Token of Darkness (3 page)

Cooper began packing away his lunch. “She probably heard something across the room.”

“Or she heard
me
, and didn’t want to look crazy asking about it. You should talk to her.”

“We’re talking about
Delilah
, Samantha. She’s a cheerleader who occasionally spends time with artsy kids. She’s cool, but she’s not the type to be able to do something
no one else
can.”

Delilah tended to be charming overall, ruthless when someone crossed her, but generally distant. Of everyone in his normal group of friends, he shouldn’t have been surprised that she was utterly unperturbed that he had simply disappeared for months.

“Coward,” Samantha said. “Why don’t you just—”

“Shut
up
, Samantha!” he snapped, this time getting a few odd looks from other people in the shop.

Samantha pouted, and then turned around. “I’m going to hang out and see what they say.”

“Knock yourself out,” Cooper mumbled under his breath, before she sauntered through the wall and back
toward the other girls. Cooper picked up his bag, threw out his trash, and left without looking back.

Halfway to school, he changed his mind. His hip still hurt a bit, but his doctors had told him that walking was good for him. He was willing to risk a little soreness, if it meant avoiding another run-in with old friends.

    “Shouldn’t you be in school?” the town librarian asked him as he approached the front desk.

“I’m at Q-tech,” he answered, naming the local vocational-technical high school. He
had
nearly gone there with John, despite his parents’ objections. Who wouldn’t want a chance to learn stuff like computer programming and auto mechanics, after all? The deciding factor hadn’t actually been his mother’s horror, but the fact that John had wanted to keep playing football, and Q-tech didn’t have a team. “We don’t start until Monday.”

“Oh.” She still looked suspicious, but was a little more relaxed, which was good, since he needed her help to find anything useful in the four-floor building. “Are you looking for anything in particular?”

“Yeah, I …” He fumbled, trying to figure out a good place to start that didn’t involve his saying,
I’m being haunted
. “I kind of forgot about the summer project I was supposed to be doing. It’s on ghosts. You know, hauntings, myths and stuff about why ghosts stay around and what people do about them. Maybe stuff about warlocks dealing with the dead?”

“Third floor,” she answered. “All the way back from the
stairs, turn left at the one hundreds. Parapsychology and occultism is one thirty-three.”

“Thanks.”

This time she actually smiled, as he trudged toward the stairwell.

Stairs
.

Flat ground was okay, but stairs were still hell.

He must have paused for a little too long, because the librarian asked, “Something else I can help you with?”

He started to shake his head, not wanting to disclose … but then sighed. Now was not the time to be macho. “Do you have an elevator?”

She frowned again. “It’s supposed to be for handicapped use only.”

He wasn’t
handicapped!

“Never mind,” he said.

“If you need the elevator—”

“No, I just realized I forgot something,” he said, bluffing.

“Oh … well, if you do need it, the elevator’s right around the corner past the copy machines,” she said.

She turned back to the books she had been scanning in. He was almost sure that she was pointedly
not
looking at him. Not forcing him to say, “I need the elevator because, despite how I look to you at first glance, this body is in fact unsound and likely to betray me if I take the stairs.”

He hesitated for a couple seconds, debating whether it
was worth trying to convince her that she
was
wrong, that he was just a lazy jock who didn’t want to bother with stairs … and then he turned to the elevator. There were a lot of ways to lose your pride. This was just one of them. And it wasn’t forever, even; the doctors said that as long as he kept doing the daily exercises he had been prescribed and attending his monthly physical therapy checkups, he would be good as new. Eventually.

Only two months ago, even walking had been impossible for him.
Breathing
had been an effort.

He hit the
UP
button, and as it lit and the elevator went
ding ding ding
, memories from the hospital started washing back. The doctors’ shouting, the lights blinking and machines beeping, breathing for him—

No, no, no, no
.

He ripped himself from the memory, only to see the elevator doors close in front of him. He hit the button again and the car opened immediately. He stepped inside, limping heavily now.

He didn’t immediately hit the button for the third floor, though. Instead, he leaned back and shut his eyes, taking deep breaths. Where was Samantha? Her chatter was usually a good distraction.

Necromantic golem, that was his focus. That was what he had come here to look up or, barring that
exact
scenario, he intended to learn anything he could about ghosts. He doubted there was going to be any way to give Samantha a body, but if he couldn’t do that and couldn’t help her live
again, then at least maybe he could find a way to bring her peace.

With these safer thoughts in mind, and the memories locked away again, he hit the button for the third floor. He still winced each time the elevator beeped, but it was only twice, and then the doors slid open and he was free.

T
here was someone already camped out in row 133, cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by books. At first, Cooper couldn’t tell if the figure was a guy or a girl—all he could see were jeans, black sneakers, and an oversize black sweatshirt.

Cooper resisted the instinct to turn around, anticipating a grungy goth with black overlong hair, eyeliner and piercings, who would probably have way too much to say about the occult.

“Hey,” he said, eliciting a start from the figure, who shoved his sweatshirt hood back in order to look up at Cooper.

Cooper’s expectations turned out to be completely wrong. The guy’s brown hair was short and spiky. He wasn’t wearing any jewelry, and a collared shirt was just visible beneath the sweatshirt.

“Hey,” he replied. “You startled me. Am I in your way?”

“I think we’re trying to look at the same books,” Cooper answered, feeling a little guilty about his previous assumptions. Considering the fact that
he
was now the guy who sat quietly at the back of the class, who had cut school to research ghosts, he should probably cut back on the goth stereotypes before he became one.

“I didn’t expect to find anyone else here,” Cooper admitted as the other guy gathered up some of the books he had spread about, making room. “With school and all.”

