Fragile Darkness (24 page)

I kept running. “I'm sorry,” I said for some reason. “So sorry. I didn't mean to drag you into this.”

“You didn't.”

Around me the crowd again thickened, forcing me to slow. I worked my way through them, knowing I had to—

Will.

I'd forgotten.

With a quick surge of adrenaline I darted into the recessed doorway of an old hotel and forced myself to focus on a quick text.

I'm close. Where are you?

His response flashed up less than twenty seconds later.

Go to the cathedral.

I'd been running and running, for so long. Far longer than the last ten minutes.

But in that moment I stood absolutely still, staring at the black letters against the glow of white, and without warning, Grace's words came back to me, about the shadows slipping closer.

What if that wasn't Will?

On a hard slam of my heart I crammed the phone back to my face. “I'll call you right back,” I said to Dylan.

“Trinity, what—” But I disconnected before he could finish and jabbed out Will's number, holding my breath with each ring.

After three he answered. “Are you close?”

It was him,
it was him.
“I'm on my way.”

Then the line went dead and I was running again, just as Dylan was running across the street.

“No!” Frantically I glanced around. “You can't let anyone see us together!”

He sprinted toward me anyway.

And with a quick twist, I realized what I'd done, that by hanging up the phone, I'd sent him straight back into the worst moment of his life. Before I could so much as move he was there, backing me against the cold brick of the old hotel. “Goddamn it, you can't do that!”

“Oh, God, I'm so sorry!” I said, trying to breathe. “I had to call Will, to make sure it was him.”

Dylan went absolutely still.

“To be
safe,
” I emphasized, more quietly this time.

Through the slits of his mask, the silver of his eyes burned through me.

“And it
is
safe,” I assured him. Without thinking, I lifted my hands to his arms, as if to push him away or pull him closer.

I did neither.

“But you can't go with me,” I whispered, swallowing hard. “You can't let Will see you.”

From the street behind us, sirens sounded. “Don't hang up on me again.”

I lifted my phone, and pushed his number. “I won't.”

Never looking away, he answered.

So much twisted through me at once, a quick swell of gratitude and relief, trust and regret. Regret for things I'd said and hadn't said, for things I could never say. For the before that had come and gone way too fast, and the after that could never be.

“Count to one hundred this time,” I said, and then I was running again, worming my way into the swarm of revelers and not letting myself look back, knowing I
couldn't,
because Will could be anywhere and …

And.

It was always the
ands
that got me.
Ands
could take you anywhere, or nowhere at all.

Not letting myself go anywhere past the moment I was in, I worked through the crowd to the beautiful old church, stopping by the fountain for my next instruction.

From there, the instructions came one at a time, thirty to forty-five seconds apart, each arriving at precisely the right moment, as if I was being monitored.

Go to the street behind the church. Walk one block. Turn left. Walk another block. Turn right. Look for a peach building. Walk between it and the green one.

I did exactly as he said. With each turn the crowds thinned, until finally they dispersed, and the old peach shotgun house came into view. I looked up, to the building on the other side, the pale green one and everything flashed.

 

TWENTY-FOUR

Life unfolds moment to moment.

Most of the time we roll from one breath to the next without thinking a lot about it. But sometimes everything explodes into sharp, excruciating focus, each sensation so acute it's like a knife to flesh. The softest sound blasts, and the gentlest touch stings.

I stood staring at the narrow concrete path winding between two buildings, the same path I'd taken six months before, two days after Jessica went missing.
With Chase.

It was one of the first times I'd seen beyond the here and now, to some other time, when a tiered fountain sprayed against the sky and clay pots overflowed with colorful flowers, and an old woman spoke in riddles.

At the time, I'd thought something was seriously wrong with me.

Now I knew I'd been picking up psychic residue.

“Talk to me, Trinity. What's going on?”

I was too close to risk speaking. Lifting my phone, I shot Dylan a text.

Everything's OK

Then I sent one to Will.

I'm here

There was only one way he could have brought me here, one person who could have guided him. The voices he heard were so not a drug-induced trip, like Detective Jackson claimed, or hallucinations from his NDE, as his parents believed.

Julian was right. I was right. The things Will heard were real.

“I'm here,” I whispered, hurrying down the path to the rusted gate. The old hinges creaked as the courtyard that once belonged to my mother's cousin came into view, the fountain dry and forgotten, the clay pots cracked and overtaken by weeds, the table and chairs rusted.

I stepped in as Will's next text arrived.

Go inside door B. I'm upstairs.

Door B.
Like last time.

I made my way through the shadows, toward the door that had transported me into a twilight zone of desperation and desecration, of death, of misery and sacrifice and love, of memory or prophecy. But that door didn't exist anymore. LaSalle had kicked it into a pile of splinters. This was a new door.

I stood there in the late-morning breeze, wondering which world I'd find this time: the now, or that other time?

“Where are you?” Dylan asked, breaking the momentary trance. “What's happening?”

Only then did I realize I'd slipped between the buildings without telling him what I was doing. Texting him, I told him about the green and peach houses, and that I was going inside.

“I don't like it,” he said seconds after I hit send.

I texted him back.

I'm OK. This place is

I hesitated, replacing the last three words.

I've been here before.

With a slow, steadying breath, I stepped through the door and into the room with the rose walls and grandfather clock, the curved velvet sofa and the black mirror, through which I'd seen my mother running toward a pale, still body draped atop an altar of stone, exactly like Faith had painted.

But none of that was there anymore. Only my memory populated the emptiness.

“I'm outside the gate,” Dylan said. “One word I don't like, and I'm coming in.”

