“Channeling?”
“Like what Monroe does. She couldn’t tell me what she knew, so she had to show me...the weather was violent around most of these images...that must be what she meant.”
My phone vibrated on my hip at that moment, causing me to jump. I reached for it with shaky hands to see Kara’s number on the Caller ID. I took in a deep breath and answered as calmly as I could. I didn’t want her to cancel her plans for the weekend; I wanted her to have fun.
“Hey,” I said as I answered.
“Hey. I was about to leave, but I didn’t want to leave Monroe here alone. Do you want me to take her to Nana’s on my way out?” Kara asked.
“No, I’m like ten minutes away.”
“Are you? OK. You sound out of breath,” she said in a concerned tone.
“Just ran longer today.”
“Alright. Well, I’ll leave then. Make sure you tell me or Mom if you guys go anywhere.”
I knew that ‘anywhere’ didn’t mean like to a movie or anything; she meant if I left for good.
“I’ll never be too far to see you, Kara. Promise.”
“Love you, little one.”
“Have fun. Love you,” I said as I hit ‘END’ on the call.
I found Draven’s name and texted: Don’t think I’m crazy, but a witch just stopped me and Madison – and btw six Escorts tried to kill me.
“That text will go over well,” Madison said as I hit ‘SEND.’
“Maybe then he’ll stay at my side. I don’t want him out of my sight, not with the mood Silas is in -- with witches jumping out in front of us.”
“We do sound ridiculous, don’t we?” Madison said as she closed her sketchbook.
“When we get home, you’re showing me what that woman showed you – like in real life. We’re going to see our way there,” I demanded as I pulled out on the main road again.
“I don’t think I can. It wasn’t like a permanent vision.”
“What do you mean?”
“It just wouldn’t sit still. I don’t even know if I had the order right when I sketched it. She just kept showing me those things, but they were moving too fast for me to hold on to them.”
“That’s how it is with Silas.”
“He must like witches. Either that, or he’s not worried about me,” she mumbled.
“Why did you say that?”
“Obviously, the undead boy can appear out of nowhere.”
I looked down at my phone, looking for a response from Draven, but there wasn’t one there.
“Watch the road,” Madison demanded as she tried to call someone. She hung up the phone and dialed another number. “They must be playing,” she mumbled as she dialed another number.
“Evan,” She said into her phone. “We’re fine, we just can’t get the boys to answer.” She listened for a second. “Are you sure they’re here, though? Not, you know, gone?” she listened again. “Alright, we’re going to Charlie’s. She sent a text to Draven that may make him upset, but we’re fine, OK?” She nodded once. “I promise – we’re fine. Bye.”
“A text that may make him upset? That’s an understatement,” I said, glancing at my phone again.
“Your bright idea to send it,” Madison said as she opened her sketchbook and began to add details to the images she’d made. “You know what? I bet Silas is the reason for that light this morning.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, gripping the steering wheel.
“Think about it. Escorts attract shadows to them. Obviously, we have a few guests in town. I’d bet you money that Silas has the power to help the whispers. What if he helped make them turn into light – leave, to make the Escorts weaker?”
“Since when are you Team Silas?”
“I’m not. It’s classic military procedure. Do you not watch movies? If he did that, he cut off their supplies. He was starving them out.”
“Well, if he can do that, he’s going to catch hell from me. I don’t know what you heard, but what I heard was more than I ever heard before. For him to help that many at once – he could have been helping them this whole time. With that kind of power, how could there be a shadow or whisper left?”
“Well, there’s no telling what it took for him to do that, and I don’t know what reality you live in, but in the world I live in, there’s more bad than good. Shadows outnumber us, no doubt.”
“What happened to that newfound ‘illumination love all act’ you’ve been going through?”
“Nothing. I’m serious. There are a lot of people that are sound asleep, drowning in their mundane lives. It doesn’t take much to create darkness, and I know I don’t get out much, but I don’t see people like Silas on every corner.”
“That could be a good thing.” I muttered.
“You wouldn’t say that if you were on the other side.”
“I’m on both sides. Why should one have to die for another to live?”
“There’s my Libra best friend, unable to take sides. Look, I agree with you about taking sides on this, but seriously, if we’re the only ones that know and understand that, the war will go on.”
“Not if we stop it.”
“It’s in The Realm.”
“What is?”
“The core of this evil. I swear The Realm is blocking something, or we’re not seeing the big picture. It’s a shared consciousness, which is what all those deep mythologists think we have in this world. What they think we don’t realize. Some of them even think dreams connect us to that on a subconscious level, and we both know The Realm is a lucid dream. For all we know, Bianca is a distraction from the bigger picture.”
“You’ve been reading too much,” I mumbled.
“Maybe. You should hear the things that go through my head sometimes. I know one thing: I don’t think there’s any such thing as coincidence. They’re footprints to our fate.”
“It would be nice to have nicer coincidences,” I said, nodding to the mile marker that said ’55.’
“Change might be good,” Madison said as she turned her attention back to her sketch.
