The Medium

Chapter Seventeen-1

Chapter Seventeen

As soon as he thought to look for them, the signs were obvious, and they were everywhere. The phone, the television… Everything down to the style of Kim’s hair. The world had gone smoother, smaller, more austere. The angles had been replaced by curves. The colors were muted. The frills were gone, and the exaggerated flowers.

It was a new decade, approaching a new millennium. Suddenly, when he tried to picture Mara, he couldn’t. She would be ten years older, ten years smarter. She would like things he’d never heard of. She would be ten years used to thinking of him as dead, if she even thought of him at all. Physically, she would be older than him, now. She might be married. She might have moved out of Abilene, like she sometimes said she wanted to. She might have died young of cancer, like her grandfather and both of her aunts had. She might be gone.

The shock hit him, piled on top of everything else, and he knew it would be the tipping point. But Kim put an arm around him and held him still.

“One thing at a time,” she said. “Stuff’s changed, but maybe not everything. Don’t flip out until we find out how much, okay?”

“T-ten years…”

“Yeah, ten years. Drop in the bucket for someone who’s immortal. You’ll be fine, honey. It’ll be weird, and then you’ll get used to it, and then you’ll be fine.”

She gave him a quick squeeze. The warmth was welcome, because he felt almost frozen.

“Breathe, baby,” she said.

Then she called Mara. He held his breath until he heard the tone that greeted her on the other end. Disconnected number.

“Okay. One thing at a time. Next: dig up an Abilene phone book. Lucky for you, I have obsessive book junkie friends who collect useless stuff like that. What name do I look under?”

“Demarco. Mara D-demarco.”

Unless she was married. Unless she had moved. Unless she was dead.

“Deep breaths, Lenny. Take it easy. We’ll find her.”

She tried someone called Ainslie, and they talked for an hour. Lenny thought he remembered Ainslie, and the snippets of voice he heard from the other end sounded familiar, but he couldn’t put a face to it. Books came to mind, though. Lots of books.

The cowboy and the shaman came back before Kim had hung up. Coyote had an ugly yellow duffel bag, and Zeb was dragging a wheeled cooler. Neither of them looked at the vampire.

Instead of bothering with Lenny, Coyote started to unpack: chalk, a bag of rice, a brass censer and cardboard box of what Lenny assumed was incense, a pair of extremely old Ray Bans with sandblasted lenses, several sloppily-folded state maps, a roll of tape, a bag of marbles, and a brown glass bottle actually labeled ‘Snake Oil.’ It seemed like a bit much to Lenny, but magic had never been one of his strong points.

“Get lost,” Coyote growled over his shoulder.

Lenny was curious about the shaman’s procedure, but the air was already getting itchy with power, and the look Coyote gave him said he would be totally willing to add a sacrifice to his routine if curious vampires stuck around, so Lenny followed the cowboy into Kim’s bedroom.

He kept his head down and held as still as he could, wishing he could will himself invisible. The cowboy left him alone.

It was true he had no magic, nothing but the few sparks keeping him moving, but he could feel it, and whatever was going on in the other room itched beneath his skin and behind his eyes. He tried to listen, but there was nothing to hear except shuffling movement and the occasional exasperated snort. The smell of burning rubber crept under the door.

He waited. The cowboy stayed silent, though his pulse pounded slowly and his breath whistled. Kim’s wristwatch ticked on top of the chest of drawers. In the other room, there was a tiny splash.

“Got the bastard,” Coyote crowed. The air surged and crackled as though electrically charged.

Lenny’s reality blurred. In his mind’s eye, he could see Sebastian, dead; Sebastian, crumbling to ash; Sebastian, human and helpless, centuries ago, ignorant of what he would become, of how he would end. Sebastian, horrible green wallpaper, the musty carpet and the tape—

The wizard gripped his shoulders and shook him, but she didn’t seem real. The shaman stood behind her, wearing his sandblasted sunglasses. Someone else was there, someone who touched his ghost sense, but not a ghost. Dead. Undead. He reached out to brush them all away like troublesome gnats.

—projected across his vision like looking through a film strip. It was as real as anything else. More so, even. And he knew, was completely sure, that he had never escaped, had never gotten out, was still in the cellar, and everything he saw was illusion, nothing but a cold trick. It hurt, but not as much as the idea that he—

A broad, sturdy woman with an eye patch peered into his face and frowned. She asked him questions, and he answered distantly, mechanically, not sure what she had asked or whether his replies were composed of real words.

—had failed as a medium, had turned his back on a creature as impossibly damaged as Sebastian, one who so plainly needed help. He listened in the dark for another dream, another sign forced into his mind through his blood, one last signal—

Impressions drifted past: the cowboy’s hat, a severe profile, black eyes, the sharp smell of matches, bright light. They strung themselves out and strung themselves together into distorted nightmare images, surreal and incomprehensible. He shivered and curled in on himself.

—that he wasn’t alone inside his head. He could almost feel the dry bones beneath his hands, almost wanted to feel them. If he stretched out far enough, he could do that. If he reached, if he stretched, he could be where he was, back in the familiar, because pain hurt less than the unknown. If he reached far enough, he could almost touch the stolen pieces of himself and the man who held them, could almost, could almost…

He felt the darkness before he saw it. It was snug and pleasant, deep enough to hide him, too thin to be oppressive. A warm, dry hand rested on his forehead. The thumb moved slowly, brushing at his hairline. But that wasn’t what had grounded him. Something else nudged the edge of his perception, getting stronger, filling the cracks spreading across his world.

