Author's Notes

This is your captain speaking. Please fasten your seat belts, as we will soon be experiencing some turbulence. Thank you for your cooperation.

You guys have had such wonderful things to say to me recently, and I just want you to know that I love you guys. You're freaking awesome. I had never heard of Air before (though I do appreciate zero 7), but I agree, Emily would totally listen to "Universal Traveler."

I register for classes tomorrow, which means the new semester starts soon, which means I won't have as much free time on my hands, and I'm sure you don't need me to finish this sentence. I'm still working on it, though, have no fear.

Warnings: Naomi kidnapping, Katie schemes, urban legends from the other side of the world, trash can punch, bitchy and kinda slutty Emily

Abnormally Attracted to Sin

Chapter 14: Save You from That Evil Faith

By Persephone's Nautical Nun

"Naomi, this is insanity," Effy tells me, watching as I shuffle around the kitchen. I've become quite the homebody, and it's taken everyone by surprise, including me. "You haven't been out with us in two weeks," she says, shoving two fingers in my direction for emphasis. "It's fucking time."

I stack a few clean plates and turn around to put them in a cabinet. I've kept Emily's original organization of things, despite it not making much sense. I sigh and turn back around to face Effy, and shrug. "I'm fine here," I try to explain, though I know it won't work.

Effy sighs through her nose and pulls out her cell phone. "I'm gonna need some help up here," she tells whoever she just called, and I arch an eyebrow at her smug face.

"What was that?" I ask, but she just smiles wider.

The door bursts open, and in saunters Cook like he owns the place. I open my mouth to ask him what the fuck he's doing here, but he quickly closes the distance between us and picks me up, throwing me over his shoulder.

"Cook, put me down!" I protest all the way down the stairs, punching him ineffectually on his back, Effy trailing behind us. He keeps hold of me as we reach the street, and continues walking, and I'm suddenly very afraid that he might actually carry me all the way to wherever we're going.

Wait a minute. Cook and Effy…? Speaking?

What the fuck did I miss?

I stop resisting and fall into my best rational voice. "Please put me down, Cook," I request. "I promise I won't bolt."

Sure enough, he stops and lowers me gently to the ground, keeping his hands on my shoulders as I regain my balance. He grins and takes a step back. "Some hermits just need a push out into the world, eh?" he reasons, and I flip him off. Of course, he just finds it amusing.

"Alright, so where are we going?" I ask, moving my hands to my hips and raising an eyebrow, trying to look imposing. I don't pull it off nearly as well as I was hoping, though.

"Well, I don't actually know," he explains, looking sheepish. "There's a party going on somewhere, but I'm not sure where. We're supposed to meet our escort at the country club," he explains, pointing in its general direction.

Wow. That seems way too hoity toity for the likes of Cook.

"So have you two kissed and made up, then?" I ask the two of them as we start walking.

"You could say that," Cook says, grinning and throwing an arm around Effy's shoulders, looking happier than I've ever seen him before.

I watch as Effy takes the hand hanging off of her shoulder and interlaces their fingers, and I hold back the urge to pinch myself in case I'm dreaming. "We've agreed to fuck each other exclusively," she explains. "But I refuse to wear the bracelet," she affirms, looking pointedly at Cook. "It feels like a collar."

"Which is funny, because it goes on your wrist," he counters, though it's obvious he doesn't care.

Wow. Even Effy and Cook can manage to get their shit together. I think I'm actually kind of jealous.

It's a balmy night, and I can feel electricity in the air. The air is heavy, but invigorating somehow, and it gives me the feeling that something is going to happen tonight. The only problem is that I don't know if it'll be good or bad.

Sometimes, no news is good news.

I catch sight of Katie as we approach our destination, and my curiosity goes up a notch. I can see her getting Freddie into a secret party, but I really doubt she'd let Cook in on it, and there's an even slimmer chance of either Effy or myself knowing about it. There's definitely something strange going on.

She smiles when she sees us, and meets us halfway to close the distance. "Oh, good, you got her," she says, glancing at me and apparently relieved. Now, I'm really scared. She's got something planned for me, and there's no way it won't be torturous. I have flashes of Carrie at the prom.

"Hey, I said I would, didn't I?" Cook says, laughing. "Took a little forcing, but…"

"Yes, you did very well, Cook," she cuts him off, holding her hand in the air, and looking around us. Who is she looking for? Who else is coming? "Would you like a treat?" she taunts.

Okay, so Cook's in on whatever this is. Wow, I am not going to be able to relax tonight.

"Yes, please," he says, licking his lips and leering down at her. Effy just smirks and I marvel at how their relationship hasn't changed in the least.

They're actually kind of perfect.

"Oh, right on," I hear a familiar voice come from somewhere behind Katie. She turns to face whoever it is, and Shane quickly comes into view, and I feel my breath shorten.

