Insanity (27 page)

My knees went watery, and Darius had to catch me. He held on, pressing me to him, saying nothing, not even trying to make it okay or make it go away, because he couldn’t.

He had waited for me. Time had passed, and Darius had waited. He was still here. He was still mine.

But ...

I was vaguely aware of Forest coming closer, and Levi. I had so many questions, but I didn’t want to know the answers to any of them.

I let Darius go and faced the three of them. Forest looked so miserable, I knew she already knew everything.

Dread was turning me to ice. I felt suddenly tired, like I hadn’t slept in years, and I hurt inside and out.

“Take me to my father,” I said.

Levi was the only one who seemed to be able to meet my eyes. He put out his hand, and I took it. His fingers seemed thin and too warm, and power crackled between us. Colors shifted across my knuckles, and Levi lifted one black eyebrow but he didn’t let me go.

Without saying a word, Levi led me slowly through the trees, with Darius and Forest following quietly behind us. We went past the bell tower. Imogene stood on the steps in a dress that looked like something from
Little House on the Prairie
, her expression a mix of relief and sorrow.

We got into a sleek-looking black truck with vanity plates—
Darius 2
—and left the grounds of Lincoln Psychiatric Hospital.

The drive didn’t take long, but then, I had known it wouldn’t.

When I first saw the wheelchair by the stone bench, I thought it was Ms. Hyatt. Then my brain and emotions caught up with reality and I ran forward, knelt on the grass beside Addie, ran my fingers across her knobby, arthritic knees, and wrapped my arms around her neck.

She hugged me back so tightly I could hardly breathe, and we didn’t move for a long, long time. When she finally pulled away
from me and studied my face, I was shocked at the lines around her eyes, the wrinkles on her forehead, and the way her sweetsmelling hair had gone silver. It was still short and curly and perfectly tended, and her smile was still wide and white, even when it was sad like this.

She toyed with my hair for a few moments, and then cupped my face with both hands and said, “Xavier always told me you would come back.”

I couldn’t find any words, so I kissed her soft cheek.

“It was foolish, what we did.” She shook her head, keeping my face firmly in her grip. “Stupid and short-sighted, and you paid for it, Trina. There aren’t words for how sorry I am.”

“You didn’t force me to go.”

“I didn’t stop you, either.”

Her eyes closed, then opened.

Finally, I was able to ask, “How did he pass?”

“Heart attack.” Her smile turned wry. “Right in the middle of having a temper fit at some fool who cut him off in traffic. I told your father a thousand times he was headed for an end like that, but did he listen?”

“No,” I said, resting my hands on her bad knees, trying not to buckle under the sudden weight of grief and regret. “Of course he didn’t.”

The colors in my hands were shifting and moving, moving and shifting, and when Addie saw them, her eyes got wider. “Looks like you got power inside you now. Have you tried to use it?”

“No,” I told her. “But you gave me some of it. It saved my life when I crossed over to the other side.”

She nodded. “Well, then. We have our work cut out for us, figuring out what you can do with power like that.”

On impulse, I pressed my palms against her knees. It was like my fingers were drawn to press on certain spots, and as I stared into the colors, I picked out the strand that reminded me of the sunlight that came out of Forest. I willed it into Addie’s knees, sensing the unnatural shape of the joints and asking my yellow light to make them smooth and round and right again. My arms vibrated and my fingers tingled, and the yellow light left me in a soft, hot rush.

“Oh,” Addie said.

My eyes flew to her face, but she didn’t seem to be in pain. Just startled.

After a few seconds, she shifted my hands away. I sagged for a second, surprised by the fatigue that hit me. By the time I got to my feet, Addie had popped her wheelchair leg rests to the side.

She stood, hesitant at first, but as she straightened, her expression moved from worry to amazement to relief. She nodded to me, bending her knees, then straightening again. “Yes, my girl, we have a lot of work to do.”

Addie was able to walk me to my father’s grave, where Darius and Forest and Levi were waiting.

I knelt in the soft grass in front of the marble etched with his name and the dates proclaiming his sixty-nine years of life and
I stretched out my hand. Dozens of tiny purple flowers sprang open everywhere I touched.

“I’m here now, Daddy,” I said, tears blurring the flecks of purple and green. “I came back, just like you told Addie I would.”

It was over now, all the struggling and fighting between me and him, but all the trying was over, too. Darius’s hand settled on my shoulder, and I covered it with my own.

“He never killed anyone else,” Darius told me. “Even the ones who needed killing. He got it, baby. He really did.”

I pressed my cheek into his knuckles and let the tears flow.

Behind us, some two miles in the distance, Lincoln Psychiatric Hospital sat soaking up the seconds and minutes and days and years. I had a feeling that the stones and mortar in that old hospital knew all about time—and pain, and power, and other things too terrible to consider while kneeling in the sunlight in a patch of flowers, crying tears for my lost father, with my friends and the boy who had waited for me to come back to him even though the other people in his life had moved on and left him behind.

That old hospital and the horrors skulking in its dark corners weren’t through with us yet. I knew that. But for now, at least, the bells were quiet.

Part IV
Fear

Levi

She comes to me in my dreams, in the clearing where Pastor Martinez set me on fire. Birds shriek as she walks, and shadows run away before she touches them. She has a golden light, and it’s beautiful.

“There are lots of wonderful places in the world,” she says, and her voice is like music. “Why do you stay here?”

In my dreams I always tell Forest the truth, so I say, “I stay here because I’m scared.”

She laughs, and the sound makes me happy. Then she looks me over with those brown eyes, and a breeze tickles the curls around her face. “You died and came back to life. You help spirits cross over to the other side, and you kill things that would terrify most people. What scares you, Levi?”

