Token of Darkness (4 page)

“And if she’s not in there?”

“Check missing persons. There are lots of places online that have officially listed missing people, especially if she’s a kid. Or if you’re really brave, you—I mean, your
character
, of course—can go to the police station and say something like ‘I saw this girl the other day, and she looked a lot like someone I think I saw on a missing-person flyer in Boston,’ and see if they recognize the description.”

“And if that doesn’t work?”

“Well … psychics, I guess, would be your next stop,” Brent said. “A real psychic would be able to tell if your character is psychic himself, or if your ‘ghost’ is really a ghost. She could be something else.”

“Like what?”

“Anything. It’s your supposed book,” Brent said. “Maybe she’s an alien, existing on a slightly different plane of existence from us, and the passage to Earth was so traumatic she lost her memory of it and thinks she’s human since she’s surrounded by them. Or maybe she’s a fallen angel, and all her memories of Heaven were taken as punishment for her transgressions. Or maybe she’s actually some kind of demonic figure, sent to torment your protagonist, and she’s lying about not remembering who she is.”

“Um … I think she’s just a regular ghost,” Cooper said. “Though those are interesting ideas,” he added, mostly to be polite.

“You’ve pretty much admitted you don’t know a thing about ghosts, so how can you be sure she’s just the ‘regular’ kind?” Brent challenged. “She doesn’t sound like a regular
kind to me, not if your character can see her and talk to her and she isn’t angry or anything. Maybe you should stick to writing football stories.”

Cooper decided not to be offended, if only because Brent had said the words with a quirked smile, the jibe meant in good humor.

“There’s nothing in here about ghosts like that?” Cooper asked, waving to all the books around him.

“Not really,” Brent said. “Most ghosts tend to be location-specific. They’re rarely seen. Even ghosts who haunt people tend not to be very communicative outside of a séance or something. You’re sure your character hasn’t desecrated any graves lately? Maybe an Indian burial ground or an ancient pagan temple?”

“Pretty sure,” Cooper answered, smiling despite himself. It was the longest conversation he had had with anyone but Samantha since the accident, and even if it wasn’t remotely helpful, it felt good to joke around with another
living
human being.

B
rent regarded the guy next to him in a vaguely clinical fashion. He had recognized Cooper Blake pretty quickly as one of the receivers from the public high’s football team. They had actually met once, at a New Year’s Eve party last winter, but Brent wasn’t surprised that Cooper didn’t remember. He had been introduced to Cooper, but they hadn’t talked long.

He had been surprised to be invited to the party in the first place; he and Delilah had been involved since that September, but she had shown absolutely no interest in including him in the rest of her social life before then. He hadn’t been thrilled by the event, and she hadn’t invited him to any more.

He would have been happy to see Delilah’s school friends in small groups; he just didn’t deal well with
crowds, which pulsed with the scurry of other people’s thoughts, most of them unfocused and indistinct like a constant background whine that only Brent could hear. There had also been a synergy of thought among the team that was deeply unsettling for an outsider, and left him feeling distinctly
outside
no matter how welcoming the group tried to be.

Cooper, on the other hand, was hard to peg. The thoughts Brent could make out were almost hyper-focused, with a kind of white noise behind them. It wasn’t something Brent had heard the likes of before, which was why he had gladly engaged in the conversation about ghosts. He was curious, and the noise made by Cooper’s brain wasn’t offensive. Even the zinging background thoughts that shot past Cooper’s more conscious ones were so quickly suppressed that they sounded like the rustling of wind chimes.

One thing Brent knew for sure was that Cooper
was
seeing this ghost he described. Whether that meant he was psychic or hallucinating, Brent didn’t know. When Brent had volunteered at the local hospital for a couple weeks over the summer, he had briefly been in a room with a hallucinating schizophrenic, and it had been spine-crawlingly horrible. The things that poor man saw, the voices he heard, were so angry. They befouled his mind and the space around him, so much so that Brent had left the room gagging, his head pounding.

That was when Brent decided to finish his mandatory
for-graduation community service at the library instead. It was quiet here, especially in the summertime. People were so trained to keep their voices down in the presence of the towering stacks of books that they even instinctively kept their thoughts small, so they were like little fluttering moths in the night.

“You okay?”

It took Brent a moment to realize that Cooper had said something.

“Oh yeah, sorry, man,” Brent replied. “Um … oh. You haven’t said when this guy started seeing his ghost.”

“Does it matter?” Cooper asked.

To Brent, the static at the back of Cooper’s mind seemed to get louder, as did all those rapid background thoughts.

“Sure it matters,” Brent said, drawing back a little from his examination of Cooper’s thoughts and trying to pay attention to the words he was saying, too. It was difficult, because thoughts weren’t really comprised of any one sense, which influenced the way Brent experienced them; he tended to use words like
hear
, but he could just as well say he saw thoughts, or felt them—or maybe it was a combination. “If he hasn’t messed up a grave or something else to get a particular ghost attached to him, then he’s either seen ghosts all his life, or something triggered it.”

Cooper shook his head. “It’s a recent thing.”

“How recent?”

“Couple months.”

More static.

“When, specifically, did it start? I mean, what precipitated it?”

Even louder. Brent started wondering if he should back down, but he wanted to know, and that meant pushing a little harder and dealing with the headache he would have later.

“He saw her for the first time after a nightmare,” Cooper answered hesitantly.

“About what?”

The static rose to a roar and those gentle wind chimes became a screeching, slamming cacophony of noise, flashing lights, and panic emanating from inside Cooper’s suddenly tensed body. Overwhelmed by the impact, Brent bit his lip so hard he tasted blood as he tried to tune it out.

