Page 63 of Keeping Sarah

I explained everything to our friends and family about the Rex and Sarah situation, including the remainder of the conduits who were still staying there in the conversation. “…so this is how things stand. I am not sure what our next steps will be, but I may need to call on some of you for assistance.”

“Of course, Son,” Father said. “What—"

Whatever he meant to say was cut off by a dull thud, followed by a grunt. We all heard it. I knew that grunt.

“Excuse me,” I said, and hunted Jac down, until I found him at a tree behind Sarah’s cottage.

Her backyard had yet to be cleared—Father wasn’t sure if she wanted it wide open or shady, so he had not asked anyone to remove the thick thatch of lemon oaks. Not a drop of sunshine reached the ground, and the trees were heavy with fruit. The air smelled lemony, and I would have smiled from it, had I not seen him.

Jac stood in the middle of the grove, both hands bloodied this time, punching the bark off a tree. “Stop it.”

“Can’t stop,” he said with a shake of his head. “Gotta train.”

“Train for what?”

He held the tree for stability and growled, “I’m going to go back to Faithless as a fighter. They have to let me in for that—I’m a returning champion. It’s in their bylaws. I’ll go back, win another fight, and the winners of the fights get to have supper with Rex. That’s also one of their rules. I’ll eat with the two of them and get close enough to figure out how to kill Rex without hurting Sarah. It’s the only way.” Then, he pounded on the tree some more.

“There might be another way, actually,” Omen said from behind us.

We turned to her. “What?”

Omen shifted on her feet. “You said that when you took Sarah to the temple, she refused to call her mother, which means, she didn’t even try to call her, right?”

I nodded. “But what does that have to do with anything?”

Omen hesitated a moment before sharing her thoughts. “It may have been because Rex knew that would be what would have kicked his remnant out of her.”

Confusion had me shaking my head. “Her mother might be the answer to all of this?”

“It’s a theory I’ve been working on. I went through the holy texts, line by line, and found references to family and bloodlines thousands of times. Mostly when speaking about ghosts in parts of the tome that I thought were literal, but Abyss said her reading of them was different. She believes the family and bloodlines references are there to reiterate how valuable both of those things are to ghosts. It’s the difference between—"

“Oh gods, Omen, please get to the point,” Jac blurted out impatiently. “Your sermon is going to put me to sleep.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “This is why we never would have worked. No intellectual curiosity.” She gave an annoyed sniff then focused on me. “The point is, if you can get her mother to her, then she could be the key to all of this like you said. But the problem is, now that we conduits are ghosts ourselves, none of us have the power or authority to call a ghost all the way from Earth to Halla like Sarah did.”

“I’m not hearing a workable plan yet,” Jac said, his tone vibrating with annoyance.

“No, but I was thinking,” she went on, “what if we could force Sarah’s mother to haunt her?”

I frowned at the suggestion. “Is that not the same thing as calling her?”

“Not really. Speaking to a ghost the way we are talking now, that takes a minimal amount of power here on Halla, but it takes loads of power to do it on Orhon, which is why the people needed conduits to do it in the first place,” she explained. “But, a ghost can be on Halla and still haunt people on Orhon, if they are thought of by enough people on Orhon.”

Jac narrowed his gaze on Omen. “So, you think if we called Sarah’s mother here, then she might be able to haunt Sarah?”

Omen nodded. “We would need an artifact they shared, something her mother gave her, perhaps, like a locket or some sort of—"

“There’s nothing,” I said, interrupting her. “Sarah has nothing from her old life on Earth.”

“Damn.” Omen’s lips pursed in disappointment. “I thought I was really onto something with this.”

I rubbed a hand along my jaw. “There has to be something else we can do, though.”

“There might be…” Omen hesitated a moment before continuing. “The other part of my plan, well, you’re not going to like it.”

“If it will save Sarah, we don’t care what it is,” Jac said. “What is it that you want to do?”

She blew out a breath. “I don’t want to get into it just yet. I don’t want to give you false hope. But if I can get what I need, it could turn all of this around.”

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