Chapter 15

“The Great Owl’s wounds will be deep and the Anisgina will leave scars that the Great Owl will lick, but will never heal.”

Crying Shadow’s teaching of the Great Owl

Translated by Erik Livingtree

This side of the Veil

1

Time was elusive and the walls had all but closed in.

Tommy was at the end of his rope and he was beginning to forget to hope.

One hour? Two? Three? He thought with a shiver. Plant your feet and forget about me. My time is short, the hour is thin. My face is a marshmallow as white as my skin.

He had no idea where he was or what he was doing. He remembered something about a fire—could still smell the lighter fluid—and his taste buds were begging for roasted marshmallows. That’s all he could think about.

The marshmallows were on a table. He knew that because he put them there and he was about to light the fire so they could get to the roasting, but now there were too many hands holding him down. They took his lighter away.

Didn’t they want roasted marshmallows?

Whitney would want some. She loved marshmallows, but poor Whitney was dead and ... wrapped in marshmallows?

He could feel the hands pushing against him and he could still smell the blood. He didn’t need anyone to tell him that it was Whitney’s blood because he could smell that much for himself. He knew Whitney’s scent as well as he knew anything, and he knew what that meant.

Whitney was dead.

His sister had lived in this darkness her entire life, but a couple of hours of it had been enough to make him crazy. He also knew that much. He was going crazy, but who could blame him. His sister was dead. She was dead because he failed to catch her. When it came to Whitney he never missed, but he missed the one time she really needed him to catch her and now she was dead, and it was his fault because he missed.

Just hold it together, Tommy, he told himself.

And he tried to. He forced his mind to swim back toward the surface, like he had been for the past hour, or two, or three, but each time he did it got harder to do. He was getting tired.

The smell of her blood was haunting him almost as much as his dreams were. He felt as if he’d spent a lifetime scouring through the memory of his dreams and the reality that his dreams gave was a reality that he never wanted to go to. There were creatures in them that would scare a titan, and the creatures there were deadly in ways that no Earthly beast could match, and then there was the smell of Whitney’s blood. It filled his nostrils and taunted his mind with his failure. It’s a sheet, he reminded himself. She’s not wrapped in marshmallows. She’s wrapped in a sheet.

And I tried to burn her! Oh God. That’s why they’re holding me down. I tried to burn her!

But that wasn’t right either. Was it?

Everything jumbled in his head. He put Whitney on the table because the Indian chief put the wrong thing on the table. He put a mannequinwrappedinasheet on the table.Who would want to eat a plastic person? If he put Whitney on the table above the fire pit then why did they get mad when he tried to light the fire? After all, owls were supposed to get burned when they died. Weren’t they?

And his dreams told him that she was going to die and get burned, or to have a big tail stuffed down her throat. Whitney didn’t have a chance. One way or the other she was bound to end up dead. At least some of his dreams said so. He had them locked in his secret chest so Whitney couldn’t see them, but now she was dead and the chest didn’t need to be locked anymore because he could smell the blood. His dreams were all this scary, but that didn’t matter anymore. Now that she was dead none of his dreams mattered. They were just dreams.

But that didn’t make sense either.

Many of his dreams were when they were older and his dreams always came true. If she was dead, how could she be in them? He dreamt of this camp and there were different versions of dreams.The only ones that could be true were the ones that left the possibility of the future dreams coming true. At least that’s what he always told himself. Whitney was in some of those dreams, therefore, she couldn’t be dead.

But he could smell her blood.

For the first time ever, he failed to protect her.

Too bad that the first time would also be his last.

2

“Something must be wrong!” Erik whispered to his uncle. He pulled his knife from its sheath and began cutting the sheet shrouding Whitney’s body; tossing the necklace aside.

“I thought you said it was finished!” he added.

“It has to be,” Little John answered. “I no longer feel ITs presence. IT is gone! But my sense of her is also gone.” Ever since coming out of the well Little John had a connection with her. He figured out why. It was the owl, and the mixing of her blood with his but it was the third element—going to the brink of the underworld—that enabled him to communicate with her. That ability was a dissipated vapor and he could no longer feel the Great Owl.

