Fragile Darkness (16 page)

“You should go over and say hi,” I suggested with a quick glance across the street. She no longer stood outside. “See for yourself.”

Standing beside a wide table of crystals and votives, Julian looked at me as though I'd asked him to walk in front of a firing squad—or send
her
in front of one. “She doesn't want me there right now.”

“That doesn't mean she doesn't need you,” I blurted out.

With a quick blast of shadows in his normally all-knowing eyes, he went back to arranging crystals. Even across the room, I could feel the sudden web of tension.

“What's the deal between you two?” One of these days I was going to find out. Because there totally
was
a deal. Or at least there had been. “Why do you both get weird when I mention the other?”

He looked up, the shadows in his eyes replaced by something dark and fathomless. “Let it go, Trinity. Not everything can be forced. Some things are simply too fragile,” he said, his gaze drifting back toward Fleurish! “If you try too hard, everything shatters.”

My heart squeezed, partly because of the irony of the word,
flourish,
but mostly because he was right. You couldn't see inside, not through the glass and the shadows.

“One day I'm going to kill that man for what he did to you and Sara.”

Two things struck me simultaneously: one, how his voice wrapped around my aunt's name, making it sound like Laura with an “S.”
Saura.
It made something inside me smile and cry at the same time.

The second was what Julian said about LaSalle. “His partner already killed him,” I reminded.

The strangest smile curved his mouth. “Doesn't mean I can't do it again.”

The trippy words did a quick stutter-step through me. “Like in another life?” I asked, thinking about what Dylan had said the night before. “Or the astral?” I made a funny face. “Can you kill someone there who's already dead?”

His smile widened, carving crinkles around his eyes. “I'll let you know.” He glanced out the window for a long, chant-filled moment before turning back to me. “You ready?”

*   *   *

White surrounded me. Walls, the floor, the sofa, everything was as white as the blizzard hiding the vision trying to form.

I'd been in the upstairs room only once before, the afternoon four weeks ago when Julian had first helped me slip from one consciousness into another. With the soft, transcendent sound of harps and gurgling water drifting around us, we did everything the same: I sunk against the couch and drank chamomile tea, he kneeled beside me and fastened a cuff around my arm to monitor my vitals,
just in case.

The first time the precaution had been hypothetical. Now I knew exactly what could go wrong when I left my body and traveled to a higher dimension.

“Do you think it'll work?” I asked. “That I'll find the vision trying to form?”
And finally see what lay beyond the white.

Julian looked up from a laptop, white, of course. “It's possible.” His mouth thinned, not a smile, but not a frown, either. “But you must remember the astral plane is not like a mall where you go shopping for memories or visions. The last time we had a target, a specific dream I was guiding you to.”

I concentrated on the trail of smoke rising from a single white votive, but through the flame I could see the small dark room all over again, where my whole life had caught fire.

Sometimes I thought I'd been foreseeing the inferno at the chapel. The twist of longing and fear was the same, the intensity. Even the words.

“You're here. You're really here.”

“Always.”

But there'd been no fire in the shadows of the room where I'd dashed after running through the tall grass, not the kind with flames anyway.

“Don't think about last time,” Julian said. “You don't want to block yourself.”

If only it was that easy. “I'm trying not to.” But the hard slam of my heart refused to slow.

He put two fingers to my wrist, his mouth moving in a silent count for over a minute. At least two passed before he pulled back and lifted concerned eyes to mine.

“Do you want me to call someone?” he asked. “Dylan?”

I felt my eyes flare. “No.” The word came out with more force than I meant, so I softened it with a smile. “I don't need him.”

Julian's brows drew together.

I settled deeper against the sofa, ready to get started.

“So if the astral is where our dreams come from,” like he'd told me before, “but we don't remember dreaming, does that mean we didn't go?” Because for weeks there'd been nothing but darkness.

“Memory is not an accurate gauge of reality,” Julian said quietly. “There are many reasons we forget, and many reasons we rewrite. What we think we know, what we think we remember, is barely a fraction of what there is.”

The room wobbled, a faint swirl of vertigo, over the moment it happened.

His eyes narrowed, as if he could tell. “You're still focusing on your senses,” he said. “That's what you've been taught. It's what's easy. But the astral is beyond that which can be seen and touched … remembered.

“The astral is the source,” he said, more quietly now, all reverent-like. “And the source is without limits or boundaries.”

A quick rush of warmth swirled through me.
The source.
“Is that how I slip between the past and a glimpse of the future, all simultaneously?”

“It's all your life, sweetheart. Past, present, and future are man-made constructs to compartmentalize time. It's tidier that way.” His smile was oddly gentle. “Looking at a moment in isolation is like looking at the Mississippi River and pretending its point of origin is the past, and its destination, the Gulf of Mexico, is the future. Not true. It's all there simultaneously.”

Flowing. Always flowing. Sometimes smoothly, sometimes over rapids. Sometimes in drought, sometimes in flood.

“Now allow your eyes to close,” he instructed. “Let your breathing slow.”

I did as he said, concentrating on the flow of oxygen moving through me while he walked me through the rest of the process. Within minutes my body grew heavy.

“You're safe,” he murmured, his voice further away. “And loved. Let yourself feel it, a slow infusion of warmth through every cell of your body.”

The scent of lavender surrounded me. The rhythm of my body slowed.

“You see the elevator opening before you…”

I did, a shimmering portal opening through the darkness, exactly like it had when Dylan and I—

I broke the thought, but not before adrenaline streaked through the calm.

“Easy,” Julian said with slight pressure against my wrist. “Just breathe and step through the door.”

I did.

“Now lift your hand, lift it slowly, and push a button…”

They all glowered, shimmery and iridescent, like the door from last night, at the party.

