Fragile Darkness (11 page)

“Broke his leg,” Jim said. “Couldn't walk so he dragged himself against the biggest tree and his big old Lab laid down in front of him, and they waited.

“I lost it when I saw him,” his father said. “I ran to him and dropped to my knees, and just held on, held on so goddamn tight, because I knew, I finally knew that I couldn't change what happened to your mama, and if I kept trying, all I'd end up changing was what I still had, what still lay ahead of me.”

In only a few minutes, Jim had told me more about Dylan than Dylan himself ever had.

“We do what we can, darlin',” Jim said, turning to me. “We don't give up. We embrace each day that we have and live every breath we take.”

He made it sound so easy.

So many people avoided talking to me about the big stuff, about Chase and LaSalle and my role in what happened. It was like sweeping dirt under the rug, or slapping paint on a wall. If people didn't talk about it, it wasn't real. Or maybe they just didn't know what to say, or didn't want to make me relive it all over again.

But here was this grizzled ex-cop, who'd tracked bad guys, and when he had to, killed them. But beneath all that lay the heart of a man,
a father.

“Thank you,”
I said, but before I could finish Dylan's phone beeped, and he was pushing to his feet and turning as he stepped toward the dogs.

A few seconds passed before he turned back to us, the sweep of his hair emphasizing the sudden tension to his face. “I've got to go.”

Jim and I stood at the same time. Father looked to son. Son looked back at father. Something silent and pronounced passed between them, and with a vague tilt of vertigo, I knew there was something they weren't telling me.

“What?” I crossed to him without thinking about what I was doing. I only knew that I needed to know, because it had to do with me. “What's going on?”

The phone beeped again. Dylan glanced back down, his hair hiding his eyes.

Jim moved closer.

The wind whipped around us, driving home the acute stillness to both Fourcades.

“It's about tonight, isn't it?” Grace had sensed something in the shadows, waiting. Something bad. “Did something happen? Grace said—”

Dylan looked up, his gaze slashing me to the quick. I could tell he didn't want to say anything, but I could also tell he knew he didn't have a choice. “The police are at the theater now. Someone had a knife.”

My mouth opened, but no sound came out.

“A bunch of kids got hurt before some guys chased him outside and tackled him. Two girls were taken to the hospital.”

“Oh, God,”
I whispered. “Maybe that's what I was picking up.” Questions tripped through me. “Do you know who the guy was?” Will? “Who was hurt? Is Grace okay? Kendall? Are they still there?”

Dylan's phone beeped again. He looked down, immediately let out a rough breath.

I rushed forward, taking him by the arm.
“What?”

His eyes met mine, and before he said a word, I knew.

Whatever was going on, it wasn't over yet.

“Come on,” he said, reaching for my hand. “We've got to go.”

And then he was running, we both were, toward his father's truck.

*   *   *

The night blurred around us.

With trees racing by, Dylan drove in silence, his eyes fixed straight ahead, while I sat in the passenger's seat, scrolling through the messages he and Grace had been sending for the past hour.

How's Trinity?

Resting. Tell me about the party.

It's like a bunch of zombies. There's something really dark here, something gathering. The vibrations are muted, distorted, but I can feel the panic, like someone crying out for help.

It's like before Katrina, when we all knew what was coming, but knew we couldn't stop it.

Be careful and let me know if anything changes.

Trinity doesn't belong in a place like this.

There's no telling what she picked up on or who picked up on her.

I was right.
That was all I could think. The flash of white meant something
bad.

Grace's last few texts, the ones she'd sent while Dylan and I had been on the patio, were about Kendall and Will.

We found Will. He was freaked, kept saying Kendall shouldn't be there.

We all left at the same time, but she won't go home. We're following him now.

We tracked him to a wooded area, but we can't find him. Kendall's a mess. She won't leave without him but she's scared to call his parents. She doesn't want him to get in trouble again.

That's when Dylan texted back.

We're on our way. Where exactly are you?

City Park.

I stared at the stark words against the white background. For a second everything else fell away, leaving only memory. Of Chase. Silhouetted against a tall white column in a clearing, with the blue, blue sky behind him.

Am I ever in your dreams?
he'd asked.

My heart squeezed. Everything had seemed so crazy innocent at the time. I hadn't known. I hadn't known about the premonitions, or why I had them.

Chase was the one who'd led me to those answers.

Chase was the one who'd led me to Dylan, and a dream as dangerous as it was forbidden.

And then everything went all watery, and I blinked against the sting, returning Chase to the quiet sanctuary of memory, and me to the truck with Dylan, racing toward the blur of trees hulking against the blanket of stars.

*   *   *

Grace met us by the fountain. Last fall water had sprayed up in a high arc to rain down around us. Now all that moved was the steady breath of the night wind through the hundred-year-old oaks.

In the moonlight, reddish-brown hair slapped at Grace's face. “We found him.” Her eyes were like dark pools, reflecting the horror of all she'd seen, and all she knew. “He's in a tree.”

Dylan looked beyond her, toward the line between the fall of moonlight and the shadows beyond.

“A tree?” A quick whisper of cold moved through me. “Why? Where's Kendall?”

“She climbed up after him, saying she won't come down until he does. But he says he can't. That he can't let them find him.”

“Let
who
find him?” I asked, but before Grace answered Dylan took off toward the back of the clearing.

We followed, Grace shooting me a quick, worried look as we left the open space and entered the shift of shadows. “Are you sure you're okay?”

With every minute that passed, the blurry edges from whatever I'd been slipped faded, and normalcy returned.

“Yeah,” I assured her, tearing through a clump of Spanish moss, that was
just
Spanish moss. The trees were just trees, the vines just vines. Everything was back to normal.