Erik continued cutting the sheet away and removing it completely. He put his fingers to her neck and waited. “Her heart still beats but the beats are diminishing. It’s been a half hour.”

He expected to see a gash on her face when the sheet was removed but to his surprise, her face was unmarked. There was a lot of blood on the sheet. Some blood from her ankle, but most from her face. Neither spot had a wound.

“Shit!” Erik said. “Her lips are starting to turn blue!”

His words got the attention of some of the other campers.Most were holding Tommy down. He hadn’t stopped thrashing since they stopped him from trying to burn his sister. Tommy was sweating profusely and moaning his sister’s name repeatedly. The rest of the campers watched over Mikey and Kat, but both of them were fading as fast as Whitney was.

Erik and Little John tried everything they knew to bring Whitney back from the ghost world, but nothing worked. Erik leaned in close and placed his ear above her nose and mouth. “She still breathes,” he said. “Why aren’t you coming back?” he added in desperation.

Penny came over, but stopped before she got Erik and Little John. She stood there staring down at the necklace. The charm gave her the creeps, reminded of how it melted into her cousin’s chest.

She picked it up anyway.

She held it in her hands and stared at it. It didn’t look the same as when Whitney had first made it. The plastic beads melted together, but the black stones were still in perfect condition.

“She used this to talk to my cousin?”

“Yeah,” Little John answered.

“Because she could ... I don’t know ... zero in on it?” Penny added.

“Son of a beaver” Erik said. He snatched the necklace from Penny’s hand, lifted Whitney’s head, and gently gave the charm of the necklace a home on Whitney’s chest.

Whitney gasped. She sucked air deeply into her lungs and sat up.

“Are you guys kidding me?” she asked after she caught her breath enough to speak. “You guys had everything figured out except for the stupid necklace!”

Little John and Erik both hung their heads. “We uhhh...”

“Never mind! Get me offa here. Where’s Tommy?”

“I think I like her better when she don’t talk!” Erik said as he helped her to the ground. He pointed her to where her brother lay. He was still thrashing, but he stopped moaning.

3

Tommy’s change was almost immediate. The second that Whitney grabbed his hands and placed hers, finger to finger, palm to palm, against his, he began to calm down. His mind was still a confused and misguided mess, but he was still there and coming back to normal.

She didn’t wait around for him to recover. She still had other things to return to their rightful owners. Without Tommy’s sight and hearing, she was on her own, but she was used to that. She stood up and used her memory to guide her to the others. She could see the shadows of both Mikey and Kat, but their shadows were faded. Mikey was closer, so she turned toward him first.

She took a step forward and felt two hands grab hers. One of the hands belonged to Cheyenne—the girl whodidn’t believe in her. The other hand belonged to Penny—the girl that didn’t seem to like anybody. They were both offering to help her and even though she really didn’t need their help, she accepted it anyway.

“Mikey,” she said and they guided her over to him.

Whitney got down onto her knees and hovered over his head. Both Mikey and Kat were bonded with her blood, but now it was time for them to go back to where they belonged. She focused on her stomach. It was the place from which they entered her bloodstream and it was also the only place they could be returned to their owners. She concentrated on the particles of them as they swum through her bloodstream and she guided their essences back to her stomach.

Everyone gathered around to watch with anticipation. They weren’t sure what a miracle was supposed to look like, but they were all sure that they were about to witness one. Whitney was about to bring one of their own back to life somehow and they wanted to see how she was going to do it.They didn’t know what to expect, but what they saw Whitney do wasn’t in line with what they imagined.

She put her fingers down her throat and threw up in his face.

The act itself took them all by surprise. They all gasped when she did it, but it worked. As soon as the puke landed on his face, he started to gasp and cough as if her puke were magical. In a way it was, because her puke contained his life force. Isolem had taken it from him, and she had taken it from Isolem, but now it was back where it belonged.

