Page 7 of Brought to Light
“What the fuck?”
I looked at Linden. He didn’t seem surprised. And his mouth was moving, silently, but somehow I knew his lips were tracing the same sounds the trees were making. I opened my own mouth to say something else, to demand answers—answers to what, though? What the fuck was the question, even?—when the sound built to a shout, a shout made entirely of hissing and rustling and the roar of wind through branches, even though therewasno wind.
The tree behind Linden shivered and shuddered, and its trunk grew and faded all at once, graying out into an expanding mist.
Linden slid backward, falling into it, being absorbed within it.
The phone fell from my hand, and I lunged, seizing a handful of Linden’s T-shirt and holding on with all my strength as he pulled away from me. The shirt tore, and I dived after him, wrapping my arm around his waist and falling with him, the mist swallowing us both.
Chapter Four
Callum
A dripping sound, and then a faint whispering echo. I forced my eyes open. Nothing. I blinked, and still nothing.
I was alive. I was lying on something cold and hard.
Had I gone blind, or was it truly pitch-black? The complete absence of light was rare, unless you were underground.
Dripping sounds, a faint whispering echo, cold and pitch-black…yeah, okay, the signs all pointed to underground.
I levered myself up into a sitting position, and something hard pressed against my hip.
The flashlight I’d taken from Asshole Two, and I took a second to thank past me for having at least a tiny bit of foresight, even if I’d fucked up everything else today. I pulled it out and clicked the button, keeping my gun aimed in the same direction. A faint, feeble blue beam stuttered out. In the absolute blackness of wherever the fuck I was, it definitely helped…but it wouldn’t go far enough to give me warning of a potential danger. Maybe the batteries were loose. I clicked it off and unscrewed the end of it, sticking my fingers in to press them down.
Except there weren’t any batteries. The flashlight was empty.
I clicked the button again, and it turned on.
The sensation of being high that’d been building for a while only increased. Talking trees. That fucker’s sharp teeth and that bone knife, like nothing I’d ever seen—and I’d seen, and stabbed and been stabbed with, a lot of knives in my time. And now…
What the fuck had been in that hot chocolate? I’d taken acid, and shrooms, and my share of other weird shit over the years, but none of those hallucinations had ever been this real. This tangible. Okay, so I hadn’t slept much the night before. But I’d gone without sleep for longer than that before and still functioned just fine in a war zone, so hanging around a rural fucking town in California shouldn’t have been an issue.
Of course, I might not be in California anymore.
Fuck. This was what I got for waiting to kill Linden, for trying to have a fucking conscience for once.
And for thinking someone that pretty couldn’t hurt me. I knew better than that.
Fuck it. No matter what had happened, how I’d gotten here, it didn’t actually make a difference to my next steps. All of this might be in my head. I could be in a coma somewhere. But I had no choice but to deal with the “reality” I could see and touch and taste.
So I shone the flashlight around, keeping the Beretta aimed with it. But there wasn’t much to see, and definitely nothing I’d want to touch or taste. I had damp, filthy stone under me, something like flagstones, only not quite as even. The wall across from me looked like the same stuff. I turned my head. The wall behind me, ditto. I played the beam in the other two directions. I was in some kind of hallway, not a room, and the light didn’t go far enough to show me more than stone floors disappearing into the darkness both ways.
The ceiling, when I turned the flashlight up, was more of the same, only with some darker patches of moisture. I’d halfway been expecting theAlienqueen, since that was what you got for looking up last, but I couldn’t even see a spider. The ceiling wasn’t too low, probably eight feet. That’d get claustrophobic after a while, but at least I wouldn’t need to crouch.
I saw no sign of Linden.
Well, fuck.
I stood up, cracked my neck, shook out my limbs, and leaned down again to examine the floor more closely. I went about ten feet to my left, using my original orientation as a starting point. One of the flagstones glowed faintly, with a light blue symbol in the middle of it. Nothing I recognized, of fucking course. I shook my head. Maybe it meant something I couldn’t begin to interpret, and maybe I’d finally gone crazy enough that glowing stones were par for the course. Anyway, I doubted Linden had stopped to write on the floor with glow-in-the-dark sidewalk chalk, so it wasn’t relevant at the moment. I headed back the other direction, examining the floor the same way.
And there it was: one single golden pointy leaf, muddy and crushed, no doubt stuck to Linden’s shoe when we…did whatever we’d done. And wasn’t that a mind fuck, but at the moment that went in the low-priority column with the rest of the weirdness. Whatever had happened, I wasn’t about to be able to reverse it. Wherever I’d landed, I was stuck, and I had no option but following Linden.
Because he’d done this, somehow, or at least known enough to let it happen. He was my way out. Or if not my way out, then my only source of answers.
And fuck it, but he was still my mark, and I was fucked if he’d get away via magical melting tree, of all the stupid fucking things.
I could smell him, I realized as I moved noiselessly down the hallway after him. A faint, fresh scent of green things and running water and under that, a hint of coffee and chocolate and spice. I kept getting a whiff of it, easy to distinguish from the musty damp of this place.
