Broken Illusions: A Midnight Dragonfly Novel (7 page)

OMG! You’ll never believe what I read on the ’net last night!

My breath slowed as another text zipped in.

Julian was right. We seriously screwed up not telling the board good-bye. There was this girl who got scared and shoved the board off the table. When she woke up the next morning her back was covered in scratches …

Against the screen, the words glowed. I felt the shaking start, even as I made my fingers slide along the keys.

That’s not why Chase had an accident.

But as I hit send, something cold slipped through me. I glanced toward the staircase, realizing I hadn’t told him about what had happened in the shop. It hadn’t seemed cool to pile that on him the second I arrived.

I hadn’t realized we’d lose over an hour playing Clue.

When I looked back at the screen, her reply waited.

I think we need to close it B4 anything worse happens.

My breath slowed as I jammed out six words.

Nothing else is going to happen.

Victoria wasn’t known for her seriousness, but in that moment, I could tell she absolutely was.

Is that really a chance you want to take?

Maybe my premonition of the accident had no logical explanation, but the rest did.

I know it’s freaky, but storms make the power go out. Drafts blow out candles. We were moving the pointer …

“Who are you texting?”

I looked up, hadn’t heard him coming. “Hey…”

“Who’s that?”

My heart slammed hard. “Victoria.”

Shoving something into his jeans pocket, Chase crossed the room. “What’s she up to?”

I tilted the phone toward me, didn’t want him to see what we were talking about before I told him about the Ouija board. “Just stuff.”

He dropped down next to me, squinting at the BlackBerry.

It was instinct that made me clear the screen—that was all. But the second his hand caught mine, I realized my mistake.

“Why’d you do that?” he asked.

The suspicion in his voice killed me. I stared at his fingers against mine, at the phone caught between our hands, and realized that in clearing the texts, I’d sent his imagination down a dark path. I could see it in the hot burn of his eyes.

“Do you have any idea what that does to me?” he asked, his voice so raw it hurt. Abruptly he pulled back and stood. “When you hide things? When I ask you questions and you don’t answer?”

The way he looked at me, with doubt turning the blue of his eyes black, it was like drowning in a room full of oxygen. My breath just stopped.

“Probably the same thing it does to me when you go straight to the worst-case scenario,” I whispered.

“You
cleared
the screen, T. You didn’t want me to see something. Maybe it
was
Victoria—or maybe someone else. How do I know? Maybe it was that cop’s son—”

“No.” I moved fast, jumping to my feet and going to him, putting my hands to his arms. “It wasn’t him.”

I knew better than to say Dylan’s name. Despite the fact I hadn’t seen him since the night at Big Charity, Chase had a hard time letting go of the fact I’d been wearing another guy’s shirt.

“This is me, Chase,” I said, looking up at him and, unlike with the game, doing my best to let everything I felt show in my eyes. “You
know
me.”

A muscle in the side of his face twitched.

“Here.” I lifted my BlackBerry to his hands. “You can see—”

He refused to take it.

I sucked in a sharp breath, let it out slowly. This was not how I’d planned to tell him about the Ouija board.

“Chase.”
I waited for him to look at me before continuing. It took a second, but as his parents’ voices drifted from the kitchen, his eyes returned to mine.

“Have you ever done something at the spur of the moment?” I hated how rock still he stood. “Something that spiraled out of control—”

He had. We both knew that. No matter how far we moved from the afternoon he’d walked away from me, its shadow never fully went away.

“Tell me.” His voice was stripped bare. “Tell me what you did.”

“It’s not what you think,” I rushed to tell him. “Last night at the shop Victoria had a Ouija board—”

Through those long bangs, awareness flashed in his eyes.

“And we started messing around, and all this weird stuff started happening—”

“What kind of weird stuff?”

I tried to soften it. “It was during the storm, and it got real cold and the candle went out, and the board kept saying bizarre things—”

The change was abrupt. There among the play of afternoon shadows, Chase went from looking like he was about to get his heart yanked out, to looking like someone facing an unseen enemy. “What did it say?”

