Fragile Darkness (28 page)

“Memories fade,” he murmured. “But dreams are always there.”

A single tear spilled over. Then another.

With a slide of his thumb, he wiped both away.

And it hurt, it hurt all over again. Blinking, I looked away. The image of me in the surveillance footage looked away, too, smiling softly and slipping against the mattress, pulling the covers high and snuggling the little golden puppy close.

“It's over,” Dylan said as Delphi's ears relaxed and she shifted down on her side, curling as her eyes slid shut.

“Almost.” I stared at the open journal against the old quilt, the words I'd written that belonged to someone else. “But not yet.”

*   *   *

Aunt Sara didn't say anything about Dylan spending the night, other than that we'd both been sleeping in the main room when she got home, so she'd left us there. She grabbed a quick cup of coffee and flashed a perfect robo-smile, then she was out the door for Ash Wednesday mass at the cathedral.

Minutes dragged into an hour. Dylan scrambled eggs and fried bacon. I tried to eat. I got dressed, I paced, I texted.

Kendall responded within seconds.

OMG. I'm at Will's house. The police are here. No one knows where he is. He says he's OK but won't say where. He says it's too dangerous. His parents want them to do one of those Amber Alerts, but the cops say they only do that for abductions. I'm so scared. Have you seen anything else? Do you think this is what you've been picking up?

Across the room, the grandfather clock ticked. One second. Two. Three. Four. Each louder than the one before.

“I feel like I should be doing something,” I said, after promising Kendall I'd let her know if I came up with anything. “Hanging out feels wrong.”

Dylan looked up from the sink. “You have done something. You've done a lot. You've done everything you can to follow up on a vision that won't form, and you led the police to everything Will's been picking up at parties.”

Jackson and his new partner Kiki were following up on every name and location Will had written on the wall, but so far they hadn't found anything they didn't already know.

I could feel Dylan watching me, even though I'd looked down. “You've risked your life,” he said, more quietly this time. “And you've gotten hurt. You can't keep putting it all on your shoulders.”

Beyond the big picture window, the sun slipped higher against a pale blue sky, making the red walls of the condo glow. There was a stillness to the city, as if even the office buildings and Super Dome needed to rest after the party the day before.

Rest was the last thing I wanted.

Restless, I stalked over to the bar and found matches in a drawer, then lit the bundle of herbs. The flame flared between me and Dylan.

He leaned in to blow them out.

“What happens if we let it keep burning?” I asked.

His eyes met mine. “You really want to find out?”

A quick little streak went through me. “Probably not the safest idea,” I said, then puffed out a breath, dropped the herbs back to the decorative ceramic plate, and reached for my journal. Maybe if I wrote, I thought, flipping to a blank page—

There were none.

Crude drawings stared up at me from every page, those in the back and even those in the front, where I'd been writing for the past few weeks: roller coasters. Some small, some big, some perfect, some
broken.

Hundreds of them.

“Trinity?” Vaguely I was aware of Dylan coming around the bar and crowding in behind me, of his hands on my shoulders, but it was all so very far away, disconnected somehow, disconnected from everything. Or maybe that was
me.
Maybe I was the one who'd left the moment and the room, who'd slipped somewhere else.

But then I was moving, lifting my hand to the page to drag a finger along a high curve, where a small, perfectly drawn dragonfly fluttered.

Dylan's hand joined mine. “This took longer than just last night.”

“It's what I've been seeing in my sleep,” I whispered. “And in the astral, when I tried to pull the vision into focus and … Will drew it, too.” My eyes stung. My throat burned. “I thought it was a memory.”

The warmth of Dylan's breath feathered against the side of my face. I twisted toward him, searching his eyes with mine. “What if it's more than that?”

There was only one way to find out.

*   *   *

A beat-up white El Camino sat alone in the parking lot.

“Come on,” I said, stepping into the warm, late-morning breeze. Jackson and Kiki were already inside the abandoned amusement park, along with several other plainclothes officers. I didn't know what they might find, but I knew I had to follow the bread crumbs. They meant something. They always did.

I also knew Deuce was right about the so-called adventures of a psychic teen. Backup was a good idea. I could follow clues, but I wasn't a cop.

“They've done a sweep,” Dylan said, coming around the other side of the car. I tried not to stare at the faint bloodstains on his jeans, still there despite the fact that Aunt Sara had washed them sometime during the night. His shoulders strained against Julian's black button-down. A few steps behind him, Grace stood staring at the sign that still read
CLOSED FOR STORM.
She'd insisted on coming with us. “No sign of anything so far.”

Which meant maybe what waited beyond the welcome center was something only I could see, or Grace could feel. It was that whole places had memories thing. Maybe, like the house on Prytania or the old hospital, the shadows had a story to tell. Abandoned places were the perfect hiding and rendezvous spots for people who didn't want to be seen.

Please,
I thought.
If there was something I needed to see, let me see it.

At first I walked. Then I ran. “I'm here,” I murmured, racing through the cluttered welcome center.
“Show me why.”

It was all the same, the exact same, the faded pastel French Quarter–styled buildings along the main drag, with their dark, broken-out windows and scrawls of graffiti. Halfway down, a man in a cowboy hat and tight-fitting jeans lifted a camera toward a woman in a white tank top and denim shorts posing by a huge broken urn.

Pretending to be tourists, Detective Jackson and Kiki looked nothing like cops.

They barely glanced at me as I hurried past them, but I knew they were 100 percent dialed in.

About to round the corner, I glanced back to find Grace staring at the building where we'd found her lying like a discarded mannequin.

I hurried back.
“Grace,”
I said, taking her arm in my hands. The sun shone bright and hot, but her skin was like ice. “You don't have to do this.”

