Indelible (24 page)

A door had been propped open on the side of the Alumni House and we went in. DJ led us to a renovated portion I hadn’t seen before. I winced as I saw the mirrors lining the entire length of the hallway. I hesitated, because I knew Cherie’s decorations had never made it here.

Within a few steps, Sophia was there. I had no idea how she knew I’d be near an unprotected mirror, but she did. Perhaps our one-time link could still draw her to me. I hadn’t seen her since the pool house, months ago. I didn’t know if she had just used that much power and she needed time to recharge, or if Cherie’s treatment of the mirrors and windows had done the trick. All I knew was, it had felt good not to see her.

Her image was reflected on both sides of the mirrors. I couldn’t suppress my shudder. Sophia’s nails screeched on the glass as she trailed along the mirrors, walking the hall beside us. DJ and Brent both ground to a halt.

Brent gazed at Sophia with half wonder, half horror. “It stills freaks me out that I can see ghosts when I project.”

“DJ, Brent let me introduce you to  Sophia Pendrell.” I avoided looking at her directly. “Don’t make eye contact with her.”

“Why? She looks nice,” DJ said, staring at the figure trapped in the glass. Her hair swirled around her as if blown by an invisible fan, her face a mask of innocence. DJ’s face reddened as he met Sophia’s eye.

I groaned. “Don’t look!”

“I am nice,” Sophia crooned, her husky voice sounding seductive as it echoed through the hall. DJ watched her, mesmerized.

He was being whammied.

I turned to make a comment to Brent but he stared too, his eyes going glassy.

Great, they were both being whammied. The lady had skills.

Brent released my hand and scooted closer to her.

“Hey!” I snapped my fingers in front of Brent’s eyes. When his eyes remained unfocused I smacked him on the back of the head. “Evil ghost! She attacked me, remember?”

Brent blinked at me. He shook his head and took a deep breath. “Whoa. Sorry, you’re right. I know she’s evil, but . . .”

“Quit looking at her,” I whispered, jerking his head around so he looked at me. “Close your eyes.”

“Right.” His eye slid closed. “Sorry.”

“DJ,” she said in a sweet voice. “Help me, please. She’s trapped me here at this school. Trapped me in this prison.” Talk about twisting the facts.

DJ stared at her, open mouthed, with a dreamy expression. I slapped his face. He didn’t even blink. Wow.

“Sophia, let him go,” I warned, stepping in front of DJ.

Sophia’s smile widened. “DJ.” His name fell from her lips in a sexy caress. “If you come closer, I’ll tell you a secret.”

He sighed. She cocked one finger at him in a come-hither motion, her smile turning seductive. He almost tripped over his feet to get to her. He slid closer to the beautiful ghost and he pressed his hand against the mirror.

“You idiot!” I lunged for him, yanking him back as her nails gouged him in the wrist.

He hissed in pain as spirit fluid oozed from the scrapes. He awoke from his trance and swore at Sophia. “I thought ghosts couldn’t touch people.”

“You’re not exactly alive at the moment, are you?” I pointed out.

He touched his face and worked his jaw muscles. “Did you slap me?”

I tried to keep a straight face. “It was for your own good.”

“Yeah, I’m sure.” He dabbed at the blue liquid on his wrist. “What is this?”

“I call it spirit fluid. It’s the disembodied version of blood.”

DJ frowned. “Why did she do this to me? Why did she hurt you earlier?” he asked, gesturing to my where my bruises once lay.

“She’s an angry ghost. It all started because she thinks Yara stole the key.” Brent crossed his arms and glared at DJ, who swallowed nervously.

DJ scratched his head. “But you didn’t even steal it from her. I did.”

As soon as the words left his mouth, Sophia lost all of her charm. Her figure ceased glowing, and she went from innocent and seductive to red-hot angry and murderous. She screamed in fury and pressed her palms against her prison, searching for an exit.

“Dude, you’re even stupider than I thought you were,” Brent said, smacking DJ on the back of the head.

I touched DJ on the arm. “Tag. You’re it. Welcome to being number one on Sophia’s Most Hated list.”

DJ’s face seemed to pale. He grabbed my wrist and walked us down the hallway, her shouts of fury echoing around us.

