The Sapphire Eye

A young adult fantasy adventure about a seventeen-year-old girl targeted by immortal beings because they need something she carries in her soul.

 

one

 

 

S

eventeen-year-old Abbey Howard stared at the coffin resting beneath the forest-green tent and tried to wrap her brain around the idea that her friend Sara O’Malley was dead.

Abbey stood away from the tent, which was crowded with Sara’s family. She folded her arms and shivered, though the late October day wasn’t cold. The sky was bright and clear, almost cheery. A far cry from how she felt.

Sara’s parents were beneath the tent with her sister and brother. All of them were crying. Abbey tried to understand how it must feel for them. The sense of loss, their world broken and changed forever.

Abbey hadn’t cried when Lori Jensen called to tell her that Sara had been killed by a drunk driver while walking home from the football game on Friday night. Abbey felt stunned, lightheaded, but it hadn’t seemed real. She wondered if something was wrong with her. The weekend had passed in a kind of dreamy haze. She slept terribly, wondered if some crucial part of her was missing or broken. Why couldn’t she cry for her friend?

At school on Monday she saw Sara’s locker. That was when it hit her, hard. It felt like something blocked up inside her had broken loose. Sara wouldn’t be coming back. She would never open that locker again. Never eat in the cafeteria, or sit through their god-awful biology class. She would never go to the prom, or kiss Mike Nevinsky the way she’d wanted. She’d never brush her hair again or put on lipstick or eyeliner or eat a taco. Never get married, never have children. Abbey would never see her smile again, or laugh, or struggle through gym class.

That was the hardest part. Realizing what Sara’s absence meant to her. How much would now be missing from her life. That seemed selfish, but it was still true.

Sara was gone. Just...gone.

She ran to the bathroom and locked herself in a stall and cried so long she was late for English class.

At the cemetery, Lori and Bobbi Brandt and Julie Anderson and Michelle Hammacher were huddled together a short distance away. Michelle’s curly brown hair was tied up in a complicated knot. She almost always wore it down, so this was a different look for her. Abbey wasn’t sure if she liked it or not. All of them were in dresses or skirts except for Julie, who wore slender black dress pants with gray pinstripes.

Her friends had all been crying. Their eyes were red and puffy. Abbey felt sad today, hollowed out from her grief, but hadn’t cried. What’s wrong with me? Why couldn’t she be like everyone else? Why couldn’t she be normal?

She got angry when she thought of how unlike other people she was, but she forced the anger away. It was like swallowing something bitter. Now wasn’t the time to be thinking about herself.

The priest was finishing his talk over the coffin. “God will watch over Sara’s soul and hold her in His loving embrace until she is at last reunited with the family that now grieves for her,” he said. Instead of comforting Sara’s family, his words made them cry harder. Abbey thought Sara’s mom might collapse right on the spot. Mr. O’Malley’s thick arms held his wife in a strong grip, helping her stay on her feet. 

Abbey looked away and saw Caleb Powell standing nearby. He didn’t see her watching him; he was focused on the priest. His older sister Riley was beside him, her face grim.

God, he’s beautiful, she thought. It felt wrong to be thinking about how gorgeous a guy was at her friend’s funeral, but she couldn’t help it. When Caleb was around, she couldn’t take her eyes off of him.

She brushed at her clothes. Abbey’s shoulder-length black hair was pulled back from her face with a black and white hair band. She wore a dark dress with low heels and a black wool overcoat, a touch of mascara to highlight her large blue eyes�"what she thought was her best feature�"and pale lipstick.

She hoped she looked good enough for him to notice.

His family had moved to the area over the summer, but she hadn’t met him until the start of the school year. Short blond hair, tanned skin, ice blue eyes, a slim but muscular build�"obvious through the fitted T-shirts he liked to wear�"and perfect white teeth. He was always smiling, as if everything around him made him happy.

