while gingerly using my other hand to find what had poked me.
A corsage?
A black rose corsage with spiny, barbed thorns that circled the stem like teeth. The lace was tied to it with the same black thread that had been stitching my father.
I hadn’t imagined it.
Somehow, I had gone to Under for those few moments. That machine, that torture, was what my father was living every second he was in the coma. I’d been in Under for only a few minutes. My father was still there. I could feel it. And it was up to me to get him back.
* * *
* * *
Everything was nearly in place.
He’d hoped for more time, more stolen moments of a life he should never really have had, but that was over now. Theia had made it clear that they were better off apart. Why he had tried to argue with her was a mystery. It was what he wanted as well.
No, not what he wanted. Never what he wanted.
But for now it had to be this way. Haden felt the screw turning in his heart with every passing minute. Soon she would know what he’d set into motion. She would be hurt and angry—that couldn’t be helped. He’d never meant to betray her, but that was how she’d see it. She should have known better than to fall for him anyway. And he never should have let her. No matter how fast he ran, his destiny always found him.
He ached from a place that didn’t exist before he’d met her.
If only they’d had more time.
* * *
I stole a car.
Muriel’s car.
She was sound asleep when I got home. Nobody from the hospital had called her yet, to let her know that her court-appointed ward had tried to pull the plug on her father’s life support. I had a feeling she wouldn’t have believed them anyway.
When I was younger, I used to wish Muriel was my mother. I’d never told anyone that. She was so warm and my father so cold—she made life bearable in that house. I repaid her in kind by stealing her car.
I grabbed only my violin and her keys from the house.
The road was unfamiliar and poorly lit. I had very little experience driving anyway, as Father had elected not to let me get my license. My hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly that they were damp with sweat but I was too nervous to remove them long enough to wipe them on my pants. I hoped I wouldn’t get lost; I’d been to the cabin in the woods only a few times.
The shack belonged to Gabe and his older brother, and it wasn’t pretty. They’d built it themselves, adding things like rudimentary plumbing and electricity as they grew up. A lot had happened in the cabin, though—it was where I’d been abducted and where I’d been returned. As I turned onto the rocky driveway, I hoped that the remoteness of it would be an asset to me. I needed someplace to go where no one would think to look for me for a while. I left my phone in the car—there was never any cell service in the cabin and I didn’t want to talk to anyone anyway.
I let myself in, locking the door behind me, but I didn’t bother trying to build a fire to warm it up. The musty smell of the room wasn’t overpowering, but it certainly wasn’t pleasant. Someone had put down a new floor rug recently. Donny and Gabe sometimes used the place to be alone. . . . I wondered if Gabe was trying to fix it up for her. It seemed like something he would do.
I opened my case and pulled out my neglected instrument. The familiar weight of my violin settled into the place on my body where it had always belonged, but I hesitated. Before I’d known what Under was, I had played a song that transported me there against my will.
This time I would take myself there.
My trips to Under had never been in my control. Often I’d been a pawn in a game I didn’t understand. The conflicting desires of Haden and Mara brought me in and out of their world on their whims. Back and forth, I’d been urged and repelled.
And where was Haden now? I wondered as I sat in a scarred wooden chair. I readied my bow. Did he miss me? Or was he filling his time with pursuits of other girls? Girls less complicated. Girls who could feed his appetites.
I closed my eyes and pulled an age-old tune from my soul, twisting and turning it around until I found just the right notes. In my head, I could hear the rest of the orchestra joining me. It was a song I’d heard only once, but such was my gift that once was all I ever needed to translate what I heard to my bow and strings.
Father had always pushed me to use my gifts to study and play classical music. I think it had been his dream that I play in a renowned symphony, but it was never mine. I heard a different kind of music in my soul—I always had. The kind of songs they played in Under. Perhaps I’d lured the underworld to me all along and not the reverse.
I didn’t need to open my eyes to feel the change. The atmosphere was thicker in Under, as if the air coated my skin. The music played on, though I no longer held my violin. I opened my eyes.
