Richie couldn’t sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, he imagined Kirstin, dirty and bloody, her peach dress torn, reaching for him. "I asked you for help," she begged. Finally, unable to stand it anymore, he carefully extricated himself from Ang’s arms and stood, stretching out his back before leaving the room. She hadn’t wanted to go home. She said she had wanted to be back out there, literally at first light. Richie hoped to hell she would change her mind.
He went upstairs to Kirstin’s room and pushed a pile of rubble aside to sit against the wall. Almost immediately, he felt uneasy and tense.
"Kirstin, where are you?" he asked the room, not really expecting a response.
He sighed and leaned his head against the wall, letting his eyes lose focus as he tried to remember the dream he had when he first stayed at the house. Was it really only a matter of days since that dream? Richie shook his head. He sat there for hours, turning the dream sequence this way and that in his mind, trying to find something, anything that would lead them to where Kirstin was buried.
He was getting frustrated. Try as he might, all he could really remember was the arm poking out from the bushes, grabbing him.
"Wait a minute," he said, excitedly. "Poking out from the bushes! We’ve been looking in the wrong damned place!" He felt a sense of calm wash through him. "That’s it, isn’t it?" he said to the room. "Kirstin, I swear to you, we will find you."
Back in Richie’s makeshift bed, Ang was dreaming. Kirstin was calling to her, crying for her, begging her to keep looking. "Why can’t you find me?" she wailed.
Ang was heartbroken. "I don’t know," she answered. "We are trying, I swear to you, we’re trying. I need more help, more guidance."
Kirstin approached Ang. "There is a way," she said, and reached out with outstretched fingers. "Trust me," she said. "I can show you where I am if you just keep still." As Kirstin’s fingertips met Ang’s face, a bone-numbing cold began to permeate her body. Kirstin was trying to fuse herself, her spirit, to Ang’s soul. If she did that, Kirstin’s thoughts and memories would be Ang’s, and Ang would be able to find Kirstin easily.
"NO!" Angel shouted, sitting upright. She shook off the last vestiges of the dream only to find it wasn’t really a dream. She could feel narrow fingers of cold pulling away from her thoughts. "Why?" a voice said in her head. "Why...."
"Angel, what happened?" Richie had bolted down the stairs and to her side when he heard Ang’s cry. He dropped onto the mattress by her side and wrapped his arms around her. She was shaking and cold. So cold.
"It’s getting stronger," she told him. "Kirstin’s getting stronger. At first it was just troublesome memories. Little snippets that plagued my awake time. Now she’s trying to reach me when I sleep; trying to bind herself to me." She started to cry.
Her mind was a quirky thing; she had learned that long ago. It could allow conversation with a spirit, or could relinquish control on her psyche and let the spirit take over. The possession, the total abandonment of self, was something she had thus far been able to stave off. At best, letting another soul take over hers would be ill-advised, but at worst, it could be catastrophic. She, Angel Rose, could be lost forever. She’d heard stories of people deemed to be mad because they thought they were someone else. In some cases, a few cases, they truly were mad, but in others, most of them in fact, they really had become the spirit to whom their bodies had become hosts.
Angel did not want to become Kirstin Maddox. She was quite happy being Angel Rose Summerlin, gift notwithstanding.
But the fact remained, she found herself losing part of her essence to Kirstin. Every dream, every vision, she could feel the other woman winding her threads of self around Ang’s. It wasn’t malicious, it just was. It was the only way the spirits knew. She felt Kirstin becoming part of her and it scared her half to death. Ang felt, felt so deeply in her bones that she knew, that Kirstin was doing this because they weren’t helping her fast enough, that there was MORE that needed to be done.
"What happens if she does that?" Richie asked her, half-knowing the answer already.
"I become her," Kirstin said. "I mean, I’ll talk like I’m her, having her memories and oh Richie, I don’t want that to happen!" She pushed away from Richie’s chest and shook him by the shoulders. "I don’t want to disappear!"
"Shhh, we won’t let that happen. All we have to do is find her."
