Token of Darkness (8 page)

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. “Sorry. 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.”

“We’re definitely talking about the same girl,” Brent agreed, good humor in his voice now despite the rings of exhaustion under his eyes. “But she seems to care about you.”

“She’s nice,” Cooper said. “Not big on privacy, but I think mostly it’s that she’s lonely. I’m surprised she isn’t here yet, actually. She normally chats all through the morning.”

“Huh,” Brent answered. Then he blinked and shook his whole body. “Sorry. Did you say something about coffee? I’m not used to being awake at this hour.”

“Sit down. I’ll get you a cup. How do you take it?”

“Just … coffeelike. Black. I’m a Dunkin’ Donuts guy,” Brent said by way of explanation. “Complicated coffee confuses me.”

Cooper’s father emerged from the back as Cooper poured Brent a cup of their house roast. “If you want to hang out with your friend, I have things under control,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“You’ve been a bit of a menace this morning, anyway,” he pointed out with a chuckle.

Cooper agreed and led Brent to a table in the corner, as far away from the counter—and his father—as they could get.

“So,” Cooper began, once they were seated across from each other.

“So,” Brent replied. “Since I’ve seen her, too, I’m going to work on the assumption that you’re not crazy. I think that’s a good place to start.”

Cooper nodded. “You’re responding to all this a lot better than I did at first.”

“My life’s been pretty weird for a while now,” Brent explained. “I’ll tell you all about it when we get to that. What else can you tell me about Samantha and … um, yourself?”

Cooper wondered if Brent had almost asked something else, but he decided it didn’t matter.

“You said you saw her?” Cooper asked, curious. “No one else has been able to see her before now.”

“I don’t think I normally can,” Brent said, “but right after whatever you did in the library—and we’ll get to
that
, too—I saw and heard her for a second or two. Last night I saw her when I was dreaming.”

Dreaming?
Dear God, it was bad enough when she showed up while he was getting dressed or something. If that girl showed up in Cooper’s dreams—

“Calm,” Brent said softly. “Wherever you’re going right now, it’s not a good place to go.”

Cooper’s eyes widened as he focused back on Brent, and
not
on the nightmares. “What are you, some kind of shrink?” he snapped.

“Not … exactly,” Brent said, his voice smooth and careful. “But I know your mind goes somewhere bad sometimes. It’s somewhere you don’t like to think about. It
hurts
. My guess is it has something to do with Samantha and your ability to see her. But I’m better with computers than with human brains, so I’m not going to try to figure out what the issue is with yours. What I can do is recommend a witch I know.”

“A …
witch?”
Cooper repeated. First ghosts, now witches. Why couldn’t this get less weird instead of more?

“Call him a witch, a sorcerer, a psychic, whatever makes you comfortable,” Brent answered. “The point is, he knows
more about this supernatural stuff than anyone I’ve ever met. He helped me, and I’m sure he can help you.”

“What did he do for you?” Cooper asked. If Brent hadn’t mentioned that he had seen Samantha, Cooper probably would have brushed him off as a quack already.

Of course, Brent hadn’t exactly
described
Samantha. And Cooper had been the one to volunteer her name.

He didn’t want to be cynical. He
really
didn’t want to be cynical, because he desperately needed to be able to talk to someone about all this. But until Samantha showed up to confirm she had spoken to Brent in a dream the night before, Cooper couldn’t help remaining a little suspicious.

“Well …” Brent hesitated, staring at his coffee. “I was hearing voices. Which turned out to be thoughts. At first I figured I was going crazy, but people kept saying or doing things I had just heard them think. It got so bad that I couldn’t hide that I was having problems. Starting at Q-tech helped, since I could focus on more hands-on projects instead of just sitting in a classroom all day, but by sophomore year it got to be too much. I collapsed at school, and they sent me to the emergency room. I spent the next couple of months going to doctor after doctor as they did a million tests. I wasn’t about to tell them I was hearing voices, so eventually they prescribed me medication for migraines, which didn’t work, of course. I spent summer vacation checking out psychics, anyone in the area who said they had power. Most of them are complete charlatans, but last fall I met someone who passed my name on
to Ryan. He walked up to me as I was in the middle of dismantling a hard drive and just asked me outright, ‘What am I thinking?’”

“And?” Cooper prompted as Brent took a slow sip of his coffee.

“And I was sick of all the BS I had gone through recently, so I looked. I
really
tried, and I got nothing. With most people, when I look at them, I get babble. Very few people have just one solid thought at a time. I get a lot of background static when I try to read you, though; you have a lot of thoughts you’ve got shoved away, and that makes the rest of your thoughts very focused, which is a nice change. But trying to read Ryan was like looking at a blank wall: you can tell it’s there, but that’s about it.”

The bit about reading Cooper’s thoughts was a little creepy. When Brent had made a comment earlier about Cooper’s mind going somewhere bad, telepathy hadn’t jumped at him as the most likely explanation. Now he was glad he didn’t have anything to hide except for the haunting Brent already knew about.

