NINE

ONE DAY IN HIGH SCHOOL, when Lance had talked me into ditching classes for the day, we hid in the oversize cleaning closet on the science wing and waited for the halls to clear so we could escape. I never thought I’d hide in that closet again, much less with a woman in her fifties, but Betty flipped on the light and pulled me inside so we could carry on our conversation in private.

Standing among heaps of mops and industrial-sized boxes of paper towels, she crossed her arms. “I’m concerned that you’re telling me fabrications, young man. Seriously exaggerating, perhaps. I’m warning you, this is no trivial matter.”

“No, I get that. I’m telling you the honest truth.”

She looked me up and down, tapping her index finger against her maroon-glossed lips, then quickly dug through her purse until she found a notepad and pen. “When do you claim to have gained your supernatural sight?”

“A little over a year ago —last March. But my girlfriend and I have promised each other not to tell anyone how we got it, so please don’t ask me.”

She tilted her head. “You’re saying she sees too?”

I nodded, eager for it to be my turn to ask questions. Betty wrote notes in nice cursive. “Describe what you see on people.” She touched her neck.

“Thick metal shackles with chains attached —and big cuffs at the end of those. Also cords, in the back of people’s heads.”

“Well, I’ll be.” She wrote faster now. “You call them cords. My great-great-grandfather —Granddaddy Arthur —called them tails.”

“They do kind of look like rat tails.” I spoke up before she could ask something else. “What were you saying when I found you in the hall? I saw you talking.”

She pursed her lips. “I was praying —for Tasha and the rest of the students.”

Interesting. “Betty, you left a long, like, trail of light down the hall.”

She lowered her pen and smiled, her eyes going glossy. “I . . . I did?”

“Yeah. But the thing is, I’ve prayed and been there when others have too, and I’ve never once seen anything like that.”

She nodded. “Granddaddy Arthur used to say that the more he sought answers —really tried to empathize and understand —the more he began to see. Sometimes just flickers of things at first.”

Wow. After all I’d witnessed, could there be more that I was still blind to? “Whatever else there is, I want to see it. Every single bit of it.”

She held out an open palm, inviting me to put my hand in hers. “I don’t fault you for that, young man, but you need to be aware . . .” She squeezed my hand like she really cared about our conversation —and about me. “The more you witness, the harder things tend to get.”

“Harder how?”

Betty’s cell phone rang, startling us both. She glanced at it. “It’s Principal Harding. I’ve got to go.” We exited the closet —thankfully, no one saw us. I don’t know what excuse we would have given for what we’d been doing in there.

After Betty’s brief conversation with Harding —something about the record of Tasha’s visits to the school nurse —Betty and I resumed our walk toward the main exit. She invited me over to her house on Friday for dinner. “There’s someone you need to meet.” She encouraged me to bring Ray Anne, too.

I couldn’t say yes fast enough.

Finally, it seemed like some major answers were on the way. And to think I’d almost given in to Doubt.

On my way to the parking lot, I called Ray and told her every incredible thing that had just gone down, and she squealed into the phone. She said we should make a list of our most important questions to bring with us on Friday. That sounded good to me. We talked a little longer, and the subject of the dead guy never came up, but she did ask me about Veronica. “Has she come by your apartment again?”

“She said hi from downstairs two days ago, but that’s all.” For the life of me, I didn’t know how to explain having heard Veronica’s voice in my head. So I didn’t try.

Later that afternoon, my heart skipped a beat when I flipped on my bedside lamp and it didn’t light up. But it turned out the lightbulb just needed replacing.

Maybe the man was truly never coming back. I was sure Ray Anne was praying he wouldn’t. I was content to let it go —I had enough freaky mysteries to unravel. On top of everything, no matter how I tried to distract myself with to-dos and music and TV shows, I couldn’t shake the eerie sense that I wasn’t alone, that I was being watched. I’d battled this ever since I’d first drunk from the well, and I’d mostly learned to ignore it. But today, it was noticeably worse. I couldn’t go very long without looking over my shoulder.

I’d just finished changing out fly traps around my buzzing apartment when my mom called. I’d been wondering how long it would take her to realize she hadn’t seen or heard from me. Or my dog.

After basically no small talk, she asked if she could treat me to dinner tonight. She paused, uttering a soft groan like she was in pain, then added, “Someone will be with me. We want to talk to you.”

Ugh. I had a hunch where this was going. “If your new boyfriend —Wayne, is it? —is moving in, you don’t have to run it by me.”

She stayed quiet, leaving my remark to linger like nasty cigar smoke.

