Broken Illusions: A Midnight Dragonfly Novel (18 page)

I blinked harder, tried to understand, to remember. “My dreams,” I whispered as the pieces kept shifting, jagged fragments that sliced every time I tried to hold on. “She was—” I grabbed his forearm. “Grace!” She’d warned me to stay away.

Be careful! He sees everything …

“Did it work?” I managed through the dryness of my throat. God, I was so thirsty. “Did I find her?”

Julian’s expression gentled. “Yes, you talked to her.”

“But—”

“The tear led somewhere else.”

I sagged back, started to cough. “Cold,” I whispered, but then someone else was there, pushing past Julian to the edge of the sofa, reaching for me …

“You’re here—” I started, but then I lifted my eyes to the blue of his, and the cold bled deeper.
“Chase.”

He breathed my name. “I’m here,” he said, pulling me into his arms and holding me, as somewhere inside, I started to cry.

I buried my face against his neck, wanting it all to go away, the confusion and the scrape of loss, wanting only to be back …

I didn’t know. I didn’t know where I wanted to be, only how I wanted to feel. It hovered at the back of my mind, without form or context, just warmth.

Pulling back, I didn’t understand the glitter in Chase’s eyes. It was scared and worried and … so, so sad. He held me, but it was as if that whisper-thin veil again hovered between us.

“Were you dreaming?” he asked.

I looked away, couldn’t stop shaking. “I … don’t know. It’s fuzzy.” Images drifted, but none of them connected. “It was like the channel kept changing. I heard her, but…”

He lifted a hand to the side of my face, returning my eyes to his. “What happened?”

Moments, I realized. Our lives are defined by them. Some bring happiness. Others destroy. For months I’d wondered how I could simply forget about something as fundamental as the night my parents died. Aunt Sara had tried to console me by saying I’d only been two years old.

But I’d known. In my heart, my soul, I’d always known I
should
remember. That night—that moment. The one that etched a stark line in my life, dividing it into before, and after.

“I remembered
.
”
The words were threadbare, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care about the sting at my eyes, either. Only the fact that I hadn’t forgotten. “It was there all along.”

Against my back, Chase’s hands tightened. “What?
What
did you remember?”

“The fire. I was there—”

“
No.
”

The shaken voice stopped me.

“How could you?” my aunt exploded, and then I was moving, twisting around as she closed in on Julian. “I told you to leave her alone! I told you not to mess around—”

“Aunt Sara!” I shot to my feet and reached for her, putting myself between her and a dead-still Julian. “It was
me,
” I said. “
I
came to him for help.”

“You’re a child,” she seethed. “He’s a grown man.”

“I’m not a child—”

“He knows this isn’t a game. He knows what can happen. But he did it anyway—”

“Sara.” Just her name, that was all Julian Delacroix said. But so much more passed between them, a dare and a challenge, a warning. Something else.

“I’m okay,” I rushed to tell her, manufacturing a smile as proof, even as, inside, I shook. It was all fading, second by second, images that had been real and stark and … familiar, terrifying, amazing, retreating so that only impressions remained.

But I didn’t want my aunt to know how shaken I was.

How confused. “See? Nothing happened.”

She stood there so rigid, her body totally closed in on itself. “You don’t know that.”

“I do,” I said. “I’m good—it was just like dreaming.”

Her attention shifted behind me. “I swear to God, Julian, if you ever look at my niece again—”

“Stop it!” The edges of my vision blurred. Shaking, I reached for her, tugging her away from our audience toward the opening to the outer room, where Victoria stood with a hand to her mouth.

With a quick shake of my head, she slipped into the hall.

My aunt was one of the most easygoing people I’d ever met. Sure, she had her moments. Cajun ran through her blood. But she was more the steel magnolia type, who could cut you to your knees with a smile while serving lemonade.

Rarely had I seen her lose control.

I’d
never
seen her come unglued.

“Please,”
I said, and if my voice cracked on the word, that was okay. “Don’t be mad. I was just trying to—”

“What? You were just trying to
what,
Trinity?”

