Chapter Twenty-Nine #2
“She said her twins' antennae were blasting her and that you were in terrible trouble. Then I arrive here to find you like this with your friends violently ill on the summit. Kudos for the strength of that emergency channel.”
“It happens. I bet mine began to sound since about the time when hers went off.”
“Because she’s pregnant and supposed to be on bed rest?”
“Calm. She’s supposed to keep herself calm because of her blood pressure. And instead, she’s digging up my garden, looking for a key, and lassoing strangers into rescue missions. Thank you, by the way.”
“You’re welcome again. You don’t have to keep thanking me. This is fine. Glad to be here doing this. Look how happy my dog is.”
Sommer turned her head to look. “She is. She’s loving that stick.”
“Do you think your sister’s okay? To be honest, she made me nervous the way she was grabbing at her stomach and wincing.”
“I think that she’s got her husband and medical staff at her disposal. So my full attention is on getting out of this situation and getting help to my friends.”
“It’s got to be hard thinking those thoughts. Should we change the subject?” Gabriel suggested. “Or would you like to sit quietly?”
“No,” Sommer all but shouted. “Please distract me. I’m physically uncomfortable. I’m mentally a mess.”
“Physically?” Gabriel leaned forward, feeling himself shift to ready stance, not that there was jack shit he could do to help her. “Were you hurt in the crash?”
“No, it’s that I haven’t been able to move lest I touch metal. My legs are painfully asleep. My bladder is full to bursting—sorry for the TMI. My blood sugar is crashing, and my mouth feels like the Sahara. Distraction is the only thing that will make this any better.”
“Alright. Sommer and Sloane seem like names from novels I might read in a 19th-century lit class in the sense of conjuring images of wind-swept moors or women wrapped in warm wool shawls as they stand at the cliff’s edge.”
“Our grandmother on my dad’s side, where the twins gene comes from, thought twin names needed to rhyme or start with the same letter. As the story is told, grandma was quite the bully about it. But we escaped without being called Etta and Gretta, which she fiercely advocated for.”
“Dodged the bullet. Daniel and Gabriel, now I understand why you thought we might be twins. So Etta and Gretta, had it come to that, which would you have preferred?”
“Gretta. But I was first out. I’d be Etta. Grandma also liked Molly and Polly. So I would have been Etta, or Molly, had Mom not put her foot down. The same beginning letter was the compromise that kept family harmony.”
“Molly’s not bad, but it’s a more domestic name.”
“How so?”
“A name that has four walls. That’s not bad. Four walls with a cozy fire, a comfy chair, and an excellent book.”
“Or a witch’s cottage in the woods.”
“I was envisioning an apartment building downtown,” Gabriel said.
“Sommer is more expansive, and that cottage in the woods shows just that. There are woods behind to explore, flower fences that bloom, animals running around. I grew up living around the corner from you. I’ve always thought of that house as magical.
I imagined the stories come to life of a lost princess who goes out and whistles a tune, and all the critters come flitting in to help with the chores. ”
“If only.” Sommer winced, then closed her eyes.
Gabriel tried to put himself in her shoes, and it was a miserable place to be.
When Sommer opened her eyes again, she panted, “I have that picture you drew in my mind’s eye.
And I love every little bit of the lost princess story.
I wish it were true. Except, perhaps, the idea of some evil person seeking my ruin with poison and spells.
I do sing my songs, but alas and alack, no chores are done.
” She turned her head toward the street, then back.
“I hope Sloane was checking on my cats while she was there or at least having her husband drive by.”
“You don’t live with anyone else in your cottage? Husband? Boyfriend?”
“I have dear friends, and cats who are also my friends. Abbie—Marna and Abbie are my friends at the summit—Abbie calls my cats my familiars.” Sommer laughed, and it sounded as if it was fueled by nervous energy.
“Familiars,” Gabriel shifted his tone to the one he used pre-battle when anxiety was high amongst his team, “that sounds witchy.”
“Meh, maybe a little. Abbie likes to look up spells on the Internet and stir her pots clockwise. She, for example, was trying to figure out how to keep the graveyard ghouls from haunting my house on full moons.”
“Ring of salt?” Gabriel asked, thinking about finding the white substance across her threshold.
“You know your stuff.”
