Sing Sweet Nightingale (39 page)

“He’s tellin’ you the truth, Dana.”

Dana’s mouth gapes as she stares at Horace, her skin flushed. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

Horace glances at me. “Show her your magic trick.”

Exhaling heavily, I pull my pocketknife out and flick it open. Horace grabs a bunch of paper towels from the connected bathroom and holds them under my hand. Across from us, Dana pulls in a shaky breath.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m not making this up, Dana. I wouldn’t do that to you.”

Before I can reconsider, I slide the blade across the palm of my hand. I barely feel it when the skin parts and blood starts flowing; I’m too focused on Dana’s face. She looks a little green, but when I hold up my palm, her eyes are locked on the open cut. I’m exhausted, drained from everything that happened tonight, but it starts to heal eventually. After a minute, the blood stops flowing. After two, the scar is completely gone.

I wipe my hand off with one of the towels Horace hands me and show her my clean, wound-free hand. Carroll is bouncing and biting his lip as his face flushes bright red. His eyes bug out, and he looks like he’s a few seconds away from bursting.

“Oh.” Dana sways and almost falls.

“And you’re saying these demons are why Mari stopped talking?” Frank asks, his eyes bright. “And why she ended up here?”

I have to swallow hard before my voice is steady enough to be heard. “Yes.”

“You
believe
them?” Dana stares at her husband, mouth still hanging open.

Frank takes her face in his hands and kisses her hard. She gasps, but he leans back before she can react.

“Dana, it explains
everything
,” he says. “We saw how different Mariella was once Hudson showed up. It explains why she changed, and it explains why she’s here. They’re telling us they can help her wake up. All the doctors want to do is run more tests and inject her with more drugs to see what happens. If there’s a chance Hudson is right, are you going to give up on that?”

He’s nearly breathless by the time he’s done, but I think it worked. In the middle of that rant, the color started rising in Dana’s cheeks. By the end, her lips are trembling as they curl into something almost like a smile.

“You always were a little crazy,” she whispers.

The words jumpstart my heart. I don’t even have a chance to ask her if that means she’ll let Carroll take over before she takes Frank’s hands off her cheeks, squeezes them tight, and then looks at me.

“What do you need us to do?”

Thirty-Eight

Hudson

Saturday, September 20 – 9:21 AM

It took the doctors a week to admit they had no clue what was going on. We were lucky none of them were in the room when Mari’s body heated up so fast steam started rising from her skin. It was gone as quickly as it happened, but it made me fight harder to get her the hell out of there.

As soon as they could, Dana and Frank switched Mariella to Carroll’s care and ordered a medical transport van to bring her to the mini-hospital room Carroll set up in the den downstairs. With substantial financial and legal help from Horace.

I try not to pace as Frank signs a stack of forms to release Mari against medical recommendation. Leventhall makes them jump through a lot of red tape before she lets anyone shift Mari to the transport stretcher. I hate that Mari hasn’t woken up, but I’ll breathe a little easier when she’s out of this place. It smells like Lysol and death.

On the way out, Horace’s phone rings. He checks the screen, and his eyebrows pull together.

“She never calls me,” he mutters as he picks up. “Afternoon, Gracie. How’re you—”

His mouth is open, frozen in the middle of his greeting, and his skin leaches of all color.

“What in the name of all seven sins did she do that for?”

Another pause, and this time his eyes nearly bug out of his head. “Pushed him down the
stairs
? Nadette?
My
Nadette?”

Horace walks away, moving fast until he’s halfway across the parking lot. Dana glances at me, but I shrug. He called the woman Gracie. If I remember right, that’s his daughter-in-law.

He’s back before our little cavalcade even makes it to the medical transport.

“Hate to leave right now, but I’ve got a bit of a family crisis. My sixteen-year-old granddaughter got it in her head to run away.” He says it like it doesn’t matter, but his eyes are tense and he’s fidgeting with his keys. “Apparently she’s already been gone a day.”