Not
cher,
like she usually called me. But my name.

She almost never said my name. “Help. I was trying to help.”

“By doing something I explicitly told you not to.”

“I’m not a child,” I said again, as rationally as I could. I knew she loved me. I knew she worried. We’d been down this road before. But … “I’m almost seventeen. You have to trust me. You have to let me fix—”

Her hands came up fast, taking me by the shoulders. “There’s nothing to fix.”

I knew the way she gripped me was supposed to silence me, but I couldn’t stop. She just didn’t get it. “But my dreams—”

Her eyes flashed. “
Could get you killed.

“My God
.
”
The words were a whisper—the kind with sharp, stinging edges. “You just don’t get it, do you? How am I supposed to get on that plane tomorrow morning when you keep pulling stunts like this? How am I supposed to trust—”

“Aunt Sara, stop.” A lifetime of being told what I could and couldn’t do boiled through me. “I was just—”

“Disobeying me.”

I’d been trying. I’d been trying to hold on, understand. But in that moment, it all snapped. “Well maybe that’s because I don’t need you to do that,” I said through the hurt and frustration. “I don’t need you to decide what I can and can’t do. It’s not like you’re my mother—”

The second the words left my mouth, I wanted to yank them back.

She winced, stepping back as if I’d struck her. “No,” she murmured. “I’m not.”

She turned and walked from the room.

*   *   *

The Quarter didn’t care about drizzle or wind or falling temperatures. The Quarter didn’t care about time, or consequence. Or inevitability. It was where you went to get lost, and not be found.

I took one street after another, Chase beside me. Not once did he reach for my hand. It was as if he didn’t want to let me go, but didn’t want to touch me, either.

I had no idea what I wanted.

Hours had passed. I wasn’t sure how many. I only knew that the second I’d seen the stricken look on my aunt’s face, the second I’d realized how badly I’d hurt her, I’d run after her.

But it had been one second too many.

I’d turned right. She must have turned left. I’d quickly circled back, but not quickly enough. It only took a few steps in the wrong direction to make turning back impossible. Time moved forward. There was no such thing as a perfect do-over.

Maybe I should have gone home. She would be there, if not now then later. Neither of us could hide forever. Sooner or later we would have to talk. But I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know how to take it back.

“You can’t walk forever.”

Wrapping my arms around my waist, I glanced toward the Square, where Grace had sat behind her table. The rain was barely more than a mist, but enough to send the artists for shelter. Only a handful of spiritual advisers sat hunched under black umbrellas.

“You’re not going to find her here,” Chase said.

“I know.”
But that didn’t stop me. Across Decatur, I headed for the river. I don’t know why that was important, but as I closed in on the railroad tracks, I realized where I’d been headed all along.

I’d always known someday I had to go back.

There along the brick walkway running the length of the levee, I finally stopped, keeping my arms wrapped around my ribs. Breathe. It was all I wanted. To be in the moment and not look to either side, not worry about what the next breath might hold—or what ghosts might be closing in from the past.

Or the future.

“It just keeps flowing,” I said, staring at the water. Day or night, hot or cold, still or chaotic, the muddy current ambled on. Sometimes it was lazy, methodical, the barges moving in slow motion. Other times, eddies sucked at whatever they could find.

I looked downriver, toward the lights of the Crescent Connection, twinkling against a blanket of ebony. It was all so crazy innocent. “No matter what, it just keeps flowing.”

Chase reached for me. “You’re tired,” he said with the oddest undercurrent to his voice. “Let me take you home.”

Beneath the bridge, a barge inched closer. “I’m not sure I have one,” I said, and before I could draw another breath, Chase lifted a hand to my face and nudged me toward him.

I’m not sure why I wouldn’t let myself move.

“Yes, you do,” he said. “Your aunt loves you. You know that.”

