Twisted Heart (21 page)

‘Holly didn’t want to leave right away,’ Channing explained, sticking close to her side. ‘She knew we’d take good care of her.’

‘And you did.’ Holly smiled and planted a kiss on his cheek. She stood with an arm around his waist as Ava played the next shot.

The same old warning siren blared inside my brain: Grace-and-Ezra, Grace-and-Ezra! Holly’s jacket and T-shirt had been torn and there was a wall of silence. ‘Did you speak with Aaron?’

‘Not yet.’ She brushed the question aside, smiled up at Channing, who looped his arm around her shoulder.

Click. Ava’s cue ball hit another red, which missed the pocket by a mile.

‘Maybe you should,’ I suggested.

Holly shrugged. ‘Why? No one’s expecting to hear from me for a couple of days. Meanwhile, chill.’

‘Holly!’ I couldn’t stop myself. I grabbed her by the hand and tugged her to the far side of the hearth. ‘What are you doing?’

‘What’s it look like? I’m playing pool.’ Irritated, she shook herself free.

‘No!’ I grabbed her a second time. ‘This isn’t what’s meant to happen. They were supposed to drive you home, inform your parents, get you checked out at the hospital or something!’

‘They didn’t. They took care of me here and I’m fine,’ she retorted.

‘And what’s this thing with Channing?’ I hissed. He was watching us from a distance, probably trying to lip-read our conversation. Dressed in jeans and a white T, with his close-cropped black hair and amazingly fine North African features, I had to admit that he did fit the babe-magnet picture that Blake and the others had painted.

‘Isn’t he totally cool?’ Holly breathed. A coy smile played on her lips. ‘Tania, did you ever see anyone so beautiful?’

‘La-la, not interested,’ I snapped. ‘Listen. Tell me how come Channing let you try out the zip-wire? I thought he was there to take care of everyone in the Hawk band.’

A frown flitted across Holly’s face and for the first time I saw her falter.

Click, click. Channing leaned over the table and pocketed a yellow, hardly taking his eyes off us.

‘I don’t remember exactly,’ she murmured. ‘I guess I thought it would be fun.’

‘Yeah, fun to almost get yourself killed. Think harder. Concentrate. Was Channing involved?’

The frown turned into a bright, superficial smile. ‘Let’s ask him. Hey, Channing, Tania wants to know what happened with the zip-wire!’

He leaned his cue against the green baize table and came across, stepping right over the bear’s stuffed head.

It morphs. It rises to its feet with a terrific snarl, lips drawn back and fangs exposed. It swipes out with curved claws. I duck sideways. It falls on to all fours, fixes me with its fire-glint eyes
.

‘Sure, I’m happy to share with you,’ Channing explained, calm as anything. ‘Tania, you know better than anyone that no one tells Holly what to do. And she has more energy than anyone I know. So she was up yesterday morning before any of the band, taking pictures on her cell phone camera, getting the idea into her head that if she used the zip-wire to reach the island, she could get some super-cool shots.’

‘Not knowing that no one used the wire for years.’ Kaylee had come across and joined in the conversation uninvited. ‘It was rusted to hell, totally unsafe.’

‘Trust me to jump in with my two big feet!’ Holly laughed and gave a goofy shrug.

I was short of breath, feeling the pressure and not able to ask her in front of the others if she knew how come her clothes were torn.

‘Anyhow, Tania, look at you,’ Kaylee mocked. ‘You look like you got run over by a truck.’

It was true – I was covered from head to toe in soot, my clothes were wrecked, my arms and hands scratched.

‘She fell down a sink hole,’ Channing told her.

I shot him a glance. How did he know? Had Ziegler told him? ‘Come home with me,’ I appealed to Holly.

She sidled closer to Channing, who locked his arm around her waist. ‘Not yet,’ she murmured. ‘You go if you want to, Tania, but I’m staying right here!’

What happened to surge power girl? Where was the strong, independent Holly I knew and loved?

‘She’s changed,’ I told Aaron when we met on Main Street for coffee. Surrounded by everyday sounds – the clatter of coffee cups, the hiss of the espresso machine, I’d had time to fill him in on the latest developments and asked Jude and Grace to join us. ‘The same way you did, Grace, when … you know.’

‘When Zoran’s guys did their brainwashing thing on you.’ Jude stepped in, knowing how painful it was for her to talk about it. ‘They dragged your head into a different space. Nobody could reach you.’

‘I guess,’ she murmured. She still carried a heavy load of guilt towards Jude because of what she’d put him through.

