Amelia Atwater-Rhodes - Token of Darkness

He tried to just be grateful she had let him off the hook. She had left him with an invitation to join her, or not, and absolutely no pressure either way.

“Who was that?” Samantha asked. “Girlfriend?”

Cooper shook his head and looked through the window to where Delilah and her friends were settling on benches with their backs to him. Delilah’s serial first-dates never included athletes.

“Did she hear me?” Samantha asked. “She did, didn’t she?”

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.

There 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.”