Luminosity (Gravity Series #3) (The Gravity Series) Read online

  The plastic over my face pressed close against my nose and fluttering eyelids. I clawed at my face and throat and then at the attacker. The person grunted behind me, twisting more tightly on the bag so it cut into my neck. I kept struggling, twisting my body left and right, but they were strong enough that it made little difference. My boots scraped against the cement ground. I sucked the bag into my mouth as I struggled for oxygen, trying to bust through it with my tongue or teeth. My heart pounded beat over beat.

  My own gurgling sounds scared me most of all. I felt my necklace rip off of my neck, the pressure of it dig in through the turtleneck. Then I was falling into a dark pit, with nothing to grab on to, and no relief.

  CHAPTER 29

  ON THE AMBULANCE ride to the hospital, the EMT thought he was a comedian. He scribbled on his clipboard and cracked bad jokes in between quizzing me on my condition. My nerves were so electrified from the attack, I laughed with him. I was just so happy to be breathing. I stared out at the world through the rectangular window on the doors, grateful to be a part of it.

  Laughing, however affected, kept the nasty, fresh memories out of my head: the grunting of my attacker and myself, the surety that I was going to die. That was a feeling I could never get used to.

  Harsh, thick sobs rattled from my chest, but I wasn’t sad or even crying. I was still just trying to catch my breath, my lungs burning like they were full of fiberglass.

  The men in the alley that I’d thought were so creepy had been the ones to save me. They had heard the attack and rushed in just in time to stop the attacker. At least I’d only lost the necklace and not my neck. I tried to convince myself of that. After the person mugged me, they’d shut down the parade and searched the crowd for him. But it was easy for him to get away or blend in.

  Two of the men told the EMT that the person was shaped like an average sized man, wearing a hooded sweatshirt. That’s all they saw, which could be any man in town and any one of the people after me.

  I kept bringing my hands to my face and feeling like my breath was catching. I could still feel the plastic bag against my skin. My throat had been cut when the necklace chain was ripped off, leaving a surprisingly achy sore. To think, I’d thought it was more safe wearing it around.

  At the hospital, I was admitted immediately. Oxygen tubes were stuck up my nose and I was hooked up to an IV to rehydrate. An endless parade of doctors and nurses came in to check on me.

  I had a rotating bunch of visitors throughout the night, too. Detective Stauner arrived with a deputy and quizzed me about the attack and the theft of the necklace. He seemed disturbed that I didn’t have more direct information to give him. Sorry, dude, I was a little busy trying not to die.

  Hugh and Callie came into visit for a little while. Being a nurse, she fussed over me a bit, moving my IV line so that it was more comfortable. Claire didn’t show up, not once, but I tried not to be too hurt by it. It didn’t work, but I tried.

  “Henry wanted to come. He brought flowers up to Erasmus but his father was taking him elsewhere,” Callie whispered to me when Hugh was twisting the blinds open to let in the gray daylight.

  “Oh?” I asked. Callie really was trying hard to be my girlfriend. I still wasn’t sure if that made me uncomfortable or not and part of me felt sorry that she’d wound up in that situation.

  I had broken blood vessels all over my face. Callie gave me her compact of powder foundation, even though she was more tanned than me, and patted my hand. I missed Theo, but I felt too upset to call her. Would she even understand? Or would she still be too mad?

  Dr. Briggs came in and checked me out, checking my pulse with his two fingers.

  “How are you feeling? Have you slept?” he asked quietly, smiling gently.

  “I feel okay. My throat is killing me and my lungs hurt, but not too bad. I haven’t slept, though.”

  “Do you think you can?”

  “Not really. It’s not a big deal. I don’t need sleep.” I didn’t want to sleep, fearful that maybe I wouldn’t wake up. Irrational, yes, but I didn’t feel very rational right then. Lying on the hospital bed all day, I had too much time to think about the how’s and why’s of the attack.

  “Yes, it is a big deal. Sleep will help you recover, help you heal. I’m going to get you a sedative, okay?” He left the room and came back after a second with a nurse and a syringe with a blue cap on the needle.

  “Do you have to poke me?” I asked.