He held her hand across the table.

‘It was so not your fault,’ I insisted. ‘You have to believe it’s all-out war – good versus bad. Evil for its own sake. You and Holly are just collateral damage.’

Grace smiled bravely. ‘So what do we do about Holly? We’re not the cavalry. We can’t just ride in there and rescue her.’

‘And in my opinion she’s not totally fallen for it – not yet.’ Trying to put an optimistic gloss on things, I told them that Holly had pulled through the dazed and confused stage and was halfway back to normal. It was just that I didn’t trust Channing, and I especially didn’t trust Antony Amos and the whole ethos at New Dawn. ‘I had a dream,’ I explained. ‘You know – a vision. My dark angel appeared.’

‘As Amos?’ Grace asked. ‘But I thought you’d decided against that idea.’

‘I was wrong,’ I said, pushing away my half-full coffee cup. ‘I was so dumb I can’t tell you. And he’s clever, twisted, really hard to read. I was thinking maybe Ziegler, maybe Jarrold, but definitely not Amos.’

‘Let me get this straight.’ Aaron hadn’t spoken for a while, but he’d been thinking plenty. ‘We’re into Black Rock territory. Tania, you’re psychic so you see this stuff before any of the rest of us?’

‘And the dark angels know this,’ I agreed. ‘It means I’m especially dangerous to them.’

‘So why don’t they target you instead of Grace or Holly?’

‘Good question.’ I leaned across the table and spoke to Aaron in a low, urgent voice. ‘What you need to understand is something I learned a long time ago from my good angel – that these love-thieves plan to steal as many souls as possible before I can identify them. They trap someone who’s deep in love – like Grace with Jude, or Holly with you – and they spin a kind of web around them, mess with their minds, make them fall in love with exactly the wrong person – who of course turns out to be a dark angel in disguise.’

‘Then what?’ Involuntarily Aaron shuddered and his voice grew quiet.

‘So they totally brainwash their victims. It’s like an hallucination – you get to believe you can fly, change shape, kick planets around the heavens. You name it, they trick you into thinking you can do it.’

I gasped as suddenly I thought of Holly and the wire. ‘That’s it! That’s what Channing did to Holly. He made her think she could do anything, even fly! She lost her mind, tried it but fell through the ice. Luckily she made it to the island. Afterwards Channing faked the whole thing with the zip-wire.’

‘But then what?’ Aaron said again.

‘They make them fall in love with the dark side; they steal their identity.’

‘It’s like living a nightmare but ten times worse,’ Grace confirmed as her eyelids flickered shut. She took a deep breath, remembering her own experience. ‘For a start, you can’t wake up to reality. And you’ll do anything they ask you to. You go through a ceremony, like a kind of marriage. What’s happening is that you’re saying you belong to them and there’s no going back. They’ve stolen your soul.’

‘And?’ Aaron’s voice was full of fear for Holly.

‘Then they’re through with you,’ I explained. ‘Once your soul is on the dark side, they don’t need your body any more.’

‘In other words, you die,’ Grace added quietly. ‘You wander off into the mountains, you freeze to death. Or you jump off a cliff, fall hundreds of metres. You disappear.’

This is where Aaron comes into sharp focus.

Normally he’s the quiet guy in the background, the perfect foil to Holly’s big personality, but not any more. Now he’s Action Man.

He swung out through the doors of the diner dead set on driving straight out to New Dawn, raiding the place and coming back with Holly.

I ran after him, telling him to wait. ‘It’s not that simple. You can talk to her all you want but she won’t listen to a word you say.’

‘I don’t care, I’m getting her out of there.’ Aaron sprinted to the parking lot, jumped in his car and started the engine.

‘They won’t let you in,’ I warned.

‘Show me the prison walls,’ Aaron muttered, his jaw set in determined lines. ‘Anyone can get in or out if they really want.’

‘And if they do let you see her, what are you going to do? Are you going to kidnap her? Believe me – now that they’ve got Holly and they’re inside her head, they won’t just let her go.’

Revving the engine, he got ready to back out. ‘I’ll figure that out when I get there.’

‘But this is too dangerous.’ Opening the passenger door, I slid in beside him. ‘Aaron, you’ve no idea what these guys are capable of!’

‘Yeah, I do, and I’m still going to do it. Are you with me or against me?’

‘With you.’ His choice was no choice. ‘Go ahead, drive.’

