Indigo Awakening (The Hunted (Teen)) (4 page)

“Luke!” she called out again.

With her throat feeling like sandpaper, his name came out sounding raspy. She cleared her throat to yell again, but when something moved up ahead, Rayne gasped and stopped dead.

The moon? A shadow?

Instinct made her turn off the flashlight and shut her eyes tight for a second to get her night vision back. Had she only imagined it? She held her breath and searched the dark for anything that moved. She prayed that whatever she’d seen had only been a branch blowing in the wind up top or some other harmless thing. Normally her luck was
for shit,
but if she hadn’t stopped cold, she never would’ve heard it.

A footstep...and another.

Someone had followed her into the tunnels. Rayne wasn’t alone.

Chapter 3

Griffith Park Zoo

Rayne’s heart pulsed in her ears, overshadowed by the hard thump it made against her ribs. Someone had followed her. She couldn’t catch her breath. After she shut down her flashlight, her night vision took time to kick in, making her nearly blind. From what she saw, she’d made it to a larger part of the tunnels, some sort of workroom. One shadowy corridor stretched behind her, where she had heard the footsteps. Another way out was dead ahead.

She hoped the footsteps had been Lucas’s, but when he didn’t call to her, Rayne shrank into the shadows and shut her eyes to listen. Luke never came. Instead, she heard a slow, melodic whistle. It echoed and bounced off the stone walls. The search for her brother had turned into a living, breathing Wes Craven flick.

“Come out, sweet thing.” A guy’s voice. “We know you’re in here.”

We?
Rayne wanted to puke. The jerk spoke in a creepy singsong voice, like a psycho killer. He pretended to play around, making everything a big joke. She thought about running, but after her stalker broke the silence, more whistles came.

More voices.

“We saw you, little girl.”

“Yeah. Come play with us.”

Sounds echoed from every direction, making it hard to figure out how many there were, but Rayne knew one thing for sure. They had her surrounded. Belowground, even if she screamed, no one would hear her. How did these losers find her? She hadn’t seen any headlights tailing her into the park. Where had they come from? Questions came at her, but she sure as hell didn’t intend to find out what they wanted.

Rayne had only precious seconds to call 911. She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out her cell. Underground, she had no bars.
Damn!
Her fingers flew over her Droid touch screen, but nothing worked, and while she’d spent the night looking for Lucas, her battery had hit the red zone. Rayne stuffed the phone into her pocket and looked for plan B.

Desperate for a place to hide, she felt along the stone wall as her eyes adjusted to the blackout. Eventually she caught a faint light, a glimmer of moon shining through a metal grate above her head. Without hesitating, she wedged her boot onto a foothold and scrambled up the wall like a rock climber, clawing her fingers into breaks in the stone. It didn’t take long until she found where the moonlight came from.

A narrow ledge near a ventilation shaft blew a faint breeze onto her face. They’d have to look up to find her, and she’d have a fighting chance to kick them in the face if they did. But when Rayne hoisted her leg onto the ledge to pull her body up the rest of the way, she heard something smash and looked down to see a dim glow fade to black. Her cell phone had fallen from her pocket and shattered on the rocks.

It was toast and so was she.

“What was that?” one of the guys yelled.

“Think it came from over here.”

Rayne had run out of time. She had to move.
Now!

Getting a closer look at the vent shaft, she had wiggle room to squeeze into it. She could crawl to the end and jostle loose the grate that led outside. After all her lousy luck, she let herself hope that she had found a way out, until she wedged into the cramped space and the stone walls closed in on her like a coffin. The stale, dank air made it hard to breathe, and sweat dripped off her scalp as she inched toward the moonlight on her belly.

When she grasped the bars of the grate and shoved, it didn’t budge. The vent felt rock solid and she didn’t have enough room to maneuver to kick it out.
Oh, man. Don’t do it. Don’t cry.
With her face against the drain, Rayne took a deep breath to fight back tears. She had to stay strong and not act like a victim. She’d be outnumbered and alone, but if they came after her, she wanted blood.

Their blood.

