Token of Darkness (6 page)

C
ooper could barely keep his eyes open after dinner. True to his word, his father hadn’t mentioned his brief sojourn from class to his mother, and their awkward chatter barely masked the conversations his parents obviously wanted to have with him, but couldn’t. The effort exhausted Cooper, and he crawled into bed without taking off anything more than his shoes, too tired to even experience the anxiety that usually accompanied the descent into sleep.

The instant the rain began, he knew bad things were coming. It started with patchy clouds, barely wispy, but as he continued driving down the endless highway they darkened and spread. Soon a fine mist was falling, but if anything, it seemed like the weather had improved visibility, since before the cloud cover built, the afternoon sun’s glare had been blinding
.

But he knew better
.

He couldn’t remember the details of what happened next, but he remembered the emotions and the physical sensations. He struggled against them. He knew he was dreaming, and he pulled his car over to the side of the highway and got out—

As soon as his feet touched the pavement, he was back in the car
.

This time he just took his foot off the gas, and let the car coast to a stop—

Then it was back to seventy miles an hour, and the brakes didn’t work anymore, and the car wouldn’t slow down
.

Black tendrils began to rise from the pavement, waiting for him. The highway went on forever without a single exit, and tall concrete barriers rose into the darkening sky on each side
.

Cooper screamed with frustration, put one hand on the wheel, and spun it as fast as he could to the side
.

The car began to spin like a top, incredibly fast for impossibly long
.

Cooper shot upright, a scream trapped in the back of his throat. People had told him the gist of what had happened in his accident, and he was grateful he couldn’t recall the rest.

Except in his nightmares.

He shuddered and stood, eliciting a sharp pain in his hip. He should have stretched before falling asleep.

He took a warm shower, hoping the pounding water would dull the ache that ran up his side from his knee almost to his shoulder. It was ten at night, and his parents were sleeping like the dead—

Wrong simile.

The sound of running water wouldn’t wake them, anyway.

After his shower, he stopped in front of the full-length mirror attached to the inside of the bathroom door. With a towel around his waist, he examined his physique with a critical eye.

He had never been
big
, compared to most football players, but he had certainly lost muscle mass since the accident.

During the day, his long sleeves covered the scars that crisscrossed up and down his arms. Some of them were starting to fade to shiny pink-white, but many were still darker, revealing the depth of the initial wounds. Those same sleeves covered the ragged patch on his shoulder, now mottled pink and brown, where most of the skin had been ripped off by the hot pavement; his pants normally hid similar marks on his left hip and knee. The clothes also hid the surgery scars, and the faint—almost gone, or was the color entirely in his head, these days?—bruises that lingered on his ribs.

Clothes, those simple defenses, hid all evidence of the accident from sight. They made him appear whole. Now if only his mind could agree. During the day he could barely remember anything, but during the night the floodgates opened. If he closed his eyes, he would see … hear … smell … taste …

“So vain,” Samantha teased as she walked through the wall.

“Ever hear of
privacy?”
he snapped as he checked that his
towel was snugly in place. The words were sharp, but he was pretty well resigned to the fact that Samantha didn’t care about his privacy or anyone else’s.

“Don’t remember,” she replied glibly. “Maybe I heard of it and just forgot.”

“Well, would you leave so I can put on some clothes?”

“Don’t be a prude. They say you used to be a football star. You must have changed in plenty of locker rooms.”

“Yeah. With
guys,”
he answered. “You’re not a guy.”

“I’m hardly a girl, either,” she argued. “I’m dead.”

“Fine. Dead. Whatever. So why do you want to stay?”

“Because you’re sexy-cute,” she replied promptly.

“Out!”

She sighed, and wandered back through the wall, mumbling, “Sometimes I wish I was the
invisible
kind of ghost.”

Cooper shook his head. Why couldn’t he have gotten a
guy
kind of ghost? The kind of ghost who would certainly never show up while he was in the shower or encourage him to track down and be friendly with guys from Q-tech.

    As soon as he had pulled on his pajama pants, Samantha appeared again. Cooper had a sneaking suspicion she had been watching, but didn’t want that confirmed and wouldn’t trust her if she denied it, so he didn’t bring it up.

She sat on the bed beside him, one leg tucked beneath her, and one dangling through the piece of furniture. He wondered what kind of effort or thought it took to keep her from falling through floors or furniture more than she chose to.

“I found Brent,” she said, “but no luck there. He was passed out with a pillow over his head.”

“We’ll find his number and call him as soon as school is out tomorrow,” Cooper promised. He didn’t want to do it, but he owed it to her.

Samantha smiled, but her expression seemed halfhearted. “I hate nighttime,” she confided. “Everyone going about, sleeping, dreaming or snuggling with other people or partying or
something
. And then there’s just me.”

“Trade?” Cooper proposed. He would have been happy to stay up alone, if it meant he didn’t have those dreams Samantha envied.

Samantha lay back. Cooper was about to yell at her about the whole “girl” thing again, but she wasn’t flirting this time. Instead, she took a funeral pose, with her arms crossed neatly across her chest. She closed her eyes and sighed.

“To sleep, perchance to dream and stuff,” she misquoted softly. “I’m really bored, Cooper. I’m getting kind of desperate.”

Without thinking about it, he reached out to awkwardly pat her shoulder. He realized what he was doing and pulled back before actually touching her, but her eyes had cracked open, and she half smiled.

“I’m going to go wander,” she said. “Look in windows. Or something.”

She sank through the bed and out of sight.

Cooper was almost certain Samantha had actually left this time, but still, he found himself staring at the spot
where she had just been—his bed, which he had come to see as a kind of enemy, one he seemed to battle nightly.

