Unnatural Occurrence (An Anna Morgan Novella (Part 1)) (6 page)

*~*

My body was my own once again. I still felt the anger and anguish that Julie had felt coursing through me. And then I felt something that had been coiled inside of me unfurl. It’d been there all along, waiting for the right moment, waiting until I had no choice. I felt the spine of the book beneath my fingers, I felt the hands and nails as they scratched me and hit me. I felt Amy’s too-strong-to-be-normal body up against my own. And I felt my own power strike out. A second later and none of that mattered.

I never knew I had this weapon inside of me.

It was new to me.

Lethal
.
Wrong
.
Mine
.

I felt bliss. I felt empowered. I felt
like I was floating so high that I’d never come down and I never wanted to. If I hadn’t, though, if through my euphoria, something—or someone—hadn’t reached out to me and snapped me out of it, I would have killed three girls that night. As it is, I put two in the hospital and Amy in the ICU. I didn’t particularly care that night though. No, I was too high on my newfound power to care. I don’t even remember what else happened that night, except for bits and pieces.

I know Detective
Williams was there, that he ordered me to take a drug test and a Breathalyzer. I remember noticing a dark-skinned guy around my age pulling me from the bodies that littered the ground in the little hidden room. He argued with Detective Williams as well. I don’t know about what. I remember the darkness seeming a little
less
than it had before. Cops and paramedics flooded the house. I remember Christopher helping me get into his car early the next morning when we were all finally released from the sorority house.

And then
nothing.

T
hirty hours later I woke up screaming. 

Julie Reese’s funeral was an extravagant
affair. Hundreds of people littered the graveyard to pay their respects and to say goodbye to her. She was no longer just a wraith. She was a sister. A daughter. A friend. And she was gone, finally and truly gone.

“It’s over now,” Christopher whispered next to me. I gazed up at him
through my dark sunglasses and nodded. He was looking grave, wearing a black suit and tie. It was over for now. For Julie it was. For me, it had just begun. People began filing forward to drop a flower onto Julie’s casket.

“Let’s go,” I
offered softly. Christopher put a hand on the small of my back and led me back to his car. We drove in silence for several minutes, both of us lost in our own thoughts. 

“When we get back to the condo, I’ll get my stuff together,” I said as I gazed out the car window as we drove through town. It had only been a few days since the night of the party, but I thought it was time for me to move on. I didn’t want to impose on Christopher an
ymore and I wasn’t sure who I was anymore either. What I was capable of. I scared myself.

“I don’t want you to go, Anna.” I turned away from the window to look over at him. He was staring ahead at the road, but I could tell he
knew I was watching him. I sighed. He was a good man. The kind of man who wanted to help everyone. I didn’t think he’d be able to help me, though.

I thought over the past few days. The days after the sorority house incident.

It turns out that Julie’s death
had
been an accident after all. Amy had found a book. An old, creepy book that had detailed a secret passage and room in her sorority house. Amy and the other girls were excited to find the old stone room in the house. What better way to scare new sorority sister hopefuls during initiation than to make them think they were one of those secret society cults, practicing black magic and performing human sacrifices?

Unfortunately for them, they had stumbled upon the real deal. The book was filled with curses, magics, and rituals.
They had only meant to scare Julie. To make her think they were a cult-like sisterhood. When Julie fell and hit her head, the girls all panicked. Amy told them they had to get rid of the body. They couldn’t tell anyone or they would all end up in jail. No one would believe it was an accident. They all told the police officers when they gave their statements that they remembered feeling groggy and confused after the accident, when they were trying to figure out what to do. The blood had already fed the altar, the stone bench. The darkness had begun working on their auras that very night. They dumped her body in an abandoned apartment building in a rundown part of the city. They knew the place because they had considered making the building a part of the sorority’s initiation process. The police found her body still there, wrapped in garbage bags and stuffed into a rusted out bath tub on the third floor.