Lowering my phone, I glanced at the unnatural white of my fingers curled around the edges. Making them relax, I assured Dylan I knew what I was doing.

His response was little more than breath. “So do I.”

I turned to the back of the room. Outside the sun shone, but here, inside with no electricity, the meager light leaking through dirty windows mixed with the darkness rather than chasing it away, creating a filtered, twilight effect.

Using my phone to guide me, I worked my way to and up a narrow staircase. A soft glow spilled from a doorway halfway down. I turned to go in, but stopped the second I saw the wall.

Dragonflies swarmed against faded peach, big and small, in red and black, hundreds of them, as perfect as they were out of place. Not real, but painted.
Spray
painted.

For a disjointed moment I couldn't move, think, couldn't do anything but stare at the hauntingly beautiful dragonflies, flying not up but down, all of them, angled toward the corner.

“Hi,” someone said, and I snapped back to life, twisting to find Will standing among the shadows with a bottle of water in his hands.

Only a faint haze made it through the grime-smeared window, but it was enough to make out the graffiti scrawled over all the walls.

“Hey,” I said, trying to make him feel comfortable.

He stepped toward me. “Thanks for coming.”

He was different. That was my first thought. His clothes were similar to the night before, faded jeans that looked a few sizes too big and a Metallica T-shirt, the beanie pulled low to his eyes. It still made him look stylish and vulnerable at the same time. But he was different, more
here,
almost … excited.

Jerkily he gestured to the wall behind him, more like a whiteboard now, with three labeled columns:
RANDOM WORDS, FEELINGS,
and
WARNINGS.

And I knew. Before Will said another word, I knew what I was looking at.

“I couldn't stop thinking about everything you said,” he blurted as I moved closer to the list of words. “But the stuff I hear seems so random. So…” He hesitated, like a kid turning in homework late. “I just started writing it all down.”

I stared at the insanely organized brain-dump, all categorized and labeled, like a glimpse into somebody else's mind. The words and pictures filled up all four walls, and I couldn't help but think with all this whispering at him, no wonder he thought he might be crazy.

“Where's Kendall?” I asked.

“I didn't tell her.”

I turned back to him.

He frowned, shaking his head. Something hot and dark and protective flashed in his eyes. “She's already freaked enough.”

“That's why you were so quiet yesterday,” I said.

He nodded. “At first I didn't want her to think I'm crazy. Now…” He pushed out a frustrated breath. “I don't want to scare her if I'm not.”

He so wasn't.

“Why here?” I asked before I could talk myself out of it. I knew Dylan was listening. I knew he would want to know everything.

“It's like that sometimes,” Will said from behind me. “Like someone's telling me to go somewhere.”

Chase.

I scanned the light of my phone around the wadded-up fast-food wrappers scattered among dirty blankets and dried flowers, the little piles of corn and ash, and for a second it was like walking into the house on Prytania all over again.

“Something happened here, didn't it?” Will murmured. “Something important?”

I stared at the words on the wall, the passage from Revelation he'd recited Sunday night, about four angels standing at the corners of the earth.

“A long time ago,” I said.

“When you…” He hesitated, like he wasn't sure about something. “… lived here?”

“No,” I said quietly. “I never lived here.”

“Are you sure?”

Yes,
I started to say, but before I could, the soft tinkling of a piano rushed through the silence of my mind, and I could see two little girls with long dark hair dancing in white dresses by the grandfather clock.

I had no time slot for the quick memory.

“I don't know,” I said instead, but that fraction of an instant was all it took for the blank look to come back into Will's eyes, as if he wasn't there anymore.

“Are you picking something up now?” I asked.

He blinked, and the Will from a few minutes before came back.

“All the time,” he admitted, staring at the swarm of dragonflies. “Especially in public, like school or parties. It's like whispers from another room, like a door got left open.” He hesitated, looking more like a fascinated little boy all the time. “A door that's supposed to be
shut.
”

My heart kicked, hard. “A door to where you were?” I asked, already knowing the answer. “After the accident?”

He looked beyond me, toward the hall, but I knew that wasn't what he was seeing.

“It was so cool there.” The memory, like that of an awesome vacation, flickered through his eyes. “I was like a bird, floating and watching everything happen around me, but not feeling anything. I could see the doctors and nurses around the table.” The happy part ended, and his eyes darkened. “The blood.”

I angled my phone back against the three columns on the wall behind him, and with one scrawled word, everything inside me locked up:
FOREVER.

It was the last of the Random Words list, right below
DESTINY
and
STOP.

“It was like some trippy cool
movie,
” Will kept on, “like I was watching it happen to someone else. The ceiling was all glowy, and it started to expand, like a window opening to a whole other world.”

Like when I'd almost drowned. “Somewhere you wanted to see?”

He nodded quick, still like a little boy, but now guiltily at the confession.
“Like being inside some super-bright star,”
he described, and the light of that, the wonder of it, glimmered in his gaze. “I felt all free, like when you go skinny-dipping.”

I couldn't help it. I smiled.

“And there was barking, and then
my dog
was there, running like he used to, toward me…”

I shifted my light, this time to his list of warnings and found the two darkly scrawled lines in a different handwriting.

Watching u.

Time running out

“I hugged him and he was licking me,” Will said as a quick blast of cold went through me. The warning was the same, the handwriting the same, the exact same as in my journal.

“But then I heard Kendy screaming and I turned to see her running toward the ER, where I was. Except I wasn't there anymore. And then there were all these voices, whispering, coming at me from all directions:
Will, please! Will, come back. I love you. Don't go. You can't stay. Please don't go. It's not time. You have to wake up!
”