Velocity

THE GRAVITY SERIES

BOOK 4

~ VELOCITY ~

by Abigail Boyd

Copyright ©2013 Abigail Boyd

http://abigailboyd.blogspot.com/

http://www.boydbooks.com

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COPYRIGHT:

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the author, except for use in review.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”

― Shakespeare,
The Tempest

PROLOGUE

This is the end.

The end of all we’ve worked for. There’s no one coming to help us. My friend and lover are doomed, inches away from death at the hands of madmen.

I struggle against my captor, but I can’t pull free. The power is gone.

I feel helpless, caught staring into the eyes of pure insanity.

And we will never see the sun rise again.

CHAPTER 1

MY MOTHER DIED
alone. At 6:06 in the morning, the doctor felt her limp wrist for a pulse and declared her gone. The note on the death certificate looked like 6:66. A bad omen. She’d been in a coma for weeks, since she slammed her own skull to pieces, but it was as though she had waited for the right moment.

Nurses had tended to her all night, checking her vitals, poking their heads in every fifteen minutes. The morning nurse had just left for coffee, she told me later, thinking Claire wasn’t going anywhere. She’d been stable. The sun must have just been peeking through the blinds.

My mother never woke up to see it.

On the way home from her funeral, I mulled it over. The heavy guilt was already pressing down on me, ready to crush me with its weight.

The week of Christmas, it felt like my life went full upheaval. Claire went off of her medication and had a psychotic breakdown, gravely injuring herself while I stood by. I hadn’t only lost my mom. The spirit of my friend, Jenna, had been pulled back into the Dark realm without any warning. Before any of this happened, I’d always been threatened by Phillip Rhodes, the most powerful man in town, that if my father and I didn’t get out of town, we’d be sorry.

The old me would have snapped. I almost did. But a new determination had settled in me. I wouldn’t break this time. I had to hold it together.

It didn’t mean that the guilt was lessened any. How could I get over my last months with Claire? I couldn’t remember the last time either of us said we loved each other. She had been so consumed with the Thornhill Society, and I had been so ready to stay far away from it, that our paths had barely crossed.

The funeral had been monochromatic, just like what Claire would have picked if she had decorated it herself. The coffin was white and so were all the flowers. I now realized why white looked so much like death―there was nothing there. My father had shaken our loved ones’ hands until I thought his wrist was going to fall off.

My strongest memory of her involved Claire standing in the road after we’d been in a car accident, telling Hugh to take me away.

Did she even know I loved her? Did she love me?

I’d found out that she’d been part of some kind of coin toss involving Jenna’s mother, wagering something precious to get into Thornhill. Rachel had lost and Jenna was dead. I just didn’t know how much my mom had known when she flipped that coin.

I shut my eyes. The car was speeding on the expressway towards home. The funeral had been out of town, with many people I’d never met.

Hugh started to laugh, jarring me out of my thoughts. I opened my eyes and stared at him, nerves screaming in torture as he continued to chuckle.

“How is anything possibly funny right now?” I croaked.

“I was just remembering that time your mom tripped off the deck. Remember?”

“Yeah.” I didn’t remember it at all.

“The entire back of her skirt ripped. She just sat on the ground, right on her backside. I could see her getting mad, and I was waiting for the curse words to start flying. And then she started to laugh. She couldn’t stop herself, her face turned red and she fell over…”

He started laughing again himself, breathy wheezes that looked painful, mirthful tears wetting his red cheeks. One hand beat the steering wheel cover and he hissed out of his teeth.

The laughter changed, dissolving into harsh sobs. His eyebrows tipped downward, mouth scrunching up. He took one hand off of the wheel to wipe the tears away. I patted his back for just a moment, but it felt so awkward that I withdrew my useless hand.

Veering the car off to the shoulder, he shut off the ignition. Dropping his head, he sobbed into his hands. The wipers pushed slushy snow back and forth. Other cars swished by. Hugh continued to sob, his big shoulders shuddering. I wished I was a passenger in any of the other cars, one not coming from a front row view of death.

“Do you want me to drive home?” I asked finally.

Hugh’s crying tapered off. He sniffled. “No. I’m okay.” His eyes and nose were bright, painfully red, but he straightened himself up. “I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry about,” I mumbled.

“Let’s just get this over with,” he said, putting the car back into gear. “I don’t want to be there any longer than we have to be.”

###

Our house looked abandoned as we pulled into the driveway. Gravel crackled like dry bones beneath the tires. The engine shut off, but we just sat, not moving to take off our seat belts. The house just didn’t seem the same. We hadn’t been back since the night that Claire had her breakdown. Even though I’d grown up there, I’d been living with Hugh for nearly a month.

“The faster we get inside, the faster we can leave,” Hugh muttered, making the first move and sliding his keys out of the ignition.