Almost.

Wordlessly we veered into the darkness, running along the carpet of decaying leaves. The night hummed around us, crickets and toads and all those other night sounds—and something else.

Chanting.

Dylan glanced back to me, his hair long and stringy against his face, but I saw the quick flash of his eyes.

We edged closer, each second playing like a slow, cautious breath as the monk-like cadence gave way to the fervor of a doomsday preacher.

“Then the kings of the earth, the very important people, the generals, the rich, the powerful, and everyone, slave and free, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains.”

Dylan stopped, reaching back to catch me by the waist and pull me into the shadow of a double-trunked oak.

Grace slipped in beside us. “The Book of Revelation,” she whispered.

Mixed with the quiet sound of Kendall begging Will to stop.

“And then they said to the mountains and to the rocks, fall on us and hide us from the face of the one who is seated on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb, because the great day of their wrath is now at hand.”

Grace frowned. “He says he's protecting her.”

Dylan glanced back. “From what?”

Her eyes went really dark.
“Me.”

I went to pull my hoodie tighter, not realizing until that moment that I'd run off wearing Dylan's T-shirt and sweats. “You?”

“And you, and everyone else who's following him,” Grace said.

Dylan stepped closer, the unexpected blast of heat drawing me back against him before I even realized I was moving. I started to shift away, but before I could move, his hands were there, sliding from my shoulders along my arms, warming.

“He's out of his mind,” Dylan muttered.

I twisted around, our eyes meeting.

I'd been out of my mind, too.

“Maybe
that's
what I was picking up on.” But even as I said the words, they rang hollow. If I flashed white for every stranger who drank too much or took things they shouldn't, my world would be an eternal North Pole.

“It's more than just him tripping,” Grace said, echoing my thoughts. “There's something else, a confusion or desperation, like he's afraid of something.”

The white flash,
I thought again. It meant something.

Bad.

“And then four angels stood at the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that no wind should blow on the earth, or on the sea, or upon any tree!”

Dylan turned me by the shoulders, leaving his hands curled there as he talked. Very little moonlight leaked through the tangle of vines, but I could tell the silver gleamed really dark.

“I need you to talk to him,” he said. “Can you do that?”

I looked up at him, at the curtain of hair cutting against his cheekbone, and reminded myself to breathe. I wasn't sure why it was so hard, but it was like I'd been holding my breath
forever,
waiting for the world to start turning again.

Now it turned, but the direction was wrong.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Get them down.”

“You want me to distract him?”

With a quick nod, he pulled away and disappeared among the shadows.

For a crazy second I wanted to drag him back.

Knowing that was the last thing I should do, I looked back at Grace. She stared off in the darkness, her pretty white poet's shirt torn at the sleeve and smeared with blood.

“I'm sorry I dragged you into this,” I said.

Tangles of hair streaked across her face, but when she glanced back at me, she smiled.

“You didn't drag me anywhere. I'm where I'm supposed to be—and so are you and—”

I'm not sure what made her stop. Maybe the quick flare of my eyes, or maybe the realization that there was no
and,
that any
and
there might have been ended the second the steady rhythm of hospital monitors fell into the scream of silence.

We could never go back to before.

“Kendall?” Slipping from the shadows, I emerged into a puddle of moonlight. “Kendall! Where are you?”

The Revelation recitation stopped. “Who's there?”

I ran toward Will's voice, searching the branches. “Kendall! Answer me!”

“Stay away,” he warned.

Near the base of the tree, a shadow slipped, and I knew Dylan was close.

“Are you okay?” I called to Kendall.

My only answer was a muffled sob.

I stopped and looked up, way up, and found them, her clinging to the big trunk with her maxi dress swirling around her legs, him balanced on the thick branch like it was a pulpit, in jeans and T-shirt and the beanie from Friday, using a clump of moss like a handle to steady himself.

I wasn't sure how high they were, maybe twenty feet, but it was far enough that I couldn't make out his face, only the shadowy movement of his body, and that he had a stick in his other hand.

“Will.” I did my best to keep my voice nonthreatening. “You need to let her down.”

Grace rushed up and grabbed my arm. “Be careful. There's no telling what he might—”

The hum started, low at first, zipping through me like an electrical current. My thoughts scattered, but on some level I recognized the vibration from the Greenwood party. And then came the explosion of blinding white, taking away everything, everything but the quick, X-ray flash of blurred shadows against the bleached-out night. But then that faded, too, leaving only the high curve of a roller coaster.

And it all started to play, exactly like it played through the shadows of my sleep, Chase silhouetted against a bloodred sky, running …

Except he wasn't running this time. He stood there unnaturally still, looking down to me.

Because it wasn't Chase, I realized, trying to pull myself away from the flashback. This was Kendall's boyfriend, Will, balanced high on a tree branch, looking down at me, as if listening, waiting.

“It's her,” he mumbled over the rush of the wind. “She's here. I found her.”

The images blurred,
fused.
I tried to pull them apart, tried to separate before from now, memory from reality, but everything kept spilling together, and then I could see Chase again, lying on the ground trying to talk.

You're okay,
I'd promised.

“… get out.”

The night stilled. Everything. Even the wind. There was no breath, no pulse.

“Get … LaSalle.”

They were Chase's words.

Chase's exact words.

Except they didn't come from my memory.

They came from high in the tree.

 

ELEVEN

Chase's words, my memory.

Spoken by a complete stranger.

“Will?” Kendall's voice shook. “You're scaring me. What are you talking about?”

Help's coming,
I remembered saying.
Just hang on
.

“You have,”
he slurred, and I almost dropped to my knees all over again.
“To get out of here.”