Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
SKYE
Istare at the shadowy ceiling and curse my brain for not letting me sleep.
Staring at the ceiling—even before I started mentally cursing myself—doesn’t help with falling asleep.
Neither does even, regular breathing, tightening and relaxing every muscle in the body, or counting sheep.
Or counting the even, regular breaths and the muscles being tightened. I know, because I’ve tried all that.
So much for going to bed early and getting a good night’s rest.
Sighing, I give up on the ceiling and roll over to grab my phone. Studies all say the blue light will keep me awake blah blah, but I’m already awake and not likely to fall asleep soon, so studies can suck it.
Squinting in the sudden light from the screen, I check the time first. Nearly midnight. I’ve been lying here for over an hour and a half. What a waste of time. Now… which mindless time-wasting app should I open first?
I notice I have some new emails, so I go with that. Maybe I should clean out my inbox. God knows that’s the most boring, thankless task that ever existed—guaranteed to put me to sleep.
One new email from a friend who’s traveling, one that somehow slipped through the spam filter, two from companies I bought something from once and ended up on their subscriber list, and one from this astronomy site I signed up for after seeing the pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope.
I wanted to actually understand a bit more about what I was seeing.
The site was helpful, but now I get these emails every day telling me what time astronomical sunset is and when the moon and planets are rising.
I should probably unsubscribe and save my future self the effort of deleting daily emails.
I click into it and start scrolling, then stop when the little intro catches my attention.
The perfect night for stargazing. I read on and learn that the moon set earlier, which means the stars are more visible to the eye, and that at around this time, there’ll be perfect visibility of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars, with limited visibility of Neptune too.
I sit up and glance toward the window. I left the blind open so the sun would wake me, and even from here I can see it’s a cloudless night. Maybe some stargazing is what I need to calm my mind.
I climb out of bed and pull on a T-shirt to go with my boxers, then shove my feet into my Converse and leave them unlaced.
It was a hot day today and is supposed to be hot again tomorrow, so even if the night is cooler than I think it is, it won’t be cold.
I grab my phone and staff lanyard with the fob that will allow me to get back inside later, then slip out of the crash room and sneak down the attic stairs using the light from my cell.
We don’t have any overnight guests tonight—that sometimes happens on Tuesdays—so Josh is staying with Ewan at the manager’s cottage, but I don’t want the ghosts to come snooping.
Outside, the night air is fresh but warm, and I stop to take a deep breath, then glance up at the sky. Okay, yeah, the stars are pretty. For a second, I just stare, then my neck starts to ache from the weird angle. I need to lie down. But not on the grass—the bugs will eat me alive.
I wander down toward the barn, where there’s a bunch of picnic tables and benches for the day visitors to eat their lunch at.
Kieran had a pitched battle with Freddie over them—Fred can be such a snob, and he wasn’t pleased about the “aesthetic outlook from the house being ruined.” Putting them on the grassy patch near the outbuildings was a compromise to shut him up.
Climbing onto one of the tables, I lie back and take in the sky in all its glory, the hundreds—thousands?
—of pinpricks of light against the velvety darkness, some bright solo artists, others happy to glow more softly in supporting roles.
I pick out the bigger, brighter ones that I think are planets.
I could pull up the website to check—it has a live map of the night sky—but I’m not that bothered. I’d rather bask in it and wonder.
Somewhere nearby, crickets are singing. I know they’re crickets and not cicadas because Daniel once subjected me to a rant about them.
Apparently cicadas are more likely to make their mating calls during daylight hours.
They also don’t eat crops, though trees and shrubs can be fair game.
Crickets, on the other hand, are noisy at nighttime and enjoy the delights of his kitchen garden.
Right now, though, they sure sound pretty.
A breeze wafts along my bare skin, carrying the scent of the jasmine Daniel planted in huge pots on the south side of the barn. Ewan bitches every fall and spring about having to move the pots to and from the greenhouse, but it smells amazing.
I give a little sigh and settle more comfortably on the table. Those stars are so far away… and so long ago. Am I looking at the memory of someone, somewhere, who also stared up into the sky and wondered?
“Skye?”
I yelp and jerk upright, searching wildly for the murdering demon… who knows my name. And whose voice I recognize.
Clutching my chest and trying to calm my breathing, I wheeze, “Jeez, Daniel. Don’t your feet make noise?”
He chuckles softly and comes closer, stopping beside the table. “I was whistling before. You must have got here after that. Shove over.”
Obligingly, I move to the edge of the table and then lie down again as he climbs up and does the same. It’s a tight fit for both of us. My shoulder and hip are hanging over the edge, and on the other side, the entire length of me is touching all of Daniel. My breathing turns erratic again.
He’s so warm.
I fold my arms across my chest to give myself more room and try to pretend this isn’t a big deal. He’s just Daniel. Annoying most of the time. Obsessed with farming.
Straight.
All things that normally don’t interest me.
But he’s Daniel. Sweet. Always happy to help out. Stupidly protective. Looking at him makes my heart sing.
And he’s currently pressed against me from shoulder to knee.
I’m so fucking screwed.
“Couldn’t sleep?” he asks, and I swallow in an attempt to get moisture back to my dry mouth.
“No,” I manage. “I got sick of staring at the ceiling. The view’s better out here.”
He hums. “It really is. There’s nothing like a starry night in the country. I missed this when I was at college.”