I went
to the hospital to see Amy three days after the party. She was still in a coma, but as I stood there looking down at her body in the stark hospital bed, I could see it, what I couldn’t see that night during the party. Amy’s aura was dimmer than it should have been, but then again, I had almost sucked her dry, so there was a reason it was so dim. But that wasn’t what I immediately noticed. Her aura was different from most. It was more. Special. Witch. The realization didn’t shock me. Not even a little bit. I should have realized it before then, that the book was even more compelling, more powerful with her. It called to her. I doubted she even knew what she was. So few people really understood their own power. If she had, she never would have messed with the book. It almost swallowed her whole, made her its vessel. I watched her aura strengthen as I stood there and knew she’d get better. She was strong. Her aura was stronger. She would be awake in a few days. I left.

I went straight the police station when I finally left the hospital.
I told Detective Williams about the book. He had it in an evidence locker somewhere. I suggested he be careful with it, not allow it to be handled much, and if at all possible let someone who understood ancient powers and magics deal with it. I told him about the room under the sorority house. How I was sure that worse had happened in that house at some point in time. Blood sacrifices. Magic. Death. He listened to me as I told him everything. He never interrupted me or laughed. He never shook my hand or said thank you either, but I didn’t expect any of that. He did tell me that if I was staying in his city that he was going to be keeping an eye on me. That he knew that I was somehow responsible for those girls ending up in the hospital, even though he couldn’t prove it. I left the police station with the intention of never seeing Detective Williams again. I planned on leaving right after Julie’s funeral.

“Anna?” Christopher’s voice pulled me out of my thoughts.

“I almost killed three people, Professor.” The movement was barely there, but I saw him flinch just the smallest bit away from my words.

“You didn’t mean to, you weren’t even aware you could,” he stated matter-of-factly. That was true enough, but it didn’t make me any less
of a danger to everyone around me. If I didn’t know what I was capable of, how could I control it? How could I make sure I wouldn’t hurt him somehow?

“I’m dangerous,” I said bleakly. “I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if I hurt more people…if I hurt
you
,” I answered softly.

“You won’t.” I turned to him once again and watched him through the
obscurity of my sunglasses. He looked tired. He stayed up for almost two days straight watching over me as I slept. His eyes met mine briefly. “I know you won’t.” He sounded so very sure. He stated a fact that he felt to be true. I wasn’t so sure.

“It felt…good.” I swallowed down the shame of what I murmured as a confession. Christopher glanced over at me quickly, his eyes going wide for just a second.

“When you…sucked the life out of those girls?” he asked gently. I closed my eyes and let my head fall back on the seat. That’s exactly what I did. Somehow I fed on them, on their energy. I consumed it, drawing it into myself until I was bloated with their life forces that I had to stagger away from the sorority house like a falling down drunk.

“Yes. I felt powerful. Invincible. High. I never wanted it to end.” A tear tripped over my lowered lashes and trailed down my cheek.
“I wouldn’t have stopped if someone hadn’t pulled me away from them.”

“But you did. That’s all that matters right now.”

“I don’t know.”

“Listen, Anna. You asked me that first day in the condo about my past…about what there was between Detective Williams and myself.”

“I did,” I answered. He took a long breath before speaking.

“
About five years ago, there was a woman who said she could see the dead. Said they were everywhere and they wouldn’t leave her alone. No one believed her…no one. Not even me.” I sat up and watched him as he spoke. His hands clenched around the steering wheel tightly as he told me the story.

“One day she told the cops that she had information on a murder. She claimed she knew who had killed a young girl
in a big murder case the cops were currently working on because the ghost of the girl had come to her. The cops just laughed and didn’t think anything of it, the woman was clearly deranged, except for two things. First of all, she knew how the girl had died. It was impossible for her to have known that, because they had purposely kept it out of the media. Except…she knew everything. And secondly, she was related to one of the detectives working on the case. She was the twin sister of a seasoned detective who swore he never told her anything.”

Detective Williams
, I thought. Christopher was still talking, faster now as he sputtered out everything.

