The Temptation (Kindred) Read online

  “I understand,” I told him, feeling hopeless.

  “Off you go, then,” said Mr. Hedges, standing and opening the door. His social skills were just as awkward here as they were at our school.

  Half an hour later, Kelsey and I sat in a café in the Nob Hill district of the city, nursing lattes and trying to make sense of things. I did not like the turn my life had taken. I needed resolution, and peace. I could not go on living like this. I would end up in a mental hospital.

  The café sat directly across the street from the purple door that led to the office of Minerva Montoya, psychic medium. We could see the office and its sign through the window next to our booth. So far, no one had come or gone from it.

  “She spelled your wrong,” said Kelsey, jutting her chin toward the purple door.

  I looked at the hand-painted sign. Sure enough, it read FOR ALL YOU’RE SPIRITUAL NEEDS.

  “But maybe spelling isn’t a requirement for being a psychic. We should really pay the lady a visit, and just see what she says.”

  Minutes later, we sat across from Minerva Montoya herself, in her Nob Hill office, which was really just the living room of her small and disorganized apartment above the shoe store. Stacks of newspapers formed walls within the walls of the place, and we’d had to navigate a maze just to get to the red loveseat upon which we sat, side by side, trying to ignore the fact that a crust of old bread had sprung out from the cushions behind us. A massive cockroach crawled quite slowly up the nearest wall, and the place smelled of many cats and overripe fruit. If this were a month ago, I would have run from the apartment convinced on appearances alone that Minerva Montoya was an unsanitary crackpot; but I was now the girl who’d been brought back from the dead by a ghost. I didn’t have much room to judge anybody anymore.

  Minerva was a pudgy middle-aged woman with wild, wavy dark hair streaked with gray that frizzed out of the bottom of her large pink hat. She sat in a low wingback chair, and when she crossed her legs underneath her gauzy, flowing skirt, she exposed her rainbow-striped leg warmers and Birkenstock sandals. On top she had a thick woolen sweater and a shawl. It all looked hastily handmade and odd, but despite that, Minerva still managed to be quite alluring somehow, and I felt comforted and soothed by the patient, knowing expression in her eyes.

  “I’ve been expecting you,” she said, leaning forward to pour tea for us. The cups were not exactly clean, and so I took just the tiniest sip, as politeness dictated I must.

  “You have?” I asked, still skeptical. “Did Mr. Hedges call?”

  Minerva look confused, and shook her head. “Clyde? No. Why? Should he have?”

  “I don’t know. He’s our teacher. He told us to see you.”

  She laughed. “Oh. No. That’s not it. I knew yesterday you’d be here. What I mean to say is, I didn’t know exactly who would be arriving, but I knew there were two girls coming into my life who needed guidance about a spiritual matter. And here you are.”

  I felt goose bumps rise on my arms, because I knew she was genuine. In the past, I would have doubted all of what she said, but now I knew better. Minerva looked at us both for a long time without speaking. Kelsey and I had agreed to tell her nothing, in order to see if she could figure out what we wanted. Soon, the psychic’s eyes came to rest only on me.

  “It’s you,” she said. “Your friend here loves you very much, and you are fortunate to have her with you during this difficult time.”

  I felt that now-familiar chill that comes when you witness something unusual. Kelsey and I remained stock-still, and offered no more information.

  “You’re testing me,” said Minerva with a sly smile as she sipped some tea. “That’s fine. I understand. When you’ve been through as much as you have, it’s hard to know who to trust, isn’t it?”

  Kelsey and I exchanged a significant look, but still said nothing.

  Minerva closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them to stare at me once more.

  “I feel a darkness upon you,” she told me. “You are marked. Something has come from the Underworld and touched you. It has left its scent.”

  Goose bumps rose across my arms, and the hair on the back of my neck stood on end.

  “Some houses or buildings are haunted,” she continued. “And sometimes people are haunted. You are haunted by this dark entity now. Shadowed by it. It is not a ghost. It is not human. It is here with us now, lurking, trying to get in. I won’t let her. She is not allowed here.”

