Luminosity (Gravity Series #3) (The Gravity Series) (28 page)

Henry grabbed me lightly by the tops of my arms, looking instantly contrite. “I know, I’m sorry. I’m not trying to lessen it. I said the wrong words.”

Ariel…

The taunting voice was hardly louder than a whisper. I turned to look down the hall, and thought I saw a small child rounding the corner.
Ariel…follow…

“What are you looking at?” Henry asked.

“There was someone in the dark. They just ran down the hall.” I pointed after the child.

The hairs on my arms were sticking up and my skin had broken out in goosebumps. Without waiting for Henry’s approval, I rushed down the shadowy passage. It was familiar to me; the same hall I’d followed McPherson down years ago when he’d had a secret meeting here.

Henry was still following me; I could hear his footsteps.

I didn’t stop until I reached the end of the hall. There was a door, behind which I’d eavesdropped on the strange meeting I’d never unraveled.

“Where are we going?” Henry whispered. I turned and put a finger to my lips, although I didn’t think anyone in the restaurant would hear us. I didn’t want to disturb the orphan’s ghost.

I tried turning the knob and sure enough, the door swung open. I stepped inside, excited to discover what could be waiting inside.

It was a small studio apartment, a living area with a stove and refrigerator crammed in the corner. The walls and floors were wooden and plain. The only light came through broken blinds on the single window. I could sense Warwick there so strongly I could almost see him walking out of the bedroom. The creepy feeling got stronger; I wanted to run far away but knew I had to look.

“This was Warwick’s apartment,” I breathed.

“Should we turn on the light?” Henry asked, but I put my hand over his before he got the chance to flip the switch.

“I don’t want to draw any attention to ourselves,” I explained.

I went through a doorway into what must have been a bedroom, with a little closet of a bathroom that contained a toilet and a sink. There was only a single window here, too, grimy and covered in cobwebs. These blinds were broken as well, as if Warwick had intentionally snapped off little pieces.

“There’s a whole lot of nothing in here,” Henry surmised.

But I felt it, the tugging feeling that let me know there was more I couldn’t see. It had been a while and the feeling took me by surprise, forcing me to gasp.

The pulling feeling led me directly to the back wall. Confused for a moment, I looked up. A heating vent was set in the wall, letting off a groaning churn of steam. I peered closer. The screws were missing on the grate, so it was just propped up in the space.

“There’s something in that vent up there.”

“Okay. I don’t know how you know that but I’ll go with it,” Henry said.

“What I mean is, can you reach it?” Henry and I were about the same height—he maybe had an inch on me—but his arms were longer.

“I can try.”

He stood up on his toes, pulling the grate down, and stuck his hand inside, feeling around.

“Anything in there?” I asked hopefully, watching him stretch his fingers.

“No, I don’t—wait, there’s something.”

It took agonizing seconds for him to grip the object with both hands. He pulled down a dusty, grungy looking spiral notebook. The cover was tattooed with ink doodles. We flipped through it briefly; it was soaked with the ink of pages full of scribbles.

“Now this is interesting,” Henry muttered. He handed it to me and I obscured it in my coat. “We should be getting back. Look, I’m sorry that I came here tonight.”

I held up my hand. “Don’t be sorry. Coming here was a mistake; I should have tried harder to talk Theo out of it. This wasn’t the right thing for either of us.”

He grabbed my hand softly and pulled me towards him, kissing me. I wasn’t paying attention to anything around us. A scraping sound came from the direction of the door, but I didn’t process it right away.

“What are you…” Theo didn’t get any farther than that. Henry and I jumped a foot apart, but it was too late. Theo’s eyes were horrified, hands clutched to her mouth as she stood in the doorway.

I tried to make my useless mouth move—to say something, anything—but she whipped around and ran off. I glanced back at Henry and he nudged me on the shoulder.

“Go after her. Go,” he encouraged.

We both ran out of the apartment, down the hall and back into the dining room with me leading the way. A waitress wrinkled her nose as I almost bumped into her, but I didn’t slow down. Theo grabbed her coat and purse from her chair, but she didn’t make for the door yet. Alex was holding Kenny off of the floor by the collar of his shirt. Kenny’s trucker hat was already crushed beneath Alex’s Chuck Taylor.

“You keep your hands off her, understand?” Alex growled, his nose an inch away from Kenny’s. “You. Stay. Away.”

“What’s going on?” Henry asked. He went up behind Alex and tapped him on the shoulder.

“He had his hand on Theo’s leg,” Alex said out of the corner of his mouth, his jaw locked and his eyes blazing.

“That’s why I came in the back,” Theo muttered, clutching her coat to her chest and not looking at any of us. “Because of the scene they were causing. I wanted to get you. Now I’m leaving.”

“Theo, wait,” Alex said, dropping Kenny unceremoniously on his butt and going after her.

She spun around, confronting him. Her lime green eyes searched his, looking wounded and guarded at the same time. “No, I’m not waiting. This is exactly why I broke up with you. You’re controlling. You’re not my bodyguard, Alex. I’ve been telling you all along that I can take care of myself.”

Alex stood like he’d been hit in the chest. “It didn’t look like you were taking care of it.”

“Mind your own business.”

“You are my business.”

“Not anymore.” Theo ran past the big fish tank in the lobby. She knocked over the red devil imp, righted it and charged out the door. I darted my eyes between Alex and Henry’s worried ones. Henry began trying to calm Alex down.

I rushed out after Theo, calling her name. It was bitterly cold outside, the wind slamming into my face after the heat inside Blind Devil. Theo had crossed the street and showed no sign of stopping as she reached her car. She was speedwalking as fast as she could go. I kept calling her name, not letting up. When she finally turned, her face was shiny with angry tears.