I didn’t know if I agreed with that. The negative side of me would tell you that with all change, pain comes. The positive side of me would say that the pain is forgotten when the change comes. I knew one thing Madison was right about: The Realm was messing with our heads. I’ve caught myself wanting to move things or change things when we aren’t in that place. A few times, I could swear something did move or appear. My memories were messed up, too. Words or phrases would still cause them to spark; the only problem was that they would be memories of another life. I could almost remember every moment I spent with Draven in that past life, at least the good ones.
Draven remembers it all now. He knew who he was then, and I feared that he was forgetting our now and living in our then -- and that was a place that ended with both of our deaths.
Madison didn’t say anything the rest of the way to my house. When I parked in the garage, I had to nudge her to let her know we were home.
“That was quick,” she said as she reached for her phone, then began to answer a text.
“Is that them?” I asked.
She moved her head from side to side as she texted. “It’s my mom. She wants to have my birthday dinner tonight. She said Dad’s in town and so am I. I love how she makes all this out to be nothing,” Madison said, smirking slightly.
“Your birthday is still a few weeks away. Where was your dad?” I asked.
Her dad was a doctor, but he didn’t practice anymore; he led lectures at conferences and traveled just as much as, if not more than, my mom.
“He was in Washington. That’s probably why they were thinking of my birthday.”
“You were born there, right? By accident?”
“Yep. They were at a conference or something. My mom went into labor like a month early. So did some other lady. My dad delivered that baby, and the other doctor delivered me.”
“Dad a little squeamish when it comes to
his own baby being born?” I teased.
Madison smiled. “Maybe, but the story I was told was that I was breach or something and the other doctor knew how to save me without having to have a C-section. I guess it could have killed my mom because they were snowed in at the time.”
“Have dinner with them,” I said, feeling guilty that more than likely when Madison’s birthday did roll around, we wouldn’t be here.
“I told her I would. It’s only eleven. Dinner’s at eight, so let’s figure out what Monroe knows.”
“It’s only eleven? Man, it’s been a long day,” I said as I clipped my phone to my side before I got out of the car.
I heard my father’s guitar blaring an angry tune before I reached my back door. My stomach dropped. There was nothing worse than being scolded for something I had no control over.
The house was oddly dim. Through the kitchen I could see the open entry hall by the front door. Monroe had pulled back the Oriental rug that covered most of the hardwood floor. She was on her knees, doing something to the floor.
I glanced at Madison as I let my bag fall to the floor; she seemed just as nervous as I was to see what Monroe was up to.
With each step I took toward her, the guitar sound dwindled a little, which was confusing. I wasn’t sure if I was still in trouble or if Monroe was or if he just wanted me to hurry up and come in to see what she was doing.
At the threshold to the living room, I could see what she was doing, and it took my breath away. My heart pounded in my ears as I reached to grip Madison’s arm.
With what looked like white chalk, Monroe had recreated the devil’s trap that Madison had drawn minutes ago. The scorpion was perfect, and there wasn’t a flaw in the circle or the pentagram. The perfection in the image was not as terrifying as seeing this little girl kneeling in the center of it. The only light in the room was from candles that she’d placed around points of the pentagram.
“Monroe,” I said hoarsely. She didn’t look up until she finished the word she was writing. I walked slowly to her side and knelt down. “Why did you draw this?”
She looked around the room, then back at me. “I don’t want my dad to hurt yours.”
I swallowed hard and glanced around the room, looking for any sign of my dad, but he wasn’t there. The sound of the guitar was still aggressive, but not loud enough that I couldn’t hear Monroe’s innocent voice.
“Do you know what this is?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Is your dad coming here?” I asked.
“He’s going to follow you here.”
“Why?”
“To stop you.”
I looked over my shoulder at Madison to see her pacing back and forth, trying to remain as calm as possible.
“What does he want to stop me from?”
“Helping,” she whispered.
“Who? You? Others?” I asked.
“Everyone.”
“And this will trap him? Because of this, he won’t hurt us?” I asked.
“He can’t hurt your dad here.”
“Can he hurt me?” I asked in a shaky voice.
She reached for my arm. With her touch, I was pulled into The Realm. The stage that Draven and the others played on was in flames. The image flashed, and I saw thousands of shadows overtaking Draven as Bianca watched at a distance. My fear and anger caused me to lose my grip on that vision, and I found myself breathless in the center of the devil’s trap in my house.
“Charlie?” Madison asked.
I stood up quickly. “We have to see our way to The Realm. They’re being attacked!”
Monroe stood and reached for Madison. I thought she was going to show her, too, but instead she pulled her arm so she was in the circle with me.
“Stand here,” Monroe said quietly.
Madison nervously reached for my hand and squeezed it. I didn’t wait for my father to stop me, to play his song louder, to appear for any reason to stop me from saving Draven.
In an instant, we were there. This Realm was like a canvas. Nothing was ever permanent, and when you first enter it again, you see how you left it. So, I wasn’t surprised to find myself off to the side of a massive stage. I was surprised to find it empty and intact, though.