When she first saw him, she understood what the phrase “take your breath away” meant. It seemed for a moment or two that she couldn’t make her lungs work.

She’d only spoken a handful of words to him so far. “Hi” was, for the most part, the extent of her conversational ingenuity, though at one courageous instant she managed to force out a “How are you, Caleb?” He looked at her as if seeing her for the first time and said, “Fine. How are you?” He gave her his dazzling smile, then continued down the hallway.

He didn’t have a girlfriend, but he flirted with almost every girl in their class, paying particular attention to the entire cheerleading squad. Abbey felt overwhelmed with jealousy every time she saw him talking or laughing with one of the s****y little pom-pom freaks. It was even worse when he touched them. She couldn’t stand any of them. She thought they were completely phony, acting all goody-goody in school and then getting drunk and smoking cigarettes and sleeping around every chance they got.

Her friend Michelle kept bugging her to ask him out. “It’s not like he’s seeing anyone,” she had told her in the cafeteria just last week. The day Sara got killed.

“That’s because he’s seeing everyone,” Abbey said.

Michelle rolled her eyes. “Even better. It means he’s not picky.”

“Thanks for telling me I have a chance because he has no standards. You should be a therapist. Though I’m sure the suicide rate of your patients would kill your malpractice premiums.”

Michelle made a face. “You know what I mean.”

She heard Caleb clear his throat, which brought her back to the cemetery. She glanced toward him again, hoping she wasn’t being obvious about it.

That was when she saw the Shadow.

 

ªªª

 

What Abbey called the Shadow was a smudge of charcoal mist or smoke that hung in the air in a vaguely human shape. It was dark enough to look almost solid, though it always seemed to be on the cusp of becoming transparent, thinning out like a fading morning mist. There was something in its core that glowed with a yellow-white light, as if the smoke were orbiting a miniature sun. Tiny rays of light flashed outward like a laser show as the smoke swirled and moved.

Wind didn’t affect it. She’d seen it a few times on windy days that should have dispersed it to nothing, but it hung in the air the way it always did. Right now it lurked near several large headstones off to her left.

She didn’t think of it as a ghost. Though she’d never seen a ghost, she thought a ghost would seem more like a person, a memory or image of someone who was dead but not quite ready to leave the world.

The Shadow didn’t feel like a person at all. She didn’t know what it was, but she didn’t think it had ever been alive the way people were. It was something else. She just didn’t know what.

“Go away,” she whispered. “I don’t want you here now.”

Abbey had seen the Shadow on and off her entire life. Her first memory of it was on a playground when she was four. She’d run toward it, trying to catch the smoky thing floating near the monkey bars. It had moved away from her, keeping the distance between them constant.

She’d never feared it, even then. Which was another reason she didn’t think of it as a ghost. Ghosts were supposed to be scary and dangerous, and the Shadow wasn’t. She wasn’t afraid of it, and no one else had ever seen it, so how threatening could it be? She didn’t know how sound her logic was, but it wasn’t as if she could talk through the details with anyone. “Hey, Michelle, guess what? I’ve seen this smokey ghost thing that no one else can see since I was a little kid, and I want you to help me figure out what it is, ‘kay?” was not a conversation she was going to have.

The Shadow didn’t leave. The stupid thing never listened to her. She’d tried to catch it over the years, but it always maintained a steady distance between them, like they were playing a game of tag and she was always “it.”

She considered quite seriously that she was crazy. But since she didn’t hear voices from the Shadow telling her to kill her mom or blow up a federal building or put on clown makeup and run naked through school, she decided she that if she were crazy it was in a way that wasn’t either dangerous or embarrassing.

In other words, it was going to remain her little secret. No confessions to friends or family for her, thank you very much. She felt strange enough as it was without broadcasting to the world that she was OUT OF HER MIND.

She closed her eyes, but when she opened them the Shadow was still there. She sighed and wondered why this always happened to her. And why now, of all times?