In my mind’s eye, I see Imogene and all the power she had when I was younger, and how it’s draining away. She started fading the moment she brought me back from the dead, as if it’s a price she’s having to pay, and I almost can’t stand to think about how I’ve hurt her.

“I’m scared of trying to handle the spirits at Lincoln,” I tell her. “I don’t know if I can do what Imogene does.”

She thinks on this, and the light around her warms me like a campfire. “Reasonable. But that’s not why you’re hiding. What scares you, Levi?”

I lower my head because I don’t want her to see my face.

In my mind’s eye, I see Trina and Addie, the witches. They have a lot of power. They might be dangerous. If they take to fighting me, I won’t be able to beat them.

“I’m scared of what I don’t understand,” I tell Forest. “What if I make a mess of everything?”

Forest thinks on this, too. Her eyes are so pretty they make my heart beat funny. “I worry about the same thing,” she says. “But that’s not why you’re hiding.”

She stops, but I know she’s going to ask me the same question a third time. When she does, I’ll have to answer her.

My hounds circle in the clearing, Cain in the lead. I met him the night I died, and he’s been with me since then. He must have heard my nerves jumping. When people look at him and the rest of my dogs they just see beagles, but in my dreams, they’re made out of shadows, and they’re bigger than ponies. They’ve all got matted black fur like Cain and fire for eyes and bloody fangs. Imogene told me they’re barghests, and they usually live on the other side. Our great-greats called them soul-eaters.

Forest doesn’t pay a bit of attention to them. She doesn’t care about my birds, either, when they come sailing down from the moonless sky. They look like geese, but in my dreams, they’re a blur of wings and claws. They’ve got heads like buzzards, but bodies like women. They’re all about revenge and nightmares, but they stay away from Forest. Her light would set them on fire.

I make myself look at Forest, but I have to blink, she’s so bright. She’s got Imogene’s power. I know she does. She’s gentle and sweet. She’s made out of love. The bracelet on her wrist hangs there like it’s mocking me, reminding me that I can’t touch her.

The third time she asks me her question, it comes out so soft I barely hear it.

“What scares you, Levi?” she whispers.

In my mind’s eye, I see her just like she is, beautiful in more ways than I know how to talk about.

“You,” I finally tell her. “I’m scared of how much I care about you.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

Some girls dream about handsome princes who carry them off to live happily ever after.

I’m not one of those princes.

In fairy tales, castles are always bright and pretty and full of unicorns.

Lincoln Psychiatric Hospital isn’t one of those castles.

It’s a monster made out of stone and brick and metal. It’s also a doorway between two worlds—ours, and the place where dead things stay until they face their final judgment. Lincoln doesn’t much seem to care what happens outside its thick walls. Time passes, but Lincoln never changes. It’s got secrets, and it watches, and it waits.

“You talk about this place like it’s alive,” Forest said as we walked through an empty ward, checking for anything weird or wrong like we did every evening, when the thin spots between worlds got thinnest. Since we fought Carl Newton Mahan and Trina went to the other side when she shouldn’t have, everything
had gotten worse. Seemed like every other night something had been trying to claw its way back to the land of the living.

I shrugged. “Lincoln is alive, in its own way. More like ... aware.”

My hand dropped to the belt I was wearing, to the knife Imogene made for me. The handle was steel, but the blade was bone. I never asked her what kind of bone she used. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. It could cut anything, and that was enough for me. Until I met Forest, I didn’t carry it much. Usually my dogs and geese did enough to scare ghosts and people into doing what I wanted, but since I met Forest, things had been trying to kill us.

“Lincoln Psychiatric can’t be aware.” Forest waved her hand around the dark hallway, the light from her skin sending spiders skittering toward dark corners. “It’s just a building.”

“It’s a big pile of rocks built on poisoned ground.” I glanced at her, trying not to get goofy because she was so pretty. “Blood rituals back through time and all the patients that lived and died here—you can’t imagine. These walls have been soaking up pain and crazy for as long as they’ve been standing.”

Forest’s brown eyes laughed at me. “You’re saying it’s a building with issues.”

“Yep.”

She moved slow, but she kept smiling. “So, is the old asylum on our side, or not?”

That made my chest go cold. In the back of my mind, I heard the tower bells ringing, and I thought about the times I’d had to fight some bad ghost or strong Madoc spirit. Lincoln was built
to help sick people, but it seemed like the hospital had gotten sick itself. I didn’t know if it was trying hard enough to keep the door closed on what was dead and gone.

I let myself look at Forest. “I don’t know.”

We were on the top floor, and the only light came from the bulbs along the baseboards. They glowed blue, barely enough for me to see the hardwood and tile. We had to be careful of all the furniture set around to make the place “homelike,” as if anything could. Each step we took echoed. I kept my hand on my knife.

“Did you see that?” Forest’s voice made me jump, and I looked where she was pointing.

Silvery smoke flowed across the painted cinder-block wall, marking the spot where a ghost had just been. I squinted in the darkness. Whatever the ghost was, it was so weak it didn’t leave much in its wake.

“A leftover,” I said.

“They aren’t leftovers, Levi. They’re people.” Her sharp tone stung, even though I knew it was coming. “Or they were.”

If I sighed, she’d give me a sermon about manners, just like Imogene. If I kept my mouth shut, she’d go right on frowning. If I said the wrong thing, she’d think I was mean. I wanted to knock my head against the nearest table.

“You’re ... right.” That was the best I could do. “Sorry. But whatever it was, it didn’t have much power.”