Luminosity (Gravity Series #3) (The Gravity Series) (38 page)

On the way over, my foot too hard on the accelerator, I tried to decipher this new situation. I was worried she might be luring me into a trap. I thought about the coin toss, about how she’d been willing to give me up. How the meetings had changed her.

She was my mother. She couldn’t really be against me—could she?

###

There must have been a hurricane.

That was my first thought as I stood inside my old house. Every drawer had been ripped open and scattered, the shelves emptied. Even my father’s den had been torn apart. Claire would never stand for such a mess.

Burglars, it must have been. What about Claire…?

Dishes were piled precariously in the sink. I frowned; that was not something Claire did, ever. There was a broken bag of rice scattered on the tile. What went on here?
I heard scratching sounds from upstairs, the sounds of someone moving.

I slid the paring knife out of my boot and walked carefully down the hall to the staircase.

“Claire?” I called. When I got no answer, I started to ascend the stairs. The wood whined beneath my feet, echoing the loneliness around me. Even though I’d grown up in this house, it seemed like a totally different place. Empty and sad, not full of the memories I’d lived.

I could definitely hear someone moving around in my parents’ room. The door was ajar. I crept slowly down the hall, holding the handle of the knife tightly by my side.

“Claire?” I asked again, pushing open the bedroom door. I was in for a shock.

All of the furniture had been pushed to one side of the room, save for the bed. As I moved in farther, I saw Claire sitting on the floor in her nightgown, her feet bare flat against the floor. The room was freezing cold; the windows were cracked. She had a bucket of grimy water beside her and a sponge. She rubbed the sponge in a wet, repetitive circle on one spot on the wall.

“What happened?” I asked her. Her circular motions didn’t stop. Over and over the sponge traced the same wet oval. Her hair was matted together in the back like dark straw, and she was clutching her knees with her other arm.

I ran over, the spell broken, and knelt beside her, shaking her shoulder. She turned her head and her eyes cleared out just a little. A spark of recognition shone from within.

“Little lamb,” she said, her voice breaking and full of sadness. I choked back a sob myself, trying to keep clarity.

“What happened here?” I repeated. I helped her to her feet, practically dragging her away. The sponge, falling to pieces, was clenched in her fist. I pried it out of her greedy fingers and tossed it away with a wet, slopping sound. Her cell phone floated in the top of the bucket.

I led Claire to the bed and sat her down, kneeling in front of her. The roots of her hair were showing, streaked silvery-gray.

“I’ve lived my life in lines,” Claire finally said, not making eye contact. I got the distinct impression that a big part of her was floating in outer space, not even in the room with me. “I wanted to know what it would be like. To go outside of the lines, outside of the safety zones. Like my daughter.

“So I stopped taking the pills. Just for a few days, but it was enough. There is so much death around us, Mama. You were right.”

I sucked in a gasp at her revelation. “You can see ghosts?”

“I’ve been seeing ghosts since I was very small,” Claire said. “Like you. But I never told you. I took the medication and the ghosts went away. It was too much, too much and my head….”

She jammed her fists hard against her temples. I gently but firmly grabbed her wrists and pulled them away an inch. She kept talking. “It scared me. I had forgotten how real it can feel, and how I began to lose my grip on the earth. I was slipping, my hand wasn’t strong enough to hold the ledge. I went back to the doctor for the stronger pills. But they didn’t work either; I was too lost.”

She started weeping silently, still staring off into the corner. I looked at her bedside table, where there were two empty medication bottles. I picked one of them up. It was a prescription for Valium; I recognized the pharmaceutical name because I’d taken it before. So had Eleanor; it had stopped us from seeing ghosts.

The label seemed a little creased, so I pried at the corner with my thumbnail. The label came off, revealing the original label underneath. The pills were a mild pain medication. And the prescribing physician was Dr. Briggs.

“Claire, it’s going to be okay,” I said, attempting to remain calm and to get her to look me in the eye. “We’ll get you to the hospital, they’ll get you the drugs that you need.”

She just nodded and hummed to herself, rocking back and forth on the bed.

“I just need to know one thing. Did you really have a coin toss to see whether it was Ariel or Jenna who would die?” It was eating away at me. I had to hear the truth from her, even if it was shown through an insane, distorted filter.

She continued to rock and stare up at the ceiling. “They said we would have to sacrifice something precious. I didn’t realize they meant my daughter. Not until after Jenna disappeared. Even then, I couldn’t believe it. Rachel was born cold, but to court Thornhill so openly…. I went to the meetings, and then I wanted back in on the power. It didn’t seem right outside of that room, but during the meetings they filled our heads with this glorious light. To be part of something powerful, everlasting and glowing. I thought, as long as Ariel was safe, what was the harm? And Phillip knew I had the Sight. He wanted to harness it the first time. Maybe this time he would, too.”

“No. They don’t want anyone with the Sight. It threatens them.” I swallowed my shock. “Let’s go, now.”

“They ransacked the house,” Claire said quickly, going still but still looking up toward the heavens. “They were looking for the necklace. I didn’t know what it was when I gave it away and then no one could find it.”

“I know. Mom, let’s go.”

“The Dark is too close, Mama,” she grasped both of my hands, finally looking at me. But I could tell by the shuddering of her eyes that she was too far gone. “Can’t you see the shadows moving in?” I looked in the corners of the rooms, and saw in horror that there were shadow people coming towards us, their hungry red eyes glowing.

I looked around frantically for my phone, but I remembered it was downstairs on the table. Hers was out of the question.

“Come with me,” I said, trying to pull her up. But I wasn’t strong enough, and she wasn’t cooperating at all. I didn’t want to leave her in the room; the shadows were stalking closer, twitching and bending and staring at me relentlessly.

