Amelia Atwater-Rhodes - Token of Darkness

Brent’s bones felt heavy and his muscles weak. His skin was too tight, and the air he drew into his lungs hurt. He tried to pull himself up by gripping one of the library shelves, but couldn’t lift his own weight.

As he waited for his muscles to stop twitching and for his body to feel less alien, he attempted to put his thoughts in order.

Cooper could see something, which he thought was a ghost—probably the girl Brent had briefly seen, after … whatever Cooper had done to him. What Brent was sure of was that Cooper’s actions had been accidental. Cooper had seemed horrified. Brent knew what it was like to have an unusual power, but not be able to control it.

But that didn’t make it his job to help other lost souls. He wasn’t responsible for this random guy he had just met in a library. Not at all. Cooper had his football friends. More importantly, he had Delilah. This could be her problem.

As soon as Brent could stand, he was going to go home and forget about Cooper Blake.

Hey, can you hear me?

“Huh?” He looked around, but as best as he could tell, the girl’s voice was coming from the picture on one of the books.

You saw me for a second, didn’t you? Can you hear me? Please?

“I can hear you,” he answered. His voice was raspy and speaking made him start coughing.

Yes! The jubilant cry made him wince and rub his temple.

“Not so loud,” he managed to say.

Sorry, she said in pretty much the same tone. But the only person I’ve been able to talk to in months is Cooper, and he’s a nice guy but he’s not very bright and sometimes he’s kind of boring, and I just don’t know how I …

As she spoke, the excitement in her voice never dimmed, but she seemed to be getting farther and farther away. She hadn’t lowered her “voice” but he strained to hear her, until in the middle of a sentence she just faded completely.

“Are you still there?” he asked.

No response, except for chills up his arms.

“Hello?”

Okay, the afternoon had officially turned into something out of a creepy horror movie. With a monumental effort, Brent forced himself to his feet. He was out of this scene. No more shouting hello at disembodied voices in empty rooms for him, thank you very much. He didn’t like to meddle with dark powers or witchcraft any more than necessary. He had only been researching ghosts as follow-up to a conversation with his mentor; he was perfectly happy to go through his life without ever seeing another one.

Brent was a little unsteady, but he managed to get to the stairs, and down them. The librarian gave him a worried look, and he heard her think, Bright boy, but so quiet, before he managed to block out anything else. Where did he park his car? He probably shouldn’t be driving in this condition, should he?

Maybe he should sit down somewhere … maybe get something to eat. His stomach felt all tossed up, but it was the kind of unsettled that solid food sometimes helped.

Enough ghost stories for him today.

He found his way to a little nearby bakery, but by the time he had paid for his cup of cocoa and bagel his vision was swimming. He was having trouble keeping his own thoughts focused, which meant he couldn’t keep anyone else’s out, either. He retreated to the courtyard nestled between the library’s old and new buildings, where a bunch of Eagle Scouts had built a beautiful garden almost no one else knew about.

He sat there, nursing the cocoa and centering himself until it didn’t sound like people were screaming all around him.

He remembered what it had been like when he first started hearing things other people couldn’t. He remembered how horrid he had felt, when he kept accidentally stumbling across people’s secrets—their wants, their fears. Their lies. Maybe it should have made him think less of other people. Instead, he had lost his faith in himself when he couldn’t stop listening. It was like peering in windows at night, and seeing people’s most private moments.

Even as a kid, Brent had had a knack for predicting what people were thinking or feeling. It wasn’t until he was fifteen that what he had always assumed was intuition had manifested as outright telepathy, and it wasn’t too long afterward that he had ended up in the hospital, completely overwhelmed. He always felt crowded, even when there were only two or three people in a room, because they were often so conflicted that their thoughts might include five or six voices each.

He had met Delilah about a year ago, after missing a good chunk of what should have been his sophomore year of high school. She had been the first person who had understood. It had been months before he got past his blind dependence and gratitude enough to question the fact that she seemed to have absolutely no interest in spending any time with him in public.

Oh, God, was he really going to subject Cooper to Delilah’s brand of help? He remembered all too well coming out of complete, terrified, helpless isolation and ending up in her hands. Yes, she had introduced him to Ryan le Coire, but she had also paraded him around like her newest project. She had put him back in the hospital for a while last spring after one of her magic experiments went disastrously wrong. He still didn’t know what she had been trying to do, since she had never attempted to ask his permission or explain. They just broke up, and had rarely seen each other since.

Brent wasn’t going to push Cooper to confide how or when he started seeing his ghost, and he definitely wasn’t going to put a hand on his shoulder—or anywhere near him if he could avoid it—in the future. But he could at least keep him out of Delilah’s grasp by introducing him directly to someone who would help. Ryan le Coire. While Ryan seemed at first glance like a normal guy, someone who could be a grad student, the twenty-six-year-old was actually a sorcerer. And, as Ryan put it, he was the heir to the most powerful human magics in the Western Hemisphere. Ryan had been able to teach Brent how to tune out some of the thoughts he heard, so he’d be less overwhelmed. Brent knew that Ryan didn’t believe in ghosts, but he certainly would know something useful.

There was too much pain radiating from Cooper’s body and mind, not to mention the darkness swirling around both him and his ghost, for Brent to just step back and pretend it was none of his business.

Cooper was still shaking when he reached his father’s shop. What had he done? He certainly wasn’t going back to school. He could barely walk, barely breathe.

“He saw me! And heard me!”

Cooper nearly screamed when Samantha suddenly reappeared. He jammed his thumb on the shop door and cussed, shaking his hand, as Samantha continued her joyous exultation.

“The guy from the library saw me,” she said. Cooper tried to look mellow as he crossed the shop and headed toward the back room. The girl working at the counter gave him a quizzical look, but let him by. “It was only for a moment, and he was pretty out of it, but he saw me, and then he could hear me.”

“‘Pretty out of it,’” Cooper grumbled, looking around for his father. “Because of what I did to him. I don’t even know what happened, but it was … I mean, what was that?”

“I don’t know, but it was cool, and I think you should experiment with doing it again,” Samantha answered as they both stepped into the back room.

“No!” Cooper nearly shouted, shocked that she would even suggest such a thing.

The back door opened and his father stepped inside from the employee parking lot where they kept the Dumpsters. He stopped, consulted his watch, and then gave Cooper a pointed look after confirming it was still during school hours.

“I’m not feeling well,” Cooper mumbled, hoping the extent to which he was pale and trembling made the excuse believable.