Then she noticed that Riley Powell was staring at the Shadow like she could see it.

 But that wasn’t possible. No one ever saw the Shadow. That just wasn’t how it worked.

She kept staring at Riley, sure the other girl must be looking at something else. But there was nothing else over there except more headstones, none of them any different from the hundreds of others in the cemetery.

Riley was the female equivalent of everything that Caleb wasn’t. She had short, spiky black hair that she apparently styled with a rusty egg beater. Her skin was pale and unhealthy, her makeup harsh and stark�"thick eyeliner, and either blood-red or black lipstick. She dressed in weird Goth clothes and painted her short fingernails black. All she was missing was the studded dog collar to complete her look.

Riley tapped her brother’s arm and gestured to the Shadow. Caleb turned his head and looked puzzled when he saw it.

Holy crap! He was seeing it.

She felt oddly offended that the Shadow was showing itself to others. She wasn’t sure why. After all, if other people could see it, that meant either (a) she wasn’t really crazy, or (b) she had company in Crazyville in the gorgeous form of Caleb Powell. His sister she could do without, but whatever.

But it did offend her. The Shadow was hers. It had been her private little secret almost as long as she’d been alive, and she wasn’t ready to share it. Not even with Caleb Powell.

Riley turned to say something to her brother and saw Abbey staring at them. She glared�"that seemed to be Riley’s primary mode of expression, from what Abbey had seen of the older girl at school�"and then her eyes widened when she realized Abbey was looking at the Shadow as well.

Oh, crap, she’s on to me! Abbey thought, as if she’d been caught stealing money or doing unmentionable things to herself in her bedroom late at night.

Part of her wanted to march right over and confront the two of them. “Do you see that glowy ghost thing over there? Any idea what it is? Because if you do, I’d appreciate it if you’d clue me in since the stupid thing has been stalking me my whole life.” But she couldn’t make herself move. She was afraid they’d deny it even if they really could see it because no one in their right mind would ever admit to seeing something that no one else could see. That would be crazy.

People started moving around her. She felt a hand on her arm and turned to see Lori. Abbey was jealous of Lori’s thick cascade of hair, which was always perfect, as if she’d just come from a pricey salon. She’d thought more than once that Lori should do shampoo commercials.

“Abs, you coming?” Lori asked. She’d buried her hands in the pockets of her red winter coat, which fell to mid-thigh and had a fur-lined collar.

“Yeah, I’m coming.” She turned and started walking back toward her other friends.

Caleb and Riley were heading toward the cars parked along the road. Riley glanced over her shoulder toward Abbey, then quickly looked away when she saw Abbey watching her.

“Micah told me a bunch of people are going back to the O’Malleys,” said Lori. “You up for it?”

“Sure.” She wasn’t ready to head home yet.

Lori stopped and turned back toward the tent. “I can’t believe she’s gone. I hope that son of a b***h who hit her rots in jail for the rest of his life.”

“Me too.” Abbey looked back, but not at the tent. She looked toward the Shadow.

It was still by the headstones, unmoving, when Abbey turned away and headed for her car.

 

 

two

 

 

T

he girls piled into Abbey’s Honda Civic. It was seven years old but still ran like a champ, even with close to 100,000 miles on it. The Civic was her first car and she loved every inch of its silver body. It was a five speed, which she also liked. She enjoyed shifting gears herself. Her friends all hated her car because none of them could drive it. She’d offered to teach them, but so far no one had taken her up on it.

They talked about the funeral and who was there and how much they missed Sara as she drove them to the O’Malleys house in Good Hope Farms in Mechanicsburg, near the elementary school where Abbey had first met Sara in Mrs. Holt’s kindergarten class. The strangeness with the Shadow and the Powells lifted for a moment, and she was filled once more with sadness about her dead friend. They’d grown apart a little since starting high school, but they had such a weight of history behind them that they could get together after barely speaking for a couple of months and fall right back into their old routines.