Fuck sake, just seeing her friends make me tingle. I must be fucking starved.

"Glad you guys could make it," he says, smiling and glancing to each of us in turn, shaking Cook's hand. Careful, both of you, you don't know where that hand's been.

"So…?" Katie asks him leadingly, brow raised, arms crossed, and hip cocked, and I giggle a little on the inside when Shane rolls his eyes before turning to her.

"So," he starts, hands outstretched. He points one hand in the direction of the club and says, "She's already inside." He drops both of his arms and glances in my direction before continuing. "And it looks like everything went smoothly on this end."

Katie, Cook, and Shane? I think I'm going to be sick.

Katie sighs and nods, and looks a little nervous. "Now's your chance, Naomi," she tells me, and I start to feel dizzy.

"What?"

I am so wonderfully articulate.

Shane smiles softly at me. "Now you're chance to tell her whatever it is you have to tell her," he explains, and I have to stare at the sidewalk and focus on staying upright.

"Why are you doing this?" I ask, looking from Shane to Katie. It's not like either one of them owes me anything. It makes more sense for them to act as bumpers between me and Emily. This can't possibly be for my benefit.

"Well, as far as loyalties go, ours definitely lie with Emily," Shane explains with a shrug. "But we think you could do her some good?

"She's kind of turned into a cunt," Katie explains, seeing my confused expression.

Shane pulls a face at her, and tries to put it in better terms. "She's just got a lot of… anger," he says, making a fist. "She's not Emily, anymore."

Wait a minute. They're making it sound like I'm the secret to bringing Emily back, but I think I'm the reason she's gone in the first place. What do they expect me to do? Hell, she probably won't even give me the fucking time of day. They're probably throwing me straight into the line of fire, more than likely purposefully so that maybe it'll be calm after the explosion.

Then again, do I really want to let this opportunity pass me by?

And besides, Cook's in on it, too, and while he may sometimes be an idiot, I know he would never put me in a bad situation.

My conflict must be written allover my face, because Shane holds out a placating hand to me. "But that's not the point," he insists. "It's about letting you get your stuff off your chest," he explains, and it's so obvious that he's lying, but I guess it's nice that he's trying.

"Okay, look, can we just go, now?" Cook asks, throwing his arms in the air and pointing towards the building. "Nothing will happen if nothing happens, get it?"

Damnit, Cook, why didn't you fucking warn me?

"Yeah, yeah, come on," Shane says, and I find it very odd that he knows about places we don't. Oh, who am I kidding? This has Emily written all over it.

I expect to see children of the rich and mighty with little waiters with red bow ties mingling through them, serving pretentious little cheeses passing themselves off as delicacies, but we spend so little time in the front area that I don't see much of anything.

Shane leads us into a back storage room filled with shelves and filing cabinets, and shuffles some things around in the back corner. Cook goes over to help him, and the two uncover a hole in the bottom part of the wall just big enough for a grown human body to squeeze through.

I expect Katie to make some kind of disgusted comment, but she doesn't, and I know Effy's not going to question anything, so it falls to me to figure out what's going on. "What's that?" I ask, eyeing the hole wearily. I know I'm going to be going through it, and I would just like to know what I'll find on the other side.

"Okay, have you ever heard about the tunnels supposedly running under the city?" he asks, making strange hand gestures.

"I've heard of those," Effy speaks up, clearly intrigued. "Weren't they supposed to be built by some cult, or something?"

"Oh, yeah," Katie says, realization dawning on her. "They were used for like, human slave trafficking, or sacrifice." Shane nods his head and gestures to the hole in the wall. "No shit!" she exclaims. "I could have sworn they were just a myth."

Shane shakes his head smugly. "Nope. There are five entrances," he says, holding up all five fingers. "There's this one, one that's caved in, one up in Fuller's Cemetery, one in the basement of the grade school, which is kinda creepy, and one in the old abandoned hospital," he tells us, ticking each of them off on his fingers.

I have to admit, I agree with him on one being in the grade school. That's just sick.

Cook whoops, and claps him on the shoulder. "Man, I've been looking for an entrance to these things for years," he exclaims. "How'd you find them?" he asks, clearly somewhat jealous and upset that he never found them on his own.

Shane shrugs nonchalantly, and holds his hands out, pointing his index fingers down and waves them around spastically, explaining, "Well, once you find one of them, you find them all. They're all interweaved together in the shape of a star." He shoves his hands in his pockets, and smiles. "Emily found the one in the hospital and we all walked straight through them."

Now, I've gone out to that hospital a couple of times, and I've never seen anything like this. Hell, I've been out there with Emily a few times. Of course, there were other people with us. I thought we had seen all of it.

Am I the only one who thinks this idea is seriously morbid?

