Her Song in His Heart (The Ghost Bird Series #14) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Her Song in His Heart (The Ghost Bird Series, #14)

  Author’s Note

  What a Strange Time

  He Was a Lost Boy, Way Too Pitiful, and Too Much Cologne

  She Was a Silent Girl, Way Too Beautiful and Way Too Alone

  Lost, Alone. Who Would Have Known?

  Their Lives, Mixed Up in Some Old Crime

  Should It Ever Happen?

  Boy, Stop Wasting Your Time

  The Past Setting the Scene

  Every Second Matters Now

  Every Moment, I Realized How

  Every Moment, I Realized How

  She Mattered More Than Everything

  Every Heated, Stolen Kiss

  What I Never Knew Could Be Consequential

  My Heart Fears That Existential Moment

  He Wanted It to Last

  Every Thing Around Us

  Working So Hard Against Us

  How Will We Survive?

  It All Happened Too Fast

  He Wasn't Sure He Was Built to Last

  Now He's Dragged Up from the Past

  If Anything Will Save Him, It's Her

  Every Minute Matters Now

  Every Step, I Realized How

  She Mattered More Than He Ever Knew

  Too Much to Learn

  Too Much to Find

  But When We Get Together

  Everything Is Fine

  We'll Figure It Out

  We’ll Manage Somehow

  No Outside Force Is Strong Enough

  To Break Us, It Makes Us

  Who We Are Inside

  When Lost Boy and Silent Girl

  Find Comfort

  Find Answers

  Find Out What It Means to Be One

  When It All Became Too Much

  When It All Turned Inside Out

  Being There with Her

  Made Life Worth Living Out

  Every Day Matters Now

  Every Day, I Realized How

  He Mattered to Her, Too

  ~A~

  Acknowledgements

  The Average Rate of Change

  Also By C. L. Stone

  The music changed over the loudspeakers. The slower pace of the song made it easier to flow in time with the music. We started swinging our hips. I was off rhythm at first and the hoop dropped.

  His hands found my waist and he brought me close to his body as if we were dancing together, and we tried again. My butt met the front of his hips, my back pressed to his stomach. He pushed and pulled at me until we were moving together and the hoop was flying around us.

  The air around us seemed to shift. I was feeling his body behind me, his breath on my neck. We had to keep our arms up to not interfere with the hoop. His fingers touched my elbows and he brought my arms up slowly. My hands found the back of his head and his hair. He kept his fingers touching the underside of my biceps as if he wanted to keep my fingers in his hair, his nails traced along the delicate underside of my arms. We twisted together. My butt brushed against his groin.

  It was far different than dancing with him. It was much closer. The music filled my ears. The school and the others had disappeared in a haze. All I could smell and feel was Gabriel.

  Author’s Note

  Dear Reader,

  The heart of this book delves into the backstory and origin of Sang Sorenson’s life, and in particular, her mother. If you're familiar with the story up to this point, it is understood she took her own life in a dark time.

  This book dives deep into that past and some of the discoveries might be disturbing and triggering.

  If you're in your own dark place at any point, help is available, no matter where you are. Please reach out.

  In the United States, dial 988 to be immediately connected to a crisis center - https://988lifeline.org/.

  Internationally, you can find a comprehensive list of emergency and crisis hotlines at https://blog.opencounseling.com/suicide-hotlines

  C. L.

  The Academy

  The Ghost Bird Series

  Her Song in His Heart

  ♥

  Book Fourteen

  ♥

  Written by C. L. Stone

  Published by

  Arcato Publishing

  Copyright © 2022 C. L. Stone

  http://clstonebooks.com

  Published by Arcato Publishing

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

  What a Strange Time

  Years Ago

  Gabriel

  Inside the Bucket Street Funeral House in lower North Charleston, the day started drearily with no one coming early. The casket remained closed. For a long time, the air conditioner whirring and stirring up the air in the room was the only real noise.

  Gabriel Coleman stared dead ahead at the casket. He’d sat down in the front pew early that morning. He got to know the casket very well, because it was all he’d looked at for hours.

  It was a pine casket with rope handles, like in old Western movies, where the caskets were handmade and simple. Plain glass flower arrangements were provided by the funeral home, containing mostly fake white lilies, daisies and carnations that had likely been reused many times.

  Plain and simple.

  His father would have liked that.

  Gabriel hadn’t moved since he’d been directed to his seat while Pam manned the door. When people started to sit, she shifted. She blocked anyone who came close to Gabriel, taking condolences for the loss and the praises for a quiet, comfortable funeral.

  Gabriel preferred it. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. He hadn’t been in a mood to talk since the accident.

  In the corner of the room, on an easel, sat a blown-up portrait of his father. It had to have been from before the first accident. He was smiling in this one. Where Pam had found it, Gabriel had no idea, because he hadn’t seen one like that in years.

  As the day continued, closer to the start of the funeral, shuffling noises came from the seats behind him. His friends would sit somewhere in the middle rows. They’d said hello when they arrived. Kota, Luke, Victor and Nathan were all dressed sharply, appropriate for a funeral.