His chest hitched as he tried to get a decent breath in. The hand’s movement stopped.

“Lenny? Honey?” The wizard. “You okay?”

He tried to open his eyes and realized they already were open. It was dark, but not completely; the girl had been reading, using a flashlight strapped to a baseball cap. The glare obscured her face, forcing him to look away, but her tone was sad and worried. He registered her existence, but it didn’t seem urgent. Something else needed his attention.

The electric blanket slid off him as he rolled onto his side and pushed himself up. His stomach lurched, and a dull, insistent heat scratched at the back of his throat. That seemed slightly more important but still, it could wait.

No, the thing demanding his concentration was nearby, but not in the room. He slid off the bed. His knees buckled, and his balance betrayed him, but he steadied himself before he could fall.

It was close.

The wizard scrambled to put herself between him and the door. Her flashlight dropped to the floor and blazed across the carpet. “Lenny. No. Sweetie, tell me where you think you need to be going right now.”

He tried to push past her, but she shoved him back. He weighed so little, but at the same time, he’d gotten stronger. He caught her wrist and held her.

“It’s very important,” he told her, voice soft and thready. “I have to g-go help.”

Kim gritted her teeth and peeled his fingers back from around her wrist. The pressure of his grip didn’t hurt, but the cold did. His skin burned her.

“There’s nothing you can do,” she told him, keeping her voice as level as she could. “Everybody already left, and I don’t even know exactly where they’re going. Duran is long gone. There’s nothing you can do to help him, and I don’t really believe all of you wants to, anyway. Coyote and Zeb are gone. There’s nothing you can do to help them, either. It’s just you and me and my friend Ainslie, and you just had a fit or flashback or something, and I am not letting you out of my sight, and I’m not letting you go anywhere you could get yourself hurt.”

His eyes, catlike, threw back a dim reflected glow from the flashlight. The words didn’t register with him.

“You’ve been flipping the hell out for hours,” she tried. “We had to call Itzli for help, and it took him and Bernice both to keep you from going out the window…”

“Have to help. I have to t-try.”

“No, baby. Duran doesn’t deserve your help, and the good guys don’t need it. No offense, but you’d just get in the way.”

As frustratingly trivial as the exchange seemed, Lenny got the impression they were having two different conversations. He shook his head and reached out somewhere beyond the physical, touching on the Veil and the things inside it. If he couldn’t go to it—to her—he could at least call her to him.

“Not them,” he said.

“Then who?”

But a dim phosphorescence had already answered her. The ghost drifted through the wall, her arms crossed, colorless ponytail floating on nonexistent wind, and she regarded the vampire with anxiety.

“Why can’t you just leave me alone?” she asked. Her voice echoed faintly, and the room grew cold.

“Because you’re stuck here. T-trapped. You don’t want to be here, but you c-can’t leave.”

His shoulders lifted, he straightened, and for an instant, he spoke with authority.

“I don’t know yet how to help myself,” he said slowly, “but I know how to help you.”

The light in his eyes went out. Kim’s breath billowed in clouds of ice around her head. He held a hand out to the ghost.

The flashlight flickered and died.

Only Vickie’s soft, white glow kept the bedroom from being black as pitch. Kim blinked rapidly, trying to convince her eyes to adjust to the dark, and strongly regretted taking Itzli’s advice. The garbage bags taped over the windows and the towel shoved under the door had done their job and blocked out natural light, which seemed to be the only reason Lenny had gone from sobbing and flailing to shaking and muttering, but they also made it hard to maneuver.

She took a step back, feeling for the doorknob. Raw power raised the fine hairs on her arms and the back of her neck, something unlike the magic she knew. There was a sense of pressure to it, like a shoulder applied to a locked door. Something was straining to open.

Her fingers brushed the knob, and she yelped as the frozen metal bit at her skin. She could hear a voice from the living room, Ainslie, but she sounded distant and distorted. The knob rattled as she tried to get in. Profanity trickled in around the door, warbling as though coming through water.

Kim kicked the towel out from under the door, and a finger of light filtered in, dull and weak. It disappeared into the carpet and revealed nothing.

Vickie was visible, outlined by a pale blue ghost light. Lenny’s white skin reflected the glow. If she squinted off to one side, Kim could almost make out his features, but they were distorted, almost rippling, like she was seeing him through old glass.

“Lenny,” she tried. “Baby, what are you doing?” It had to be him. Freaky extras. She remembered how he’d watched the ghost, how he touched her without going through. She might have thought him a sensitive, then, but this, the darkness and the cold, was much more. He was tearing open the wall between worlds.

But Vickie jerked away. Her glow receded, and Lenny disappeared into the blackness.

“I’m not going,” the ghost snapped. “I’m still here because I wanted to stay, and you are so not kicking me out of my own place!”

The door opened with a bang, and light tried to spill in, but it shimmered and wobbled as though traveling through dark water. Ainslie dropped the towel she’d used to handle the knob.