I pulled Claire’s arms again, trying desperately to get her up. Suddenly she bolted to her feet, and with untold strength, slammed me away from her. I collapsed into the wall, staring at her in shock. I saw she had tucked kitchen knives into the waistband of her pants.

“The demons are closing in. Too close. Get out. Get out now!” She started screaming her head off. She tried to take another swing at me, still squealing at the top of her lungs, and rushed at the wall. Before I could stop her, she began slamming her skull into the drywall.

An involuntary scream rushed out of my mouth. Blood began to mark the wall. I jumped up, turned on my heel and flew out of the room and down the stairs, nearly tripping over my feet. I skidded on the floor and fell on my back, wincing in pain. I could still hear the dull thud of Claire hitting her head into the wall upstairs.

I reached the phone, hitting 911 and holding the phone to my mouth as I panted on the floor, standing on my knees and clutching the table. My heart felt like it would explode. Tears of fear and horror trailed down my face.

“911 dispatch, what is your emergency?”

Then I heard one final, heavy thud above my head.

###

Claire’s motionless body lay on a gurney, arms and legs strapped down. Her head was covered with bandages like an mummy, so that I couldn’t see her face. Or what was left of it.

She wasn’t dead yet, but her respiration was very shallow, only noticeable if I stared really close. Her chest fluttered like a dying butterfly. Already wires had been attached to her skin, linked up to several portable, beeping monitors. The paramedics rushed her into the ambulance, lifting the stretcher up and slamming the doors.

An EMT with a clipboard came to me. He spoke rapidly, but I couldn’t process a word he said. I nodded so he’d think I got it. So he would stop talking. My eyes wouldn’t stop leaking tears. I could still hear the slamming sound of Claire’s head on the wall.

“Thank you,” Hugh said sincerely to the EMT, taking some kind of paper he’d been handed. He was still wearing his pajama bottoms. He had me wrapped in a hug around my shoulders, but my body felt numb. The EMT nodded and jogged back to the driver’s seat, starting the ambulance up and driving away with the emergency light flashing blue.

She’s not going to make it
, whispered a voice inside me. I didn’t have to analyze it much; it was the obvious choice.

“What happened?” Hugh asked me. His voice was toneless and strange. “What did you see, what did she say to you? Why didn’t you stop her”

“I went in, the house was a mess.” Words were coming out of me, but I couldn’t feel my lips moving. “She was upstairs. She’d had a nervous breakdown. She told me that she sees ghosts. These shadows were closing in. They’re all going absolutely crazy.”

His lips set into a firm line. “It’s all over now.”

“She thought I was her mother,” I murmured.

“What?”

“She thought I was Grandma Eleanor. She kept calling me ‘Mama.’” A thought struck me hard. I looked at Hugh with frantic eyes. His face was flat but his eyes were red from the tears he was holding back.

“Phillip Rhodes told me that we have to leave town.”

“What?”

“His creepy assistant, they took me to an abandoned road. He told me that they were exactly what I thought they were and that I would have to leave town, and you would have to come with me.”

“Don’t worry about that now,” Hugh whispered soothingly, rubbing my numb arms again.

“How can I not worry? Everything is falling apart.”

“Maybe it would be a good idea to get away from this,” he said. His lower lip trembled, and he blinked as though stunned by a bright light. I didn’t think he had comprehended all of what had happened yet.

A small crowd had gathered on our lawn, eagerly watching the paramedics work. Anything was entertainment to these people. I wanted to shout at them and scare them all away, but I stood motionless. I looked to the right, and saw Eleanor standing alone, regarding me with her cold, flat stare. She was leaning against a tree, and at her feet was the black dog, his gaze just as cold.

I heard buzzing from my left—a strange, insect-like hum that sounded unsettling and familiar. It reminded me of when Ambrose was taken over by Dark…

My head snapped in the direction of the hum. Jenna was standing there; I hadn’t noticed before, too caught up in what had happened.

A cloud of black, fly-like specks was spinning around Jenna’s face and upper torso. I felt flush with fresh panic and reached out for her.

“Ariel, I can’t hold on any more….” Her voice came out quiet and distorted, though her eyes were wild and intense. Our fingertips almost touched. In an instant, her eyes filled with black, and she was swallowed up by the air.

I began screaming like I would never stop.

EPILOGUE

JENNA STOOD ACROSS
the street, watching the phantom of the orphanage. It was so much scarier here, naked and stripped of its harmless disguise. The tops of the trees burned, blackening the violet sky with smoke. She could feel the dark spreading through her veins, into her arteries and empty organs, making her thoughts and body heavy.

And worse, she could remember the feeling now. She had been suppressing it all this time. The feeling of being dead, of death controlling her body.

The fire burned steady and strong, no going out now. The fuel of the blood that had soaked into the Earth, and the promise of more to come. Dark would take over Limbo soon, and it would spread to the world of the living. The plan was in motion, and there was no way to stop it. Then the Master would creep out of Luminos.

Jenna opened her mouth to scream. But she couldn’t make a sound.

Acknowledgments

First off, I wanted to give a huge thanks to my beta readers. These ladies rock and offered me a huge amount of feedback, good ideas, and support. Special thanks to Jeanne Walkowe, Diana Fetherston, Teri Christensen, Mimi Madsen, Ashley Dexter, Heather Menna, Katy Austin, Colinda Abner, Linda DiGregorio, Renee de Risio, Angela Weyhrauch, Beth Herlihy, Lucy To, Renee Dean, Andrea, Katie, Andrea Perry, Aubrae Collins, Amanda, Anni McHenry, Renita, Juliet and Tausha Hewlett. I wanted to take all my readers and fans, especially the ones who have emailed me to let me know how much they’ve enjoyed the series. Another gigantic thank you to my husband, TJ, for knowing how much this means to me.

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