Long, reddish-brown hair whipped against her face. “I'm not afraid of this place,” she said, blinking. “Running from what happened doesn't make it go away.”

I let out a slow breath, and with it a low, steady current echoed through my blood.

“Trinity.”

I spun around, searching. Swarms of black birds dipped and soared. Hundreds flocked to overgrown bushes, resting before lifting back toward the pale blue sky. The past and the future, the now, they merged, fusing into something so seamless it was impossible to know where one ended and the other began.

“I'm here because you are.”

I turned the corner and started to run again, and then Dylan was there, beside me in the twirling kaleidoscope of buildings and rides and memories. Sharp gusts of wind pushed us past the ghostly metal swings and the collapsing carousel, toward the ice cream shop with the vanilla swirl rising up from the roof.

“You have to get out of here!”

Around the corner the Mardi Gras Madness ride waited, with its long-abandoned cars waiting in an eternal line. Beads still lay scattered against the cracked concrete. The jester, so like the one from the Rex parade, still hung upside down.

Everything inside me raced, faster now, faster with each step I took deeper into the park. “It's all the same,” I murmured.

Dylan stopped, scanning the restrooms and restaurants of the concourse, where together we'd searched for my aunt.

Nothing
had changed.

And I didn't understand, didn't understand how time could stand still like that, how everything could be
exactly
the same, untouched, despite the fact that life barreled on.

I felt it then, the vibration inside me, faint at first, stronger as I twisted toward the weed-infested path winding beneath the
JESTER
sign. Without hesitation, I ran toward the rusted gate.

“Trinity.”

I kept going.
We
were the ones who needed to compartmentalize life into beginnings and endings.
We
were the ones that needed limits, boundaries. But nothing ended. Not really. Not even death and devastation had that power. It was only
to be continued.

Changes. Transitions. They were everywhere, from season to season, dormancy giving way to rebirth. It was all so clear as I followed the path that Chase had, through the overgrown shrubbery crowding the sidewalk and the birds swarming the roller coaster, one purpose giving way to another.

“Trinity!” Dylan shouted, and this time I turned. He sprinted up behind me, his eyes dark, tortured.

“I have to do this,” I whispered. To fill in the blanks and understand what it had been like for Chase in those final moments, to pull the random images into a coherent picture. “Don't try to stop me.”

With the wind slapping against him, he stood without moving, watching me in that way of his, touching me, holding me, despite the distance between us. It was like he was etched into the moment, etched with something sharp and permanent and
painful.

“Come with me,” I said, holding out my hand.

He didn't take it, but he did come up beside me. Together, we made our way through the empty station, exactly like Chase had done four weeks before. Heart slamming, I worked my way onto the track and toward the high curve, the incline so gradual I had no idea how high I moved, until I looked down.

I swayed, throwing out my arms to catch myself at the same moment Dylan reached for me.

With the park swirling around us, we stood like that a long moment, my arms thrown out for balance and his hands at my waist. I wasn't good at distances, but guessed we stood three stories from the ground.

“You can see everything.”
The rides, the buildings, the paths. The sprawl of trees and interstate beyond, farther away, toward the east, the hazy city skyline.

A few steps brought me to the curve where the tracks fell away, and the ground gaped below.

“I think about him sometimes,” I said. “Up here, alone.” My eyes filled. “When he told me to go with you, he was so calm and sure, as if he knew exactly what he was doing.”

For the first time, I didn't yank myself back from the memory.

“And I wonder if he had any idea of the danger.”

The angles of Dylan's face tightened. “Sometimes it's not about the danger,” he said. “It's about what's on the other side.”

I looked down, toward the broken tracks.

“That's why you're here, too,” he said, “why you never pull your hand back from the fire, no matter how hot it burns. Because you need to know what's on the other side.”

“I have to,”
I whispered. “I can't pretend I don't know the things I know. I can't pretend something bad isn't happening, not when there's something locked inside me that might be able to help.”

The wind picked up, sending that long curtain of dark hair into Dylan's face. “I know.”

“My grandmother was so afraid something bad was going to happen to me,” I blurted, shifting to take in the expanse of the park. “I know
why
now, because of what happened when I was little and my mother saw me dead. But I couldn't live like Gran wanted me to, alone in the cabin all the time, like that dragonfly in the glass jar. I loved being outside. It made me feel alive, connected to something bigger. It's like I've always known something was waiting for me.”

On a deep breath, I turned back to Dylan. “And so do you,” I said. “You know, too. You're always there when I need…”
You.

But the word wouldn't come.

“It's like you have this freaky fear-radar,” I said instead, “that goes off whenever I do something dangerous.”

The corner of his mouth lifted. “It's not radar.”

“Then what is it?” I asked before I could talk myself out of it.

The sun, so high and bright against the sky, caught on the silver of his eyes, making them burn hotter than I'd ever seen them. “It's you.”

 

TWENTY-EIGHT

“Because you're
not
afraid even when you should be.”

He made it sound so simple. And yet
that
was the lie. That had always been the lie. From the moment I'd seen Dylan standing on his father's porch, something inside me had stirred,
called
.

Recognized.

That's why I kissed him that first night, after he pulled me from the river, because it felt like I'd been waiting forever.

There was so much more to knowing someone than flesh and blood.

That's why it hurt every time he walked away.

Except now it hurt when he walked back. When he looked at me.

“So you keep racing in after me and dragging me out of rivers and fires,” I whispered over the wind. None of that scared him. But I did. I scared him. “Because you don't want me to get hurt.”

But the water kept filling my lungs and the flames circled closer, because every time he looked at me, touched me, time rolled backward and the darkness fell all over again, and with it the hurt slipped back into my soul.