The ground below me was parched and cracked, so devoid of color I couldn’t even call it gray. All around me it hinted at once being resplendent by how desolate it now appeared—nothing grew, but in place of vegetation, the stalks of dead plants withered in the bleakness. The wasteland seemed to stretch for miles around me in every direction. On the horizon, bolts of lightning cracked the sky and the beyond rumbled back as if in protest for the deep crevices the lightning left behind.
The whole place felt lonely.
A splash of color caught my eye. I couldn’t tell how far it was from me, but I started towards it. My legs grew heavier the farther I walked, but the colors were so beautiful in the middle of the barren earth that I pushed myself to slog ahead even when they seemed to be getting no closer as I walked towards them.
In the distance, dark clouds gathered ominously. The thunder clapped louder, followed by long sizzles that echoed as if I were standing in a cavern instead of on the flat ground. I didn’t like the noise; it sounded as if the sky was being torn at the seams.
I kept moving, knowing that standing still would be no safer, despite the part of me that wanted to cover my head and hide. Finally I looked down at myself and realized I was wearing a large, heavy coat. Strange. While I walked, I unbuttoned it, shrugging out of it and letting it fall to the ground. I felt a little lighter, but I was still wearing another coat. I kept shucking off layer after layer of restricting jackets and coats, getting lighter and lighter until finally I was down to a nightgown, red again.
Without the bulky clothing, I moved with ease and sprinted to the colorful spot in the desolate landscape. As I neared it, I realized it was the flowers that I had liked so much. Strange that they could grow where nothing else survived, here in the middle of nowhere. I smiled when I could smell them—so sweet, like fruit.
I needed to go find my father, but first I rubbed the soft petals of the yellow bloom across my cheek, inhaling deeply at its fresh scent. The pink one was next and then the blue. I felt giddy, despite my surroundings. If my flowers were here, it couldn’t be that bad.
“Theia!”
Haden’s voice startled me and I turned abruptly towards him, surprised to see him. He wore faded jeans and one of his white button-up shirts with an untied cravat under the collar. His face was covered in stubble and his hair was rakishly mussed. His black eyes made him appear more demon than human at that moment, and he reeked of the sulfur that accompanied his use of the Lure. His face was stretched tight and I couldn’t decide if he looked tired or angry or both.
He looked behind me and then back at my face. “My
God, what have you done?”
Confused, I turned to the flower bed. The yellow flower had lost its color and its stalk bent sadly. “I don’t understand,” I said, looking back at him. “I was just smelling the flowers.”
I looked behind me again, and the flowers were all drooping. Dying.
“Oh, Theia.” He looked crushed. More so even than the night I had broken up with him. “Those aren’t flowers.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
My eyes snapped open. Someone was pounding at the door.
I was back in the cabin, still playing the song on my violin that had carried me Under. I had to concentrate to pull my arm away from my instrument, my body still a little possessed with the aftereffects. The pounding on the door continued, but I couldn’t seem to move from my chair. I was paralyzed with grief. I hadn’t found my father. A blade of guilt slashed my stomach. I’d been distracted by the flowers.
The flowers.
Every time I’d touched them or inhaled their pleasing fragrance, I’d been draining them. Their scents had filled me with a sense of well-being. I’d taken such pleasure from them.
The shame overwhelmed me. Not flowers . . . souls. I’d been feeding from human souls.
“Theia, I know you are in there. Open up. It’s Mike.”
Why in the world was Mike at the cabin?
The oddity of his presence startled me out of my numbed state. I crossed the room, aware for the first time that it had begun to rain while I’d been gone, the sound of it like falling nails on the tin roof. I opened the door with trepidation. “Mike?”
He dripped all over the stoop, water running down his face in rivulets. He was breathing heavily and looked agitated. He folded me into his wet embrace, squeezing harder when I stiffened in his arms. “It’s okay. It will all be okay now,” he assured me.
He didn’t loosen his hold on me, but instead pushed into the cabin with me in his arms. Unease shot arrows down my spine. I tried to shove away from his chest, but his arms didn’t relent. Years of wrestling made him strong. “I promise it will be okay now. You don’t have to worry anymore.”