Sovereign Hope (10 page)

“
You had a what?” she asked.

“
I see things sometimes. Things that aren’t really there. Do
you think it could have something to do with, well, with all this?”
There was no way I was saying
my
father
. Everything Agatha had said last
night was still difficult to believe, and besides, I would never
call the man who had been absent my whole life by that title. He
was a stranger named Elliot.

Agatha’s brow
was creased. “I don’t know. What do you mean, you see things? Like
ghosts?”

“
No, not ghosts,” I said. “More like things happening to
people that shouldn’t be. Like them being shot, or maybe part of
them looking like they shouldn’t. Sometimes they’re on
fire.”

From Agatha’s
expression, this was entirely unexpected. “Wow. That’s not
something I’ve ever heard of before.”

The blood drained from my face. Agatha had that high, odd
note in her voice that people usually got when I tried telling them
about my hallucinations. Maybe telling her
had
been a bad idea.

Agatha pulled
herself straight and gave me a firm smile. “It sounds fascinating,
though. Maybe it has something to do with the prophecy. I’d love to
talk to you about it. You say you had one last night? What did you
see?”

The memory of
the blindness sent a shiver over my body. “I didn’t see anything.”
I shot a glance over at Daniel. He was still, his back to us,
completely frozen. Listening. I turned back to Agatha. “I thought
I’d gone blind. I tried to make my way here to get my bag but I got
lost somehow. Daniel found me and took me back to my room.”

“
No, I didn’t.”

His voice behind me made me jump.
Sneaky son of a…
I spun to face him,
confused. “What do you mean, you didn’t?”

“
Nope,” he said. He wore an oversized, black long-sleeved
shirt, which, combined with his dark charcoal hair and pale skin,
made him look like a study in contrasts. All blacks and whites.
Except for his eyes, of course, which were a burning green fire,
fixed on mine. His body tensed and relaxed in waves as he stared me
down.

“
But you did,” I said. “You carried me back to my
bed.”

“
I’ve often been told girls dream of me stealing into their
rooms at night.” His lips curled in a haughty way, and he flashed
me a wink, ignoring the horrified expression on my face.

“
Daniel, I know it was you. I smelled…”

“
You smelled what?” His expression wavered, his immodesty gone
in a flash.

“
I smelled
you
.” I felt ridiculous as soon as I had said it. My cheeks and
neck flushed scarlet. Even the backs of my hands blossomed with a
blotchy, embarrassed rash.

Daniel let out
a hard, amused laugh. “You did, did you? And what do I smell
like?”

“
Like arrogance and self-adoration,” I snapped. “I can smell
it a mile off. Why bother saying you didn’t help me when it could
only have been you?”
And
why are you lying?

He gave a
casual shrug. “Because I really didn’t. Like I said, maybe you were
having some sort of blissed-out dream.”

“
No.” My voice hardened. “If anything it was a
nightmare.”

A curious,
flat look passed over his face. “Dreams. Nightmares. They’re two
sides of the same coin down here, Miss Hope. One can easily turn
into the other in the flash of an eye.”

His words caught me off guard. That was exactly how it had
felt last night—that I was trapped in some horrendous, never-ending
nightmare, which had changed the instant he picked me up off the
cold ground. I had felt warm and secure and
safe
. Right now I just felt rather
stupid.

“
Leave her be, Daniel,” Agatha cut in. “You said you see
things that aren’t really there, Farley?”

“
Yeah. Hallucinations.”

“
Well maybe you hallucinated that Daniel came and carried you
back to your room. Maybe it wasn’t a dream or reality. The human
mind is a powerful thing. It can trick you into believing almost
anything.”

Yeah
, I thought,
but it didn’t trick me into imagining the chair he left in my
room, or that twisted up piece of paper
.
“Yeah, you could be right,” I said, instead. Daniel clearly didn’t
want me thinking he’d helped me. Fine. He could have his own way,
if only he would stop giving me that lazy, churlish
look.