Cars had already filled the driveway and were parked up and down the tree-lined street on both sides. Abbey found an open spot half a block away and parked next to the curb.

They were almost to the house when Abbey saw a blue Jetta come down the street toward them. Riley was driving. Caleb was in the passenger seat. For a moment their eyes all locked onto each other, like the targeting system of a military aircraft.

Julie nudged her. “Oooh, I saw that. Caleb Powell giving you the eye.”

“I keep telling her to ask him out,” said Michelle.

“Not gonna happen, so save your breath,” said Abbey.

They entered the house. The O’Malleys weren’t back yet from the cemetery, but a couple of Sara’s aunts had returned early to get out the food and greet visitors.

The house was already crowded with a lot of kids from school. She got some food, then found a corner where she attempted to eat the crab dip and pasta salad without somebody knocking into her plate and spilling it on her clothes or flipping it onto the floor.

The O’Malleys came in a short time later. They looked exhausted, wrung out from their grief and the living nightmare of Sara’s death. She wondered how someone moved on after suffering such a tragedy and hoped she never found out.

Abbey finished eating, threw out her paper plate in the kitchen, and went for some more Coke. She got in line behind her friend Bobbi. Bobbi had some Cherokee in her family history and it showed in her ruler-straight, jet-black hair and flawless complexion.

Bobbi turned and saw her. “Hey, Abs. Did you hear that the a*****e who hit Sara had lost his license six months ago? This was something like his fifth DUI. Why was he still allowed to have a car?”

Abbey shrugged. “People like that should be locked up forever.”

“Forget that. Just shoot them and be done with it.” Bobbi reached the table. “What can I get you?”

“Coke, please. Thanks.”

Bobbi hefted the two-liter bottle and refilled Abbey’s plastic cup. Bobbi filled her own cup, then they got out of the way of the people behind them.

They chatted for a bit about school and work and how Abbey needed to grow a spine and do something about Caleb Powell.

“You guys need to back off or I’ll ask his sister out instead just for spite,” said Abbey.

Bobbi grinned. “Expanding your horizons! I like it! So how long have you had these feelings for the home team? Though I think you can do better than little miss Goth super-b***h.”

Abbey wandered off to find the bathroom. There was a line of six women ahead of her. She sighed and settled in to wait. She was looking at one of the watercolor prints of the Harrisburg skyline hanging on the wall when she felt someone touch her back.

But it wasn’t a normal touch. She felt something pass through it. Like a small electric charge, though that wasn’t really right. It felt more like a thing of the mind, as weird as that sounded.

Riley Powell was standing behind her, glaring at Abbey, her eyes squinted and dark.

“Um, hey,” said Abbey when Riley didn’t speak. She wasn’t going to mention being touched or the strange sensation it caused. “You’re Riley, right?”

“What are you?” said the other girl, quietly enough that no one else heard them.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me. Don’t pretend like you didn’t.”

“What kind of rude a*****e question is that?”

Riley turned scarlet. Her black lips were pressed together into a thin line. The clumped mascara on her lashes reminded Abbey of little roach antennas.

“Just answer my question.”

Abbey cocked her head, thrust out her hip, and unleashed the full fury of what she hoped was her withering attitude. “Listen, b***h. I don’t know who you think you are �"”

“You saw that thing. I know you did.”

Caleb appeared beside his sister. “Don’t mind her,” he said to Abbey, tilting his head toward Riley. “She’s not really a people person.”

Riley started to say something, but he cut her off. “Not now. Go piss off someone else for a while.”

Riley gave Abbey a final hateful stare, then stormed off.

“Sorry about that,” said Caleb. He flashed her a dazzling smile and she forgot all about his rude sister. Well, almost. “She gets a little worked up sometimes. Well, okay, she gets worked up a lot. It’s part of her charm.”

“So that’s what they’re calling rude and bitchy behavior nowadays. ‘Charm.’” She made finger quotes in the air.

