Earthbound

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I wake in a comfortable darkness, floating slowly out of a haze to the sight of an orange sun piercing through a canopy of nearly bare-branched trees. It takes me a few seconds to remember where I am.

Reese’s car. Quinn. Benson. Quinn!

Through the lingering haze of sleep, I try to remember what happened. What happened after—

After the car hit Quinn.

After the car killed Quinn.

There’s no way anyone could have survived that.

The scene flashes through my mind even as I try to push it away: the mangled car covered in shattered bricks, its hood swallowed by a gaping hole in the brick wall.

Don’t make me see it. Him. The blood.

I squeeze my eyes shut and try to push the memory away. Try to forget the last time I was surrounded by blood and death. But closing my eyes only makes it worse. I have to get out of the car. I shove the door open, desperate for a breath of fresh air, fighting not to puke on the upholstery.

Thankfully, when I push the door open and swing my legs out, my head doesn’t pound like when I first woke up from the coma after the plane crash.

I really was just sleeping this time.

I manage to stand, but it takes more effort than I feel it should. My body is completely wrung out, like I’ve been climbing a mountain for the last three days. It feels like those first few weeks after the plane crash, when even simple movements were tasks of herculean scope.

I don’t like thinking about those days.

I wrap my arms around my waist and look around. Benson. Where is he? Is he here? Surely I didn’t drive myself.

It takes a few more seconds, but then I remember. Benson pulling me to my feet, dragging me away before the cops could arrive.

And something else I saw … someone. Someone I knew.

Then there was the hysteria. Completely out of control, like someone was pulling my puppet strings. Tears, desperate words, telling Benson about Quinn. The hard line of Benson’s mouth. Him, pushing me into the car, draping his coat over me.

Then nothing.

I shiver at the awful memory. I’m still tired, but at least I feel like myself. I never want to be anyone but me ever again.

A sound pulls me out of my thoughts. I can hear Benson, but not see him. We’re pulled off on the side of the road somewhere I don’t recognize, and I finally find Benson behind a tree talking on his phone.

Arguing.

I step closer, trying to catch words, but he keeps cutting off, like someone’s talking over him.

“… not what we agreed to. But—” I watch his hand fist against his hip. “I understand,” he says a few seconds later, then hangs up without saying goodbye.

“Who was that?” My voice sounds creaky.

Benson whirls around with a gasp and sighs when he sees me. “Make some noise, will you?” he says with a half grin.

“Sorry.” It sounds lame, but what else is there to say? “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, roommate stuff,” he says, pointing at the phone.

I nod. I don’t know what he means and my brain is still too fuzzy to care.

“How do you feel?” he asks.

I laugh. “Like I’m never going to sleep tonight.”

Benson shrugs helplessly. “Sorry, I couldn’t bear to wake you up.” He pauses and then puts his fingers just under my chin. “I worry. You’re so tired.”

“Hey!” I counter. “Under-eye circles are the new black.” But my joke falls totally flat.

“I don’t mean physically.” He studies me for another long moment, like he wants to say something else, but I don’t drop my challenging gaze, and after a few seconds he lets his hand fall.

The look on his face is so strange—there are more emotions there than I can interpret, and I find myself wishing I’d brought my charcoals so I could capture him on paper—maybe figure him out that way. I lift my hand to his face and he leans into it, trapping it between his face and shoulder. I step forward for more, but he clears his throat and holds up his phone and I stop. “I found a small online report of what happened today,” he says.

“Oh yeah?” I say, instantly curious.

“It didn’t say much, just that an unmanned car was parked on a hill without the e-brake set.” He looks up from the screen on his phone and says, “They’re saying no one got hurt.”

“No one got hurt? But—” I close my mouth to cut the words off. “Are you sure?” I have to ask. I know what I saw. The images are branded into my brain.

“That’s what the report says. They commented that the office staff had just left for lunch, so the building was empty.”

“And there’s nothing about … about …”

“Nothing about Quinn,” Benson finishes for me.

I stand for a long time in the crisscrossed shadows of the trees. I have no idea what’s happening to my life. It feels like it’s slowly splintering. Not breaking apart yet, but full of spidery cracks barely clinging to each other.

Things were starting to get better.

And then this.

It’s like all the emotional healing I went through after the plane crash never happened.

“I saw him,” I say.

“I believe you.”

“Not Quinn—I mean obviously Quinn too, but—” I take a steadying breath as the shadow memory finally solidifies. “I saw the Sunglasses Guy. From Portsmouth. Just out of the corner of my eye a second after the accident, but I know it was him,” I say quickly before Benson can cut me off.

He doesn’t try. It’s like he already knew. But then, he was there. He probably saw the guy too and didn’t want me to know.

I look up at Benson, force myself to meet his eyes. “Is everyone in on it? You asked me yesterday how deep I thought this went and I didn’t know. Is this a cover-up, Benson?”

Benson is silent. He folds his arms across his chest, then changes his mind and shoves them into his pockets instead. Though my mind is screaming for him to just speak, I stand silently, watching him. There’s a possibility my eye is twitching.

“What if Quinn’s a ghost?” Benson says softly.