“
I still think she was fantasizing about me,” he said,
throwing himself down onto the computer chair nearby and pulling
the guitar up into his lap. He pinned me with his eyes, the great
sea-green depths of them, and plucked out a melody I faintly
recognized.

“
You’re impossible,” Agatha sighed. She continued speaking,
but I wasn’t listening. I was staring at Daniel the way he was
staring at me, daring me to be embarrassed or look away. I didn’t.
If he wanted to lie about what he’d done last night, that was his
business, but I wasn’t about to let him make me feel like a fool
for remembering it.

“
Farley? Come and tell me more about these hallucinations,”
Agatha said, drawing me to her desk by the hand. Daniel gave me a
little wave as I was pulled away, and I felt like dashing back over
and slapping him upside the head. There was no point, though. He
would only enjoy having provoked the reaction. Instead, I went and
sat with Agatha, feeling a little stupid as I explained the
intricacies of my hallucinations to her. I started with how and
when they had begun, and all that had happened in between. The
smell. The taste.

By the time I
was done, I was tired again, and I excused myself to head back to
my room. I clearly wasn’t recovered yet. Sleep was the only real
cure. My mood was still agitated, though, and on the way back I
paused, contemplating rushing back and grabbing hold of Daniel.
Dragging him back to the room and showing him the evidence of his
presence would wipe the smile off his face. A good thing I was able
to control that urge, because when I threw back the door to my room
nothing was out of place. The bed had been made, and not only that
but the chair and the paper were gone.

CHAPTER NINE

Look with Your Eyes,

and Not with Your hands

I knelt in a
snow-covered landscape, my feet bare and blue with the cold. I felt
it within the very depths of my soul, lacing its fingers through
mine, beckoning me to lie down and sleep. Just for a moment.

Emaciated
trees, tall against the black expanse of sky, hid willowy shadows.
They watched me, waiting, poised for the right moment to show
themselves. Daniel was there at the top of a bluff, looking down at
me. Blood poured from his hands in a macabre waterfall, and there
was a broken look on his face as he screamed something to me across
the vast space. I couldn’t hear him, though; the frozen wind ripped
his words away and tossed them up as an offering to the barren sky.
He gave up after a while and stared down to watch as the blood ran
thick through his fingers.

The cold
whispered its teasing susurrus into my ears, its pleading too
tantalizing to resist for long. I gave in and lay down on the
glacial cushion of snow, staring up at the sky above, and Daniel
picked up yelling again. I knew he could see them—the shadows. They
drew long and tall from the tree line, creeping forward like
skeletal wraiths, their fingers lengthening under the tainted light
of the malevolent moon.

I was frozen
to the ground, the snow entombing me in its icy embrace. It was
crimson now, and I could smell the metallic tang of blood. There
was sound, too. I barely noticed it at first—a low hissing, growing
in depth and pitch until it rose into a sonorous roar. The beating
of my heart slowed in my ears until there was barely the echo of it
to keep me conscious, and then…

Silence.

Like cotton
wool in my ears. A silence so profound, it spoke of eternity and of
being alone. Above, the stars pulsed in the sky like the distant
lights of a city, only to be interrupted by the flight of a
solitary bird flying with haste across the breach. And then, his
voice. It was just one word, but the sound of it was like falling
into a chasm of misery and pain and I knew I would never hit the
bottom. Just keep falling and falling, with that word echoing in my
ears:

“
Run!”

My hands shook
as I pulled myself up in bed. My hair wouldn’t stay tucked behind
my ears, and I gave up even trying after three failed attempts. I
needed to breathe. I blew out a long, steady breath while I tried
to relax my body.

The cold had
been so vivid, the fear in Daniel’s face so real. I shuddered and
pushed it out of my head. It was only a bad dream. Surely a bad
dream or two was to be expected given what was happening in my life
right now? I heaved myself out of bed and looked at my watch on the
nightstand where I had left it. It was past midday.

