Alight The Peril (22 page)

Angeline?
I tried to keep my mental “voice” at a whisper.
If you can hear me, focus on the cove. Pretend like you’re following my voice here, like you’re moving through your own dream. Imagine what it looks like at night, deserted, except for me and Mason. It’s quiet, and the lake is still.

I waited for half a minute, listening for signs of Ang or Sophie’s arrival.

Oh, shoot!
Ang’s telepathic voice came from far away.
I’m awake now. You might as well come back.

I woke myself up and sat up on my bed. Ang and Sophie both sat cross-legged on the floor. Mason opened his eyes and sat up, too.

“Sorry,” Ang said. She wove her fingers into her hair in frustration. “I did kind of doze off, and I started imagining the cove. I thought I was there for a second, but then I woke up.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “We’re just experimenting, still trying to figure out how to do this.”

“Maybe we could wait until tonight, when they really are asleep?” Mason said to me. “You could try again with both of them. I guess I’m not much help here since I’m not linked with them.”

“Good idea,” I said. I looked at the girls and grinned. “Get ready to have your dreams invaded.”

“That’s creepy, Corinne.” Sophie said. “You can’t really see into my dreams, can you?”

I remembered her disapproval of the influences. “No, I don’t know how to do that. Speaking of dreams, though, I had a conversation with my grandmother.”

I told them about Quicksilver, and Grandma Doris’s warning about the army. All three of them grew wide-eyed as I spoke.

“I hate to just drop this on you, but I thought you should know,” I said. “I’m really hoping my grandmother comes back with more about this, or some kind of advice about what we should do. And she said nothing will happen until the winter solstice, anyway, so we have plenty of time.”

We all sat there in silence for a moment, considering the gravity of it all.

“So we should pretty much party it up this summer, because it could be our last?” Sophie said. She gave me a sardonic smile.

The sound of my own laughter surprised me. “Sure, why not?”

***

Later that night, I stood alone at the cove in the hypercosmic realm, and I reached out to Sophie through our link. She felt far away here, the connection between us much fainter than in the waking world. It was a delicate balance, trying to get her attention without waking her.

I began with my telepathic “voice” at a whisper.
Sophie, it’s Corinne. Focus on the cove, try to follow our link to where I am.

I repeated the message every few seconds.

The crunch of footsteps sounded behind me, and our link felt stronger, closer.

I turned to her with a triumphant grin, and she grinned back. We stood together, facing the dark, still water.

“This is so peaceful,” she said.

“Sometimes I come here just to get away,” I said. “Well, I’m a little more cautious ever since Harriet ambushed me. You probably shouldn’t try to come here without me.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t.” Sophie shivered, and she glanced over her shoulder.

“I’m not sure how to send you back other than just waking you up,” I said. “So, I’m going to wake up and call your cell, okay? I’ll be gone only a few seconds, and then you’ll hear your phone.”

“Okay.” Her eyes darted around the dark beach.

“I promise, it’ll be really fast,” I said, and, in a blink, I returned to my own bedroom.

I reached for my phone and dialed her number, and she answered before the second ring.

“Hey, Corinne,” she said, and let out a relieved breath.

“Hope you can get back to sleep,” I said. “ ‘Night.”

“ ‘Night. See you tomorrow.”

I tried to pull Ang into the hypercosmic realm, but like before, she woke up too soon. I didn’t want to pressure her, but the sooner I could successfully bring the whole union together in the dream world, the sooner we could put Harriet out of action for good. We really needed to get it right.

|| 25 ||

THAT WEEKEND, AUNT DOROTHY gathered us at the cove for another drill. Mason, Ang, Sophie, and I assumed our usual positions around the meadow, waiting for whatever test or horror that weird piece of grooved wood conjured for us.

See anything?
I asked Mason. He’d say something if he did, of course, but nerves made me want to chat. I stole a peek at him. He stood alert, his hands at his sides, hazel eyes searching.

Nothing but flowers and blue sky.