  Gabriel would have preferred to sit with them, but Pam insisted he sit in the front.

  Pam, his stepmom, with her blond hair piled on her head and curls formed at her ears, stiffly raised and lowered a tissue to her nose and eyes. All black didn’t really suit her. Ghostly pale was as kind a word he could summon in the moment.

  They hadn’t slept in a week. Not since hearing the news on the last day Gabriel had even seen his father.

  Pam, alongside her mother, made the arrangements. They did ask Gabriel’s opinion on things, but Gabriel had nothing to offer. He hadn’t really spoken much except to say the casket choice was fine, that her flower choices were fine, and he’d be fine.

  Whatever fine meant.

  Gabriel zoned out as people filled in the pews behind him. With a shift in the air, a shadow that towered over him drew him out of his thoughts.

  A man stood over Gabriel, staring at him as if he was trying to recognize him. He seemed oddly familiar. Very tan skin, dark hair and eyes. Gabriel was sure he’d seen him before, but he couldn’t remember.

  Before the man could say anything, Pam, who had been talking to someone else, stepped away from that and inserted herself between them.

  “Good morning, sugar, thank you for coming in,” she said in her sweetest Georgian Southern tone, her usual go-to accent when talking to someone new. Her arms were up, ready to escort him away to another pew. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”

  “I’m the boy’s uncle,” the man said simply. There was some sort of accent that at first Gabriel couldn’t place.

  Pam lowered her arms and touched gently at the base of her throat. “I didn’t know my husband had a brother.”

  “He does have one. But I’m not him,” he said. “My sister was his mother.” He pointed to Gabriel.

  Gabriel tilted his head, his gaze on the man but also not seeing him, because he was trying to remember anything his mother ever said about her family. Or his father about his own.

  His mother had died a couple years ago. That funeral Gabriel didn’t remember at all. He’d gone, but he couldn’t recall anything about it. He’d been so angry at his father, and his father had gotten so crazy at that time, that it was all a blur.

  So it was likely he had met this uncle before, but he didn’t remember a moment of it.

  Did extended family ever show up besides for funerals?

  Next to the man was a girl, about Gabriel’s age, with the same dark skin and dark eyes. And next to her was a boy, young, maybe five years old. The boy hid behind his presumed to be sister, peeking out for only a second before getting distracted by the other people in the room.

  But his eyes were very much like Gabriel’s, the same color.

  After a split second of consideration, Pam opened her arms up, motioning to the first pew. “Then you’re family. Come along and sit with us, if you’d like. I haven’t been notified any family would be coming down so I think there will be plenty of room.”

  Gabriel didn’t move as his uncle and cousins joined him. Al
though he wished he had once they sat down. As it was, he was at the front row, and right on the edge of the seat. If the people behind him weren’t looking at the closed coffin, they were likely looking on toward Pam, the photo... or him.

  He didn’t want people to look at him. He felt eyes on the back of his head, and it creeped him out. It was like holding in a breath, an emotional frog stuck in his throat, and not being able to do anything because he was in front and people were watching.

  He wanted to disappear.

  He tried to forget about that, and instead, glanced at his cousin, the boy, who had sat down next to him. He picked his feet up, putting them out toward where the small stage was in front of them in the room, trying to plant them on the stage, but his legs were too short to reach. He kept trying, lifting his legs, sliding more until he was on his back in the seat and able to prop his feet up.

  The boy’s sister nudged her brother and said something that Gabriel didn’t understand. At first Gabriel thought she’d just mumbled but then realized she was speaking Spanish.

  The boy put his feet down and then focused on Gabriel. “Why do you live so far away?” he asked. No accent like his father. He spoke a lot like Gabriel’s mother had. Gabriel wondered why his mom’s brother had a much stronger accent.

  Gabriel shrugged, unsure how to answer the why question. “Where do you live?”

  “Kentucky.”

  Gabriel barely remembered his mother talking about they hadn’t originated in South Carolina. That his father had moved them there. Was it for a job? They never mentioned family. They never visited or sent Christmas cards. For a long time, Gabriel just assumed there wasn’t any other family at all.

  Suddenly the funeral director drew to the front. Pam nudged Gabriel, and he made room for her to sit next to him by nearly squishing the boy before he finally sat up and moved closer to his sister.

  The room was only half full. When his mom had died, there had been many more.

  But none of his father’s family. Not one soul. If there were any more, like a brother as his uncle had said, they weren’t here.

  Were they dead too?

  He found it odd that even now, with his father in the casket, the only family that did show up was from his mother’s side.

  And they should maybe not have come, because it was his father’s fault she was dead in the first place.

  Maybe if he’d killed himself the first time, instead of her...

  The boy picked his feet up and put them on the pew they sat in this time, nearly squatting where he sat, distracting Gabriel from going down those twisted thoughts.

  The funeral began. The boy fidgeted. Whispers and the occasional cough and shuffling noises floated around behind them.

