A Raging Dawn (17 page)

“I have.” Esme’s voice dropped to a sorrowful sigh. “That’s why I don’t have any friends.”

Flynn pulled her closer, surprised that her heart sped up at Esme’s words. “Don’t worry. You still have me.”

“I wish Mama was here. Or Ozzie. Or my daddy. Then we’d be a real family.”

Devon had wanted Flynn to tell Esme he was dead, wanted his daughter as far away from him as possible, to keep her safe. But Flynn hadn’t had the heart to lie to a girl who’d just lost her mother and had been uprooted from the only home she’d ever known, so she’d told Esme her father was away on business.

Big mistake, she quickly realized. But what the hell did Flynn know about little girls? Not like anyone had ever raised her properly. Before she killed her mother’s boyfriend, Flynn had been used as a punching bag and sex toy. Then Daniel had taken her in, molded her from a rebellious teen who’d gotten away with murder into a stealth weapon, able to blend in with any level of society and do his bidding.

Flynn had no clue what normal was, much less a normal family. But that’s what Esme needed, and she hated that she couldn’t give it to her.

“Story,” Esme insisted.

Before she met Esme, Flynn had no stories suitable for a little girl’s ears—unless she wanted Esme to suffer even more night terrors. But Esme craved stories, they were sustenance to her, so Flynn set her imagination free, giving Esme the fairytale shoulda-coulda-woulda wistful lives neither of them had found in reality.

“Where were we?”

Esme burrowed deeper into Flynn’s embrace. “Princess Rhetta was fighting the dragon to save Prince Ozzie and his kingdom.” Prince Ozzie featured in all of Esme’s stories, even if the princesses varied.

“Okay. How do you think Rhetta defeated a fire-breathing dragon ten times her size?” Flynn had quickly learned that when she had no clue how to twist a story, if she simply asked her audience, the answer would be supplied. Esme had very firm ideas about how a good story should be told. Princesses kicked butt and saved the day, princes rewarded them with kisses and pretty dresses, and the bad guys ended up in dungeons.

“Well…” Esme considered. “Her sword is too short for her to get close enough without getting burned by the dragon’s fire, so she’s going to have to trick it. I think she plays dead and waits for the dragon to open its mouth to gobble her up and—”

Esme went silent, mid-sentence.

“And then what?” Flynn prompted.

No answer. A warm wetness spread beneath the duvet and sheets. “Esme!” Flynn turned to the girl. Esme’s face was slack, her eyes unblinking, staring into space. Drool slipped from the corner of her mouth, and she’d wet herself.

Flynn couldn’t help herself. She shook Esme, trying to snap her out of her spell. Her breathing was okay, pulse normal. But Esme had simply vanished, leaving only her body behind.

She climbed out of bed and carefully positioned Esme on her side, away from the wet stain, head turned so she wouldn’t choke on her drool. Flynn reached for the phone, then stopped, her hand hovering over it. It’d been less than a minute. Should she call an ambulance? Invite all the questions that would come with an ER visit?

Then Esme blinked. She shook herself and looked up at Flynn with mournful eyes. “It keeps happening.”

“What happened? When did it start? How often?” Questions poured from Flynn as she knelt at Esme’s side.

Esme sat up, one hand slipping on the wet sheets, and looked horrified. “I wet the bed?”

“That doesn’t matter. Tell me what happened.”

Tears slid down Esme’s cheeks. “I never wet the bed. Not since I was a baby. Not even when Mama—”

Flynn bundled her into her arms and carried her from the wet bed out to the living room. At Esme’s command, she’d bought them a real Christmas tree. A first for both of them. It shed needles all over the carpet, kept sagging in the tree stand, and although the pine smell was heavenly, it made Flynn’s eyes itch. But they’d had fun dragging it in, setting it up, and decorating. Esme had even taught Flynn how to make a popcorn garland and the proper way to hang tinsel icicles.

