The Spirit Keeper (24 page)

“Sarah,” he said, coaxing me from sleep with a soft brush of his fingers against my burning forehead.

At last I opened my eyes to find I wasn’t dreaming at all. Adrian was there, in my bedroom, kneeling at my bedside.

“Adrian,” I murmured. My voice was groggy and my body on fire. I offered him a weak smile, happy that he’d returned for what were surely my final moments.

He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and bent close. “She’s here. I brought her here just like I promised I would.”

He turned his head, and I tracked the movement with my eyes. Sure enough, there was Shyla, standing just inside the doorway with Meg and David flanking her on either side.

I took a deep breath, and my voice was just a soft wheeze when I spoke. “It’s too late.”

“Don’t say that!” he said, grabbing my hand. “It’s not too late.”

I licked my lips, painfully dry and cracked. My tongue was like a lead weight in my mouth, making it impossible to argue. When I swallowed, my throat felt lined with a million shards of glass. I looked longingly at the glass of water sitting on my nightstand, and immediately Adrian held it to my lips.

Shyla stepped to the foot of my bed and held her hands clasped in front of her. She wouldn’t meet my eyes, and there was something about her that seemed so small, vulnerable even, as I lay there watching her.

“Shyla,” I whispered. She looked up and came immediately to my side.

“I am so sorry,” she said as she knelt beside me. She clamped her hands around mine and pressed her forehead into the mattress, as though desperate for my forgiveness. She looked up at me then, with tears in her eyes, and every fear I’d ever felt because of her disappeared in an instant.

Before I could say anything, Shyla took a deep, shuddering breath. Her body convulsed, and her eyes rolled in the back of her head so that they looked like a pair of boiled eggs in her face. She yanked her hand free and stumbled back from the bed.

“Death has a strong hold on her already,” she said, “but the Spirit is stronger.”

Adrian had stayed close to my side, but now Shyla edged him out of the way. He hesitated only a moment to touch my cheek before moving to be next to David and Meg, who were each standing ram-rod straight, their eyes wide with fear and expectation.

“I am so very sorry. I never meant to hurt her,” Shyla said to them. Then she turned back to me. “Whatever happens now, I hope you can forgive me.”

Shyla closed her eyes and began murmuring in hushed, urgent tones. Seconds passed, but then a great gust of wind rushed in through the open window and encircled Shyla, lifting the hair from her face so that it waved in wispy tendrils around her head.

Her voice became louder and stronger, and I wondered abstractly if it was the wind giving Shyla strength, or the other way around.

The atmosphere changed abruptly until it seemed alive with an electric magic. The wind whipped around her and she opened her mouth to take a deep, seemingly endless, breath, sucking the air into her lungs until the room was left feeling curiously stagnant and thin.

Shyla closed her mouth then, pressing her lips firmly together, and leaned in close until her face hovered directly over mine. When our faces were no more than an inch apart, she closed her eyes and began to exhale in a slow steady stream.

At first I felt nothing more than her warm breath across my cheeks, and I didn’t understand the purpose of what she was doing. When Shyla had exhausted her breath, she stepped aside and turned to the others.

“I’ve done what was revealed to me by our Spirit Leader,” she said. “Now we wait.”

I looked at them all—David, Meg, Adrian, and Shyla—staring at me, and I wondered exactly
what
we were waiting for. Was something supposed to happen to indicate I’d been healed? If so, how long would it take? And what if it didn’t work? What if I couldn’t be healed at all?

But then I thought I felt a little stirring of something inside. A seed of warmth had taken root deep within the core of my body and begun to slowly spread. It was hotter even than my already burning skin. The feeling reached all the way down to my toes and circulated back to my chest, seizing the air from my lungs and leaving me gasping for even the tiniest of breaths. The heat shot to the tips of my fingers and radiated upward to my head until I swore my face was a glowing ember of fire.

I placed a tentative hand to my cheek. The heat was so intense it burned the tips of my fingers, leaving ugly, festering blisters in its wake. Shyla hadn’t healed me, after all. She’d come back to kill me. We’d been tricked!

“What did you do to me?” I screamed, my back arching against the mattress. “Make it stop! Make
her
stop!”

I tried to leap from my bed, but Adrian was faster. He pushed through the others and pinned my shoulders against the mattress so that I couldn’t move.

“Stay still!” he yelled. “Don’t fight it!”

“I trusted you!” I screamed at him, struggling to break free and refusing to go down without a fight. “I trusted you!”

The heat in my body was focused, raw and brutal in its intensity. The building pressure in my head was excruciating, and I could taste blood running down the back of my throat as the tiny vessels in my nose broke. I saw the horrified look on Adrian’s face, and he whipped around to yell over his shoulder, “Somebody, help me!”

I bucked against Adrian, even as David forced his weight against me, too. “Get off me! Let me go! You lied to me!”

But my struggling was useless. The more I fought, the harder they restrained me. I gave up within minutes, too exhausted to keep struggling. Instead, I searched out Meg and found her leaning against the door frame, her hand to her mouth and her face blanched with fear.

“Help me, Meg!” I cried, desperation thick in my voice. But Meg could only stare back, too stunned to answer.