  I gasped. Minerva reached out to me and took my hand.

  “Don’t be frightened. She feeds off of that. You have fought her off already, or you would not be here. You know instinctively that she is afraid of goodness and love. These are the best weapons you have against her.”

  “Who is she?” I asked, my voice faint with fear.

  “She is known by many names. Maera, Mara, Bakhtak. Most often, she is called the Old Hag in the English tradition. She is a very old, very hateful female demon who comes when you are sleeping and sits upon your chest to suffocate you.”

  Kelsey and I both widened our eyes in amazement.

  “Am I correct?” asked Minerva.

  “Yes,” I said. “She came to me for the first time last night.”

  “I can talk to her,” said Minerva, “but it is very draining, and very dangerous for me and for my spirit guides. I’m keeping her at bay right now with their help. She is furious with you for some reason. A necklace, I think.” Her brow furrowed with deep concern. “Do you have any idea what that might be?”

  I nodded, and was about to tell Minerva about Travis when Kelsey interrupted me.

  “Minerva, shouldn’t you be able to know why?” Kelsey asked her.

  Minerva turned her eyes toward my best friend and smiled in patient offense. “Still testing me, I see.”

  “We just have to be sure,” said Kelsey. “I’m sorry if that offends you. There is a lot for us to lose here.”

  “Then give me a moment,” said Minerva, a hint of frustration in her voice. “I’m listening to her now. She is not someone I wish to invite into my space, but your friend here needs my help very much. Her life is in danger. Be quiet so I can hear the Old Hag, please.”

  Minerva’s eyes rolled back in her head, and she began to whine and rock. I felt a sudden wave of anxiety as the presence of the Old Hag returned to me.

  Finally, Minerva’s eyes popped open, and she smiled at us as though seeing us for the first time in a very long while.

  “Well, hello, girls,” she said.

  Kelsey looked at me, and I shrugged almost imperceptibly.

  “You are so, so special, Shane,” Minerva said warmly, tears flowing freely from her eyes as she got up to come and squeeze herself onto the sofa next to me now. She held me tightly to her bosom and released me with a heavy sigh. I had not told her my name, and Kelsey knew it. If there was any doubt that this woman was the real deal, it was gone.

  “You have found your soul mate,” she said to me joyfully, “but he is on the other side, is this right?”

  I began to cry, and in a flood of words, I told her everything, from the moment of the crash up until an hour before in the café. Minerva listened attentively until I was through.

  “So what do you hope to get from me?” she asked. “How can I be of use to you?”

  “I want to know what to do now,” I told her. “Travis said I could help him, he asked me to find him. I don’t know how to do that. I want to know if we can figure out where he is, and how to get him back from there. He saved me, and it’s my turn to save him. I know it.”

  “I see,” she said thoughtfully. “This is a new one for me. I’ve been doing this for many years, but I’ve never run into a situation like this. Let me see if I can find him, dear.”

  Tense with excitement and fear, I waited as the medium closed her eyes again. Kelsey and I looked at each other, and I could tell that she shared my nervousness and that she believed Minerva. The medium began to mumble and murmur, rocking so vio
lently at one point that Kelsey and I both had to lean far from her to avoid being smashed into.

  After about ten minutes of this, Minerva’s eyes snapped open again, and again she said, “Well, hello, girls,” as though she had forgotten where she was or who we were for a moment. She composed herself then, coughed for a full minute, and finally spoke.

  “He exists,” she said. “This much I know. I feel echoes of him in various corners of the cosmos. He’s not gone. The Old Hag speaks of him, and for this reason I believe he is with her, or near her, but I am sorry to say I cannot contact him directly at this time.”

  “Why not?” I cried.

  “I need something of his,” she said apologetically. “The Old Hag is standing in my way, and won’t let me through. If I could physically touch something that he’d once held in his hand, that he loved, then I could find him more easily.”

  “What about me?” I asked. “He’s touched me. He loves me.”

