Chapter 9
The sun had not yet made its appearance when Arianna and Luke left the Main Street Motor Inn. Stars still ornamented the velvety abyss and the Moon had just begun its descent. They’d dressed and grabbed food from the takeout window of a fast-food restaurant before they’d resumed their drive to Rockdale. Luke had not mentioned their night together and Arianna wondered why. In fact, for the remaining two hours it had taken them to journey to the town she’d lived in just a few short weeks ago, Arianna had begun to fret about his silence on the subject. She had been reluctant to bring it up herself, especially since at the height of her arousal, Desmond had invaded her thoughts, and had become the subject of a sexual fantasy. Merely recalling the scenario, of her fantasizing about Desmond while making love to Luke, made her cheeks burn, guilt and discomfort conspiring against her. She was certain Luke had no way of knowing of her fantasy; he was not capable of mindreading. Yet, he’d acted as though he knew and had been oddly silent for much of the ride. He’d left the radio on, but it had not been playing so loudly that a conversation would have been impossible. She wondered whether he had been displeased with her sexual performance. He had seemed happy enough with it last night. But she didn’t know what he’d been accustomed to. Perhaps he was used to more adventurous interplay, or found her body unattractive.
Suddenly plagued with insecurities and doubts she was unacquainted with, she began to feel anxiety stir in the pit of her stomach. First, her little jealous schoolgirl episode at the diner had occurred, and now this. She was the Sola, possessed supernatural power and was designated to unite her fellow witches, yet was worrying over her boyfriend being quiet. It all seemed so absurd. Whatever his reason for silence, she was determined to not waste another moment fretting over it. They were headed to find Lily. Everything else would be addressed, or not, another time.
When finally they turned on to Lily’s street, the uncomfortable silence that had plagued Arianna for the two-hour drive had become unimportant. The white Victorian waited at the end of a long tree-lined street. A warning breathed at the back of her neck and tiptoed down the length of her spine. Lily’s house typically looked warm and inviting, but not today. Cloaked in thick fog, the steep roof pitches and pointed decorative gable trim assumed a hostile, foreboding quality. Mist veiled the entire neighborhood, covering it like a funeral shroud. It clung to the cedars that flanked the residential road causing their limbs to droop as if carrying the fog as they would the weight of wet snow. As they drew closer, Arianna immediately noticed that both of Lily’s parents’ cars were parked in the driveway. The digital clock on the radio read 7:45 a.m. Neither Lily nor her parents would have left for school yet. The presence of the cars should have been a promising development, but didn’t feel promising in the least. Something felt off.
“Looks like their home,” Luke commented and ended their silent streak.
“Looks like,” Arianna replied but couldn’t shake the feeling that something was not right. “But there are no lights on.”
“Maybe they’re still sleeping.”
“Sleeping in on a weekday? What about school and work?”
“Maybe they’re sick, who knows? Either way, I think you have your answer,” he said more gently.
The answer he thought she had was that Lily was fine, but no longer interested in maintaining a friendship with Arianna. What he did not know was that would have been the preferred answer to what her body, what every cell within her, screamed. Inside of her, it was as though an alarm wire had been tripped and silent sirens were wailing.
“I don’t have any answers,” Arianna said softly.
“You can do whatever you want. I’m not telling you what to do. We can go up to her front door and ring the bell. You know I’m with you. I just don’t want to see you get your feelings hurt, that’s all. I care about you.”
She thought it ironic for him to worry about her feelings after hurting them with his reticence for the two hours it took them to get from the motel to Lily’s, the motel they’d shared a bed in.
“I appreciate your concern, but I’ll be fine,” she said a bit more testily than she’d have liked. “And I highly doubt Lily’s going to slam the door in my face or something if that’s what you were implying.”
“I wasn’t implying that at all. It’s like I just said, I don’t want to see you get hurt.”
“Huh,” she huffed then mumbled under her breath, “That’s why you were so chatty on the ride up.”
To her surprise, Luke had heard her mumbling and replied to it. “I wasn’t the only one quiet in the car, you know,” he shot back staring straight ahead. “First I felt stupid, thought maybe you’d had too much to drink last night and regretted sleeping with me. I was sober, and nervous as hell, but you, you’re a lightweight. The beer must have hit you like a ton of bricks. When you didn’t say anything about it, I figured I’d better keep my mouth shut.”
He had no idea what she was, that alcohol had no effect on her whatsoever.