As the whistles got louder, she looked over her shoulder to see lights strafing the stone walls below her hiding spot. The voices and whistles intensified. Rayne wiped her slick palms down her jeans and clutched her flashlight tighter, the only weapon she had. Once they found her smashed cell phone, these jerks would have her. She’d be trapped, but she wouldn’t go down without a fight. Rayne gritted her teeth and sat motionless in the dark—until the moon did a funny thing.

The shaft where she hid got brighter.

A pale blue light filled the dark corners around her. At first, she thought they’d found her and one of them had shone a light down the vent, but when she turned to catch where the glow came from, Rayne saw something move in the dark outside.

A guy. Edged by the moon, he looked more like a ghost.

Like Lucas, he was tall, but that was where the similarities ended. Wearing a hoodie, he looked fierce with his face covered in shadow, like the scary knight dude in
Assassin’s Creed.
Rayne almost called for help, but didn’t. He could’ve been with the others, but something else stopped her. His body tensed and shook. He looked consumed by a blinding rage. When his mouth opened in a scream, no sound came out. He stretched out his arms and lifted his chin toward the moon, shaking as if he hurt.

She couldn’t take her eyes off him, and a sudden chill gripped her hard.

Her body tingled with a rush of static electricity. Even the hairs on her forearms stood on end. Stranger still, Rayne felt a sudden and overwhelming rush of emotion flood her mind and heart—memory flashes of her father and mother when they were alive. Their love felt tangible and real, and it filled the hole in her life where her parents and family had been.

She pictured Lucas’s grinning face and imagined Mia’s familiar soft giggle when she was a kid and they shared a bedroom. In that moment, it felt as if she had her family back, the living
and
the dead. The phantom touch of her father’s arms made her feel safe, and the faint scent of her mother’s favorite perfume lingered. Rayne couldn’t help it. Tears came for real this time. One by one, the memories sucked up her fear like a sponge.

She didn’t feel alone, but how the hell could that be? Rayne wanted to believe that the power of her mind had reached out to calm her, but she’d never felt anything as strong before. Was that what people meant when they talked about a near-death experience...memories that flooded them like a merciful anesthetic before they kicked off?

Or maybe another explanation stood in front of her eyes.

Rayne watched the strange boy with the outstretched arms. How could a boy so filled with rage be the cause of the love she felt now? He had to be part of it. Everything she felt had triggered after he showed, but when something else moved behind him, her fear threatened to rush back.

He wasn’t alone.

A large lurking shadow crept forward.
Oh, my God!
She peered through the dark to make out the shape. A massive dog stepped out from behind him and stood at his side—the biggest dog she’d ever seen. It had an electric shimmer that radiated off its body. An eerie glow stabbed through its eyes as if the light had escaped from inside its belly.

The damned thing moved and drifted like a ghost. Rayne could’ve sworn it never touched the ground. She blinked twice, but the phantom dog didn’t go away, and that boy never looked down. Frozen in that moment with him, Rayne felt strangely calm and watched as he kept his face lifted toward the night sky. She thought things couldn’t get any weirder, but when that ghost dog brushed against him—

The boy caught fire.

Blue fire.

* * *

“She couldn’t just disappear. Find her,” a guy yelled. “We’re not leaving until we do.”

His voice clenched Rayne’s stomach into an aching knot. Despite the freaky stuff happening outside with hoodie boy and his ghost dog, Rayne couldn’t ignore the threat coming from beneath her. If the jerks found her smashed cell phone and looked up, they’d spot the only place she could be and it would all be over.

“Hey, found something. Check it,” a voice called out. “It’s gotta be hers.”

They must’ve found her cell. Rayne held her breath, not making a sound.

“Yeah, looks like. What’s that up there?”

A beam of light blinded her. She squinted and covered her eyes with a hand.

“I see a boot,” another one said. “Little girl found a fraidy hole.”

Rayne pulled her legs in tight and grabbed the metal bars near her head to make it harder for them to pull her out. But as she tensed her body for a fight, a ghostly sound echoed through the tunnels. It started low and menacing, but as it got louder, she cringed. The growl magnified into the distinctive yowl of a fierce panther or lion. Rayne crooked her head to listen, not believing her ears.

“What the hell is that?”