I went back to searching the meadow for anything out of the ordinary. Sweat trickled down from my hairline, and I dragged the back of my hand across my forehead. It was nearly eighty degrees, unusually hot for this time of year.

So you talked to Zane lately?
Mason asked. My gaze whipped to him, but he was half turned away from me, watching the tree line.

Um, no, not in a while.
I swallowed.
Why?

Just curious. Seems like you were meeting up in the dream world a lot there for a while.

It was just a few times, and he—

“There!” Mason interrupted me and pointed toward the trees.

I squinted into the shadows, searching for movement or something that didn’t belong.

“I don’t see it,” I said.

“It’s like . . . a huge chunk of clear ice moving through the air.”

I frowned and looked again.
You guys see a giant ice cube?
I asked Ang and Sophie through our link.

We’re making a net, going to try to bag it up,
Sophie said.

“Crap, I still don’t see it, Mason.” I took a few steps forward just as a sheet of silver-blue static blew by me. For a split second I caught a glimpse of it, but then realized I was seeing it from Mason’s vantage point.

Two more sheets of static at different angles followed the first one, and I saw the Guardians’ net flicker through the air, fold into a ball, and shrink into itself until it winked out.

Ang let out a whoop of victory, and I turned to Mason. “Okay, what happened?”

“I sort of gathered the cloud together, then I assume the girls netted it and somehow dissolved it.”

“Wait,” I said. “You managed to do all that without talking to Ang or Sophie, and without being able to see their net?”

He grinned at me, squinting against the glare of late-morning sun, and we turned to join the others at the edge of the meadow. “Yeah, guess so.”

“That was an interesting one,” Aunt Dorothy said. She surveyed my three friends with a look of approval. “You made short work of it.”

“I couldn’t even see the thing. I was completely useless,” I wailed, throwing my hands up and letting them drop. “What went wrong?”

“Oh, I don’t think anything went wrong,” she said. “That may have been the point of the drill.”

“Awesome,” I muttered. I’d learned one thing from the drill: I
loathed
being excluded from the action.

Our session ended after only one drill because I needed to catch a ride with Dad to Danton. He’d hired help for a few hours today so he could leave the café and visit Bradley. I, of course, had a bag full of tincture to distribute to all the Tapestry kids who’d been hospitalized.

During the drive, I stared out the passenger window, my eyes losing focus as trees and signposts whizzed past. I wouldn’t have many more chances to visit the kids in the hospital before the solstice.

Combining and using the influences was second nature to me now. I was a painter, taking dabs of the different colors, mixing and swirling them together on instinct, with an ease and precision I’d never imagined possible. It was partly due to practice, probably, but just as Aunt Dorothy had promised, my abilities seemed to be growing as we neared the summer solstice. My links with the others also developed and deepened in unexpected ways. At times, I could even see what they saw and hear what they heard.

All of the sick kids I’d been treating with tincture and now with influences, too, had made at least a little progress, and I wanted to cry with relief. But the sense that I was merely addressing the superficial manifestation of a deeper evil loomed over me every day. This outbreak of strange illnesses—even Bradley’s cancer returning—was just the first small stirring of what was to come. My little bottles of tincture weren’t really protecting any of us.

Lulled by the sound of the road under the tires, my eyes slipped closed. I woke to the sensation of falling. Not falling in the normal plummeting-to-earth sense, but a slow descent, like a pebble sinking to the bottom of a deep, still lake.

I tried to make out my surroundings in the impossibly dense darkness. I tried to raise my hands and . . . nothing. I had no hands to raise. I began to doubt that I had eyes, either. Maybe I should have been panicked, but instead I felt detached . . . calm.

Music. Why had I not noticed it right away? I listened, and what I heard made my heart—or what served as my heart here—ache at its beauty. It wasn’t a tune I’d heard, and yet, somehow, it was one I recognized.

I listened as the melody wandered and soared and rang right through me. It sang to me.
About
me. Somehow, it contained the essence of every moment of my life, every fiber of my being, as if composed by someone who had an impossibly intimate knowledge of me.

I wanted to breathe it in, bathe in it, carry it with me.