I tried to backpedal toward niceness. “I worry about you, Mom.” It was the truth.

“I understand.” That’s all she said.

“All right, I’ll be there, but I’m bringing Ray Anne.”

She paused so long I thought she might say no. “Um . . . okay. I suppose you can bring her.”

Since when did she care if my girlfriend was with me?

The phone call came and went without her ever mentioning Daisy. For all I knew, she hadn’t noticed she was gone.

I parked my bike at Ray Anne’s, and we got in her car. It’s not like she could straddle my motorcycle in a dress —a stylish black dress that looked amazing on her, by the way. She was backing out of her driveway when we spotted Demise hovering across the street, staring at Ray’s house, grinding its razor-like teeth.

“I don’t know why it’s camping out here,” she said, “but I don’t like it. I don’t think Ramus likes it either. He’s been coming around even more.”

Ramus —a Latin word, of course —was the name we’d given the armored Watchman who often guarded Ray Anne’s house. That was actually a big improvement over what Ray Anne wanted to call him: Bloom. “Because he smells like flowers,” she’d said, “and he looks a little like Orlando Bloom, don’t you think?”

She might as well have named him Cupcake or Fairy Dust. It was unfitting. Insulting, really. “Let’s name him after something strong and sturdy,” I’d pleaded. We settled on Ramus, meaning “branch.”

“Can we stop by and see Ashlyn?” Ray Anne asked as we pulled onto the freeway. “We have some time to spare, and Central Hospital is on our way.”

Ashlyn was yet another one of Dan’s victims. The poor girl had slipped into a coma after being struck the day of the shooting —a bullet to the base of her neck. Clinging to her injured body that day, Ray Anne had promised Ashlyn that she’d never leave her, and true to her word, she went to see her a lot. Sometimes several days a week.

I still didn’t like hospitals —the dingy air and coats of death dust blanketing just about everything and everyone were beyond depressing —but I agreed to go along. We sat at Ashlyn’s bedside, where she’d been lying like a prisoner to her mattress for months now, hooked up to all kinds of machines, including one that breathed for her.

I couldn’t imagine having had my nineteenth birthday come and go without being aware of it, lying comatose while every muscle in my body wasted away. On top of that torture, Ashlyn was entangled in a mass of those sickening webs Creepers spawned onto the walls and over the critically ill and dying —another burden of a shackled existence.

Ashlyn’s eyes were open today, but open or shut, she was always unresponsive. Still, Ray Anne talked to her as if she were wide awake, and prayed for her too —pretty much the same thing every time, asking God to show Ashlyn mercy and wake her.

How many times did a person have to ask God to intervene before he’d do it? If he did it at all? Seeing Ashlyn had a way of stirring skepticism in me, evoking old resentments toward God that ate away at my faith. I knew better than to gripe about it, but on the inside, I wrestled.

Ray Anne took some pink carnations from a vase and tucked them into Ashlyn’s hair, braiding a strand in the process. I whispered to Ray, “You’re going to be an incredible nurse someday, you know that?”

She grinned at me, then turned her attention right back to Ashlyn. “I wonder how much longer her mother will hang on.” From one week to the next, Ray feared she’d arrive at Ashlyn’s room only to discover that she’d been removed from life support. “I’m still holding out for a miracle.”

I admired Ray Anne’s unshakable faith. Mine was racked by constant tremors.

In Ashlyn’s shackled state, the risk of her dying was catastrophic. Ray Anne lost a lot of sleep over it, and it haunted me, too. I didn’t know if Molek would be the one to confiscate her soul or some other Lord of the Dead would show up in his place, but either way, Ashlyn was in the worst possible danger. Like a sleeping duck drifting toward a crocodile’s den.

Surely God wanted her to wake up, to have a second chance at finding light and freedom. Why wouldn’t he?

Ashlyn’s mother was a Light —did she assume her daughter was too? Ashlyn’s father had died a few years before; there was no way for us to know the state of his soul or where he was spending eternity.

Ray Anne moved a framed childhood picture of Ashlyn, taken with both of her parents, to a tray table within Ashlyn’s line of sight, even though she couldn’t really see anything at all. And then we left her there. Too quiet and still, encased in Creeper webs.

As Ray and I entered the dimly lit steak house where we’d agreed to meet my mom, I tried to make sense of the nervous pit in my stomach. I wasn’t looking forward to meeting my mom’s date, but why was I dreading it this much? It reminded me of when I had to force myself to leave the house after first witnessing people’s shackles. Okay, not that bad, but still miserable.

The hostess led us to our table, dragging her chains along, but I froze before reaching my chair. What was he doing there, beside my mother?