Everything shifted again, a stronger ripple through the stillness.

“You're going home,” Julian continued, and that place inside me, that tight, locked-up place, started to open. “You're going back to where you came from…”
The source.

Warmth swirled slower, deeper, insulating layer by layer, until my whole body surrendered.

“Feel the light, feel it blend with your own…”

His voice drifted from somewhere far away, somewhere against the horizon. And with another drugging breath I was floating, too, drifting beyond the here and now, with the stars.

“Trinity.”

“I'm here,” I whispered, and with my words, the doors I'd forgotten about, those to the elevator, slid open. Beyond them stretched a corridor, long and glimmering.

I hurried forward. “Show me,” I called, searching.

The first door was locked. So was the second, and the third. No matter how hard I pushed or pulled, they didn't budge.

Through the silence came the drift of music, soft at first, louder with each slow breath I took. The hypnotic rhythm drew me, syncopated drums pulsing from behind a vibrant blue glow. I reached for a glass knob, cool to the touch, turned—and the door fell open.

Everything flashed, an X-ray-like explosion of shadows strewn against the bleached-out night, grotesquely twisted, frozen where they lay, as if they'd been dancing when the world ended.

But then white spilled in from all directions like thick, globby paint and the door slammed shut.

“No!” I grabbed the knob and twisted, trying to push back in.
“No.”
But it was like reinforced steel between me and the other side, keeping me out.

I spun around and ran to the next door, twisting the knob and shoving inside, but stopped the second I saw the silhouette of the roller coaster against a fading red sky.
“No.”
This time it was a whisper. I didn't want memory. I didn't want the past. I wanted what was yet to come.

Jerking back, I raced down the corridor, no longer shimmering but starting to fade, the doors blending together until there were no more.

“No!” I shouted, lunging.

“Trinity!”

I slammed down hard, the quick, violent impact reverberating through every cell of my body. I hung there, frozen, my breath burning from the inside out.

“Easy,” came a voice from behind me.

Blinking, I found Julian crouched beside me, and the final fringes of darkness fell away.

“What happened?” I asked against the sudden sting of brightness. Everything inside me raced, like I was running still, running always, even when my body didn't move.

He reached for my arm, sliding two fingers to my wrist. “You started to run.”

And now I was on the floor all the way across the room.

“Your pulse is thready,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

He kept his hand on my arm, no longer taking my pulse, but not breaking the contact, either. “Stress,” he said. “Anxiety, your body's reaction to what you experienced.” Something dark flashed in his eyes. “Tell me what you saw.”

Pulling myself into a seated position, I did. “It was so fast,” I finished. “Like an X-ray, gone before I could see any details.” Only the unnaturally contorted shadows.

“What about your dreams? What are you seeing at night?”

I wrapped my arms around my middle. “I'm not.”

“What do you mean, you're not?”

“I'm not dreaming,” I said. “Just…” I searched for the right words. “It's dark, like a night without stars. And sometimes I feel like I'm running. But all I ever see is the roller coaster.”

His brows drew together, his lips pressing into a thin, tight line.

Suddenly I stilled. “What are you thinking?” Because he so was. The dark swirl of his thoughts gleamed in his eyes.

Slowly, they met mine. “You're blocked.”

 

SIXTEEN

He called it psychic amnesia.

“It's like a door closing,” he said. “Just as people can lose their memory or identities, trauma can impact psychic abilities, too.”

I kneeled on the floor of his bright white room, trying to remember the last time I knew something before it happened. Four weeks, I realized, the morning I'd awoken from the dream about Aunt Sara, and Dylan and I realized she wasn't in Mexico, like she was supposed to be.

“It's a self-defense mechanism,” Julian said, “like a scab, the brain's way of protecting you from something you're not ready to experience, grief maybe. Guilt.”

“But I feel all that,” I said.
All the time.

“Then maybe you're protecting yourself from feeling it on a deeper level.”

I looked away from him, toward the white sofa against the white wall, but for a second I saw the tarot card I'd pulled from my mother's deck, the woman bound and blindfolded.

“For many years I've run a Web site,” Julian said as I realized I needed to investigate the VIII of Swords a little more. “With metaphysical information and quizzes, experiments, courses for strengthening abilities, that kind of thing.”

His voice was so quiet it was like he'd moved away from me. I think that's why I turned to look, to make sure he was still there. He kneeled right there, only inches away, his face a harsh collection of lines and memories, broken only by a few dark strands slipping from his ponytail.

“There's a discussion forum,” he said, all monotone-like, “where people talk about their experiences and share information. A lot of users post daily, comparing notes and sharing their learnings, like a public journal.” He paused, his eyes locking onto mine. “Several years ago the online quiz results dropped simultaneously, and users began flooding the message boards, reporting that their sixth senses had gone silent.”

Like mine.

“Within twenty-four hours, there was a surge in Web site traffic as people all over the world joined the discussion, with similar experiences, dreams, visions, telepathy, all silent. Even mine.”

His?

“I'm not like you,” he explained gently. “But I can sense things, feel them, like Grace does.” With a rough breath he looked beyond me, toward the white blinds hiding the window to Royal Street. “Like with LaSalle. I knew he was bad news,” he murmured. “And I knew he would hurt Sara.”
Saura.

My heart kicked.

“I could feel the coldness in him,” he said. “But that's all it was, a feeling.”

“Did you tell her?”

Julian looked away from the window, but not completely back at me. “She wasn't interested in what I had to say.”

“I never liked him, either,” I said.

Another rough breath ripped from him. “I know.”

And just like that, a quick sharp chill cut through me. If I had psychic amnesia, how would I know the next time someone like LaSalle came along?