The Veil (5 page)

“She just turned seventeen today, for God’s sake. Let’s try not to kill her yet!” Nate protested from the front seat, grabbing onto the passenger-side door and letting out a silent scream of terror.

“Oh, Grandma, hush,” Olivia said, utterly calm as she narrowly avoided rear-ending an Acura with the audacity to be going a mere seventy miles per hour in the fast lane. We made the usually
forty-minute-plus drive to the city in record time, pausing only because of slight traffic just before the Golden Gate Bridge.

Once we finally got onto the bridge, I fidgeted anxiously. I wasn’t a big fan of heights, and being suspended above water always made me edgy. Instead of thinking about it, I pondered to myself for the thousandth time why anyone would call something painted bright red “Golden.”

Olivia zoomed through the Marina District and turned right just before Fisherman’s Wharf. By the time she’d squeezed the Prius into a tiny and very crowded parking garage, I knew my guess was correct. I also knew I would soon be regretting my unusually large dinner.

Nate and Olivia led me straight out of the parking lot and to the Ghirardelli Ice Cream and Chocolate Shop, just underneath the red and white clock tower. There was a line out of the door, but it went quickly; when it was our turn, we bypassed the menu and walked right up to the counter.

“The Earthquake, please,” Nate ordered for us. He and Olivia paid (ignoring my attempt to chip in). We took the receipt from the clerk and scooted along the counter to watch our dessert being made.

We always got the same thing there. The Earthquake was supposed to contain eight large scoops of ice cream, but you could easily push it to at least ten scoops and a few extra toppings with just a teeny bit of flirting.

To that end, Olivia was already leaning seductively over the counter, chatting up the guy who Nate had just handed our receipt to.

“Definitely double fudge and double marshmallow,” Olivia was saying. “And caramel, butterscotch, blueberry, raspberry . . . how many do we have so far?”

“Not nearly enough,” the ice cream guy smiled at Olivia and added two extra scoops of chocolate ice cream and a generous ladle of butterscotch.

But she wasn’t done. She threw an arm over my shoulders and pulled me over in front of him. “It’s my friend’s birthday. And she
loves
sweets, don’t you, Addy?”

Behind us, Nate snorted with laughter and left to go find a table. I turned bright red and mumbled something unintelligible.

Still grinning at Olivia, and mercifully paying me no attention whatsoever, the ice cream guy grabbed a handful of chocolate cable cars and sprinkled them over the top of our completed sundae.

“Happy birthday,” he said to Olivia, who winked at him and whisked our dessert over to the table Nate had staked out in the corner.

I was already full from Gran’s dinner, but tackling an Earthquake is a team sport, and I wasn’t about to let down my team. So I ignored the uncomfortable feeling in my stomach and proceeded to plow through my third of the plate.

A lot of people at the tables around us—mostly tourists, from the looks of them—gawked at us in fascinated revulsion as we worked our way through the mountain of sticky, cold perfection in front of us. No wonder they’ll give you extra ice cream if you look like you can handle it! We were most definitely a part of the entertainment at Ghirardelli that evening.

When only two rather runny scoops of ice cream remained, floating serenely in a pool of congealed hot fudge, Nate leaned back in his chair and let out a half groan, half burp.

“Don’t you quit on us, Whitting,” Olivia said sternly, although she too had laid down her spoon and was looking a little bit green. “I worked hard to earn those two extra scoops.”

“You mean your
scoops
worked hard to earn them,” Nate retorted, with a meaningful nod at Olivia’s low-cut shirt.

She made a halfhearted attempt to slap him as he nudged one of the ice cream mounds over toward my part of the plate. It skidded toward me and avoided flying into my lap only by lodging itself against a half-eaten chocolate cable car at the edge of the dish.

“Come on, birthday girl,” Nate said. “One for you and one for me.”

He held his spoon up. I reluctantly raised my own, clinked it once against his, and fell upon the extra scoop I really had no business trying to fit inside of my already cramping stomach.

When we were finally finished, Nate wiped his mouth and, without standing up, bowed dramatically to our audience.

“Show’s over, folks,” he said.

A group of tourists wearing identical purple shirts gave him a disgusted look.

