Token of Darkness Read Online Free Page B

last winter, but Brent wasn’t surprised that Cooper didn’t remember. He had been introduced to Cooper, but they hadn’t talked long.
    He had been surprised to be invited to the party in the first place; he and Delilah had been involved since that September, but she had shown absolutely no interest in including him in the rest of her social life before then. He hadn’t been thrilled by the event, and she hadn’t invited him to any more.
    He would have been happy to see Delilah’s school friends in small groups; he just didn’t deal well withcrowds, which pulsed with the scurry of other people’s thoughts, most of them unfocused and indistinct like a constant background whine that only Brent could hear. There had also been a synergy of thought among the team that was deeply unsettling for an outsider, and left him feeling distinctly
outside
no matter how welcoming the group tried to be.
    Cooper, on the other hand, was hard to peg. The thoughts Brent could make out were almost hyper-focused, with a kind of white noise behind them. It wasn’t something Brent had heard the likes of before, which was why he had gladly engaged in the conversation about ghosts. He was curious, and the noise made by Cooper’s brain wasn’t offensive. Even the zinging background thoughts that shot past Cooper’s more conscious ones were so quickly suppressed that they sounded like the rustling of wind chimes.
    One thing Brent knew for sure was that Cooper
was
seeing this ghost he described. Whether that meant he was psychic or hallucinating, Brent didn’t know. When Brent had volunteered at the local hospital for a couple weeks over the summer, he had briefly been in a room with a hallucinating schizophrenic, and it had been spine-crawlingly horrible. The things that poor man saw, the voices he heard, were so angry. They befouled his mind and the space around him, so much so that Brent had left the room gagging, his head pounding.
    That was when Brent decided to finish his mandatoryfor-graduation community service at the library instead. It was quiet here, especially in the summertime. People were so trained to keep their voices down in the presence of the towering stacks of books that they even instinctively kept their thoughts small, so they were like little fluttering moths in the night.
    “You okay?”
    It took Brent a moment to realize that Cooper had said something.
    “Oh yeah, sorry, man,” Brent replied. “Um … oh. You haven’t said when this guy started seeing his ghost.”
    “Does it matter?” Cooper asked.
    To Brent, the static at the back of Cooper’s mind seemed to get louder, as did all those rapid background thoughts.
    “Sure it matters,” Brent said, drawing back a little from his examination of Cooper’s thoughts and trying to pay attention to the words he was saying, too. It was difficult, because thoughts weren’t really comprised of any one sense, which influenced the way Brent experienced them; he tended to use words like
hear
, but he could just as well say he saw thoughts, or felt them—or maybe it was a combination. “If he hasn’t messed up a grave or something else to get a particular ghost attached to him, then he’s either seen ghosts all his life, or something triggered it.”
    Cooper shook his head. “It’s a recent thing.”
    “How recent?”
    “Couple months.”
    More static.
    “When, specifically, did it start? I mean, what precipitated it?”
    Even louder. Brent started wondering if he should back down, but he wanted to know, and that meant pushing a little harder and dealing with the headache he would have later.
    “He saw her for the first time after a nightmare,” Cooper answered hesitantly.
    “About what?”
    The static rose to a roar and those gentle wind chimes became a screeching, slamming cacophony of noise, flashing lights, and panic emanating from inside Cooper’s suddenly tensed body. Overwhelmed by the impact, Brent bit his lip so hard he tasted blood as he tried to