  “Nope. Right in the old IV,” he said.

  “Don’t nurses normally do that?” I asked, staring up at the IV as he took the cap off of the syringe and primed it.

  He chuckled softly and said, “Well, yes, I suppose so. But you’re our special patient. I figured I was here, I might as well participate.”

  “What if I still can’t sleep?” I asked, lying back on the pillow. “Even with the medication?”

  “Don’t worry, it really won’t give you much of a choice.” He injected the syringe, then sat down on the bed next to me and smiled benignly, adjusting his silver glasses.

  An electrical zap of panic hit me, forcing me to speak. “Look, about the other night…please don’t tell Phillip about what you saw between Henry and me.” I slurred the last words. The medication was already starting to take effect. The room started to swirl like water down a drain.

  He looked puzzled. “Why?”

  The medication seemed to be taking over awfully fast. I wondered what he’d given me. I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and felt my consciousness slipping away as I slid towards the realm of deep sleep.

  “He’s not supposed to know,” I murmured.

  “But, honey…he already knows,” I heard Dr. Briggs say before I psed outas.

  ###

  Next I knew, I heard a disturbance from the bed next to me, one that I thought was unoccupied. Maybe Hugh had come back after all. I opened my eyes, and watched the aqua curtain slide back, scraping the metal rod.

  Ambrose was lying on his side, with his blond head propped up in his hand. I flopped back down to the pillow.

  “Oh God, not you again.”

  “Look, cookie,” he said, and jumped down to his feet. “I don’t want to keep hanging around you, either. You’re boring. But I’m stuck here until Hell comes calling. Don’t fret; it won’t be long now.”

  His voice came out distorted, and I studied him more closely this time. A black haze, swirling like gnats, surrounded his head. I could barely see the haze unless I squinted, but it was definitely not a product of bad lighting. A faint buzzing accompanied the cloud. Ambrose didn’t even seem to acknowledge it, as much a part of him as the increasingly grimier tuxedo.

  “Why don’t we take a walk?” he suggested. “It’s good to be on your feet when you’ve been lying on a gurney all day, so you don’t get blood clots. Blood loves to clot, and then you have to cut more.”

  He should have scared me. Ambrose used to scare me, much more when he was alive and capable of hitting, in fact.

  But I felt nothing but a dull sense of familiarity around him, like a buoy in dark water. He was someone I knew in an alien world, and my suspicion was that he really was there for me.

  I was still wearing my scratchy, poorly tied hospital gown—and I did a quick check to make sure that my butt wasn’t exposed. All of my leads had been disconnected, and the monitor was flat-lining.

  “That can’t be a good sign,” I said.

  Ambrose just shrugged. “I wouldn’t worry about it, as long as you can get back.”

  The hospital didn’t look the same. The structure was similar, but all of the doors were gone, leaving open portholes into the patient’s rooms. The floor was covered in grime, and the brown smears on the walls looked suspiciously like blood. The floor was made of hard, black and red mesh. All of the TVs were flickering snowy static.

  “You’ll really want to hold my arm now,” Ambrose whispered. “Those shadows are everywhere here, feeding off the energy. The dead and the dying, y’know. Sic
k people are their snacks.”

  I didn’t need to see them to believe, but I did anyway; three of the black humanoid shadows were leaning over the next patient, an old woman whose skin was gray and as wrinkled as a prune. They seemed to be pulling a glowing light from the center of her chest, sucking it into where their mouths would be. I could see splashes of dried blood on the walls and the floor.

  “What are the shadows, exactly?”

  “Spirits that have been so corrupted by Dark that they are nothing but evil,” Ambrose said simply.

  “Oh. Well, delightful.”

  I slid my arm through the crook of Ambrose’s arm and we hurried on, me holding on tightly and grimacing at the sandy sensation.

  “You’re like the ghost of Christmas present,” I told him, thinking of Callie’s earlier comparison to Scrooge. To my surprise, he snickered.

  “You know, I kind of wish I’d given you more of a chance before I died. Maybe we wouldn’t have hated each other.”

  “Oh, I still would have hated you,” I said. Yet, I didn’t know if I was so sure anymore. “You’re a sociopath.”

