Children of the Earth (4 page)

She glanced meaningfully in the direction of the doorway, where Owen had just left. Daphne watched her heart rate spike on the monitor next to her bed. Had Janie guessed that there was still something going on between her and Owen? She’d seen them flirting when Owen first came to town, and she'd tried to put a stop to it, but Daphne and Owen had kept their relationship private since.

There was a flat, sick-sounding slap as the sole of one dirty pink boot hit the linoleum, then another. Janie was halfway to the door by the time Daphne located her voice. “Janie, wait!” she called.

Janie stopped, her shoulders tensed under a sagging hoodie. She turned and regarded Daphne, her eyes narrowed to slits. “What?” she asked.

Daphne ached to confess the truth: not only to get her secret off her chest, but to rekindle the closeness she and Janie had lost. But how much could she risk telling? Janie didn’t approve of Owen any more than her parents did. What if she passed Daphne’s secret on to Floyd and Karen? They were vulnerable enough that it seemed like the news could break them.

But maybe she just needed to bite the bullet and tell. Janie would understand—she’d been in love once, or maybe she still was. And even though they’d drifted further apart since Janie had lost her baby and slipped into her depression, Daphne still considered her cousin her closest friend.

Her silence stretched on as she tried to formulate the words, and then the moment was gone.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Janie sighed. She turned back to the door, her feet falling into a slow, sad shuffle, hair trailing down her back like the tattered trim of a cheap, grubby blanket.

“Tell my folks I had to go,” she said woodenly.

Before Daphne could respond, Janie was a silhouette, then a shadow, then a watery reflection in the hospital window as she hurried down the hall.

6

HEATH
ER ANDERSON SQUINTED
INTO THE
sunset. She’d been wearing her sunglasses for most of the drive west, to protect her striking green eyes from a sun that felt like it was growing closer and brighter with every mile she put between her and the leafy passageways of her hometown in rural New York state. But even polarized lenses were no match for the glare of the sunset, pricked by the peaks of Wyoming’s Medicine Bow mountain range so that it spilled like the runny yolk of a soft-boiled egg across the sky.

The west, and her future, felt wide open, full of possibilities. She’d spent most of the drive picturing the University of Arizona’s sunbaked quad, weekend Wildcats games and field trips to buttes and faults and canyons, the cool slosh of beer in a Saturday night Solo cup and the ring of study-break laughter with her first-ever roommate. There would be midnight Lucky Charms from the cafeteria and toothy kisses with tall, tanned boys, pickup soccer and, best of all, weeks on end without snow, clouds, or rain.

Arizona’s endless sunlight and crisp, dry air would evaporate the darkness that sometimes permeated her nights, the dreams that woke her gasping and drenched in sweat. She blamed northern New York’s upstate gloom and long winters for her moodiness—because it wasn’t
her
, she knew that. Heather Anderson was as solid and sensible as the rocks she planned to study, a declared geology major who’d chosen her college as much for its Earth Sciences Department as for the warm winters. She was student council secretary and captain of the Oneonta varsity girls’ soccer team, doting big sister to Matt and Jessica, beloved daughter of Mira and Frank. She wasn’t the dark figure chanting and dancing around bonfires in her dreams, goaded and cajoled and strangely, horrifyingly attracted to the gravelly voice urging her to “find the vein.”

Her stomach rumbled, and she checked the GPS on her dashboard. Six hours to Moab, a long and lonely hump until she could check into the motel she’d booked online the week before. She’d decided to take the scenic route to Tucson, planning her trip around a handful of geological oddities: the Tripod Rock in New Jersey, Missouri’s Ozark caves, the cannonball concretions in Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota, Arches National Park in Utah, and then finally down to the University of Arizona and her brand-new college life. Her mom had wanted to come, but Heather talked her out of it: There would be a lot of driving and a lot of rocks, and her mother would start fidgeting in that distracted way she had. It was better for her to go alone.

Another, more forceful groan rumbled her gut, and the sun slanted sideways through her windshield, temporarily blinding her.

“Okay, okay, fine,” she said to the Jeep Cherokee’s interior, slowing to a crawl and squinting into the horizon. “We’ll get off at the next exit and find a diner, wait for the sun to go down. But then on to Moab.”

A sign loomed ahead, its stark white letters barely visible in the glare. “Looks like we’re going to Carbon County,” she said to the voice warbling pop songs on the radio. “And, note to self, stop thinking out loud. Your new roommate’s going to think you’re a freak!”

