Fragile Darkness (21 page)

“He's going to get the help he needs,” Jackson added. “And you need to stay away from him, away from that whole scene.” He hesitated, his gaze gentling. “The people behind bliss … the last thing they want to see is someone like you walking among them. Let us take care of this.”

A blast of cold shot through me, while a blast of heat shot from Dylan. Someone like me.
Someone who knew stuff.

“She's not going to any more parties,” Dylan said.

Before I even looked at him, before I met the dark intensity of his eyes, I knew what he was thinking: the people behind bliss had already tried to get rid of me once before.

“What kind of person
does
that?” I whispered, shaken. “What kind of person puts a drug like that on the street?”

Jackson's smile was the sad, point-blank kind.

“Monsters walk among us,” he said simply. “It could be a husband, a father, a teacher.” Suddenly the cool undercover vibe hardened into the bleakness of a cop who'd seen too much. “I was at Aaron's house hundreds of times. I ate there. I slept there. Watched the Super Bowl.” He looked beyond me, through the big window to the darkness outside.

“Even when I went back, I still didn't see anything out of the ordinary,” he said. Rage twisted his face. “Except in the attic. He'd refinished it into a big media room. That's where we found…”

I knew the second he realized he'd said more than he meant to. “Found what?”

He let out one of those rough, frustrated breaths, obviously debating what to say. “That's why I called your aunt.”

Dylan moved closer.

“Tell me.” I didn't need to be unblocked to know it was bad. “It's about me, isn't it?”

He stood there all contained, every muscle tight, vibrating. “The portraits,” he said, and it all glittered there in the dark coal of his eyes, the truth and the agony, the disgust. “He had the portraits from Belle Terre.”

At first I thought I must have misunderstood him. But the way he looked at me, the way Dylan closed the rest of the distance between us and came right up to my side, standing so close the heat from his body warmed mine, told me there was no misunderstanding.

The portraits still existed, the images of
GLORY
and
ECSTASY, RAPTURE
and
ETERNAL.
Of me. My life.

My future.

Or was it my past?

Increasingly I didn't know that there was a difference.

“That's why I called your aunt,” he said. “To see what she wanted me to do with them.”

He'd seen them. He knew what they contained, what a complete stranger had seen, and painted.

“Where are they now?” I asked, more desperately than I meant. “I want to see them.”

He glanced at Dylan, as if asking if that would be okay.

“They're of
me,
” I reminded, annoyed. “I have a right to see them.” I
needed
to.

Frowning, Jackson reached for his phone. “They're at headquarters.”

“When can I—”

“But I have pictures,” he said, stopping my question. Within seconds the cool, heaviness of his iPhone pressed down against my hand.

I stared down at the image of my face against a sea of shooting stars, with soft waves of brown falling against bare shoulders. My gaze was open, seeking, my lips parted.

After weeks of worrying about what the portraits might show, a quick breath of relief rushed out of me.

Until I thumbed to the next one and saw the tree-shrouded altar glimmering in the moonlight. I lay on top with my arm falling limply over the edge and my face turned to the side, exposing eyes wide and unseeing, exactly like I'd seen in my dreams, so many times before.

But I had no idea if the scene was only that, a freaky, recurring dream,
or my future.

At the bottom, silvery letters swirled into one word:
GLORY.

Mechanically I flicked to the next picture, the slam of my heart slowing when the tarot card appeared, the one I'd drawn two nights before, of the girl draped in robes of red and standing in front of gleaming swords, with a puddle at her feet and a castle in the distance behind her.

Me. My hair blowing in the wind. My cheekbones.
My
dragonfly with the glowing greenish crystal dangling from a chain of bronze.

Bound and blindfolded.

“It's the Eight of Swords,” Detective Jackson said.

I swung toward him, he was so not a fortune cards kind of guy.

