Alexander Death (The Paranormals, Book 3) (3 page)

“I don't think I'll ever sleep again,” Seth's mother said.

Seth looked back as the door to the morgue swung closed behind them. Carter hadn't moved, and he would never move again.

The funeral in Fallen Oak drew a huge crowd, made up of locals as well as far-flung relatives and business associates of the Barrett family. Dr. Goodling led the service at Fallen Oak Baptist Church, though Carter would naturally be buried in the family cemetery on the Barrett's land outside town.

“It is always difficult when the Lord takes one so young,” Dr. Goodling said. “It is a struggle to find the words to express the profound grief, the loss of promise and hope...a struggle to remember that God has a greater plan, and no man knows the place nor the hour...”

Seth sat in the front pew, staring at his polished black shoes. He knew he bore some of the responsibility for his brother's death, because if he'd only gotten to Carter faster, he could have healed him. His fists clenched and unclenched all the way through “The Old Rugged Cross” and “Amazing Grace.”

As they left the church, a strikingly pretty blond girl in a prim black dress rushed up to Seth. It took him a moment to recognize the preacher's daughter, Ashleigh, since Seth's family rarely attended church. Her eyes were huge and gray and wet with tears.

“Oh, Seth, I feel so bad for you,” Ashleigh said. Though they'd rarely spoken, she threw her arms around his neck and hugged him tight. “I can't imagine what it must be like,” she whispered in his ear.

Seth felt a weird, warm glow fill him, as if the girl's touch had filled him with a deep sense of love. He broke down and began to cry, and he hugged her back.

“Ashleigh, don't pester that boy,” said Mrs. Goodling, the preacher's wife, who had caught up with her daughter. She took Ashleigh's hand and reeled her back from Seth.

Seth and Ashleigh continued looking at each other while Ashleigh's mother pulled her back into the church, and Seth's dad hurried him out to the car. Seth's heart was thumping. He would think of that moment, the painful mix of misery and love, the compassionate look in Ashleigh Goodling's eyes, many times over the following few years.

At the family graveyard, where rows of monuments were enclosed by a high brick wall, Seth watched them bury Carter under the monument with his name inscribed on it. Seth's own grave marker stood beside it, a dark obelisk, with Seth's name and birth year already carved in place, waiting for his turn to die.

At their house, people ate and drank and spoke in low voices. Seth was introduced to more distant relatives, including his great uncle on his mother's side, Senator Junius Mayfield of Tennessee, a man with a balding scalp and a face like a basset hound.

As Seth walked away, he heard Junius whisper to his pretty young assistant: “I told Iris it was bad juju to get mixed up with Barrett family. You'd listen if I told you that, wouldn't you?”

“Of course, sir,” the assistant answered, and she gave him a dazzling smile. “I always take your advice.”

Seth made his way to the back yard, away from everyone. Beyond the peach orchard, on the far hilltop, he could see the brick walls and wrought-iron gates of the family's private graveyard. Carter was there now, and Seth's parents would follow him there, and Seth himself. And that would be the end of the story.

Years later, on the night of the Charleston riot, Seth searched for Jenny until the National Guard cleared the streets.

The riot had erupted during the Southeastern Funk Fest, an outdoor music event by the water. Seth didn't know why the riot had started, but it had been huge, sudden, and violent.

He'd completely lost Jenny in the chaos. It didn't help that she'd been running away from him, understandably angry at what she'd seen—Seth, with a strange naked blond girl on top of him. Seth didn't know what had come over him to make him hook up with that girl. It almost reminded him of Ashleigh's enchantment, the power to make people feel love, or at least intense attraction. But Ashleigh was dead, so she couldn't have been behind it.

He narrowly avoided getting swept up into a paddy wagon with a group of teenage rioters, and finally made his way back to The Mandrake House hotel. Jenny would know to find him there, if she wanted to see him—although, considering what Jenny had last seen him doing, he doubted that she would be looking for him anyway.

