Broken Illusions: A Midnight Dragonfly Novel (29 page)

My aunt was having a great time, but I could tell she was a little worried. She’d left me one garbled voice mail, followed by three texts.

U’ve been quiet. Hope all is ok. Text me when u can. Naomi rocked the wedding. Prettiest. Ever. Guess u r asleep. Text me in the AM. I’m hitting Tulum around noon.

Blinking against the sting at my eyes, I thought about calling, but knowing the time, I texted.

Sorry! Fell asleep! Glad the wedding was great. Miss you!

Then I tackled the mess that was my best friend:

Whazzup? Where r u? Amber sez Chase is with Jessica again. How does that not kill you? And u say Lucas needs to get a grip. But seriously. Where r u? Why won’t u answer? Want to tell you about Trey. R u ok?

That was one message, and to it I fired back a quick response.

All’s good. Got hung up. B back in the AM. Sorry!

I leaned back against the cool, concrete wall.

Chase had texted me three times, all between 11:11 and 11:22.

Sorry about b4

I’m thinking of Pensacola.

CMWYC

Not sure what else to do, I turned and started to walk.

The town slept. There wasn’t a single car on Main Street, just the parade of streetlamps ending where the old chapel sat, and the woods took over. Maybe that’s where I was headed all along, back to the gallery. Or maybe it was a whim. But the second I saw the glow of white against the night sky, I knew there was no turning back.

At the steps leading to the old door, I hesitated. The wind had fallen quiet, darkness spilled from all directions, and yet the hum grew louder as I spun around—and saw the dragonfly.

It couldn’t have been the same one from that afternoon. I knew that. And yet familiarity gripped me, and when its gossamer wings carried it toward the back of the building, I knew I was supposed to follow.

Thick grass cushioned my feet—bare, I realized for the first time. Dylan had slept in his shoes, and yet I was the one who’d slipped into the night. But I hardly felt the cool dampness against my feet, not when I saw the dragonfly veer toward the building, and vanish.

I froze, stared, was vaguely aware of pinching myself to see if I dreamed.

The pain registered, but I also knew it didn’t necessarily mean anything. Sometimes I felt nothing in my dreams. But increasingly, I felt everything.

And whether this was real or a dream into which I’d awakened, I knew I had to go inside. The doors were closed, but there, partially concealed by a barren climbing rose, a window stood open.

*   *   *

Once there would have been wooden pews, an altar, and a crucifix. But the chapel no longer served as a church, and it was not religion people came to find. It was art, and it was everywhere.

The stained glass remained. The thick windows on both sides of the church no doubt glowed with the sun. But the moon was not strong enough to penetrate, leaving the sanctuary draped in darkness. Fascinated, I reached for Dylan’s BlackBerry and turned it into a flashlight.

I moved slowly, lifting the phone to painting after painting, some quiet and serene in soft swirls of colors. Others were bolder, angry. Others were playful, while others haunted. Still lifes and landscapes, plantations along the river, oaks dripping with moss and even an eerie white tiger crouched in the shadows of the swamp. There was a close-up of a large hand cradling a small one, and a child at its mother’s breast. But none of me.

With every step the disappointment knotted tighter, until I turned to the last row, and saw the four empty spots.

And before I reached them, I knew.

The placards remained, bronze rectangles identical to those beneath every other portrait. There would be two names, that of the piece of art, and that of the artist.

I’m not sure how I didn’t run to them. Then, as I lifted the phone, I wasn’t sure how I would ever stop shaking.

Glory.

Ecstasy.

Rapture.

Eternal.

Each portrait had a different name, but the artist was the same.

Anonymous.

“No,” I whispered, spinning around. Just … no. They couldn’t be gone.

But even as the thought formed, the truth reverberated.

They were.

I ran, guided more by memory than light, until I reached the huge door to the lobby, where the other portrait of me hung. I yanked at the ancient handle, kicked it hard when it didn’t budge.

That would have been a good time to leave.

But when I turned, I saw the dragonfly. And again, I followed.

