Alive at Sunset (Rituals of the Night Series Book 2) (6 page)

Luna forced herself to wake up the rest of the way. She wanted to know who was hovering around their apartment that early in the morning. Determination filled her mind, and she stumbled as quickly as she could to the door. In that moment, she wished that her door had a peephole. She wrapped her fingers around the knob but wasn’t too sure of opening it. She composed herself, a moment of mental preparation, and pulled open the door; there was no one on the porch.

Rain splattered on the ground as the sky continued to pour out its grievances. The sky was dark, still heavy with clouds. The light of the late sunrise barely shone through. Luna blinked and glanced around, trying to find the source of the knock. Finally, her eyes dropped to the porch.

She froze, petrified. She noticed a heavy black mound lying there, soaked with rain. It was hard to distinguish what it was from where she was standing. Luna bent down beside it and ran her hand over it.

Instantly, she knew it was Lucky.

L
una let out a choked sob and picked up the dog’s limp body. The dead weight was unreasonably heavy, but she carried her inside and saw Amanda standing in the middle of the kitchen. Amanda’s eyes grew wide at the sight of Lucky. For a minute, all she did was stare.

“What happened?” she asked finally.

“I don’t know,” Luna admitted with tears running down her face as her dog’s drenched fur soaked her bedclothes. She hardly noticed it as her mind focused on her dog.

Amanda moved out of the way as Luna stepped into the kitchen. She set Lucky on the floor beside the kitchen table and both girls stared at the dog, horrified. Tears streaked Luna’s face as she petted the limp dog’s side gently. Lucky didn’t move; she didn’t twitch under Luna’s touch like she did when she was sleeping. She stayed perfectly still on the hard tiled floor.

“I-is she dead?” Amanda asked from a few feet away. She was peering towards the dog cautiously like she thought she might rear up and suddenly attack.

Luna wasn’t cautious. She was grief-stricken. She ran her hand over the front of the dog’s neck and noted the odd, ripped feeling of the skin. She pulled her hand back quickly to see that it was covered in bright red blood.

“Yeah, she is,” Luna replied finally. She set her hand gently under the dog’s chin and pushed her limp head up. She glanced at the wound she had accidentally touched. Seeing it, she knew that there was no way she would’ve survived.

“I wonder what happened,” Amanda said quietly. “She was perfectly fine last night.”

“She-she must’ve gotten out while we were asleep and got hit by a car. Whoever did it probably left her on our porch. She has tags on, they probably didn’t know what else to do,” Luna said, sobbing again. The fact that the only injury that could be seen on Lucky was a fatal slash across the throat didn’t register with her.

“That
could
be what happened,” Amanda said frowning. “But the thing is, how did she get out?”

Luna shrugged. “Accidents happen.”

“Maybe,” Amanda said, sounding critical.

Luna glanced up at her from where she crouched on the floor. She knew that Amanda was sad too, but it seemed as if she thought Lucky’s death was strange.

Luna ran the back of her hand against the side of Lucky’s face, savoring the feeling of her fur even though it was soaked and freezing. She was glad the semester was over. She had the whole day to bury Lucky and grieve.

Luna stood up, her gaze focused on the floor. She hoped that at any minute, Lucky would hop to her feet and bound out of the room. But of course, she didn’t move an inch -she was dead. Luna walked away towards the bathroom, her steps stiff as she felt suddenly numb inside.

“Luna?” Amanda asked her uncertainly.

Luna didn’t hear her as she went into the bathroom and shut the door. What she needed in that moment more than anything was to be alone. She collapsed beside the white bathtub and cried. Tears stained her face, stinging the corners of her eyes, leaving them feeling as dry as sandpaper as she sobbed into her hands.

Why did this have to happen?

                            ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Luna wiped her forehead with the back of her hand to take away the sweat that had collected there in the past hour. She went back to carefully filling in the hole where Lucky lay. Her hands were covered in dirt all the way up to her elbows, and her face was as well. After she finished up, she wanted to do nothing but take a shower and go to sleep. Hopefully, she’d dream of happier times.

The sky overhead was still heavy with clouds, but it had stopped raining. She didn’t know how much time Mother Nature would leave her to give her pet a decent funeral, but she took advantage of the rain’s respite. Luna set the shovel down beside the hole and shoved a stake of wood into the ground to serve as a grave marker. It wasn’t much to look at, but at least it was something to hang Lucky’s collar on. She sighed as she picked up the shovel again and looked at the single dirt patch that marked her dog’s final resting place.

It wasn’t right that Lucky would have to stay out there all by herself. She hadn’t been an outdoor dog, but she would be outside forever. Luna felt another tear drip from her eye and cling to the dirt that streaked her face. She threw down the shovel; all intent of bringing it back inside was forgotten. She ran in the apartment and was glad Amanda wasn’t in the living room. She didn’t want her to see her come into the apartment in her frenzied state.