  Minerva’s eyes softened as though she found my naïveté adorable. “No, dear, that doesn’t work. Your own spirit would overpower whatever other spirits are on your flesh. I need an inanimate object. A hairbrush, or something he wore, a shirt. Jewelry works especially well. Metal is always good.”

  “We’ll find something,” Kelsey blurted.

  “We don’t have anything like that,” I reminded Kelsey.

  “I know. But we could,” she said.

  Minerva continued, “I just need to be able to pull some of his energy and his vibration into myself so that when I seek him on the other side I will be able to find him more easily.”

  “Where are you looking for him?” I asked. “In the Vortex?”

  “No. In the Underworld,” she said. “That is where I feel he is most likely to be found now.”

  “Is he stuck there?” I asked.

  Minerva shrugged and sighed. “I don’t know. Probably, because I cannot find him by calling for him. I have a very good network of guides who are able to find almost anyone I seek on the other side. But if you’re his soul mate, then what the Old Hag says makes sense. You can probably enter the Underworld and bring him back, but only you can do that. This is probably why she fears and hates you so much. She loves having him there. I think she feeds off of darkening his positive energy. When he is scared or lonely or sad, when he feels hopeless, she thrives.”

  “How will I be able to reach him?” I asked, horrified by the idea of going to the Very Bad Place. “Would I have to die again?”

  She smiled at me. “No, dear. Of course not. I would never assist you if that were the case.”

  “Then how?”

  “There are other ways. Clyde is working on travel to other dimensions. Did he tell you this?”

  Kelsey and I nodded.

  Minerva continued. “Yes, he’s quite close. We just needed to nail down an actual portal location, but it sounds as though you might know where that is?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good. Then we are in good shape, relatively. But first we have to figure out where Travis is. Do you have something of his I can use to pick up on his energy? If we were to just randomly enter the Underworld, we might never find him.”

  “But I don’t have anything of his,” I said desperately.

  “I know where we can find something, though,” said Kelsey.

  “What?” I asked, shocked.

  “You should do this soon,” said Minerva sagely. “The Old Hag is dangerous and very real. There are many people throughout all of history who are said to have quietly died in their sleep. People say their hearts just stopped, or something of that nature. That is usually not what happened. In such cases, the Old Hag has taken them. She feeds on the energy of human souls. She needs a lot of them. She is voracious and said to want to rule the known universe.”

  “You think she’ll kill Shane?” asked Kelsey.

  Minerva took one of my hands, and one of Kelsey’s, and said, “Not if we can help it, she won’t. Now, go. Get that something of Travis’s and bring it back to me right away.”

  Kelsey was already up, preparing to go, but I had one last question for Minerva.

  “If we do this, and I get him back, is there any way my life will ever go back to normal again?” I asked. “I can’t imagine living around people like my mom who don’t believe me, hiding the truth for the rest of my life.”

  Minerva’s eyes grew sorrowful, and I knew she understood personally what I was saying.

  “I am sorry to say your life will never be the same,” she told me as she looked about her, as though remembering something from her own life. “But I am happy to tell you that you will become strong and smart enough through this journey to be able to navigate the rapids of humanity in a way that keeps you safe from their misunderstandings. You will have a happy life, Shane, if you do this right. And whomever you lose to them thinking you are crazy, you will find new friends who understand you.”

  We left then. Kelsey hurried out to the street, and practically ran to her hybrid car.

  “Here,” she said, tossing me the keys. “You drive.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “Because I’m the navigator,” she said, whipping her smartphone out of her handbag.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “You’re driving us down to Belen,” she said with a conspiratorial grin on her face. “There’s this widow who runs a ranch out there. I think we need to use her bathroom because we got lost trying to find a dog breeder and, like stupid city girls, we can’t bring ourselves to squat behind a tree.”

  “What?” I asked, completely confused.

  “Just drive,” she said.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Kelsey and I drove along Highway 47, south through the Isleta Indian reservation with its massive Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, through the suburb of Los Lunas, past farms, trailers, and long-abandoned adobe dwellings, following the scribble of water that was this area’s only major river. The ranch was set back from the highway a mile or so on a dirt lane, accessed by passing beneath a large metal arch bearing the name Hartwell Ranch.