Tonight, Esme ignored the tree, instead curling up on Flynn’s lap, her face against Flynn’s neck. “Tell me,” Flynn coaxed, once the tension had fled Esme’s body and her tears had stopped.

“I knew you were there—I could see, hear, feel everything.” Esme’s voice filled with wonder.

“Has it happened before?”

Esme nodded, her braids bouncing against Flynn’s shoulder. “A few times. Once it happened in school, and I could see the answers sitting on the teacher’s desk while we took a pop quiz. Not really, not with my eyes, but I’d walked past them on my way into class, and she’d turned them over before I could see. But then, when I was frozen, I could see, like I could go back in time and flip through my memories, rewind them.”

Esme looked up at her, swallowed, and tried on a brave smile. “It’s kind of cool. When it’s not scary. I’m sorry I wet the bed. You’re not mad, are you?”

Flynn’s pulse buzzed, a wasp beating its way free of a spider’s web. Maybe she wasn’t in the fight of her life, but Esme might be. Because Flynn had seen the same kind of thing happen to one other person…the doctor who’d saved her life.

Angela Rossi.

NINETEEN KIDS FROM
one apartment complex, all with the same symptoms. This was so not good.

“Let’s see what we have.” Somehow, I kept my voice calm, reassuring even. But my mind was whirling with the ramifications and consequences. If Devon was right, I’d have to get the Health Department involved, call the CDC, alert the staffs of all the local hospitals…except…I had no idea what to tell them.

I left Ozzie with the other families while Devon led me into a storage room that Sister Patrice had converted into an examination area. The cement-block walls were as stark white as the sheets on the cot that functioned as an exam table, but colorful, crayoned drawings and finger-painted masterpieces hanging from a bulletin board broke up the monotony. The room smelled of candle wax and antiseptic, a strange mix of faith and function.

A dark-haired boy, maybe five or six, sat on a cot, hunched over a coloring book, his back to me. A young woman, thin from worry, her cheekbones hollowed out and eyes rimmed red, held his hand and stroked his hair. She shifted to stand between me and the boy, while an older couple stood on the far side of the room, the man gray-haired with thick glasses, pressed against the wall as if hoping to melt into it, and the woman, her hair dyed black, regarding me with a fierce challenge. The grandparents.

“These are the Lees,” Devon made introductions. “They run the Imperial Lotus restaurant. Randolph is their grandson, and this is his mother, Veronica.” The grandparents nodded, but the mother ignored the social niceties.

“Tell me what’s wrong with him, please,” she pleaded.

Randolph sat cross-legged on the cot, drawing, eyes scrunched in concentration as he refused to make eye contact with me. Classic
if I can’t see you, you’re not there
.

“When did it start?” I asked.

“A little more than two months ago, right after school began. At first I thought it was just stress. Kindergarten, being away from me.” She stroked his hair as she spoke. Randolph kept working his crayons. He gripped them with his full fist like a toddler, and his lines were shaky.

“What have you noticed?” I asked, sitting down in one of the wooden folding chairs, the kind used for funerals or bingo.

“He drops things and he falls all the time. We took him to the clinic. They said everything was fine.”

“What tests did they do?”

“Blood counts, lead, something they called a chemistry panel.”

Ruling out all the easy-to-treat causes, including my initial theory of lead exposure. “And then what?”

“He stopped sleeping. Began having what the doctors call night terrors.” She reluctantly pulled her hand away from Randolph to reach into her purse and remove a small spiral notebook. “Here. I kept a record.”

I opened the notebook. Pages after pages of detailed observations. I saw why Devon had wanted me to start with the Lees. It wasn’t often I had actual data to create a diagnosis with. In the ER, finding the right reason for a patient’s symptoms was more art than science. I couldn’t help but think that Louise would have loved it if I’d kept a symptom journal like this for her.

According to his mother’s notes, Randolph’s sleep had been disturbed since September, but his night terrors were now occurring daily, and he wasn’t sleeping more than two to three hours at a time. He’d also stopped eating, was choking on anything too large, and was basically subsisting on protein shakes. I kept flipping pages, the words mirroring every case report of Fatal Familial Insomnia I’d been able to find.