I never went to college—never lived anywhere that isn’t twenty minutes from here, for that matter—so I wouldn’t know. “Why are you wandering around in the dark, scaring innocent stargazers?” I ask instead.
His shoulder moves against me as he shrugs. “I couldn’t remember if I latched the henhouse door. I was almost positive I did, but then it started nagging at me, so I decided to just check.”
“And did you?”
“Yep.”
I chuckle. “But the henhouse is on the other side of the barn. How’d you see me?” Please let some mystical connection you don’t understand have drawn you to me. Although that still wouldn’t help with the whole straight thing.
“Crickets,” he mutters darkly. “I heard them and went over to the kitchen garden.”
“Oh.” No, wait. “Um… why? I mean, is there really anything you can do about them in the middle of the night?”
“No, but it made me feel better to warn them off.”
Oh my god.
Oh my god.
No wonder I’m in love with him.
Before I can get too far down the mental path of planning our wedding—I’d totally wear some of his hand-grown jasmine in my hair—he says, “How are you feeling?”
My starry-eyed dreams of a summer ceremony here in the garden dissolve, and I thump back to reality. The reality where I’m one of the few people standing between humanity and what might turn out to be a disaster.
“Okay, I guess. It’s still kind of surreal.” I remember the spirit falling to pieces before my eyes this afternoon and shudder. I hope it didn’t suffer. I hope it felt, in the last moments of its existence, that it had done what it set out to do.
Again, I wish I’d focused less on giving it directions to California and more on what it was trying to tell me.
“I’m so angry with myself,” I burst out.
“If I’d let the spirit talk, we could have the answers we need right now instead of desperately hoping we’ll stumble across them.
I mean, fuck, if I’d paid attention to what Connor tried to teach me, we could have spent the whole day interviewing the spirit and maybe even protected it somehow instead of making its last hours of life an exercise in frustration. ”
There’s a little pause, and then Daniel says mildly, “Are you done?”
Even if he’s looking at me, he probably won’t be able to see my pout in the dark, but I do it anyway. “What, you can’t be sympathetic to my inner crisis?”
“I’m sympathetic. But none of this is your fault.
And even if you’d somehow managed to communicate with the spirit early this morning, there’s no guarantee it would have made any difference.
Maybe all it came to say was ‘look out.’ Maybe it didn’t know anything else except that something was in the works.
Maybe the higher demons have some kind of weird-ass telepathic alert out so that when a spirit starts talking about the secret plan, they get notified and activate the seek-and-destroy curse. ”
I snort. “The seek-and-destroy curse?”
“What? It could happen. Neither of us—nor anyone else, to hear Connor tell it—knows much about the otherworld. Who knows what they can do?” He props himself up on an elbow and leans over me, peering into my face. The night casts his features into shadow, but I can still feel his gaze on me.
“I guess,” I concede. “Do you really think that happened, though? That once it started warning me, it let the demons know?”
He shrugs and lies back down, the full-body contact warming me again.
“Maybe. It’s a huge coincidence that it spent the whole day yelling for your attention, plus however long before that looking for you or anyone, but the second it started to warn you, that’s when the demons found it… and somehow destroyed it remotely.”
He’s got a point. I instantly feel better—maybe it’s not my fault we’re in this predicament.
“Another option,” he continues, “is that this whole thing was a demon setup.”
I freeze. “What?”
“Think about it. Whatever they’re planning with the hidden gateway, they’ve managed to keep it secret for more than fifty years.
Maybe much more. Maybe this hidden gateway’s been there for a thousand years and this is a really long con.
Then the Collective finds out it exists—by accident—and starts looking for it, but the demons aren’t ready for us to find it yet.
They need time to get their plans in place.
So they send a spirit to ‘warn’ us and leak just enough information to have us chasing our tails all over the county, and in the meantime, they get their ducks lined up and pow. ”
I blink up at the stars. “Your imagination is a very scary place,” I say finally. “Do you really think that’s what’s happening?” Fuck, I hope not.
“I hope not,” he echoes my thoughts. “But how are we supposed to know? All we can do is act on the information we have.” He knocks his foot against mine. “We stick together and have each other’s backs, and maybe it’ll all turn out okay.”
He sounds way too calm and accepting of “maybe,” when “maybe” can also mean “we’ll be enslaved by higher demons.
” Or something. I’d think he wasn’t taking it seriously, but when I glance over, I see him rubbing his hands.
It’s become a familiar habit of his over the past year—ever since the confrontation with the soul-eater demon that left his hands so badly scarred.
There was a short time back then when we thought he might lose the functionality of them, and I was there when the doctor ran all those tests and finally said the prognosis was good.
I watched Dan close his eyes in relief, saw the single tear that tracked down his cheek.
He’s taking it seriously. This is just his sunny, stay-positive nature. And he’s right—there’s nothing else we can do.
“But I didn’t mean how are you feeling about the spirit drama,” he continues, putting me on guard. “I meant how are you feeling about your mom.”
Dammit.
I sigh, tempted to shut this down, but… out here in the quiet dark, with the stars overhead as impartial witnesses, it’s safe to share. Daniel wouldn’t betray me by gossiping, anyway.
“I have no fucking clue,” I admit. “Seeing her again was a slap in the face.”
“You don’t have to answer this, but what happened with her? When she left?”