Shane climbs down the hole, feet first, and I follow suit. There's a ladder near the bottom of the hole, and my feet find it easily. I see Katie come down after me, so I keep my head down. We're fairly high up, and it's dark, so I can't see the ground, and I hold a little tighter on the rungs.

I don't know how far down we went, but it was a while, and when my feet finally touch the ground, it takes me by surprise. The darkness is complete, and the air is kind of dank. I blink several times, trying to adjust to my surroundings, but it doesn't help, and I think I nearly go blind when Shane turns on a flashlight.

"So how'd you find the one in the hospital?" Cook asks, stepping off the ladder, and joining Shane at the front of our little queue. I trail behind with Effy and Katie, and I'm slightly amused that we don't speak to each other at all.

"There was a mysterious hole down in the emergency room," Shane explains. I always found the emergency room the creepiest part of the whole place. There's just something really creepy about the air in there. I also know the hole he's talking about. Emily had gone down there once when I was there with her and Effy, but I was overcome with such an irrational fear that I made her come back. That hole didn't look anything like the one we just went through, though. "Well, it led to some underground hallway in the hospital, which led to an entrance to these tunnels," he explains. "Did you know there's no morgue in there?" he asks, curiously. "I wonder what they did with the dead," he ponders, and the thought disturbs me.

The tunnel is actually very large, though the ceiling's kind of low, and there's a musky sort of smell in it. I can feel it rush into my lungs, and make me sluggish. When we eventually get to a fork, Katie asks, "Which way?"

Shane shrugs, shining the light down each path. "Doesn't really matter," he says. "They all empty out at the same place anyway," he explains, and starts walking down the left path, so I guess that's the way we're going.

The further we walk, the warmer it gets, and the air gets foggy and heavier. The air doesn't smell as musky anymore, but slightly toxic. I can feel my mind begin to unravel with each breath I take. We start to pass people, who are lined against the walls, smoking or drinking or groping, and bass starts to throb through the soles of my shoes. The people become more frequent, and my contact high gets worse, and the music grows louder until we empty out in a huge pentagonal chamber.

Someone has taken glow necklaces and splattered them all over the walls again, and I wonder which one of them likes that look so much, not that I'm necessarily complaining. My bets are on AJ. There's a strobe light going from the center of the ceiling and it highlights the smoky atmosphere, and I wonder if we're all going to suffocate down here.

The same tables that were set up in the church are arranged in a square in the center of the room, and as I work my way through the crowd, I can see kegs and huge water dispensers that turn out to be filled with a substance I can only call "trash can punch" on them. I think it's got some of every kind of alcoholic beverage in it, and it feels like glass on the way down.

Clearly designed to fuck you up.

I notice lemons floating in the top of one of them, and I discreetly fish one out, sliding it in my mouth. The alcohol content is through the roof, and I'm already buzzing. It's easier on my stomach than the drink, though, and the point is to get as fucked up as I possibly can, anyway.

I start to listen to what's playing through the speakers, and feel myself grooving. It takes me a few minutes, but I eventually recognize it as a song by Ghostland Observatory, having stumbled upon it at Emily's one day. I feel my shoulders start to move to the beat, and start to make my way through the crowd. Endorphins rush through my veins, and you can smell the pheromones in the air, see them slide down skin in sweat.

Alright. I can do this. I know that Emily's somewhere in this mass of bodies, and my courage is up. My eyes scan for any glimpse of red, and there are a few false alarms where I feel my heart jump into my throat, only to swallow disappointment. I eventually do find her, though, dancing, clutching a glass in one hand, and chewing on a piece of fruit, and I feel like someone who's been lost in the desert and has just found a huge lake to jump into.

I take a deep breath, and knock back the rest of my drink before tossing the empty plastic cup on the floor. I decide it's now or never. I don't know when I'll see her again, after all. I close my eyes, and let the music move through me, loosening up and letting the moment drive me. I slowly make my way over to her, her back to me. I dance near her, and then I dance with her, and I have to force myself not to jerk away when my hands move to her waist, because the electricity under my fingertips literally burns.

She pushes back against me, and I don't think she knows who I am, yet. I let my hands slide their way down to her hips and she snakes her free hand up and through my hair, and I'm reminded of our "date" about a month ago, and it feels like we're just reenacting.

She tugs lightly at my hair, but pauses after she runs her fingers through the length. I can feel her finger the tips of my hair, pulling it down to see where it falls on my neck. Her hands practically fly to my wrists to pull my own off of her, and she and turns around to face me. She doesn't look like herself. Her eyes are pale, and her face is screwed into an almost gruesome mask, and before I even have the chance to open my mouth, she shoves me violently away from her, and into the people behind me.

Bodies quickly move into the space between us, and I soon lose her in the crowd.

Well, that went well.