That girl was gone, thankfully, by the time Seth returned to the hotel. In his suite, he checked the sitting room, the bathroom, and both bedrooms. Nobody was there.

He walked out onto the balcony to think. Below him, pulsing blue light filled the streets—local and state police, Homeland Security. An armored transport cruised very slowly down Battery, with National Guardsmen perched on the sides, looking for signs of trouble. The authorities had arrived and dispersed the rioters in an incredibly short amount of time, almost as if they'd been expecting something big and chaotic to happen.

Seth wanted to call Jenny, but of course she didn't own a cell phone. He needed to call Darcy and find out why she hadn't made it back to their hotel room, but he couldn't find his Blackberry. He wondered where he'd left it. He'd been fairly drunk earlier, before the sight of Jenny's angry face sobered him up.

He tried to retrace the steps that had led to him bringing the other girl—what was her name? Allegra?—back to his hotel room. He certainly hadn't intended to cheat on Jenny, despite the encouragement of Wooly and friends. His memories around the girl were fuzzy, as if suffused with a weird golden light, the way it had felt whenever Ashleigh touched him.

It wasn't possible that Ashleigh was involved, though. Ashleigh was dead, and Seth was responsible for what he'd done, drunk or not.

Seth felt completely drained—the crowd had crushed in around him, leeching his energy, which had gone to heal any number of kids who were bleeding or injured from the riot. He staggered to his bed, leaving the bedroom door open so he could hear if Darcy returned. He turned up the volume on the phone on his bedside table, in case either Jenny or Darcy decided to call.

He closed his eyes, trying not to imagine Jenny caught in the middle of the riot, with people pushing in around her. He didn't want to think about what the mob might have done to Jenny—or what she might have done to them, and how it would upset her if she infected anyone with the Jenny pox.

The phone never rang.

***

Seth awoke sticky-eyed and sick in the morning. He checked the other bedroom, where there was still no sign of Darcy, who was supposed to be there. The odd girl had made friends with Jenny after Ashleigh's death, and Seth had brought her to Charleston for college orientation this weekend, since they were both starting at College of Charleston in the fall. Darcy, like Jenny, had disappeared the previous night.

He looked at the room phone. He didn't know Darcy's cell number by heart. He did know Jenny's home phone, but he didn't want to get her in trouble with her dad if she hadn't returned home yet. She already had enough reasons to be angry with Seth.

He wandered downstairs to the hotel's dining room. Maintenance men were fixing broken windows from the riot, and the hotel's promised “Southern-style” hot breakfast was not being served. There was only some cold cereal and coffee available in the lobby.

Seth helped himself to a huge bowl of Frosted Flakes and a Styrofoam cup of coffee. He ate quickly and sloppily, drawing disapproving stares from more elderly hotel guests. Using his healing touch sucked out his energy, even burning away at his body mass if he didn't eat a gigantic pile of calories. It worked the same for Jenny.

When he was satiated, he approached the front desk, where the hotel manager was on duty, a slender man with a pencil-thin mustache and a seersucker suit. He raised an eyebrow at Seth's disheveled appearance and the clumps of strawberry blond that stuck up from his head.

“May I help you, sir?”

“Hi,” Seth said. “Things got pretty crazy last night, huh?”

“I believe we shall endure. We are fully insured.” The manager gestured at his computer. “If there is nothing further, I'm afraid we have a great deal of work to do this morning, cataloging the damage to our exterior.”

“There was a girl who checked in with me, but she disappeared last night.”

“How unfortunate.” The manager resumed tapping at his computer keyboard.

“I was wondering if anybody's seen her.

The man sighed. “May we assume she was blond, scantily clad and quite drunk? We did have to ask such a person to leave the premises.”

“Um...no, that's a different girl,” Seth said. “The one I'm looking for has glasses and she's really, you know, pregnant.” Seth held a hand out in front of his stomach, not sure why he was demonstrating what the word meant. “So somebody might remember her. Her name's Darcy Metcalf?”