He actually laughed at her joke. “Yeah, well, that’s sort of our private little code word for her behavior. Charm. Throws everyone off.”

“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

She looked into his eyes and suddenly ran out of things to say. She knew there should be a thousand things to talk about, but she couldn’t think of a single thing. It was like her conversational skills had evaporated out of the top of her head.

“Where do you work?” he asked, ending the awkward silence. “I kind of think I’ve seen you out but I can’t remember where.”

She was certain he hadn’t seen her because she would have remembered seeing him, but was grateful he politely covered for her sudden silence. He must think I’m a complete idiot.

“I work at the movie theaters over by the mall,” she said. “I’m usually at the concession counter, but sometimes I sell tickets out front.”

“Sweet. So do you get to see all the movies for free?”

“Yep. Perk of the position. Over the summer it’s even better because we can watch them late at night after the last shows let out. We don’t open until noon so it doesn’t matter if we’re up until two or three in the morning.” She took a sip of her Coke and saw Bobbi and Lori staring at her from across the room. She suddenly felt very exposed and self-conscious and raised her cups to her lips. “Do you work anywhere?” she said.

“Nah. I do odd jobs for my parents, but nothing regular. They keep threatening to make me get a job but I’ve thwarted their evil plans so far.”

“I help pay for my car, so for me work’s kind of necessary.”

“A self-sufficient girl. I like that.” Tom Carlson called Caleb’s name from across the room. Caleb turned and gave him a just-a-sec gesture. “Look, I need to talk to�"”

“Oh, yeah, go,” she said a little too quickly. A little too eagerly. She was trying to be casual and let him know she wasn’t trying to hold him there, but she sounded kind of desperate. She winced inwardly at looking even more like an idiot. “Thanks again for saving me from your sister,” she added.

“Sure. Maybe I’ll see you at the movies sometime.”

He smiled, then turned and was gone.

 

 

three

 

 

H

er girlfriends grilled her mercilessly on the drive home. What had Caleb said to her? Did he ask her out? If he hadn’t, did she ask him out? Was he wearing cologne? What did his breath smell like?

“Oh for God’s sake just give it a rest,” she finally said after Julie had asked her for the third time if she’d managed to touch him. “He was apologizing for his sister being a rude b***h to me. Really. That was pretty much it.”

“’Pretty much’ isn’t everything,” said Lori. “And we want to know everything. Come on, spill. What are you holding back?”

“All right, you got me. I’m holding back the part where we groped each other and made out on the living room floor. I’m not sure how you missed it, but there you go. I’m sure it’ll show up on YouTube before the end of the day.”

“Liar.”

After she dropped everyone off, she headed home. She cranked the music, glad that the questions about Caleb were over.

She wondered about what Riley had said to her. She really was a b***h, but she’d also seen the Shadow. “You saw that thing.”

There was only one “thing” she could be talking about.

But how could the b***h-wonder see it? No one saw it, even when it appeared in a crowd of people.

She remembered a trip to New York City she and her mom had taken two years ago. She’d seen the Shadow near the Maine Monument at the southern end of Central Park. She’d watched, fascinated. No one noticed it even when they walked right through it. She thought they might shiver or glance around like they were being watched, but not a single one did.

She and her mom lived in a rural area on the western side of Mechanicsburg, not far from where the Pennsylvania Turnpike cut through on its way west to Pittsburgh. It wasn’t a development like what was found closer to town. This was more of a cluster of houses huddled along a tree-lined gravel lane called Timber Hollow Road.

The house was a plain, two story affair on the end of the road that had been built in the 1970s. It had needed a new roof for a couple of years now, but Abbey’s mom didn’t have the money to get one. There was a two-car garage on the left side of the house. The driveway leading to the garage was gravel like the road, and sheltered from sight by a stand of pine trees.