I quickly
pulled a brush through my hair and got dressed, swapping clammy
nightclothes for my favorite green shirt and a pair of black jeans
from my bag. Peering out into the corridor, I was only able to make
out a couple of feet illuminated by the bedroom light. In a few
turns I would be back at the hangar, but fear still pulsed through
me as I took my first tentative step.

As I did, my foot hit something solid, and my heart leapt
into staccato overdrive. The bulky Maglite Daniel had carried the
day I arrived rocked silently on its side a few feet away.
Huh,
I breathed,
here lies Farley Hope. Died of cardiac arrest,
aged eighteen.

I scooped up
the flashlight and turned it on, my confidence mounting as I made
my way back. It really wasn’t so scary when you had some light and
didn’t think you’d gone blind. The hangar was only a single turn
away when I noticed the crack of bright light lancing out from
underneath one of the doors. Aldan’s room.

My pace slowed
to a complete stop outside the door. Listening hard for sounds
within, I held my breath and closed my eyes to concentrate.
Nothing.

Curiosity was
the only logical thing that could have spurred me to push against
the door, half wanting to stay and half wanting to run away. I
quelled my rising nerves and stepped closer so I could peek into
the room. When I saw inside, I relaxed for the first time in
days.

Agatha had
been so certain of my safety, and now, looking down upon the
unconscious man lying in the bed, I understood why. Aldan was
still, his eyes closed, but he wasn’t sleeping. He was
comatose.

The old man
must have been at least fifty. A thick shock of unruly hair, so
grey it was almost white, lay about his head on the pillow. He
would have fit your average hospital patient stereotype except for
the Styx t-shirt he wore. His closed eyes gave him a peaceful
air.

I hesitated before entering the room. Daniel’s voice played
out in my head:
Just don’t bother him,
okay. He’s sick, and he doesn’t need strangers harassing
him.
But how could you harass someone who
was unconscious? And, more than anything, who cared what Daniel
said? He was a jackass. It was going to take a while to get over
him trying to make me look like an idiot, and going into Aldan’s
room seemed like a good way to show him I didn’t give a damn about
what he said.

I went closer
to the bedside and looked down at Aldan, half expecting the old man
to sit bolt upright and start yelling. He didn’t. He looked so
serene. How could he be like the other guys, the ones that wanted
to kill me? He looked like a trimmed down version of Santa. And he
liked Styx, for crying out loud.

I was so
distracted by Aldan that it took a few moments to notice the
hundreds of books that lined the walls. The shelves ran from the
high ceiling, dusted with a cobweb here and there, down to the
floor. There was nothing else in the room save a small bedside
table, the lamp that lit the room, and a small leather chair on the
other side of the bed. A throw was neatly folded over the back of
it, suggesting someone spent a lot of time there.

I studied the
rows of books. I’d never had great luck not breaking things in
stores, and my instincts warned that this might be a good time to
look with my eyes and not with my hands. Most of the books had no
inscriptions on their worn leather spines. The few that did left me
curious. I walked the perimeter of the room, taking in the various
titles as I went.

Mastering
Eternal Physics.

The Unknowable
Trickery of the Mind.

Idiom.

Revolution of
the Human Condition.

None of the
authors’ names were familiar, and I’d certainly never heard any of
the titles before. When I’d circled the room, I returned to Aldan’s
bedside and examined his face again. The fine veins visible in his
eyelids expanded and contracted with the flow of his blood, and a
faint rhythm throbbed at his temple.

It was then that I noticed the ragged scar. It ran from the
corner of his jaw down his neck in a thick arc that terminated just
before his Adam’s apple.
Definitely a
contender as to why he’s in this condition
, I mused. But on closer inspection the puckered skin looked
to have been healed for a long time. A well-worn battle
scar.

Every part of me screamed that I shouldn’t, but something
irresistible pulled me forward towards the bed. I reached out to
touch the scar with my index finger. The skin looked shiny and
smooth, but how did it
feel
? My fingertip touched the slick
surface of the twisted flesh, felt warmth, and then…