"I know," Ang said, getting angry. "But we can’t find her." She looked at her watch. It was coming up on five in the morning. "Soon it will be light. We have to go out and finish clearing the path. We have to find her grave."
Richie suddenly remembered the revelation he had up in Kirstin’s room. "Honey, I don’t think she’s under the path," he said. He recalled the dream to her, explaining how Kirstin’s arm had thrust out from the bushes to grab him. "That has to mean that she’s buried in the thicket of bushes, not along the path, right?"
Ang thought for a moment. "Yes, I think it would." She said. "But," she started getting excited. "We know she took off down the path; we followed her that way. We still have to clear it off, but now we know what we have to look for!"
"We do?" Richie asked. "How are we going to find her if she isn’t in the path? That’s a lot of bushes out there."
"I know," Ang said, "but think about it. Whoever buried her probably didn’t drag her too far into the shrubs. He wouldn’t have wanted there to be any trace. He must have buried her in an empty spot. A – a – void in the bushes. We just have to look for that void!"
Richie smiled at Ang. It sounded so simple, that should be easy to do. Except. "Hell, Angel," he said cautiously. "I’m no scientist, but wouldn’t the void be filled now? I mean, surely in all the time since she died, she’s been, uh, well, taken back to the earth you could say."
"Yeah, and?"
"And," Richie really didn’t want to discourage Ang, but he didn’t want her being disappointed when they didn’t find anything, either. "Well, wouldn’t things have grown over her grave?"
"Probably," Ang agreed reluctantly. "But the bushes are pretty thickly packed; not too much sunlight." She shook her head. "Nope, I believe there’s a place to look." She got up and strode to the window, willing the sun to peek over the horizon. "Now we just have to wait for the damned sun to come up." She put her chin on her fist, fixed her gaze on the horizon, and waited.
The Past
When it was done, when Isaiah was on his way to the bottom of the lake, Jeremiah went back into the woods to his friend’s grave. "I am truly sorry for my brother’s sins." He looked down at her mud-streaked face and cried. He didn’t want to leave her there, but what choice did he have? If he carried her back to her house, Geoffrey would surely believe HE had killed her. No, he decided she had to have her funeral now. But not here. Not in the place where Isaiah had terrified her and killed her. She had to go somewhere different; somewhere pure.
He walked along the path, but everywhere he looked, all he could see was his brother’s face. He veered off the path into the bushes, breaking a few branches as he went. He had to find someplace...here. He came to a place where two bushes had tangled together, making a canopy of flowers. Underneath was a mossy bed, almost fit for a princess to rest on. Grinning, he ran back to get the shovel.
He carefully dug the moss up, setting it aside so he could put it back on her grave when he was done. Then he dug.
Finally, he went back to where he had left Kirstin. He knelt by her side and took her hand. "I’m sorry I cannot take you home. You’re the best friend I ever had, and you should be home. But I can’t. But I found someplace pretty for you to be. I promise." He started to weep as he gathered her gently in his arms. He walked slowly through the bushes, not wanting anything to snag on her hair or poke at her skin.
When he came to the grave, he stopped at the edge and looked down. It looked so dark and scary in the hole. He put Kirstin on the pile of moss and stripped blooms from the bushes around him. Not too many; because he didn’t want to get caught, but enough to line the bottom of the hole. He picked her up again, and transferred her delicately onto the bed of flowers. He straightened Kirstin’s clothes, and crossed her hands over her chest. After dropping a few more blooms around her, he took Kirstin’s hand and said a prayer for her soul. Then he sent up another prayer that she would understand what he was about to do.
With shaking hands, he pulled Kirstin’s wedding ring from her hand and put it in his pocket. Geoffrey would want this. Jeremiah would give it to Kirstin’s widower before he left. He took the locket from her throat, the one she had shown him with her children’s pictures tucked inside, her most favorite thing, and put that in his pocket as well. That he would keep for himself.
Then after saying one last message of goodbye, and putting a mostly clean rag from his pocket over her face, he started to bury her.
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