Velocity (The Gravity Series)

  THE GRAVITY SERIES

  BOOK 4

  ~ VELOCITY ~

  by Abigail Boyd

  Copyright ©2013 Abigail Boyd

  http://abigailboyd.blogspot.com/

  http://www.boydbooks.com

  DISCLAIMER:

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  COPYRIGHT:

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the author, except for use in review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”

  ― Shakespeare, The Tempest

  PROLOGUE

  This is the end.

  The end of all we’ve worked for. There’s no one coming to help us. My friend and lover are doomed, inches away from death at the hands of madmen.

  I struggle against my captor, but I can’t pull free. The power is gone.

  I feel helpless, caught staring into the eyes of pure insanity.

  And we will never see the sun rise again.

  CHAPTER 1

  MY MOTHER DIED alone. At 6:06 in the morning, the doctor felt her limp wrist for a pulse and declared her gone. The note on the death certificate looked like 6:66. A bad omen. She’d been in a coma for weeks, since she slammed her own skull to pieces, but it was as though she had waited for the right moment.

  Nurses had tended to her all night, checking her vitals, poking their heads in every fifteen minutes. The morning nurse had just left for coffee, she told me later, thinking Claire wasn’t going anywhere. She’d been stable. The sun must have just been peeking through the blinds.

  My mother never woke up to see it.

  On the way home from her funeral, I mulled it over. The heavy guilt was already pressing down on me, ready to crush me with its weight.

  The week of Christmas, it felt like my life went full upheaval. Claire went off of her medication and had a psychotic breakdown, gravely injuring herself while I stood by. I hadn’t only lost my mom. The spirit of my friend, Jenna, had been pulled back into the Dark realm without any warning. Before any of this happened, I’d always been threatened by Phillip Rhodes, the most powerful man in town, that if my father and I didn’t get out of town, we’d be sorry.

  The old me would have snapped. I almost did. But a new determination had settled in me. I wouldn’t break this time. I had to hold it together.

  It didn’t mean that the guilt was lessened any. How could I get over my last months with Claire? I couldn’t remember the last time either of us said we loved each other. She had been so consumed with the Thornhill Society, and I had been so ready to stay far away from it, that our paths had barely crossed.

  The funeral had been monochromatic, just like what Claire would have picked if she had decorated it herself. The coffin was white and so were all the flowers. I now realized why white looked so much like death―there was nothing there. My father had shaken our loved ones’ hands until I thought his wrist was going to fall off.

  My strongest memory of her involved Claire standing in the road after we’d been in a car accident, telling Hugh to take me away.

  Did she even know I loved her? Did she love me?

  I’d found out that she’d been part of some kind of coin toss involving Jenna’s mother, wagering something precious to get into Thornhill. Rachel had lost and Jenna was dead. I just didn’t know how much my mom had known when she flipped that coin.

  I shut my eyes. The car was speeding on the expressway towards home. The funeral had been out of town, with many people I’d never met.

  Hugh started to laugh, jarring me out of my thoughts. I opened my eyes and stared at him, nerves screaming in torture as he continued to chuckle.

  “How is anything possibly funny right now?” I croaked.

  “I was just remembering that time your mom tripped off the deck. Remember?”

  “Yeah.” I didn’t remember it at all.

  “The entire back of her skirt ripped. She just sat on the ground, right on her backside. I could see her getting mad, and I was waiting for the curse words to start flying. And then she started to laugh. She couldn’t stop herself, her face turned red and she fell over…”

  He started laughing again himself, breathy wheezes that looked painful, mirthful tears wetting his red cheeks. One hand beat the steering wheel cover and he hissed out of his teeth.

  The laughter changed, dissolving into harsh sobs. His eyebrows tipped downward, mouth scrunching up. He took one hand off of the wheel to wipe the tears away. I patted his back for just a moment, but it felt so awkward that I withdrew my useless hand.

  Veering the car off to the shoulder, he shut off the ignition. Dropping his head, he sobbed into his hands. The wipers pushed slushy snow back and forth. Other cars swished by. Hugh continued to sob, his big shoulders shuddering. I wished I was a passenger in any of the other cars, one not coming from a front row view of death.

  “Do you want me to drive home?” I asked finally.

  Hugh’s crying tapered off. He sniffled. “No. I’m okay.” His eyes and nose were bright, painfully red, but he straightened himself up. “I’m sorry.”

  “You have nothing to be sorry about,” I mumbled.

  “Let’s just get this over with,” he said, putting the car back into gear. “I don’t want to be there any longer than we have to be.”

  ###

  Our house looked abandoned as we pulled into the driveway. Gravel crackled like dry bones beneath the tires. The engine shut off, but we just sat, not moving to take off our seat belts. The house just didn’t seem the same. We hadn’t been back since the night that Claire had her breakdown. Even though I’d grown up there, I’d been living with Hugh for nearly a month.

  “The faster we get inside, the faster we can leave,” Hugh muttered, making the first move and sliding his keys out of the ignition.