“Present time!” Olivia announced, pulling a carrier bag out from under her coat, where she had been hiding it. The bag was a distinctive shade of pink, which meant it could only have come from Jest Jewels, a store Olivia and I were obsessed with, and that Nate loathed. “It’s from both of us.”

Inside, wrapped in pink tissue paper, was a beautiful leather-bound journal. I grinned over at Nate; I had about a dozen journals at home, which I’d been systematically filling since the age of nine, and I was just about to run out of space in my latest one. Only Nate could possibly have known that. It must have been his idea.

“The book’s not even the good part,” Olivia insisted. “Check out what’s inside.”

I opened the journal to the page marked by a silver chain. On the end of the chain, pressed between the blank pages, was a silver horseshoe charm.

Olivia grabbed it and put the chain around my neck immediately. It was just long enough so when I looked down, I could just see the tiny, perfect charm. “It made me think of you,” she explained.

“Thank you. I love them both,” I tapped the pink label stuck to the back of the journal and cocked an eyebrow at Nate. “I can’t
believe
you went inside Jest Jewels.”

“I dragged him,” Olivia said proudly, as Nate groaned.

“Everything in there is so . . . pink,” he complained.

Olivia tweaked his nose. “Don’t worry, Princess, we won’t shop there for your birthday.”

I had a bit of a brain freeze as we rolled ourselves outside. I breathed in the cool night air, much colder here than in Marin because of the breeze coming off of the bay, and closed my eyes, trying to fight back the sugar rush that was rapidly taking over my brain.

When I opened my eyes again, my stomach flopped over itself and an odd, hollow, rushing sound filled my ears. I stared, unbelievably, at the scene before me.

The red and white walls of Ghirardelli Square, the sign, and the clock tower were gone. In their place, surrounding us on all sides, were blindingly bright walls of silver. When I shielded my eyes from the glare and looked again, I saw that the “walls” were really just strands of tiny metallic strips that had been woven together. The walls were swaying like curtains in the light breeze from the nearby bay, and yet somehow I still got the impression they were more solid than steel. There was something oppressive, almost fortresslike about those walls—but whether they were keeping us trapped inside or protecting us from something outside, I couldn’t tell.

I was totally unable to look away, but the brightness made my eyes start to ache. I closed them briefly, and the reverberating, metallic glow made strange shadows behind my eyelids until I opened them again. Unlike my hallucinations from earlier in the day, the strange fortress of light did not disappear or run away. It stayed where it was. Bright, solid, and as real to me as the rushing sound inside of my ears.

I looked over at Olivia and Nate; they were watching me curiously.

“Addy?” Nate asked finally. “Your face is white.”

“Can you see it?” I breathed.

They looked at each other.

“See what?” Olivia asked.

Before I could answer, a movement out of the corner of my eye caught my attention. I looked up and watched as a half-dozen hazy
figures, with wings like bats but as big as eagles, glided overhead and turned around in a lazy curve. Circling us.

I don’t remember falling over, but I vaguely recall Nate diving forward to catch me as the ground rolled and knocked my feet out from under me.

——

“No more sugar for you, little girl.”

I blinked. I was flat on my back. My neck was bent up at a strange angle, and my head was resting against something hard, which I realized, as I blinked again, had to be Nate’s knee.

There was a light overhead. For a moment I stared up at it, afraid my hallucination was continuing. But when my eyes adjusted, I realized I was looking at a street lamp—just an ordinary, everyday street lamp—and the harsh, yellowish light it gave off was entirely different than the blazing silver walls of light I’d just seen.

Behind the light, I could see the clock tower—red with lacy white trim. Not silver. And there was nothing flying around overhead except seagulls.

There was a loud bang as Olivia burst through the doors of the Ghirardelli Ice Cream and Chocolate Shop, holding a paper cup in each hand. She dropped to her knees next to me and handed me one of them. “Here, drink this,” she said. Reaching into her back pocket, she produced a napkin and dunked it into the second cup. “Sit her up, Nate.”

He hauled me up into a semi-sitting position and wedged himself behind me so I wouldn’t flop back over.

I sipped the cold water and felt instantly better. Olivia bent my head forward and pressed the water-soaked napkin to the back of my neck. After a moment, I sat up by myself. Olivia removed the napkin and took the empty cup out of my hand.

