Dream Dancer (Ghosts Beyond the Grove Book 2) Read online

  Dream Dancer

  Ghosts Beyond the Grove Part Two

  by Joy Elbel

  Dream Dancer, Ghosts Beyond the Grove Part Two

  © 2015 by Joy Elbel

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Dedicated to the dreamers…the ones who never lose hope…the ones who follow every sign until they reach the inevitable end…

  .

  Acknowledgements

  Tigerlily from www.selfpubbookcovers.com for the spectacular cover design that depicts the Dream Dancer exactly the way I pictured her in my mind!

  Raven Moon’s Oracle—for supplying Ruby’s in depth tarot card reading. She truly does have the gift of guidance when it comes to readings like this. Check out her gypsy shop online at www.ravenmoonsoracle.com.

  Karel Bailey—coworker and friend who allowed me to turn her into a male detective simply because I can!

  The real “voodoo queen” who wishes to remain anonymous—your “positive curse” was so accurate it scares me. I’m just glad you didn’t set your sights on the alligator and snakes in the basement!

  Bob Brooks—for helping me see change the ending of my story. I like this one much better than the original!

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  1. Swimming Against the Current—Ruby

  2. Smoke Screen—Zach

  3. Sea of Doubt—Ruby

  4. Flaming Mad—Zach

  5. Go with the Flow—Ruby

  6. Backfire—Zach

  7. Riding out the Storm—Ruby

  8. Liar, Liar Pants on Fire—Zach

  9. Water under the Bridge—Ruby

  10. Spark of Hope—Zach

  11. Doing the Backstroke—Ruby

  12. Burning for You—Zach

  13. Wishing for a Whitewash—Ruby

  14. Blazing a New Path—Zach

  15. Treading Water—Ruby

  16. Slow Burn—Zach

  17. Rain Must Fall—Ruby

  18. Game, Set, Match—Zach

  19. The Art of Drowning—Ruby

  20. Boiling Point—Zach

  21. Sync and Swim—Ruby

  22. Ignition Switch—Zach

  23. Turning Tides—Ruby

  24. A Fire Inside—Zach

  25. I’ll Stand Bayou—Ruby

  26. Dying Ember—Zach

  27. Diving Headfirst—Ruby

  28. Wax Cat in Hell—Zach

  29. Will it All Come out in the Wash?—Ruby

  30. Up in Flames—Zach

  31. Tombstoned—Ruby

  32. Bridges Burned—Zach

  33. Waves of Panic—Ruby

  34. Torch Song—Zach

  35. Taking the Plunge—Ruby

  36. Poker Face—Zach

  37. Swamped—Ruby

  38. Burn Out—Zach

  39. Waters of Unrest—Ruby

  40. Eclipsed—Micah

  41. Letting it Soak In—Ruby

  42. Burning Questions—Zach

  43. Pooling My Resources—Ruby

  44. Lighter than a Feather—Zach

  45. Watershed—Ruby

  46. Peace and Perigee—Ruby

  Epilogue

  Foreword

  Just like Sleep Stalker, Dream Dancer is told from alternating viewpoints. This time around, odd numbered chapters are the voice of Ruby; even numbered chapters are narrated by Zach. In this part of their story, they hit their darkest times yet. But as long as at least one of them can keep their eyes open, the light at the end of the tunnel will surely be found.

  1. Swimming Against the Current

  I stumbled back down Bell Rock feeling like I was no longer inside my own body. My brain was screaming “Run!” but I was shaking so hard that I could barely even walk. The brambles I so cautiously avoided on the way up now slashed at my shins with a vengeance. How could I possibly maneuver my way through them when I couldn’t even maneuver around the thoughts inside my own head?

  With every jerky step forward, my mind took another step back—back to the frantically garbled message from Rachel. “Zach. Suicide.” It couldn’t be true! The Zach I knew would never harm himself no matter what. He had reverence for life unlike anyone I’d ever encountered before. Even in his darkest moments over the last few months, he never once seemed depressed enough to do something this heinous to himself. Or had his strange behavior been one long, agonizing cry for help but I was too preoccupied to notice? Maybe I’d been paying too much attention to the wrong kind of signs all along.

  That’s when the anger hit. Pure rage, actually. And I started screaming toward the heavens like a maniac. I didn’t care who saw me. I didn’t care what they would be thinking about me. All I cared about was Zach and how I wished I’d never seen a single feather because they had blinded me to what was actually going on around me.

  “WHY, MOM?! WHY?” I shouted furiously and with deep hatred. I trusted her to lead me in the right direction. I would have trusted her with my life but I never should have trusted her with Zach’s. When he needed me the most, where was I? Arizona, that’s where—following her stupid trail instead of staying home and taking care of him like I should have. “I HATE YOU FOR THIS!!”

  That’s when something else hit me. As in my face meeting the dusty ground in a literal head over heels tumble down the last small bit of incline. I wasn’t exactly sure how it happened. One minute I was still upright and ambling toward level ground; the next, I was pitching head forward and praying that I would snap my neck in the fall. If I died, Zach and I would still be together and we would both be okay. We could spend eternity the same way Sophie and Clay were. It worked well for them—it would work for me and Zach too.