A bark of laughter bursts from me before I can stop it. “Seriously? No. There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

“There’s no such thing as people who can pull ChapStick and pencils and stress balls out of thin air either. Think about it, Tave, it would explain everything: the old-fashioned clothes, the thing with Rebecca Fielding, having that car run into him and no one notices.”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” I repeat, but my voice is so quiet it’s almost a whisper. My mind is racing. I saw him die. But did I actually see the blood or was that my mind filling it in? I shake that thought away and try to analyze what I know. Quinn is always in old-fashioned clothes; he comes and goes so quickly it’s like he disappears; he never lets me get a word in edgewise—it’s almost like he can’t hear me. And that weird place he led me to last night, it seriously looked like no one had stepped into it for …

For …

Two hundred years. My mind forces me to complete the thought.

“He never touched me,” I say, looking at Benson with wide eyes.

Benson says nothing but he’s studying me with a grim expression that says he knows it makes sense.

“All those times—even when we talked—he never touched me.” My chin jerks up. “Am I a psychic now?”

“Like a medium? Maybe.”

“Benson, the fact is that I see things that other people don’t see. All the time. I can’t deny that anymore.”

Benson nods, but says nothing.

“Do you think this is because of my surgery?”

“Your brain surgery?”

“Yeah. When I was in the hospital, I found this wacko website that suggested that trauma to the brain could give you paranormal abilities. I thought it was stupid at the time, but now?” I spread my hands out helplessly.

Benson pushes his glasses higher on his nose. “It doesn’t sound very likely to me. But what do I know? Nothing, apparently.”

Something doesn’t fit. “Except …” I say, the idea gelling even as I speak. “It couldn’t have been totally triggered by my brain injury. Reese and Elizabeth got me on that plane. They were expecting something like this to happen. You can’t just predict that anyone who has brain trauma is suddenly going to turn into … I don’t know, an X-Man or something.”

“I wish I knew what they know,” Benson says with a sigh.

“Me too.” I sink down onto a moss-covered stump.

Two weeks ago I was a regular old sole-survivor-of-a-plane-wreck orphan being hidden from the media. Today? I don’t even know what I am.

“Elizabeth called me an Earthbound,” I say after a while. “What do you think that means?”

Benson stares at me blankly. “I don’t know,” he says.

“It all comes back to Quinn Avery,” I finally say. “The old one, I mean. Everything. I think …” I don’t even want to say it. “I think I need to go see that place he took me to again.”

“You said you’d never go back there …” Benson answers, a spark in his eye betraying his interest.

“I know, but I think maybe that’s what we’re going to have to do to figure all of this out.”

Benson nods thoughtfully. “If Quinn had any answers, it makes sense that that’s where they’d be.”

“I don’t want to go alone. Will you come?”

“Of course,” Benson says, and there’s a ripple of excitement in his voice.

The place scares the bejesus out of me, but I guess it’s kind of a grown-up field trip to him.

“Sun’s going to set in about an hour, but I can pick up a flashlight in Camden,” he says, then flushes. “I stopped in some town we passed through while you were sleeping and sold the gold coin. I hope you don’t mind; we were out of gas money.”

I wave his worries away. “That’s what it’s for.”

He nods and drapes his arm lightly around me as we head back to the car. I have no clue how an over-two-hundred-years-dead guy—I cringe at the thought—is going to help us, but everything revolves around him. There must be a connection.

Besides, the irrational part of me is desperate to find out more about Quinn. It doesn’t matter that he’s dead—that he might have been a ghost all along—he’s still the one with the answers.

I steer the car away from the shaded clearing and Benson helps me get oriented on the right highway. Once I set the cruise control, he squeezes my hand before releasing it and opening Rebecca’s journal, leafing through the beautifully scripted pages. “Have you had a chance to read any more of this?” he asks.

“Since this morning? When would I have done that?” I drawl. “Before or after I eluded my assassin?”

Benson is flipping pages—slowly, but not slowly enough to really be reading much.

“Look at this,” he says, tilting the journal toward me.

“Benson, I’m driving. Read it to me.”

“I can’t. It’s code.”

“Code? Really?” And I chance a look over, but the tiny, perfect cursive is too small to make out.

“Not actual code, I think. More like another language, but I don’t recognize it. It’s kind of Latin-ish, but not exactly. Maybe an old form of a different Romantic language?”

“Great,” I say, my heart sinking a little. “A different language and in 1800s speech.”

“It goes like that for the rest of the entries, it looks like,” he says, flipping until he reaches blank pages. “The weird language and a whole bunch of drawings.”

“What happens right before the change?” I ask, forcing myself to concentrate on the road.

Benson goes back and turns pages more slowly. “It’s all about Quinn. How in love she is. How he has things to show her, just like he told you.”

I cringe at the memory, especially now that Benson and I are … what exactly are we, if Quinn is out of the picture?

Well, physically.

Sadly, he’s still very much haunting us.

“Let’s see, she’s supposed to meet him. It’s a secret. She thinks he’s going to propose.” He turns to the next page. “Then that strange language. I wonder …”

“What?” I ask when he pulls out his phone but doesn’t finish his sentence.

“I’m putting it into Google translate to see if anything comes up.”

“God bless Google,” I murmur sardonically.

“That’s weird,” he says after a few minutes.

“What?”

“Well, it is Latin. Sort of. It’s close to Latin. Google isn’t translating everything because most of the words are spelled wrong.”

“Do you think there’s any way we can translate the whole thing?”

“Maybe. I can figure out some of the roots of the words that are misspelled, but”—he looks up at me—“it’s going to take a really long time to even get the gist of it.”

“What have we got if not time?” I reply quietly.

But it’s a blatant lie.

Ever since the car almost hit me, it’s like I’ve been hearing a clock ticking down in my head.

And I’m not sure what’s going to happen when it reaches zero.