I didn’t know why telling him was so hard. I’d told him much, much worse. “Just stuff,” I muttered, but knew that was never going to cut it. “That someone was going to die—”

He moved fast, taking me by the shoulders. “Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“Me?”

“No!”

On a harsh breath he released me and looked toward the fireplace, shoving his hands through his hair. “That’s what Victoria was texting about.”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was going to—
today.
But I didn’t want to hit you with that the second I got here, and then we were having fun—I wasn’t even thinking about it.”

Something changed in his eyes, softened, all that devastating doubt fading into a blue so heartbreaking my breath caught. Jessica’s lies had done a real number on his ability to trust.

“You can’t do that,” he said, stepping closer to take my face in his hands. “You can’t hide things—”

“I wasn’t hiding—”

He shifted, pulling back one hand but leaving the other against my cheek. “I should have been there,” he said. “None of this would have happened—there wouldn’t have been an accident, no reason for you to have a vision or a bad dream.”

He made it sound so simple: one plus one equals two. And it was true there were always choices. How could you not wonder? Could things have been different with a different choice, or did all roads, ultimately, lead to the same destiny? If he’d been with me at the shop, would the accident still have happened? Maybe at a later time? With a different outcome?

Or maybe, everything had happened exactly the way it was supposed to. The dreams and the Ouija board, the flash, had all worked together to make sure I found Chase before the canal claimed him.

“Now close your eyes,” he said.

It was such an odd request. But I could no more have denied him than I could have stopped the sun slipping low against the horizon.

With complete and absolute trust, I closed my eyes, and thought about Pensacola. We’d be together, away from school and New Orleans and … Jessica. We’d be away from bad memories and making new ones. I’d see the surf for the first time, and like so many other amazing firsts, it would be with him.

Water formed, darker than I expected, surging up toward the shore and breaking—

I winced, tensing as he lifted my arm to wrap something around my wrist.

“You can look now.”

I did. Actually, I stared. A long, thin strip of leather coiled around my wrist, with a delicate silver chain laced through it, a few charms—a cross and a fleur-de-lis and a dragonfly—and words etched into the leather:
HONEST, STRONG, SMART, CURIOUS, FEARLESS, IMPULSIVE.

I looked up at him. I’d never seen a wrap bracelet like it. It was almost as if it had been custom-made—

“Your aunt helped me,” he said. “I was going to give it to you last night.”

Everything just kind of froze. “You
made
this?”

He made a funny face. “Do you like it?”

Blown away, I stepped into him and pushed up on my toes. “I
love
it,” I whispered, wrapping my arms around him and holding on tight, wishing the moment could last … forever.

I’m not sure what made me look down. But the second I saw the flash of silver on the carpet next to my foot, everything inside me tightened.

“No—stay away—you’ll never get—”

The breath of cold swirled deeper. Squeezing my eyes against it, I focused on the warmth of Chase’s body.

But when finally I looked down again, just like the black feather mask the night before, the knife was gone.

*   *   *

By the time I got back to the condo, it was after seven and I knew I would be up late studying for my chem test.

Jazz drifted from my aunt’s iPod speakers. I saw her first, standing behind a chair at the table. She had her back to me, her hair pulled into a loose knot and her arms lifted.

Detective LaSalle sat in the chair with his head bowed and his shirtsleeves rolled up, making a guttural sound as she worked his shoulders.

If I could have, I would have slipped back out. But she shifted toward me as the door opened, her eyes meeting mine. “Trinity—you’re home.”

I tossed my keys onto the table where I always kept them. “Don’t mind me,” I said, heading toward the hall. “I’ve got a big test—”

Detective LaSalle twisted toward me, and something inside me jumped. He always had that
cop on the hunt
look in his eyes, hard, assessing, even when he and my aunt were kicked back watching a movie. The guy never relaxed. I was used to that.

But as he pulled back from my aunt’s hands, for a weird second, he was a stranger all over again, at the condo for the first time, full of questions about how I knew Jessica—and why I thought they should search the mansion in the Garden District.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, looking back and forth between them. “What’d you want to talk to me about?”

