Free Token of Darkness by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

but tomorrow would be good.”
    Saturday. Brent’s last free weekend before school started. There was some kind of fund-raiser for the football team, so at least Delilah probably wouldn’t be hanging around Ryan’s when they got there. As far as he knew, Delilah and Ryan had been on rocky terms ever since the mishap that had also ended her relationship with Brent.
    “Sure. Tomorrow’s probably better, in terms of timing. Will you be able to get off work?”
    “Yeah, no problem,” Cooper said without hesitation. “I might have to cover the early morning and opening, but I doubt this Ryan guy would want us to show up at dawn anyway.”
    “I have to check the train schedule, but I think there’s a nine-something. I’ll meet you here around eight?” Brent asked.
    Cooper nodded and glanced over his shoulder at the clock on the far wall. “I should get going,” he said. “We need to open, and then I’ve got to get to school. But I’ll see you tomorrow.”
    “Sure, sounds good,” Brent said.
    He drove home with every intention of looking at the public police reports, and scanning for any headlines about missing teens, accidents or abductions, but the conversation with Cooper had started a pounding in his head. It wasn’t
only
for Cooper’s sake that Brent hoped Ryan could help him.
    His mother had passed out, thankfully, so Brent didn’t need to deal with whatever inflated accusation she would come up with about where he had been. Instead, he crept back upstairs, turned out all the lights, drew the curtains, and crawled under the covers on his bed. In absolute darkness, he closed his eyes. At least the migraine had shut down his mind enough to keep the shadows at bay.
    He was driving through a fine drizzle. The weather was otherwise warm and visibility wasn’t too bad, so he wasn’t uncomfortable. He was driving reasonably. He had his headlights on, and used his blinkers whenever he had to change lanes
.
    In fact, he had just put on his right signal, and looked over his shoulder to check his blind spot, when it happened
.
    A flash of color in front of him, almost a blur
.
    The blare of horns, screaming of brakes, screech of metal against metal—
    Brent woke with a silent scream choking his throat. Oh,
hell
. It wasn’t bad enough that he was hearing thoughts and apparently dreaming ghosts—now he was sharing Cooper’s post-traumatic flashback nightmares. Spending too much time with that guy was going to end up giving
Brent
a severe case of anxiety.
    With any luck, he could hand Cooper over to Ryan, and Ryan would have an easy answer.
    In the meantime, he went downstairs and booted up the family computer, which he had built himself and which his mother had taken possession of so she could order prescriptions without looking a pharmacist in the eye. There had to be
something
online about this girl. Then again, the search could be a little more complicated than Cooper made it out to be.
    Cooper had said Samantha sounded local, but it was more true to say that she didn’t seem to have any distinctive regional accent at all, at least in the short period when Brent had spoken to her. That meant she could be from anywhere in New England, the Midwest, or Northwest, at the least. She
didn’t
sound southern, and she definitely sounded born-and-raised American … but that wasn’t a lot to go on.
    Searching for deaths in the area in the last few months, of course, instantly pulled up articles about Cooper’s accident.
    Brent swore out loud as he read the details. He had spent most of the summer at Ryan’s or in the library, not watching television, and pointedly avoiding anyone from the regular high school in order to keep out of Delilah’s way. He vaguely recalled Elise mentioning something about an accident one day while he had been helping her stack books, but he’d had no idea the extent of the damage.
    Samantha had to be related to the accident. If she had died as a direct result of the crash, even Cooper