“I looked it up,” he said, pushing a thick gnarled dread from his face, reminding me for a minute of a kid caught sneaking cookies and trying to explain it away. “Something about facing the truth and emotional release.”

Needing to move on, I dragged my finger against the cool glass, pulling up the fourth image, and realizing too late that sometimes what came next was only more of the same.

Flames stained the darkness in violent red streaks, consuming the old white chapel while, amid the sanctuary of ancient trees, I kneeled. My head was tilted, long dark hair flowing in the wind, my eyes closed.

But I wasn't alone.

Dylan was there, too, kneeling in the moonlight, with his hands tangled in my hair and his shoved back from his face to reveal the wide slant of his cheekbones, and the burn in his eyes.

“Blew me way,” Detective Jackson said, but I barely heard. It was one thing to live a moment, to take pictures so you could look at them later and remember. But this …

It was like having one of the most forbidden moments of your life tattooed in plain view, a moment you'd give anything to erase, or completely rewrite.

“Why?” I asked, trying to understand. “Why did LaSalle take these?” The thought of him having the portraits, the random illustrations of my life, made me want to throw up.

“Because they were important to you,” Dylan said, sounding a lot like his father. “Having them gave him power.”

“I'd kill him every day for the rest of my life, if I could,” Jackson vowed darkly. “And it would still be too good for him.” His eyes met mine, and hardened. “If not for you, he'd still be preying on young girls.”

*   *   *

I gave Jackson the pills, but didn't tell him where they came from, only that someone had given them to me at Club Rouge. Amber didn't need the cops breathing down her throat.

She needed bliss to go away.

It took awhile to get Jackson to leave. Finally I closed the door behind him, but it was a long moment before I turned around.
Everything had changed.

Dylan stood against the sea of paint-smeared plastic with Delphi in his arms. Her eyes were closed, her body fluid, but her motor-boat purr rumbled between us.

He didn't belong there. That was all I could think. I needed to be alone, to figure out what I was supposed to do now.

Needing to do something,
anything,
I headed to the kitchen for a glass of water.

“You want some help cleaning this up?”

“No, thanks,” I said, turning back around to the crinkled tarps. Helping me meant he would stay longer. “I'm not sure Aunt Sara is done.”

His eyes met mine. “Neither are you.”

I froze mid-sip.

“You're not going to stop,” he said, watching me with the quiet burn of understanding in his eyes. “You're going to try to talk to Will again.”

I set down the water more forcefully than I intended. “I have to.” The reality of bliss was the missing piece, the one that made a picture start to form. Whatever danger I was picking up around Will, whatever secret someone wanted to make sure I didn't uncover … bliss resided at the heart of it.

“It's like I'm following this trail of bread crumbs—”

Dylan's mouth curved, a faint, ghost of a smile that jumbled up my thoughts.

“What?” I said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

The smile turned lopsided. “Now you're Gretel? No more Alice? No more Goldilocks?”

This time it was my turn to stare, my turn to stand in the recessed lighting of the kitchen and watch
him
as my mouth curved. “It's probably best if I quit waking up in strange places, don't you think?”

His hair fell against his face, sliding in along his cheekbones and making his eyes look deeper set.

“Probably,” he agreed, but just as quickly the moment passed, and his smile returned to the shadows.

“You need to be careful, Trinity. There's a real chance the people behind bliss know who you are, that they're the ones who got rid of you last night. You don't want them to think you know who
they
are.”

I looked away, staring at a glass-like rock toward the back of the counter, nearly identical to the one Grace had given me the night before. Black obsidian.

“I know,” I said, picking up a half-burned bundle of herbs that had not been there that morning.

“Smudge sticks,” Dylan said.

Sage, I realized, recognizing the pungent scent from his father's house the night before—and Horizons.

“For cleansing,” he said.

I dragged them closer, inhaling deeper. “It didn't seem like that big of a deal Friday night,” I whispered. “I thought I'd see if I could do a reading of Will, and that would be that.” I drew in another deep breath, let it out slowly. “Three days later, I realize a lot more is at stake.”