  But my luck being what it was, of course I survived. In fact, I was barely even scathed. Still, I lay there for a moment before trying to move. And whispered one last angry statement to my mother.

  “Where are you and your stupid feathers now? Huh? Where are they?”

  I should have known better—really I should have. I should have known that she hadn’t led me down the wrong path. But sometimes when I got angry, I said things I didn’t mean. This was definitely one of those times. One of these days, I would figure out how to hold my tongue until my brain and heart were ready to speak. But today wasn’t that day.

  After spitting out the small bit of dirt that found its way into my mouth during the fall, I raised my head. And immediately began to cry. Until that moment, I hadn’t shed a tear. I was in too much shock for that. But now that I saw what was in front of me, fat tears began to drop from my eyes and into the parched desert earth beneath me. She hadn’t steered me wrong and she hadn’t left me literally in the dust. At that moment, I knew in my heart that Zach was still with me. Still alive and still with me. I may be going forth but this was his time to be still. And that thought made me cry even harder.

  Directly in front of my face, sat not just a feather but a whole bird-ful of them. It was a small and unassuming little creature who seemed more interested in me than frightened by me. I watched in sheer amazement as it plucked
a small feather from under its right wing and placed it carefully onto the ground. I sat up slowly to get a good look at it. And yet again, I was brought to tears.

  This carefully selected feather was now actually inside a footprint in the dirt. My very own footprint. How did I know that it was mine? Because the shoes I was wearing bore a unique pattern on the sole—a heart. I cried even harder just then. I had to know what kind of bird she sent to help guide me this time. Quietly, I dug my phone out of my pocket and photographed the tiny little messenger who stood before me. He chirped a cheery little song to me then flew off over the desert.

  Trembling but with renewed spirit, I picked myself up and did my best to brush the dirt away. Then I continued moving forward. It was really the only thing I could do. I had no idea what I would be facing once I got back home to Zach, but standing there crying at the foot of Bell Rock was a waste of precious time and getting me nowhere. Arizona wasn’t where I needed to be anymore—Charlotte’s Grove was.

  Once I felt calm enough to communicate, I dialed home to find out what was going on. When Shelly picked up on the first ring and shouted, “Where are you and why haven’t you responded to the fifty plus messages we’ve all left for you?”—I knew I had some serious explaining to do. Flying off to Arizona alone was going to sound psychotically irrational to everyone else. This is where a good lie would have been an appropriate way to hide my crazy. But I was tired of hiding it so I spat out the truth instead.

  “Shelly, don’t freak out but I’m in Sedona, Arizona right now. It’s a long story—I’ll explain everything when I get home. What happened to Zach?”

  Just like your average mother, she did the exact opposite of what I asked her not to do. She freaked out. Hardcore. I let her chew me out for about a minute before I cut in and reminded her of the very important question I needed answered.

  “Shelly, please! Not now. You can yell at me all you want to when I get back to Charlotte’s Grove! But I need to know what happened to Zach!” I added one final, pitiful “please” to the end of my sentence and it was enough to do the trick. Sympathy had to come first—lectures later. Much, much later.

  “Zach swallowed almost an entire bottle of sleeping pills. He was lucky your father was heading over there to check on him—got to him just in time. They pumped his stomach and once he was stable, they admitted him to the psychiatric ward. Did you two have some sort of fight? Is that why he did this? Is that why you’re in Arizona? Were you trying to get away from him?”

  “It’s a very long story and those questions can’t really be answered with a simple yes or no. Like I said, I’ll explain everything later; I just needed to know that Zach was still alive. I’ll catch the first available flight to Pittsburgh. Can you pick me up at the airport?”

  “Only if you promise to tell me what’s going on with you and Zach on the ride home. And I want the whole story—not the ‘mom approved’ version.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, knowing that it was time to allow Shelly deeper access to my ever widening loop of weirdness. It was going to be hard admitting to her that I’d been tracking down my real mother for the last few months but I felt she deserved to know.

  “As soon as you know your flight itinerary, let me know. In the meantime, be careful for heaven’s sake! Never leave your bags unattended—someone could slip weapons or something into them. And watch what you eat and drink too. You could get drugged and sold into sex slavery.”

  “Okay. But I can still take candy from strangers, right?” I replied sarcastically. If I ever had kids, I resolved right then and there to not be absurdly overprotective. I wasn’t really sure how one got dragged into the international sex trade, but I was pretty sure it didn’t start with an airport Big Mac.

  By the time I finished my conversation with Shelly, I was already back to where we’d parked. I found Roxanne’s car with no problem but she herself was a different story. She was nowhere in sight and I didn’t have the first clue of where to look for her. Frustrated, I slumped down beside the convertible and gave her a call.

  With each unanswered ring, I grew more impatient. I needed to keep moving forward. I was trying to keep moving forward. But the universe kept holding me back from the one thing it was telling me to do. It was the most vexing paradox imaginable. It was like trying to swim against an impossible current. When Roxanne finally picked up, I blurted out the first thing that came to my mind like the weird, random dumbass that I was.

