Fragile Darkness (19 page)

Fascination.

Heart slamming, I ran past them, and saw Will crammed against the back wall and Kendall crying.

“Trinity!” she shouted as the guy shoved up against Will went statue still. “Make him stop!”

But I was the one who stopped, the one who froze, staring at the guy with his back to me, the way he stood in a fighter's stance with his feet shoulder-width apart, the sinewy strength, the jeans hugging his legs and the black T-shirt stretching across his wide shoulders, the dark, silky hair cutting in a line beneath his ear, and the intricate lines of the dream catcher inked against his arm.

 

EIGHTEEN

“This isn't a game,” he seethed. “This is real, and if she gets hurt—”

So much hit me at once, dull, little pebbles of anger and frustration and confusion, all rolling through me, giving way to the soft swirl of inevitability.

Dylan.

I should have realized there was no way he was going to let me get out of his car and walk away, not after the bizarre encounter with Will, and not after I mysteriously appeared in his dad's flower bed with no memory of how I got there. Not after Will narrated my memories. Not after everything Dylan and I had been through.

Not when he knew exactly what I was going to do next.

Which he always did.

Whether I wanted him there or not, he always was, at the exact moment I needed him most.

Part of me wanted to be mad or annoyed, to shout at him that I meant what I said in the car, that I couldn't be around him anymore. But life didn't grant time-outs like that, not with Kendall crying and Will staring over Dylan's shoulder, directly into my eyes, like he knew I was the only one who could cage the animal.

Disconnecting myself from the unwanted rush, I squeezed toward them.

“It's okay,” I said, sliding in next to Dylan. He stiffened as I reached for him, but I took him by the arm anyway, not thinking about what I was doing until a different rush went through me, this one hot and dangerous. “Don't hurt him.”

Moving fast, I caught a glimpse of Victoria and Deuce out of the corner of my eye as I spun toward the wood door of the bathroom and pushed it open.

A group of girls stood bunched around the cup-lined counter, sliding lipstick over their mouths and redoing their eyes, not looking up until Dylan escorted Will to the graffiti-filled wall near the air blowers.

“Hey you fuck-head!” a skinny blonde protested. “What the—”

All Zen-like, Dylan looked at her. That's all he did. Looked at her.

Her eyes, one artfully remade and the other still smeared, widened before glazing over, and without another word, she motioned to her friends. They ran out as a toilet flushed and an older woman hurried from a stall.

Then we were alone.

I shot Dylan a quick look.

Silently he backed off, relocating to stand beside the door so no one could come in, or get out.

Question after question tripped through me, but I had
no idea
where to start. At the Greenwood party, when I'd agreed to follow up with Will, I'd known it was the right thing to do. Because of the flash of white. Now, three days and a whole lot of bizarre later, I realized there was way more at stake than I'd first realized.

It was that whole coincidence thing.
They didn't exist.

But where did you start? By telling him about the vision trying to form? That I thought he was in the path of something bad? That I thought someone might be following me, too? That his near-death experience had changed him?

The way he stood looking at me, with the breath ripping in and out of him, courtesy of Dylan, told me he wasn't exactly going to be receptive to anything.

But then Kendall looked at me, and gave me the opening I needed.

“I told him what happened at the party Friday,” she said. “When y'all were looking at each other.” She hesitated, shooting him a tentative look before continuing. “I told him that I asked you to do a reading.”

He hardly looked like the guy from the park. The clothes were the same, the jeans and T-shirt and beanie, but there was a quiet control to him tonight, like someone standing guard rather than spinning away from reality.

Through narrowed eyes he looked at me, as if Kendall had requested I perform some bizarre ritual rather—

That's when I remembered I
was
dressed like a voodoo queen. The mirror above the sinks showed dark hair streaking against a pale face, the heavy eyeliner and the faded red of my lips, the little doll hanging from the pocket of my dress.

