Persephone's Orchard (The Chrysomelia Stories) (6 page)

Circling around to the front, Sophie examined the horses. She approached one and reached out slowly. Her hand slipped straight through its glowing neck, but stopped upon the solid harness that secured it to its team. She tried it again, watching her hand glide through the animal as if it were made of mist. Fascination was starting to push out uneasiness, at least for the moment.

“It’s not as comfortable, riding the horses for that long,” Adrian added. “Especially if we’re both sharing a saddle. The seat in the bus is nicer.”

She kept passing her hand through the horse’s body. “So it’s across an ocean? What part of the world?”

“I’d rather not say yet. I don’t want to plant ideas in your head.”

His answer didn’t make much sense, but she was growing used to that. “How long is the trip?” She tried stroking the animal’s nose, but her fingers went straight through that too. The horse twitched its ears and whickered patiently.

“About three hours each way,” he said. “So, if you want to sleep on it, you can go back to bed tonight, and we’d take off tomorrow morning. Or—”

“Let’s go,” she interrupted. She moved to the open door of the bus and peered up into it.

“Now?” Adrian’s pitch rose in surprise. “You’d be up all night.”

“I’m not tired. You wanted me to come. Let’s do it.” Though fear fluttered again in her belly, she felt a bit steadier when she took control. She climbed into the bus. The horses’ glow lit the vehicle well enough for her to see its interior. The door was missing, and none of the original seats remained inside. Instead it contained two mismatched bench seats, looking like they’d been pinched from other cars, one bench in the region of the driver’s seat and the other behind it. Some bundles and bags were strapped under the seats. The rest of the bus was empty, its floor rusty but more or less clean.

“Okay.” Adrian walked around to the door and climbed in too. Kiri leaped in after him, taking the steps in one bound.

“Just going to let my friends know I’ll be out tonight.” Standing beside the seat, Sophie tapped a text that she copied to Tabitha, Jacob, and Melissa:
Staying with some people from the party tonight. M, don’t expect me till morning. All is fine though. See you.

Tabitha and Jacob, of course, were in different cities and wouldn’t know if she slept in her dorm room or not, but it felt safer to let a few various people know where she was.

Not that she was telling them the
truth
about where she was.

Sophie watched the text whoosh away, then glanced around at the dark landscape. “How come you can text and call the regular world from here, but can’t see it? Or hear it or touch it or anything?”

“Certain frequencies of electricity or radio waves get through to here. Just another oddity.” He buttoned up his coat to the neck, then handed her another bundle of black cloth, which looked to be a wool blanket when she unfolded it. “You’ll want that,” he said. He sat on the driver’s seat, gathering up a riding whip from the floor. Behind the seat, Kiri turned around in a complete circle, then lay on the floor, chin on her front paws.

Sophie sat next to Adrian, the blanket bunched up on her lap.

“Buckle up.” He fastened his seatbelt, and nodded to hers.

She found the two ends of the lap belt, which was the kind you’d encounter in an old pickup truck, and clicked them together over her lap.

He hooked his arm into hers. “The seatbelts are old and don’t work terribly well,” he explained, “especially at the speed we’ll be going. So it’s really important you hold on and stay near me. Ready?”

Suddenly terrified, she only nodded.

Adrian snapped the whip out the empty windshield, saying the word “Home” as he did so, evidently a directive to the horses.

They launched off, shooting up into the sky like rockets, pulling the bus with them.

The force crushed her back against the seat and stole her breath away. This was what G-forces must feel like to jet pilots, she thought as the world blurred past in blue, black, and flashes of reflected starlight. The notion of looking for signs of human habitation became laughable. She could barely distinguish one entire forest from another at the rate the landmarks were flying past.

“So if I die here,” she said, raising her voice to counter the roar of the wind, “do I die in real life?”

“Unfortunately, yes.” He clutched her arm tighter against his side.

As the horses reached their cruising speed, or so she assumed, the force eased, and she was able to move a bit more freely. But the shapes of mountains ahead still approached at a reckless speed. “How fast are we going?”

“The speed of souls. From doing the time-and-distance maths, I’d say it’s a bit over three thousand kilometers an hour.”

That scared her into shutting her mouth and holding still.

The bus tipped up, up, up into shockingly cold air, and skimmed over the snowy caps of a mountain range before plunging down again. Her ears popped with the altitude change. Sophie realized the mountains had been the Cascades, which should have been at least an hour’s drive away by car, yet they’d zoomed over them within a few minutes of take-off.

She stared at him. “How can we possibly be going this fast? I mean, without the wind or the G-forces or whatever ripping us to pieces?”

“Not really sure.” He kept watching the horses, but tilted his head closer to hers as he spoke. “Our best guess is some kind of aura. Either from the horses or from us. Or a combination of both.”

“From you? Who
are
you guys?”

“We’re on your side,” Adrian said. “Try not to worry.”

“How long have you been doing this? Coming to this other world and flying around?”

“Couple of years.”

“And you’re sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Well. Mostly sure.”

She watched the continent flow past beneath her. The horses kept the bus just above the treetops, but not a single car headlight or street lamp sparkled anywhere around them. It really did seem to be a world free of humans.

She shivered in the cold air. The wind, though not as strong as it should have been, still hit hard and stripped away the summer warmth from above the land. No wonder Adrian had buttoned up his coat. She shook open the blanket and wrapped it around herself. The blanket’s wool felt scratchy against her hands and neck, but it took the chill off.

“So before you started hanging out with ghosts, where did you live?” she asked. “Australia?”

“Close.”

“New Zealand?”

He glanced halfway in her direction, not meeting her gaze, then looked forward again.

The insight sparked to life in her mind with a jolt. “Adrian from New Zealand,” she said. “
Kiwi Ade
?”

