The Eternal Tomb (22 page)

Still, Oliver did. But it was impossible. And so having Nathan around, though it was nice, also reminded Oliver of what could never be.

Hi Oliver,
said Jenette. She circled the room in a flurry. Wraiths were spirits tied to the world by their grief. Instead of flowing out of the world upon their death, they lingered because of sorrow and guilt, until they became trapped. Jenette had originally been hired to slay Oliver, but since then they'd become friends. The wraiths didn't want Oliver to fulfill his destiny of opening the Nexia gate, as it would destroy the loved ones they grieved for. They had helped Oliver and his friends on a number of occasions.

Any word?
Jenette asked.

Nothing,
said Oliver. That was his answer to most things these days.

Jenette floated over. Her wispy hand rubbed Oliver's shoulder.
I'm sorry.
Oliver could definitely hear the little note of hope in Jenette's voice. She tried to be supportive, but her crush on Oliver was no secret, not that she or Oliver ever mentioned it. They had even kissed once; well, Jenette had kissed Oliver on the cheek, back in the Space Needle. They didn't mention that, either.

How are you doing?
Oliver asked.

Jenette sighed. It sounded like wind whistling through a crack in a wall.
Okay, I guess.

Oliver was more careful with his next question.
How is she?

Not good,
said Jenette. She sniffled.
I saw her last week, and she was getting an MRI. The doctor said something about it spreading. …

Jenette's mother had been diagnosed with cancer. It was bad. She had been smoking for decades, so the cancer wasn't a huge shock but it was still terrible for Jenette, especially since there was nothing she could do. Jenette had died in a house fire over thirty years ago, when she was only eleven. She still looked about that age. Wraiths were able to make themselves apparent to the living, but in the past when Jenette had tried to visit her mother, it had only terrified her.

I'm sorry
, said Oliver.

I know
, said Jenette.
Thanks
.

Time is short
, Nathan reminded them.

Okay,
said Oliver.
Let's get this over with
.

Nathan sat beside him. His warmth seeped into Oliver's shoulder. Together, they reached down and cupped their hands over the earring, Oliver's on top of Nathan's. Jenette put one hand atop theirs, and then twisted her body and extended her other hand behind her. It seemed to encounter a ripple, as if the air were liquid.

The ripple parted to reveal a hole in reality. Through it poured the haze-gray light of the Shoals, a beach on the edge of the world. Oliver could hear the waves lapping against the sand and rocks.

There was a hissing cry, and a black, bony hand draped in ragged cloth shot through the hole. It grabbed Jenette by her wrist, which was still fleshy and nearly human looking compared to this ancient wraith.

Jenette gasped at the strength of the hold, but then nodded.
Ready.

Oliver closed his eyes and began the Skrit incantation for the
Sonarias
enchantment. “
Contatennn
…” The spell was somewhat like a homing pigeon, or a search command. They were sending a message out along the force beams, designed to attract itself to Emalie's presence, which was why each time they performed the spell, they had to use one of Oliver's precious mementoes, the trinkets and notes he'd collected during their time together.

This enchantment was actually part Orani in origin; Oliver had found it in Emalie's notebooks. She would have been much better at it, but using the power of the wraiths, they did okay. The wraiths acted as a kind of amplifier to get the message out across time and space.

“
Trasmethhhh
…” Oliver felt warmth prickling up through his arms. Orange sparks began to fly out from their hands. The connection had been made, and now it was time to send the message itself. Oliver aimed his mind, and thought the words, slowly and carefully …
Hope you are well. … Be in touch. …

It had been agonizing trying to decide exactly what to say. Oliver's first instinct had been to say “come back,” but that seemed too … desperate or something. And he'd obviously thought to say “miss you,” but that was, well, just something he didn't want to admit out loud. Because, was she missing him? Probably, but … how could he know for sure? And there were other words too, that he wanted to admit even less, about his feelings. …

There was a whooshing of energy, light coursing from their hands, through Jenette, and then a blinding cry from a hundred wraiths, like icicles of sound. Then silence. Dark.