“How could you?” she shouted. “How could you lie to me?” Her clothes were askew, glitter smeared.

“Theo…” I reached for her arm but she pulled away violently. I hadn’t expected her to blow up quite so fiercely. Her intense reaction surprised me.

“We had to keep it a secret, Theo,” I protested. I couldn’t think of exactly how to explain because my brain was too stressed out. “You know if Thornhill found out, they’d punish us. Phillip could hurt either one of us.”

“How long has this been going on?”

I paused. “Since last December.”

“Almost a
year
?” Her yelling was renewed. Her voice would be hoarse tomorrow. “And you didn’t trust me? I’m your best friend, I’ve never lied to you about more than my being okay. I’ve never told you anything but the truth when it mattered. And I never told one of your secrets, not even about you seeing ghosts. How could you lie to my face every day for a year?”

I couldn’t say anything to defend my choice. Theo was the most loyal friend I’d ever had, even more so than Jenna. Guilt rushed through me.

“Henry is an asshole,” Theo said.“After the way he treated you, I can’t believe you would be so shallow as to get back with him. And then lie to my face every single time the issue was brought up. Is that why you’ve been so busy and unable to hang out?”

“I didn’t mean to lie to you. I swear, there was never a moment that I wanted to hurt you. There were reasons….”

“I don’t care about his reasons! Henry’s phony reasons don’t matter to me; he hasn’t pulled the wool over
my
eyes.”

I bit my lip. “He didn’t pull the wool over my eyes. He cares about me.”

“He only cares about himself. I can’t believe you wouldn’t see that.”

“Are we still friends?”

She stopped for a moment, catching her breath, her chest heaving beneath her coat. “I won’t turn my back on you. But it’s not going to be the same, either.”

She got into the Toyota and sped off through the cold night, as I stood watching helplessly.

Back inside the restaurant, Alex was getting his things together. He looked like he might start crying; his face was red all the way up to the scalp below his blond hair. Kenny and Ron slid out of their seats and scurried out.

“I can’t win,” Alex said, ruffling his hair. “I can’t even win by sticking up for her.”

“Maybe it’s not about winning,” Henry offered.

“I think it’s really over, man,” he said. “I thought before I had a chance. But now….” He rushed out through the tables and slammed out the door.

Henry and I stood alone, as the other customers eating their dinners stared at us.

“Somebody’s got to pay for the food those boys ordered,” the waitress told us sternly.

With a sigh, Henry whipped out his credit card to pay the meager check.

“What a waste of a night,” he said.

“It was an awful night. But maybe not a waste.” I cradled Warwick’s notebook in my jacket.

###

Theo wasn’t at her house. There were no cars in the driveway and the lights were all dark. I’d texted her now three times and received no answer. When I had tried to call her, standing in the dark on her porch, the phone rang once and then she banished me to voicemail.

Waves of guilt kept hitting me. As soon as one would start to pass, another would overtake me. I’d been a terrible friend, not making enough time for her, not being close when she was pulling away. I knew it had technically been lying, but I’d never in my wildest dreams meant to hurt her.

Claire was already up in her room by the time I got home. I took off my heels by the door and set them on the rack. It was depressing looking into the unused living room and the kitchen where my father had spent so much of his time. Usually this time of year he would be out stringing lights on the tree. I wanted to call him, but it was past ten o’clock and I didn’t want him to think anything was wrong.

I stood outside the back door. I didn’t know if Henry would drop by, but I thought it was a pretty good bet. The fleeting worry that Claire might catch us fluttered through my mind, but at that moment, she didn’t scare me. I was fighting much bigger monsters.

Sure enough, he scooted around the side of the house and I slipped him inside. I locked up and shut off all the lights.

“Don’t think about it right now,” Henry said later when we were in my basement on the couch. We were each facing in different directions so that his legs rested by my head. “She can’t stay mad forever. She’s your other half; you two are like peanut butter and jelly. Jelly does not a sandwich make.”

“She holds a grudge like nobody’s business,” I countered. All I could see when I blinked was the hurt, confused look on Theo’s face when she’d caught us kissing.

“Well, at least distract yourself.”

He had been reading Warwick’s notebook and he chucked it on my lap.

The notebook was a study in madness. Full of notes in different handwriting, different colors of ink, all crammed in so there wasn’t a bare spot on any of the pages. If I’d had any doubts of Warwick’s mental state at the time, they were erased upon reading the outpouring of frantic, twisted thoughts. He’d doodled in any of the tiny empty spaces. They were crude images of demonic faces and buckets of dark swirls that looked like blood.

The contents of the words was even crazier.

I had a dream last night, not like those dreams of the big sloppy screaming black hole when I have the wanderlust and am in the desert forever, but I had a dream last night instead about the early days.

Some passages showed lucidity, although the words quickly dissolved into the same gibberish.

They said that they spoke prayers but there was nothing but demon speech rolling off of their tongues and their mouths were full of the spit of betrayal. They wouldn’t let me join their little club. Club them over the head head heads

Edgar and I were so unpopular. So was Hugh, but he was the kind of unpopular that is cool because he doesn’t care. He doesn’t see that my coat turns colors. The inside is different than the outside.

Phillip is going to be the THRONE master, after the last blood-feeding ritual. But his body grows weak, roots rotting, and gray hair sprouting. He needs a vessel. He has a back up plan.

We passed the notebook back and forth, engrossed in the disturbing contents.

“Why is it called bloodfeeding?” Henry asked.

“I’m guessing because they have to put a certain amount of blood on the symbol platforms, and they feel like it’s feeding whatever evil force it is that lurks under our town,” I said.