Alight The Peril (19 page)

A response from Ione, the Rome Pyxis, appeared a few seconds later.

It may have no effect because the rectification influence works to neutralize an already-applied influence, but certainly won’t hurt them.

“Bleh, that’s true,” I muttered. “It probably won’t work.”

“How will I know if Harriet is trying to influence me?” Ang asked.

I scowled at the monitor. “By the time you know, it probably will be too late. But I
know
there’s something we can do. We’ll have to stay close and watch out for each other until we figure it out.”

I tapped an irritated rhythm against the casing of the laptop. I wanted to throw it at the wall. I
knew
a solution to all of this existed, but it was like a downy feather floating through the air that I couldn’t quite catch. I’d reach for it, think I had it in my grasp, and then it would slip through my fingers only to taunt me again a few inches away.

“It’s really freaking me out, Corinne,” Ang said. “I’m jumping at every little sound and constantly looking over my shoulder.”

Some of my irritation drained away as I took in my friend’s anxious frown. I stopped drumming my fingers. “I’m sorry. I’ll come up with something, I promise. And in the meantime, I’m going to keep an eye on all of you.”

“But there are three of us. You can’t be everywhere at once.”

“No, but I have the
syndesmo
link with all of you. If she influenced you, I think I’d feel it. If nothing else, you might be suddenly gone from my mind. Or something. I don’t know. I’m sure something would feel different.” My mind flashed to Zane, to feeling the strand of Mason’s energy fluttering across my hand. “Okay, don’t freak out, but there actually is a way I can check on you guys,” I said. “In the dream world. While you’re sleeping, I can find you there and make sure you’re okay.”

“Whoa. How’d you figure that out?”

“Zane showed me.”

Ang eyed me. “Huh. Did he show you anything else?”

“No, not really,” I said. I tried to keep my gaze steady, but finally broke. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Just want to make sure there’s not something else you should tell me.”

Heat prickled up my back. “There’s not. I promise!” I held up my hands in a show of innocence. I hoped I wasn’t blushing.

“Is everything okay with Mason?”

I gave her a wide-eyed look of annoyance.

Ang giggled. “Okay, I believe you.”

Late that night, I lay in my dark room with my eyes closed. I let my mind drift for a moment, relaxing into pre-sleep limbo. Just before I crossed over from conscious thought to dreaming, I narrowed my focus to the cove. Not my memory of it, but the cove that existed in the hypercosmic realm. In my mind, it was more a sensation—the dark cold of night, faint illumination of stars, and a caressing sea of gossamer strands—than a physical place.

I opened my eyes and shifted my weight in the sand beneath my feet. Unfocusing my gaze and wrapping my arms around my ribs, I thought of my best friend. Her blonde curls, blushing cheeks, green irises flecked with brown. The way her bedroom always smelled faintly of the lavender laundry detergent her mom used. The way she giggled whenever anyone said something a little naughty. The tears sliding down her cheeks as she cried with me at my grandmother’s memorial service.

The sea of faintly glowing threads surrounded me, waved gently past me. My feet swung through empty space. It wasn’t the strands moving, it was me. I kept my head down, my eyes on my arms folded across my middle, to stave off vertigo.

When the sensation of movement ceased, I raised my eyes, and one of the threads seemed to beckon to me. I grasped it with feather-light pressure and “read” it, the way Zane had taught me. No doubt it belonged to Angeline. Relieved to find she was still safe from Harriet’s influence, I let it slip away and returned my focus inward.

I knew it would be easy to find Mason’s thread of subconscious. I’d save it ‘til last. I nearly grimaced when I thought of trying to locate Sophie’s, but then remembered our last conversation, the raw anger and sadness on her face, the vulnerability and trust it cost her to cry in front of me, and ultimately the steel core of determination when she pushed the heavy past aside. I hoped I could do the same. I understood why she’d treated me the way she had. But the sting of her cruelty over the years would take time to fade. If it ever did.

I tried to see her behavior in a new way, to understand from her point of view. She punished me because she needed someone to blame for her pain. She acted tough because she didn’t want anyone to mess with her. It felt like Brad was being disloyal to me, but it was no wonder, really, that my brother was drawn to her. That lots of guys were. Sure, she could be scary and downright horrible, but I had to admit, she possessed a survivor’s strength and I-will-not-be-messed-with attitude that had its own undeniable magnetism.