I moved slowly, not wanting to scare it away, ignoring the hiss of the wind outside, the dead calm inside. On some level I was aware of the blast from an unseen heater, the way the air was almost too acrid to breathe, but none of that mattered, not when the dragonfly led me through a door I’d not noticed before, to where an old altar served as a worktable, and a sketchbook sat on top.

Mechanically, I reached for it, flipped it open, and saw. I was there, right there on the pages in front of me, not in bold dramatic oils as I’d been in the lobby, but in shades of charcoal. My eyes were wide, captured in that place between rapture and horror, my mouth open, contorted, but I could not tell if I breathed—or screamed. In the corner of the sketch, a dragonfly hovered, and vines tangled. At the bottom, one word.

“Again.”
Without thought, I flipped the pages, one after the other, but saw the same thing: me trapped beneath the surface.

Suddenly I knew I wasn’t alone.

Dylan.
But as quickly as his name formed, details began to register, all the little things I’d ignored before, like the intensifying heat inside the small room—and the crackling outside. And even as I spun for the door, I knew it would be closed.

Time fell away, and I was two years old again, in the small room with the rocking chair and the crib, and no way out.

“No, no, no,” I whispered.

But the crackle became a roar and the heat an inferno, and as flames consumed and smoke poured in, I dropped to my knees and felt the burn sear my lungs.

There was no time for question or disbelief, only to get out. I clenched the BlackBerry as tightly as I could, but the faux flashlight was no match for the smoke. Crouching, I crawled toward the back of the room, using my hands when I found the wall. A window. That was all I needed.

I found only smooth panels of wood.

A thousand things ran through my mind, fear and shock and determination, horror, disbelief, questions and answers and dreams. Fantasies.

Reality.

They all tangled, preventing me from grabbing onto anything. There was only blind desperation, and suffocating reality.

The town slept. At some point, five minutes, maybe six, firemen would come. They would lift their hoses and attack the flames, but there would be no reason to check inside. Not in the middle of the night, in a building that should not have been occupied. It was old, wooden, a tinderbox. No one would risk their life to save a painting.

By the time Dylan realized I was gone …

Coughing, I made it to my feet and staggered forward, groping along the wall. I couldn’t just sit down and wait to die. I couldn’t—

“Trinity!”

Blindly I reached for him, even though I knew he was only in my mind. I grabbed at my shirt and dragged it over my nose, breathed greedily for the fraction of a second until smoke took over.

My eyes burned. My throat burned. Somehow I kept moving, even as something behind me exploded, and embers fell like rain. I knew better than to look back.

“Trinity!”

His voice was vague, far away, shouting from that place inside me, the place where the dreams came from, and to where I made them return. Or maybe it had nothing to do with him or a dream, but the fantasies of an oxygen-deprived brain.

And then I could see her, see her coming toward me from the trees in a gown of white, glowing, reaching for me.

“Mama.”

Her hair was long, dark, and flowing. Her face was ashen, stricken.

“Mama,”
I said again, and then she was running so fast, screaming.

“No!” she shouted. “No!”

She was beautiful, her movements graceful. All I had to do was go to her and—

“Fight,” she shouted. “Fight!”

But I was so tired of fighting, and my body was working against me. And all I wanted was to sink into her arms and let her take me.

“It’s not time!” she said, but I knew that was just a mother’s love talking, because even as sirens sounded, my lungs were shutting down, a sweet, gentle softness replacing the cutting edges, enveloping me.

And then the fire was licking closer, the heat fusing through me as I fell.

But I never reached the ground.

“I’ve got you.”
Suspended somewhere between here and there, between her world and mine, the words barely registered.
“I’m here—I’m always, always here.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

Dying is a lot like dreaming.

I’d heard that once, that when the body fails and conscious thought falters, the mind takes over, stripping away the fear and the pain, leaving only beauty and wonder, a few last, exquisitely gorgeous glimpses before it’s all over. It’s a chemical process, nothing more. Deprived of oxygen, the body turns to hallucination.

