The Shadows Trilogy (Box Set: Edge of Shadows, Shadows Deep, Veiled Shadows) (50 page)

The horror of Bobby’s words ripped through Ellie like a knife. Melissa’s small shoulders started to shake, and then Bobby leapt up from his chair and wrapped his arms around her. Ellie felt a small tug on her arm, and found Beanie’s huge green eyes staring up into hers. She didn’t even think but pulled his compliant body up into her lap. He settled his head into the crook of her neck, and she started to rock him. Ellie, who had always wanted children, couldn’t imagine how a woman could so easily rid herself of the ones that she should have died protecting.

“You all are safe here, Bobby,” Ellie said. She didn’t know if it was true, but she couldn’t believe that the three innocent children in front of her were bound for anywhere other than Heaven. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

Bobby scooted his sister over in her seat so that she leaned against him as he sat down. He left his arm draped around her. “I’m glad she’s gone. She was a bad person.” The venom in his voice left no doubt how he felt about his mother. After hearing his story, Ellie didn’t disagree with him one bit.

For the moment, Ellie was able to forget about everything that had happened to her in the Afterlife. She forgot about Mikel. She forgot about Lucy. She forgot about her parents’ secret past. Only David remained near her consciousness because this was the future that she wanted with him. She wanted a houseful of children and David beside her, adoring her just like her father had adored her mother. It was her dream.

“Jeffrey, I’m going to take the kids upstairs and let them pick out their rooms,” she said. She lifted Beanie up as she stood, and he immediately wrapped his legs around her waist. She didn’t mind. His small warm body tucked against hers felt natural. It was like he was hers, and it made her happy to think that, even just a short time, he was. She nodded to Bobby with a smile. “Follow me upstairs. You can have whichever room you want.”

Melissa squealed, and Bobby’s face broke out in a wide grin. “First one upstairs is a rotten egg!” he yelled. The two older siblings tore out of the room towards the front of the house.

Ellie knew that Jeffrey was watching her closely, but she didn’t care. For a little while, she was going to enjoy her role because, for the first time in what felt like forever, she knew exactly what to do.

CHAPTER FOUR

With the three Palmer children settled into their rooms, occupying three of the four bedrooms on the second floor, Ellie returned to the landing of the staircase and was turning to go back downstairs when Lucy materialized in front of her. Ellie tripped and found herself pitching forward into a free fall. She caught Lucy’s look of horror just before her head whipped around and saw that she was rushing toward an impact with the top risers. Ellie brought her arms up to break the fall when her forward momentum suddenly stopped, causing her to choke on the yell that had built up in her throat. Her eyes opened and she found her prone body floating inches away from the carpet.

“Sorry, El! Here, let me help you,” Lucy called down to her.

Ellie felt the air around her swirl and then her body slowly raised from a horizontal to a vertical position. Her feet floated gently down to the step and then she felt the weight of her body return to her. Her heart was pounding a mile a minute. Although she suspected she’d heal quickly, she still didn’t want to risk broken bones in the Afterlife.

“Geez, Lucy! You scared the heck out of me,” Ellie said once she felt as if she had caught her breath. “Can you not appear out of nowhere like that? Or at least give me some kind of warning?”

Lucy shrugged as she flounced down the stairs to stand at Ellie’s side. “Be mad at me all you want. You are going to love me in two seconds when I tell you what I found out.”

Ellie scowled at her friend. “Unless you tell me that Max Turner is on his way here right now, fat chance.”

A nail file appeared in Lucy’s hand as she leaned back against the railing. Lucy was perpetually filing her nails. “Oh, okay Ms. Grumpy Pants. I won’t tell you then that I can take you to see your boyfriend.”

Ellie’s mouth fell open. “David? You found out where they are keeping David?”

The look of nonchalance on Lucy’s face was replaced by a Cheshire grin. “I did.”

“So can we get him out? Bring him back here? Hide him or something?”

The smile slid from Lucy’s face. “I said I can take you to see him. I didn’t say that we were ready to stage a jail break yet.”

“We can’t leave him there, Lucy. We have to protect him,” Ellie argued. The thought of seeing David and then having to leave him in whatever hellish place he was being kept filled her with dread.

“We don’t even know
how
to protect him, El. First things first, I thought you may want to talk to him. I know you didn’t really have a chance to say goodbye the night he was taken. Plus he may have heard something or knows something that could help us. He probably understands the situation even better than we do right now.”

Ellie nodded slowly. As much as she didn’t want to admit it, it made sense, and she wanted to see him. She needed to see him. “When do we leave?”

