Authors: Gwen Hayes

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Horror & Ghost Stories

Falling Under (34 page)

BOOK: Falling Under

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“We can’t just leave her there.” Donny stood up and began pacing. “I can’t believe you didn’t drag her out with you.”

“I don’t have any special powers anymore, Donny. I don’t know how it works—I asked her to come with me. She said no.”

She spun and looked at Gabe. “You would have dragged me out, wouldn’t you?”

“By your hair,” he answered.

She crossed her arms and glared at me again, vindicated by his answer.

“I wanted to bring her back, I swear.”

Ame looked at Varnie hopefully. “Can we try? Maybe the cards or the crystal ball?”

“Of course,” he answered, taking her hand and leading her into the other room, not looking as optimistic as she did.

Donny and Gabe stayed in the living room with me pretending we were fine, until Donny was strung so tight, I thought she might explode. She was like a rubber band stretched to its very limit, ready to snap.

Gabe’s face was tense with worry. “Babe, you need to relax.”

“Are you kidding me?” she retorted. “My best friend has been living in hell for a month. A month, Gabe. God, a month ago, I didn’t even really believe in all this crap.”

I fought for something to say. “She looked well—healthy, I mean. She was beautiful, and she was playing her violin.”

Donny stared at me like she was trying to pick out words she understood from what I said. “She looked
well
?”

“She actually seemed …” I really didn’t know how to say it without making it sound bad. “She sort of fit in there. Like, it agreed with her.” Like she was ready to hunt me like prey is what I did
not
say.

“Your mother is a freaking demon and Theia is her prisoner. I don’t think she’s
well
. We tried to look your mommy up, you know. If she’s who Varnie thinks she is, she is like the patron saint of night terrors.”

I grimaced. “I know.” I had seen the same tome on demonology. If Mara was my mother—and Varnie thought she was—Theia couldn’t last long in that place. “But she still looked okay.”

Gabe looked at me like I was an idiot. He was right. “You have a lot to learn about girls, amnesia boy.”

I agreed and went to the kitchen to grab a Coke so he could calm Donny down in private. I could hear her yelling at Gabe and his calm voice reassuring her. It felt like I was the kryptonite of their group. I made them weaker, broke them apart. And yeah, I could remember what kryptonite was, but not how I met the girl who loved me so much she went to hell in my place.

I was a curse.

After another hour, Ame came out of the other room looking like a kicked puppy. The three of them left without much of a good-bye. I questioned Varnie with my eyes, but he just shook his head solemnly and I followed him back into the kitchen while he got himself a beer.

“I’ll take one of those.”

“I don’t think so.” He did, however, hand me another Coke.

“I thought I was one hundred and seventy years old,” I argued.

“Your ID says seventeen.”

“Your ID says nineteen.”

“Nobody cards Madame Varnie.” And they didn’t. He used that costume shamelessly to fill the fridge with beer. Beer he wouldn’t let me drink.

“So, no luck finding Theia?” I asked, even though it was obvious he hadn’t found her.

Varnie shook his head. “Neither of us can get a bead on her. It’s frustrating. Especially since now we know to focus the energy to Under. Before it was shots in the dark, but this should have worked. I don’t understand why we can’t bring her out this time.” He took a long pull from the bottle. “You doing okay, man? They were pretty rough on you.”

“No rougher than I deserve. They’re right. It should be me in that hell, not Theia.”

“So why were you hitting on that girl?”

I cast him an are-you-kidding-me look. “I wasn’t. She wanted me to ask her to prom. I said no.” How many times did they need to hear that?

Varnie hiked himself onto the counter. “Is Ame going to prom?”

I choked on my drink. “Wow, that was subtle.”

“What do you mean?” asked Mr. Obvious.

“You interested in Amelia?”

“No,” he scoffed and peeled the corner off his label. “Why? Has she said anything about me?”

I didn’t really want to get into the fact that Ame only had eyes for Mike Matheny, the guy who could barely string three words together for a sentence but ate every meal like it had been a week since his last. So I just said, “I’d be the last person she talked to.”

He nodded, realizing I was right. When Amelia saw me in the corner being fondled by Brittany, I lost her trust. Since I wasn’t sure how I had gotten her trust in the first place, I was clueless as to how I was going to get it back.

Or if I deserved it.

“Tell me about the night in the cabin,” I said, thinking maybe there was something we’d missed. The key to my memories.

“What do you want to know?” he asked.

“You always do that. It’s so frustrating. Look, I understand that nobody wanted to overdo it with the intel when I first woke up. I get it—but I’ve been around for a while now. It doesn’t look like I’m going to get my memories back on my own.”

Varnie shrugged. “I’ve told you everything now. We summoned you, but we didn’t know only the demon and your body could make the trip, which meant we managed to lose your soul somewhere along the way. Luckily, because I summoned you, the demon was bound to me, though I’m sure he would have figured a way around that eventually. Something happened—we assume now that it was your mother coming—and Theia sent us outside.” He paused, remembering the last time they’d seen Theia alive. “When we came back in, she was gone and we were stuck with the demon.”

“But you still didn’t know where my soul was?”

