In the spirit realm, a red shape hung over the city, puffing and pulsing like a blood-filled organ. Tendrils like veins reached for miles, tethering it to the ground. Shaking, Adam gripped the steering wheel and pulled over to the shoulder. He stumbled out, felt the wake of a passing car, but still did not take his eyes off the sight in the sky.
Colossal, hovering, it felt like a stain, a poison cloud pressed against his senses. Perhaps Bobby had seen something after all. Under an apparition like that, only the least sensitive wouldn’t.
Adam cocked his head to the side and drew his walls up around himself. He couldn’t let that thing past his defenses.
Back in the Cutlass, he followed the directions his phone gave him, south and into the city, but he needn’t have bothered. The nearest tendril, one of the thickest, dove straight into Bobby’s ugly yellow house.
6
Adam
The house looked like a wedding cake or an Easter bonnet. Confection yellow, it sat on a square of green unmarked by dogs, weeds, or decorations. The windows were so shiny Adam couldn’t see inside.
He hadn’t known what to expect from Denver. Something different from Oklahoma City, sure, but this suburb was a little scary and slightly creepy in its cleanliness.
He parked the Cutlass on the street, pleased to see the battered car mar the scene. Climbing out, he closed the door with a strong shove and stared at the thing in the sky.
“Damn, that’s ugly,” he muttered, feeling small and exposed, he resisted the temptation to crouch, to hide.
The bloody tendril shifted in the wind, a gory rope mooring a tumorous blimp. Yellow electricity, sallow life, sparked across the tendril. High school biology had been a long time ago, but he thought the spirit had the same general shape as a heart. Purple and veined, it pulsed faintly, beating, like it might squirt blood across the city. Adam had never seen anything like it.
Slow, like a sleepy bull, the spirit turned toward him. Yellow eyes opened along its tendrils. They swiveled, random, searching for Adam.
“Shit!”
He leapt back, pulling his senses away and shutting down his Sight before the thing could focus on him.
Shaking, Adam looked around, saw only the mundane, the street and houses, but he felt the spirit lurking beneath the surface of his perception, like water moccasins on the lake back home. He kept his senses closed, exhaled. Sometimes half of magic felt like focused breathing. If he could not see the spirit, it could not see him. It could not cross over without a body. And this was a spirit that should not be let in.
He’d been stupid to look too closely, to draw its attention.
“Adam Lee?” a sawing, familiar voice demanded, “What are you doing out there? You look like a crazy person.”
His mother stood in the doorway, behind the porch’s white railing. Her nicotine-riddled voice and look of disappointment took him back to high school, to before Liberty House. She did not come to meet him.
Adam slung his backpack over his shoulder and walked toward her.
“We don’t say crazy anymore, Ma,” he said. “We say things like ‘mentally handicapped’ or ‘challenged.’ ”
Tilla narrowed her eyes, like she always did when she didn’t understand him, which was always.
She stayed inside the door, as if the daylight might burn her. Adam looked from her to the sky, where the spirit lingered on the Other Side. Perhaps she sensed it hiding there. He’d always assumed he’d gotten his Sight from his father, and he’d always wondered how much, if any, of the spirit world Bobby could see. But his mother had no Sight. She’d certainly had no trouble trying to pray away the things he’d seen as a child or signing the forms for Bobby to have Adam committed. Maybe the spirit was so big even true normals could feel its presence.
“Are you coming in?” she asked. “Or are you going to stand out there all day being a smart aleck?”
“Missed you too,” Adam said. He wasn’t certain he meant it, and yet he wasn’t angry with her, at least not like he was with Bobby. Thinking of his mother just made him sad, like they should love each other but didn’t. Too much difference lay between them.
He reached the porch. Tilla measured Adam with her eyes. Taller than her by a hand’s length, Adam looked down to take her in.
Dingy silver streaked her hair. The rest was the same sandy brown as his. He’d remembered her being taller. The wind, the constant work, and the red Oklahoma grit had worn her down to a rocky pear shape. The smell of burnt coffee and menthol cigarettes clung to her. So much memory came with that, her holding him, lifting him up. She didn’t embrace him now.
She still smoked. That had to piss Bobby off. It chased off some of the lingering chill to know his mother and brother weren’t in lockstep. They usually were when it came to what they thought best for Adam.
“You’re too skinny, Adam Lee,” Tilla said, completing her assessment with a nod. “Doesn’t that woman feed you?”
“I eat, Ma,” he said, bristling at her mention of Sue. Adam didn’t know why his mother hated Sue, but he suspected Tilla blamed her side of the family for his Sight, like how she believed he’d caught being gay from missing his father, even though he’d been kissing boys in kindergarten.
And he hadn’t lied. He ate when he could and what he could afford to.
“You should have stayed at school,” she said, firing a warning shot he knew would likely become a barrage when Bobby joined in.
“It wasn’t a school, Ma,” Adam said. He kept his voice calm as his guts tightened, bracing for the coming fight.
She glared at him. Great. He’d already pissed her off. That had to be a new record.
Adam didn’t want to fight about Liberty House, at least not yet. And, as tempting as it was, he didn’t turn around and walk back to the car.
He’d tried to tell them, that the orderlies were thugs and bullies, that the “classes” he took were just a room full of drugged-up patients with a TV, a beaten VCR and no movie newer than 1989. Sometimes it was just the same movie, day after day in a cinder block room with a water-stained ceiling.
His one relief, for a while, had been his nights. There had been spirit walking. There had been Perak. Then there hadn’t. Perak had vanished without warning or explanation, leaving him no comfort and no escape from the horrors of his days.
Mind-numbing boredom, the side effects from drugs, drool and pissing himself, and the ice water baths when he rejected the pills, crept into his nights.
His mother hadn’t believed him. She hadn’t come for him.
But it was Bobby he really didn’t want to see.
“Where is he?” Adam asked.