  The last time I’d been inside, the house had been trashed by Thornhill members looking for my grandmother’s necklace. I had no idea what we would find inside.

  Hugh unlocked the front door and we walked in. I tore off the ‘NO SHOES ON THE CARPET!’ sign and crumpled it into a ball.

  Inside, the presence of death was stifling. I felt like I was the occupant of a coffin that had a limited supply of oxygen. The air was still and cold, and dust motes floating in the gray light. I turned on a lamp but it didn’t do much good.

  He went into the kitchen. I followed, but paused in the spot beneath their room. I thought I might hear the awful thudding of Claire beating her skull against the wall. I wanted to cover my ears, to run out screaming. Instead, I froze, my ears zeroing in.

  The fridge hummed, the grandfather clock ticked, and there were snaps and groans of a settling house. Nothing else. The tense band of muscles along my shoulders relaxed a fraction.

  “It smells like bleach in here,” I commented.

  “Stauner had a cleaning crew come in,” Hugh explained, “as a personal favor to our family. So we wouldn’t have to…worry about the mess.�
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  He laid his suit jacket across the table, sweat bathing his forehead and the scruff on his chin.

  We’d bought new mourning clothes the day before, his cheap suit and my godawful black cotton dress. We didn’t have the funds for much else, not with his business tanking, until the life insurance was figured out. The receipts and shopping bags were waiting at his apartment. We’d never wear these clothes again.

  He put his hands on his hips and started doing a visual inventory. Most of the items in the living room were boxed up and the furniture was covered with plastic sheets.

  I followed him as he continued his evaluation. At the bottom of the staircase he halted with his hand on the banister.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, shuffling closer beside him.

  A shaft of light from the skylight fell onto his unblinking eyes as he gazed up.

  “Are you going up there?”

  “They scrubbed it all,” he said, just a breath above a whisper. “Mike said they did a very thorough job. So that we’d never even know what happened in there.”

  I could hear the tears in his voice and I wanted to run and hide. Fear made him look so young, like my brother instead of my father. There was no safety here.

  “You probably couldn’t even see anything,” he continued.

  Her blood, piped up a voice in my head. No matter how hard they scrubbed, they couldn’t get all the blood out…

  I wrapped my arm determinedly around his shoulder, turning him to face me. He was so pliable that he moved with little effort, and his haunted eyes met mine.

  “It’s okay if you can’t go upstairs,” I said firmly. “We don’t need anything up there. We got almost everything out when you moved. They can mail the rest.”

  He seemed to find relief in my words. He took my hand from his shoulder and squeezed it gently, nodding. As he stepped off of the stair, it reminded me of someone stepping off a ledge after deciding not to jump. He wandered back towards the kitchen.

  I shot one last glance up the ominous stairs. I didn’t possess the strength to go up, either. At the moment, I wanted to level the entire house.

  As I passed back by Claire’s office, something moved inside. Peering through the crack in the door, I gently pushed it open. My mother sat in front of the computer, staring at the monitor like a zombie. Skeletal hands rested atop the keyboard. Her clothes, a cardigan and a skirt, were musty with moth holes nibbled into the fabric. Brown blood stains ran down her shoulder to her hip.

  She turned towards me, dried bones creaking, her face green and rotting. Her yellow eyes were rolled up, revealing nothing but whites. The broken half of her face began to show, and I squeezed my eyes shut.

  You’re not real. You’re not real.

  When I opened my eyes, there was nothing in the computer room. The computer had been dismantled, the monitor dark, the rest stacked in boxes. I hadn’t seen but my own guilt to haunt me.

  In the kitchen, I poured a glass of water, drinking it down in a straight shot of gulps. Hugh was sitting at the table, drumming his fingers on the wood. I was about to ask him what he wanted to do next. Were we going to start boxing things up? Leave everything alone? Donate her things to charity?

  What do you do when your mother suddenly goes insane, reveals that she can see ghosts, and kills herself to stop the suffering?

  I rushed to the sink and vomited the water back up. I gripped the metal, chest heaving until there was nothing but air coming out. Hugh joined me, rubbing my back.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. He started to pull my hair back, but I squirmed away, still feeling raw to the touch.

  “I’m fine.” I wiped my lips with the back of my hand. “Can we just get what we need and get back home?”

  I went downstairs and gathered my few remaining trinkets, not paying much attention to my musty room. I caught a glance at myself in the standing mirror. I looked like a stranger―my hazel eyes were haunted with regret and my hair was a ragged mess behind a thin headband. I thought of Jenna looking at herself in the same mirror.

  What do you mean, you’re going out?

  The words have one meaning, Ariel. Not difficult to understand.

  I slammed the locks shut on the heavy suitcase and left the room. I only glanced for a moment at the heavy lock that Claire had installed on the basement door, not wanting to hold the image in my head.

  I didn’t wait for Hugh to settle in when we got back to the apartment. I was done skirting around―I just wanted answers. It was time to split this thing between us open and let the guts hang out.