  The ranch appeared to be about forty acres, with stables and corrals. The horses wore blankets over their backs and seemed strong and well cared for. I spied the pinkish-beige stucco pitched-roof house set back from the farmland, with its large wraparound porch and three-car garage. A big, healthy family house. I wasn’t sure why this surprised me, or why I had assumed Travis would have been raised in a small, dumpy house or trailer. I guess it was because he was from Valencia County, his speech had a twang, and he wore a cowboy hat. I was embarrassed by how little I knew about the lives people lived in the rural countryside so close to my own home.

  As we drove over the bumpy road, alongside a fallow, frozen field, toward the house, two large dogs gave chase on the field side of the fence, yapping and barking. I had the strangest feelings coursing through me as I looked at the place. This was my one true love’s home. It felt familiar to me somehow, as though he’d imparted a sense of the place to me through his touch. I felt I’d been here before, though I knew that was utterly impossible. It felt haunted by him, by Randy, too, just a little, and I tried to picture them as children here, playing, working, growing up. A shroud of sadness hung over the ranch, too, and it was palpably a place of undeserved sorrow. A place wrapped in a veil of shouldn’t-have-beens. A place of ghosts.

  I parked in the driveway, and cut the engine. It was so quiet, and I felt so odd, as though I might see Travis come bursting out of the front door. I wondered what that might have been like, the two of us dating like normal teenagers, if he’d lived. But I probably never would have met him, he said so himself. The question was moot. It would never be.

  Kelsey and I quickly went over our plan, agreed upon it, and exited the car. We walked to the door, and rang the buzzer. We were waiting for someone to answer from inside the house, but as it happened, our answer came from outside, from behind us.

  “Can I help you?” called a tou
gh woman’s voice.

  I spun to see a trim, seemingly strong woman who was probably in her late forties or early fifties, standing maybe fifteen feet from us, holding a wooden-handled ax. She wore jeans, work boots, and a large flannel jacket that seemed like it might once have belonged to a man because of the way she had the sleeves rolled into thick cuffs. Her hair was back in a ponytail, and she had a kerchief tied around her head the way some women did when they performed chores. Her face was pretty for her age, though she did not seem to wear makeup or carry herself in a way that said prettiness mattered to her, and in her expression and the set of her jaw I instantly saw Travis. He had her soulful brown eyes, and her dark hair and full mouth. They were so alike that I gasped a little at the sight of her, and had to work very hard to retain my composure in order to effectively pull off our plan. There was no doubt about it. This was my Kindred’s mother.

  “Hi!” Kelsey called out cheerily, always having been a better actress than I was.

  “Hello,” the woman replied politely but coolly. She didn’t smile. I wondered if she ever did anymore. I could not imagine the pain she had suffered in her life, losing everyone she loved, having herself perhaps been brutalized by Victor. He’d taken everything from her, and I loathed him.

  “We’re sorry to bother you, ma’am,” Kelsey continued, even though in the plan it was supposed to be me doing most of the talking. She probably knew I was frozen with shock. “We were just down here looking to get a puppy from a breeder, but the address we had was wrong, and we got lost, and now, and this is the embarrassing part, we really have to pee.”

  The woman cracked a bitter half grin that seemed a good bit annoyed, though I couldn’t tell what annoyed her more: the fact that we were the type to buy designer dogs, or the fact that we didn’t know how to pee in the countryside. She sneaked a look at Kelsey’s shiny hybrid Prius, and smirked to herself. It was not the sort of car you found on ranches, generally.

  “Come on in,” she said. “Let me just put this ax out back. Be right there.”

  Kelsey and I exchanged a significant look that marked our success with step one of our mission. The woman returned with a stern, carefully guarded expression on her face, and opened the door with a set of keys. I noticed she unlocked three locks on it, even though this was the sort of area where most people felt safe leaving doors unlocked. If I had been her, I would have done the same thing. She knew the tragedy life could dish out unexpectedly. She wanted no more loss. She was never going to be vulnerable again.