“I was sober and knew exactly what I was doing, thank you very much,” she argued. “And you’re my boyfriend, right? Keeping quiet was the worst thing you could do. I mean, with all the girls you’ve slept with, surely you know the silent treatment never goes over well.”
“What do you mean all the girls I’ve slept with? I haven’t slept with a lot of girls.”
“Oh give me a break,” Arianna huffed. “You expect me to believe that? You’re the badass guy that’s hot and knows how to fix shit. That’s the stuff of every girl’s fantasy.”
Except hers apparently.
“Arianna, you’ve only been at our school for what, two weeks?”
“Yeah, so?”
He turned in his seat to face her. “So, you may think you know what goes on there, but you don’t. Our school is divided into social classes. In the small group I’m in, yeah, I suppose I’m a stud. But beyond them, I’m a fucking leper. I smoke. I drink. I have tattoos. And it’s no secret my mom’s a goddamn junkie. None of that nominates me as prom king,” he said.
“Bullshit,” Arianna said.
“Bullshit?” he asked incredulously. “Arianna, you’re the second girl I’ve ever slept with, okay,” he admitted, his cheeks suddenly streaked with scarlet bands. “And you’re the hottest girl I’ve ever seen. I have no idea why you even did it. Every guy at school wants you.” He refused to meet her gaze, chose instead to stare at his lap.
She was shocked. For all his flirtation and macho bravado, he had been unsure all along. The way he’d behaved, his hot and cold moods and his overt attempts at seduction, had seemed like things a hormonally charged playboy would have done. But he was not a playboy at all. He was vulnerable.
She reached out and took his hand in hers. “Hey,” she said and craned her neck to look into his eyes. “Hey, last night happened because I wanted it to, because we wanted it to. All that other stuff doesn’t matter. All the bullshit at school, all the bullshit in your head, it’s just that: bullshit.”
He didn’t reply, just smiled thinly and blew out a small puff of air through his nose. He looked sad, and his sadness made her chest ache. Without thinking, she yanked his hand toward her, pulling him to her side of the car, and kissed him. At first, he kept his lips closed. But she swept his lips with her tongue playfully then nibbled his lower lip. Finally he smiled then returned her kiss.
Their kiss continued for several seconds and was passionate. Luke had returned from whatever brooding doldrums he’d hidden in and she was sad when it ended. Now it was time to find out, once and for all, what had happened to Lily.
“My, my, Arianna, you have a knack for improving my mood,” he said and smiled warmly. “Are you ready to do this?” He nodded toward Lily’s house.
“As ready as I’ll ever be, I guess,” she said and felt anything but ready.
They climbed out of his pickup truck and out into the mi
asma. Somewhere beyond the clouds and fog, the sun waited, prepared to rid the area of the seemingly impenetrable murk that had besieged it. Luke took her hand in his and walked alongside her. She watched as the fog licked at his body like innumerable serpentine tongues, their silky, sinuous shapes passing over and under him menacingly. She willed the sun to burn through the clouds, to incinerate the spectral vapors, but as far as she knew, she did not possess the capability to raise the sun.
Arianna and Luke walked up the driveway and walkway and stopped on the large front porch. She rang the doorbell and waited for a response. After nearly a minute had passed, she rang again.
“Cool it with the doorbell,” Luke advised. “Give them a chance to get to the door.”
But she did not hear movement inside. The street was quiet, unnaturally so, and had someone been moving inside the house, she would have heard it thanks to her newly enhanced hearing. She stood perfectly still and focused on the area beyond the walls, listening for conversations, for water running, for movement, breathing, anything. But the house was completely still. She quickly stepped back from the door and scanned the porch, searching for a ceramic frog.
“What’s the matter?” Luke asked perplexed.
“I’m looking for something,” she said.
“Okay I get that, but what?”
“A frog, I’m looking for a frog,” she said as she moved to the far corner of the porch. “This frog as a matter of fact,” she said as she lifted a weathered gray frog that rested against the front of the house between two gnomes. Beneath it was a key.
“Are you kidding me?” Luke asked. “People actually leave a key to their house on the front porch?”
“Yeah, they do.”
“Seems really stupid to me.”
“Well, maybe to us, but does this look like my neighborhood or yours for that matter?”
“No,” he replied and she watched as his eyes examined the stately houses and the luxury cars that sat in front of them. “I guess not. But still, thieves target neighborhoods like this. They prey on trusting fools like them.”
