Hourglass → Ace; Nancy Drew [1]

xviii. the location of buried bones

Beads of sweat had formed on her forehead and upper lip while her cheeks were shiny under the daylight glimmering through the windows. It was evident to him that with her slumped shoulders, Olivia could hardly hold her head up. She almost looked dead. If it hadn't been for the slow rising and falling of her chest, he would have thought she was. It was as though with every second that passed, she became more and more pallid like she was washed out, bloodless.

"Do you feel sick?" he whispered again, shooting his hand forward and pressing the back of it to her clammy forehead.

"No." She shook her head slowly, trying to mask the pain with her pursed lips. She tried to brush him off by returning her gaze back to the group at the table, encouraging Ace to do the same.

Although her chest burned as though it had been set aflame while her body felt as cold as ice despite the sweat lacing her skin, her physical state would be something she worried about after they broke the curse. This map– had the answers Olivia needed. The map was what would save her. So now, the map was all that mattered.

"You see this?" George's voice slowly began to refill Olivia's head, although her tired brain tried with all its might to filter everything out. The brunette pointed to a spot on the west side of the map, where all the ley lines intersected. "This is the Nexus of leylines."

"What the Hell does that mean?" Nick was quick to interject with a dissatisfied scowl on his face since everything sounded like gibberish to him– as it did to everyone else.

"It's an energetic vortex," she explained. Olivia pushed her body forward, intrigued by George's words. She felt that piece by piece, things were coming together, things were starting to make sense. "It could mask a person's energetic signature and hide them from the supernatural."

"So you're saying that Arthur Irvine might have hidden there?" Bess questioned, propping her chin in the palm of her hand. Her eyes darted from corner to corner of the room as she tried to give her brain time to process things.

"He must have known his time was up..." Nancy trailed, staring at the wall ahead of her. She pushed herself off the coffee table and climbed onto her feet. "He knew that the Crossroads Demon was coming, so he hid." She bent over and tapped her finger aggressively against the Nexus of ley lines. "He hid right here."

"That must be where his bones are!" Ace exclaimed, flailing his hands in the air in disbelief of the discovery they had just made.

"Oh my Goodness..." Bess clasped her hands against her mouth and followed Nancy to her feet. "We have to go there! We have to go there now."

"Question is, where is this?" Nick asked, picking up the map.

"It doesn't have any names or labels."

"Well it's right along the ocean, so that narrows things down," Ace announced as he stood up. "I can do a search online– it shouldn't take too long."

"You don't have to," Olivia's voice came out hoarse and barely audible. "I know where this is." She pushed herself onto her knees and placed her arms on the table so she could try and climb to her feet. Ace quickly hurried to her side, gripping onto her waist and helping her up. "It's the lighthouse."

The car ride was tedious, painful, filled with bouncing legs and tapping of fingers against cold steamed windows. Olivia felt her heart squeeze tighter with every minute that passed on the navigator, and her jaw clenched harder with every turn on the road.

Picking at the skin around her thumbs, she tried to distract herself with the small raindrops streaming down the window. She followed them down the glass, one by one, trying to place her mind elsewhere– anywhere but where she was now. Anywhere that would rid her chest of her palpitating heart, or her mind from its dreadful, terrifying thoughts.