  After all the events that had happened, Hugh had told me he would tell me all of his secrets. He gave me a time frame of a week, but he’d kept tight lipped. With Claire’s deteriorating medical condition, real life got in the way of our fractured fairy tale.

  “We need to talk,” I said, shutting the door and tossing my coat on a nearby chair.

  He collapsed on the couch with his shoulders hunched over.

  “About what?” he asked, irritated, peering up at me with hollow, sickly eyes.

  “I want answers.”

  “Answers regarding what, kiddo?” He wiped his tired eyes with his hand, looking ancient. The TV remote was waiting on the coffee table and he reached for it. “Look, I’m really tired and I don’t want―”

  I knocked the remote to the floor, where the batteries skidded out and bounced off the wall. His expression changed into stunned surprise.

  “Enough! Enough of the lies and sneaking around!” I couldn’t stop my voice from shouting. “I can’t wait anymore! I understand that you’re tired, but there is something huge and scary about to go down in Hell, and I’m a part of it―whether you like it or not. So was mom. After what I saw…” I shuddered at the memory. “I’ve had to deal with being scared and terrified and shunned by people that hated me for reasons I didn’t even understand, for years now!”

  He assessed me for a long moment without speaking, his reaction maddeningly impossible to read.

  “Ariel…you know I love you. But it’s because I love you that I feel like you don’t need to know. Claire…she thought she saw visions. But she was emotionally unstable for a long time. I know the Ford girl has been cruel. I know that dating Henry has upset Phillip, and he’s been horrible, but you’re too young to…”

  “Didn’t Claire tell you?” I asked in a hushed whisper.

  “Your mother didn’t tell me a damn thing once she started going to Thornhill’s meetings.” Bitterness edged his voice, and I was taken aback. It was the first time since Claire’s death that he had expressed anger. “All I knew when you came to live with me was that you two weren’t getting along, and it was my job to deal with it.”

  I steadied my shoulders and looked him in the eye. “I see ghosts, too. Just like mom said she saw.”

  At first, his expression remained flat, like he couldn’t comprehend my revelation. But then his eyebrows rose sharply and I could tell it came as a surprise.

  “I started seeing them when I turned fifteen,” I continued, bolstered by my own courage. I felt my face heat up but wasn’t about to stop now. “At first, it seemed random. Dreams about weird places and things. Then Jenna and the ghosts of the other girls that died visited me. But I never thought I could tell you about it.” I laughed a short, hollow laugh. “I mean, how do you talk about something like that without the other party thinking you’re a nutcase? I didn’t tell anyone except for Theo and Henry.”

  I was pacing now, back and forth in front of the TV. “I know that grandma was in a mental hospital for the same thing. I know both of them took medication to stop it. And I know what Thornhill is doing—that they’re really a cult.”

  I felt so lightheaded that I had to grip the back of the recliner, but it was all out. All my secrets. Now, hopefully, I wouldn’t regret talking and want to shut the secrets back in. I waited for Hugh’s reaction.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” He jumped up from the couch with sudden anger, his eyes
hurt and wandering, nostrils flaring. “You and I were always close, why didn’t you tell me?” His tight fist slammed onto his chest. “I would have believed you.”

  I stepped back, a little shocked by the intensity of his sudden reaction. “I couldn’t talk to you. You two were always so scared for my safety that you kept me under lock and key. I had no evidence and I’m just a kid. I couldn’t predict how you would react. After all, you could have locked me up in a mental institution like Eleanor.”

  “We never would have done that,” Hugh said firmly.

  “But other parents would have. You knew that Claire saw ghosts before this all happened, didn’t you?”

  He turned away from me, running his hand through his hair, his nervous tic. “Of course I knew. But I thought she had stopped.”

  “Did you know that I would see ghosts?”

  He remained in loaded, unbearable silence. I shifted where I stood, my thoughts racing. Finally, I stomped up and slammed my hand forcefully on his shoulder. “You did, didn’t you?”

  He whipped around, grasping me by both shoulders. “I didn’t know for sure! It was only a possibility.”

  I wrenched away from him. How could they not tell me? It would have prevented so many hours of me thinking I was a freak.

  “Corinne never saw ghosts,” he continued, more quietly. “Even though she’s spent her life trying. And Claire knew nothing about her real grandparents because Eleanor was adopted.”

  “Why didn’t you warn me about what I was going to be up against?” I asked through gritted teeth, turning back so I could glare at him. “Do you have any idea of the things I’ve seen?”

  “More than you know,” he said, his shoulders slumping sadly. My feelings of anger towards him softened a little upon looking at his sorry face.

  “We were trying to shield you,” he continued. “I know you’re angry, but it’s because you don’t understand. You’ve always been so open with us, that’s why we encouraged you to treat us like friends―so you’d come to us if something was off. I know we were smothering you, but it was like drowning a flower in too much water because you want to make sure it grows. We hoped that you didn’t have the Sight. We…”