Arianna bristled at his implication that Lily and her family were fools. Regardless of his thoughts on the subject, suggesting they were anything less than the kind and decent people they were seemed harsh.
“They’re not fools, okay. They’re decent people,” she snapped.
Luke raised his hands in surrender. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”
She didn’t say anything further. She knew he hadn’t meant for his comment to be offensive. Instead, she moved toward the door again and pushed the key into the lock.
“What’re you doing?” Luke panicked. “We can’t just barge into their house. They’re home! Their cars are here.”
Arianna spun around and trained her gaze on him. “If you’d like to wait in the car, be my guest. I’m not forcing you to come in. But my friend and her family could be hurt and I’m going in to find out.”
“If you’re worried, call the police,” he argued.
“Not yet,” she replied. “I’m going in.”
“I guess I’m coming too,” he huffed. “I can’t let you go by yourself.”
Arianna turned the handle of the front door and pushed it inward. “Lily? Mr. and Mrs. Andrews? Anybody home? Hello?” she called.
No one answered. She stepped inside with Luke behind her.
“Lily?” she called out louder. “Is anybody home?”
She began walking down the center hallway. The kitchen lay ahead while a formal dining room waited to the right. The house was completely quiet save for the ticking of a grandfather clock coming from the living room to the left and the faint whirring of the refrigerator.
“Mr. and Mrs. Andrews?” she shouted. “It’s me, Arianna Rose!”
No one replied.
“No one’s here, Arianna,” Luke said and tugged at her arm.
“Then why are the cars here?” she asked.
“I don’t know, but this place, how quiet it is, is freaking me out. Let’s get out of here.”
“No!” Arianna said sharply. “Something doesn’t feel right. I’m going upstairs.”
She started to move away from him toward the staircase. He reached out and gripped her upper arm. “Wait. You’re right. Something does feel off here. All the more reason to, I don’t know, put in an anonymous call to the police department or the fire department.”
“I’m not waiting around for anyone,” she replied. “If they’re hurt, we may not have time to wait.”
She turned to leave again, but he spun her around. “And we’re going to do what exactly?” he asked, annoyance creeping into his tone.
“I, well, I don’t know,” she stammered.
“Exactly. And neither do I. So let’s just call the police. Do you have your phone?”
“No. I left my bag in your truck.”
Luke patted his pants pockets searching for his phone. “Mine’s in the truck, too,” he said. “Let’s go get them, or better yet, call from there.”
She paused a moment and looked around, feeling the strange rise and fall of energy, slow and steady like the chest of a sleeping beast. “Fine,” she finally gave in. Or so she’d led Luke to believe.
She waited and watched as he turned to leave before she stole up the steep staircase. Luke was halfway to the door before he turned and realized she had tricked him.
“Damn it Arianna!” he yelled and scrambled up after her.
He reached the top of the stairs just a few steps after her and must have taken them two at a time. He grabbed her arm again and turned her to face him. “That was not right,” he said, his eyes hardened. “We don’t know what is going on here and you pull shit like that?”
“Sorry,” she said and made no attempt at sounding sincere.
“Yeah, you really sound it,” he said sarcastically.
She stood on her tiptoes and pressed her lips to his. “Oh don’t be mad,” she attempted. “We’ll just do a quick check then get out of here. We will call the cops as soon as we get to the truck.”
Luke narrowed his eyes at her as if assessing whether or not she was telling the truth. When he felt satisfied she was telling the truth several seconds later, he released her from his gaze and smiled. “Okay, okay” he agreed.
“Okay,” she echoed him and walked to Lily’s room.
They stepped inside and Luke immediately commented on the décor.
“Whoa! This room is like, I don’t know, a dream or something,” he observed. And he was right. Arianna had always loved Lily’s room. The striking midnight blue walls with Sun and Moon ceramic wall hangings and floor-length gray drapes with matching gray bedding, though dramatic and unusual, were whimsical. Shimmering stars in silver and gold tones of metal hung from beaded strands from the ceiling just over Lily’s bed.
“I know,” Arianna nodded. “I always loved sleeping over here.”
“I can see why,” he said as his eyes scanned the room.
The room looked neat, far neater than Lily had ever kept it. Every knickknack was in place and looked freshly dusted and polished. The bed was made so meticulously it looked as though a hotel chambermaid had done it. Lily had never liked to make her bed, had usually left it unmade, in fact. The sudden change set off warning bells inside Arianna. Ignoring the bed for the moment, she crossed the room and walked toward the window. For reasons she could not explain, she felt drawn to it. She pushed the curtain aside and peeked out. As she did so, an image jolted her. She felt suddenly terrified and began to tremble. The fog outside wavered briefly before it was replaced by bright light, blindingly bright light. Her breathing came in shallow pants and she felt the urge to run, to search for Mr. and Mrs. Andrews.