A strand curled itself around my forearm with its delicate, electric touch, and it lifted me from my reverie. I’d found it. Sophie’s thread of subconscious. I gaped down at it. A thread had never reached out to me this way, as if it were a living tendril that knew me and sought me out. I unwrapped it from my arm with a gentle tug, and it wove itself over my palm and around my fingers. A faint pulse of energy vibrated against my skin. I knew without reading it that Sophie was safe, but for some reason I didn’t want to let it go.

I drifted with Sophie for . . . I wasn’t sure how long. Time was somewhat meaningless here because nothing changed to mark its passage. Even my body was too light and hollow, a borrowed shell that wasn’t quite mine. Almost as if I could spirit myself out of it, and glide with the threads on the invisible current that carried them.

I blinked hard.

This was what Zane had warned me about, the temptation of losing yourself here. My pulse lurched when I realized how easily I could have stayed, drifting. I looked down. Sophie’s thread was already untangling itself from my hand.

I found and checked Mason’s thread quickly, then brought myself back to the cove and solid ground. I dropped my arms to my sides and filled my lungs with cool night air. Some of Sophie’s determination filled me, fortifying my body and my mind. I imagined Bradley, weak and pale in Danton, and my friends, defenseless against a dark force we didn’t fully understand. My fingernails dug into my palms. I’d had enough.

I was tired of the anxious suspense of Harriet’s inevitable next attack. No more waiting. It was time to find her.

|| 21 ||

I SPENT THE REST of the night searching for Harriet’s thread. I focused with feverish intensity on the image of her face in my mind, her pale green eyes and rasping, chill-inducing laugh. The smell of her apothecary shop. Surely, if Zane had warned me to be careful in the sea of strands, that meant they were prone to damage of some sort. I wanted to find Harriet’s and then. . . . What? Pull it until it stretched and broke free? Well, sure. Why not?

But my efforts yielded nothing. My feet failed to leave the sand. Finally, out of frustration, I woke up. Why hadn’t it worked?

A question began somewhere deep in my mind, and rose slowly, like a bubble released from the seafloor.

“Oh, duh!” I slapped my forehead. If we could just go into the hypercosmic realm and yank threads, why hadn’t Harriet done that to us already? Clearly there was some piece of this I was missing. I needed to talk to Zane. And if for some reason I couldn’t confront her in the hypercosmic realm, I’d just have to march down Main Street and find her the old-fashioned way.

I slept past my alarm the next morning and woke to my phone ringing. It was my dad, ready to drive to Danton. I quickly got dressed, brushed my teeth, and pulled my hair back into a ponytail.

Dad pulled up in the van, and we rode in companionable silence for most of the way. When we parked in the visitor lot at the hospital, I felt for the shape of the small vial through the thin fabric of my bag.

When we got to Brad’s room, Mom hugged Dad and then me, and I looked over her shoulder at my brother. Pale skin and dark circles under his eyes made him ghostly, and my heart ached for him. Dad said hello to Bradley, ruffling his hair like my brother was five years old, and made small talk for a few minutes. Then my parents pulled two chairs close together and talked with their heads bent toward each other. My gaze lit on the pitcher of water and plastic cup on the other side of Brad’s bed.

“How are you feeling?” I said, my voice low. I glanced at my parents, then slipped the glass vial from my bag.

“Been better. But you’re going to help me, right?” he said. I tried to hide my surprise. His eyes followed my hands as I pulled the lid from his water pitcher and quickly squeezed three droppers full of tincture into it.

“Aunt Dorothy helped me make this. Natural remedy. We figured it couldn’t hurt,” I said. I tucked the bottle back into my bag, then filled up his cup from the pitcher. “So how did you know I could help?”

The shadow of a mischievous smile crossed his face, and for a moment, he looked like the Bradley I always pictured in my mind. “I had a dream about Grandma Doris,” he said.

“Ah. I’ve had dreams about her, too. Really vivid ones.” I watched Bradley out of the corner of my eye for any sign that he suspected his dream was something more. But he just settled back against the pillows. I gestured to his cup. “Drink some, will ya? I need to go find Toby Ellison, but I’ll be back.”

