Sing Sweet Nightingale (41 page)

I hold my breath as Mom runs into the room, her ponytail flying out behind her. It’s weird; I almost forgot how alike we look.

“Mari?”

I grin. “Hi, Mommy.”

Mom collapses onto the bed, wrapping her arms around my neck and squeezing me tight, laughing and crying at the same time.

The contact with her skin intensifies the emotions rolling off of her, blurring the line between where my emotions end and hers begin. Several other abilities activate—I hear the thoughts spinning through her head, get flashes of her past, and see images from her possible futures.

I don’t have time to collect myself and shut them off before Dad runs into the room, catching the doorframe to spin himself in the right direction. Dr. Carroll is a second behind him.

“I’m not dreaming, am I?” Dad asks, his voice thick and his eyes gleaming. “Because I think I’ve had this dream before.”

“Not dreaming,” I tell him over Mom’s shoulder as I stroke her back, smiling through the tears falling from my eyes, wrung from me by the crush of emotions that aren’t even mine. It’s hard to breathe, but everyone thinks my slight gasps are because of the tears. “Not this time.”

A second later, Dad joins us, wrapping his arms around both Mom and me and crying.

Relief, joy, worry, love—their emotions all crash against me at once, muddling together until I don’t know what I’m feeling. I see their first date, when Dad took Mom all the way to New York City to see a symphony. I shudder as chills wrack my body, a blast of icy energy coming from somewhere in the house.

The weight of it all is too intense. It’s like someone has changed the pressure in the room until it’s so heavy I’m being crushed underneath nothing but air. Pushing back all of the abilities at once doesn’t work. They slip past me. Even one at a time, I can’t get them all to shut down. I have to pick one to keep. Fast. It’s only been a few seconds, but the longer I struggle with this, the more my grip on everything else slips.

Glancing at Hudson, I lock everything but telepathy away.

The thoughts of everyone in the room are almost weightless after the press of emotions and visions that assaulted me. At least until I hear Hudson’s thoughts.

“—and you really think it’d be any different now? Bullshit. Even on their good days it was never like this. No way in any level of hell were they going to let you stay after what happened to J.R.”
He looks away from us and stares through the window into the backyard.
“Horace would’ve wanted to be here for this. The old man better be okay.”

He pulls out his phone and sends a text to Horace, actively forcing his mind away from memories of his own family. My chest aches for him, and I close my eyes, relaxing into my parents’ tight embrace, letting their arms and their meaningless, reassuring words surround me and wanting so badly to walk across the room and do the same thing for Hudson.

My stomach grumbles so loud everyone hears.

“Oh!” Mom pulls away, a huge grin on her face. “Oh, you must be
starving
! What would you like? I can make you that salmon pasta you always loved when you were little? Or we can order in?”

I wipe my eyes and rub my stomach. “At this point, even a jar of peanut butter and a spoon sounds delicious.”

“Here, let me get these out of your arm.” Carroll bends down and gently peels off the tape holding my IV in place. “You’re going to be a little weak. It’ll probably be a few days before you can—”

I smile as his eyes widen. One drop of blood escaped before the hole the needle made in my arm was gone. Healed as though it was never there. A second later, even the slight bruise surrounding the injection site fades.

“Never mind.” Carroll grins. “You might be up and about a
bit
sooner.”

A slow smile curves across Hudson’s lips, making my heart beat faster.

“If they’re impressed by that, wait till they see what else she can do.”

In his mind, I see the moments he noticed strange things happening—when I heated up in the hospital, when everything in the room suddenly tilted toward me, when the room started warping in front of his eyes. He’s guessing at what those moments mean, but his guesses are pretty damn close. Pyrokinesis, telekinesis, and illusions.

“Well,” Mom says, laughing a little. “I can’t say I’m disappointed
that’s
something you came back with.”