He reached to put a hand on Cooper’s shoulder, trying to calm him. “I’m sorry, man,” he said. “I didn’t mean to—”

Wham
.

Brent couldn’t begin to describe what happened next. He had just touched Cooper’s arm, when Cooper looked up, his hazel eyes suddenly an eerie silver color. Without moving, without doing a damn thing, it felt as if Cooper shoved him backward, so hard he was flying through the air.

Brent tried to curl, to brace himself for the fall, for the crash of his body impacting the shelves behind him, but it didn’t come.

Instead, he found himself sitting exactly where he had
been, only coughing so hard he felt like his lungs had forgotten how to inhale. His whole body was shaking as if he was coming out of deep hypothermia, and Cooper was drawing back, looking horrified, his face gray-pale with sweat beading on his brow.

“I’m sorry,” Cooper whispered. Brent could still hear those jangling noises and lights in Cooper’s brain, but was too shaken to try to tune them out or to focus on them.

They were no longer alone. A girl knelt beside Brent in scene-style clothing—mismatched and torn, but artfully so. Even if she had come to complain about the commotion they were making, he was grateful for her presence. She looked quizzically at Cooper, who just shook his head, still backing away as the girl knelt and tilted her head as she examined Brent.

Around them, the shadows seemed to pulse. Cooper’s gaze shot from one dark blur to the next, and the girl shuddered when they drew near enough to touch her. They growled and snapped at Brent.

“I’m sorry,” Cooper said again. “Samantha, we should go.”

“Cooper!” the girl shouted, sounding cross and frightened. Brent was still too dazed from whatever had happened to pick up any thoughts from her.

“Wait!” Brent choked out, but Cooper just turned and dashed the other way, his limp almost hidden in his haste as he shouldered through the double doors to the staircase.

There was no use going after him, even if Brent could
have moved at that moment. Cooper didn’t want to be stopped. That was okay; Brent didn’t think he was ready to deal with the ex-football star again yet. He couldn’t even stand.

He drew in deep, gasping breaths. He had no idea what had just happened, or if it had been Cooper’s fault or his own. He was a telepath, but unlike many of the people he had spent the last year studying with, he wasn’t good at recognizing or controlling other kinds of power. He had no idea what those shadow-things had been, except that they clearly weren’t good.

“Can you help me up?” he asked the girl.

She jumped, and then tentatively offered her hand, with an expression of pure shock. “Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he answered, “I think so.”

He reached up, only to have her whole form dissolve when he tried to grasp her hand. Cooper’s ghost? But did that mean Brent had really seen her, or had she just been a lingering image from Cooper’s mind? At least, once she was gone, the shadows started to sink back into the floor and walls around him.

Brent’s bones felt heavy and his muscles weak. His skin was too tight, and the air he drew into his lungs hurt. He tried to pull himself up by gripping one of the library shelves, but couldn’t lift his own weight.

As he waited for his muscles to stop twitching and for his body to feel less alien, he attempted to put his thoughts in order.

Cooper could see something, which he thought was a ghost—probably the girl Brent had briefly seen, after … whatever Cooper had done to him. What Brent was sure of was that Cooper’s actions had been accidental. Cooper had seemed horrified. Brent knew what it was like to have an unusual power, but not be able to control it.

But that didn’t make it
his
job to help other lost souls. He wasn’t responsible for this random guy he had just met in a library. Not at all. Cooper had his football friends. More importantly, he had Delilah. This could be
her
problem.

As soon as Brent could stand, he was going to go home and forget about Cooper Blake.

Hey, can you hear me?

“Huh?” He looked around, but as best as he could tell, the girl’s voice was coming from the picture on one of the books.

You saw me for a second, didn’t you? Can you
hear
me? Please?

“I can hear you,” he answered. His voice was raspy and speaking made him start coughing.

Yes!
The jubilant cry made him wince and rub his temple.

“Not so loud,” he managed to say.

Sorry
, she said in pretty much the same tone.
But the only person I’ve been able to talk to in months is Cooper, and he’s a nice guy but he’s not very bright and sometimes he’s kind of boring, and I just don’t know how I …

As she spoke, the excitement in her voice never
dimmed, but she seemed to be getting farther and farther away. She hadn’t lowered her “voice” but he strained to hear her, until in the middle of a sentence she just faded completely.

“Are you still there?” he asked.

No response, except for chills up his arms.

“Hello?”

Okay, the afternoon had officially turned into something out of a creepy horror movie. With a monumental effort, Brent forced himself to his feet. He was out of this scene. No more shouting hello at disembodied voices in empty rooms for him, thank you very much. He didn’t like to meddle with dark powers or witchcraft any more than necessary. He had only been researching ghosts as follow-up to a conversation with his mentor; he was perfectly happy to go through his life without ever seeing another one.

Brent was a little unsteady, but he managed to get to the stairs, and down them. The librarian gave him a worried look, and he heard her think,
Bright boy, but so quiet
, before he managed to block out anything else. Where did he park his car? He probably shouldn’t be driving in this condition, should he?

Maybe he should sit down somewhere … maybe get something to eat. His stomach felt all tossed up, but it was the kind of unsettled that solid food sometimes helped.

Enough ghost stories for him today.

He found his way to a little nearby bakery, but by the
time he had paid for his cup of cocoa and bagel his vision was swimming. He was having trouble keeping his own thoughts focused, which meant he couldn’t keep anyone
else’s
out, either. He retreated to the courtyard nestled between the library’s old and new buildings, where a bunch of Eagle Scouts had built a beautiful garden almost no one else knew about.