I run into Effy as I try to force my way back to the center of the room, and I guess I don't look well, because she simply grabs my hand and pushes through anonymous bodies, creating a pathway for me, and I'm amazed that someone so little can have such force in them. "Did you find her?" she practically yells in my ear so I can hear her over the music, and hands me a fresh glass of punch. Even still, she's just barely loud enough for me to make out.

I nod, not even trying to be heard over the throbbing around us. I do my best to look as miserable as possible so that maybe I won't have to attempt an explanation, and I guess it works, because Effy's waving a bullet at me, and telling me to try again.

I wave her away and shake my head. Things don't go up my nose, it's never anything good. Best case scenario, you're facing a potential mild heart attack, and at worst, you're about to spend the next several hours slowly dying and actually live to tell the tale about it, and that just seems wrong to me.

I wonder where Cook is, and why he's not attached to Effy's hip, but then I remember that he never was before, and there's no actual reason for him to start now. It just would have been convenient for him to have morphed into an attentive boyfriend, because I can use a spliff, and he's always got some.

I stop at the edge of the crowd, and inhale deeply. Surely, there are at leas fifteen circles going at this exact moment in time, and it's just a matter of figuring out where. People are generally pretty generous at these kinds of things. I pick a direction, and find Shane and AJ passing a pipe back and forth between them in the entrance to one of the tunnels, and I make my way over to them.

"You find her?" Shane asks me as I approach. It's significantly quieter over here.

I sigh and nod, and offer a futile kind of smile, and he mirrors it before holding the pipe out to me, which I take thankfully. I fill my lungs with smoke, more than usual, and hand the pipe back to him, biting back the cough that's trying to force its way out of me.

"She's over there if you'd like to try again," Shane offers, pointing her out in the crowd. As soon as I spot her, she turns and catches my eye, before quickly glancing at Shane and AJ. My own eyes flit over to AJ, and I nearly collapse into a coughing fit as the wind is knocked out of me, and the smoke is expelled from my body, and it feels like part of my soul is getting ripped out through my mouth.

God, that hurt.

When I compose myself, she's still standing there, only now she looks viciously amused. I bite my lip, pull my shoulders back, and shove my way through the crowd, trying to look as sure of myself as I can, but I'm fairly certain she can see right through me.

I think she always could.

She arches a challenging eyebrow at me, as I stand in front of her, and her smile grows wider as I notice a pair of slender arms snake their way across her waist. She turns from me and wraps her arm around some tiny, olive skinned, dark haired, curvaceous number, and with one last glance at me, she dips her head down, and practically shoves her tongue down the other girl's throat, and I feel more disgusted than anything else.

I roll my eyes and walk away. Whatever Fitch. You're fucking showing.

There's no point in me staying here. Not really. We all should have known this was doomed to fail. I look around the chamber, trying to figure out which tunnel leads where, but nobody's thought to label them. Great. It could take me all night to get home, depending on where I end up, and I don't particularly fancy wandering around the tunnels all night, looking for the right one.

"You're not leaving, are you?" Katie shouts towards me as I pass her, and start walking down a tunnel. I just hope this doesn't go to the exit that's caved in.

I sigh and turn around to face her, confused by the fact that I feel it necessary to offer her some kind of explanation. "Yeah, I…" I start, pointing towards the last place I saw Emily. "This is pointless," I declare with a shrug and a sad head shake.

"You're just not trying hard enough," she exclaims, and I'm shocked at how angry she is. I don't know why. This kind of behavior is perfectly in character for her. "How many times has she tried to prove her feelings for you?" she asks, pointing in the direction I did earlier, and I flinch at her vitriol. "It's your fucking turn!"

Fuck, she's got a point. I hang my head and sigh before turning back to the party, but not before I catch sight of a smug grin creep across her face.

Cunt.

I catch sight of Bryan as I maneuver through people in my search for Emily, and when he sees me, I see his angry face fall into place. What, is he like, the older brother she never had? He starts to make his way towards me, so I duck down, and put some more distance between us, trying to lose him in the crowd. There's no way I'm going to let him intercept me.

I have to duck behind some people gathered around a tunnel mouth, and take a few steps inside, trying to get swallowed in the darkness, and it's one hell of a coincidence that this is where I find Emily.

Of course, she's got the girl that's the complete opposite of me pinned against the wall, with her hand up her skirt, and the same disgust from earlier comes washing over me. "You're busy, so I'll keep this short," I say, and she hits the wall next to the girl's head with her free hand, but doesn't look at me; doesn't acknowledge my presence or interruption at all, really. I understand now, what Shane meant when he said she had a lot of anger. "I'm sorry, for everything," I say, and she finally looks at me, poker face firmly in place. "I miss you. I wish you'd come home."

I see her eyes soften, and I know I've reached her on some small level. There's more I want to say, but I can't, because she's already turned her attention back to the girl against the wall.

It doesn't matter, though. I've done all I can do, and now I can only wait.