Token of Darkness (5 page)

He sat there, nursing the cocoa and centering himself until it didn’t sound like people were screaming all around him.

He remembered what it had been like when he first started hearing things other people couldn’t. He remembered how horrid he had felt, when he kept accidentally stumbling across people’s secrets—their wants, their fears. Their lies. Maybe it should have made him think less of other people. Instead, he had lost his faith in himself when he couldn’t stop listening. It was like peering in windows at night, and seeing people’s most private moments.

Even as a kid, Brent had had a knack for predicting what people were thinking or feeling. It wasn’t until he was fifteen that what he had always assumed was intuition had manifested as outright telepathy, and it wasn’t too long afterward that he had ended up in the hospital, completely overwhelmed. He always felt crowded, even when there were only two or three people in a room, because they were often so conflicted that their thoughts might include five or six voices each.

He had met Delilah about a year ago, after missing a
good chunk of what should have been his sophomore year of high school. She had been the first person who had understood. It had been months before he got past his blind dependence and gratitude enough to question the fact that she seemed to have absolutely no interest in spending any time with him in
public
.

Oh, God, was he
really
going to subject Cooper to Delilah’s brand of help? He remembered all too well coming out of complete, terrified, helpless isolation and ending up in her hands. Yes, she had introduced him to Ryan le Coire, but she had also paraded him around like her newest project. She had put him back in the hospital for a while last spring after one of her magic experiments went disastrously wrong. He still didn’t know what she had been trying to do, since she had never attempted to ask his permission or explain. They just broke up, and had rarely seen each other since.

Brent wasn’t going to push Cooper to confide how or when he started seeing his ghost, and he
definitely
wasn’t going to put a hand on his shoulder—or anywhere near him if he could avoid it—in the future. But he could at least keep him out of Delilah’s grasp by introducing him directly to someone who would help. Ryan le Coire. While Ryan seemed at first glance like a normal guy, someone who could be a grad student, the twenty-six-year-old was actually a sorcerer. And, as Ryan put it, he was the heir to the most powerful human magics in the Western Hemisphere. Ryan had been able to teach Brent how to
tune out some of the thoughts he heard, so he’d be less overwhelmed. Brent knew that Ryan didn’t believe in ghosts, but he certainly would know something useful.

There was too much pain radiating from Cooper’s body and mind, not to mention the darkness swirling around both him and his ghost, for Brent to just step back and pretend it was none of his business.

C
ooper was still shaking when he reached his father’s shop. What had he done? He certainly wasn’t going back to school. He could barely walk, barely breathe.

“He saw me! And heard me!”

Cooper nearly screamed when Samantha suddenly reappeared. He jammed his thumb on the shop door and cussed, shaking his hand, as Samantha continued her joyous exultation.

“The guy from the library
saw
me,” she said. Cooper tried to look mellow as he crossed the shop and headed toward the back room. The girl working at the counter gave him a quizzical look, but let him by. “It was only for a moment, and he was pretty out of it, but he saw me, and then he could hear me.”

“‘Pretty out of it,’” Cooper grumbled, looking around
for his father. “Because of what
I
did to him. I don’t even
know
what happened, but it was … I mean, what
was
that?”

“I don’t know, but it was cool, and I think you should experiment with doing it again,” Samantha answered as they both stepped into the back room.

“No!” Cooper nearly shouted, shocked that she would even suggest such a thing.

The back door opened and his father stepped inside from the employee parking lot where they kept the Dumpsters. He stopped, consulted his watch, and then gave Cooper a pointed look after confirming it was still during school hours.

“I’m not feeling well,” Cooper mumbled, hoping the extent to which he was pale and trembling made the excuse believable.

His father still looked skeptical, but just said, “If you’re sick, stay in the employee area and away from the food. If you start feeling better, you can come out front and give me a hand at the register.”

Cooper was grateful that his father wasn’t the type to probe further—yet. He would expect answers later, but would give Cooper some time to calm down first.

Cooper’s mother had tried to convince him to see a shrink about a month ago when it became obvious that he wasn’t sleeping, and had no interest in getting back in touch with his friends. They had ended up shouting, all of them. Cooper had never raised his voice to his parents before, and he couldn’t remember the last time they had yelled.

They hadn’t discussed the subject again since, but he remembered his father’s view of the situation:
Sometimes we need time to heal in our own way, without doctors telling us what we should be feeling
.

“Are you okay?” Samantha finally asked as Cooper collapsed against a wall in the employees’ lounge and slid down to sit on the floor.

“Just
fine.”
Sarcasm wasn’t his natural tone, but sometimes Samantha brought it out of him. “What did I do back there? It was like—”

It was if a part of him over which he had no control had shoved Brent away—except that Brent’s
body
had never moved, only collapsed in on itself. Afterward, Cooper felt like he was looking at a corpse.

Cooper squeezed his eyes shut, trying to block out the memory of the first time that had happened, in the hospital. He had woken up in the hospital only a few minutes before, and there had been so many doctors and nurses and people asking questions and poking and prodding him. He had just wanted them all to go
away—

He bowed his head and drew a deep breath.