Abbey parked her car in the garage, then walked down the driveway to get the mail. Her mom wasn’t home yet. She worked as a waitress and probably wouldn’t be home for hours.

The sun was nearing the horizon. It was a beautiful sunset, the western sky streaked with bright colors. It made her think of Sara again. Sadness welled up in her suddenly, cold and biting. She paused. Would people be sad if she died? Her mom and dad would be devastated, and a few friends, but who else? Had she made enough of an impression on anyone for them to notice if she was gone?

Stop being so damn gloomy, she told herself. She resumed her walk to the mailbox, flipped down the metal door, and yanked out the thick stack of papers inside.

She was walking toward the house, flipping through the mail. Most of it was junk, and most of it for her mom. She never got anything good, like an unexpected lottery check or complimentary plane tickets.

From the corner of her eyes, she saw a light.

She paused to look.

The light wavered as if passing through water, then blossomed outward like some kind of complex origami figure, dozens of rectangular surfaces unfolding from a central core. The unfolding branched off until it formed the rough shape of a person. Once this was done, the angular planes of light softened, resolving into something more substantial, as if she were looking at something being brought into clearer focus.

She took a step away from it but was too fascinated to run.

With a sudden snap of resolution the shape became a living man, standing on the driveway and looking at her through strange mechanical goggles.

Part of her wanted to run to the house and call 911. Another part thought she must have really gone off the deep end to have something this whacked out appear in front of her. Whatever little craziness had been in her before must have gotten a serious shot of steroids to manifest itself as this schizoid life-sized insanity.

But part of her wanted to stay to see what happened next.

She looked at the man carefully. His clothes were odd. They seemed old-fashioned, but she couldn’t say they were from any particular time period, like the 1950s or the 1880s. They were just...strange.

He wore heavy work boots of brown leather with an odd and complicated lacing pattern up the front. His pants were sort of like dark khakis, but again with an odd cut to them and heavy stitching in an x-pattern along the seams. They were tucked into the boots in what she thought of as “military style.” He wore a stained and wrinkled blue linen shirt over a T-shirt; both were tucked into the pants and cinched with a thick leather belt with all kinds of gadgets and pouches hanging from it.

The goggles were powered. She could hear the faint whirring of the motors. They fit snugly across his eyes and extended a few inches from his face. There were layers of lenses to the thing�"some were clear, while others were tinted various shades or had patterns etched on them. While he watched her, some of the lenses flipped up on thin metal arms that folded out of the way against his temples.

He carried something in his hand that looked a little like a Geiger counter, with some big dials and a meter with a needle dancing in it.

She finally found her voice. “Who are you, and where did you come from? There’s no Steampunk cosplay convention around here that I know of.” She tried to sound sassy and dangerous but didn’t think the slight quaver in her voice helped the effect.

The man stepped closer to her. She could see the needle on the Geiger counter thing pointing right at her.

She backed up and banged into the side of her car. It startled her and she let out a little yelp. If he takes one more step I swear to God I’m going to scream my head off and kick him in the balls, she thought.

He touched something on the side of the goggles. They stopped whirring. He slipped them from his head, making a mess of his dark hair.

For the first time she got a good look at his face. He had olive skin and thick eyebrows. He looked old. Maybe forty or so.

Then she saw that his eyes had flecks of gold in them. They didn’t exactly glow, but they seemed to reflect the light in a very unusual way.

“Can you understand me?” he said in a heavily accented voice.

She nodded. She was mesmerized by his eyes.

“Good.” He was muttering to himself more than to her. “Hemlock was right. The barrier facilitates language translation.”

“What are you talking about?”

He put up a gloved finger like a teacher about to make a very important point. “The Empress is trying to make the severed worlds whole again,” he said. “You can’t allow that to happen. Your Earth will be awash in blood if it does. Her hunger has no bounds. Even now the barriers are weakening. She has weakened them. Otherwise I would not have been able to come here.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.

“I’m sorry. I know this must seem strange to you.”

