Token of Darkness (2 page)

Necromantic golem
. Maybe he should look into that. How, he wasn’t at all sure. He didn’t know if Samantha’s idea was
possible, but then again, he didn’t used to believe in ghosts. He knew a few people at school who claimed to be witches, but most of them seemed to be more about earthy religion or pissing off their parents, and he was pretty sure they would respond negatively if he asked them if they had any recommendations for how to deal with the undead.

He probably shouldn’t start at the school library, either. That seemed like a good way to get pulled into the counselor’s office for an emergency meeting.

“Cooper, you’re late,” his English teacher announced as he walked through the door, and slipped to the back of the classroom.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, and reached in his bag for his copy of
The Color Purple
, only to realize he had left it at home that morning. His teacher shook her head with a sigh before turning back to discussing the book.

Cooper’s mind wandered. Necromantic golem, indeed. Maybe he could start with myths?

Why was he focused on this, of all things? He wished he could help Samantha, but the bottom line was, she was dead. He had watched enough horror flicks to know that if you wanted to help a ghost, you did it by telling them to go into the light, or helping them let go, or whatever. You didn’t do it by making them new bodies; that was the way to B movies and red corn syrup.

Maybe he should talk to a priest? He didn’t know any, but his mother went to the Unitarian Universalist church. Or were ghosts more of a Catholic thing?

He jumped violently when someone’s cell phone rang across the room, a screaming jangle of noise. His chair skittered backward and crashed to the floor, turning all eyes his way.

“Sorry,” he said again. He pulled his chair upright and sat back down, trying to hide the fact that he was shaking and sweating, and his heart was racing so loudly he could barely hear the people around him murmuring comments. Across the room, he saw John mouth the words, “Are you okay?”

He nodded, then hunched down lower in his seat and picked up a pen to pretend to take notes.

“Okay, everyone, quiet down,” the teacher said. “Put your books away. We’re having a quiz.”

The whispering turned to grumbled protests. Cooper just shrugged and put away the notebook he hadn’t yet opened. He hadn’t read the book past the first couple of pages, but that was fine. Samantha reappeared after the quizzes were handed out, and reported on the variety of responses from around the room, noting which were most common and so were more likely to be right.

It wasn’t a good way to start the school year, but if he was going to be haunted, he might as well get something worthwhile out of it.

“I think I’ve read this book,” Samantha announced as the quizzes were collected. The idea seemed to excite her. “No, I’m almost
sure
I’ve read this book! I remember it! I mean, I remember what it’s
about
. But I don’t actually remember
reading
it.”

She sounded deflated. Cooper fought the urge to groan.

The problem with helping Samantha resolve whatever issues were tying her to this world was that she had no memory of
who
she was, just random details that may or may not have been from her previous existence. She didn’t know why she was relegated to this half-life, without the ability to touch or affect anything in the world. She remembered snow despite not having seen it since her death, and sometimes remembered books or movies. She didn’t have a heavy Boston accent, so probably wasn’t from the city, but she could easily be from any other area of Massachusetts. She was also obviously well-versed in movies, especially horror movies. She knew her own name in the same way; she was certain she was Samantha, but couldn’t recall anyone but Cooper who had ever addressed her that way.

She and Cooper had sat at the computer for hours at a time this summer, reading all the obituaries for the area in an attempt to find out who Samantha might be. There had been deaths in the accident that occurred immediately before Cooper had met Samantha, but none that felt right to her. And not just because they were men.

They didn’t even know if her physical description would mean anything. Her basic coloring, height and age usually remained more or less constant, but everything else seemed to change from one manifestation to the next. Samantha said she had no conscious control over it.

After spending most of the month of August searching, they had kind of given up as Cooper had prepared to
return to school. So far as Samantha was concerned, she had been born that July, at the moment when Cooper had woken in the hospital.

    He knelt down to slowly put his notebook away at the end of class, using it as an excuse to avoid his classmates as they filed out, and so was surprised when he looked up to find a 227-pound linebacker hovering above him. He slammed his head against the desk leg as he tried to stand up.

“Damn it, John!” he shouted, rubbing the spot he had just banged. “You scared the hell out of me.”

“I had to sneak up,” John answered. “You run faster than I do.”

Cooper fumbled for words while fighting the urge to do just that—bolt. “Look, man, I’m sorry—”

“No big,” John interrupted. Then he winced. “I mean, of course it’s—” He broke off, and shook his head.

Cooper shut his eyes for a moment and drew a breath, trying to figure out something to say that would help them to get past this. Neither of them wanted to acknowledge that the “big deal” they were both avoiding talking about had to do with Cooper spending most of the summer in the hospital following an eight-car pileup on the highway the first weekend after school let out in June. It had to do with the fact that, in the blink of an eye and the flash of brake lights, he had gone from being John’s best friend to someone even
Cooper
barely recognized.

When he opened his eyes, though, John wasn’t alone. The black mist from Cooper’s nightmares seemed to have
risen from the floor. It rippled and crawled up John’s body, twisting around his limbs like something alive. John didn’t seem to see the shadows, but his skin rose in gooseflesh, and he crossed his arms as if he was cold.

Cooper looked to Samantha, hoping for some kind of reassurance—even hearing that he was hallucinating, and the dark creatures weren’t real would be comforting at this point—but she had backed into a corner and was kicking at them. They didn’t seem to be able to hold on to her, but they stalked around her, snarling.

John took a step back from Cooper, averting his gaze with an awkward expression. “Anyway,” he said with a shiver that dislodged two of the creatures that had been hunched on his shoulders. “I just wanted to see how you were doing. If you’re not up to hanging out, that’s … that’s cool, I guess.”