But as the words drifted through me, the fusion of dream and fantasy felt like so much more.

“I’ve missed you,”
I said, but like all the other times, it was more breath than voice. “So much.” I was being lifted then, my body swept from the ground and cradled as heat blasted and flames danced. But none of it seemed real, none of it even mattered, not as we ran toward the darkness.

I’d always imagined light. I’d heard it compared to the end of a tunnel, a seductive pinprick, and that nothing would matter but reaching it. But I saw no light, not the bright brilliant glowing kind, just swirling reds and yellows and oranges slashing against the night. And the crackling, the hissing. They grew louder, surrounding us like sinister laughter.

But I wasn’t scared. Not anymore. I wasn’t scared, was barely even there. I wasn’t out of my body, either, just suspended, lifted. Insulated.

I held on, held on so very, very tightly, didn’t know how I’d ever let go. But not even that mattered. If my body gave out, I was being held, being held as tightly as I, in turn, held on, and it didn’t matter if I let go, because he wouldn’t.

He’d promised. So many times. He wouldn’t.

And then, as the last few breaths were shredding through my chest, the flames fell away and the darkness turned pure, and before I realized what was happening, a breath of cool air enveloped me, and we were on the other side, running into the night as sirens screamed and new lights flashed. There was shouting and a new roar, but none of
that
mattered …

We ran toward the trees. It was all so familiar, even as it was new. And only then did I realize I’d buried my face against his throat. I pulled back as he slowed, made myself look.

“Easy,” he said as he always did, and his eyes, they were so silver, glowing in that burnished way as if the fire that consumed the chapel was consuming him, too, consuming him from the inside out. But there was no pain there, no fear, just a fervor I’d never seen before, and it merged with the oxygen swirling through me.

“You’re here,”
I whispered with what little voice I could find. It was raw and it scraped, but I didn’t care, couldn’t care about anything but the moment that was holding me.
“You’re really here
.
”

“Always.”

Conscious thought fell away as I lifted a hand to his face, my fingers feathering the warmth of his flesh. And when the illusion didn’t crumble, when it strengthened instead, drawing me closer, promising me something I didn’t understand but wanted so very, very badly, it was my face I lifted to the scrape of his whiskers, my eyes that closed.

“Always,”
I echoed. As my mouth found his I absorbed that first breath between us, that first kiss. It was slow and soft, achingly tender.

All I wanted was to touch him and feel him, to hold on and never let go.

“Everything’s going to be okay,” he murmured even though he didn’t need to, because I already knew it, felt it with every beat of my heart.

The night held us. Arms around me, he lowered me to the grass and a new dream took over, not the dream of dying, but the dream of living.

“Trinity,”
he breathed as I pulled him closer. He’d come. Somehow he’d come. He’d known.

He always knew.

Behind us the fire blazed, but there in our own little world, a different fire healed. “Dylan—”

I froze, tried to understand. I had no conscious memory of sliding my hands beneath his shirt, of clinging to him in every way imaginable, but there was no denying the intimacy of our bodies, or the blind desperation that had exploded between us.

He pushed back from me, his body suspended over mine, but no longer touching.

I looked up at the dark hair sweeping against his cheekbone, shielding but not hiding the anguish in his eyes, and the ache in my heart deepened.

“This is so wrong…” It was such an odd time to start crying. But I did. Because it
was
wrong. So very, very wrong, on so very many levels. But even as the realization took hold, I didn’t want to let go, and somewhere deep inside begged me to close my eyes and go back, let the dream take over once more.

“I’m with Chase now,”
I whispered—as much to myself as to Dylan.

Shadows shouldn’t fall at night. It shouldn’t even be possible, not with thick clouds of smoke obliterating the light of the moon. But I saw it, saw the shadow slip over him, and the beautiful silver of his eyes go flat.

“Then why isn’t he with you?”

That was all he said, but it was enough. “Dylan—”

He stood and stepped back from me, his face twisted with something I didn’t come close to understanding.

“Dylan,” I said again, scrambling after him.

He caught me as the world tilted. “Just breathe.”