One guy must’ve heard it, too, because he sounded scared. He wasn’t the only one.

“This better not be a joke.”

None of them had time to talk. More noises swept through the maze. A shrieking elephant. Howling dogs. It got so loud that Rayne winced. It hurt her ears, but she had to look. When she scrunched toward the shaft opening, she nearly choked.

“No, this can’t...” She gasped.

“¡Ay Dios mio!”
one of the guys yelled and made the sign of the cross. “It’s the devil.”

An inferno in cobalt-blue raged through the tunnels and inched up the stone walls, but instead of heat, she felt icy cold. Even her breath turned to vapor. She should have burrowed deeper into the hole, but she couldn’t turn away. Ghost animals spiraled out of the flames. The hellish menagerie looked more like a hallucination. She wouldn’t have believed her eyes, but the guys who had come looking for her saw and heard everything, too. In the chaos, they yelled and scrambled for cover in total panic. If she hadn’t been so scared, she might’ve laughed at the sight of them running like barnyard chickens.

But she wasn’t safe, either.

She heard something that made her skin prickle—on instinct—even before she saw a dark cloud spiraling through the shadows, caught in flickers of light. A flapping noise swelled into something really loud. A swarm of bats filled the cavern. They weren’t ghosts. They were real and
alive.
Their bodies pummeled the guys, who dived for cover and swatted at them. When that didn’t work, they ran, covering their heads.

Rayne screamed when the bats came for her. She felt the weight of them slap her legs. Repulsed by their hairless, freakish bodies, she kicked and pushed them off until a shrill scream erupted and drowned out their grotesque screeches. The shriek had come from her. She cowered in the shaft with her eyes shut, making her body into a tight ball. Her heart raced like a rapid-fire drill, and every inch of her shook.

Make it stop! Please!

Rayne braced for whatever came next. Cringing in the dark, she’d be alone to face it.

Minutes Later

As shocking and sudden as everything happened—the blaring shriek of stampeding phantom elephants, the gross swarm of bats, the fierce lion and the whole freaky circus, live and dead—
everything
shut down to such a deathlike stillness that Rayne thought she had died.

No glow from blue fire. No icy chill. All of that vanished when the tunnels turned pitch-black. Rayne lay in the dark with her ears popping from the abrupt, sucking vacuum. She couldn’t see anything, and the trauma of her own screams made any noise muffle in the startling calm. When her shaky breath and the frantic pounding of her heart came back to her, she dared to lift her head and look over her shoulder, but a solitary voice stopped her dead.

“You can go now. They’re gone,” a boy said.

His soft voice took her off guard as it echoed off stone and filled her with a peculiar warmth. He calmed her and made her believe he told the truth. Still, she didn’t move. She couldn’t. After an agonizing debate in her head, Rayne dared to speak, even though she couldn’t look.

“Lucas?” She called her brother’s name and waited for an answer, willing the next voice she heard to be his.

“Who’s Lucas?”

She shut her eyes and let out the breath she’d been holding.

Rayne inched toward the shaft opening. Every muscle in her body squeezed tight with dread until she looked down. Her eyes grew wide and her jaw dropped with a soft gasp. The entire cavern dazzled in flickers of light that floated on wings.

“Oh. My. God,” she whispered.

Fireflies were everywhere. Their yellow glow blinked and trailed light like tiny fairies. The terror she felt over the bats had been replaced by magic she hadn’t seen in L.A. Rarely were fireflies witnessed west of the Rockies. Up north, yeah, but not in L.A. How had he done it? Rayne didn’t question that the boy had summoned them.

She just knew.

Standing below her, by the dim glow of a flashlight that one of the guys had dropped, the boy pulled down his sweatshirt hood and let her see him. When he did, fireflies swept toward him en masse on silent wings. They spiraled and flickered around him, casting him in a warm glow. After a few landed on his body, more came and did the same, unafraid of him. Their small bodies pulsed in pale yellow glimmers as they clung to his clothes and down his arms. They made the boy smile until in a slow, gentle sweep, he lifted his arms and they flew into the air to fill the darkness with their light. They had come in numbers at his beckoned call and now they vanished at his whim, as if he’d conjured them from nowhere.