Saving Her Shadow Read online

  “Damn!” Bryce cried as the car spun out.

  “Hold on,” Larry said, gripping the dash.

  Jackie cursed. Monica screamed. Raina held on to Jackie’s arm and the door handle, too afraid to make a sound. What felt like an eternity was over in a matter of seconds. The car had done a three-sixty and come to rest in a field.

  “Everybody all right?” Bryce asked, once he could talk again.

  Except for the fear that had probably shaved moments off of each of their lives, everyone was fine. Thankfully there’d been no other cars around or there would have surely been a collision. As it was there were four very scared, extremely thankful kids and a car that wouldn’t budge, no matter what they did to try and get it unstuck. As Raina’s spirit continued to drop along with the temperature, Jackie remembered that she was on her mother’s car insurance plan, which came with roadside assistance. A beam of sunshine burst through Raina’s dark night. It only lasted until the end of Jackie’s phone call to the company. The unexpectedly heavy snow had produced a plethora of accidents. It would take anywhere from two to four hours for help to be on the way. In that moment Raina knew that her plan had failed. An hour late could be explained away. Maybe even two. But four or more? No. Raina looked up at the brightly glittering stars and mumbled, “Never mind.” Whatever time she arrived back in Lucent Rising, she’d have some explaining to do.

  Chapter 8

  They reached the outskirts of Lucent Rising at just past ten. With each passing mile, Raina’s thoughts of her parents’ reaction to what she’d done had gone from mild fear to sheer terror. She was in caca deep enough to start a sewage plant. She didn’t bother asking Bryce to drop her off in the park. By now her dad and sub-division security had probably scoured every inch of the town. Illumination security had undoubtedly been notified and every available security camera had probably been rolling since four o’clock, when the first of several calls from her family was ignored.

  “You going to be all right?” Bryce asked.

  “Define all right,” Raina said, trying to make a joke when there wasn’t a darn thing funny. She zipped her coat over the modest clothes that hid the fly girl and opened the door.

  Jackie placed a hand on her arm. “Give me a call later, okay?”

  “If I can.”

  “What does that mean?” Monica asked.

  The porch light turned on. Raina swallowed her answer. Time to face the firing squad. She got out of the car without saying goodbye, took a deep breath, and walked up the sidewalk. The door opened when she was still three feet away.

  It was Jennifer, resembling a thundercloud, her straight, shoulder-length black hair twisted and wrapped into a conservative bun, a drawn expression marring her pretty, oval-shaped face. Instead of the smile that often split her face there was a line straight enough to test a potential DUI.

  “Where on earth have you been!” Raina reached the front door. Jennifer did not step aside. Her eyes slid from the car from which Raina had exited to the shamed face of her daughter.

  Raina shifted nervously from one foot to the other. “I was with some friends and their car broke down.”

  “The car that just dropped you off?”

  “Yes. Something with the battery. He had to call—”

  “He?!?”

  Raina froze. Had she really used that pronoun? When she, they, even it, was available, she had to put the shovel in the dirt with he and start digging her grave?

  “Who were you with, Raina? Never mind, we’ll get to that. Where is your phone?”

  “Um, it died.” Raina’s religion didn’t believe in hell, but as easily as that lie rolled out, Raina thought that for her they might make an exception. “Sorry, Mom.”

  Jennifer finally shifted so that Raina could enter the house. “Your dad is furious,” she hissed into Raina’s ear as she passed her. “He’s in his study. Get up there. Now.”

  That last command was issued in a near bear growl. Had she turned around and seen her mom’s eyes blazing red, Raina would not have been surprised.

  She stopped at the bottom of the stairway. “Where’s Shadow?” In her state of dread, she needed a lifeline. The nickname that she’d used for so long slipped out without a thought.

  Jennifer’s eyes narrowed. “Stay away from Abigail Denise. You are the shadow.” A stabbing forefinger emphasized the point. “Your level of contamination is probably through the roof. The entire block has been shielded.”

  “Mother, I—”

  “Save your lies and your stories for someone who might believe them. Your father and I deserve the truth. And you’re going to give it to us. Now get upstairs. I’ll be there shortly, as soon as I call the Center and let them know the search party can be called off.”

  Search party? Leave it to her parents to call out the cavalry. Raina wished her mom were joking, but given the circumstances, she knew it was totally true. When it came to members, the Nation was overprotective. She’d been right about her dad and company scouring the streets. That’s how they rolled.

  She reached the closed door to her dad’s study and knocked. Twice. Nothing. While debating whether to knock a third time or simply open the door, it opened. Her father’s gray eyes were the color of rain. The kind that comes down in droves during a hurricane, Category 5. They were filled with emotions, but she couldn’t guess which. Anger, for sure, but what were the others? Disappointment? Compassion? Frustration? Relief?