“Not really, I think I read that in a novel when I was a kid and tucked it in my back pocket in case it ever came in handy. So how much salt did you use to ring your house?”
“None. And in fact she mentioned the salt, then went and looked it up, and came back with an idea for witch pots.”
“Pots. And what is that exactly?” he asked.
“Different people make them in different ways. Mostly you put sharp things in a little jar: broken glass, rusty razor blades, nails. Some people pee in the jar. Just things that are unpleasant, I think. I don’t know if there are any hard-and-fast rules.
Abbie likes to interpret things in her own way. ”
“Okay.”
“Then you bury them on the edges of the property.”
“Like an etheric fence?” he asked.
“Exactly.”
“And you did this?” He chuckled at the absurdity. “Peed in a jar of rusty blades?”
“I can neither confirm nor deny. But what I can tell you is that my cats have never given me any sign that there were things in the room that would go bump in the night.”
“Brave of you to buy a house tucked in the woods near a graveyard.”
“Would you say brave?” Sommer asked. “I’d say thrifty. I’m an emergency room nurse, so funds are tight.”
“You work in a hospital. Have you ever wondered if any of the people who died there followed you home?”
“This is what you want to talk about with a body six feet away from me?” she asked.
“Absolutely not.” What was he thinking?
“Go ahead, tell me why you asked that,” Sommer said.
Gabriel imagined he’d planted a thought-worm and they’d better finish this part of the conversation and be done with it. “I have a friend, and back when we were soldiers, he was always wigged out by the idea that if he killed someone, with the dying guy's last gasp, he’d send his soul over.”
“To what end?”
“The way this guy explained it was that he was a fit and healthy body, and since he was the reason the dead guy’s soul was disembodied, it might just want to go and live in him. And I thought, if there were any place where that might regularly happen, it would be in a hospital.”
“That gave me goosebumps,” Sommer said. “I never considered that before. I don’t want to consider it now.” She looked toward the open door and frowned, and Gabriel felt like a shit head.
Usually, he had better control over his tongue.
Something about being with Sommer Hayes in person was throwing him off. Way off.
Gabriel tried to recover, saying, “Yeah, it made him a liability in the field, and he eventually had to get a desk job because he second-guessed every bullet. That slow-twitch put our team in danger.”
He looked down at his sat phone when it pinged.
Reaper: I’m working on a plan to reallocate resources if required. We need eyes on the medical situation on the summit and a sitrep before taking action. If some electrolytes and antidiarrheals can do the trick, we need to keep searching for that family.
Gabriel typed back: As soon as emergency response is on scene, and I can leave Sommer, I’ll be moving. Will check in with sitrep. Anticipated time to summit twelve hours.
Reaper: Is Sommer going up with you?
Gabriel: She needs a paramedic to clear her. She’s an emergency room nurse. She’ll be the best resource on the mountain to tell me how to proceed.
Gabriel put the sat phone in his thigh pocket. “That was my emergency contact telling me they need a better idea of the situation on the summit, so they know best how to help.”
Sommer didn’t seem to hear him. She kept her gaze on the open door.
“I was hitchhiking a couple hundred yards up the road, and she stopped. As I was getting in the car, a herd of deer came out of nowhere just ahead of us. She said that if she hadn’t stopped to pick me up, she could have been killed.
” Sommer stopped and shut her eyes. “My lips are buzzing, and I’m wondering if I’m picking up an electrical charge from the car or I’m just upset.
” Sommer sat quietly for a moment. “I’m pretty sure it’s that I’m upset.
” She let out a heavy exhale. “She told me that that stretch of road always wigged her out.”
Gabriel had seen the limbic responses many times. Her words embodied that sensation of ‘freeze,’ as if she were physically forcing her thoughts over her lips and out her mouth.
“She told me that, since she could remember, even as a little girl, she always got a chill down her spine at this stretch of road and had always thought about dying when she came this way. She said she thought this stretch of road was probably haunted.” Sommer turned to him.
“Isn’t that astonishing, Gabriel? It’s like she always knew the time would come.
And minutes before she died, she thought she’d dodged the bullet. ”
“There was a second herd?” Gabriel asked his words loud enough to reach Sommer, but he tried to keep his tone soft and supportive.