The last time I’d been inside, the house had been trashed by Thornhill members looking for my grandmother’s necklace. I had no idea what we would find inside.

Hugh unlocked the front door and we walked in. I tore off the ‘NO SHOES ON THE CARPET!’ sign and crumpled it into a ball.

Inside, the presence of death was stifling. I felt like I was the occupant of a coffin that had a limited supply of oxygen. The air was still and cold, and dust motes floating in the gray light. I turned on a lamp but it didn’t do much good.

He went into the kitchen. I followed, but paused in the spot beneath their room. I thought I might hear the awful thudding of Claire beating her skull against the wall. I wanted to cover my ears, to run out screaming. Instead, I froze, my ears zeroing in.

The fridge hummed, the grandfather clock ticked, and there were snaps and groans of a settling house. Nothing else. The tense band of muscles along my shoulders relaxed a fraction.

“It smells like bleach in here,” I commented.

“Stauner had a cleaning crew come in,” Hugh explained, “as a personal favor to our family. So we wouldn’t have to…worry about the mess.”

He laid his suit jacket across the table, sweat bathing his forehead and the scruff on his chin.

We’d bought new mourning clothes the day before, his cheap suit and my godawful black cotton dress. We didn’t have the funds for much else, not with his business tanking, until the life insurance was figured out. The receipts and shopping bags were waiting at his apartment. We’d never wear these clothes again.

He put his hands on his hips and started doing a visual inventory. Most of the items in the living room were boxed up and the furniture was covered with plastic sheets.

I followed him as he continued his evaluation. At the bottom of the staircase he halted with his hand on the banister.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, shuffling closer beside him.

A shaft of light from the skylight fell onto his unblinking eyes as he gazed up.

“Are you going up there?”

“They scrubbed it all,” he said, just a breath above a whisper. “Mike said they did a very thorough job. So that we’d never even know what happened in there.”

I could hear the tears in his voice and I wanted to run and hide. Fear made him look so young, like my brother instead of my father. There was no safety here.

“You probably couldn’t even see anything,” he continued.

Her blood
, piped up a voice in my head.
No matter how hard they scrubbed, they couldn’t get all the blood out…

I wrapped my arm determinedly around his shoulder, turning him to face me. He was so pliable that he moved with little effort, and his haunted eyes met mine.

“It’s okay if you can’t go upstairs,” I said firmly. “We don’t need anything up there. We got almost everything out when you moved. They can mail the rest.”

He seemed to find relief in my words. He took my hand from his shoulder and squeezed it gently, nodding. As he stepped off of the stair, it reminded me of someone stepping off a ledge after deciding not to jump. He wandered back towards the kitchen.

I shot one last glance up the ominous stairs. I didn’t possess the strength to go up, either. At the moment, I wanted to level the entire house.

As I passed back by Claire’s office, something moved inside. Peering through the crack in the door, I gently pushed it open. My mother sat in front of the computer, staring at the monitor like a zombie. Skeletal hands rested atop the keyboard. Her clothes, a cardigan and a skirt, were musty with moth holes nibbled into the fabric. Brown blood stains ran down her shoulder to her hip.

She turned towards me, dried bones creaking, her face green and rotting. Her yellow eyes were rolled up, revealing nothing but whites. The broken half of her face began to show, and I squeezed my eyes shut.

You’re not real. You’re not real.

When I opened my eyes, there was nothing in the computer room. The computer had been dismantled, the monitor dark, the rest stacked in boxes. I hadn’t seen but my own guilt to haunt me.

In the kitchen, I poured a glass of water, drinking it down in a straight shot of gulps. Hugh was sitting at the table, drumming his fingers on the wood. I was about to ask him what he wanted to do next. Were we going to start boxing things up? Leave everything alone? Donate her things to charity?

What do you do when your mother suddenly goes insane, reveals that she can see ghosts, and kills herself to stop the suffering?

I rushed to the sink and vomited the water back up. I gripped the metal, chest heaving until there was nothing but air coming out. Hugh joined me, rubbing my back.

“Are you okay?” he asked. He started to pull my hair back, but I squirmed away, still feeling raw to the touch.

“I’m fine.” I wiped my lips with the back of my hand. “Can we just get what we need and get back home?”

I went downstairs and gathered my few remaining trinkets, not paying much attention to my musty room. I caught a glance at myself in the standing mirror. I looked like a stranger―my hazel eyes were haunted with regret and my hair was a ragged mess behind a thin headband. I thought of Jenna looking at herself in the same mirror.

What do you mean, you’re going out?

The words have one meaning, Ariel. Not difficult to understand.

I slammed the locks shut on the heavy suitcase and left the room. I only glanced for a moment at the heavy lock that Claire had installed on the basement door, not wanting to hold the image in my head.