Wonderful. Not exactly the best start, given there were entire blogs dedicated to the bad things that happened to people after being around me.

The dull throb of music pulsed through the walls and the door, muted, indiscernible, a world away. There was just Will and Kendall and me, and Dylan.

Trying to put him at ease, I offered my best voodoo-queen-next-door smile.

“Kendall's right,” I said. “There's nothing to be afraid of. I only want to talk to you.”

It would have been way easier without feeling the hot burn of his stare meld with the heat from the exposed bulb overhead. Already little streams of sweat ran down my chest.

“I read about you,” he finally said, confirming what I already saw in his eyes. Last night they'd looked dark, but tonight the bright light revealed the color of emeralds, swirling with doubt and apprehension, a determination that hadn't been there before.

“None of that stuff's even real,” he said.

I smiled, realizing
exactly
where to start.

“When I was a little girl I had a dog,” I told him. “A golden retriever, Sunshine. One day we were playing and she ran into a thicket, and I started to scream. I didn't know why, it was like there was something inside me, something squeezing so tight I couldn't breathe. And then everything started to flash and I saw her, saw Sunshine, lying dead in the grass.”

Kendall's eyes filled. Will, never ripping his gaze from mine, simply tucked her closer, and waited.

“But then she was there, running up to me and licking all over me,” I said, and for a second I was that little girl again, so crazy relieved to see her dog, and that whatever freaky thing had just happened was only that. A freaky thing.

“Two days later I found her dead on the other side of the thicket,” I whispered, and out of the corner of my eye saw Dylan shift.

She'd been alive when he'd come to visit that summer. He'd taught her to fetch.

“Exactly like I saw in the vision.”

Kendall paled.

Will took a quick step back against a scrawl of graffiti.

“It was
real,
” I told him. “And so was what you said to me last night.” I stepped forward, saw him try to step back again. But the wall left nowhere to go.

Lifting my arm, I turned my hand up, allowing him to see the leather coiled around my wrist. “Do you remember what you said about this?”

Unblinking, he stared down at the small dangling charms. “That you didn't take it off,” he murmured, for the first time sounding confused.

More pounding at the door. Louder.

“That was a promise I made,” I told him. “The day someone special to me died.”

Slowly Will's eyes met mine.

“I've known things before they happen since I was a little girl,” I said. “And Kendall's right, something happened Friday at the party. I feel something around you, something bad. I can't see it yet, but I feel danger. And…” I hesitated, deciding to just throw it out there. “I don't think you're hallucinating. I think you're like me. I think your near-death experience changed you, like it does lots of other people, and that whatever it is you're experiencing, it's real. And that's why I was drawn to you.”

Like calls to like.

“Because your energy matches mine,” I pressed on, concentrating on him and not the music and shouting from the other side of the door, and not the way Dylan stood there, making sure the moment didn't break. “I think I'm supposed to help you. I
want
to help you. But you're going to have to trust me. You can't keep running.”

Kendall pulled back, gazing up at him.

Will looked from me to her, holding her gaze a long moment before looking back at me.

“If you're not seeing anything, how can you help me?”

With a quick glance back at Dylan, I stepped forward. “I'd like to touch you. Sometimes that helps.”

You would have thought I'd asked to drive a knife through his heart. Fear, I realized as the blood drained from his face. Will was afraid. But the way he turned to Kendall, the quick streak of regret in his eyes, told me that the fear wasn't for himself.

It was for her.

So much played in her eyes, the memories she'd told me about the night before, of when he'd died, and the desperation from Friday, when she'd asked if I could help, but happiness, too. And love. Hope.

“Please,”
she whispered. “For me.”

He squeezed his eyes shut.

I felt like a voyeur watching them.

Finally he looked at her again, a rough breath shredding from him as he turned back to me and offered his hand.

Not sure what to expect, I stepped closer and pressed my palm to his.

The quick jolt knocked the breath from my lungs.

I made myself hold still, bracing against the current revving between us, stronger than the night before.