“You need to let the cops deal with the bad guys, Trinity.”

Before they dealt with me.
“I'm not going to any more parties,” I said. “But I do need to talk to Will again. In the bathroom, it was like we were having two conversations, one with words, the other with our eyes. If he's picking up stuff from me, if he's going to those parties and experimenting with bliss—”

“Then maybe he's picking up stuff there, too,” Dylan finished for me.

Not too far from the obsidian, the little prescription bottle sat near a partially burned votive, Aunt Sara's pills, her own personal primer to cover up what she didn't want to feel.

“Maybe that's why he's taking it,” I said. “Because everything's different after his accident and he doesn't know how to handle it.” He wanted to dull the edges, like Amber said. “But instead he's put himself in the path of something even worse.”

The quick white flash, the distorted shadows … “Maybe if we can get Will to Julian. We can try to access my—”

We.
The word lodged like a rock in my throat.

When had it become we?

“Why?” I asked before I could talk myself out of the question, or remind myself that the answer didn't matter. “Why are you always there when things get crazy?” Even when I asked him to stay away. “Because of your dad?”

He stood there all crazy-still, watching me across the bar. Silence screamed between us.

“No,” he finally said, lowering Delphi to the back of the sofa. “Because of you.”

 

TWENTY-ONE

Slowly he crossed the plastic between us.

“Because I saw you last night after my dad found you,” he said, “and I know how much worse it could have been.”

I told myself to look away, but couldn't.

“Because I don't want you to get hurt again.” His voice roughened around the words, ripping against the quiet of the condo, and me. “Because I'd change it all if I could,” he said, coming up next to me and taking the bundle of herbs from my fingers. Lifting them, he dragged the sotty ends along my forehead. “But I can't.”

This,
I thought a little frantically. This was why I couldn't be alone with Dylan, exactly the kind of conversation we couldn't have, that I didn't know how to have—that I didn't
want
to have. Because when he looked at me like that, with quiet understanding in his eyes, little fissures started springing up inside of me, and it was all I could do to breathe. Being with him hurt in ways I'd never imagined when I first saw him standing in the shadows of his father's porch last fall.

Except, that was the problem. Last fall was not the first. I'd seen him,
known him,
long before that.

Once, knowing he had my back made me feel crazy strong. Now I couldn't help but think about my glass dragonfly, and how fragile perfection could be.

“Because I can't let you fly blind,” he added, and then he was touching me, turning my hand up to drag the bundle along the inside of my wrists.

I stared down at the smear of white ashes against pale flesh. “You talked to Julian,” I realized.

“He's worried about you.”
And so am I.
But Dylan didn't say that. “Tomorrow's Mardi Gras,” he said instead. “With the crowds we'll want to get an early start.”

The quiet words drifted through me. I knew there was no point telling him no, that there was no
we
. Because until the whole bliss/Will thing was over, there
was
a we. No matter how much I didn't want him around, I couldn't deny we made a good team. I'd have to be reckless to not want Dylan to have my back.

Done smudging, he released my arm and stepped back, returning the herbs to the counter.

“You better get to bed,” he said. “Eight's going to come pretty early.”

*   *   *

I couldn't sleep.

Every time I closed my eyes, my mind raced. I could see Will holding Kendall while she cried and Detective Jackson checking my pulses, Dylan holding my cat, and
the portraits
: me starring as the VIII of Swords and draped across a stone altar, kneeling in the moonlight with Dylan while the world around us burned.

Everything kept swirling. I tried a long hot shower, a cup of warm milk, deep breathing, meditating, even counting sheep, but nothing worked.

At eleven thirty Aunt Sara got home. We talked about the shop and the parades, but nothing big or important. At twelve thirty she went to bed and I excavated the sofa and curled up with my journal to sort through all the questions, but instead found myself returning to the letter.