Sometimes sleep didn’t come at all. He would spend hours lying there, fighting to keep his eyes closed and his body relaxed, but every time he started to slip into sleep, it was like he could
feel
the nightmares reaching for him. If he cracked his eyes open in that state, he saw shadows that didn’t match any light source. They lingered around him and even more thickly around Samantha, and upon seeing them he would jerk back awake with a start.

Instead of going back to bed now, he took some time to try to read the assignment for English, but couldn’t absorb most of the words. Lately his memory was simply
shot
. He did a couple of math problems and read three or four paragraphs of his history textbook, and then chucked the book across the room—only to cringe as it narrowly missed the window. He didn’t want to explain shattered glass to his parents.

He booted up the computer, and lost himself in Wikipedia for a while, then spent a good half hour looking at cat macros before he broke down and logged into his MMORPG pirates game. He couldn’t quite resist opening the one e-mail in his account, which was from Delilah, but all it said was,
If you’re in trouble, Cooper, you can talk to me. I might be more understanding than you would expect
.

By then, however, it was one in the morning and his eyelids were so heavy they seemed to be dragging his head down. His eyes kept unfocusing so he had to roll away
from the computer, and the dizziness of exhaustion made him lie down. Ignoring the blankets, he collapsed onto the bed.

The first time he jerked back from sleep, his heart was pounding and there was a sour taste in his mouth. 1:45. He pulled a pillow over his head. He only had a couple of hours left until his alarm was due to go off. He couldn’t possibly dream on only a couple of hours’ sleep.

C
ooper Blake was in trouble. Delilah hadn’t decided yet what she planned to do about that, if anything, but it had taken only a moment for her to know that Cooper was in way over his head and sinking fast. It was now the middle of the night … no, well
past
the middle of the night … and her mind was still on the problem.

Unlike most members and supporters of the Lenmark Ocelots’ football team, Delilah had not gone to visit Cooper in the hospital. She knew about the accident, of course, but though she had many interesting skills, she was no doctor; there would have been no point in her loitering by his side while he was comatose.

She knew Cooper had been unconscious for three days. She couldn’t help hearing about it from the other girls on the squad, the guys on the team, her friends on the school
paper, and everyone else she ran in to, all of whom it seemed wanted to offer emotional support, or ask for it.

It wasn’t that she didn’t like Cooper; he was hard to dislike. He was the kind of person who, when presented with the opportunity to do a good deed, didn’t have the sense to contemplate being selfish instead. A total sweetheart, which meant he wasn’t interesting enough to be her type for dating, but he was fun to keep around as a friend. Indeed, she would’ve been sad if he had died … but he was still alive and kicking, so she didn’t know why everyone had made such a big deal about it.

What that meant, though, was that she hadn’t sought Cooper out in the hospital or at school since his return, and so had no idea how long he had looked this bad. People normally didn’t get that coated in psychic filth without dabbling in heavy magics. But unless Delilah had seriously misjudged him somewhere along the way, Cooper was no amateur sorcerer. She had to look for another source.

If Delilah hadn’t known what Cooper was normally like, she wouldn’t have felt driven to help him. After all, he wasn’t on the team anymore, he hadn’t called her, and he had snubbed her attempt to be nice. Under any other circumstance, she would have said that if he wanted to huddle in his own mystic mishap, that was his prerogative. However, Cooper was so infested with dark power, he probably couldn’t help being jittery, couldn’t help seeking isolation. He would draw back from those he was close to
instinctively, even if he didn’t consciously realize his infection was a danger to those around him.

Delilah sat cross-legged on her down comforter and shut her eyes now, centering her awareness.

She knew from experience that there were beasts in the shadows of the world; they had nearly killed her when she was twelve. They scurryed about intent on nothing more than sating their own hunger. They latched on to the weak to feed, bloating themselves until their hosts somehow shook free of them, or died from the infection.

Sure enough, when Delilah opened her eyes, her attention focused not on the physical world but the paranormal one instead, she saw the hungry shadows pacing around her. Ryan le Coire had told her that those few individuals who could see these beasts all perceived them differently; they always reminded Delilah of some kind of centipede or other vile, multi-legged creature, slithering and grasping at everything they touched. They must have caught her scent when she stopped to talk to Cooper.

The sight of them made her skin crawl. She crossed her arms across her chest and fought the instinct to run. Running would give them an opening.

She walked slowly to the window, which she opened fully. The fresh night air would help her focus. She wasn’t strong enough to banish the shadows completely, but if she was careful, she could keep them from making a meal out of her. Eventually they would tire of stalking prey they had no hope of taking down.

It would have been a wild coincidence if Cooper’s current state was not related to the accident, so Delilah opened her laptop, signed on to the neighbors’ unsecured wireless network—their own fault for not bothering to set a password—and looked up the event she had only barely paid attention to at the time.

She skimmed headlines as they came up.

MAJOR ACCIDENT ON INTERSTATE KILLS TWO, LEAVES FOUR IN CRITICAL CONDITION
.

WET ROADS BLAMED FOR EIGHT-CAR PILEUP ON I-90
.

She read article after article, starting with national press and then focusing on local news outlets, which had given more attention to Cooper instead of chattering endlessly about the celebrity involved in the crash.

From what she could put together, a patch of fog had turned slightly slippery roads into a zero-visibility death trap. One witness said she thought she saw a deer or some other animal in her rearview mirror. She had passed safely out of the fog, but the driver of the car behind her had slammed on the brakes, and because the drivers of the cars behind it weren’t able to see what was happening, disaster had followed.