only a half dozen of them were able to go. Cooper was looking forward to it, despite the dreary weather as the trip began .
“Calm, Cooper,” Brent said. “It isn’t happening now.”
Cooper pulled in another deep, rattling breath.
“This was a bad idea,” he said.
“Pills are in the glove box,” Brent replied.
He wasn’t planning to take any, but Cooper used the offer as an excuse to snoop into Brent’s life, and to distract himself from what was going on outside the car—namely, movement, road, water, and other cars. “Why do I get the impression you have a very different life than I’m used to?” he pondered out loud as he looked through the collection of prescription drugs. Brent had said they were from his mother’s medicine cabinet, but several bottles had Brent’s name on them. “Please tell me you do not take this crap when you’re driving.”
“I don’t even take it when I’m sleeping,” Brent answered. “When the telepathy got strong enough to be a problem, and I kept ending up in the hospital, doctors always gave me more migraine prescriptions and sleeping pills. I didn’t take them because they only made the voices worse, but Mum kept filling the prescriptions if I didn’t and—Damn it, Cooper, stop it!”
Cooper wasn’t sure what he was doing at that exact moment to cause the outburst. “Stop what?”
“Stop … thinking, asking questions,” Brent replied tightly. “All I have to do is hit the brake or swerve a little to give you a heart attack, and I swear to God I will if you keep prying.”
The words, coupled with the shout, were nearly enough to cause the threatened reaction on their own. The gray sky had started to drip the moment Cooper got on the road, a fine drizzle that suggested a damp weekend. Hopefully it would pass. This was Massachusetts, after all; the weather was rarely the same from hour to hour .
“Cooper. Cooper!” Brent’s words jerked him out of the memory. “I’m sorry. I’m tired, and it takes enough concentration to drive without being swamped by your flashbacks that I say stuff without thinking. I don’t like to talk about myself, and I really don’t like to talk about my family, so do me a favor and keep off that subject.”
Cooper nodded. If Brent’s mother was as unstable as Brent made her seem, Cooper could understand why Brent didn’t want to talk about it. He could also guess why telepathy might come in handy.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I won’t ask more about your family, but would you talk about something? Please. I’m just trying not to think.”
“Well, that’s kind of you,” Brent replied. He paused a moment, and then said, “How about Delilah? There’s an interesting girl for you. Doesn’t date jocks. Practices black magic in her spare time. On an unrelated note, she likes to dance naked outside on the new moon.”
That image was enough to distract Cooper momentarily from his memories of the accident.
Brent laughed, and then said, “For someone who has never dated her, you have a remarkably accurate image of her, down to the tattoo on her left hip.”
Cooper felt himself blush, as he stammered some kind of excuse about teams and traveling and parties and occasional lack of privacy. “And you two dated?” He still couldn’t picture it.
“Yeah, for a while, but then there were some basic ideological incompatibilities. None of that neo-pagan earthy no-personal-gain stuff for that girl,” Brent said. “I’m not sure she fancies the ‘harm none’ principle, either.”
“So she is a witch?” Cooper asked. “I thought maybe she was like you or something.”
“She doesn’t like to be called a witch,” Brent answered. “She says that gets her confused with the Wiccans and stuff. She plans to become a registered member of the C.O.S. when she turns eighteen.”
“C.O.S?”
“Church of Satan.”
“Now I know you’re messing with me,” Cooper said. He leaned back, shaking his head. Brent was probably making stuff up to distract him. Probably.
“The Church of Satan isn’t the way it’s portrayed in movies, with human sacrifice and killing kittens and that Hollywood crap,” Brent explained. “A lot of it has to do with personal power, which I’m fine with. However, they do not believe in being kind to those who have ‘wronged’ them, so I imagine Delilah might have some choice words to say about me, since I kind of implied she was a sociopathic freak when I broke up with her. I think she expected me to be a whole lot more grateful that she passed my name on to Ryan, and she didn’t expect him to be more impressed by the abilities I got by accident than he is by the ones she worked on for … oh, never mind.”
Cooper looked up at the road—which was a mistake. He knew this stretch of highway. He had seen it in his dreams so many times. The road crested in a hill, and over the hill—
“Stop the car,” he gasped.
Brent responded promptly, putting on his hazards, checking for other cars and easing onto the shoulder as quickly as he safely could.
Cooper nearly fell out the passenger-side door, while Brent waited in the car. Leaning over the guardrail, he tried to pull in enough air to keep from passing out as the rain soaked through his clothes. He had nearly succeeded before he lifted his eyes and saw the two white crosses.
He scanned the area, taking in the dents in the guardrails, his mind seeing another day … and suddenly all the memories came flooding back. He had tried to slow down, seeing the thick, white fog, but he knew there were people close behind him, and that braking too suddenly on the highway was as dangerous as going too fast. He was riding the brake when he barely saw the flash of movement and color out of his peripheral vision .
He put a hand on the guardrail, in the exact spot the girl had been. Without slowing, she set one foot on the metal rail and vaulted onto the road . She landed in front of him, and only then did she turn and seem to see him. Her eyes widened and her mouth opened. He jammed the brake pedal into the floor mat, but she was barely an arm’s length away, and nothing could stop the series of collisions that followed . An enormous crash, and then he was airborne. Shattering glass, and impact .
Had Samantha been the one who leaped in front of his car that day? But there had been no mention of a girl being killed in the crash. Cooper had checked. Unless Ryan was right, and she had never been alive in the first place. In which case the real question was: had she known what she was doing, and the damage she would cause?
19
Delilah felt like she was drowning, not in rain, but in fire. The world seemed to be ablaze. She couldn’t make sense of it. She wished she was dreaming. If she had been, she could have woken herself. But this was more like wandering, lost.
She remembered the way the skies had split while she tried to figure out how to link to Samantha. The rain that had fallen around her had been so thick she couldn’t draw air into her lungs. With every breath, she had inhaled more water. But this was something different, someone else’s memory of another time and place. She drew a breath, but it was a futile one. Her lungs were scorched by smoke and heat. She struggled forward despite every survival instinct telling her to run, because she could hear screaming .
Delilah knew she wasn’t some helpless child. She was a sorcerer.
I think, therefore I am, she pondered. If she still existed, then she was still alive, and she did not have to linger this way. And if she was alive, then she could learn.
Instead of struggling toward consciousness, she reached for the memory of fire. She had tried to bind a water elemental, and had found a vision of flames and … something. Pain, yes, but more than that.
She woke in the hospital with a shudder and found herself shouting, “Leave me alone!”
Her eyes were barely open before Ryan began the lecture she had anticipated. “What did you think you were doing?” he demanded, only to answer his own question before she could draw a breath into her aching lungs. “No, I know what you thought you were doing. You thought you were being clever, and bold.”
“No less so than Arabella le Coire once was,” she managed to gasp out. Ryan’s ancestor had bound herself to an earth elemental and set herself up as lady of a great manor—the same manor where she had been imprisoned, awaiting death for heresy and witchcraft before then. Hundreds of years later, the le Coire family still