“Q-tech,” he answered briefly.

“Really?” Cooper asked, wondering if this guy was using the same excuse he was. He didn’t look familiar, though, and didn’t look young enough to be one of the underclassmen Cooper wouldn’t recognize.

“Yes,” he snapped, “people from Q-tech can
read
. We don’t combust when we walk into libraries. God, I hate the way you—”

“Whoa, whoa,
not
what I meant,” Cooper protested. “We
are
supposed to be in school today, so I told the librarian I was from Q-tech to stop her from getting on my case. I was just wondering if you had done the same.”

“Oh.” The hostile energy faded, replaced by an embarrassed-looking expression. “Sorry. I get a lot of grief from people who think only stupid people go to the vo-tech school.”

“I wanted to go there, actually,” Cooper admitted. “My parents said no.”

“My mother doesn’t really care where I go.” The other boy shrugged. “I’m Brent, by the way.”

“Cooper.”

“You look familiar. Football team, right?”

“Last couple years, yeah,” Cooper admitted.
But not this year
.

“That explains it,” Brent said. “I went to a few games last season. You’re the fast little guy.”

Cooper couldn’t help chuckling, since that was the exact description Coach used for him. At two inches shy of six feet tall, he had still been one of the lighter guys on the team. It was all right that he didn’t have a lot of weight to throw around, though, since he had good hands and quick feet. Or, he used to.

“Get hurt in practice?” Brent asked.

Cooper cringed. He had gotten so used to carefully shifting his weight when he had to kneel or sit, relying on his good knee and hip, he hadn’t given it any thought when he had slowly eased onto the floor next to Brent.

He just shook his head, and changed the subject. “So … anything good in here? I’m looking for stuff on ghosts.”

Brent paused before asking, “What kind of ‘stuff’? Haunted places? Poltergeists? Séances?”

“I’m kind of writing a book,” Cooper lied. “This guy’s being haunted and trying to figure out who the ghost is and how to help her. I thought I’d do some research.”

“Uh-huh.” The invented plotline apparently didn’t impress Brent much. At least, that’s what Cooper thought
until Brent added, “You’re a piss-poor liar. I don’t even know you and I know you just made that up. I hope you were a little quicker with the librarian or she’s probably called the truant officer already.”

“You think?” Cooper sat up, worried.

“Nah. Elise is cool,” Brent answered. “If she caught you at a movie or smoking somewhere she would call you on it in a heartbeat, but you’re in a
library
. She doesn’t care if you’re supposed to be in class.”

“Good to know.” Amused, Cooper asked, “You’re on a first-name basis with the librarian? Do you work here?”

“Work? No. Well, I volunteer sometimes. I practically live here when I’m not at school. I like the quiet.” Brent looked at the pile of books around him, as if he was trying to decide which to pick up next.

“A little light reading?” Cooper asked, wondering why anyone would be doing such dedicated research before the school semester began. He wondered if he should insist he had been telling the truth about the book he was writing, or if he could come up with a better excuse.

“Light by my standards,” Brent said, laughing a little. “I don’t think I believe in ghosts, but figured it might be interesting to research the phenomenon. But anyway. Your ghost. More of a specter, or a poltergeist?”

“You just said—”

“Yeah, I don’t believe for a minute you’re writing a book,” Brent interrupted. “And if you were looking up how
to make arsenic or something I’d worry. But
ghosts?
It’s an interesting topic for discussion, but not likely to get anyone in trouble. Now, let’s start basic. Is your ghost location-bound or person-bound? Oh, or object-bound? They’re all different.”

“Person-bound, I guess,” Cooper answered. Brent seemed like he could be helpful, and he wasn’t likely to talk to anyone Cooper knew, so it didn’t really matter why he was helping or what he thought Cooper needed the information for. “She goes wherever she wants, but this one guy is the only one who can see her.” He debated adding something about the shadows, but his gut seemed to twist when he even thought of them.

Brent didn’t notice his hesitation. “Oh!” he exclaimed, seeming more excited now. “Then your
person
might be the thing to focus on, not your ghost. Maybe he’s psychic. Does he see ghosts a lot?”

Cooper shook his head. “No, this is the only ghost.”

“Hmm.” Brent paused, looking at the books around him. “Well, there are a lot of stories about people who did something—a séance, or violated a graveyard, et cetera—and got haunted for that. Is your ghost angry?”

“No, just color-challenged,” Cooper mumbled, recalling Samantha’s outfits.

“What?”

“Never mind. No, she isn’t angry, but she’s frustrated that she doesn’t have a body.”

“So she knows she’s dead?”

Cooper nodded. “Oh yeah, she knows. She’s annoyed about it.”

“Young or old? Unfinished business? Maybe a tragic death, murdered and dumped somewhere, and no one’s found her body and she desperately wants to make sure she gets a proper burial. That’s a little cliché, though. Maybe she
was
the murderer or she kidnapped someone, only then
she
died, and her victim is trapped somewhere and she can’t rest until the victim dies—or is rescued. That would be a cool story.”

“Do you write?” Cooper asked.

“Nah, I’m not creative,” Brent replied, straight-faced. “But your ghost—”

“Doesn’t remember who she is or how she died,” Cooper said, before Brent could come up with another dozen scenarios. “But I think she’s young, our age, and from around here.”

“Huh.” Brent paused again. “Amnesiac ghost. Trauma can bring on amnesia, and death has to be pretty damn traumatic. I wonder if a ghost could get psychotherapy? Or hypnotized?”

“Let’s not go that route,” Cooper said, trying to derail what looked like it was about to lead into another list of possible plotlines.

“Well … I’d check obituaries,” Brent said. “You need to figure out who she is and why she might be hanging around.”