Done
, said Jenette. The wraith released her wrist. The hole into the Shoals closed. Oliver sighed. He always hoped for some kind of instantaneous reply, some kind of sign that somewhere out there in the universe, Emalie could hear him, but instead there was only the silence of the basement, the sound of rain outside.

Nathan patted his shoulder.
It's all we can do
, he said.

I know
.

Something knocked distantly on the roof. Three raps of a fist: Dean's warning that he'd spotted an occupied creature approaching.

Go
, said Oliver to Nathan and Jenette, and as Nathan nodded and stepped away, Oliver frowned at the loss of that warmth.

We'll let you know
, said Jenette,
if we hear anything
.

Okay
.

Nathan and Jenette joined hands and winked out of sight, back to the safety of the gray beach.

Oliver's head fell. His shoulders slumped. Outside, fresh sheets of rain began to pebble the basement window.
Miss you
, he thought, and wondered if he should have just said that in the message. He pulled the box toward him, dropping his hand inside. He felt a fuzzy moment of weightlessness as his hand scraped through the objects. Hair bands, notes she'd left under their desk at school …

He slammed the box, knocking it across the room, its contents scattering. This sucked! Why did he even come here? It was pointless. Emalie was gone, and it wasn't like she'd taken a trip to Hawaii or something. She'd left this timespace altogether! There was no way he was going to get in touch with her. And she was never coming back.

She will
, he thought, trying to convince himself.
You have to have hope
. Like he'd had when she left, on that September evening …

But as Oliver stood and began picking up his Emalie collection, he considered that that evening was a long time ago, now, and his feeling of hope had long since dimmed.

There were only a few items left to put back in the box. They would have only a few more tries at the Sonarias enchantment. Once a month they'd performed it, when the moon was new, from September to November. But though Emalie had left in late September, they hadn't been trying for just for two months. …

It had been over two years.

Chapter 3

Cohesion

“ANYTHING NEW ON THE TRIAD?”
Dean asked as they leapt from one rooftop to the next, making their way to school.

“No,” Oliver muttered, and he felt another fierce surge of frustration grip him. There was a satellite dish on the roof they'd just landed on and Oliver kicked it, shattering it into multiple parts.

Ugh! It was always the same! During their first year together, there had been so much promise: discovering truths, solving mysteries, getting closer and closer to changing Oliver's destiny. Everything had been scary and overwhelming and yet, looking back, it had all been an incredible adventure, as exciting as it was ominous, and then … nothing. Two years of nothing! It was as if all that momentum had just faded away. Sometimes it seemed hard to believe that it had all really even happened.

They leapt again, this time pausing on a flat apartment roof. The rain was pelting now. Below, a bus roared by. They vaulted down onto it and sat on the roof.

“I'm beginning to wonder,” said Oliver, “if the Triad even exists, or what.”

On the night that Emalie left, they had received the oracle Selene's final message, hidden within a firefly. Oliver still remembered it:
There exist three elements known as the Triad of Finity. They are most cleverly hidden. …

“You will know it when it appears before you,” said Dean, remembering the end of Selene's message. “I still don't get what that means.”

Oliver just shrugged. “If something was going to appear before me, you'd think it would have happened by now.” He huffed to himself.

“What?”

Oliver shook his head. “Why hasn't she gotten in touch?” He meant Emalie.

“I don't know,” said Dean. “Maybe she's trying, but it's hard. Or someone's stopping her.”

“Or …” Oliver didn't want to finish the thought.

“Yeah,” said Dean, thinking it too.

They'd already discussed it a number of times: How there had been that photo in Selene's bedroom at the Asylum Colony that showed Selene and Emalie's mom standing together. How on the back it said:
Selene and Phoebe, Guardians of the Muse, March 14, 1868
. How back when Oliver was first researching the sunlight slayings, the vampire Codex had told him that the entire town of Arcana had been destroyed in 1868 due to a mass hysteria that was supposedly caused by the Orani.