Love. It was such a complicated word. At first it’s basic. You love your parents, your siblings, your friends, and they love you. End of story, no strings attached. Then your world gets bigger and your dreams take you in new directions, and when you close your eyes you fantasize about a different kind of love, the huge, all-encompassing kind, what it’s going to feel like when that one perfect guy sweeps in and changes
everything
. Make it better—happier.

But as you get older fantasy blurs with reality, and all those pretty dreams shift into something as seductive as it is dangerous. A dare, a game, a risk.

Then before you realize what’s happening, the fantasy morphs into something you might not be ready for, more like a lock than the magic key you once dreamed of.

And you realize there’s no such thing as easy.

“Love isn’t supposed to have conditions,” I said, staring at the dull haze of moonlight from behind the clouds. “Or rules. It’s not supposed to
hurt.
”

Chase stiffened. I felt it, even through the feather-light touch of his fingers.

Love was something we didn’t talk about.

“How can it not hurt?” he asked quietly. “When someone else has that much control over you?”

SEVENTEEN

Control.

Maybe it was inevitable. When you care about someone, when your heart gets involved, everything tangles. You want to make them happy, even if that means sacrificing what you want or need, what you believe.

But sometimes you wake up one day and realize that in trying to make someone else happy, trying to give them what
they
want,
they
need, to make sure
their
boat never rocks, your boat no longer exists.

Victoria and Lucas proved that.

“Then something’s wrong,” I said. “Love isn’t supposed to be about control—there has to be give and take, compromise.
Trust
.”

His hand fell away.

There were so many nights when I lay in my bed with Delphi at my side and the phone to my ear, listening to his voice, as if he were right there beside me. I could close my eyes and, there in that hazy place, we were together.

But other nights when we sat side by side, I would have sworn he was a million miles away.

“It’s about acceptance,” I said. “Appreciating someone for who they are, about
wanting
them for who they are. Not who you want them to be.”

Around us the sounds of the night deepened, the slurp of the river and the hum of crickets and toads, jazz from the Quarter. But Chase stared toward the lights of the riverboat
Natchez.

Sometimes silence spoke more than all the words in the world.

Closing my eyes, I sucked in a breath, felt it feather against a longing I didn’t understand. It was like trying to work a puzzle you couldn’t see, but knowing—
knowing
—that somewhere out there, a piece waited, and it was perfect.

“All my life people have made decisions for me,” I said into the darkness. “My parents, my grandmother, now my aunt.” And sometimes … Chase. “They’ve decided what I do and don’t need to know, where I should and shouldn’t be, who I should and shouldn’t see…”

I felt him move, felt him shift toward me. And when his hand found mine, I waited for warmth to slow dance through me.

Cold slipped deeper.

“And I’m so tired of it,” I whispered. “So tired of everyone thinking love gives them permission to keep me in this tight little box and play God—”

“Not God,” he said as I opened my eyes. “Just someone who knows how special you are—how different. That when you close your eyes, you go somewhere else.” Curled around mine, his hand tightened. “Who’s scared one time you won’t come back.”

“But it’s time for
me
to make those decisions,” I countered. “I want to
fly
—to spread my wings and see where they take me.”

“And if you fall?”

I felt my eyes go wide, and realized we were no longer talking about my relationship with my aunt. “Then I get back up and try again.”

The drizzle kept falling, like an ethereal wall slipping between us. “Once when I was a little girl, I was playing in a wooded area at dusk, and I saw the most beautiful—”

Dragonfly.

I’d seen a dragonfly in the mountains.

Shaken, I lifted a hand to my pendant, and felt a door somewhere inside me slip open, and the memory slide through.

Gossamer fine wings of iridescent green fluttered against a bright pink flower. “Look how pretty!!”

“It’s a dragonfly,” he said, edging closer.

“I’ve never seen one before!”

“You shouldn’t be seeing one now.”

Excited, I scrambled for my insect collecting kit.

“No, you can’t—” he said, but already I was closing the net around the beautiful wings and ushering my prize into one of the jars where I kept roly-polies and moths and ants.

“Wait ’til I show Gran!” I said, running toward the house.