“As soon as you’re ready,” Lucy said with a smile. “I’m assuming you’ll want to freshen up, but we have to get there before my contact’s shift is over. This is kind of a one-time thing.”

Ellie had a million questions to ask, but knew that she needed to focus. “So I can leave the waypoint, and everything will be fine?” She glanced at the bedroom doors on the second level. “I’ve got three kids that came in after you left. I don’t want to do anything that would hurt them. I didn’t sense any psychic abilities in them, so I don’t think the transports will be here to retrieve them right away.”

One of the first things that Ellie learned after becoming the new waypoint Guardian was that, for some reason, the number three had great significance in the Afterlife. Souls transitioning through the waypoint came in threes. Each section of the Afterlife, Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell had a designated representative in the group that collected the souls from the waypoint. Those representatives were called transports. If a soul had physic abilities, that soul carried a higher priority, and so the transports arrived sooner.

“Kids, huh? That sucks,” Lucy said. “As long as you aren’t gone long, the waypoint should be fine. Remember that little field trip you took with Mikel? It should be the same thing. We’ll get in and get out.”

Ellie had been led to believe that since the waypoint depended on her energy for its survival, she needed to be there at all times. It wasn’t the first time that the truth was carefully arranged in a way that it wasn’t quite the truth, but not quite a lie either. Since arriving in the Afterlife, she had only been away from the waypoint once, but that had been with Mikel. It hadn’t escaped her notice that, without help, she had no choice but to remain at the waypoint. She had no idea how to navigate the pathways between the waypoints and the other sections of the Afterlife. She had to trust that Lucy knew what she was doing.

Ellie started up the stairs. “Give me five minutes.”

She ran all the way up the stairs to the third story leaving Lucy behind her. Her thoughts were filled with David. She couldn’t believe that she was about to see him again. It felt as if it had been years since they had been together, and for all she knew, it had been. She had no way to tell how long it had been since she entered the Afterlife, and she had spent a period of time in a place that she remembered only as floating darkness before Mikel brought her fully into the waypoint. Years could have passed, but to her it felt as if she had accepted Mikel’s offer to take Lillian’s place as the Guardian there just a few weeks ago.

As she entered her room and made her way into the bathroom, Ellie felt a small tendril of doubt curl in her stomach. David had been the reason that she pulled out of her depression on the Other Side. She had fallen head over heels for him as he helped her pick up the pieces of her life and put them back together. He had been her rock of support, and had given her hope that she could have the life that she had always dreamed of; the life she saw her parents have when they were alive.

But it scared her to know that it had been Mikel’s doing that brought David into her life. He had wanted Ellie to fall in love with David. He knew that their love would be enough to restore the energy to the Bradford mansion waypoint and bring it alive again so that it would draw souls to it once more.

When Mikel threatened David’s life as well as her own if she didn’t leave the Other Side, she had agreed without question. It had been that, or become victims of Lillian and Joseph Bradford, who would have sucked her life energy and used it to keep the waypoint hobbling along until they could coerce David to return to the Other Side and find another psychically gifted woman like Ellie. David had been innocent of the whole mess, but Mikel and Lillian’s pawn nonetheless.

David surrendered himself without a fight to Braz after Mikel was banished back to Hell to await his punishment. Somehow David had known that he posed a threat to Ellie, and he hadn’t wanted to affect her any more than he already had. Ellie remembered the tortured look in David’s eyes. He blamed himself for everything. David didn’t believe that he was good.

She shook those thoughts from her mind. No matter what David thought, he was still the man that she had fallen in love with. Mikel had not manipulated that. There was no way that David was a bad guy. She wouldn’t believe it. Ellie stared at herself in the mirror and then quickly ran some lipstick over her lips, and brushed her long hair so that it was shiny and smooth. Her eyes looked tired, but there wasn’t much she could do about that. Sleep was a fleeting thing in the Afterlife, not really necessary and so something she often forgot.

Then she changed her shirt and wondered what people wore in Purgatory. Was she going to stand out?

“We aren’t going to be out in the open, but even if we weren’t you look just like everyone else there,” Lucy said from the doorway. “We pretty much get to dress exactly like we used to on the Other Side. The lighting there makes everything look pretty bland though.”

A deep frown crossed Ellie’s face. “Are you reading my mind?”

Lucy laughed. “No. I’ve just been standing here watching you pick at your clothes for the last two minutes. It wasn’t hard to follow your train of thought.”

Ellie took a deep breath. “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” she said.