“I was brought in as an expert to talk with her, to evaluate her. I was young then, but already considered one of the top experts in my field. She seemed sane some of the time. Mostly she seemed
disturbed
. She told me that she saw the dead every day. That most of the time they were only there for a moment before they vanished into nothingness. Other times, she told me, they were lost, wanting something, or were angry that they were dead. Nothing she told me really convinced me that she was anything other than the dozens of other cases I had studied. Did she believe what she said? Absolutely. Did that mean
I
believed her? No.” His hand gripped the steering wheel even tighter, his knuckles going white from the force of it. 

“They asked me if, in my opinion, she was telling the truth. Or if I thought she was delusional. So I told them. The next day she was committed and put on a strict regime of pills.” He sighed deeply, a sound full of regret and uncertainty.

“I don’t understand.”

“The things is, Anna, I’d like to try to help you. Not just for you. But also for me. Maybe if I could help you, learn more about you and the things you can do, then maybe
I can help you and you can lead a normal life someday. Maybe I can make up for failing her. Maybe we can make a difference together.”

I glanced back out my window, watching the city pass by in a blur. I thought of my abilities. The ones that I still had no clue how to use and of the ones I still hadn’t even learned about. I wondered if
I even wanted to know anymore. If I even wanted to figure out who or what had killed my mom. But then I thought of the wraith of Julie Reese and I thought of my mother’s body on our linoleum floor, and I knew. I couldn’t run from this. I had to face it and I didn’t have to do it alone anymore.

“I’ll stay,” I said softly. We were pulling into the parking garage near the condo. Christopher put the car in park and then let out a long breath, like
he was waiting for my reply. He reached out a hand and put it over one of mine.

“I’m glad. We’ll get through this together.” I gripped his hand and nodded my head. We could do this. We had to. “I’m going to call someone today. Someone I knew from when I studied abroad. He’s…eccentric, but I think he might be able to help us.”

“Who is he?” I asked. Christopher grimaced. I narrowed my eyes.

“He’s an expert and I’m sure when I tell him about you
, about your abilities, he’ll hop on the first plane to the states.” Someone from out of country then. Interesting. Christopher seemed nervous about it though. I sighed. He tightened his grip on my hand and smiled his most charming smile at me. It didn’t have the effect he would’ve liked.

“Professor…”

He cut me off. “It’s
Christopher
and you have to trust me here.”

I searched his face and eyes but I didn’t see anything but honesty and hope. And God help me, but I trusted him more than I trusted anyone in my entire life.

“Okay,” I breathed out.

He relaxed and smiled crookedly at me. “Good,” he answered after a moment. “Let’s get upstairs then and make some plans.” I nodded. Christopher let go of my hand, but before I opened my door, I had one more question.

“What happened to her?” I asked softly, my fingers resting on the door handle. He stiffened just a bit before his shoulders drooped. He didn’t look at me.

“She killed herself,” he whispered, full of regret and sorrow. “Turns out she was right
. The man she said had killed that little girl was caught less than two weeks after she died. The little girl had been his sixth victim.” I shivered and grasped the handle a little tighter.

“That could have been me,” I said softly. Christopher dropped his head.

“Yes it could have been,” he acknowledged.

“Why?” I asked what I’d been wondering for days now. Why had he believed
me
?

“Because
I promised myself that if I ever came across anyone like her again, if there was any chance I could do something for them, I was going to do it.” His voice wavered, but just barely. I caught his gaze and held it with my own.

“I’m not her,” I stated. He knew that, but I had to say it.

“I know,” he answered stoically. 

“I’m something completely different,” I added. “I could end up hurting you or someone else. I don’t even know myself anymore.”

He nodded. He knew that too. “I understand that, Anna.” His determined eyes didn’t leave mine. “I’m still not going anywhere.”

I exhaled a long breath. “Okay.” I held out a hand. He
immediately took it. We shook hands and his aura caressed mine. I frowned.