Chain Letter (43 page)

The stranger laughed easily. Tony pressed the guy’s hand to his forehead. “Please?”
Tony begged.

The stranger took his hand back and knelt in front of Tony. He put both his hands
on Tony’s shoulders and bid Eric to come closer. “I’ll tell you a secret,” he said
to both of them. “Joan took a long time to bring the gun to your house, Tony, because
she first had to find blanks to fill it with. She never did the bidding of the Caretaker.
She fooled the Caretaker.”

Eric and Tony glanced back at Alison, and at the fallen girl. “But Alison is dying,”
Tony protested. “That witch is dead. The revolver must have been loaded.”

Eric interrupted. “But Tony, you pressed the revolver to the girl’s temple when you
pulled the trigger. Even if it was loaded with blanks, it could still have killed
her. Most people don’t know this, but blanks shoot out quite a formidable wad of paper.
At high speed it can be lethal. The temple is the weakest part of the skull.”

“But what about Alison?” Tony asked. “She’s bleeding. She’s dying.”

“The same thing,” Eric said. “She pressed the tip of the barrel flush with her chest.
Even a blank would have torn up her skin pretty bad. But the wound shouldn’t be fatal.”
Eric glanced at the stranger, who seemed to intimidate him. “Is that true?”

The stranger nodded. “It is the truth. See it how you wish it.” He closed his eyes
briefly before reopening them. “Alison can stay with you. That much is granted. It
is all right.” He stood. “Go to her. Take care of her. I am leaving now.”

Tony reached out and shook the stranger’s hand. He looked him straight in the eye,
and this time the impact wasn’t so overwhelming. Tony felt as if he were merely saying
goodbye to an old friend.

“Will I see you again?” Tony asked.

“Someday,” the stranger promised. Then he turned and walked into the night and was
gone. Tony and Eric hurried over to Alison. She was still breathing. In fact, she
appeared to be gaining strength. Tony helped her to a sitting position, and she opened
her eyes.

“Am I dead yet?” she asked.

“No,” Tony said. “You’re going to be fine.” He felt under her blouse in the area of
her wound. Eric was right. Her flesh was badly torn, but the bleeding was slowing
down. He applied pressure to the wound. He could not find a bullet hole. Yet he could
have sworn when she was first shot—There had been that powerful recoil. . . .

“Is she going to live?” Eric asked hopefully.

“I think so,” Tony said. “I honestly do.”

Alison jerked in his arms, then relaxed. “I think so, too,” she said. She smiled sheepishly
at Tony. “Who was here?”

“I don’t know,” Tony said, raising his eyes to the brilliant moon. “A friend. Someone
wonderful.” He nodded to Eric. “Let’s get her to a hospital.”

Eric helped Tony lift Alison into his arms. As they walked back toward the car, Eric
suddenly stopped. “I’d like to check the revolver and see if it really does have blanks
in it,” Eric said.

“You think maybe it didn’t?” Tony asked.

“I just want to know for sure,” Eric said, turning. Tony stopped him.

“Don’t check,” Tony said. “Let’s see it how we wish it.” He leaned over and kissed
Alison on the forehead. She sighed and snuggled warmly into his arms. “To me it’s
a miracle,” he said.

TURN THE PAGE FOR A PEEK AT

CHRISTOPHER PIKE’S

NEWEST NOVEL:

ONCE I BELIEVED THAT I
wanted nothing more than love. Someone who would care for me more than he cared for
himself. A guy who would never betray me, never lie to me, and most of all never leave
me. Yeah, that was what I desired most, what people usually call true love.

I don’t know if that has really changed.

Yet I have to wonder now if I want something else just as badly.

What is it? You must wonder . . .

Magic. I want my life filled with the mystery of magic.

Silly, huh? Most people would say there’s no such thing.

Then again, most people are not witches.

Not like me.

I discovered what I was when I was eighteen years old, two days after I graduated
high school. Before then I was your typical teenager. I got up in the morning, went
to school, stared at my
ex-boyfriend across the campus courtyard and imagined what it would be like to have
him back in my life, went to the local library and sorted books for four hours, went
home, watched TV, read a little, lay in bed and thought some more about Jimmy Kelter,
then fell asleep and dreamed.

But I feel, somewhere in my dreams, I sensed I was different from other girls my age.
Often it seemed, as I wandered the twilight realms of my unconscious, that I existed
in another world, a world like our own and yet different, too. A place where I had
powers my normal, everyday self could hardly imagine.

I believe it was these dreams that made me crave that elusive thing that is as great
as true love. It’s hard to be sure, I only know that I seldom awakened without feeling
a terrible sense of loss. As though my very soul had been chopped into pieces and
tossed back into the world. The sensation of being on the “outside” is difficult to
describe. All I can say is that, deep inside, a part of me always hurt.

I used to tell myself it was because of Jimmy. He had dumped me, all of a sudden,
for no reason. He had broken my heart, dug it out of my chest, and squashed it when
he said I really like you, Jessie, we can still be friends, but I’ve got to go now.
I blamed him for the pain. Yet it had been there before I had fallen in love with
him, so there had to be another reason why it existed.

Now I know Jimmy was only a part of the equation.

But I get ahead of myself. Let me begin, somewhere near the beginning.

Like I said, I first became aware I was a witch the same weekend I graduated high
school. At the time I lived in Apple Valley, which is off Interstate 15 between Los
Angeles and Las Vegas. How that hick town got that name was beyond me. Apple Valley
was smack in the middle of the desert. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said it’s easier
to believe in witches than in apple trees growing in that godforsaken place.

