Free Living the Dream by Annie Dalton Page A

at Cody, uneasily asleep on the pull-out bed provided for kids, then with a tiny grunt of effort, she swung her legs off the bed. She softly dragged a chair over to the door and jammed it carefully under the handle. Then she went back to CNN. Apparently Aunt Bonita was planning to sit up all night guarding her great niece.
    I wondered what this feisty old Navajo lady could have seen in her dream that made her drive hell for leather all the way to Maryland? It wasn’t possible, surely, that she knew about the PODS? If she knew what Cody was up against, she’d know that just blocking a motel door wouldn’t stop them. The Powers of Darkness can send a disembodied agent swirling up through a bathroom plughole if they want to. They could be monitoring us from the Hell dimensions right now through the screen of the TV…
    Stop it! I commanded. You’re freaking yourself out .
    I was totally freaked for a few seconds, then I pulled myself together and got busy with some cosmic precautions of my own. I moved softly around the room setting shimmery angelic symbols on the ceiling, floor, walls, door and windows. These ancient symbols are invisible to humans and blazingly toxic to the PODS.
    As I drew the final symbol, sealing the circle of divine protection, I caught sight of Aunt Bonita’s lips moving in silent prayer and wondered if I’d got it all wrong. Maybe Aunt Bonita did know who was threatening Cody. Maybe she was doing the only thing a human can do: whisper a prayer and stay on guard till morning.

Chapter Twelve
    N ext morning Aunt Bonita grudgingly allowed Aunt Evalina to take over the driving seat. She claimed her rheumatism was playing up, but I thought the old lady was simply worn out from sitting up guarding Cody, on top of three days’ solid driving.
    We had another long drive ahead of us if we were going to reach Dallas by nightfall. Hopefully we’d make it to Arizona by sometime tomorrow.
    Cody looked dazed and pale. She never seemed particularly well, but today she looked like she might keel right over in her seat.
    Having sat beside her for hours in the cramped, smoke-filled cab of a pick-up truck, I was getting to know her vibes. It seemed like the right moment to dig a little deeper, before we reached the reservation where I’d have to deal with all kinds of unknown factors. Extremely gently, as Mr Allbright taught us, I sent out a teensy bit of my own energy into the first outer layer of Cody’s energy field.
    As I suspected, she was physically in bad shape. I had a feeling she might have an allergy the doctors hadn’t picked up. Next layer down I found a faithful record of Cody’s recent emotions. They were what you’d expect: worry for her mum, intense anxiety that she might not be allowed to live with her again. In the third layer I found worries about school, friends, boys. Normal teen worries.
    Four layers down I found energy so stagnant, so totally disconnected from Cody, that I actually recoiled. It felt wrong , like a seam of hard black coal where there should be sparkly little streams. We’d studied energy blockages in class. Mr Allbright says sometimes it’s so painful to humans to be who they really are, they simply shut off huge areas of their life force without even knowing. Some humans, he told us, run on as little as twenty per cent of their energy supply!
    I wished Mr Allbright was here with me now to explain my disturbing discovery. The feelings she’d buried were too huge, too traumatic, to be explained away by the loss of a parent she’d never really known. I’ve been an angel for long enough now to know that the PODS are not responsible for every single painful thing that happens to a human child. Sometimes stuff just happens. But when it does, the Dark Agencies are always ready and waiting, invisibly nudging things along, playing on human weaknesses, sneaking ugly thoughts into people’s heads, hoping to turn a crisis into a complete catastrophe.
    “I’m going to throw