Varnie shook his head. “No, and you were a real bastard. Well, I mean the demon part of you. Donny made a comment about wishing she’d paid more attention during
The Exorcist
, which made Ame think we should give exorcism a try.”

“Okay,” I broke in. “So then you exorcised the demon out of the body, and I—well, my soul—came back into it.”

“With no memories,” he added. He winced and looked off into the distance. “I still can’t figure out what went wrong there. A missed word in the chant, one too many eyes of newt? It doesn’t make any sense. Where
did
your memories go?”

“I am more concerned with where the demon went, Varnie.”

“Out.” He drained the bottle and tossed it across the room, missing the recycle bin, and it thunked onto the linoleum.

“Out where?”

“I have no idea. If you recall, which you don’t, of course, that was one of my arguments for not exorcising the demon that night. Of course, I hadn’t wanted to summon you in the first place, but the Betties had other opinions.”

I picked up his bottle and set it on top of the other glass. “So, my demon half is just out there, circling around, waiting for another chance to make himself at home in my body. Which, I suppose is technically half his.”

“Well, we threw him out of this realm, so he’d have to be invited back into your body. I think.”

“You
think
?”

“Sorry, I’m not proficient at exorcism. Or spell casting. I’m a psychic. It’s like asking a podiatrist to perform brain surgery.” Varnie rubbed his face in exasperation. “By the way, I hate spells. I’d like to never do another one. I don’t mind poking around in my visions—I’m used to those. But I’m not really interested in auditioning for
Charmed
.”

“I’ll make a note of it.”

“Maybe I should update my Facebook page.” We laughed, but the lines on his forehead came back. “I don’t know where the demon is, dude.”

That news wasn’t reassuring. “Are you sure I can’t have one of those beers?” I asked.

“Go to bed. You have school in the morning.”

I nodded and passed him on my way into the guest room. “Yes, Mom.”

I took a long, steamy shower. The hot water stung the scrapes, but part of me wanted the burn, the penance. Once in bed, I stared at the ceiling for a long time, willing sleep to come.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I
heard a giggle and saw a flash of red darting between the trees. I blinked hard. What the hell? Where was I?

I was surrounded by trees as wide around as a full-grown man was tall. They stretched to the sky so far that I couldn’t see the tops, the boughs providing a canopy of lush, wet green tenting over me and creating a strange, insular world. Moss draped over some branches like tinsel, and in other places it clung like a dense carpet. The air was thick with moisture, but the temperature was moderate, almost cool.

I saw the flash of red again from the corner of my eye. It was a cloaked person darting between the humongous trees. Theia maybe? I hoped it was, so I followed the figure. I had to stop several times, when I lost sight of the red, and listen for snapping twigs. I got a glimpse of the cloak and realized it was a girl for sure, but she reappeared behind trees she couldn’t possibly have reached without me seeing her. She just kept popping up here and there, and whenever I would get close, she’d be behind me instead.

I began losing my patience as well as my breath, and stopped to lean on one of the massive trees. As my heart slowed down, the bark changed beneath my fingers.
Strange
, I thought, and looked closer. It morphed into a human face and I snatched my hand away and stumbled backwards.

The entire tree was made up of faces pressed into the bark like masks. Angry, sad, and mean faces glared and snarled and screamed at me with no sound, moving around in a macabre fashion while trapped on the surface of the tree. Fear gripped me and I ran blindly away from the tree, bumping into another, realizing as I hit the trunk that it was the same. All the trees around me were the same.

The bark writhed and pulsated like the faces were moving beneath a blanket. Their pain and anger consumed me. Madness descended over me, drowning everything but the kind of fear that made a man saw off his own leg to flee a trap. Everywhere I looked, the faces haunted me. I’m ashamed to say I curled into a ball on the ground. I didn’t want to see what they were going to do to me. I couldn’t look at them anymore, and with my eyes open I couldn’t see anything else.

I sensed someone else then, in front of me. I peeked and saw black riding boots. I followed the leather up a woman’s calf until I got to the hem of a red cloak. I sat up quickly.

“My, Haden, what big eyes you have.” Theia removed the hood and crouched down to my level. “You shouldn’t have come back.”

She looked so cool and collected amidst the horror, and there I was, hyperventilating and dripping in the cold sweat of fear. I could barely breathe. At least the faces were gone. For now.

“This is no place for you. Not anymore.”

I swallowed. “This is no place for you either.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.” She looked around like she was appraising a house she was thinking of moving into. “It has a lot of promise. I kind of like it.” Theia stood up. “The neighborhood is a little rough sometimes, but it’s got good bones.” She laughed at that.

I didn’t know why.

“I’d help you up, but it’s probably best that I don’t touch you.” While I was getting up, she walked over to a tree and touched the bark lightly, reverently. “They were human once. All of them. She drove them mad and collected them like bugs in a jar.” Theia glanced at me. “I’m speaking of your mother. You don’t remember her, do you?”

I shook my head.

“You don’t remember me either?” She looked away before I could shake my head again. “It’s for the best, I suppose.”

“I don’t remember you, Theia, but I still have feelings for you. Feelings I can’t explain, I just know they are there.”

“Get rid of them.” Her answer stunned me. “Feelings like that won’t help you. Not now. It’s best if you just move forward from here.”

BOOK: Falling Under

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