“Wow,” I said.

“Yeah, wow,” Nate scooted to the side of me, concern all over his face. “Are you okay? You just keeled over.”

“I feel better now,” I said. I did, although the idea of crawling into my bed and sleeping for a year was starting to sound like the best plan in the history of the world.

“Just sit for a minute,” Olivia suggested, dumping the two cups and the napkin into a nearby trash can.

After another minute of sitting, I felt well enough to try walking. Leaning heavily on Nate, I managed to make it back to Olivia’s car, where I was able to stretch out in the dark backseat. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “I don’t think I’m being very fun on my birthday.”

“You’re a blast,” Nate said from the front seat. “Fainting, seeing things, what’s not to love?”

“Nate . . .” Olivia warned.

I shivered, thinking about what I’d seen. Not just that night, but all throughout the day. Multiple hallucinations in a twelve-hour period couldn’t possibly mean anything good.

I fell asleep on the way home but woke up just as Olivia exited the freeway. By the time she pulled up in front of Gran’s house, I was sitting up. I was able to get out of the car, through the iron gate surrounding the house, and up the front stoop all by myself.

“I’ll call you tomorrow!” Nate yelled from the car.

“Rehearsal at noon!” Olivia reminded me with a wave. “Happy birthday, Addy!”

Happy birthday, indeed. I was just relieved the day was finally over. Or it would be, just as soon as I could roll into bed and close my eyes.

I let myself in the front door, just as the clock on the mantle let out eight quiet chimes. Not even close to curfew, but I went right to bed, pausing only to pat the heads of the two cats sitting, sphinxlike, on either side of my bedroom door.

Just before I fell asleep, I had a strange thought: the cougar in my math class and the frog on Sully’s shoulder had both been the exact same shade of silver as the building of light at Ghirardelli Square. How odd.

——

O
KAY, SO YESTERDAY WAS WEIRD
.

But it was over now. It was the beginning of a brand new day, and there was absolutely no reason to think anything remotely strange was going to happen to me today.

Now, if I could just muster the courage to get out of bed.

The clock on my bedside table said eleven. This meant I’d slept in later this morning than I had in years. It also meant that if I did not get up soon, I would miss rehearsal. And Olivia would kill me.

And yet I stayed there, huddled under the covers with my favorite blue blanket pulled up to my chin long after I’d woken up, trying very hard to stop all of the strange things I’d seen yesterday from replaying themselves, over and over again, inside my head.

The frog. The giant silver cougar. Lucas Stratton. Ghirardelli Square.

It’s Saturday,
I told myself, chasing the disturbing images from my mind.
Nothing bad ever happens on a Saturday.

But I still felt no inclination to crawl out from beneath my nice, warm covers and face the world.

In the end, the cats got me up. More particularly, their outraged yowling at my having missed their usual breakfast time was what finally motivated me to throw on a robe and stumble downstairs. After I fed them, I trudged back upstairs and locked myself in the bathroom.

I took the longest shower our hot water supply would allow, twisted my hair into a bun without drying it, and threw on jeans. I added an ancient yellow T-shirt and a black button-down sweater, then headed downstairs.

Gran was waiting for me in the dining room. The bottom drawer of the china cabinet was open, and she held a plastic bag away from her body as though it was emitting some sort of foul odor.

I cringed.

I’d hidden the bag in the china cabinet last week, thinking Gran would never look there because we never had company that required using the good china. And contrary to her expression of revulsion, the bag contained nothing smelly at all—only two bags of Halloween candy and a plastic bowl with a witch’s face on the bottom.

I cringed again when she looked over at me, but the look on her face was more sad than accusatory. This was not, after all, the first October I’d tried to sneak trick-or-treater supplies into the house.

“I don’t know why you bother with this,” she said, handing the bowl and the candy to me. “You know no one ever makes it to the front door.”

“Maybe this year there’s someone new to the area,” I said hopefully, knowing even as I spoke that any kid who might’ve just moved into our neighborhood would probably be even more terrified of our house than the kids who’d lived here their whole lives. I guess that’s what I get for living in a house that always looked like it should be a shoe-in to win “Best Haunted House,” even though we never did any decorating.