Carroll quickly unhooks me from a few tubes I really don’t want to think about. Then, Mom snaps her fingers and chases the guys from the room so she can help me get dressed. She talks the whole time. It’s strange to hear her reference the power of the stones and Hudson’s different abilities like they’re commonplace, but I guess she’s had a month to adapt to the idea.

We move into the kitchen, and I sit next to Hudson, moving my chair as close to him as I can. He smiles, but he doesn’t say anything. He wouldn’t. Not now, when my parents could hear him. I stay close to him for the rest of the day, trying to show him without words that he has nothing to be scared of.

Later in the afternoon, Mom mentions calling the rest of the family, sharing the good news of my recovery. Dad’s thoughts cloud over in an instant, his mind traveling to his sister Jacquelyn and my cousin Julian.

He’s still missing. All anyone has been able to figure out so far is that he wasn’t abducted. They finally found him on several traffic cameras walking away from the house with a backpack and a duffle bag almost as big as his entire body. If he was kidnapped, it wasn’t until after he left on his own.

Focusing on Julian, his quick smile and his intelligence and his inexhaustible optimism, I grasp for an ability that might help me track him down. Or at least tell me if he’s all right. Despite the combined abilities of several moderately talented prophets, it’s as if a dense fog surrounds Julian. I get the sense that he’s alive and safe, but I have no idea where he’s hiding. He could be in Vegas or Venice for all I know.

Taking a chance, I think about Horace’s missing granddaughter, Nadette. It’s harder to get as much as I sensed about Julian, maybe because I’ve never met her. I don’t even know what she looks like. All I have is the vague picture Hudson has of her—a sixteen-year-old redhead. I can see Horace, the circles under his eyes and the weariness hanging around him as the search for Nadette drags into the fourth week. From what I can tell, she’s alive, but that isn’t much to go on. It’s not worth mentioning. I don’t have
anything
except a feeling I don’t understand.

I try to focus on my parents, on how thrilled they are to have me back. To hear me speaking. The whole night, though, there’s something splitting my attention away from Hudson and my parents. On top of the physical pressure of their attention—like layers and layers of thick blankets being thrown over my head—the energy upstairs pulls at me. The strange chill I felt when my parents’ sudden contact overwhelmed me. Whatever is upstairs is sharp and cold and insistent, a gravity well that keeps trying to suck me in. Hudson and my family help keep me anchored, but I can’t ignore it forever.

Sooner rather than later, Hudson and I are going to have to face whatever is waiting up there.

It’s almost midnight and my parents are exhausted, but they fight it off, swallowing their yawns and shaking themselves awake every time they start to drift. Carroll gave up the fight an hour ago—after I promised to give him a more detailed description of what I experienced during my coma—but my parents will need to be nudged.

After a second of searching, I find the ability I need and turn it on. I glance at Hudson, remembering his reaction when he realized I could hear his thoughts and wondering how much worse it would be if he knew what I was about to do. But I don’t like the chill I’m getting from upstairs, and I don’t want anyone else getting involved in this.

Reaching out for my parents’ minds and upstairs for Dr. Carroll’s, I plant a suggestion. A couple of them, really. The idea that they should go to bed because they’re so tired and then stay there until morning.

“Sleep. Rest.”
When they hear it, they’ll think the whisper is coming from their own mind.
“Everything will be fine until morning. Mariella will be fine.”

It takes a few minutes for the suggestion to take root, but eventually Mom’s eyes droop shut and stay shut for a few seconds. Dad smiles and nudges her awake. “I think it’s time for us to go to sleep.”

Mom looks around and nods. “You’ll come get us if you need anything, Mari? Please?”

I lean closer to her and press a kiss to her cheek. “Promise.”

I wait, holding out until they drift off to sleep before I tell Hudson, “There’s something upstairs we need to take care of.”

He tilts his head toward my bedroom. “The trinkets the demon left for you?”