He held his spine stiff. “I
was
going to tell you.”

“Why didn’t you tell me right off the bat, the other day?” she said, infuriated.

“I didn’t want you to go looking me up, sending police to my house, anything like that.”

“I thought you said the police were no threat,” she accused. “You said you could hide out over here and they’d never find you.”

“I could, and they wouldn’t. But it’d cause a lot of worry for my dad, and I’d rather not have a police record even if no one does find me.”

“So you follow my blog. That’s why you decided to come steal me?”

“No. I—”

“All these months we were posting nice comments back and forth, you were planning on how you’d reel me in with your weird skills?” Why it angered her, she couldn’t say. It wasn’t like he could have explained to her about this other world and his weird skills. But the dishonesty and sneakiness still creeped her out and made her genuinely angry.

Adrian huffed out a short breath. “You make it sound like I found you on the Internet and got obsessed and decided to stalk you. That’s not how it is at all.”

“Then why don’t you tell me how it is?” She scooted farther from him, and in his agitation, he let her.

“Trust me and wait, all right?” Adrian said.

“Trust you? That’s—”

The bus jolted; possibly the horses were dodging a hill. Sophie’s seatbelt unsnapped itself, and she toppled over, catching a frightening glimpse of dark hills rolling past beneath the open door before Adrian yanked her back up. Even in her terror, she noticed he lifted her with seemingly no effort at all, just as Nikolaos had.

“For God’s sake, stay close.” He sounded scared, if gruff. He held her firmly, this time with his arm all the way around her. The steel grip of his muscles lightened to a warm human hold. The scent of his skin, swirling around her in the wind, somehow made her feel calmer. And, after all, he
had
just saved her.

She sucked in a deep breath, refastened her seatbelt, and leaned back on his shoulder.

“Is super-strength one of your abilities?” she asked, as her heart slowed down from its mad gallop.

“Yeah,” he answered, but didn’t elaborate.

Stars by the thousands gleamed in the sky. The bus pitched over the next range of hills, then leveled out again over the lowlands.

She stayed silent, still processing the fact that this was her online friend Kiwi Ade, now with her arm close around her, carrying her away in a flying bus drawn by spirit horses.

Adrian seemed to be thinking along the same lines. “You’re important to me,” he finally said, “for reasons far beyond your blog. And I know that sounds insane and stalkerish, but I promise you’ll understand eventually. If you choose to.”

“If I choose to?”

“It’s your next decision.”

One more mountain range passed beneath them, in a bumpy swath and a breath of pine-scented air. Then the land gave way to ocean, and the smell of saltwater drenched her nose. The bus ride smoothed out flat again. They shot forward through the star-strewn darkness like a comet. Adrian stayed silent, his arm around Sophie.

A glow beside the carriage caught her attention. She looked aside and blinked in wonder. A person flew beside them, like Superman, at the same speed as the horses. It was an old woman in a polka-dotted dress, with her sparse white hair in a braid down her back. And, like the horses, she glowed.

A human ghost. Up close and in person this time.

The old woman looked at them and smiled, then accelerated and zoomed ahead, her glow soon vanishing in the distance. Now that Sophie looked around, she saw other streaks from time to time, all headed the same way across the ocean.

“Souls,” she said.

Adrian nodded. “We’ll see more and more as we get closer.”

She was about to visit the afterlife. Suddenly it sounded ghastly instead of intriguing. She let her head sink back onto the stiff, cracked leather seat. She closed her eyes and tried merely to breathe.

Chapter Five

T
HE GLOW OF A SUNRISE
penetrated her eyelids. Sophie opened her eyes and looked around, disconcerted. She wondered if those minutes spent tucked under Adrian’s arm had been longer than she realized. However, at the speed they were traveling, they could have covered several time zones and swung around the Earth to meet the sun again. She squinted at the bright green and brown mass of land that swept forward from the misty ocean.

“Europe?” she asked. “Africa?”

“Really, I shouldn’t tell you.” Adrian sounded tired.

Annoyed, Sophie drew an inch away from him, though keeping close enough this time to stay safe.

The air warmed as the sun rose. Wherever they were going, it wasn’t the Arctic. Adrian pulled up on the reins, and their speed slackened. She caught glimpses of dark blue sea, white beaches on a curving shore, green hills, and expanses of beige earth.

“Hang on.” Adrian tightened his arm, gripping her close. The horses dived straight down in a vertical descent, pulling the bus with them. It was like being dropped in the world’s highest roller coaster, and Sophie’s heart rose to her throat. Watching the ground swoop up to meet them, she couldn’t help making a squeak of terror. He wouldn’t crash them straight into the ground, right? Would he?

At the last second, she made out the crooked black shape of a cave mouth in the rocks below. The horses and bus plunged through it. Darkness engulfed them.

With a thud and an echoing splash, and not nearly as much bone-breaking clatter as she expected, they landed. Everything went still. She sat up and tested her limbs, stretching each one. Nothing injured. Incredible.

While Adrian tucked away the whip, Sophie leaned out of the glassless windshield and looked around. They were in a deep cave, at the edge of an underground river. A blue piece of sky glimmered a hundred feet above them at the cave’s entrance. A stream of transparent humans—souls, like the old woman she’d seen—flowed steadily down into the cave, and flew along the river into a tunnel. Her jaw dropped.

Adrian nodded toward the doorway. “Hop out.”

Sophie dropped the blanket on the seat. The cave air was mildly cool but comfortable, with an occasional breath of warmth blowing down from above. She gripped the door frame and descended to the stone floor. Ghosts continued flying past, sending curious glances or smiles toward the two of them. It gave Sophie goosebumps.