“What are we looking for?” Madison asked.
“The stage was burning in the vision.”
With my words, the stage erupted into flames and we ran away from it as fast as we could. Breathless, we stopped a half-mile away.
“There’s no way for us know if that happened on its own or if you did it with your thoughts,” Madison breathed out. “Don’t tell me what happened next because you’ll guarantee that it happens.”
I didn’t respond. I was so scared. I kept thinking about how mean I was to Draven the last time I saw him, how I refused to even kiss him goodbye.
Madison gripped my shoulders and shook me once. “Charlie, stop it. Clear your head. We have to witness or we’ll be trapped in your nightmare.”
I nodded once and focused on her eyes. The burning stage in the distance vanished, and we were in a field. The sky was a deep gray, and the blades of grass were long and orange. The wind was whistling by us.
“Nothing,” I whispered, frustrated. This was like the first layer of The Realm, what you saw if you had no intention.
“I see something,” Madison said in an angry tone.
I followed her stare, and in the distance I saw the silhouette of who could only be Bianca. I gripped Madison’s arm. “We aren’t following her – it’s a trap. She wouldn’t just appear that easily.”
“You’re right,” Madison said, forcing herself to look away from her. “What, then? Where do we go? Where would they be in here?”
“They were going to look for those guys. Maybe they started in a place that looked like where they were taken.”
“Do you remember it?”
“Yeah,” I said as I closed my eyes.
“That’s a little eerie,” Madison said in a shaky voice.
I opened my eyes slowly, and now on the horizon there was a massive castle-looking place. A stone wall surrounded it, and the building itself was at least eight stories high with balconies stretched out on different levels. The sky above this place was black and circling rapidly in place. Lightning would spider web across it every other second.
In one of the large windows that was a few floors up, I saw images. There was a massive balcony in front of it.
“Balcony,” I whispered.
Madison squeezed my hand, and in that instant we there. We crouched down in the shadows and peered in. There was a fireplace on the back wall, and an aggressive fire was raging within it. At first it was hard to make out the images in the glow of the room, but then I began to focus my eyes. There were three men and a woman, Bianca. They didn’t notice us. As the man in the center turned to his side, I saw that it wasn’t a man at all; it was a boy. It was Winston. At first I thought he was trapped, that they were questioning him or something, but he looked too calm, too at home where he was.
“That evil bastard,” I hissed.
“I don’t know; he may be just playing it cool,” Madison whispered.
Bianca began to circle Winston, looking him over seductively. Winston followed her path with hungry eyes. At that moment, the other two men turned into images of her.
I looked over my shoulder out at the field and imagined an explosion, and with my thought it appeared. The force rattled the stone palace we were at, and I looked back for any kind of response from Winston. If he were guilty, he would have shown fear; if he were trapped, he would have used the distraction to escape.
Bianca looked out the window, then her and the images of her vanished. Winston looked down and sighed; he almost looked disappointed.
“What now? Are we going in there?”
“Yup,” I said as the thought came to mind and I appeared in front of Winston. He jumped back, only to find Madison behind him.
“You’re not supposed to
be here,” he seethed.
“Says who? Draven? Or your girlfriend?”
“Says me! Why did you do that? I was so close!”
“To what?!”
“My family!” he said as he vanished.
“What the hell?” Madison said to me.
“I don’t know; maybe he was looking for his mom.”
“I’m not worried about Mom...Dad, that’s another ball game.”
A horrifying moaning echoed around us. I looked at Madison, then nodded for her to follow me. The sound was definitely a man, but I didn’t think it was Draven. When we reached the threshold of the room, we didn’t find a hallway; instead, another room appeared. I wasn’t really surprised by it. You never really moved far in this place before everything changed.
The room was so dark; it took me a second to focus my eyes. When I did, I had to hold my breath. This was the room the prince was in, and I could swear he was slouched against the far wall. It was too dark to see his face, so I had a second or two before Madison’s world came crashing down around her. The moaning wasn’t coming from him; it was coming from another boy lying across the floor. He was too shadowed for me to make out his features, but I could hear him clearly. It was like he was having a nightmare.
He was moving his head from side to side. “We leave together, or we die together,” he muttered. Then a second later, he said, “She’s not here! Watch out!”
Just as I went to step forward to wake him out of whatever illusion he was in, an icy chill blew past us. It was so cold that it was dark. Shivers spread across every inch of my body. Before I could say a word, ash began to spin before the images of the boys on the floor. Within that second, an image appeared. It was the evil angel that Madison had sketched. Its wings were dark, ashy, and stretched from one end of the room to the other. Its flawless face smiled slyly at us, daring us to move forward. It was a silent standoff; he was telling us that they belonged to him.
I was torn on what to do. If that was Draven or even Aden lying on the floor, I wouldn't care what was in my way; I would charge forward. But not knowing who those boys were -- or if they were even real -- made me hesitate. I was screaming at myself on the inside, telling myself that karma was a bitch and that if I didn’t help them, it would come for me, come back and hurt Draven. I boldly stepped forward.