I thrashed one last time against the combined weight of Adrian’s and David’s bodies and screamed as loudly as I’d ever screamed before. I imagined my insides vaporizing with the intense heat ripping its way through my body.

But just as the pain climaxed and I opened my mouth for one final shriek of terror before plunging into death, relief rushed through me—calm and cool and refreshing, as though the fire in my veins had been suddenly doused with icy water.

The cry stuck in my throat and I lay still, breathing heavily. I felt abruptly and inexplicably well, apart from the blood still trickling from my nose. It was as if I’d woken up from some horrible nightmare only to discover that I really
was
okay. 

“It’s over now,” Shyla said, breaking the silence. The only sound was the quiet shuffling of her feet against carpet as she left the room.

Adrian finally let go of me as David pressed a tissue against my nose. I glared at them both. “What the hell was that?” I said, my voice muffled as I tried to stop the bleeding. They looked at each other, too stunned to say anything.

“How do you feel?” Meg asked. Her entire body was trembling.

I let out my breath in a concentrated stream of air as I reached a shaking hand to my head. “The pain is gone,” I said, more than a little astonished.

Meg pressed the back of her hand to my cheeks and then to my forehead. “Her skin is cool,” she said, speaking to the others.

And then the realization of the healing seemed to hit Meg all at once. She collapsed at my side and buried her face into my neck. “Thank you! Thank you!” she cried. She kissed my cheeks and hands, pressing them against her face.

Adrian and David shook each other’s hands, and then David pulled Adrian into an awkward hug.

“I guess it took me almost dying to get the two of you to warm up to each other,” I said, smiling at the sight of them.

“Well, you know,” David said with a shrug.

I attempted to sit up, but my body failed me. I slumped against the bed, momentarily panicked that whatever Shyla had done hadn’t worked, after all.

“I can’t move,” I said.

“You’re just weak,” Meg said. “You’ve been stuck in this bed since Saturday, and it’s already Tuesday. I’ sure all you need is a shower and a bit of food in you.”

The mention of a shower made me suddenly hyper-aware of the fact that I hadn’t had one in days. Those things, while minor in comparison to almost dying, made me intensely self-conscious with Adrian in the room. I pulled Meg’s hand to get her to lean in close.

“I look and feel disgusting,” I whispered, covering my mouth so I wouldn’t blow Meg away with my foul breath. “Adrian must think I’m revolting.”

Meg laughed with the ease of her worry. She turned to the others. “If you don’t mind,” she said.

Adrian was reluctant to leave at first, and I shied away from him and pulled the sheet over my head. “I don’t want you to see me like this,” I said.

He only laughed and patted me on the head through the blanket.

David came by then and tugged at the sheet, and I peeked at him over the hem. “I thought I was going to go crazy,” he said. “I was so scared we were going to lose you. After your mom . . . I don’t know what I would have done.”

Compassion won out over embarrassment, and I pulled him to me in a fierce hug. “But I’m okay now,” I said. “I promise.”

He straightened and gave me a stoic nod before leaving.

When we were alone at last, Meg helped me sit up in bed, holding my arm to make sure I wasn’t going to black out. Only after I had promised her a dozen times that I truly and honestly felt fine did she leave my side to find me a fresh change of clothes.

“Wait right there,” she said then, hurrying from the room.

A moment later, I heard the rush of water in the bathroom and then the spray of the showerhead. Meg returned, wiping her wet hands against her legs. “A hot shower will make you feel much better.”

She slipped an arm around my waist and helped me to my feet. Then she led me down the hall to the bathroom, which had filled with an invigorating steam. “Can you manage?”

“I really am okay, Meg, despite how hideous I must look. Whatever Shyla did, it worked.”

The crease in her brow deepened momentarily, but then she let out her breath and nodded.

Since I had made the mistake of looking in the mirror once before, I avoided doing so again. Instead, I undressed quickly and stepped into the spray of hot water. The combination of the heat and steam caused me to go immediately lightheaded, so I sat down and let the water run over my head and down my back. I pulled my legs to my chest and rested my forehead against my knees. Only then did I allow myself to contemplate what had just happened.

The only word I could think of to describe any of it was “strange,” but that fell remarkably short of what it really was. I had just lived through one of the single-most traumatic events of my life, and I’d walked away with nothing more than a bloody nose to show for it. I splashed my face with water, scrubbing away the disgusting, crusty blood from my nostrils, and watched remnants of pink swirl down the drain.

None of it made any sense. I didn’t even know the appropriate response for this kind of thing or how to compartmentalize what had occurred.

There was a knock at the door, and Meg asked if everything was okay. I called out that I
really was fine
and that she should stop worrying already.

Physically I was well, or as well as I could be under the circumstances. But I also felt altered in a way I couldn’t quite explain or understand. Maybe what had happened had changed me in some permanent way. Probably I would never be the same person I had been when I woke up Saturday morning.

The water was getting cold, so I nudged the tap all the way to hot, hoping there was still enough to finish my shower. Once I had scrubbed my skin red and raw, I wrapped a towel around myself and meticulously brushed the fuzz from my teeth and tongue. I dressed quickly and fixed a band in my hair, grateful the extra length was gone. Finally, I had nothing left to do but face everyone.