“You’ve done plenty, Horace.” Dana hugs him and kisses his cheeks, bestowing a warm but wobbly smile. “I hope everything turns out well with your granddaughter.”

“Never woulda expected it of Nadette,” he mutters as he pats me on the shoulder. “Her sister Jessica, sure. That girl’d take flight like a dandelion seed. But Nadette was always a rational little thing.”

“Be careful, okay?” I grip his shoulder and make sure he stops to look at me, pays attention to what I’m saying. “Make sure you take those stones with you.”

“Kid, I ain’t messin’ with these demons of yours if I don’t have to.” He starts walking off, but then stops and scuttles back. “Dana, you mind lookin’ after the kid while I’m gone?”

“Of course.” But then Dana glances at me and smirks. “Though I doubt we would’ve gotten rid of him even if I said no.”

Pretty much. As much as I hate it, I’ve become crazy good at sneaking into their house.

I help Carroll get Mariella set up on the bed in the den, then pull a chair up to her bedside. I stay long after everyone else has gone to sleep, exhausted.

Holding her hand, I run my thumb along her fingers.

Wake up, Mari. Wake up, wake up, wake up
, I chant in my head.
Please wake up
.

The door opens, and I look up as Dana comes into the room. “How is she?”

“The same.” I whisper like Mariella is sleeping and we’re trying not to wake her.

Dana leans over the bed, her expression tight as she reaches out and traces the line of Mariella’s face with her fingertips. This has to be hard for her. She’s trusting me with something precious, and right now all we can do is wait.

“You’re really sure she’ll wake up?” Dana whispers.

“I’d stake my life on it. I just don’t know when.”

It takes a moment, but Dana slowly pulls back and nods. Resting her hand on my shoulder, she leans down and presses a kiss to my head. It takes every bit of concentration I possess to not tense up and jump away. Even on her good days, Mom wasn’t exactly affectionate. Despite everything, Dana seems to have accepted me into her family on some level. And I’m terrified of letting her down.

“Take care of her, Hudson,” Dana whispers before she turns and walks back upstairs.

Once she’s gone, I take a deep breath—one that’s too shaky for my liking—and focus on Mari.

I hear a crackling sound as the energy in the air spikes. Everything in the room rattles and shifts, tilting toward Mariella. I tense, ready to deflect anything that goes flying toward her, but it doesn’t move. I watch the lamp on her nightstand wobble in a circle like an off-balance top before finally settling down.

I collapse against the chair and rub my hands over my face. Whatever is going on in her head is so much bigger than what I went through. I
want
to take care of her, but all I can do is wait. Wait for her eyes to open and wait for her to decide what happens after that.

Even if I want to take care of Mariella, there is no guarantee she’s going to let me.

Thirty-Nine

Hudson

Monday, September 29 – 5:18 PM

The first two weeks of my life in Swallow’s Grove blew past me with the speed and force of a bullet train running on rocket fuel. The past two have dragged, each second seeming to move slower than a sleeping sloth.

Mari has been home from the hospital for just over a week, but I’m going fucking stir-crazy.

There’s nothing to fight. And if I try to put any more stones in this room, the floor might collapse into the basement under the weight. All the flat surfaces are filled with protective stones and others that exude health and positive energy—tourmaline in green, pink, red, gold, and brown; quartz; transparent pink and green calcite; chlorite phantom crystals; bixbite; pyromorphite; blue aventurine; astrophyllite; zoisite; and amber. Dawn is right. I could start my own store if I wanted to, but all the stones in the world won’t give me a goddamn clue where to go from here.

I’ve done everything I can for Mari, so…what now?

Pacing the length of the room, I run my nails along my scalp. The answers I’m looking for are out there somewhere. How do I open a portal from this side? Can the demons be killed? Has anyone ever turned them down? Will I ever sleep again?