  He said nothing, just left the door open and walked back to the chair behind his massive desk. She was already terrified. Being interrogated in his masculine office, with its antique furniture, plank cedar desk, and oppressive dark paneling, made it even more so. To twist the knife there was another set of eyes staring down a hawk nose at her from a museum-sized picture, that of the church founder, Daniel Best. She could almost hear his tinny condemnation. You have kept company with the unsanctioned, broken our laws. Obscure!

  Her dad took his seat. She sat in one of two chairs in front of the desk. He didn’t look at her but went back to reading from the Book of Light. Damn. She knew a sermon was coming, but had he prepared scripture and verse? Was he going to pass the offering plate and ask her to sing a selection? The thought almost brought a smile to her face, almost being the operative word. Right now fear had her so paralyzed that moving her mouth at all would be a huge win. She bowed her head, clasped her shaking hands together, and repeated the Ode of Enlightenment until she heard the door open and smelled her mother’s cologne.

  Jennifer took the seat beside her. Ken looked up. “‘An obedient child is like a diamond,’” he began, indeed quoting from the book as she figured he would. “ ‘A precious crystal, of great value and worth. A disobedient child is like a lump of coal. Hard, destructive, disastrous. Better to have one, tiny diamond, than a million lumps of coal.’”

  He paused, to let those words sink in. They did, and with every consonant and vowel, pulled her heart to her toes.

  “Where were you, Raina?” Jennifer had regained her composure. Her voice was calm; her question, direct.

  Oh. Snap. Maybe her mother had gone to the school after all and what she’d thought a secret wasn’t anymore.

  “At the library.” Last week.

  Jennifer and Ken exchanged a look. “With whom?”

  Now it gets tricky. How much truth should she tell? How much did her parents know and when did they know it?

  “Jackie McFadden and Monica Wilson.”

  “Monica Wilson?” Jennifer asked coolly.

  “Yes,” Raina answered, understanding the chill.

  “She is unsanctioned,” Jennifer said. “You were told to stop interacting with her.”

  “With anyone not of the Light,” Ken said.

  Most of her classmates fit that title, as did everybody who wasn’t a member of the Illumination. Raina thought the reason Jennifer didn’t want her hanging around Monica specifically had less to do with their present than her and her mother’s past.

  “
We’re working on the English project together, remember?”

  “How long were you at the library?” Ken asked. Raina didn’t answer. Now it wasn’t a matter of whether or not her stepfather knew anything. The question was how much.

  “Because you weren’t there when your mother went by the school.”

  Thunk.

  “Raina?”

  “Huh? I mean, sir?”

  “I asked a question.”

  “I don’t know,” was her noncommittal answer.

  Belatedly, Raina realized she should not have assumed their ignorance and just told the truth. It felt that way now and later she’d be sure of it. But on the slightest chance that he was fishing without provable bait, she continued down the road of deception.

  “Why did you leave the school with them?” Jennifer asked.

  “I didn’t think it would be a problem.”

  “Didn’t think it would be a problem?” Ken asked, his voice rising. Anger in a deep shade of red crept from her father’s neck to his face. His jaw clenched, as Raina imagined he worked to calm his nerves. “After I explicitly told you that a road trip with them was out of the question?”

  “We weren’t supposed to be gone long.”

  Translated: long enough for you to find out I skipped school and rode to the city. Blasted snow! Were it not for the change in weather they’d have returned by four, Raina would have been home on time, and no one in Chippewa would have been the wiser about her great adventure.

  Jennifer made a sound of incredulous disgust. “You weren’t supposed to be gone at all!”

  “I’m sorry,” Raina said. An afterthought that even to her ears sounded like too little, too late.

  “I’m not familiar with these Vessels helping you with this school project,” Ken said. “They must be from the Center because I’m sure that there are no other girls you’d feel it remotely not a problem to get in a vehicle with, except a group of your own kind.”

  “Jackie is not a Vessel, either,” Jennifer explained. “There was at least one he,” she added.

  Ken’s expression didn’t change. Not even a whisker moved. No one touched the dimmer, but Raina could have sworn the lighting changed.

  “Who was this boy?” he asked.

  “Jackie’s cousin. It was his car.”

  “Where did you go?” Jennifer asked.

  Two sets of eyes bore down on her, waiting.

  “Answer your mother,” Ken all but growled.

  Jennifer shifted in the chair to eye Raina more fully. “You’re working on a school project, why did you leave school?”

  Raina hesitated. The problem with lying is that when you told one, you usually had to tell two. Then you had to keep them straight. Then tell another. And another . . .

  “Just . . . for a ride.”

  “A ride to where?” Jennifer demanded.

  “Over to . . . Clinton,” Raina said, writing a story as fake as the one for English class. “To the . . . theater.”

  She felt horrible lying to her parents but felt a little better that this bag of perjury popcorn held small kernels of truth. As unauthorized as movie-going was, she also thought it a preferred offense to being in a rap video.