“We need to get out of here.” DJ’s breath came in ragged pants and a faint sheen of perspiration glistened around his hairline.

I grinned at him. “She scared you.”

“Of course she scared me. She just grabbed me from inside a mirror!”

“Yeah, she likes to do that.”

DJ shot me a disbelieving glance, his hand twitching. “How can you be so calm? Don’t you remember what she did in the pool house?”

I shrugged. “You get used to it.” My voice sounded confident. But truth be told, I wanted out of the mirrored hallway too. “Where are we going?”

DJ blinked. “Oh, right. This way. They won’t be happy we kept them waiting so long.”

Once we were out of the mirrored hallway, he let out a sigh of relief and ran his fingers over Sophia’s claw marks. “I can’t believe this is your life.”

“Most of the time, I can’t either.”

After that, the three of us walked in silence. DJ led us around another turn, to a hallway that looked familiar.

“Hey, this is where we have our internship,” Brent whispered.

We followed him as he turned down another corridor and into a doorway I remembered very well. It was the room I had been locked in. The plastic tarp had been parted and we proceeded to the narrow hallway I had almost ventured down. We passed through another doorway and suddenly the décor was new, luxurious even. My feet sunk into thick carpet and we went up a set of stairs. At the top, the heavy ornate door stood open.

I gulped as we entered. The room was almost pitch black.

Chapter Twelve

“Stand here,” DJ instructed before he turned right and walked to the other side where he stood, eyes down.

If I hadn’t been projecting, I probably wouldn’t have been able to see a thing despite the dozen or so thick candles set around the large, circular table. About forty chairs were gathered around the table and every one of them was filled. I squinted around the room at the robed figures, but I couldn’t make out a single face behind the darkened hoods.

What I could see were dozens of hands resting on the table, their owners still enveloped in darkness. The dark wood of the heavily ornamented table was polished to a shine. The air smelled stale, thick with cologne and expensive cigars.

The hands seemed to be men’s hands. Most were old, some twisted with arthritis, others fat and hairy. Only a few looked young.

Besides the robes, they all had two things in common: each wore a matching ring, and they could all project. The empty bodies sitting around the table were perfectly still, but behind each one stood its spirit. I could see clearly, on the hand of the man closest to me, the silver ring he wore. It was embossed with an insignia—a large skeleton key clenched in a closed fist.

“Welcome, Miss Silva and Mr. Springsteed,” a baritone voice called out from the darkness. “Thank you for joining us tonight.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

The voice continued. “Even though we had heard the rumors about your ability to project, Miss Silva, we are still shocked to see you here. We’ve never heard of a young woman with this ability before.”

Last year Brent had also been surprised when he found out I could project.

“We have something we need you to see.” A man near the back pointed toward a TV and DVD player. “Please, press play, Mr. Springsteed.”

“Can you do that?” I asked Brent, pressing my lips against his ear so only he could hear.

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“Are you sure you want them to know?” I whispered.

He gave me a sad smile. “Yara, they already know everything we can both do.”

“He is right, Miss Silva. We know exactly what you can do. Don’t bother to deny it,” the voice said again. “Please, press play, Mr. Springsteed.”

Brent pushed play and a video started. There was no sound but I immediately recognized Brent and myself on the screen. The footage was taken after the Homecoming Dance last year. I recognized that moment. It was the first time Brent and I had kissed.

We watched as Brent created a small cyclone around us while we made out. The footage showed that the more we kissed, the more intensely the air whipped around us. Garbage cans tipped over, leaves flew off the trees. Brent’s ability to manipulate the elements was at its highest when he experienced extreme emotion. And based on the storm around us, he had really been feeling it.

The kiss had been phenomenal and romantic, but watching a video of it in a room of strangers was mortifying. My face flushed. It wasn’t like I was naked on the tape; Brent and I were just kissing, but still, I felt exposed, violated even. That was a private moment.

I opened my mouth to say, well, I wasn’t sure what to say at that point but  Brent gripped my hand and shook his head. I pressed my lips together to keep from speaking.

“That security footage is why you are here tonight, Mr. Springsteed. It confirmed to us some of the outlandish rumors we had heard about you.”

