Better off Dead Book Three Read online

  Instead, I had to push deep, didn’t I?

  So I did. I concentrated until time became irrelevant. Seconds and whole minutes passed by in chunks like ice float from a broken glacier.

  Finally, finally something started to happen. This doorway opened up inside me. I wanted to say it was located in my chest, but the reality was it didn’t have any physical place to reside. It was all through me, all around me, and nowhere at the same time. As soon as I connected to it, I felt this heady rush – this powerful wave blasting through me. It lit me up – literally. Even with my eyes tightly closed, I could see illumination encircling me like a halo. I finally connected the cross to the box, and I heard something snap inside the lock. It was one of the most satisfying sounds I’d ever encountered.

  The lid opened of its own accord. As the hinges groaned under their own weight, I opened my eyes. I did not once break my grip on the cross. Which was a good thing. Because the box was a pocket space, and once more I was sucked inside to another realm.

  The box clattered on the floor, the lid open and me within.

  It was time for me to go back to the past – literally. For I had left something important behind that was mine to find and wield.

  Chapter 5

  I arrived back underneath that gnawed oak in the playground. I was down on my hands and knees. Magic wafted around me, but it wasn’t my own. It was just the remnants of the pocket spell. I immediately jerked to my feet. I patted my hands and legs, but then one of my hands lurched back up to my cross. I held it tightly as I turned on the spot. “Jesus, this really is a true memory, isn’t it? And I’m inside it.”

  I turned around again. Reluctantly, scared of what I would feel, I reached a hand out to the oak. I let my fingers trail down the trunk. It was real. So real this place didn’t feel like a frigging memory. It felt as if I’d been transported into the past. I shivered, the move tight. It gripped my stomach and legs and back. It made me stand there as if I was a steel peg.

  I couldn’t stay here. The very last thing I wanted was for Hilliker to attack my house only to find out that I was conveniently locked inside a pocket space. But at the same time I didn’t want to leave. It had taken me everything to get inside here. And I knew that the secrets within could be the difference I needed so much.

  I pushed forward. I knew exactly how to get to my room from here. Though I’d spent most of my life trying to bury the memories of this orphanage, they were still inside me, written on my damn bones. I shivered as I walked out across the yard. It was starting to become dusk. Along the horizon line to my left, I could see this glorious yellow and purple glow picking up.

  I thought I could hear footfall. It was proceeding toward the gates. As my stomach gripped and my memories aligned, I realized it would be the priests.

  This was a true memory. I was trapped inside. But I didn’t understand quite how the reality would work. Could I die in here? I wanted to pretend it was unlikely, but I didn’t know the mechanics of how this space was programmed. So it was time to run and get things done.

  I had to find myself first.

  According to my original memory, I should be hiding under my bed. But the memory I’d seen of Hilliker meant I would be close by here.

  I searched until I found myself. I was far back on the edges of the playground. I was seated behind an old, rotten wooden bench. I had a parcel of food beside me.

  With tears trailing down my cheeks, I recalled that at this time in my life I’d decided it was suicide to eat with other people. I’d been terrified that my power would somehow leach out and poison them.

  As soon as I saw myself there, I stared at the 16-year-old version of Eve. Her expression was grim, permanently blackened as if she was the sky and someone had covered her in clouds that would never leave. She slowly took a bite out of an old bread roll. She barely chewed it before swallowing it down.

  “Eve,” I said softly, hardly capable of pushing that word from my lips.

  She didn’t turn around to look at me. So I couldn’t fully interact with the memory, then? It made it less likely that I would die, but it also meant that it would be hard to gain useful information.

  “Eve,” I said, staying there even though I knew full well I had to take this opportunity to leave and find out everything I could. “Hilliker is coming. Don’t trust him. He’s gonna kill you for the second time. Then he’s going to hunt you without you knowing it. Eve, just get out of here. Don’t let him use you.” I stood there, crying as I said that, knowing that every second was a waste of time I would not get back.

  I could not drag myself away.

  I thought I started to hear chanting. I was oblivious to it. My skin crawled with terror. Jerking my wide-open eyes over to the gate, I swore I could see a flicker of purple behind it.

  Damn. It was about to begin.

  I dragged myself away from Eve. I had seen this part of the memory. Hilliker would find me, and he would snap my neck. If I wasted this opportunity to re-live that, then I’d ruin the only chance I had of finding out what else happened on this fateful day.

  It was agony to drag myself away. I did it. But at the last moment I thrust back. I fell down on my knees and embraced my own shoulders. Shaking, I cried into the face of my 16-year-old self. She couldn’t see me. She didn’t stop eating her sandwich.

  “Be strong. Don’t let those bastards win.” With that, I pushed up. I ran toward the orphanage.

  I could hear the chants of the priests picking up. A lesser practitioner would only be able to hear a slight hum as if too many cicadas had woken up all at once.

  ... A lesser practitioner? Hold on, were my powers back? As I reached the main doors and walked in through them, I opened my hands and tried to let flame burst out of me, but it wouldn’t.

  My overt power was still gone. But my magical senses had returned to me. They became even sharper as I clutched hold of my cross.