  “I didn’t know that’s where we are going. I thought that . . .”

  Ken’s movement stilled her words. He reached for a manila folder lying next to the Book of Light. Inside were photos, blown-up eight-by-tens. Silently, he placed them before her. Black and white, a bit grainy, but with unmistakable time-stamped images of a trip that began just before eight that morning.

  Raina exiting from a back door at Chippewa High. A figure bundled in a faux-fur-trimmed parka running toward a black Mustang.

  Raina climbing in the back seat of the car.

  A black Mustang on Main Street, heading toward the edge of town and the interstate entrance beyond it.

  “You did not attend any of your classes today,” Ken said. “And while you were given every opportunity just now to tell the truth, you didn’t do that either.”

  “We emphasized what a crucial time this is,” Jennifer said. “How careful we had to be in following every tenet of the Illumination.”

  “Mother, Father, I can explain.”

  “You could have, but you didn’t.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  “It’s too late for that,” Ken said. “This could not be contained within the household. Everyone knows, including the Council.”

  “Especially the Council,” Jennifer reiterated.

  What was bad just got worse.

  “We were frantic when you weren’t at school,” Jennifer said.

  “And we couldn’t reach you,” Ken added.

  “All. Day. Long.” Jennifer lost her cool as she leaped from the chair. “What were you thinking?”

  “I wasn’t. I’m so sorry,” Raina cried, fighting back tears. The weight of her treachery slumped her shoulders, the mistake in thinking she could leave town and get away with it all too clear. She waited for the consequence to be meted out. It didn’t come immediately. Instead, silence screamed throughout the room, almost taunting in its completeness. Raina was already stressed to the nth, she didn’t want to wait another second to hear her fate.

  “I will pay for the classes,” she offered. “I was planning to get a summer job anyway. I’ll get one now and pay back every dime.”

  “Are you serious?” Ken, who until now had been almost too calm, began to lose the grip on his measured restraint. “Do you think this egregious act can be mollified with a series of classes? Going deep?” He shook his head. “No. Your actions disrupted this entire community. Did I mention that everyone knows what you did?”

  “Why did you tell them?” It wasn’t a fair question, but she was not thinking straight.

  “What did you expect us to do? We couldn’t find you,” Jennifer said, sitting down once again to get in Raina’s face. “None of the member classmates had seen you or knew where you were, especially Roslyn whom I finally reached, by the way.”

  “Dennis organized a search party,” Ken continued. “And instead of being claimed by an upstanding, honorable man like him, you’re cavorting with those outside of the Light. Men who drive black Mustangs,” he sneered, stabbing the picture of Bryce’s car with his middle finger.

  Dennis. For a second, Raina’s fear turned to fury as she remembered that he’d seen her leave the gym that day, dressed inappropriately, and imagined he may have been the one to suggest she’d done it again. The diverted blame was short-lived. The only way she could see the reason she was in the hot seat was to get up and look in the mirror.

  Ken’s anger grew. “Who is this guy? I should . . .”

  “Honey.” Jennifer’s voice was soothing.

  “What if in addition to DEEP classes, I become a Vessel-in-Training?”

  It’s the very last thing on earth Raina wanted to do, but the feeling gathering in the pit of her stomach suggested that unless she could convince her parents of how much she regretted her actions, and how committed she was to the Light, the night was not going to end well.

  “None of that is an option, Raina Lynn,” her mother said. “Been there, done that. It’s clearly not working.”

  “It is. My last infraction was almost a year ago. The classes are how I shined brighter.” Her parents were looking at her intently, both of their expressions otherwise unreadable.

  “If not through classes, how do I begin the process of reillumination?”

  Ken took a deep breath and steepled his fingers. “By leaving our home.”

  “What?” The word came out on the whoosh of breath that had just been taken away.

  “Your actions are those of someone determined to do what they want to do,” Ken continued. “To live like a grown person, be on their own. Tonight, we will oblige you.”

  “I don’t understand,” Raina said, honestly confused.

  “The Council has recommended that you be obscured.”

  “No
!”

  “It’s not final yet, Raina,” Jennifer said, her voice softening slightly. “Your membership has been suspended until their investigation is completed. While that is happening though, you can’t be here.”

  As the severity of this new reality dawned, fear seized her. Suddenly Raina was very much just barely eighteen, not at all ready for the grown-up life.

  “You have thirty minutes to get your things,” Ken said before Jennifer could answer. “And five more to get out.”

  The situation had gotten much further out of control than Raina imagined. This had to be some sort of dream, some twisted form of punishment meted out to get the kid’s attention before laying out exactly what she needed to do to reenter the Light. Her stepfather hadn’t just told her to leave home, right? Had she just heard the words, get out? Yes, said the devils on both of her shoulders. And she was pretty sure he wasn’t referencing the Jordan Peele film.