Fragile Darkness (3 page)

Yeah, that was Amber.

Now she clung to me, her tank top and micro shorts plastered like a swimsuit to her sickly thin body, courtesy of the hot tub, while her long dark curls hung like limp pasta.

“Whazgoingon?” Her words ran together as her teeth chattered. “Whatareyou
doing
here?”

I sucked in a deep breath, grateful at least that the guy in the orange shirt had taken a step back for the Amber show.

“Okay, so this is wild,” Amber was saying, “but I have dreams, too, sometimes, and last night it was really
crazy.
”

I turned back to her, the unfocused look in her eyes confirming she was beyond gone.

“We were at this party,” she slurred, “me and Lucas and Jessie and V'toria, you and Chase and even Pitre.”

I winced.

“We were all laughing and dancing, getting ready to do one of those séance thingies you do…”

Everything around me swayed.

“And then it started to rain!” Amber exclaimed.
“Inside.”

The party revolved around me—the girl who'd been crying, with the short hair and sad eyes, standing near a corner now, in front of a guy in a beanie with a blanket wrapped around him. He looked around wildly, as if watching a movie he didn't understand.

“So we ran outside and the sky was all blue.” Amber kept on as the girl in the butterfly mask slipped back into view. “And then we were all flying, and the stars were all melting into each other.”

Another wave of dizziness swirled through me.

“Look, I gotta go,” I said with a quick check for Victoria, but Amber's bizarre grip on me tightened.

“Not yet,”
she gasped. “Not until you tell me what the dream means.”

She was breathing faster now, harder, and I realized she was dead serious.

“Amber,” I started, but then the blood was draining from her face and she took a jerky step back.

“Omigod,”
she whispered with a clumsy sign of the cross. “It means something, doesn't it? That's why you're looking at me like that.
I'm next.
”

The words went through me like hot, boiling acid. Realizing where this was going, I turned.

“Tell me!” she screamed. “You can't just let me die like you did Chase!”

I froze, the loud roar rushing through me and throwing me back to the shadow of the old roller coaster.

“It wasn't her fault.”

The deceptively quiet voice,
his voice,
slipped in through the vortex and pulled me back. Everything blurred, Amber's eyes blanking as Dylan broke between us in that predatory way of his, stepping her back to the wall until there was nothing except her and him, and me.

“Who are you?” she asked with a birdlike blink.

But already he was turning as if she wasn't worth his time, and taking me by the arm. “Come on.”

“Holy effin' crap, you're that guy,”
she was saying, but then she was gone, and Dylan had me in the shadows of the next room, where a single Tiffany lamp glowed, and no music blasted.

He watched me. I could feel him, the familiar, hot burn of his eyes concentrated on me, but I didn't want to look, didn't know how to be in that moment, not after all that had gone down the last time we were together. The fear and the desperation, the stark, jagged point of no return. The memories hovered like poison, choking out everything else.

“Hey,” he said. His voice was quieter now, without the edge from a few minutes before, and I knew that if I looked …

I made myself. No matter how much I didn't want to be alone with him, staring at the Oriental rug wasn't going to end things any faster.

Different. That was all I could think. There was something different about him. This wasn't the guy who'd taken my hand and run with me through the darkness. His eyes were harder, darker, his body more contained. It was like an invisible wall surrounded him, cutting him off from the world around him, as if he were the witness of a terrible holocaust—or the sole survivor.

“You okay?” he asked.

And I couldn't do it, couldn't stand there and make small talk, not with everything we'd been through.

“What are you doing here?” I asked against the burn of my throat.

His shoulders rose, fell. “It's a party.”

I couldn't stop the quick flare of my eyes. “You're hardly a party kind of guy.”

“Depends on the party.”

I pushed out a hot breath. There'd been so many big, intense moments between us, but none like this, normal, ordinary, in public at a party.

But this wasn't normal, either, I realized. It wasn't ordinary. It was like lightning from a clear blue sky. You knew it made no sense. You knew it shouldn't be there.
And you knew it was wrong.

“You were watching me,” I reminded him.

A quiet apology shadowed his eyes, but he said nothing. There was only the way he looked at me, the unsettling stillness that made everything inside me lock up.

“My friends are waiting,” I said, and with two steps I really did see Victoria standing in the doorway with her feather plume and pink highlights falling against her face, her mouth hanging open.

“Trinity.”

My name, that was all he said, but the rough edge to his voice stopped me. With Victoria's eyes going wide I turned and found the same rough edge to every line of his body.

“I meant what I said in the card,” he said, keeping his gaze steady on mine.

The simple envelope had arrived the day of the funeral. I'd waited a week before opening it.

“I'd change it all if I could.”

Seven words. That's all he'd written, followed by the scrawl of his name. But suddenly, with no more than that, the words and the memory, I was there all over again, running, screaming—seeing Chase fall.

Trying to breathe.

“I gotta go,” I murmured, and this time I didn't look back, not even when his voice, quieter now, followed me.

“I know.”

