Persephone's Orchard (The Chrysomelia Stories) (5 page)

Still, the day before leaving for Corvallis, she had found herself sitting on the fence regarding whether to break up with him before going away to school. Ultimately she hadn’t even brought it up. She couldn’t bear the thought of arriving in a new town not only alone, but with one of her closest ties freshly severed.

Now she wondered if it would have mattered. They were growing apart anyway. The last few days, even while comparing freshman-orientation stories with him via text, she felt distantly separated from him. Their paths seemed to have diverged. So, what to do?

Her phone buzzed with a new text. She looked at the screen.

David
was the sender’s name.

Though she knew a few Davids, she wasn’t on close enough terms with any of them to expect a text from them. She opened the message.

Are you interested in being kidnapped again, then?

She clenched her fingers around the phone. Her shivers became trembling. Breathing in flutters, she shot a look around, as if he might be texting her from ten feet away. But only a few pairs of students strolled down the nearby sidewalks, no one she recognized.

She leaped up, descended the steps, and paced back and forth under a lamp post. The air smelled of damp crushed grass. An evening star gleamed over a treetop.

What would she say? Why hadn’t she decided on her answer in the past few days?

Well, if going back to the dorm or the party sounded no fun, and texting her friends was going to be equally unsatisfying, and if all she was going to do was wonder about Watson and Nikolaos the rest of her life…

Rather than text him back, she selected his number and examined it. It likely belonged to another country, to judge from the extra-long chain of digits. She tapped “Call,” and lifted the phone to her ear, listening to it ring.

Chapter Four

H
OLDING HIS PHONE,
A
DRIAN PACED
back and forth along the steep grassy slope atop Mary’s Peak, in the light of the camping lantern he had set on the ground. Kiri raced up and down the hill, tongue flying out the side of her jaws, retrieving every stick he threw for her. Only five minutes had passed since he had texted Sophie, and already he was going mad with impatience.

Adrian had remained in Oregon—or, technically, the corresponding region in the spirit world—for most of the time since their meeting four days ago. He had chosen the nearest scenic mountaintop, because lurking in the region of Corvallis would have felt
too
close to her, as if he really were a stalker.

Honestly, how am I not?
he asked himself, irritated.

Regardless, he had gone back to the Underworld only long enough to fetch some of his camping gear, then returned here. He’d forced himself to wait a few days, to let her curiosity build up and to make sure she didn’t contact the police. As far as he could tell, she hadn’t. In the old bus pulled by the horses, he had flown to the top of Mary’s Peak and set up a tent in the forest. His only trips away had been quick jaunts to Southern California, to bathe in lakes that were warm, rather than frigid like the waters in Oregon. But living in the wilderness like this, rather than clearing his head like it was supposed to, was making him feel more like a social outcast than ever.

Up here, twelve hundred meters above sea level, the wind was chilly and the air felt nothing like late summer. Stars quivered overhead, and a faint band of blue sky lingered in the west. Mist was already forming around the mountaintop, shreds of it slipping past him.

His mobile rang, electrifying his nerves all over again—especially when a look at the screen showed him the desired name.
Sophie
.

He cleared his throat and answered. “Hello.”

He heard her draw in her breath. Silence for a few seconds. Then: “What is your name? Really?”

“It’s Adrian. Watson was just…an alias.”

“The phone said ‘David’ when you texted me.”

“Yeah, that’s another alias. I figured it was kind of a generic name; no one would notice it. So…?”

“Before I say whether or not I’ll go with you,” she warned, “I have to tell you I don’t like what you did with Grandpop.”

“I can understand.”

“You used him as a…a hostage.”

A burst of static hissed across the line, in tandem with a gust of wind. Adrian picked up the lantern and walked toward the trees. “Not a hostage. A bribe. Because I want you to come with me.”

“What do I have to give up, to come with you? To have you explain all this?”

Smart questions. She’d been thinking about this intelligently, as he’d hoped. “Nothing too bad,” he said. “You don’t have to give up your soul or anything like that. But you may give up some safety. And you have to start keeping a heap of secrets.”

“So if I say I’ll come, then what? You pick me up and we go to this…afterlife place? To see Grandpop?”

“Right.”

“And you’ll bring me straight back afterward.”

“Yes. But…”

“But what?” she countered.

“You’ll have a couple more choices to make on the way.”

“Such as?”

“Um…” He leaned against a tree trunk. Kiri loped toward him and circled the tree, sniffing the ground. “I’d rather show you in person. It’ll make more sense.”

“And you swear I won’t be in any danger.”

“Well. No one can ever promise that, can they.” They were both silent a second, then Adrian added, “I promise
I
won’t hurt you. And I’ll do my best not to let anything else hurt you either.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“No good reason. Except that you’re curious. Aren’t you?”

Longer silence. Then she said, “Fine, come get me.”

“Tonight? Now?”

“I’m not busy. Might as well.”

He began breathing faster. “Fifteen minutes, at the spot where I saw you last?”

“All right.”

“Oh, and Sophie—dress warm.”

“Fine. I’ll be there.” She hung up.

Tingling with excitement, Adrian shoved his phone into his coat pocket.
You can’t swoop in and kiss her when you pick her up, you know
, he reminded himself.
Not today, likely not even this month.

Nevertheless, he jogged back to the bus’s parking spot beneath the swaying fir trees, and dug through his stuff to find his electric razor to get rid of his scruffy three-day beard. Least you could do when going to meet a girl.