Luna trudged into the bathroom and shut the door quickly behind her. She turned on the hot water and stripped off her muddy clothes to the clear white floor. She’d worry about the mess later. Luna hopped in quickly and stood beneath the hot water. The water ran off brown chunks into the clean white bathtub.

She watched it run down the drain until the water ran clean against the basin once again. Her heart was still gripped in heavy grief that she didn’t see having relief from. But at least she could feel some of the tension in her shoulders loosening. Suddenly, she heard a knock on the bathroom door. It brought her out of her thoughts and back to the present, back to reality and back to her burden of grief.

“What is it?” Luna asked, peering around the shower curtain to look at the door.  She wondered what Amanda had to say that couldn’t wait until
after
she had finished her shower.

Amanda popped the door open a crack before she spoke. “Your phone was ringing so I answered it for you. This boy really wants to talk to you, Luna. It sounds important.”

“Oh, okay. Thanks, Amanda,” Luna said, feeling as though she already knew what boy her friend meant. “Set it on the sink and leave it on speakerphone.”

“Alright,” Amanda said. She set the phone on the sink across the room and closed the door behind her.

“Hello?” Luna called to the phone as she resumed her shower.

“Hey, Luna,” Max’s voice poured from the speaker and echoed around the room.

“What are you calling for this time, Max?” Luna asked, slightly paranoid that he would pick up the conversation from where it had last left off. Knowing Max, that was exactly what he was planning to do.

“To talk to you, Luna,” he replied, not sounding offended. His tone sounded light like he only called for small talk. Luna knew better. He always called for a reason, a very specific reason.

“About?” she inquired.

“We might have a slight problem in DreamWorld, remember?” Max replied. “You can’t have forgotten already. Luna, I know you don’t want to hear it, trust me I don’t either, but if something
is
wrong then I need you to help me. I can’t do this alone.”

“’If’? What do you mean ‘if’?” she asked, scrunching up her face as she washed the shampoo out of her hair. “If you’re not even sure there’s a problem then I don’t want to worry myself for nothing.” She wouldn’t let herself believe Max was right. Things were bad enough without worrying about things that
might
happen.

“I know. But I’m convinced there
is
a problem,” Max said. “I still have that feeling that something’s wrong.”

“Have you actually
seen
anything that proves that something is wrong?” Luna asked tiredly.

“Honestly, no, but I’ve visited a part of DreamWorld that I haven’t been in before. There’s a field with haze and a bright light,” Max said. “I’m convinced that it’s telling me that Chance has his memory back.”

Luna stiffened at his description as she remembered that she had had the same dream before the one about Chance himself.

“Luna?” Max asked.

“I’m here,” she whispered.

“What are you thinking?” he asked, sensing that something was bothering her.

“I had that same dream.”

“Then I’m convinced it definitely means something,” Max said. “When we both had the same dream before, you knew to take it seriously.”

“It was just some haze in a field. It’s nothing life threatening like before,” Luna said, feeling hostile as memory of that night engulfed her. “In the dreams we had before, we saw people
die
.”

“Yes, but don’t you think it’s a little weird that we’ve had the same dream once again?” Max asked.

“Come on, Max. I thought we’ve been through this already. I don’t want to hear it today,” Luna said.

“But-“ Max tried to interrupt her.

“I’m having a bad day,” Luna continued.

Max was silent for a moment. Luna knew that he wanted to press more about DreamWorld, but he could tell he hit a wall with her. He knew she wouldn’t listen to a word he said when she was in that kind of mood.

“Well, what happened to you?” he asked, sounding slightly flustered.

“Lucky died today,” Luna said, feeling grief crash over her again. She really didn’t want to talk, but she couldn’t hang up when the phone was on the other side of the room.

“How? Why?” Max asked.

“She was dead on the porch this morning when I woke up. I think she got ran over and someone put her there and left because it happened in the middle of the night,” she replied. “There wasn’t anything we could do to help her.”

“Did you see that happen?” Max asked.

“No, not exactly. I was sleeping. Why?” Luna asked, having a bad feeling where Max was going with the conversation.

“Why do you think she got hit then?”

“She had a wound on her neck,” Luna said hesitantly.

“Uh-huh, just one?” Max asked, his voice growing more critical.

“Yeah?”

“Luna, don’t you see what really happened to her!” Max exclaimed. “Come on!”

“See what?” she asked.

“Do you really need me to spell it out for you?” he asked, exasperated. “It’s happening again, all the evidence is right in front of us! Luna, you have to believe me that we need to take this seriously.”

“I don’t
have
to believe anything,” Luna said, feeling frustrated with her old friend. Accidents happened, and she wished that Max would leave it at that instead of trying to use it to prove his point.