  Gabriel tried to tune out, going into his own head instead of listening to the proceedings, thinking about this being over and being able to go back home, back to his room. He just wanted this to be over. Finally.

  It had been a struggle to fight the thoughts that crept into his mind; the anger, and most of all, the fear.

  He was the only one left. Three out of four in his family completely gone within a few years.

  Maybe he’d be next.

  He Was a Lost Boy, Way Too Pitiful, and Too Much Cologne

  Present Day

  Gabriel

  Gabriel Coleman barricaded himself inside his bedroom. The loose wood panels along the walls vibrated and thudded as the entire trailer shook with footsteps and banging cabinets from the kitchen.

  That guy was here again.

  In his house. Gabriel’s father bought this place. Pam kept it but... Gabriel hated that the guy—he refused to even think of his name right now—thought he could wiggle into Pam’s pants and take over.

  He muttered under his breath. “This is getting so fucking old.”

  He pressed his back against the door, held his breath, and listened. While he obviously couldn’t see, he visualized as he heard his stepmother opening the front door.

  “Clay, either get the groceries or get out of the way so I can get inside.”

  “What took you so long?” Clay asked.

  “I was only a minute!” Pam said with a light whine at the end. More footsteps as they moved to the kitchen.

  Gabriel waited, hoping they wouldn’t ask him to go in and help put things away. While they were busy, he took a mental note of his half-empty room. His easel he’d moved to Dr. Green’s. His sketchbooks and guitars were at Luke’s. His clothes were divided between closets of all his friends. Most of the items remaining were things he hadn’t used in a long time. Maybe he should just leave them.

  He wished he could take the new mural with him. He gazed at it. The forest was now complete.

  With a shadowed figure of a girl and a boy holding hands together, gazing up and into the trees.

  Not like he could remove an entire wall from the place. Sang hadn’t been by to see it yet.

  There was a good reason for that. He was in the living room.

  Their Academy team hadn’t closed on the townhomes they were buying, so he couldn’t move. Yet. He’d been staying with Victor so he could be close to Pam, but since now that wasn’t an option, he drifted between other houses.

  He couldn’t wait for the new house to finally be theirs. They could have picked out a tiny farmhouse in the middle of nowhere and he would have gone in a heartbeat.

  To drown out the others in the kitchen banging around, he flipped on some music, streamed from his phone to the speakers.

  The song was a popular rock song stripped of the vocals, which Gabriel usually preferred. He’d listen to the song a few times with lyrics, but instead of continuing to listen, he’d buy—or make himself—the stripped-down music.

  And from within his own room, he’d make up lyrics. At first, he tried to recall what the original words were, even if he was getting them wrong. Then he’d make up the wrong lyrics on purpose.

  He did that now, singing aloud to no one, just drowning out the sounds from the house.

  “Da-a-amn. Twenty-five ce-e-ents. Wonder how much that Nintendo i-i-is—”

  The closet door opened abruptly, followed immediately by a voice. “That’s not how that song go—”

  Gabriel screamed and jerked back, crashing into the dresser that held the speakers, and they toppled off to the floor, along with the rest of a collection of items that had been sitting with them.

  Luke sat with his knees up to his chest, his back against the inside wall of the closet, blankly staring at Gabriel, blinking in his direction.

  Gabriel clutched at his own chest, over his heart, and slid down until his butt hit the floor.

  “Luke!” Gabriel squealed at him.

  “What?” Luke said.

  “What are you doing in there?”

  “I crawled in through the window and I heard the yelling, so I hid in here.”

  Gabriel groaned a little. “You don’t have to crawl through the window anymore.”

  “I don’t?”

  It had been a long time since his father died, or so it felt. Prior to that, the others sneaked in, because when his dad was on a bender, he got violent with everyone, not just Gabriel. And it had been hard to keep him sober. Not a lot a bunch of kids could do, even once the Academy stepped in.

  Suddenly there was a knocking at his bedroom door.

  Pam called to him. “Gabriel? Sugar, you okay in there?”

  “Yeah,” he said quickly. “Just saw... a... spider.” He couldn’t make up another good excuse that would mean her not coming in.

  “Oh, ew,” she said. “Maybe it’s time to spray that stuff again? You know, the stuff that’s in the shed.”

  “Maybe!” Gabriel said without opening the door. Pam walked away.

  Pam was mostly harmless. It was the new guy, her boyfriend. He was nice to everyone.

  Except Gabriel. And lately less and less nice to Pam.

  From the kitchen, voices rose, until Clay could be heard saying, “When I was sixteen, I had a job, a car... I could have moved out. He should be out here right now cleaning if he’s not doing any of that. What kind of little bitch hides in his room all day?”

  “Fucking faker,” Gabriel said, rolling his eyes.

  Clay was a faker. Worried about what other people thought of him, except Gabriel, who he didn’t give two shits about. Especially when Gabriel defended Pam when Clay said something rude. He wasn’t helping around the house, so he blamed Gabriel for nothing being done, despite Gabriel hardly ever being at the house anymore. And he made it more than obviously clear he expected Gabriel to pay rent for staying... in his own house.