Banishing the Dark

23

I was dreaming about shrimp again. This time, Lon was showing me how to catch them with a fishing pole in a stream. But while he was struggling to reel one in, I walked away and found myself in a strangely familiar field. Tall grass. Wildflowers. And standing in the middle of it with her back to me was a tall, leggy woman with graying hair.

A terrible anxiety came over my dream body.

The woman turned around and smiled triumphantly. “Ma petite lune. You are awake.”

Snapping out of sleep, I tumbled off the bed in a cold sweat. Several panicked moments ticked by as I jerked my head around, looking for my mother in the shadows, unsure of where I was. Or when it was . . .

Twentynine Palms. The cheap motel. Two in the afternoon.

Daytime. The safe time to sleep. So that was only a dream. Right? I pushed off the floor and looked at Lon. He was stretched out on the bed, softly snoring. His halo was still healthy. But when my gaze slipped over the rumpled sheet, I found the problem.

I’d forgotten to charge the ward.

No protection. I had slept without any protection, and now my mother knew I was no longer in a coma. Worse, she’d managed to tap into my dreams during the daytime.

Mad at myself and scared, I sat on the floor next to the bed and wilted into a shaking mess. My breathing quickened. It didn’t take long before I was hyperventilating and nauseated. I stuck my head between my knees and tried to count myself into a calmer state. The mattress creaked. A warm hand smoothed across my shoulders as Lon settled on the floor beside me.

“What’s wrong?”

“What isn’t wrong?” I said before telling him what had just happened.

He listened, rubbing circles on my back, while I talked into my knees. When I finished, he exhaled a long breath, and said, “Cady—”

“What am I going to do, Lon? I’m out of ideas. I don’t know what to do next.”

“Cady.”

I looked up at him. He pointed in front of us. A ball of cotton-candy-pink light hovered in the air above my overnight bag. My servitor! That was fast. Too fast? We both watched the pink light disappear inside the bag, heading back into my soap doll.

“I need your pocketknife again.”

I both dreaded and couldn’t wait to see what it had found. I pulled out the soap doll and wasted no time drawing the series of symbols that would trigger the servitor to spill its contents. I only needed a tiny bit of Heka to charge the retrieval spell, so I stuck my finger in my mouth and rubbed saliva over the scribbled sigil while stabbing the carved bar of soap.

Cool energy surrounded me as the servitor’s collected images unfolded. Like a psychic film, it replayed the spell’s journey: leaving the hotel room last night, floating into darkness. Then it sped up in a flash of blurry light, the shift making me dizzy until it settled on its final destination.

A forest, heavily wooded. A dirt road. A dark green house sat at the end of it, the roof covered in leaves and pine needles. Dozens of white antlers hung around the door. A hunting lodge? No identifying house number. No mailbox. No signs. The image moved through the door like a ghost to show the inside of the house. A spacious great room with a rustic fireplace. Sparsely furnished. Dark. Blinds drawn.

I strained to see anything that might indicate location: mail, calendar, family photos, letterhead. But no. Nothing and more nothing. It was the blandest, least personal house I’d ever seen.

“Come on, give me something,” I murmured, as if that would help. It wasn’t sentient; the images were already prerecorded, so to speak. What I saw was what it had retrieved. I hoped it would move into another room where I might see something more—magnets on the refrigerator or a takeout menu on the counter. But the servitor’s metaphysical lens only moved to the far end of the room, where an oversized grandfather clock sat near the fireplace.

Deer and trees and wood nymphs were carved into the massive wooden base. A stag’s antlered head jutted above the gold clock dial. A terrible familiarity washed over me at the sight of it. Some dusty, long-forgotten memory cowered in the corned of my mind.

I’d seen this clock before.

The servitor’s gaze bobbed and floated down to the bottom of the clock. In a swift movement, it pushed forward and ghosted through the base, but there was nothing but darkness. Darkness, and more darkness, then—

Pop!

The servitor’s transmission ended, leaving me sitting on the hotel floor with Lon’s pocketknife stuck into the bar of soap.

“What did you see?” Lon asked, squatting next to me.

“A house in the woods, no cars. I couldn’t even tell where the woods were—Oregon? Maryland? Florida? I don’t know. There was nothing identifiable, Lon. Just a grandfather clock. But maybe that was the clue the servitor was trying to show me. And it’s weird, but I think I remember it from when I was a kid.”

“Your parents’ house in Florida?”

“No, that’s long gone. And we didn’t have a grandfather clock. Maybe I saw it somewhere we went. Another house.”

“Family vacation?”

“We never went on vacation.” Like, never. And strange, but the word vacation triggered a whole other nagging feeling inside my brain, that déjà vu sensation. Plane tickets. Skiing. Mountains. Christmas. Where the hell was this all coming from? Someplace more recent? I couldn’t piece it together.

“Did you ever visit anyone?” Lon pressed, unaware of my warring memories. “Friends of your parents? Another lodge, maybe?”

“They never took me anywhere. They were gone half the time, traveling.”

Lon’s phone rang, tearing me out of my brain strain. He slid his fingers over the screen to answer the call. Even with the phone against his ear, I could hear Jupe’s urgent voice. Then Lon said, “Hold on.” He put it on speakerphone and held it between us.

“Cady?”

“I’m here,” I confirmed. “What’s wrong?”

“You guys need to come home,” Jupe’s voice said. “Right now.”