Hallowed

“It’s a dog, see?” Jeffrey says again. “It’s hurt.” He steps toward the fence. “Here, boy.” I yank him back, put my arms around him, and cling. “It’s not a dog. Look at its ear. See how the right one’s mangled? That’s because I pulled it off last summer. He had to grow it back.

See on its shoulder, where it’s bleeding? That’s where Mr. Phibbs got him with the glory arrow.”

“What?” Jeffrey shakes his head like he’s trying to clear it.

“It’s a Black Wing.”

The dog stands up. Approaches the fence. Whines. A low, plaintive sound that stirs the sorrow up to an even higher intensity. Come. Come.

“That’s Samjeeza,” I insist, pulling back on Jeffrey’s shoulder, but he’s stronger than me.

I’m not moving him.

“I think you’ve officially gone off the deep end,” Jeffrey says.

“No, she hasn’t, son,” comes a voice. Mr. Phibbs, walking up briskly behind us. “Come away from there now, children,” he says.

Jeffrey stops pushing against me. We turn and walk slowly to Mr. Phibbs. He keeps his eyes trained on the dog. It growls.

“What, do you want another one?” Mr. Phibbs asks. “I can put one right between the eyes this time.”

It growls again, a sound full of so much hate it makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Then it vanishes. No poof or magic words or anything. A chill in the air, a hint of ozone, and he’s gone.

We all take a minute to catch our breath.

“Crazy,” Jeffrey says finally. “I would have taken him home if you hadn’t stopped me.”

Chapter 15 Angel on My Doorstep

From then on I can feel Samjeeza in that field almost every day. He doesn’t always call to me, that sad seductive music that I can’t keep out of my head. But he shows up even if it’s just for five minutes. He wants me to know he’s there.

He doesn’t cause any trouble, doesn’t harm any of the students, doesn’t show himself. He doesn’t attack us coming and going to school, but he knows where we live now. He follows us home. I can’t usually feel him while I’m in the house, since our land is all hallowed and there’s so much of it, from the main road to the woods to the stream behind the house. He can’t come close enough to bother me. Still, if I try, if I listen for him, I can sometimes hear him. Waiting.

I wonder if Mom can feel him, too.

“You have to learn to block him,” she says when I ask her. “It would be a good idea to learn how to block your empathy completely, because there are times you’re going to need to.”

“How?”

“It’s like closing a door,” she answers. “You erect a spiritual barrier between you.”

“A spiritual barrier?”

“You close yourself off from the force that connects us to each other. It’s not good for you, in the long run. It will make you numb if you do it all the time, but it might be the best solution for now. Just so you can get through school without so many distractions. Try it.”

“What, you mean right now? With you?”

“Yes,” she says. She reaches out and takes my hand. “Use your empathy on me.” For some reason this scares me a little.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I can’t control it. The only times my empathy really works when I ask it to is when I’m with Christian. And sometimes. . it’s not just feelings I get from people.

It’s thoughts, too. Why is that?”

“Our thoughts and feelings are entwined,” she tells me. “Memories, images, desires, feelings. You seem to have a knack with feelings. It will be stronger when you touch the person, skin to skin. And sometimes you might get an image or a specific sentence that they’re thinking at the moment. But mostly it will be feelings, I think.”

“Can you do it?”

“No.” She lowers her gaze for a minute. “I don’t often pick up feelings. But I am telepathic. I can read thoughts.”

Hello, news flash! No wonder she always seems two steps ahead of me. When I was a kid I seriously thought she had eyes in the back of her head.

Yes, it’s been a particularly effective parenting tool, she says in my mind. She smiles.

“Don’t look at me like that, Clara. I haven’t been reading your every waking thought. Most of the time I choose to stay out of people’s heads, especially the heads of my children, because you deserve some privacy.”

Now let’s practice, she says. Open yourself up. Try to feel what I feel.

I close my eyes, hold my breath, and listen, like what she’s feeling is something I could hear. Suddenly I see a flash of pale pink behind my eyelids. I gasp.

“Pink,” I whisper.

“Concentrate on it.”

I try. I try to look into the pink until my head starts to ache, and just when I’m about to give up I see that it’s