“Look, Brent was okay,” Samantha said awkwardly. “I stayed until he stood up and walked out. He’s all right. It’s no big deal.”

“No big deal,” Cooper repeated. “Samantha, I see ghosts—”

“Just one.”

“Fine, one ghost,” he said, continuing more firmly, “and now I have another freakish thing going on.”

“Technically, you’ve had that as long as I’ve known you,” Samantha joked. “You’ve just kind of avoided people so you haven’t—I’m not helping, am I?”

“Not so much,” he said, and yet her awkward attempt almost brought a smile to his face.

“If you’re so worried, talk to him,” Samantha said. “You could look for him at the library again, or ask the librarian if she knows his last name so you can look up his phone number. Or just ask around at Q-tech on Monday.”

Cooper shook his head. “I doubt he wants to talk to me. He probably doesn’t want anything to do with me.”

“You’re such a
coward
, Cooper Blake,” Samantha snapped. “You wouldn’t talk to that girl earlier when it was perfectly obvious she was trying to leave you an opportunity, no questions asked. And now you meet someone who might be able to help you, might even
want
to help you, and you’re running away as fast as you can. What about your
friends?
You don’t call anyone, and barely talk to people in the hall, even when I hear them call your name. I know you don’t talk to your parents, even when you all sit around the table together. I’m your only friend at the moment and I swear the only reason
I
talk to you is because no one else can hear me.”

Cooper blinked, startled by the tirade.

“I wouldn’t even know where to start with Delilah and the others,” he said.

“It’s not like they don’t know … what happened,” she said, sounding as unwilling as he was to remember the
details out loud. “They’re probably just giving you space. I’m sure they’re worried—”

“They’re worried, sure,” Cooper interrupted. “They would be even more worried if they knew what was
actually
going on, and then instead of dealing with my issues, I would be dealing with
their
issues with my issues. I don’t want to have to take care of other people, not until I’m okay taking care of myself.”

“Coward,” Samantha said again with a flounce of her currently neon orange, yellow and pink hair.

“I’m not a coward!” Cooper protested, before realizing he was speaking loudly, and clamping his mouth shut.

He stood up. The shaking had mostly subsided.

“Come on, just talk to Brent,” Samantha said. “If not to help you, then for
me
. Unless you want to be stuck with me the rest of your natural life?”

“You’re charming, but I could live without you.”

“So go talk to him. He saw me for a moment, and he talked back to me. He’ll believe you. It doesn’t just have to be you and me trying to figure this out. Because, I hate to break it to you, but you’re not very good at the whole magic and mythology stuff.”

“I’m a football player,” he grumbled.

“No, you’re an ex-football player, the same way you’re probably an ex-friend to at least a few people.”

“The doctors told me I wouldn’t be able to play, anyway,” Cooper said—before opening the door to face his father up front.

“Yeah, they told you that you couldn’t play football. But
not that you couldn’t have a life.” She shook her head and sighed. “You work, then. I’ll look for him. Do reconnaissance. I’ll try to get him to hear me.”

Cooper could only stare as she walked off. Maybe she was right. Samantha’s support was all that had gotten him through the first weeks of physical therapy, when everything hurt all the time. It had been early August before he had been able to walk across a room on his own. Samantha had been the one who kept him going and convinced him to keep trying, back when he was sure he would be a painful wreck the rest of his life.

He owed it to her to do whatever he could to help her, too.

First, though, he waited for his father to finish the order he was working on and gesture to Cooper to follow him a few paces from the register.

“Cooper …” He had a sinking feeling in his stomach as his father took a deep, thoughtful breath, and finally just asked, “What happened?”

Cooper hated lying to his parents, but contrary to what Brent thought, he had gotten pretty good at it. The trick was to keep it as close to the truth as possible, and to include something the other person wanted to hear.

“I was at the library, and ran into a friend,” he said, meaning Brent, a slight exaggeration but one that would make his father happy. “We got to talking about what happened this summer, and it brought a lot of stuff back. I couldn’t handle going back to school right away.”

He knew his father assumed Cooper meant the accident, though he was actually referring to Samantha. But all in all, his words were pretty much honest.

His father nodded. “Okay, then. Thanks for telling me.” He turned back to the coffee machine, as one of their regulars came in. By the time his father had prepared her order, he had come to a decision. “Cooper, get an apron on and watch the register for me. I’ll let the school know I forgot to call them before taking you out for a doctor’s appointment this afternoon.”

Cooper breathed a sigh of relief as he did as instructed.

Before leaving the front room, however, his father added, “I’m covering for you this
once
, by the way, because you’re seventeen, you’ve always been a responsible young man, and I believe you’re doing what you need to do. But if I start hearing from the school that you’re skipping classes or not getting your work done on a regular basis, we’re going to have a longer talk. Understand?”

Cooper nodded. “I understand.”

If today was any indication of how the school year was going to go, then he suspected the next “talk” was going to come sooner rather than later—and it was going to be the least of his problems.