  “I need to keep moving forward!”

  “Ruby? Did something go wrong on your hike? Because you really don’t look like you’re moving anywhere right now.”

  Hurriedly, I got to my feet and looked around, knowing that she was somewhere close enough that she could see me. When ten seconds of scanning the horizon got me nowhere, I actually stamped my foot on the ground like a toddler in a full blown tantrum.

  “Where are you? I need to get home ASAP!” I barked a little too loudly into the phone. I wasn’t trying to be rude—really I wasn’t. It’s just that no one seemed to understand the urgency of my situation. I didn’t have the time or patience for lectures or impromptu games of hide and seek. I needed to keep moving.

  “I’m at one of the lookout points with a pair of binoculars. I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes.”

  Fifteen minutes? How was I going to get through a quarter of an hour without going absolutely stir crazy? The honest truth is, I wasn’t. I obsessively, compulsively kept checking the time on my phone. I mean, like, at least three times per minute. I paced back forth; I sighed a lot. And all of that was in the first five minutes alone. The next ten minutes were spent thinking about what my next move should be once I was back in Charlotte’s Grove.

  Visiting Zach immediately was of course number one on my list. But after that, what was I going to do? How was I going to remove whatever it was that was torturing him when I didn’t have the first clue as to what it was? Rita said it wasn’t any kind of ghost she’d ever dealt with, but what if she was wrong? A visit to Something Wick-ed was the second stop I needed to make before getting back to Rosewood.

  Make that if I ever got back to Rosewood. It was seriously ninety full seconds past the fifteen minute mark and Roxanne still wasn’t back yet. What could possibly be the hold up now? I decided to give her until the two minute mark to materialize before I called to cuss her out again. I had important things to do. Why couldn’t anything happen exactly when I needed it to happen?

  Roxanne showed up two seconds “early” with a concerned look on her face. “What has you in such an all fired hurry to leave Sedona? When I last saw you, you were happy to go on that hike. Now, you look like your best friend just died.”

  Her words cut straight through me. My best friend wasn’t dead but he very well could have been. Once again, my dad was the only reason Zach was still breathing. But I was afraid to push my luck. I needed to get the old Zach back so that Dad didn’t have to keep saving him. Saving Zach was my job now.

  “I have to get home as fast as possible. Zach’s in the hospital.” I had to swallow hard before uttering my next few words because they were something I never thought I would hear myself say. “He tried to kill himself.”

  “Oh dear God. I’m so sorry for what I just said to you—I didn’t know. Of course you need to leave. I’ll drive you back to your hotel. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help.”

  “Thanks,” I said quietly.

  There was nothing else left for me to say. Talking about it hurt almost as much as thinking about it did. I planned for a silent four hour drive back to Tucson until Roxanne sped past Stardust Crystals. That’s when I realized that I needed to talk to Salma one more time while I still had the chance.

  “Wait!” I shouted, pointing to the bazaar. “I need to stop and see Salma—I told her I would! She’s going to give me protection crystals for Zach!”

  Roxanne eased on the brakes until she found the first spot where she could turn the car around. Salma was standing outside the
shop with a worried look on her face. Somehow, she knew that things didn’t go well for me at Bell Rock. In her hands was a small, red pouch. I needed whatever was inside it and I needed it now. We hadn’t even come to a full stop when I flung my door open and jumped out.

  “Namaste, Ruby,” she said as she gave me a hug.

  I was never much of a hugger but I especially wasn’t now. There wasn’t time to hug. I needed the bag and the knowledge on how to use what was in it. Patience was simply not an option. There were flights to book, planes to catch, curses to remove—lives to save.

  “There’s been an emergency back home. I never had the chance to take my journey but I need something to protect Zach now more than ever. What do you have for me?”

  A mysterious smile wasn’t what I was expecting nor was it what I needed at the moment. Irritation set in once again.

  “I really need to get home. If I ever have the chance, I’ll come back and take that journey you suggested.” With Salma still silent, I repeated myself. “What do you have for me?”

  “I can’t give you what you truly need. You’ll have to find that on your own. But I do have two things for you. The first,” she said as she pulled a small vial from the velvet bag, “is patchouli oil. Use this to help counteract his craving for the scent of cinnamon. It should help to calm him.”

  I nodded impatiently as she instructed me on how to use it properly then asked what the second thing was. This time, she dug out two identical items. I was confused. She said she only had two things for me but technically she was giving me three. Again, I didn’t have time for mystical mind games.

  “Give me your hand, Ruby.”

  I quickly did what she asked of me and held out my open palm. She placed two pearlescent white stones into my hand then closed my fingers around them.

  “This is a rainbow moonstone that has been cleaved into two halves. There is a powerful connection between you and Zach. You are a double rainbow. As much as you say he needs protection, that’s exactly how much you need it as well. You’ve led many complicated lives together but this one will be your last. Even when the moon is new, there are still stars to count—remember that. Don’t be so sure that you didn’t take the journey you were meant to take. Go forth in peace, love, and light my little indigo. Namaste.”