She almost laughed at the sheer volume of understatement in that sentence.

“Seem strange?” she said. “We’re way past that. Let’s start with some basics. Who are you? Where did you come from?”

He folded the goggles and put them in a container attached to his belt. “My name is Ezrit. I came from the Principality of Eden. I don’t have time to explain that now.”

“Well, buddy, you’d better find the time, because�"”

“Listen to me!” He held up his hand again to quiet her. “You carry a splinter of Paraxa’s soul. It’s bound to you in some way I don’t understand, but this proves it.” He pointed to the Geiger counter thing. “It led me straight to you.”

“This is crazy,” she said. “I’m calling the cops.”

“Call whoever you will. I must leave in moments.”

As if cued to his words, his body unfocused for a second and lost all color before returning to normal.

“Please, listen,” he said. “You must find the Black Flame. It has been hidden here on your world for ages. You must find it.”

“I’m not doing anything for anyone. You’re out of your mind.” She folded her arms and tried to look defiant. But her curiosity got the better of her. “What’s the Black Flame?”

“A way to defeat the Empress. It’s the key to the feyad mortum. The key to death.”

“See, there you go again. You say something sort of mysterious and interesting, if a little incomprehensible, and then you go right off the rails when you try to explain it with all this crazy talk about an Empress and death.”

He unfocused suddenly again, this time for a few full seconds. “I must leave. Find the Black Flame. Awaken Paraxa and you will have your answers.”

His body transformed into the many planes of light she had first seen, which folded in upon themselves, collapsing toward the center of his being.

In a moment he was gone.

“What the holy Jesus Christ was that all about?” she said to no one. “My life is so freaking weird. I really must be losing my mind.” She felt shaky all over.

She moved away from her car and was about to go into the house when she saw the Shadow watching her from the trees. She’d never before seen it twice in one day.

“What do you want?” she shouted at it.

The Shadow didn’t move.

“No, I didn’t think so,” she said. “You’re not good for anything.”

She turned her back to it, then faced it again. “If you’re not going to help me, then go away,” she said. “All you do is make me feel strange and weird and I can do that all by myself without your help. Either explain what you are, or go away forever.”

 

 

four

 

 

S

he went inside and tossed her purse and keys on the kitchen table, kicked off her shoes, and got a bottle of water from the fridge. She was a knot of emotions. She’d never felt more strange and alone. But even though the brief conversation with Ezrit had left her angry and confused, she was also, in some sense, exhilarated by it. Intrigued. The whole thing was so weird-a*s strange it was almost comical. Some guy with bizarre mechanical goggles steps through a hole in the air spouting nonsense about an Empress and a Black Flame? And someone or something called Paraxa?

“Seriously, this is too strange for words,” she said to herself as she took a sip of water.

She went to her room and flopped down on her bed. She stared at the ceiling for a while, not really seeing it as she thought about Sara and Caleb and his b***h sister and Ezrit and his even weirder goggles.

She picked up the framed picture on the nightstand by her bed. It showed Abbey and her dad at Universal Studios in Florida after coming out of The Mummy ride. Both of them were grinning like idiots. Two years had passed since then.

It was the last vacation they’d taken as a family.

Her dad had moved out a few months later, and then wham, suddenly her parents were divorced. Her mom didn’t allow pictures of him in the house outside of Abbey’s bedroom. He’d left her for a younger woman named Melissa and had moved with her to DC. Abbey’s mom had never forgiven him for that. “I gave that man the best years of my life, and how does he thank me? When I get a little older he tosses me aside like a goddamn piece of trash,” her mom had said. She also knew there was more to their breakup than just her mom getting older. There were faults on both sides. She was old enough to see that and cut through the crap each of her parents said about the other.

She missed her dad. She knew he wasn’t perfect, and she wished he hadn’t left, but she still loved him.