Still, it was home, the only home I had known since I was six. That was when my father
the doctor had decided that Nurse Betty—that was what my mom called her—was more sympathetic
to his needs than my mother. From birth to six I lived in a mansion overlooking the
Pacific, in a Malibu enclave loaded with movie stars and the studio executives who
had made them famous. My mom, she must have had a lousy divorce lawyer, because even
though she had worked her butt off to put my father through medical school and a six-year
residency that trained him to be one of the finest heart surgeons on the West Coast,
she was kicked out of the marriage with barely enough money to buy a two-bedroom home
in Apple Valley. And with summer temperatures averaging above a hundred, real estate
was never a hot item in our town.

I was lucky I had skin that gladly suffered the sun. It was soft, and I tanned deeply
without peeling. My coloring probably helped. My family tree is mostly European, but
there was an
American Indian in the mix back before the Civil War.

Chief Proud Feather. You might wonder how I know his name, and that’s good—wonder
away, you’ll find out, it’s part of my story. He was 100 percent Hopi, but since he
was sort of a distant relative, he gave me only a small portion of my features. My
hair is brown with a hint of red. At dawn and sunset it is more maroon than anything
else. I have freckles and green eyes, but not the green of a true redhead. My freckles
are few, often lost in my tan, and my eyes are so dark the green seems to come and
go, depending on my mood.

There wasn’t much green where I grew up. The starved branches on the trees on our
campus looked as if they were always reaching for the sky, praying for rain.

I was pretty; for that matter, I still am pretty. Understand, I turned eighteen a
long time ago. Yet I still look much the same. I’m not immortal, I’m just very hard
to kill. Of course, I could die tonight, who’s to say.

It was odd, as a bright and attractive senior in high school, I wasn’t especially
popular. Apple Valley High was small—our graduating class barely topped three hundred.
I knew all the seniors. I had memorized the first and last name of every cute boy
in my class, but I was seldom asked out. I used to puzzle over that fact. I especially
wondered why James Kelter had dumped me after only ten weeks of what, to me, had felt
like the greatest relationship in the world. I was to find out when our class took
that ill-fated trip to Las Vegas.

Our weekend in Sin City was supposed to be the equivalent of our Senior All-Night
Party. I know, on the surface that sounds silly. A party usually lasts one night,
and our parents believed we were spending the night at the local Hilton. However,
the plan was for all three hundred of us to privately call our parents in the morning
and say we had just been invited by friends to go camping in the mountains that separated
our desert from the LA Basin.

The scheme was pitifully weak. Before the weekend was over, most of our parents would
know we’d been nowhere near the mountains. That didn’t matter. In fact, that was the
whole point of the trip. We had decided, as a class, to throw all caution to the wind
and break all the rules.

The reason such a large group was able to come to such a wild decision was easy to
understand if you considered our unusual location. Apple Valley was nothing more than
a road stop stuck between the second largest city in the nation—LA—and its most fun
city—Las Vegas. For most of our lives, especially on Friday and Saturday evenings,
we watched as thousands of cars flew northeast along Interstate 15 toward good times,
while we remained trapped in a fruit town that didn’t even have fruit trees.

So when the question arose of where we wanted to celebrate our graduation, all our
years of frustration exploded. No one cared that you had to be twenty-one to gamble
in the casinos. Not all of us were into gambling and those who were simply paid Ted
Pollack to make them fake IDs.

Ted made my ID for free. He was an old friend. He lived a block over from my house.
He had a terrible crush on me, one I wasn’t supposed to know about. Poor Ted, he confided
everything in his heart to his sister, Pam, who kept secrets about as well as the
fifty-year-old gray parrot that lived in their kitchen. It was dangerous to talk in
front of that bird, just as it was the height of foolishness to confide in Pam.

I wasn’t sure why Ted cared so deeply about me. Of course, I didn’t understand why
I cared so much about Jimmy. At eighteen I understood very little about love, and
it’s a shame I wasn’t given a chance to know more about it before I was changed. That’s
something I’ll always regret.

That particular Friday ended up being a wasteland of regrets. After a two-hour graduation
ceremony that set a dismal record for scorching heat and crippling boredom, I learned
from my best friend, Alex Simms, that both Ted and Jimmy would be driving with us
to Las Vegas. Alex told me precisely ten seconds after I collected my blue-and-gold
cap off the football field—after our class collectively threw them in the air—and
exactly one minute after our school principal had pronounced us full-fledged graduates.

“You’re joking, right?” I said.

Alex brushed her short blond hair from her bright blues. She wasn’t as pretty as me
but that didn’t stop her from acting like she was. The weird thing is, it worked for
her. Even though she didn’t have a steady boyfriend, she dated plenty, and there
wasn’t a guy in school who would have said no to her if she’d so much as said hi.
A natural flirt, she could touch a guy’s hand and make him feel like his fingers were
caressing her breasts.

Alex was a rare specimen, a compulsive talker who knew when to shut up and listen.
She had a quick wit—some would say it was biting—and her self-confidence was legendary.
She had applied to UCLA with a B-plus average and a slightly above-average SAT score
and they had accepted her—supposedly—on the strength of her interview. While Debbie
Pernal, a close friend of ours, had been turned down by the same school despite a
straight-A average and a very high SAT score.

It was Debbie’s belief that Alex had seduced one of the interviewing deans. In Debbie’s
mind, there was no other explanation for how Alex had gotten accepted. Debbie said
as much to anyone who would listen, which just happened to be the entire student body.
Her remarks started a tidal wave of a rumor: “ALEX IS A TOTAL SLUT!” Of course, the
fact that Alex never bothered to deny the slur didn’t help matters. If anything, she
took great delight in it.

And these two were friends.

Debbie was also driving with us to Las Vegas.

“There was a mix-up,” Alex said without much conviction, trying to explain why Jimmy
was going to ride in the car with us. “We didn’t plan for both of them to come.”