Salem's Civil War (Book Five of The Silver Society)

Chapter Sixteen

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Ellyn awoke in a cemetery. She stood before the grave of someone she had only vaguely known named Lewis Ashford. The grave appeared to have been visited recently and was well tended.

"Great," she said. "First, I see the end of the world, now I'm blacking out and waking up in cemeteries. Could this get any weirder?"

She started to walk away, but she felt compelled to turn around and study the headstone. Lewis had died fairly recently, and he was described as a loving father and husband. He was buried beside the empty plot dedicated to his wife, Maggie, whose tombstone listed her date of death as the same as his. Ellyn remembered hearing about his death. He hadn't been a member of her father's parish, but had sometimes attended mass there with his family. He'd been a lawyer, his wife was a doctor, and their family had been the perfect picture of a wealthy suburban family. Flowers, stones, and small gifts had been left by his grave. A notebook lay open in front of the headstone and at first, Ellyn thought it was one of the items that someone had left there, but when she picked it up, she realized that it was one of her journals.

"What the hell is going on?" Ellyn wondered aloud. The words written on the page were in a handwriting she did not recognize and she stared at the page in disbelief as she read the same words over and over again until there was no more room on the page.

Save Deenie.

~*~

Aideen was surprised when the phone rang in the middle of the night, but she picked it up and answered it before it could wake her mother and sister up. "Hello?" She asked. She hadn't been asleep yet. In fact, she'd just barely gotten back from slayer patrol. She still sounded annoyed.

"I know it's late, but we need to talk," a voice replied without preamble or introduction. "Who the hell was Lewis Ashford to you?"

Aideen dropped the phone. When she picked it back up, she tried to sound threatening. "Who the hell is asking?" She retorted.

"Oh, right, sorry. It's Ellyn... From the waterfront."

Aideen tried to be patient, but Ellyn's question had caught her off-guard. "Hi Ellyn," she replied cautiously. "Why are you asking me such random questions at this hour?"

"I just got home after blacking out and ending up at his grave, and... Well, I found a message in front of me when I came around. People call you Deenie for short, don't they?"

"Yeah, they do. Why do you ask?" She wasn't entirely sure that she wanted to know why Ellyn had ended up in front of Lewis's grave. She tried very hard not to think about the first person she'd ever fallen in love with, especially with how inappropriate their relationship had been. Still, since almost no one knew that Lewis had ever been anything more than her lawyer, Aideen knew that Ellyn hadn't just decided to mess with her head by making this call.

"One of my journals was at the foot of his grave. An entire page is filled with writing that's definitely not mine. It just says 'save Deenie' over and over again. Why does he want me to save you, and from what?"

Aideen nearly started to cry. Instead, she took a deep breath and said, "Can you meet up with me right now?"

"Yeah, sure. My dad's an insanely sound sleeper. When you cause Armageddon, he'll probably sleep right through it, which is a shame because judging from the way he preaches about it, I'm pretty sure he'll be sorry to miss the show."

"Be at the waterfront as soon as you can get there. I'm on my way." Aideen hung up the phone, grabbed her jacket, and ran out of the house.

It didn't take Aideen long to get to the waterfront. Ellyn arrived two minutes later. She immediately showed Aideen the page in her journal.