The talking-out-loud-to-nobody thing was new, and she blamed the solo cross-country road trip. All that time to herself, the hours where the cliffs along the side of the highway started to develop personalities in her mind, the nights alone in chain motel rooms that smelled of mold and disinfectant and hard, sad little soaps, the sleep streaked by yellow parking-lot lights and broken by recurring dreams—all of it was starting to get to her, and in a way she regretted refusing her mom’s offer to come along.

The road dipped into a valley sprinkled with lights, and she passed a sign so new she could see the mounds of fresh dirt where it had been planted.
Welcome to Carbon C
ounty: Home of Mirac
les!
it declared cheerfully, next to a seal that appeared to contain an oil derrick and something that looked like the Ten Commandments.

“It’ll be a miracle if I can find something to eat besides McDonald’s,” Heather joked, tapping the brakes and falling in line behind a slow-moving water truck with Global Oil logos on its mud flaps. She followed the truck at a glacial cruise past a flashing sign advertising Elmer’s Gas ’n’ Grocery and onto a bustling main street lined with shops just closing up for the day. Idling at a traffic light, Heather noted the parking spaces packed with mud-splattered pickups and a sign in a real estate office advertising one-bedroom apartments starting at $1,800. She saw throngs of scruffy, tired-looking men waiting for tables in the well-lit windows of restaurants with names like Pat’s Steakhouse and Manic Manicotti.

The businesses along Main Street thinned out, replaced by a vast trailer park packed with mobile homes that were squat and uniform as headstones. A sign at the gate informed her that it was the Lucky Strike Community
—Pros
pectors Welcome! Hoo
kups start @ $200/wk
!

“I should turn around,” Heather declared. The sun had disappeared behind the mountain range, leaving only a rusty stain in the sky, and the spaces between the trailer homes were thick with shadows. Yet she kept driving, telling herself she’d hit the next turnaround and maybe just grab a slice of pizza somewhere, eat it in the car, and hustle down to Moab. As the sky darkened and the water truck turned off onto a dirt road and her stomach gave another long, low moan, Heather kept driving. She had an inkling now that there would be more up ahead, felt promise in the way the road curved up into the foothills. None of the restaurants along Main Street had been quite what she was looking for, she reasoned, but soon she’d find the perfect spot for a bite.

As the last greasy trails of sunset smeared across the sky, she noticed a sign glowing red in the distance, its molten glare fire-bright in the quickening dark. Her stomach clenched—not with hunger, she realized, but with anticipation. Even though the sign was still far off, she knew from the strong twist in her gut that it was the place.

Her body seemed to pick up speed even as the Jeep slowed. She felt the racing patter of her pulse and her blood flowing faster in her veins. The sign was closer, almost close enough to read, and her turn signal was already on. She was halfway into the parking lot, pulling up in front of a long, low building with a peaked roof and blacked-out windows, when the words on the sign registered, and she slammed on the brakes and cut the engine, shuddering along with the Jeep as its power ticked away.

The words on the sign sat black and somber against smooth plastic that glowed scarlet from within, as if lit by fire. They were words she felt she’d known forever, words whispered to her night after night in a voice like tumbled pebbles, broken and granite-hard and flecked with shavings of glimmering mica, words that filled her with darkness and dread and longing.

The Vein.

She sat for a moment, hands useless in her lap, unable to unbuckle her seatbelt.

“It has to be a coincidence,” she whispered. “It just . . . there’s no way . . .”

She knew she should turn back, turn around, get out of that parking lot and as far away from Carbon County, Wyoming, as possible. She knew, somehow, that once she stepped foot inside the Vein, everything would change. She thought about her life, her future down in Tucson, the mirage of college life shimmering in the distance. But she was already unbuckling her seatbelt, stepping out into the early evening chill. Dry mountain air caught in her lungs, and her heartbeat was a drum marching her to the door, matching the pulse of music thudding faintly through the walls.

She pushed open the door and stepped inside, into a room glowing with the dim intensity of an underground cavern.

“Sorry, we’re not open yet.” A guy with a chiseled chin and massive shoulders stopped her with a gentle tap on the arm. He had a long, dark ponytail and a serious mouth, but his eyes were all Heather saw.

His eyes. Gazing into them she forgot where she was, forgot where she’d been or where she was going, almost forgot her name. His eyes were green in a way that had seemed, for all of her life, impossible to duplicate, green in a way that made strangers on the street stop and stare and her friends ask, in hushed and giggling tones at countless slumber parties, if she wore colored contacts. It was like staring into a trick mirror, like her eyes had been transplanted into the bouncer’s face.

He looked up at her, and his expression changed. “You’re here.” He stretched his arms wide, showing the callused ridges of massive hands. “Welcome home.”

Heather’s feet felt like concrete. “What do you mean? I’ve never even been here before.”