The green of his eyes went dead dark.
“He wasn't afraid,”
he said, looking beyond me, beyond
everything.
“Your mom was there.”

Everything tilted.
“What?”
I whispered, but before he could say anything, white exploded against black, and the shadows returned, sprawled against the ground with their arms and legs twisted, frozen where they lay.

I sagged, and then Dylan was there, crowding up against me and sliding an arm around me, murmuring for me to breathe.

I did, but each quick pull scraped more than the one before.

“What is it?” Kendall asked while Will continued to stand there, as frozen as the bodies strewn against the darkness of the X-ray flash.

Bodies?

“It's like they all just collapsed,” I whispered. In one instant. One heartbeat.

“Who?” Kendall gasped.
“Will?”

His eyes flashed, and then he was shooting me a don't-say-anything look as he wrapped her up in his arms.

“I don't know,” I answered as the door swung open, because Dylan was holding me instead of blocking the entrance. “I couldn't see faces.”

Girls rushed in, laughing, ranting. “Omigod, are you idiots crazy?” a Lady Gaga–wannabe shrieked, darting into a stall.

“It's going to be okay,” Will murmured to Kendall, staring at me over her head. “I promise nothing bad's going to happen.”

But the way he looked at me told a way different story.

A few more girls rushed in. “Come on,” Dylan said. “We can wait in the hall.”

I looked at Will, the way he'd turned to Kendall and was holding her, and knew Dylan was right. For now, with the flood of girls to the stalls and the mirrors, we'd have to go somewhere else to finish talking.

Drained, dazed,
disappointed,
I walked to the door and stepped back into the slow roll of amber into black.

Dylan moved so fast I had no chance to prepare, dragging me past the blur of my friends to the back of the hall and bracketing me there, against the wall in the same spot he'd caged in Will.

“What are you doing?” I breathed, but the second I saw the burnished gleam of his eyes, everything inside me jumbled.

“Don't fight me,” he muttered, bracketing me so tightly I could feel every vibrating line of his body.

“Dylan—”

He leaned down, brushing his mouth along my ear. “Put your arms around me.” There was nowhere to go, no way to escape, no way to miss the hard slam of his heart reverberating through me. “Pretend you like it.”

My mouth went dry.

“Now!” he commanded with an odd softness.

Finally the urgency in his voice registered, the same urgency I'd heard when he'd kicked down the door to my aunt's bathroom to prevent me from finding a way to make myself go to sleep. More than a little dizzy, I lifted my arms around his middle and held on—

It was already too late.

 

NINETEEN

“Trinity.”

The voice cut through the pulsing music, low, quiet, so totally, horribly familiar. I looked up, the moment snapping into focus as I realized what Dylan had been trying to do: hide me.

In the shadows of the narrow hall, Detective DeMarcus Jackson stood with his eyes blazing like hot, glowing coal, exactly like they had a month before from the bottom of the stairs leading to Grace's apartment.

It was the first time I'd seen LaSalle's former partner since the funeral.

“Detective Jackson.” I kept my voice strong. I wasn't doing anything wrong.

The artsy dreadlocks and big diamond earring made him look like a musician. His silky black shirt made him look successful in a dangerous kind of way. But he was a cop. And he was trained to hide what he thought. Blending in kept him alive. He could be anyone, I remembered thinking once. Like a chameleon, he could shift in the blink of an eye.

But in that moment, I knew exactly what he thought. It glittered in the way he looked at me, the surprise and the disappointment, the accusation.

“Don't make a scene,” he growled, and when his eyes slanted over to Dylan, an unspoken conversation flashed between them.

Very unlike Dylan, he eased away from me, giving me a quick glimpse of Victoria and Deuce and Trey.

Jackson took me by the elbow, turned, and stiff-armed the thin wood door behind him. It flew open, and a guy jumped back from a urinal, grabbing himself.

“You need to be done,” Detective Jackson said.