  “A sociopath doesn’t have feelings. I have feelings.” He was starting to get angry; heat emanated from him, warming up the stale, irony smell of the blood dried on his tuxedo shirt.

  “You killed the girl you loved. The evidence is against you.”

  His chiseled jaw tightened, his mouth set in a hard, furious line. We passed another room full of shadows, a single light flickering overhead. That patient looked like a child. I ripped my eyes away and clung tighter to Ambrose’s semi-solid arm.

  He shook his head, and I wondered in horror and fascination if his neck would tear worse.

  “I didn’t kill her, and if I could take her death back, I would.” He stopped walking and stared at me, the cloud of gnat-like specks retreating. “How is Jenna doing?”

  The question was like a bucket of cold water, and reminded me of why I’d ended up in the light-strung alleyway in the first place, how I’d been in a vulnerable position to be attacked.

  “She’s as good as any dead girl can be. Why did you try to lure her away at the Night Lights festival?”

  He was watching a lone man pushing a wheelchair down the hall. The man’s face was twisted and blurry, his sallow skin marred with pockmarks and gouge-like wrinkles. The wheelchair’s wheels squeaked loud enough to hurt the fillings in my teeth.

  “It was the first time I’d seen her since I passed,” Ambrose said, still watching the wheelchair pusher. “I wanted her to come with me. It’s been so lonely, and I knew she was out there in the fog. I know she’s lonely, too.”

  The man pushing the wheelchair stopped and stared at us as we passed, glaring with sunken eyes. I wanted to be far away from him before he decided to start chasing us, but the wheels started squeaking again as he kept to his path.

  “Where’s Warwick?” I asked.

  “You don’t need to worry about him. Wick has slipped much farther down. He’s barely holding onto this place, his mind is so weak. I’m slipping, too—but if the evil takes me, at least I’ve put up a good fight.”

  “So, I should probably ask all of my questions now?”

  “If you have questions, then yes.” The haze of specks became denser again, the buzzing louder. His blue eyes had darkened to cobalt.

  “Why did you kill her? Jenna?”

  He snorted, making me jump. I didn’t see what was funny about it.

  “Right to the heart of the matter,” he said. “Well, you always seemed pretty clever, for a social reject. My parents wanted to be in Thornhill, too, but the powers that be were so selective. My dad has a really bad gambling problem, he owes bookies and loan sharks tens, maybe hundreds of thousands.”

  “Despite all the money he rakes in from his dealerships, there was barely enough to stay afloat and maintain our image. Enter Phillip Rhodes, the headless horseman, to save the day. He took over long before Hell Day; the instant he set foot in Hell, he became their leader again.”

  “He blackmailed my father, told him that his only son would have to do them a simple favor. A little sacrifice. Blood was needed to activate their first symbol, to get the ritual started.”

  “So, your small sacrifice?” I prodded. “Thornhill made you kill Jenna with Warwick?”

  “I didn’t kill her,” he snapped. “I just helped to lure her into that van and tie her up.”

  “Oh, is that all?” I asked snarkily.

  “I tied her loosely. I don’t think she realized it. Jenna was her mother, Rachel’s, sacrifice. You probably don’t want to hear the rest of this. But your mother and Jenna’s mother were tied to Thornhill a long time ago. They made some kind of oath of loyalty. And then, when Phillip formed it again, he told them that he required the same sacrifice of them. But only one. They tossed a coin, and your mom won because she picked tails. So they sacrificed Jenna.”

  As simple as a coin toss. The words Jenna’s mother had screamed at me during her funeral. It all clicked into place now.

  My mother was willing to sacrifice me to get into Thornhill. My worst fears were real. “How could she?”

  “Because your mom isn’t your mom,” Ambrose said, licking his dry lips. “Those meetings that they have, the ceremonies they perform…it weasels into their brains. Changes things.”

  I should have felt relief, but at the moment, it only made me more horrified. At least it was an explanation.

  “Warwick was the one that cut Jenna. I told her she’d be just fine, because that’s what they told me. Phillip told me that all they needed was to bleed her and that they’d let her go with no memory of the event.”