“Kat,” Whitney said as she stood back up.

Cheyenne and Penny were both stunned by what they saw her do, but that didn’t stop them from leading her over to Kat.

Whitney got down on her knees and repeated the process with Kat.

Apparently, her puke really was magical.

Whitney stood back up, removed the necklace and held it in Penny’s direction. “Burn it,” she said. “It has caused us enough trouble.” A second later, the necklace was removed from her hand and before she knew it, she could feel the heat of a fire against her back.

4

“So Margraves finally decided to call everyone’s parents in?” Tommy asked Kam.

The four of them were back at their little copse. It was their place and all of them knew that.

“Yeah,” Kam answered. “Better late than never.” He was talking to Tommy but his eyes never left his sister.

She sat there with that same blank stare on her face. It was the same blank stare Tommy had while Whitney was in Nethermore. That blank stare was just as chilling on Kat as it had been on Tommy and Kam couldn’t get over the feeling that he had to get used to. No doctor in the world, physical or mental, was going to be able to return her to the way she was.

“I swear to you, Kam,” Whitney said. She was connected to Tommy, but she spoke the words using her own mouth. “If it’s the last thing I ever do I will get the rest of her back! I swear it to you and I swear it to her!”

Kam didn’t answer her and neither did Kat.

Margraves considered the night to be fortunate and without casualties. He said so when he gathered everyone and announced that all of their parents would be called and that they were all to be sent back home. But Margraves was wrong.

“She’ll be fine, Whit,” Kam said after a minute. The left side of his lip curled upward in a half smile, but there was no happiness in it.

“I’m surprised they didn’t force us to go back to our cabins,” Tommy said trying to change the subject, but even in his attempt to lighten the mood, he couldn’t help but glance at Kat, and he couldn’t stop himself from feeling the same sadness that both Kam and Whitney were feeling.

Tommy got up from his stump and walked over to Kat. Kat’s gaze remained steady and even though her face was pointed directly at his chest, she wasn’t seeing anything in front of her. None of them knew for sure where Kat was, but she wasn’t in the copse with them.

Tommy continued looking at her for a while. He didn’t know what else to do. Eventually, he couldn’t take it anymore and he plopped down next to her. At first, she stiffened as if his proximity terrified her and Tommy leapt back up from his perch next to her. Carol Anne would have recognized Kat’s reaction, because she had seen Whitney do the same thing twelve years prior. Kam tried to hug her earlier and she spazzed out. Tommy didn’t want to see a repeat of that, but Kat quickly settled back down, so Tommy sat back next to her.

When Kam hugged Kat, Tommy wanted to do the same thing. Tommy also wanted to kiss Kat like Kam kissed Whitney, but he never did. He regretted that now, because kissing Kat would always be something he could have done, but didn’t. Now it was too late for kissing.

He wanted to reach out to her in some way, but so far, she showedno sign that she was even in the same universe. Her mind was a billion light years away and unreachable. The sign of her presence at all was when he sat next to her.

He reached out and gently clasped her hand in his. She didn’t spazz out. At first, she didn’t do anything. She left her hand in his like a limp dishrag. After a while, she gripped it.

Her expression didn’t change. Her eyes still read like nobody was home. After a while, she leaned her head onto his shoulder, a single tear pooled in her tear duct, held its place for a while and finally lost its grip, falling onto his pant leg.

Tommy sat and enjoyed the feeling of Kat close to him for as long as he could. He didn’t want to leave her side. He wished they could sit there forever. There was no such thing as forever, but there was a single yellow dandelion growing next to his feet. He bent, plucked it and placed it in the fold above her ear. He didn’t know whether that would make him the man of her dreams like Kam said it would, but he knew that he wanted it to. One of his own teardrops fell from the bridge of his nose and landed on top of her teardrop. It was fitting for those two tears to remain on top of each other on his jeans and he would never allow them to be washed again.

Whitney went over and sat next to Kam and all four of them spent the rest of their time holding each other until the sun came up and the staff came to let them know their parents had arrived.