It could have been my own medical history, in fact. Shock ran cold through me. No. It was impossible. I glanced at the door, the other families waiting beyond, then at Devon. He nodded grimly.

Randolph’s crayon slipped from his hand and fell to the floor with a clatter. I retrieved it, tried to hand it back, but he’d already moved on to a different color.

“Show her,” the grandfather urged his wife. The grandmother nodded reluctantly and took a folded piece of paper from her coat pocket. She unfolded it and handed it to me, her gaze imploring.

It was a remarkably detailed freehand crayon drawing of a dinosaur. With Randolph’s name carefully printed in childish block letters below it.

“He did that in August,” his mother said. “Drew it all himself. Now, he can’t even scribble in the lines.” She sounded close to tears.

Everyone in the room went silent. Randolph’s hand froze, hovering over the paper, mid-scribble. His eyes were open, unseeing, unblinking. I snapped my fingers near his ear, checked for corneal and other reflexes. Nothing.

“Has he done this before?”

The mother sniffed back her sobs and nodded. “It’s new. Three times this week.”

“Anything run in the family? Symptoms like this? Seizures? Anything at all?”

“Diabetes on my dad’s side. But not in kids.”

“And Randolph’s father?”

“He was killed. Iraq. I asked his parents. The only thing that runs in their family is breast cancer on his mother’s side. But she’s fine.”

Randolph blinked. Gave a shudder, as if shaking off a chill, then went right back to coloring as if nothing had happened.

“Randolph.” I lowered myself to his eye level, although he still refused to look at me directly. “What just happened?”

“Echoes.” His voice was so low I could barely hear it.

His mother wrapped her arm around his shoulders, her body shifting to cover as much of his as possible. “That’s what he calls the spells. The echoes.”

Like the shimmers of color and music that preceded my fugues? Or was I reading too much into it? Maybe it was a simple petit mal seizure.

Or maybe it wasn’t. If it wasn’t…no, how could that be possible? I forced myself to stay calm. There was already more than enough fear filling the room. “When the echoes hit, what happens? Do you see or hear anything?”

He nodded. “I see everything.”

“Can you tell me something you saw?”

He thought a moment, then jerked his chin up, finally looking at me. “I want to play with the dog.”

“We don’t have a dog,” his mother said, sounding panicked. “Randolph, there is no dog.”

“Yes, there is.” He twisted to point to the closed door behind him. “She brought him.”

I glanced at the door, then at Devon, who stood silently in the far corner, listening. There was no way Randolph could have seen Ozzie when we came in. The door was behind him and had been open for only a few seconds.

Unless, during his fugue, he’d rewound those few seconds and noticed what had happened too fast for him to realize before. Maybe he hadn’t even seen Ozzie, but with the hyperacuity the fugues brought, he’d heard or smelled the dog. At any given moment, our brain absorbs millions of data points, ninety-nine percent of which it files away as irrelevant. But in a fugue, I was able to access all of those sensory impressions, those hidden memories that the fugue allowed me to replay and slow down, analyze.

In a fugue, I truly could “see everything,” just as Randolph had claimed. It was how I’d saved Esme last month.

“His name is Ozzie,” I said. “Want to go out and play with him?”

For the first time, he smiled. “Yes, please.”

The mother gasped. Randolph slid away from her grasp and scrambled out the door. I looked up to her anguished face as she realized her nightmare had just begun.

AFTER ENSURING THE
medics didn’t contaminate the crime scene as they evacuated the few victims with vital signs, Ryder had the uniforms secure the area while he returned to the patrol car where Littleton waited.

He pushed through the school’s front door, the wind catching his open coat, flapping it around his knees like wings. All hell was about to break loose. He only a few minutes before the brass and press arrived along with the crime-scene techs, detectives, and for a sensational mass murder like this, any warm body with a badge. A crapstorm of blue.