The hotel manager raised his eyebrows—both of them this time, not just the one.

“Metcalf,” the manager said. “Am I to understand you were sharing her room on the fifth floor?”

“Fifth? No, we're on the third. Seth Barrett?”

The manager tapped at the keyboard. “Ah, yes, Mr. Barrett. This is a bit confusing, sir. We had to call the police for someone matching that name and description. She had a room on the fifth floor, which she reserved, we eventually discovered, using a stolen credit card.”

“What? No, that's not right. We were on three, with my credit card, which isn't stolen.”

“Hence the aforementioned confusion, sir. If she was staying with you, at your expense, why would she then rent a room on the fifth floor using a stolen credit card?”

“Well, I don't fucking know, man,” Seth said, and the manager flinched a bit. “You must be confusing two different people.”

“You propose that there were two women answering to the name Darcy Metcalf?” the manager asked. “Both of them pregnant?”

“That doesn't make any sense, either,” Seth said.

“I refer you once again to the aforementioned confusion, sir,” the manager said.

“To be clear,” Seth said. “While Darcy was staying with me, she also rented a room on the fifth floor? With a
stolen
credit card? That doesn't sound like her at all.”

“Perhaps I should not disclose this,” the manager said, “But it might be the case that the card in question was stolen from the lady's father.”

“Then it wasn't all that stolen, was it?” Seth asked.

“The father reported the card stolen, sir.”

“Okay...then where's Darcy now?”

“We handed her over to the police,” the manager said. “I presume you will find her in the city jail, in need of someone to post a bond.”

“Well, shit,” Seth said, and the manager flinched once again. “Okay. Where's the jail?”

“I will have to research that, as few guests of this hotel face problems with the police, as one can imagine.”

“Just tell me where to go.”

“I would be more than happy to do so,” the manager said. He printed off a Google map with directions to the jail and slid it across the desk. “Do let me know if there's anything further that will make your stay at the Mandrake House more comfortable. Perhaps we might direct you to a bail bondsman, or a criminal defense attorney.”

“Yeah, very funny,” Seth said. “Thanks for the map.”

He tipped the man a dollar—normally he would tip more, but he suspected the hotel manager was subtly being a douche to him throughout the conversation. Then he walked out to his car.

The jail was a zoo, full of parents bailing out kids who'd been swept up from the previous night's riot. Seth had to wait in line.

“Weeell, look what the dog dragged in,” a voice said beside him. Seth turned to see Darcy Metcalf's father approaching in his wheelchair—Mr. Metcalf was a very obese man who'd lost a foot to diabetes. His face was blood-red, and he sneered at Seth. Darcy's pale, cringing mother trailed behind him.

“Mr. Metcalf,” Seth said, surprised.

“Don't you 'Mr. Metcalf' me, you dumb fancy-pants ball of shit,” Mr. Metcalf said. “Run off with my daughter on a Friday night, then I come to find out I got to bail her big ass out of jail on Sunday morning? In goddamn
Charleston
. What do you got to say for yourself?”

“We were just coming here for orientation,” Seth said.

“Oh, I bet you orientationed the shit out of her, didn't you?” Mr. Metcalf said. “Who's gonna pay for this baby, that's what I want to know.”

“Morris—” his wife began.

“Shut up. I got a few things to say to Little Lord Fancy-Pants here. I had to pay Darcy's bond, and how am I gonna afford that when I'm on disability?”

“I'll pay her bail—” Seth said.

“Naw, here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna call up your daddy and tell him the Metcalf don't have to make no mortgage payments for the next three months. That's what you're gonna do.”

“I'm sure something can be worked out—” Seth began.

“You bet your ass something can be!” Mr. Metcalf interrupted. “Matter of fact, make it four months. I got a pregnant slut daughter to feed.”

“Morris!” his wife gasped.