These creatures seem ancient, like they’ve been here since the dawn of time. I can’t be the only person who has ever broken out of their clutches and lived. There have to be more like Mari and me. How in the world do I find people who have probably become masters of hiding in plain sight, though? My abilities are low-key. The only obvious difference about me is my eyes. What if someone had laser eyes like Cyclops, or ended up made of energy like Doctor Manhattan? Blending in might not be an option. They’d either get scooped up and experimented on, or have to go into deep hiding somewhere.

I force myself to sit down. Brushing Mari’s bangs away from her face, I wonder if she’ll have to go into hiding when she wakes up. What did facing Orane do to her?

The footsteps in the hall don’t sound like Dana. Turning toward the door, I see K.T. and Dawn.

“She wanted to visit,” K.T. says as she trails Dawn into the room.

“Brought you this, too.” Dawn presses a striped stone, a large piece of tiger iron, into my hands before she leans over the bed, bending so close her nose almost brushes Mari’s.

Running my thumb along the edge of the rough, circular rock, I take a breath. It’s soft and barely audible, but I hear the chime of the stone’s power in the back of my mind. A trickle of energy runs up my arm. As it passes through me, my muscles relax and the crick in my neck eases. It’s like getting a massage from a ghost.

“Better?” Dawn asks without looking up.

“Yeah. Thanks.” I roll the tiger iron between my hands, watching Dawn inspect Mariella with more attention to detail than a doctor.

After a minute she straightens, biting her lip. My grip on the stone gets tighter. I’ve kinda gotten used to Dawn coming up with solutions. When I saw her, I guess I expected—hoped—she’d do it again.

Forehead creased, Dawn walks toward the coffee table and runs one hand along the geodes, statues, and bowls of stone chips gathered there, almost like she’s cataloging them.

“Have you heard from Horace?” K.T. asks.

Watching Dawn’s inspection, I nod. “They tracked Nadette to Trenton. They think she was heading for Horace’s place.”

“And he wasn’t there.” I glance at K.T., but I can’t see her face. She’s sitting next to Mari, adjusting the blankets on the bed. “New Jersey is a long way to run from Florida.”

“Depending on what she was running from, it might not have been far enough.”

The words are out before I can catch them. K.T.’s eyes widen, and I remind myself that I’ve got no reason to think Nadette was running for the same reasons I did.

I grind my teeth and grip the tiger iron tighter as the tension creeps back into my body. Nadette’s disappearance is one more situation I can’t do shit about.

“Look, you’ve got to give me something to do here.”

K.T. and I both look at Dawn.

“My mom has been driving me crazy, and I want to help,” she says, planting her hands on her hips. “Don’t tell me I’m too young to get involved because I’m already involved, so that argument won’t hold water and—Gaia help me—I’ll figure out something I can do without you if I have to, and I’ll probably waste a whole lot of time or get myself into trouble, so you’re better off giving me something to do, okay?”

“Dawn, I’d have to be stupid to say you couldn’t help after everything you’ve
already
helped with,” I tell her. “But I don’t know what you can do.”

A little of the determination fades, but the creases are back in her forehead.

“I mean, unless you can tell me how to open a door into the dreamworld and wipe out the demons? Or if you know how to track down other people who’ve lived through this, too.”

She huffs, crosses her arms, and then freezes. Slowly, a smile stretches across her face and her eyes grow bright.

“I can do that.”

“Do what?” K.T. asks.

“Help you look for other survivors.”

Shaking my head, I ask, “How do you look for people who survived something most people don’t know exists, and who probably work really hard not to be found?”

“No one can hide completely. There will be stories about people with strange abilities or
something
I’ll be able to follow,” Dawn says.

“Not just that.”

We both look at K.T. She’s smiling, focused, and nearly exuberant.

“You don’t only look for the paranormal,” K.T. says. “You look for the
ab
normal. Or things that are
too
normal.”

Dawn seems to get it, but I’m lost. “Can something be
too
normal?”