Lucy came into the room and took Ellie’s hand. She turned it over so that Ellie’s hand was palm up. “We can’t exactly use the front door just in case the transports are on their way here and I’m not strong enough to take both of us the back way on my own. The waypoint in the basement is really only good for time travel, so I’m going to have to do this a bit differently. You know what I’m going to ask for, right?”

With dismay, Ellie realized what Lucy wanted. “Why is it always my blood that does the trick for your magic?” Ellie grumbled.

“Because you are special,” Lucy said with a wry smile. “Not all of us are so lucky.”

“If this is luck, I’d like to have a little less of it,” Ellie said, straightening her back. “Do what you need to do, witch.”

A small knife appeared in Lucy’s other hand. “I need to pull on your mojo, Ellie. Casting a spell to move two people from here to Purgatory without using the way line requires a lot more energy than I have. The easiest way to bypass that is to hijack the magic in your blood.”

Ellie said nothing. Ultimately, she would do whatever it took to see David again. So if Lucy required a transfusion of all of her blood, then Ellie would willingly give it to her.

Once she determined that Ellie wasn’t going to argue, Lucy sighed and then ran the sharp tip of the blade across Ellie’s palm. Ellie bit back a gasp of pain. Then Lucy’s eyes closed, and she started to chant. She waved the knife in a small circle around their heads and then she slashed down and sliced open her own palm. Ellie did cry out when Lucy’s cut hand grasped hers and it felt like a million tiny needles dug into her skin.

As light enveloped them, Lucy’s voice grew louder. The pain scorching through her limbs made it hard for Ellie to concentrate. She couldn’t see anything and her other arm came up to block out the brilliant blinding white light. The only way that she knew that Lucy was still there was the other woman’s death grip on her hand. Then a ball of white-hot light hit Ellie squarely in the chest.

Lucy’s hand shot out of hers and Ellie went flying backward. Her head smacked into a hard surface, and she saw stars. As the light finally dimmed and shapes came back into focus, Ellie found herself looking into two dark blue eyes she knew well.

“Ellie?” David’s voice was full of tight anticipation.

“That’s me,” she croaked. Ellie saw Lucy standing behind David shaking her head and raising a finger to her lips.  Then she flipped up her hands and showed all ten fingers.
Ten minutes,
Lucy mouthed. Then Lucy flew straight at the door, and Ellie was amazed to watch her pass right through it.

Then David’s fingers were probing the back of her head and Ellie winced when they found the tender spot of her skull where it had connected with the wall. As Ellie’s eyes looked over David’s shoulder and wandered around the room, she saw that the room was small. There was a bed pushed against the far wall and a small writing desk next to the door that Lucy had just exited. She could see through the open door on the other side of the room that it led to a small bathroom. It seemed clean and comfortable, although stark. She wasn’t sure what she was expecting.

“Swell digs,” she said. “Sorry that you had to trade down on my account.”

“Ellie, it is you!” David pulled her into his arms and Ellie savored the warmth of his skin next to her nose as she buried her face into the crook of his neck.

“Who else would it be?” she said. She felt happy and safe for the first time in what seemed like forever.

David pulled away just enough so that he could look down at her. “What are you doing here, Ellie? It’s dangerous for you to be here.”

Ellie heard his words, but her eyes were drinking him in. His dark hair curled around his face, and one tendril dropped low on his forehead, just like she remembered. She reached up to push it off his face. Wrinkles lined the corners of his eyes. Those were new. David looked tired. She wanted to settle back into his arms, but Lucy’s time limit was ticking in her mind.

“We’re going to bust you out of here, David, as soon as we figure out how. Those details are a little fuzzy at the moment. But first we wanted to know if you had found anything else that may be useful.” Ellie felt as if she was drunk. She was certain it was the knock to the head that was clouding her thoughts, but the timing was incredibly inconvenient.

“Who is we?” David’s eyes narrowed.

Ellie was thrown off by his question because David didn’t look happy to see her at all.  The reunion scene she had in her mind wasn’t going according to plan at all. “We…as in me, Lucy, and Jeffrey. Did you know that for anything to get done around here you basically need three people? That’s another thing they don’t put in the Afterlife brochures.”

David slowly helped Ellie to her feet. His silence was deafening. Ellie swayed as she tried to take a step, and David put his arm around her and led her to the side of the bed. He pushed her down onto the thin mattress and then sat down next to her. His jaw was twitching, and Ellie fought to keep her hands in her lap because she just wanted to hug him. David didn’t look happy to see her at all.

He sighed and ran a hand through his brown curls. “I don’t need you to bust me out of here, Ellie. I’m here because I chose to be here. You know that.”