“Yeah.” We’re a floor away from that drawer of glass, yet it feels like I’m standing next to an open industrial freezer. For Hudson, it’s simply a reminder of what almost happened that night and the month-long recovery period after. There’s nothing tangible about it to him.

We head upstairs, both of us holding our breath as we step inside my room.

The cold gets worse, but Hudson doesn’t notice. I know he sensed it before the fight with Orane, but he doesn’t anymore. It’s like it’s tied directly to me. He’s aware of what’s in the drawer, but he approaches it the same way he would a box of rattlesnakes rather than a dark, yawning force. Whatever those glass trinkets have transformed into tugs at the center of my chest and tries to pull me forward. It’s like a black hole sucking in everything. I shudder and stop walking, letting him take the last few steps alone.

I heighten my sense of awareness, trying to pinpoint what this is. All I can tell is that the energy doesn’t go through Hudson. It’s going
around
him. Those trinkets were never linked to Hudson, but they know me. Whatever they’ve become is looking for
me
.

Hudson crouches next to the drawer and glances at me as though asking for permission. I nod, even though I want to evacuate the house and condemn it so no one will ever come in contact with whatever is inside that drawer.

With a slow, deep breath, Hudson opens the drawer carefully.

When I see what’s inside, I blink. The drawer of tainted trinkets is nothing but broken bits of glass.
What
?

“Huh.” Hudson leans over the drawer. To him, it’s a little anticlimactic. Then again, he doesn’t sense the cold, dark energy pulsing out of that drawer. I want to yank him back, but it’ll scare him. And it’s not after him.

“Hey, be grateful for what we get.” I force myself to smile and nudge him gently with my foot. “Would you rather have had smoke and fireworks?”

Hudson shudders, his mind replaying the destruction of Orane’s world. “No. I’ve had enough of that to last a while.”

He flicks through his vision filters, searching for any lingering energy, but none of these fragments show even a glimmer of light. Whatever this is, Hudson can’t see or sense it at all. He’s not stupid, though. He knows that the dreamworld—that Abivapna—is far more complex than he thought—and he knows that underestimating what the Balasura can do is dangerous.

“Are you picking anything up?” he asks me.

My entire body shudders, and I clench my hands, forcing myself to step a little closer to the drawer. Closing my eyes, I feel the room. The dresser, the nightstand, Hudson—everything in this room has a presence. I can see its shape and its energy in incredible detail inside my head. Everything except what’s in that drawer. In my mental map of the room, that drawer is an empty black space.

“It’s like there’s nothing there,” I finally tell him.

Hudson relaxes a little. “Well, that’s good, right?”

“No.” I look around the room and shake my head, trying to find the words to explain. “I can feel everything in this room. I could walk around blindfolded and not run into anything, even if you moved it all around. But this is
nothing
. Like it doesn’t exist in our world.”

“Creepy,”
he thinks. As though my description of what is inside that drawer made him more aware of it, he shivers and tightens his grip, holding himself in place by willpower alone. “So we probably shouldn’t touch it.”

My voice barely stays level when I answer. “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“Good to know.”

Carefully removing the stones lining the edges, Hudson dumps the whole drawer into a garbage bag I pull out of the bathroom.

“We’ll drive out past the edge of town and burn it all. Melt it down,”
he thinks.

Will that work?

Sometimes if I ask a question, the answer will kind of appear—the combined powers of a couple of fortune tellers Orane destroyed—but this time I don’t see anything. That in itself makes me nervous.

“And then what are you going to do with it?”
I ask silently. He jumps a little, but otherwise he’s perfectly accepting of the fact that I’ve invaded his head again.
“If you think the bits have power left, how do you know fire is going to get rid of it?”

“Damnit,”
he groans silently, his mind already whirring as he tries to come up with a new solution. After a few seconds, he looks up at me. “Okay, well, we’ll collect the ashes, lock them into a crystal-lined container, and bury the whole thing. If we ever find a way to get rid of it for good, we can come back and collect it.”