Tyres squealed at we left the parking space and headed for the exit. We shot down Main Street, past Grace’s house next to the bank, then the hairdresser’s and the pharmacy, heading on to the highway that took us to New Dawn. The windows were open, a wind blasted through the car as we reached fifty then sixty in a forty mph zone.

‘I still think we shouldn’t be doing this,’ I told him. ‘We should be taking our time, working out a plan.

Aaron was manic. He didn’t take his eyes off the road ahead and his foot stayed hard down on the accelerator. ‘There’s one thing you don’t seem to realize,’ he muttered, his arms braced, hands gripping the steering wheel.

‘Slow down, please wait.’ I heard the faint sound of a siren coming up from behind, growing louder.

‘I’d do anything for Holly,’ he muttered. ‘I love her.’

It broke my heart to hear him. ‘Enough to die for her?’ He’d be no match for Amos’s army of dark angels. Aaron going into New Dawn would be like a Christian being thrown to the lions.

‘If I have to,’ he said grimly.

We were doing eighty when the speed cops stopped us. They overtook us, lights flashing. They made Aaron pull over on to the hard shoulder.

‘Get out of the car.’ Cop number one leaned in through the window. The smell of burned rubber drifted in.

Cop number two ordered both of us into the back of their car. It didn’t look like it at the time but they’d just done Aaron the biggest favour of his whole life.

‘So they busted him for exceeding the limit. They took him to the sheriff’s office and called his parents,’ I told Orlando on Skype. It was past noon and I was due to drive into Denver to see Mom.

‘We’re talking about Aaron, right?’ he said doubtfully. ‘Laid-back, fade-into-the-background Aaron?’

‘Yeah. He was scared for Holly,’ I explained. But this didn’t feel like the time to go into too many details with Orlando, who I was missing like crazy. Now that things were getting tough with Holly and the dark angels, I wanted him with me, holding me without speaking, just touching and kissing and making me feel safe. ’How many hours before I finally get to see you?’

‘In the flesh instead of digital? Twenty-four. Twenty-six max. We plan to set off early tomorrow, but it depends on the traffic.’

‘I’m counting the minutes.’

‘Wait, Tania. Show me your arms.’ Orlando was peering into the camera with a puzzled frown as reluctantly I rolled back my sleeves to reveal the cuts and bruises from my fall down the sink hole. ‘What happened to you?’

Shoot! I closed my eyes and grimaced. ‘I didn’t want to talk about it until tomorrow.’

‘Talk about what.’ His hair flopped forward, his eyes narrowed.

‘I went on a wilderness walk.’ I confessed my guilty secret.

‘You volunteered at New Dawn?’ He looked totally shocked then fierce. I saw the stubborn shutter come down.

‘Yeah. But only for a couple of days.’ Make it light, make it seem like nothing.

He stayed angry. ‘But we agreed you wouldn’t.’

‘No, it was you who didn’t want me to. I actually said I hadn’t made up my mind.’

‘Tania, are you crazy?’ Orlando leaned back in his chair. ‘How could you do that?’

‘Don’t be mad. Try to see it my way. I have a choice – confront this dark angel thing head-on or keep on running. Well, it turns out I’m tired of running.’

‘And you couldn’t wait for me?’ he demanded, coming close to the camera again. I caught a glimpse of a willowy blonde figure in the doorway behind him, heard some giggling then a deeper voice that must have been Ryan’s. Orlando got up, strode across the room and slammed the door. He came back to the desk. ‘All along I said you should stay away from Antony Amos,’ he reminded me. ‘But no – you said he was an OK guy. There was nothing weird. So you go out there and get involved with a bunch of juvies doing some stupid wilderness therapy and guess what – you come back covered in bruises.’

‘Stop,’ I told him. ‘It was worth it. I found out what I needed to know.’

‘Which is?’ Behind him, the door opened and Natalie reappeared, hands on skinny hips. She demanded to know why the hell Orlando had slammed the door in her face.

‘I’ll explain later,’ I promised. ‘Wait until tomorrow.’

‘I can’t believe you did this!’ he sighed. I knew from his expression how hurt he was.

‘Hi, Tania!’ Natalie said, putting her chin on Orlando’s shoulder. She waved at the camera and gave a lip-gloss smile.

I left a message with Grace that no way should she and Jude let Aaron out of their sight while I drove into Denver to visit Mom. ‘Keep him away from New Dawn,’ I texted. ‘Meet me at six thirty. We’ll make a plan.’

When I arrived at the hospital, Mom wasn’t in her room. ‘She’s with her physical therapist,’ a nurse explained. ‘She’ll be through in five minutes.’