I used the barest wash of green influence on my parents, told them I’d return in a few minutes, and walked out of Brad’s room to the nurse’s station. I told the nurse at the desk I was Toby’s stepsister, and pushed a bit of orange and green at her for good measure, and she pointed me toward Toby’s room.

I knocked on the door. “Toby? It’s Corinne Finley. I just wanted to say hi.”

“Come on in,” he called.

I stepped into Toby’s room and quickly scanned his body. An ugly mass like Brad’s was lodged at the base of the right lobe of his lungs. It seemed to be pressing against some other organ I couldn’t name. I made a mental note to look up some basic anatomy later.

I smiled. “I’m here visiting my brother. I told Angeline I’d check on you. How are you?”

“Better now that my fever is down.” He tried to look brave, but his eyelids drooped closed every few seconds. “I haven’t spent this much time in a hospital since I was a little kid.”

“Oh?” I said. “Were you sick a lot?”

“Yeah, I used to get pretty severe asthma. Really freaked out my parents. I still have attacks sometimes, but it’s not nearly as bad as it used to be.”

His lungs were his weak area.

“How’s Angeline?” he asked, his eyes lighting a little.

“Worried about you, but okay. She misses you a lot.”

“Tell her I miss her, too, and I hope she stays well.” His expression shifted from warm to troubled. “Seems like lots of people from our class are getting sick lately.”

I nodded, and pushed a small vortex of green at him, and his face relaxed into passivity.

“Where are your parents?” I asked. If possible, I hoped to avoid surprise interruptions while I was dropping murky green liquid into Toby’s water.

“Eating in the cafeteria.”

I chattered about school and Ang while I filled his water pitcher from the sink, dropped tincture into it, and then poured him a cup full and watched him drink.

“Hope you feel better soon, Toby,” I said, and I closed the door softly behind me.

When I turned, I spotted Genevieve and Hannah’s mothers down the hallway. One of them dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. My heart dipped. Sophie’s friends must have gotten worse.

I found each girl’s room and repeated the whole routine I’d just done with Toby. I had to use the influences on Genevieve’s mom and Hannah’s older sister, but I was able to deposit the rest of the tincture in the girls’ water pitchers. Hannah’s lower abdomen seemed to be affected, and I wondered if the location had to do with her multiple food allergies. Genevieve was different. Small pieces of the ugly black substance seemed to be lodged along her spine. I didn’t know anything about her health history, so I couldn’t guess why.

When I returned to Brad’s room, I found my brother asleep and my parents reviewing some bills at the small table in the corner.

“Just a few more minutes and we’ll take off,” Dad said to me, and then he bent over the papers again.

I mentally scanned my brother’s torso, hoping to find the tincture already had some effect. The mass definitely seemed smaller, and possibly less resistant. I probed it a little, and Brad stirred but didn’t wake. Maybe at my next visit, I’d be able to use the influences to shrink it more. If nothing else, I’d refill the glass vial from Aunt Dorothy’s jar and bring more tincture with me.

A deep, unexpected exhaustion overtook me on the way back to Tapestry, and I slept so soundly it took me a moment to recognize my surroundings when Dad pulled into our driveway. I was grateful for the rest because I planned to spend part of the night checking on Mason, Ang, and Sophie in the hypercosmic realm, and the other part trying to track down Zane. I wanted his take on my plan. It was time to stop Harriet.

|| 22 ||

I ENTERED THE HYPERCOSMIC REALM that night, quickly found the threads for the three members of my union, and scanned them. Then I returned to the cove to wait for Zane. I’d sent him a private message via the website and asked him to meet me. Last time I checked, there was no reply, but I believed he’d show.

I sat down at one of the picnic tables and ran my fingers over the weather-beaten surface. Everything here had a different sort of presence than in the physical, waking world— undisturbed, but also more alive, somehow. The vividness of the sensations and the detail in my surroundings made it hard to believe that only my mind occupied this place. The lapping of the water against the sand, the whisper of the night air through the pines seemed so . . . real. Even the bare patch of wood on the table, where I’d picked away the red paint as Aunt Dorothy gave us lessons, looked exactly the same.

Most of the time I found the cool, continual nighttime here soothing. But now I fidgeted with pent-up energy. I wasn’t sure if it was due to nerves about seeing Zane, anxiety about my plan, or both.