  I was in the main hall now, and I could see staff and kids walking about, heading to the dining hall. No one either cared or noticed that Eve was gone.

  I stared in surprise at some of the faces. They... had only ever haunted me. Because they were about to die.

  Terrified, I shadowed some of them, staggering, my feet dragging over the worn but cheery red and blue carpet. I almost followed them into the dining hall, but I reminded myself I didn’t have the time. That humming was picking up. A few of the kids were now frowning at it. They’d always been the better students. Some of the staff looked a little worried, too.

  “Just get out of here,” I spat uselessly as I reached the massive staircase that led up to the second floor. I clutched hold of the banister, my sweaty fingers leaving stains on the wood as I threw myself up.

  I almost tripped on several of the stairs, but I picked myself up until I reached the landing.

  I climbed another set of stairs until I reached the third floor. I threw myself into the hall. Kids were lining it. Some of them were talking about their studies. Others were gossiping. A lot of that gossip was about me.

  “Do you think she’s a monster?” one girl asked gleefully.

  “I heard she was a present from Hell. The sisters are trying to save her soul before it’s too late.”

  “At night... at night sometimes I think there’s a demon over her bed,” one girl whispered.

  I stopped. She’d shared a dormitory room with me. What was her name again? Sarah?

  While the other girls looked gleeful, she was ashen.

  “What kind of demon? A scary one? I’ll bet he’s the worst kind. She’s destined to fall into the arms of damnation, that one.”

  Though I was still crying from the inevitability of what was about to happen, I stopped and snorted. The kid was right.

  I was destined to fall into the arms of damnation – but it wasn’t nearly as bad as they thought.

  I finally reached my room. Fortunately the door was open. I had a limited ability to interact with the things around me. I could shove objects out of
my way, but it took a lot of effort – and critically, a lot of time.

  There were eight other girls sharing the dormitory. There were bunk beds. I had the broken bottom bed closest to the window. I raced over to it. Skidding down on my knees and almost tripping over a dirty uniform, I stared at my bed and the small table beside it. What was I thinking that I would find?

  I didn’t want to waste my time in this memory, so why wasn’t I out shadowing Hilliker in case he said something useful?

  Frustrated with myself but incapable of denying that my gut told me I had to be right here, I used an enormous amount of energy to pull my pillow off my bed and ruffle my covers. Again I continued to search, but I couldn’t find anything. Just when I almost gave up, I saw something carved into the wall just beside where my pillow used to be. Reaching forward, my fingers trailed down it. It was a symbol dug into the plaster – one I’d seen before. It was in my orphanage files next to the name of the mystery man who’d taken me to Saint Fredericks in the first place.

  “What?” Scarcely did that word leave my lips when I heard screams outside.

  “Fire,” one of the kids shrieked.

  My eyes opened wide – terror and trauma mixing inside my gut to create an explosive force that could have blasted me in two.

  I shook back, but at the last moment I rocked forward again, planting my palm hard over that symbol.

  I started to hear frantic footfall outside. Some of it was the kids running away as fire leaped up the side of the building – others sounded too deliberate.

  The door suddenly thrust open. I saw several of Hilliker’s priests rushing in.

  A kid got in their way. And... they... they incinerated him. With a specific chant and a certain movement of their hands, he just... died.

  I was so terrified, I could barely move. I was locked to the spot, my hand still pressed over that symbol.

  “Find it,” one of the priests snarled.

  The other started to tear through the room. I remained exactly where I was. There was no way for me to keep this symbol hidden. Or so I thought.

  “Find the symbol,” the main priest snarled.

  Several more priests joined them. Soon there was no screaming from the landing outside. There was just the crackle of flame.

  The priests were keeping this room safe. While the rest of the orphanage was on fire, nothing had combusted in here. Even the smoke hadn’t reached in through the open doorway.

  I stared out. I thought I saw a few bodies trying to run through the flame, but they were too indistinct.

  I cried and cried and cried. It felt like I was raking my emotion out of my soul. My whole body shook. But I remained there with my hand pressed over that symbol.

  What the hell did I think I was doing? This was a true memory, sure, but it wasn’t actually what had occurred all those years ago. I wasn’t changing the past here. But you couldn’t move me, not for the world.

  “Where is it?” that head priest screamed, the walls shaking at his fury.

  The priests reached my bed. They searched everywhere. They even ran their hands over the walls, sparks of magic sinking into the plaster as they tried to uncover anything hidden with magical ink.

  But they found nothing.

  “Dammit, it must be elsewhere. Head to the records room.” The head priest walked out, his robes flaring behind him. The other priests scurried to follow.

  Trembling, terrified, and incapable of understanding what had just happened, I fell away from the wall. That’s when I realized there was somebody right there with me. No – there was somebody who I was standing inside. I knew that sounded gross, but you had to remember that I wasn’t real. I was only partially interacting with this true memory.

  As I forced myself away and fell on the floor in surprise, I saw that it was Sonos himself. He was leaning there on my bed, one knee down on the threadbare mattress, his large arm reached out and his equally large hand blocking off that symbol. There was a look of total repressed anger – and grief – on his face.

