Eerie (6 page)

She could hear him jiggle the handle to the front door, which was right under the balcony, but she just didn't care.

“Hailey!”

Something scraped along the outer brick wall, and the next thing she knew, someone lifted her up and was carrying her inside. It smelled like Fin, but her eyes were swollen, and she couldn't muster the energy to open them enough to see. Not that she cared.

“Hailey, I'm so sorry . . .” Fin was saying, but his voice faded in and out. “ . . .freezing cold . . .in the house . . .” Hailey heard, but sleep thundered through her mind and claimed her for its own.

Chapter Nine

Hailey's Nightmare

“Reality is never as bad as a nightmare, as the mental tortures we inflict on ourselves.”

- Sammy Davis, Jr.

Churning skies of violet greeted Hailey when she succumbed, still sobbing, to her dreams. Hailey's soul, like all human souls did, had wandered into the Aether in what humans call a dream, and
he
was there waiting. His voice came in the usual way—first as an echo, before it rang out loud.

“I'm very sorry,” he said as Hailey approached. “I did not want to leave you tonight.”

The Envoy was a muscular silhouette of soft iridescence. His eyes were exactly as Hailey remembered them—very kind and swirling with purple clouds. He still looked like an angel, but angels don't leave you in your time of need.

“Why did you leave me all alone?” She enunciated her syllables.

Talking to someone through the Aether was a lot like speaking across a giant chasm. You can't really touch each other, and you'd better not mumble or else the other person won't hear.

“The others were watching,” he told her, sounding tortured. “I could not linger.”

“But why? Why couldn't you stay with me?”

“I . . .
care
for you, Hailey, but if the others knew, they would tear me apart.”

“Why would they do that?”

“We are creatures of balance, Hailey. We believe feelings are a perversion—a disease—one that should be eradicated among our kind.”

Hailey shook her head. “I don't understand why.”

A patient smile played on his lips. “We live by two laws,” he said. “Never take a life before its time, and never extend one. Before we came to Earth, none of us were capable of . . .caring. Emotions don't exist in the Aether.” He tilted his head. “But when we became trapped on Earth, we became infected with them. And those emotions, those
feelings
—they tempt us to break our laws . . .to extend some lives and end others.”

“You're not allowed to care about me?” Hailey frowned and looked into the chasm between them. “There's so much space between us now. Where have you been anyway?”

He hadn't shown himself fully to her like this in ages . . .well, not that she remembered.

“I never left you, Hailey. I've been watching you . . .through the Aether.”

“Was it you in the pub?”

“It was.”

“Why did you leave?”

“Because you ran from me.”

“I didn't run . . . I didn't run from
you
,” Hailey stammered. “I ran, because I spilled beer all over you, and I was embarrassed. I'm really sorry. I didn't want you to go.”

He closed his eyes and heaved a great sigh, looking suddenly very content.

“Will you walk with me, Hailey?”

He held out an incandescent hand.

Hailey looked at the chasm between them again.

“I can't reach you.”

“You have to jump,” he said, hand still extended.

“Will you catch me?” she asked as she pushed a pebble over the edge with her foot, listening as it bounced and ricocheted for several seconds, never hitting the bottom, and then she looked up at him.

“Or will you let me fall?”

“I haven't let you fall, yet,” he told her, and Hailey pushed another rock over the edge, swallowing hard and trying to convince her legs to jump.

Stepping back, she shook her head and took a deep breath. It's just like dancing, she told herself, and then she went for it, leaping off the edge as hard as she could and reaching for Asher's outstretched hand. But she was way short and fell, arms flailing, grasping for an Envoy who didn't catch her. Down, down, deeper and further into darkness she sank, unable to catch her breath to scream and dropping for several agonizing seconds until finally a powerful yank jerked her up and over the wall again.

“I thought . . .you were . . .going to . . .let me fall!” she tried to yell, but it came out breathy as she steadied herself on shaking legs next to him.

He blinked, looking confused and a little injured. “I will not let you fall, Hailey. I will never let you fall.”

“It felt like I was falling.” Hailey was catching her breath and waving her hand at the canyon behind her.

“Where did the canyon go?” What had been a giant crevasse for Hailey to jump was from the other side nothing more than a hairline crack in the sidewalk.

“In the Aether, time and space move differently. I took your hand in the moment you stepped toward me.”

Very slowly, Hailey wiggled her fingers inside his hand and marveled at how his light wrapped around them. It was like holding hands with the air. Her hand looked exactly like a hand should: covered in skin and not emitting any light at all, but his was bright and beautiful and felt like . . .nothing.

“Why do you look like a flare?” she asked him.

“I am an Envoy, made of energy.” He lifted his hand to her cheek, where it tingled against her skin.

Oh, the Aether was frustrating! It was hard to remember anything that happened there.

But more was coming back to her. She remembered now. His name was Asher, and he and several others had fallen out of the Aether long ago, and now they could only visit the Aether, as a human does in a dream, but the Earth always pulled them back.

And they hated it.

It was driving them insane. It was driving them to . . .

“What happened to Holly?” Hailey asked in a whisper so faint she wasn't sure he'd heard. But when she looked up, she found a heartrending longing in his eyes.

He placed his hands over her shoulders and moved them down the length of her arms then beckoned her to stand with him under a great sycamore on a hill overlooking a clear river.

“Cobon killed her,” he said, his voice gentle but strained, “just as he killed your mother.”

“Cobon . . . Is he an Envoy too?”

Asher nodded.

“But why?” she asked, her voice rising. “Why is an Envoy killing the people I love? What did I do wrong?”

Asher moved his hand to Hailey's shoulder, which instantly calmed her, and he took his time in forming his answer.