She finally hit her breaking point. She climbed out of the shower as fast as she could and pressed the end button before chucking it across the bathroom. It hit the hard tiled wall with a clunk that made her sure that it had broken before it fell solemnly to the floor and laid there alone.

Max was convinced that something was deeply wrong, something ominous that could affect both of them, but Luna didn’t want to think about it. She wanted to ignore it, wanted to mourn the loss of her dog and have life go back to normal.

But history tended to repeat itself, why should her past be any different?

W
hen Luna was finally done with the shower, she carefully put on clean, dry clothes. She picked up her phone and went into her room only to throw her phone across the room again. She wondered how it wasn’t broken. It was days like that that made her regret ever buying it. After the phone left her fingers, she forced herself to stop for a minute as she took a breath. She could feel the anger flooding through her, and she knew she needed to calm down.

When she walked into her room, she realized she had left her precious leather bound notebook open beside her bed. The paper was still a tattered mess on the floor beside it. Her heart sank as she wondered if Amanda had read any of it when she had answered her phone.

Luna pushed the thought away. She knew that anyone that read it would be bound to have questions, especially Amanda. Luna hurried over to it and picked it up. She balanced it on one hand as she plucked the torn paper up off of the hardwood floor. She realized again that the knife was missing.

After the discovery of her dead dog, she had completely forgotten about the suddenly missing knife. Nothing else had mattered when she watched her precious puppy bleeding on the kitchen floor. Luna frowned as she remembered that she had assumed Lucky had had it. She felt bad for blaming her once faithful dog. She was faced with the same question again; where had the knife gone?

She shook her head in the fruitless hopes of clearing it and tucked the paper away into the empty page of the book. She hugged it to her chest and sighed sadly. She was no closer to finding it than she had been that morning.

She frowned before she crammed it under her mattress. She knew that it would be impossible to see it. Amanda didn’t need to find it; she would never understand if she did. Luna glanced at the small clock on the wall. It was already three in the afternoon. She had spent most of today waiting for the rain to stop so that she could bury Lucky. If she was going to visit David and Rose, she’d have to leave within the hour.

Even though she promised she’d visit them more, she didn’t know if that was such a good idea. Should she tell her parents what had happened to Lucky? Part of her felt that was the responsible thing to do except she didn’t exactly know how to tell them
why
Lucky was dead. She still wasn’t sure what had happened herself. If she didn’t tell them a word about what had happened, they’d still be able to tell that something was wrong.

She knew it would be better to stay home and relax. Luna felt the tension leave her joints as she finally worked up the courage to plod out to the living room. She sat down on the loveseat next to Amanda. All of her movements had been rigid and stiff, almost as if she wasn’t fully human. When she sat down, her friend turned and gave her a sympathetic look. She must’ve noticed.

“How’re you holding up?” she asked Luna affably.

“I’m alright, I guess. Not really sure what I should be doing today, but at least I know I won’t be visiting my dad,” she said, simpering slightly.

Luna felt awkward talking about her feelings, but she didn’t know how else she could feel. She was a loner; she wasn’t used to sharing her feelings with someone else. The last time she had held grief, she had had to carry it alone. It was made worse by the fact that Violet had tossed disbelief to her baggage until it was too late to undo the damage.

“I understand,” Amanda said. “Just take the time you need to relax. You’ve had a hard morning. What happened today upsets me too, and Lucky wasn’t even my dog.”

“It just seems like such a waste,” Luna said, sighing. “I mean Lucky was in the prime of her life, and now I don’t even know how to tell people that she died.”

“She got hit by a car, right?” Amanda asked questioningly.

“That’s what I think,” Luna said shrugging and secretly wishing she would’ve kept her mouth shut. She didn’t want to get in that conversation again.

“But?” Amanda asked guessing there was more to her statement.

“Max doesn’t think so. He thinks it’s funny that the only wound that Lucky had was on her throat,” Luna said.

“It
is
odd,” Amanda said. “What do you think could’ve caused it?”

“I think that she got hit by a car; I mean it is possible,” Luna said not wanting her roommate to agree with Max.

Amanda was silent. For a minute, she turned back to watch television. Luna caught the look on her face. She noticed that her face was creased, and it was obvious that she was thinking. Without even asking, Luna knew that she was thinking of their conversation yesterday. It was bothering her that Luna wasn’t more open. Did she suspect that Lucky’s death had something to do with the thing that was bothering Luna? Luna hoped that her roommate wasn’t that wise because she still wasn’t ready to tell her about her past quite yet.

“Yes, it’s possible,” Amanda said, and she still sounded like she was thinking of something that she wasn’t saying.

Luna merely nodded in response to her roommate. There was nothing else she could say. Lucky’s death hung over her like a guillotine, threatening to fall and consume what was left of her at any minute. She hated not being able to talk to anyone about how she truly felt. Amanda was willing to listen to her sure, but she didn’t understand what she would be getting herself into. Nobody else that she knew could truly understand the spectrum of pain and grief that she had experienced all those years ago.  She hated the fact that the other people who experienced her past with her were dead.