She saw him a couple of weekends a year and for a week over the summer and a week around Christmas, but she wanted more. A year ago she’d considered asking him if she could come live with him, but she chickened out.

She was afraid he’d say no.

She put the picture down and ran her fingers through her hair. Too much crap had happened today. She decided to go for a run to clear her head.

She changed into her running gear and went downstairs to stretch in the garage. Daylight was almost gone, but she had reflectors on her shoes and carried a small flashlight in her hand.

She loved to run. Her dad was a runner, and she’d picked up the bug when she was eleven or twelve. There was something about the isolation of it that appealed to her. It helped her clear her mind. She usually took her iPod along but that was more to drown out the sounds around her than to have something to concentrate on. She hit a kind of trance-like groove around the three or four mile mark that unloaded a flood of happy endorphins into her brain. It didn’t hurt that it helped her stay thin and in shape, because the last place on earth she wanted to join was a gym.

She’d tried running cross-country in school but hated it. She stuck it out for one year because she didn’t want to quit in the middle of it, but that was enough. She hated running with other people; she hated the competition. Her coach pestered her to come back, and even her father got involved, putting some pressure on her to try a second year, which was unusual, since he prided himself on letting his daughter make her own choices and live with the consequences.

But she’d held firm, and everyone had finally backed down. She still ran, but it was just for herself.

She was walking down the driveway when a car pulled up. A blue Jetta. Caleb’s face was staring at her through the passenger window.

It parked on the street. Caleb and Riley got out.

Riley looked as pissed off as ever. Abbey wondered what her problem was. Persistent diarrhea? Chronic inflammation of the b***h gland?

“We need to talk,” said Riley. There was no friendliness in her tone.

“Whoa, sis, chill the hell out,” said Caleb. He looked at Abbey and smiled. “Don’t mind her. She’s got that charm thing going again.”

Abbey almost laughed but didn’t want Riley to think she was making fun of her (even though she was), so she held it in and covered it up by pretending to wipe her lips.

“About what?” asked Abbey.

Riley took a few steps onto the driveway and stopped. She looked around, her face troubled. “Something’s been here. Something powerful.” She gave Abbey an accusing stare.

How does she know what happened? thought Abbey. Were they watching me?

“Now we really need to talk,” said Riley.

“We’re not talking about anything until I get a couple of answers,” said Abbey.

Caleb and Riley exchanged a look. “We know about that ghost thing you can see,” he said. His expression was very serious. “We can see it too.”

Even though she’d already figured that out, it was still strange to hear them say it. Someone else could see the Shadow! And admitted it!

“How?” She was vaguely surprised she could force the word out of her mouth. For the first time in her life, she had spoken of the Shadow aloud to another human being.

“Because we’re witches,” said Riley impatiently. “Now can we come in?”

Author's Note

Here is the blurb for the completed novel:

More than anything, Abbey Howard wants to be an ordinary seventeen-year-old girl—hang out with her girlfriends, gossip about boys, stay ahead in school. But there’s one thing that makes her different: a ghostly shape she calls the Shadow that’s haunted her since she was a little girl.

Her life gets stranger when the new guy in school, dreamy Caleb Powell, claims he can also see the Shadow. He tells her that he and his family are witches who guard ordinary people from the very real and very dangerous things that go bump in the night.

The Shadow is more than a simple ghost. It’s part of an ancient plan to thwart an immortal empress who longs to conquer Earth. The empress was separated from Earth untold ages ago by a Veil of power that bars her and her kind entry to our dimension. But over the millennia she’s worked tirelessly to tear down the Veil, and her work is nearing its completion.

Abbey has the power to bring true death to the immortals—a fact that has come to the empress's attention. She knows Abbey's name, and the dire threat she poses to the empress's everlasting rule.

Abbey and Caleb must fight for their lives against demons and undead soldiers sent by the empress to destroy them. Their only hope for survival lies in the hands of a shady spiritualist, and a mysterious artifact known as the Sapphire Eye.