  “And you believed him?”

  “You’ve met him. He’s very persuasive.”

  “Go on.” I was watching a pair of shadows in the room across from us. They were hunched so low over the unseen patient in the bed that they could have been one.

  “Jenna wouldn’t die, but they wouldn’t let her live. I helped Warwick drag her to Mr. Ford’s, all the while telling myself that I would find a way to let her go. Mr. Ford and Warwick were the ones who put her in the boat and took her off in the water. They made me drag her to the boat, kept threatening to tell Phillip and his gun that I was disobeying Master’s orders. She was still alive the last time I saw her, and the whole time afterward, I kept expecting her to crawl out of the lake and come home to me.”

  I could barely see his face through the haze now, except to see that his eyes were almost entirely coal black. But he didn’t stop talking, even if I had to struggle to hear the garbled words.

  “I spent the rest of my life drunk and high, on anything I could get my hands on. I couldn’t face being alive without her. I’m not going to be here much longer.”

  It was as though he wanted reassurance, his tortured black eyes boring into mine.

  “Are you scared?” I asked in a small voice. Even the solidity of his arm was becoming less real.

  “No, I’m not scared. It’s what I deserve. I cheated on all my tests. I’ve lost everything.”

  Part of me wanted to offer him some comfort. He had been the one to help me the most, after all, and below all of the bullshit that had formed his tough exterior was a real person inside. I wracked my fevered, bloated mind for something to give him in return.

  “Your father was heartbroken when you died. He couldn’t stop crying. He stopped doing his commercials. It seems like he hasn’t been the same since, because of how much he misses you.”

  “My father?”

  I nodded. Even through the haze, his eyes were full of intense emotion. Then a gurgling erupted from his throat, the buzzing growing uncomfortably loud, and it went down his throat.

  I felt suddenly desperate for him not to leave.

  “What was your favor?” I asked helplessly.

  He struggled to move his mouth, and the dark cloud flew in and around his mouth and eyes. “Tell her I love her.”

  “Wait!” I cried out, but i
t was too late. I let go of his arm, barely there anymore, and stepped back. A swirling wisp of smoke, and then he was gone, and I was alone in the nightmarish hospital.

  The shadows instantly noticed, abandoning the shriveled corpse on the bed. My heart pounded out a single, frightened beat.

  And I opened my eyes back at St. Joseph’s, screaming for help.

  CHAPTER 30

  HUGH’S APARTMENT WAS supposed to feel like home. Nothing about it did. There were no familiar details, few personal possessions. He’d bought a row of cacti in clay pots and lined them up on the snack bar; I didn’t even know he liked cacti. I twisted them around, frowning and wanting to toss them out the window.

  He already knows… Briggs’ words kept echoing in my ears. Even as drugged up as I’d felt at that moment, I was sure that was what he said. So we hadn’t kept our secret, after all. I thought of the times that I felt watched, the car in the parking lot, the door shutting below us when Henry and I were in the stairwell at school. My paranoia had a solid basis.

  I secluded myself away in the little guest room. My joy at merely being alive had been replaced by anxiety. I felt pissed that the necklace was gone and also almost like I was going through withdrawal. Patches of burnt nerves were all over my skin. I felt tired and dehydrated, and I kept sipping water, holding it in my parched mouth before swallowing. Whenever I thought about the fact that I might never see the necklace again, my anxiety flared.

  “We’re better off without it,” Jenna said, coming up behind me.

  “No, we’re not. Not if it has wound up in the wrong hands. You’ve said it yourself, the necklace could be evil. I certainly had a strange reaction to it; I felt like I had to carry it all the time or I’d panic. Look at me now.”

  “Who do you think took it?”

  “I have a few guesses. All roads lead back to Phillip Rhodes.”

  Jenna groaned. “Was the pun necessary?”

  I turned to her. “Why did you follow Ambrose?”

  She staring down at the floor at her flip-flops. She looked ashamed, which wasn’t a common emotion for my friend, curls falling over her eyes. Her voice was soft and eerily sentimental. “Because it was the first time I’d seen him. Then I lost him again.”