Then, a bump, and another, like turbulence during air flight, and the song changed. I listened for several moments. The low notes, the undertones, still felt familiar. But the melody did not belong to me. It was more seasoned . . . warm . . . and somehow more complete. It was my grandmother’s song.

Another shift, and a new song. The same low, droning tones as the previous two. And the melody seemed to combine elements of both songs. Who did it belong to? I could almost grasp it. I strained, feeling for a telltale run or refrain. It was so familiar, I wanted to reach out and draw it into my own song, allow them to run alongside each other like two wild horses racing across a plain. If I could grasp it, gently, gently, maybe I could take it with me, combine the two into a melody that would swell so huge with its beauty, every molecule in the universe would vibrate with its song.

“Honey, wake up. We’re here.”

I opened my eyes at my dad’s voice, but I didn’t move. I yearned to hold onto the songs. My heart told me they held the key to something I needed. But the meaning danced and slipped and faded from my mind like dandelion fluff lifted high on the wind.

As I moved through the halls of the hospital, depositing tincture in water pitchers and scanning the patients to see if they’d improved since my last visit, I tried to recapture my dream. Snippets of music came to me, but I couldn’t make any further sense of them.

When my parents went to the hospital cafeteria for coffee, I scooted a chair close to my brother’s bed. His hair lay flat against his head, messy and matted in a way he would completely freak over if circumstances were normal.

“Is it working?” he said, his voice so low, it was almost a whisper.

“Yeah, it’s just taking some time.” I tried to give him an encouraging smile, but my heart wrenched. His pale face and the dark shadows under his eyes were too much like my vision in the bonfire.

“They’re giving me chemo, and then sending me home,” he said.

“Good. I mean, about the coming home part. It will be better if I can see you every day instead of only once a week. I can help you more that way,” I said. “And . . . and I just really want you to be home with us.”

“Me too,” Bradley said. “You talked to Sophie lately?”

“Yeah, I saw her this morning. She’s coming to visit you tomorrow.”

The shadow of a smile spread across his chapped lips.

“So the two of you are BFFs now, huh?”

I snorted. “Not exactly.”

When I got home, I logged into the All Unions message board.

This is going to sound weird, but I just had a dream about music. But the music was more than just music. The song I heard was . . . mine. I don’t know how else to put it. I also heard my grandmother’s song. And then a third one that I couldn’t put an owner to. I’m trying to remember the dream in more detail, but also understand what it meant. I can’t shake the feeling that it’s important. Anyone know what these songs are or how they can help me?

I posted my message and then stared at the screen, willing a response to appear. After a few minutes, I sighed, grabbed my phone, and dialed.

My great-aunt answered.

“Aunt Dorothy, have you ever had dreams about songs?” I asked.

“I’m not sure what you mean, my dear.”

I described everything I could remember.

“Ah, what you heard was fairy song,” she said. “I’ve never heard it myself, but Doris spoke of it.”

“What does it mean?”

“My guess is that it is a relic left from a long-ago time, perhaps the echoes of the songs’ creators through the hypercosmic realm.”

“That’s all?” I didn’t try to hide the doubt in my voice.

“Yes, my dear, as far as I know.”

It had to be more than an echo of a dead civilization, I was sure of it. But I wasn’t certain whether my great-aunt really didn’t know more or if she just didn’t want to tell me. Maybe this was another one of those things she thought I shouldn’t worry over.

I spent the next day, Sunday, visiting several of my patients in their Tapestry homes. We’d stopped Sunday family dinners when Brad went into the hospital, which gave me more time to work on the sick kids.

Only four days of school left. And summer solstice was only two weeks away.

|| 26 ||

THE LAST FEW DAYS of my sophomore year passed in an anticlimactic blur. Prior to this semester, I’d always completed every assignment and studied for every test, and my GPA never fell below 3.5. But now, my ability to do geometry proofs or recall details of the Industrial Revolution seemed laughably unimportant. Final exams were a little blip in my life. I knew my teachers and parents accepted my slipping grades without comment because of my brother’s illness.