Shadow Souls

Chapter Ten

It still took a long time before I felt as confident in Tyler's theory as he was. Plus, remembering the terrible scene of my beloved, undead cat meowing at me, made me understandably nervous about ever being around anything dead again. However, I usually contained the panic a little better than I did today... Okay, a LOT better than today. Luckily, I didn't have any more problems with accidentally raising the dead after the whole Mr. Whiskers thing. For about three years anyway. Not until I spent the night at my grandparents' house when I was in sixth grade. That was the second time it happened.

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They had a super old cockatoo named Sunny that was sick and had lost almost all of its feathers. When I would visit them, I always loved having him perch on my shoulder, and trying to get him to repeat all kinds of ridiculous words, although he never would. He was special to them, and to me, and we knew that he didn't have a lot of time left.

When I went to bed that night, I ended up dreaming of a memory from a few summers ago. It was of the time I stupidly left the screen door open, and Sunny got loose outside. I was so scared that we would never see him again and my grandparents would be heartbroken, but luckily the loyal bird didn't go far. All it took was my grandpa holding up a potato chip for him to fly right back to him and be taken back inside.

I was woken up early that morning by the sound of rustling, flapping wings and found Sunny at the bottom of his cage flailing about, smacking into the bars. Thinking something must have scared him, I went over to try and calm him. That's when I saw those same cloudy eyes that I had seen on Mr. Whiskers. The poor thing had died during the night, and I had accidentally brought him back to life.

Realizing what was happening, I knew I had to work quickly to fix the problem. Especially before my grandparents woke up and had heart attacks. Closing my eyes, I called upon what I did the first time to reverse the process, remembering Tyler's instructions from that day, and I managed to fix the situation fairly quickly without having any major freak-out. After that, I had no more accidental zombie-making moments.

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So, what was going on with me now? I've obviously come across roadkill and other dead things pretty often, and everything has always been fine. Was it because of the way I was losing control of my air power that I freaked out this time about seeing the dead rabbit? Is my freak out what caused it to rise? Ugh! This was giving me a headache.

Seeing the worry on my face Tyler walks over to where I was pacing in the center of my bedroom. He looks down into my eyes and his voice softens. "Don't freak out Alice. We will figure this out. We always do."

I try to give him a reassuring smile, but it comes out more of a grimace. Will we figure this out? For the very first time, I'm not so sure.

"Okay, your turn. What did you want to talk to me about?" he asks.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. "I wanted to ask you about Paige," I tell him.

"What about her?" He gives me a confused look unsure of what I could be thinking.

"Something about her behavior has me feeling off, but I'm not sure what it is exactly, and I need someone to bounce my thoughts off of."

"Okay. Shoot." He folds his arms over his chest ready for me to throw all the questions that run through my head his way.