And so, what if Emalie had gone to Arcana and died, or been killed or whatever, before she'd even had a chance to get in touch with them? There was no evidence that this had happened, but also no proof that it hadn't.

It drove Oliver crazy, lots of thoughts tumbling through his brain at once: her kissing him, how he should have kissed her back, should have grabbed her and held on, told her how he felt, even that he loved—but he'd just stood there and let her go.
Like a little lamb
, Bane would have said.

“I wish we could go after her,” said Dean, as he had many times before.

“Tsss,” Oliver hissed in sullen agreement. Over the last two years, they'd had plenty of time to research the possibilities for getting to Arcana themselves. Traveling through space-time was no easy thing. Traditionally, only certain higher demons could do it, and they always had to secure permission from a Time Merchynt who existed across four-dimensional space. Emalie and her family had used just such a being, Chronius, who granted access to time portals in the form of his fingernail.

Last January, already tired of waiting around, Oliver and Dean had climbed down into the Yomi and asked Chronius if he could send them back to Arcana, but he merely dismissed them with a wave of his smoky, time-blurred hand.

“Look at you,” he had whispered. “A vampire and a zombie. You have no form of payment that I could possibly want.” Emalie and the Orani had apparently been able to give Chronius information from the minds of his competitors in the Yomi. Emalie had also been known to pay Merchynts with future days of human happiness. Neither Dean nor Oliver had those.

“We're never going to find her,” Oliver muttered.

They sat silently in the rain.

“Nnnn,” Dean moaned quietly a moment later. Oliver turned to see him wincing and scratching brusquely at his forearm, his long yellow fingernails leaving black streaks across his blotched purple-and-yellow skin.

“Bad?” Oliver asked.

“Yeah,” said Dean. He scratched harder, and now a patch of skin tore free. Black fluid dripped down his wet arm. Oliver's nose twitched at a tangy smell of decay, like spoiled milk mixed with rancid meat; he was getting better at not showing his disgust at this, but it wasn't easy.

“Antibiotics aren't helping?”

Dean just shook his head. “The only thing that helps is the rain. The cold, too. And, well, you know …”

Oliver nodded grimly. Over the last two years, Dean's zombie condition had been getting worse: the necrosis of his skin, the festering bacteria that no amount of antibiotics or toxins could totally cure. Rain eased the near-constant itching he felt, but the moisture led to mold problems too severe to be treated even with the pure quartz sand baths his mom Tammy prepared for him.

The fact was that even though zombies were more long-lived than vampires, eventually they tended to rot down to the bare bones (they usually kept their eyeballs and brains, though, along with various kinds of bone fungi, which made for an appearance that even a vampire could find unsettling). It was the natural way of their existence. But it was happening to Dean faster than most, because there was only one thing that somewhat staved off the effects of time, and it was the one thing that Dean swore not to eat.

Human brains. But much like human blood for a vampire, once a zombie had a taste for brains, there was no turning back. The desire became an unquenchable thirst that overtook any other kind of rational thought. The only way to keep from becoming a moaning brute like the other zombies was to resist. Which meant living in near constant rot and pain. Both options sucked.

“I'm not going to be one of them,” said Dean quietly. This was something he repeated often.

“I know,” said Oliver, but he had to wonder: How long could Dean hold out? He was only a zombie after all. His destiny was inevitable, just like Oliver's destiny to get a demon.

On nights like this one, Oliver couldn't help entertaining a certain thought: Maybe opening the Gate and ending all this was actually the best way things could turn out, at least for the two of them. Dean's suffering would be over. And Oliver would be a fully demonized vampire, so his guilt and worry would be gone. There'd be no more yearning for his soul, no more emptiness or confusion, and there'd be no more missing Emalie. …

They reached school. Rodrigo let them in the back door. Oliver waited as Dean ducked downstairs to a bathroom, where he changed into a dry school uniform that he kept stashed in the ceiling panels: white shirt, black pants and a tie, just like Oliver's.