Free Fear to Tread by Lucy Blue Page B

it’s hard for you to think about this stuff, after what went on with your mama, but…there’s something else, Laura. I know there is. Jake didn’t just stop or just go away. There’s something else, and I think sometimes that wall between gets thin, if we really need it to.” Laura didn’t answer. She could barely breathe. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” Patti said with a nervous laugh.
    “No, I don’t,” Laura promised. “I guess I think you’re right.” She closed her eyes, remembering the ghost, feeling his arms around her. “I love you, little sister,” she said, just the way Jake always had when he and Patti had talked. “You know that, don’t you?”
    “Of course I do.” Patti took a ragged breath. “I love you, too.”
    “Okay. You study.” She suddenly felt restless. “Tell your mama when you talk to her that I’ll call her soon.”
    “Please do,” Patti said. “She’ll love it. And we’ll see you soon, right?”
    Laura smiled. “I’ll see you.”
    She hung up and drew her knees up to her chin, curling into a ball. She had been on her feet all day; she should have been tired. She took a few deep breaths, trying to relax. The wind was blowing through the narrow window opening now, reaching out for her, and she shivered. Her heart was beating fast, she realized; she was afraid. She could hear cars passing on the street below, hear someone crying out, angry, an obscenity. The light from the studio barely touched the dark outside, turning the sleet into tiny flashes as it hit the glass. “I’m scared,” she said aloud. “I don’t know what to do.” She thought about the weird priest that morning and about Caleb, the stranger who had shown up from nowhere just when she needed him most. She shivered again, trembling steadily now. “Help me,” she whispered, a desperate prayer. Her tremors subsided; she could breathe. She got up from the floor and left the studio, turning off the light.
     
     
    Across town, Caleb stepped out on the sidewalk with the other two seraphim, turning up his collar against the sleet. But suddenly he could feel Laura; he could see her light go out. He couldn’t make out what she was saying, but he could feel her desperation. “Help her,” he prayed as he prepared to cross over with the others to travel between worlds. “I don’t know what to do.” He looked up at the dark, empty sky and trusted that Someone there heard.

Chapter Twelve—The Half-Demon
     
    Caleb and his two companions emerged from the space between worlds inside a tiny, dimly-lit parlor. The smell of an oil furnace was thick in the air, but the room was still cold. The furniture was worn but clean and polished, and every table and chair back was draped with a doily of handmade lace. The walls were hung with framed photographs and holy icons, including a crucifix hung in place of prominence over the bricked-up fireplace. An old woman was sitting near the door to the hall, close beside the furnace. She was weeping and chanting steadily in Russian, a wooden rosary twisted in her gnarled, blue and white hands. She didn’t react when they came in; in their pure angel form, she couldn’t see them.
    “The child isn’t here,” the male seraph, Anthony, said.
    The other seraph, the female, Rachel, went over to the woman and revealed herself slowly before touching her gently on the shoulder. “Peace, Mother,” she said in Russian. “Where is your little one?”
    The woman barely seemed to notice her. “Gone,” she moaned, still rocking in her chair. “All gone…taken…all of them.” More screams and wails of grief could be heard from outside, and the old woman sobbed, pressing the fist that held the rosary to her forehead. “All the little ones….”
    “The creature,” Anthony said. “Come on.”
    Outside they found a tiny village, a dozen or so shabby houses and half that many shops hunkered in the waist-deep snow around an open square. People, mostly women, were