  “Sonos,” I spluttered. Incapable of stopping myself, I tried to race over and embrace him, but I couldn’t interact with him.

  He pulled away from the wall. He took a chunk of it with him. He hollowed out the section that symbol had been on. He kept it locked in his palm as he pushed out into the flames consuming the hall. They did nothing to him. Though I was scared at first, they could do nothing to me either. I raced behind him. I tried not to look at the bodies and ash. This was no normal flame. It consumed everything it touched.

  “Sonos. Can you hear me? Sonos.” I didn’t know what I was doing. Of course he couldn’t hear me. I just... he was the closest thing to the real Sonos I had right now, and if I couldn’t wrap my arms around the real demon’s shoulders, I wanted to assuage my fear and terror with this one instead. But I still couldn’t touch him.

  I heard more children scream. I waited for Sonos to do something – to try to save them – but instead he walked behind the priests. I could tell based on the way Sonos looked that he was using powerful invisibility magic. That’s why the priests hadn’t seen him leaning on my bed.

  “Sonos, why... why aren’t you trying to save the rest of the people in this orphanage? I thought you were good?”

  Scarcely had I pushed those words out did I hear several of the priests snarling. “Keep your eyes out for that demon. He will be here. Not that he will be able to do anything against our chaos flame.”

  I stared at the flames. I hadn’t really paid attention to them before. My brain had kind of been working based on its old understanding of what had occurred. In the version of this memory I had kept for most of my life, the flames had been hellfire. Hellfire was materially different from other magical flames. It burned brighter and hotter. It also had this vibrant orange heart.

  The flames around me on the other hand were much darker.

  Now I knew full well that I could not be hurt, I shoved a hand out. I pushed it through the flames. I relied on my magical senses, hoping they were still as sharp as they had been when I’d picked up that humming. They were. The flame was inherently unstable. I wanted to say I’d never encountered anything like it, but that wasn’t true. It felt like the other powerful spells Hilliker had tried to cast on me.

  Sonos... he couldn’t do a damn thing.

  We finally reached the records room.

  The priests started to tear it apart. They were merciless. They destroyed everything in sight, including a picture of the cross over the door. They took particular glee in ripping it apart. But it didn’t lead to the symbol they were after. That was still in Sonos’s grip.

  Why were the priests trying so hard to find that symbol, and what did it mean? More to the point – “Why had it been carved into the wall by my bed?”

  I desperately tried to search my memory to figure out if that symbol had meant anything to me as a kid. But I couldn’t. Whoever had blocked off my real memories of this event had obviously erased that symbol from my mind too. But why? It was just a symbol. Yeah, I understood that when magic was involved, symbols were powerful. But they had psychological force more than physical force. Yet the way the priests were searching for it was as if that symbol held the very key to reality.

  “Rip everything to shreds. Burn anyone who comes near. But find me that symbol,” the head priest roared.

  Sonos remained behind them, shadowing them. I’d said earlier that the flames couldn’t affect him, but that wasn’t true. The floor suddenly caught alight. I watched him clench his teeth. His shoes weren’t affected, but I could see burn marks traveling up his legs. His Hell symbols turned on to full, magic pumping out of them as they attempted to counteract the damage.

  “Move, Sonos – don’t become injured for me again.”

  I imagined that even if he’d heard my desperate words, he wouldn’t have reacted to them. He kept his deathly, steely gaze locked on the priests as they ripped through the records room like hungry killer whales.

  Mean
while, the rest of the orphanage burned. I could see it out of the cast-iron windows to my side. Dusk was still marching toward night, but now the entire school was lit up with chaos flames.

  The priests continued to search – their efforts becoming increasingly more desperate – but they couldn’t find anything. Because what they were looking for was clutched in Sonos’s palm.

  I had to go back to the fact that it was just a symbol – and while such things can have strong psychological power over people, they very rarely inherently have strength of their own. And yet considering how the priests were desperately searching for it, there was obviously something far more important about it.

  “We have to find it, or there will be no point to this charade. It’s the only thing that can increase her power. Without it, we’ll have to wait years or decades before she’s strong enough to call the Banished.”

  The other priests in the room whispered prayers at the mere mention of the Banished’s name. Me? I became cold all over.

  I stared at Sonos’s crumpled hand with terror pulsing through my wide-open eyes.

  “What?” I spat. “That symbol... can it give me power?” As my mind ran wild, trying to figure out how that could be possible, I chanced upon one thing. It had to be something to do with the Deep. That was the source of my power in the first place, apparently. What if this symbol somehow allowed me to access it better?

  Maybe I was clutching at straws there, or maybe it was the best possible conclusion I could make, because as soon as I associated the symbol with the Deep, I found myself clutching my cross tighter. Securing my fingers around it, it would’ve taken an entire army to wrench my hand free.

  The priests finally gave up on the records room. The whole while Sonos just stood there behind them, staring, cold terror bleeding from his gaze. It was damn clear that the only thing he wanted to be doing right now was wrapping his hands around these bastards’ throats. There were no more screams out in the orphanage. The damage was done. The whole place was aflame. I could guarantee that the only reason it hadn’t fallen down was that Hilliker’s priests were still inside it.