Max was still alive, of course, he pressed that fact every day, but Luna knew that opening up to him would mean admitting that he was right. It would mean admitting that once again her life was in danger. She didn’t want to believe that Chance was back, that Chance even
could
come back. She didn’t want to believe that he was healthy and out there waiting for the perfect moment to strike, waiting to tear her world apart. That was her worst nightmare. Forget all the scary movies she had ever seen.

She wanted to believe her faithful Border Collie’s death had been an accident. Every fiber of her being hoped the timing of Max’s warnings and Lucky’s death were coincidental. When she thought about it, one thing clung to her mind like a burr. The slash that Luna had discovered on her dog’s throat pointed to murder; Max had avidly pointed that out. She didn’t want to admit Lucky’s death could’ve been purposeful; she didn’t want to admit that anything bad could’ve happened to her dog.

She shook her head trying to clear the image of that morning’s wretched discovery from her mind. She knew the carnage would add itself to the rest of the devastation in her mind.

She hated thinking back to the events that she had suffered through in her senior year of high school. More often than not, it left her feeling awful. She knew the people that died, and she knew that some of them had died because of her. Her eyes fluttered open suddenly in astonishment. She found she was glad she had spent time thinking. It made her remember that Max and her weren’t the only survivors of Chance’s last rampage -there was one more.

Amy had been so traumatized by whatever Chance had done to her three years ago that she hadn’t said a word since. Luna didn’t know what had happened to Amy after graduation. She remembered that Amy hadn’t shown up to the ceremony -Luna had noted that as odd. The last time she had seen her was when she had wandered away into the woods, in the hopes of getting away from the temple that had been her prison years ago. She felt like a horrible friend when she remembered that she had never tried to help Amy. Violet’s death had been her main focus.

Luna never figured out how Chance had taken Amy away from her own home. Luna frowned as she realized that she had a lot of unanswered questions, questions that she hadn’t bothered to even notice before. The only way to find the answers would be to talk to Amy herself. But where had her poor friend gone?

Luna knew the only hope she had of finding her old friend would be to find Amy’s sister, Michelle. Would she still be living in the house that Amy had happily shown Luna all that time ago?

                                          ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Luna made an excuse of where she was going and promptly grabbed Amanda’s keys off of the kitchen counter. She got in the Ford Taurus Sedan and sat there in the driver’s seat for a minute. It had been years since she had visited Amy’s sister (and Amy herself), and she had only been there once; once when she was already in a state of emotional turmoil. Luna took in a deep breath, trying to draw a map in her head. Finally, when she had the route etched in red in her mind, she ignited the engine and began to drive.

She did her usual hour drive and got to her hometown of Lima. She parked a few houses down from her own house. She tried to remember the path that she had run that day when Amy had picked her up.

Amy had found her when she had been by the park. She drove the car there, thankful that she had a place to work from. She sat beside the exit of the park and set her head onto the steering wheel as she tried to remember which way Amy had been driving when she picked her up.

Finally, Luna remembered. She drove the right way down the road and onto the path that Amy had once taken. Luna carefully took the turns down different side streets and not too long after that, she ended up in front of a white house. At one time, it had been well taken care of, a beautiful home.

The lawn had been carefully mowed and the window boxes had been flowing with beautiful flowers. The porch was small, but it had been complete and beautifully painted. The shingles on the roof had been even and the siding had been complete.

The house before her was unkempt. The lawn was brown and brittle; the flowers that had once thrived in the window boxes were long dead. The porch was missing chunks of stone and the siding had chunks of plants in it and half of the siding had been torn off revealing brown wood of the house underneath. It was obvious that the house was long deserted by whoever had put such tender effort into the lawn work.

Luna swallowed uncomfortably, wondering if it was a sign that to was a bad idea as she stepped out of Amanda’s car. To her, the house looked abandoned. If it was, then Luna had no way of getting in touch with her old friend. Cautiously, she made her way to the front door. The paint that had sat in an even layer on it was peeling and cracked. She was almost positive that no one would answer her, but something drew her to knock anyways.

She waited but after a minute, no sound alerted her to a presence. When she knocked, she could hear the echo inside the house. Luna felt her hope slip away as she moved to take a step off of the broken porch. Suddenly, she heard a familiar click sound as the front door opened.

Luna turned slowly, not knowing what to expect. She blinked once as she stared at the girl that opened the door. Hollowed cheeks and sunk in eyes made up her face while her once long and vibrant brown hair had dried and thinned considerably. It looked brittle and ready to fall out in chunks from the roots. At first, Luna didn’t recognize her, but it wasn’t long before she realized it was Amy’s sister, Michelle.