She bolted out of the room past Luke.
“Arianna!” he called, alarmed. But she did not stop. She went straight to Lily’s parent’s bedroom.
The room w
as empty, just as Lily’s had been and possessed the same sterile quality; it was neat, too neat, and smelled of cleaning product. She stopped at the foot of their bed and her heart pounded frantically. A vision flashed in her mind’s eye, a vision of Lily’s parent’s lying in a pool of blood where she stood. She stifled the scream that begged to escape her throat and walked on unsteady legs to the window. The backyard beyond it, though enveloped in fog, looked different. She could plainly see a patch of grass on the otherwise scrupulously maintained lawn had been burned, its shape a near-perfect circle.
“Oh my God,” she whispered.
“What is it?” Luke asked, concerned.
“There,” she pointed to the grass.
“What am I looking at?” he asked, confusion in is voice.
“The grass has been burned in an almost perfect circle.”
He moved his head closer to the pane of glass and strained his eyes against the mist beyond it. “Holy shit,” he murmured. “What the hell? Why would anybody do that?”
“I don’t know,” she said. But an instinctive awareness drifted across her skin like a sigh of warm breath.
She took Luke’s hand in hers and pulled him out of the room toward the top of the staircase. She ran down the stairs and turned down the center hallway once she reached the bottom. She ran straight through the kitchen and opened the sliding glass door that led from it to the backyard. She stepped outside and walked until she stood upon the burnt grass.
Standing near the center of the scorched patch of grass, Arianna was hit with a surge of energy unlike any she’d ever felt. A dark, sinister force crashed against her. It felt like a million needles piercing her skin at once. She felt pain immediately, pain and heat. Burning heat started low and rolled up her body with a flash of intensity, singeing her cells. She felt her feet burning, felt flames licking at them, writhing and blistering up her ankles and calves. She cried out, heard the sound tear from her throat, but was powerless to stop it. She no longer felt in control of her body. She knew that Luke waited somewhere along the edge of the charred circle of grass, knew that he’d heard her scream, but he began to fade. The world around her began to fade. Blackness taunted the edges of her vision and the low clouds that occupied the early morning sky began to spin round and round, threatening to send her off balance. Her legs buckled beneath her. She dropped to the hard, unforgiving earth on her knees and for a moment, the world fell completely silent. She no longer heard anything but the surge of her own blood through her veins. An acrid stench began to fill her nostrils, smoke and sulfur mixed with something else, something like hair and oil burning. The smell tore the air from her lungs and made it difficult for her to breathe. She gasped for breath, yet every attempt she made was strangled by air so heavy, so blackened and foul she could not seem to fill her lungs. She struggled against the blackness that beckoned her, and felt rage fill her. Her entire body began to tremble. Sweat trailed down her form, hot and cold contending. She squeezed her eyes shut, tried to force back the scorching heat that had reached her thighs. When she lifted her lashes, a face appeared before her eyes.
The face was monstrous. Charred and puckered, his complexion was a patchwork of pitted skin in varying shades of brown, gray, pink and red. His mouth snarled and he glowered at her with sunken, slate-colored eyes devoid of eyelashes and eyebrows. He spoke to her, words that were muddled and indistinct. She strained to hear them, but could not concentrate, for something else was happening. His dark energy shot through her body, clawed its way through her muscles and bones. She did not know who he was or where he’d come from, but she knew what he wanted; he wanted her dead. His hatred of her was palpable, throbbing and pounding like a heartbeat. She blinked and fortified her resolve, pushed back against his encroachment. A tingling sensation of success raced through her. She clung to it like a lifeline and pushed harder until his putrid face vanished altogether.
“No!” she cried out, the guttural cry of a warrior.
She heard Luke’s voice, felt his touch jerk her back to reality. “Arianna!” he shouted.
“They killed her, Luke,” she heard herself say before sobs overtook her. “They burned her to death right here!”
“What?” he asked bewilderedly. “Who burned her to death? H-how could you possibly know that?”
Even in the gray light of the overcast morning, she could see the confusion etched on his face, the worry in his eyes.
“I saw it happen just now. I felt her pain. And I’m sure they’re coming for me next.”