My Immortal Read Free Page B

her mind was churning with one frightening scenario after the other as she pulled open the vault once more.
    Nothing could have prepared her for what she saw.
    The slab was empty.
    She would have checked the vault again to see if Lily’s name was still on the outside, but one piece of evidence lay upon the formless blanket to prove that she had the right chamber.
    It was her phone, in exactly the s ame spot the dead child once laid.
    Her legs shook so badly she felt like they would buckle underneath her as she grabbed her phone. The minute she powered it on, the photo came to rest on a very still, very dead little girl whose eyes were definitely closed.
    Adele shook her head again, trying to rid the images from her mind. Had someone been messing with her? Or had she hallucinated the whole thing? Both seemed as reasonable a theory as any to why Lily was now gone.
    Dead children don’t just get up and walk away, even if they do try to hold a conversation with the closest lunatic who happened to be standing nearby.
    Adele punched the speed dial button on the phone and held it to her ear, trying to ignore how badly her hand was shaking.
    “ I need you to page Dr. Ashcroft.” A pause. “Yes, I know it’s midnight. It’s an emergency.” Another pause. Adele grew impatient. “Just tell him it’s Adele Lumas. Lumas!” she snapped. Her teeth chattered so badly she had to clinch her jaw tight to spell out her name. “Tell him I’ve had another episode.”
    As she held on the line she closed the vault with a slam, and made a hasty retreat from the building.
     
    Rain misted down on the Church of the Holy Sacrament that dreary fall morning that followed Adele’s harrowing, and understandably sleepless, night. The sky was positively gray, as if the sun itself could not face their sad gathering. Adele stood on the steps, oblivious to the rain, reluctant to go in behind a steady stream of downtrodden mourners. No day was as sad as the one where one must bid a final farewell to a child. Adele wouldn’t have come at all had her questions not been met with more questions. It was no longer just business. The dreams had made it all too personal. Now she had to know.
    It drove her to attend this funeral, just the like funeral before that, and the others before that. Her feet carried her in, but as usual her resolve carried her on.
    She slipped into the back pew unnoticed just in time to see the young, grief-stricken mother, Marisol Maldonado, crumple before a full canvas photo of Lily that stood at the foot of the altar. The child looked so full of life it was hard to find any similarity between that child and the one that lay on the slab at the morgue. The wail of a devastation resonated through the large sanctuary and danced all over Adele’s already frayed nerves.
    Another woman, who looked like so many of the older gypsies of the t own, instantly knelt at Marisol’s side. Adele wiped a tear away as Father Michael Pierce took the podium. He wore his twenty-five years well underneath the ornate white vestment that he had once told her represented the hope of resurrection for the dead. It was a message of hope, but when his dark eyes scanned the crowd, lighting briefly on her face, he looked as helpless as she felt.
    “ What can you say to a mother who has lost her child?” he began as he glanced toward Marisol. His deep, rich voice was soothing, like a blanket chasing the chill of sadness away. “You can say ‘I’m sorry,’ but the words fall short of what you want to say. You want to say that it’s all a bad dream.”
    Adele gave an absent nod. It should have all been a very bad dream and nothing else. Nothing like this.
    Michael’s voice cracked with emotion. “What do you say to the person staring back to you from the mirror as he grapples with the kind of contradictions that arise in one’s faith? That no loving God could allow the death of a child, nor condemn a parent to the living hell that follows.”
    He