The bouncer ignored her, cupping his hands around his mouth. “She’s here!” he called in a voice that echoed through the empty bar: “She’s here!”

Suddenly, people began to appear. A head popped up from behind the bar, and she heard shuffling footsteps, felt the presence of bodies hastening toward them from hidden back corridors.

“She’s here.” The voice was throaty, rich as turned earth. A door opened behind the bar, revealing a girl with wild, colorful dreadlocks, wearing a backless green top and tattered bell-bottoms that rode low on her hips. Her eyes met Heather’s from across the room and sent sparks prickling up and down her arms, shorted her breath, and spread heat up the back of her neck. “Welcome,” she said with a honey-slow smile. “I’m Luna. I’m your Earth Sister.”

Heather’s mouth fell open. She couldn’t take her eyes off the girl, couldn’t look away from those eyes. They were the same green as the bouncer’s, the same as her own.

“Yes,” Luna glided toward Heather, grinning like a cat. “You’re finally here, Earth Sister. Welcome home.”

“Hold up.” Heather’s voice came out shrill, shaky. Not the way she wanted it to sound. “What’s going on? Why are you all freaking out about me being here? I’ve never met any of you before.”

“But that’s not true.” Luna spread her arms, which dripped in bronze bangles. “You’re our Earth Sister. You’ve known us since the day you were born.”

She indicated the small crowd of bar staff that had gathered behind her. A chill trickled down Heather’s spine as she saw their eyes: all the same shocking shade of emerald. Even in their strangeness, there was something familiar about them, something almost comforting.

She took another step back, so the cool steel of the door pressed into her spine. “I only have one sister,” she said. “And she’s not here.”

Luna’s laugh was a silvery tinkle in the silent room. “It’s not that simple, Heather. Don’t you know where you were born?”

Heather went cold all over. “How do you know my name?”

“Because I’m your sister,” Luna explained patiently, as if speaking to a child. “We were conceived on the same night, at a place called the Children of the Earth, during a beautiful ritual under the full moon. We were born side by side and took our first breaths and our first milk together. We came into this world as a family, as Children of the Earth, and now we’re all together again, a family once more. At last.”

The others nodded somberly behind her.

“But . . .” Heather began. She couldn’t find the words to continue. If what Luna said was true, it would explain why she had never seen a photo of herself as a baby, why her parents were always vague about her birth and jokingly referred to that time as “our hippie phase.” It would explain why they didn’t get married until she was three years old, when she toddled down the aisle in front of them in an itchy blue dress carrying a basket of flower petals.

“You were named after the grasses that blew like waves in the fields,” Luna continued, her voice a seductive singsong. “Your birthday is sometime between April second and April ninth. You’re an Aries—and you act like one, too. And for the past few months, ever since your eighteenth birthday, you’ve been dreaming of us: all of us, dancing together around a bonfire, summoning the God of the Earth to set things right. You’ve dreamed of us, and seen our eyes, and just before you wake you hear a voice telling you to find the vein.”

Heather’s knees buckled, and she leaned against the door for support. “How do you know?”

“Because we’ve all had them, too.” Luna’s voice was soothing, rubbing away at her fear. “Those dreams were messages from the God of the Earth, calling his children home.

“And now you’re here!” Luna clapped her hands with childlike delight, her jade eyes sparkling. “And just in time, too: The moon is already waxing. Oh, I know—you probably have a million questions. Let’s go upstairs, and I’ll tell you everything.”

She reached out a hand, urging Heather to take it, to follow her.

“No,” Heather whispered. She shrank back, wedging her hands behind her back, not trusting them. “I’m not going anywhere with you. I’m getting out of here. I’m—I’m going to Moab.”

Darkness winged briefly across Luna’s face. She locked eyes with Heather, and even though she wanted to, Heather couldn’t look away—couldn’t focus on anything else. It was like the entire world, the galaxy and universe and everything beyond, was concentrated in those eyes.

“You want,” Luna said, “to come with us. You want to be here, with your family.”

The words wound hypnotically through Heather’s brain and spread in a warm blue-tinged haze to her heart. She
did
want to follow Luna, to be part of this strange yet strangely familiar tribe. She wanted it desperately, and she understood that part of her had wanted it her whole life. She knew without having to be told that the darkness she’d felt back in Oneonta, the loneliness that plagued her heart even when she was around family and friends, would turn to light once she surrendered to Luna and accepted her place with the Children of the Earth. She knew that this was her true family, where she’d always belonged.

With Luna’s voice singing in her head and Luna’s words flowing through her veins, it didn’t matter that she was supposed to go to Moab, to Tucson, to the University of Arizona and her sunny new life. That was all meaningless, a shadow world to distract her from the truth. Nothing mattered but Luna.