“You did nothing to deserve this.” He stroked her cheek, and Hailey pressed her head through the warmth he emitted. “Cobon believed that Holly could tear open the Aether so that we could go home,” he told her.

“Why would he think that?”

“Holly came from a line of women who have for centuries, collected your family's energy.”

Hailey shook her head, confused.

Asher studied the violet skies for a moment. “When someone dies, their energy is released from their body along with their soul. An Envoy's duty is to ferry that energy across the Aether and then back to Earth and into another human at the very moment of their birth. That energy fuses the soul and body together. It's life energy, and it's powerful.”

With a wave of his hand, he drew a bright streak in front of them. Hailey reached out to it, smiling.

“It's beautiful. What happens to someone's soul after they die?”

“I don't know,” he said faintly, and the band of light he'd painted crystalized, hung for a moment in the air, and fell to the ground. “Cobon fashioned a stone to hold your family's life energy on Earth,” he continued. “As the generations passed, the energy in the stone grew, until he believed there was enough stored inside to split open the Aether.”

This story sounded familiar.

“The legend of the black rock. It's a fairy tale.” Hailey's mother had told her this story when she'd given her the necklace.

“It's no fairy tale, Hailey. It's Cobon's experiment. We all have them . . .our own theories, our own research, our own . . .obsessions.” Asher paused here to gaze at Hailey, and she met his purple eyes, hungry for more information. “We all just want to go home . . .” he told her wistfully.

She held his gaze, unable to fathom being pulled away from her home.

“But it failed.” Asher's voice boomed, and Hailey jumped.

He seemed suddenly angry—as if he cared more about a stupid experiment than he did about her sister.

“Why didn't you stop him?” Hailey demanded.

Asher, looking wounded, moved toward her, but she backed away. “Don't run from me, Hailey,” he warned, and Hailey planted her feet to the ground, her heart thumping.

“Asher,” she said more gently, “why didn't you stop him?”

“I very well might have stopped him from killing your sister,” he said, his voice cold, “but only if I'd told him he had the wrong girl. In his madness, he may have killed Holly anyway and then taken you as well. I could not rescue Holly and protect you.”

He tilted his head and continued more forcefully. “
You
were passed the black rock, Hailey. It is
your
energy the stone has lassoed,
your
energy Cobon must sever from
your
body. It's your death that will complete his experiment, only he doesn't know it. His obsession ended with Holly's death, she being the first born daughter. For now he believes the stone is a failure, and that will keep you safe.”

“My mother gave the necklace with the black rock to me,” said Hailey, realizing Cobon's mistake. “I gave it to Holly—” Her eyes filled with tears. “—I marked her for death!”

Asher moved to embrace her, but she swatted his light away.

“It's my fault!”

“You mustn't tell anyone, Hailey. Do you understand?”

Hailey nodded, her lip trembling.

Asher studied her fearful expression.

“Don't be afraid,” he whispered. “Cobon will not hurt you.”

“You're protecting me. You're always protecting me.” She looked up at him with a new understanding. “Was it you? Did you pull us from the fire?”

“I was there,” he said simply, and then he cupped her face in his hands.

“I'm sorry, Hailey,” he told her tenderly stroking her cheeks. “You're waking up, and you won't remember all these things we spoke of.”

He fixed his intense stare at Hailey's eyes as he gave her his instructions.

“You
will
remember to keep your secret. You
will
remember that Holly did not suffer, that I would have saved her if only I could have, and you will remember that Cobon has gone, and I am watching over you . . .”

Asher's voice filled her ears in overlapping echoes, growing louder and louder, hurting her ears when it reached a roar and only dying when Hailey opened her eyes.

As she woke in Holly's bed to the smell of bacon and coffee and the sound of muffled voices in the kitchen, Hailey twitched her crusty nose. Her head was pounding and full of snot from a long night of uncontrolled sobbing, which she thought ended with a visit from an Envoy, but now she wasn't sure. She felt her shoulder where she thought he'd touched her, and something quite unexpected happened.

Her heart leapt.

She wanted to see him again.
Him
—the one who pulled her and Holly from the house fire; the one who would have rescued Holly if only he could have; the one who watched over Hailey now, even though she couldn't see him, protecting her from the evil Envoy—Cobon—who killed Holly . . .though, why he killed her, she couldn't quite remember...

Hailey staggered into the bathroom and twisted the sink faucet before looking in the mirror.

“Ah!” she yelled.

“Are yeh alright?” asked Pix through the door, and Hailey had to think about that.

“I think so . . .”

She surveyed her reflection. She had to do something, good lord, she looked a fright. Her eyes were red and swollen, her face was unevenly puffy and her hair—her hair was a physics experiment. It defied gravity, standing almost straight up and out like she'd been electrocuted. She knew better than to let it dry un-corralled. Still, it almost looked as if someone had teased her hair with a comb and hairspray while she slept.

She cranked on the shower and climbed inside.

By the time she got out, her puffiness had gone down, her headache had faded and her hair was in a more natural state.

When she joined the others in the kitchen for breakfast, they each greeted her with hugs and kisses, except for Fin. He sat in the corner and merely nodded as he wolfed down a piece of toast.

“Did you sleep well, dear?” Uncle Skeet asked as he pulled her chair out.

“I think I did.”

“Sorry we were so late in getting home. We didn't wake you, I hope?” Pix said as he set a plate of breakfast in front of her.

“I didn't even hear you come in.” She took a bite of bacon and suddenly realized how hungry she was.
Did she even eat yesterday?

She finished everything on her plate and drank two glasses of water before she said another word, and those words stunned the table into silence.