I
’M CRAZY
,
S
OPHIE
thought.
This is incredibly dangerous
. Going off some inaccessible place with a guy she barely knew? It was not her usual style and not an activity she’d recommend to anyone she cared about.

Then again, several people at tonight’s campus parties were probably hooking up with strangers too—though in a more sexual and less supernatural fashion. Risky either way. So maybe this was Sophie’s method of going wild at college.

She jogged back to her dorm room to change into jeans and fetch a zip-up hooded sweatshirt, then ran across the quad to their meeting spot. It was a dead-end corner off a breezeway, beneath a tall building with restaurants on the street level and student housing on the upper floors. Only the planter with the ivy and a few faded flyers tacked to a utility pole shared the space with her.

She bounced up and down on her toes in nervousness, pretending to read her texts as an excuse for standing alone in a dark corner. It surprised her when a new message crystallized before her eyes.

Coast clear?
Adrian texted.

She glanced around, and answered,
Yes
. Then she kept her gaze fixed on the phone, hardly daring to breathe.

A gust of wind swirled around between the walls. A pair of black boots, their edges and laces mud-splattered, materialized a yard from her feet. She moved her gaze up the dark jeans, past the thigh-length hem of a black wool coat lined with plaid flannel, to the solemn face of the young man standing there. The loose curls of his black hair stirred in the wind. His jaw looked tensely set, and his dark eyes glimmered from their shadowed hollows. The red neon light in the nearest shop window cast a glow across the planes of his forehead and cheeks, making his skin look perfectly smooth and strangely beautiful.

Her memory hadn’t failed her. He was one of the hottest guys she had ever met. But unlike Jacob or the other boys she had found “hot” in her life so far, Adrian was attractive in a different way—a more mature way. More like a man than a boy.

He stepped closer, sliding his hands around her waist cautiously. “Hi.”

“Hi.” She looked aside as he hugged her tight for a moment and performed that trick where the civilized world vanished. They wobbled in the tall grass, clutching each other for balance. Sweet forest-and-meadow air blew across Sophie’s face, and swirled up a whiff of Adrian’s scent too—the enticing and healthy smell of a young man who’d been walking in the fresh air. Uneasy, she wriggled her arm to get free.

He let go of her. A camping lantern sat on the ground, its LED bulb illuminating the orange-flagged stake. His dog sat next to it, tail wagging.

Sophie stretched out her hand to let the dog sniff it. “Is your dog a he or a she?”

“She. This is Kiri.”

After receiving a calm lick on the fingers from Kiri, Sophie folded her arms and looked around. “No lions tonight?”

“None that I’ve seen. Saw some mammoth-type things earlier.”

“Mammoths?”

“Yeah. They took off when they saw Kiri and me.”

“Do they keep away because of your ‘abilities’?”

“I assume so. We must smell strange to them, is all I can figure.”

“If this is the ghost world, why are there living animals?”

“Same way there are living plants, I guess. They evolved here. Differently than they evolved in our world—that’s why the weird species.”

“Then why didn’t people evolve here?” she asked.

“Maybe they did, long ago, then died out. Or maybe the only humans meant to be here are spirits.”

“And people like you.”

He shrugged, looking away.

Beneath the starry sky lay the same wilderness she remembered from the day Nikolaos nabbed her, or what little she could see of it in the dark. The trees and grasses bent in gusts of wind. A streak of greenish light shot from one horizon to the other, like a long-lived meteor or an extremely fast plane.

“What was that?” Sophie asked.

“A soul. Someone on their way to the—the place where they go.”

“You mean someone who just died?”

“Yeah.”

Chilled, she turned to scan the rest of the sky. “So that’s the direction we go if we want to visit Grandpop.”

“Yes. But it’s kind of a long flight.”

She looked at him. “Flight?”

He picked up the lantern. Pale blue beams forked upward onto his face. “Come see.”

He led Sophie across the field, swinging the lantern between them. She picked her way carefully through the long grass, which covered an uneven ground on which you could easily twist an ankle. Adrian rounded a stand of trees, and stopped.

A team of four ghost horses waited there—or at least she assumed they were ghosts, as they were glowing green and translucent the same way Grandpop had in the video. The horses were harnessed to a small rusty bus, which looked as if it had been recently borrowed from a junkyard. All its window glass was gone, and nothing was left of its paint except a few flakes of green and what seemed to be the remains of a letter X in blue. The three tires she could see from this side were completely flat. The horses’ harnesses were entwined in vines of some kind, with a few dried leaves still hanging on in spots. Where the harnesses met the bus, thick metal cables took over, so heavily welded that they had melted into the bus’s exterior and become a part of it.

After taking in this strange contraption, Sophie looked at Adrian.

“So your first big decision is,” he said, “are you willing to climb into this bus with me and fly across the world at incredibly high speeds?”

She gave a laugh of half-panic, half-disbelief. She walked around the back of the bus, touching its dented exterior. It felt solid enough. “What is this thing?”

“Something I built, to attach the horses to.”

“Is it safe?”

“Well, it’s held together so far.”

She circled to the other side, finding those tires flat too. “Is there any other way to get to the afterlife place?”

“Not realistically. This realm isn’t set up for living humans. We’d have to walk across the continent, then build a boat to cross the ocean, all of which would take months and be far more dangerous, so—yeah, this is it. This or ride directly on one of the horses.”