“And he didn’t decide you were a fake right then and there because you couldn’t answer him?” Cooper asked.

“I looked at him and he stood there completely calm as I got more and more frustrated,” Brent answered. “Finally, I told him the truth, that I couldn’t hear a damn thing. He smiled, and sat down next to me and said he had heard that I was looking for someone to help me learn to control my ability. Then suddenly I heard his voice in my head, as
clear as day, saying, ‘I can help you.’ I couldn’t read him because he’s used to spending time with people who can, so he knows how to shield himself. If I’d been a fake, or crazy, I would’ve bluffed and come up with something. When I admitted I couldn’t hear anything, he knew I had to be for real.”

“That’s pretty intense,” Cooper said, despite still feeling that wriggle of doubt. “And you think he knows about ghosts?”

Brent hesitated, long enough to make Cooper nervous.

“I don’t know what he knows,” Brent answered after a minute. “Ryan and I and—well, we got into a conversation about the afterlife once. Ryan doesn’t bother meditating on God or religion, and I know he doesn’t believe in ghosts as solid personalities the way you describe Samantha, or even the way they show up in stories. He says sometimes the dead leave behind imprints on places or things, but those are just remnants of power in the form of emotion or single, key memories or impulses. I don’t know what he’ll make of Samantha.”

So the miracle witch—or whatever—might not know a thing.

Cooper’s disappointment must have shown on his face because Brent added, “That doesn’t mean he’ll be useless. Ryan’s kind of like a scientist. He won’t discount what’s right in front of his face just because of his previous beliefs. If there’s one thing he taught me—beyond how to control my own ability—it’s that this world is full of more weird
things than we can imagine. Samantha might be something he’s never seen before, but that doesn’t mean he won’t be helpful.”

Cooper was still skeptical. “Would it piss you off if I asked you what I’m thinking?” To make it fair, he tried to focus on something particular. The number forty-two; that would work. Forty-two.

Brent shook his head. “You don’t want me to answer that.”

“Sure I do, or I wouldn’t have asked,” Cooper insisted, his doubts increasing as Brent stalled.

“Seriously, you
don’t
. You don’t realize how many thoughts cross your mind in a single second.”

“Seriously, I
do.”

Brent shut his eyes and said flatly, “Forty-two. And cars. Rain. Noise. Where’s Samantha? The cars again. Now the image in the mirror. Scars. Samantha again. Your father’s glad you’re talking to a friend—he’s actually humming in the back room, something from
Fiddler on the Roof
, which he saw with you years ago. For your eighth birthday. You had strawberry cake with chocolate frosting. It was a Colt Hatchback … 2003. Green … blue. Greenish blue. You argued with your mom over what color the car was. Rain, and—”

“Stop it!”

Brent opened his eyes. “I won’t do it again,” he promised. “Calm.”

“Don’t you
tell
me to be—”

“Cool it!” Brent shouted. At least, it seemed like a shout. Cooper didn’t think Brent had actually raised his voice, but the word echoed in Cooper’s mind. “I didn’t do this to you. Someday you’re going to have to square with those memories, those thoughts. For now, though, I just needed you to believe me. Do you believe me?”

“I believe you.”

He certainly didn’t want another demonstration.

B
rent waited, sipping his coffee, until Cooper’s agitation had subsided. The coffee was bitter, stronger than he was used to, but it was palatable enough and it gave him something else to focus on so Cooper didn’t feel even more on the spot.

He didn’t have to make an effort to read Cooper. In fact, even when he made an effort
not
to, Cooper’s clear, surface thoughts were sometimes hard to tune out.

“I assume you have to go to school today?” he asked, once Cooper’s thoughts had settled back into something manageable.

Cooper nodded. “I skipped yesterday afternoon. I don’t intend to make a habit of it.”

“I could grab you from school after classes are over, and drive us to—” Brent winced as his words elicited a series of
pain-filled images from Cooper. “Or we could take the train into the city. We can get to Ryan’s via public transportation.”

“You said you weren’t going to read my mind again,” Cooper said, but there was a halfhearted quality to his objection.

“I won’t try to read you intentionally unless I have to, and I’ll try not to prod you with anything I hear, but when you shove thoughts at me like iron pokers through my eyes, I’m going to respond,” Brent said bluntly.

“Like … iron …
pokers?
Didn’t you say you mostly got static?”

“Mostly, yes, but that’s the background. Your thoughts in front can be pretty sharp,” Brent said, reminding himself to watch his words. He had to admit, he had never thought he would be having this particular conversation with the regular-high’s football star, but weirder things had happened. He had stopped believing jock stereotypes after seeing Delilah practice magic in the middle of the woods, and learning a week later that she was also the captain of the cheerleading squad. “Mostly I can control things now,” he added, still trying to convince Cooper to come with him and get help. “It was a lot worse before.”