“John—”

John nodded as if in response to something else, then hoisted his backpack more solidly on his shoulder and backed hurriedly out the door, nearly knocking down a freshman trying to get in for the next class.

The shadows receded into the corners of the room, fading into something harmless. Cooper grasped the desk until his heart stopped pounding, and then he looked up at Samantha, whose form seemed tattered, the colors from her hair to her paisley stockings all a little less bright.

“I thought they were gone,” she whispered. “I haven’t seen them since the hospital.”

Cooper just stared at her, not knowing how to respond. He had not known that she had ever seen the shadows before, but had thought they were part of his private fears. He had once had a nightmare about a living, creeping, hungry darkness, like a swarm of locusts made of smoke and misery. When he woke, Samantha had been beside him.

C
ooper made it through his next couple of classes using a combination of willpower and despair. He didn’t know what else to do. As soon as lunch came around, though, he rushed from the school building. As a senior with no history of discipline or academic problems, he had offcampus privileges, so no one looked twice as he walked toward town.

Samantha chattered nervously as Cooper wandered, finally deciding he should force himself to eat something. He hadn’t had breakfast, and it would be a long time before dinner. Besides, it gave him something to do other than search the corners for those
things
.

“I would kill for a BLT,” Samantha declared as she sat on the table at the deli while Cooper ate. She now seemed to be dressed in faded, torn jeans with dribbles and splashes
of paint in a vast variety of colors, a baggy T-shirt sporting the image of a pink elephant, and a large gray sweatshirt with the zipper torn out and the sleeves cut off just above the elbows. Her earlier fears seemed forgotten. “Seriously. If I could taste anything … if I could
eat
that would be the first thing I would get.”

Cooper’s nerves had settled enough that he was finally able to focus on her and respond. “How do you know you’re not a vegetarian?” he asked, speaking quietly so his voice wouldn’t carry. Thankfully, the sandwich shop was so busy, he figured people wouldn’t notice that a few stray words belonged to a one-sided conversation.

“I can remember what bacon tastes like, and it is
goooooood,”
Samantha replied. “I’m no veggie. Have you given any more thought to what we talked about this morning?”

The burst of laughter behind him was normal enough not to even draw his attention, but the way it abruptly cut off did. It seemed like an hour passed in complete silence before a familiar voice said softly, “Hi, Coop.”

He tensed, his spine seeming to fuse into a lead bar, and it took a monumental effort to turn his head to face the head of the Lenmark cheerleading squad.

“Delilah, hi.”

Cooper tried to make the words seem welcoming and warm, but they came out flat. He and Delilah had never been very close, but she was part of what had been Cooper’s crowd. They all usually ate at the pizza place
down the street, so Cooper hadn’t expected to see them here. He hadn’t considered Delilah, whose social circle wasn’t limited to the athletics department. In addition to cheering, he knew she built sets for the drama department and spent much of her free time in the photography lab’s darkroom.

He stood up and flinched as his hip gave a sharp twinge, a pain that shot from his toes up to his shoulder. The injury from the accident didn’t bother him too much anymore, but sometimes it stiffened when he sat.

For now, he stood before Delilah and felt every inch of his diminished self. She looked, as always, like she had walked right out of a magazine, in designer clothes that suited her strong and lean figure, honed by time in the gym and on the field.

With Delilah were two other girls; both looked familiar, but Cooper knew neither of their names.

“We thought we would get some lunch,” Delilah said, which Cooper thought was fairly obvious. She leaned against the back of a chair as her friends went up to the counter to order food, and sighed before saying, “I’ve missed you, Coop. I called a couple times, but your cell always went straight to voice mail.”

Since Cooper hadn’t ever charged the phone his mother had bought to replace the one destroyed in the accident, he imagined he had more than a few messages.

“Who’s she?” Samantha asked, moving to the middle of the table to avoid being jostled. Cooper still didn’t
understand why Samantha couldn’t walk through people or other living creatures. He had seen some people shiver, or brush the place where their skin touched Samantha, but they almost never even glanced in her direction.

Delilah, however, looked up as if she heard something. Her gaze went right through Samantha, so it was obvious she couldn’t see the ghost, but nevertheless Samantha gave an excited hop and said, “Hello?”

Delilah looked like she was about to say something else, but at that moment one of her friends returned and asked, “Who’s this?”

“Oh.” Delilah glanced quickly at where Samantha stood, then shook her head and answered. “Cooper Blake. He’s from the team. Hey, get me a basil-mozzarella sandwich with bacon, then let’s eat outside.”

“It’s all wet—”

“It’s sunny,” Delilah interrupted, “and I’m sure it’s dry enough. Cooper will join us if he has the time.” She reached out to touch his shoulder gently before adding, “Take care, Coop.” She tossed her hair and walked directly outside without waiting for another word.

Well, that was weird. Cooper and Delilah hadn’t exactly been best friends, but in his experience girls were usually more aggressive than guys when it came to asking about things no one really needed to talk about, like the accident or how he was feeling since. Of course, Delilah wasn’t like most girls.

He tried to just be grateful she had let him off the hook.
She had left him with an invitation to join her, or not, and absolutely no pressure either way.

“Who was that?” Samantha asked. “Girlfriend?”

Cooper shook his head and looked through the window to where Delilah and her friends were settling on benches with their backs to him. Delilah’s serial first-dates never included athletes.

“Did she hear me?” Samantha asked. “She did, didn’t she?”