“We’ve heard a lot about you, too, Miss Silva,” a gravelly voice to my left called out. “We’ve heard that you can see ghosts and have some minor telekinetic talent.”

I stiffened. “So?”

“We’ve also been told that you both can project and use these powers away from Pendrell,” a nasally voice stated. “How?”

“We don’t know,” Brent said. He slid his arm around my waist. “You don’t need Yara involved in this. There’s nothing she can do that I can’t.”

“You’re wrong, Mr. Springsteed. She has unique strengths we admire,” the baritone voice said. He twisted his ring around his finger. “You each have special rare talents. You can’t see and communicate with ghosts and she can’t manipulate the weather, and has hardly a drop of your telekinetic ability.”

The gravelly voice said, “We aren’t here to hurt you. We know what happened last year. We’re not your enemy. As a matter of fact we are grateful for the service you performed for us last year.”

“What did we do for you?” I asked. “How could we have helped you when we don’t even know who you are?”

Brent gave me another sad smile. “I know who they are.” He squeezed my hand. “They’re the—”

“We’re the Clutch,” the voice said before Brent could.

The Clutch
? I couldn’t have been more surprised if we had been kidnapped by the Easter Bunny.

The Clutch, Pendrell’s secret society. The one that had supposedly disbanded because Thomas had scared them away. The one that Brent had wanted to restart last year. Brent had told me about them, but I was sure they wouldn’t like that, so I acted clueless.

“What’s a clutch?”

Brent squeezed my hand again, in what felt like gratitude.

“We’re
the
Clutch. We are a secret society here at Pendrell. The last sixty or so years we’ve been forced into hiding, meeting at random places because Thomas was trying to destroy us. We’re sure he thought he succeeded. While we weren’t able to get rid of him, our society still stayed strong, but we became more secretive, more exclusive. Being able to project wasn’t enough, anymore. Several legacies never even knew we still existed. It was a shame, but it was imperative if we wanted our group to survive the storm.

“You see, we knew something was wrong. Bad things kept happening to our members, but we couldn’t figure out who was behind it. You succeeded where we failed. We didn’t even have his name until this summer, and we’d never considered he might be switching bodies. But the truth is, even if we had known who it was, we couldn’t have stopped him. He was a powerful spirit. But you have fixed that. Now we can be the group we were meant to be. For that you have our thanks.”

“You’re welcome?” I said, taken aback. This ominous group DJ had warned us about only wanted to thank us. That didn’t seem right. What about the . . .

Before I could even complete my thought, Brent challenged, “And to thank us you followed us, destroyed Yara’s room, spied on us?”

Yep, that would be what was wrong with the baritone voice’s little speech.

“We were vetting you. Making sure you were as worthy as we had heard,” the baritone voice explained reasonably. “We are exclusive. Not many people are chosen to join us. That is how grateful we are. We are offering you membership.”

“Thank you?” My fingers tugged gently at my necklace. “Why would we want to join?”

“We are powerful friends. A scholarship might come in handy for you next year. Don’t you think? Columbia is an expensive school. Wouldn’t your friend, Cherie, love to get into Stanford? We can help.”

My stomach twisted. They knew which college Cherie wanted to go to and that I’d been accepted to Columbia. The things they were offering sounded too good to be true. Which meant they probably were. There had to be strings hidden in there somewhere. I would have bet my soul on it.

“Just like that? No strings attached?”

“No strings attached.”

I snorted. I didn’t believe that at all. “We don’t want your help,” I said. “We’re not interested.”

The room burst into laughter and this time the sound did bounce off the walls, making the chortles seem scary, ominous. Goose pimples formed on my arms.

“Tell me, Mr. Springsteed, have you been experiencing any unpleasant symptoms lately? Fatigue? Nosebleeds? Seizures? Other reactions you can’t explain? Have they been happening closer together?”

Brent stilled and his grip on my hand tightened. “What do you know about that?”

“We know everything. We know that Thomas controlled your body and tried to kill Miss Silva.” The baritone voice paused. “We also know that an experience like that can have lasting, indelible effects on a person. More than one would expect.”

His words stole my breath. I cast a glance at Brent, who had tensed beside me. His brown eyes flashed with raw fear.

“What do you mean?” Brent asked through clenched teeth.