Aunt Sara didn’t have much makeup on, just a light shadow at her eyes, making her look a lot younger than thirty-three. She had on her favorite jeans and a
SAVE THE GULF
tee. Wire-wrapped turquoise dripped from her ears—another creation she’d been playing with.

Since opening the shop, she was constantly sketching or experimenting, working up designs and possibilities. It was bizarre to come in and find her and Detective Tell-Me-Your-Secrets beading a necklace or stirring essential oils.

“Aaron needs to talk to you,” she said, stepping back.

Standing, he retrieved a thin manila folder from the table. “Want you to take a look at a few pictures.”

I stayed where I was. “Why?”

His eyes met mine, and his mouth twisted.

“Trinity
.
”
My aunt’s voice was oddly quiet.

Detective LaSalle shoved a hand through a thick wave of hair, a gesture of frustration I almost never saw from him. “Got a call about a missing girl.” His voice was flat. “No one has seen her for over twenty-four hours.”

This was New Orleans. People vanished all the time. Sometimes they said good-bye or scribbled a note, sometimes they just went to the restroom and never came back. Sometimes those left behind noticed immediately, and sometimes days went by. Sometimes longer.

“And?” I asked.

He looked up from his iPhone—I couldn’t tell if he’d received a text, or had been reviewing one. “Her coworkers said she’s been jumpy, looking over her shoulder.”

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. “And you think I might be able to help?”

The strangest look passed between him and my aunt. She stepped toward me, twisting my grandmother’s wedding ring on her right ring finger.

“It’s more than that, Trin,” she said, but didn’t need to finish. The buzz started all over again, lower, deeper, and with it I stepped toward the table.

“He thinks you know her.”

SEVEN

The eyes. They stared up at me, wide and dark,
knowing
. Next to the photo lay a torn scrap of paper—with my name written all over it, big and small, in print and in cursive, black and blue and pink. Neat.

In red.

“We found that in her apartment,” LaSalle said as I braced my hands against the table, and tried to breathe.

“Grace,” I whispered, and the room started to spin.
GRACE,
I’d spelled out with the Ouija Board.

DIE

“You know her,” Aunt Sara murmured.

I looked up. My aunt was crazy pale. I was pretty sure I was, too. “She’s a palm reader,” I said. “The one I told you about last fall.”

“Have you talked to her since then?”

“No.”

She looked up from the scrap of paper. “Then why would she write your name?”

I seriously needed to sit down. “I don’t know.” Only that a whole bunch of mismatched pieces were falling together into a very bad picture.

“Have you …
seen
anything?” Aunt Sara asked.

Slowly, I shook my head, even as the dream from the night before played at the edges of my mind.

“When was the last time you saw her?” Detective LaSalle asked.

I made myself look at him, even as I knew what I was going to see: that sharp, locked-in look that reminded me of a starved dog catching that first whiff of blood.

Four months. I’d last seen Grace the night LaSalle’s partner had hauled me down to the station, and Chase had walked away. When I’d run from the guy with the mask, and opened my eyes to find myself in the arms of a stranger.

“Last year,” I murmured, reaching for Delphi as she jumped onto the table. “Do … do you have any leads?”

“Nothing yet,” he said. “No signs of forced entry at her apartment. No screams, no nine-one-one calls. No blood. Her purse was on the sofa, wallet still there. By all accounts, she walked home Friday night, and vanished.”

And the very next night, after spelling out her name with the Ouija board, the sound of a girl screaming had sliced into the dream I’d been having for weeks.

But I couldn’t bring myself to say that, not to Detective LaSalle—not yet. Because really, I had nothing more than that. Maybe it was all some kind of psychic SOS—or maybe a random vibe I’d picked up on.

Until I knew for sure, I didn’t need him breathing down my neck.

*   *   *

Delphi followed me into my room.

Detective LaSalle wanted me to go to Grace’s apartment. He wanted me to stand where Grace had and smell the air she’d smelled, to close my eyes and see if I picked up on anything. He wanted me to concentrate on her name before I went to sleep. He’d even given me a picture to slip beneath my pillow. Seeding dreams, he called it.