I kept walking, past a massive antique armoire and a life-size family portrait, past a marble statue of a nude woman, past Victoria. She scrambled after me, grabbing my hand and tugging me into the rush of music outside.

“This way.” Wobbling on her uneven stilettos, she guided me away from the stage where Trey and Deuce played, toward the last green- and purple-wrapped column before the porch curved to the front of the house.

“Take a deep breath,” she said all serious, but when her eyes met mine, questions danced faster than the crowd swarming the stage. “And tell me what
that
was all about.”

“There's nothing to tell,” I said.

“That was Dylan,” she said, and though she phrased it as a statement, I knew it was a question.

“Yeah.” He'd saved my life three times, but never met my best friend, because our paths had only crossed twice: two weekends, four months apart.

She watched me very carefully. “He's even more intense in person than the pictures I found on the Internet.”

I looked away, toward the stage where Deuce stood with the mic wrapped in both hands, close to his mouth.

Last fall, after Dylan dragged me from the river, I'd looked for pictures, too. But I didn't need them anymore, not with the scrapbook etched in my mind: him watching me from the shadows of his father's porch and leaning over me beside the river's edge, with his clothes wet and his hair falling into his face; statue still in the morgue with a gun trained on the vagrant who held a knife to my throat and holding me in the darkness while a fire raged behind him; sliding down the brick wall of an alley; running, shouting my name …

I slammed the album closed before I reached the final picture, the one I would give anything to erase.

“What's he doing here?” Victoria asked. “Is something wrong? Isn't that when he shows up?” She grabbed my arm. “Is
it
happening again?”

I turned back to her.
It,
of course, meant premonitions.

“No,” I said.

“Then what'd I walk in on?”

“Nothing.”

She gave me one of those looks. “Trin, come on, I saw the way he was looking at you.”

I shook my head, feeling it all over again, that horrible crushing pressure in my chest, as if air was being sucked out of me.

“We barely know each other,” was all I said. Three days. If you added up all the minutes and hours we'd spent together, that's what you'd get. And those days had been as far from “Hey, how you doing, let's hang out and get to know each other” as possible. They'd been big and blown up, magnified, isolated moments carved out on a razor's edge, when life and death had blurred and I'd needed something to hang onto.
Someone.

“Just because we played together as kids,” I started, but Victoria didn't let me finish.

“You played together as kids?” Sliding a pink streak from her mouth, she looked like I'd just disclosed some major state secret. “You never told me that.”

“Because I don't remember.” I'd only been two, then six. No one remembered stuff from that long ago. “Let it go,” I said. “I have.”

I broke off as the back door swung open and the party emptied onto the porch, girls racing down the steps to the backyard while guys shoved and vaulted over the rail.

“Fuck, who called the cops?” someone shouted as Victoria and I hurried to see what was going on.

The guy in the orange shirt stared at me as if I was making it all happen, while Amber danced in her own little world and the guy with the beanie and the blanket ran toward us.

“Will, no!” the girl with the short hair cried, following him. “We just want to help.”

Several adults rushed past the girl in the butterfly mask, adults I hadn't seen all night—Mr. and Mrs. Greenwood, who I recognized from pictures inside, and another man, slightly younger with alarmed eyes.

The hum started without warning, not from the party but inside of me, somewhere deep and dark and dormant, ripping through me with another swirl of vertigo. Dizzily I glanced from face to face, but they all seemed to revolve around me. Victoria and Amber and the guy in the orange shirt, the guy in the blanket and the girl with the short hair, the adults. And with the blur came the quick sweep of cold, and the world flashed white.

 

THREE

I couldn't move. I couldn't breathe. I hung there as frozen as the bleached-out night, waiting.

I knew what came next, what always came next, the streaks of invisible lightning giving way to the slide show from some other time and place, a slide show that had been absent for weeks.

A slide show that always previewed something bad.

“Trinity!” someone called, but the drone of the vortex made it impossible to know who.
Victoria,
a little voice inside me whispered. She was there, beside me, exactly like she'd been the night evil swept in from the open portal of the Ouija board, and warned that it was too late to stop destiny.

But I couldn't see her, only the white spilling from all directions, like a blizzard from the unseen, pure and pristine and shocking. Everywhere. Without form or texture, without the shadows from before. There was only the clawing from deep inside, something trapped and trying to get out.

Then I was falling, could feel myself falling …

“Quick, call a priest.” I heard someone laugh.

“Holy eff'in crap,
Mile High
!”

Hands curled around my arms, dragging me back.

I didn't want to go. I tried to stay in the moment, in the white, so that color could meld into shape and the images would form. But the buzz dropped into silence, and the white faded, leaving not a premonition of something horrible, but my friends crowded around and staring like they wanted to throw up.

“Get the fuck away from her!” Deuce growled.

The moment held, frozen, Victoria and Deuce crouched over me and people I didn't know gathered close, the guy in the orange shirt and Amber with her phone held up, Lucas trying to drag her away.

But not Dylan.

Just as quickly everything lurched, timing jumping forward as the people around me scattered like ants, and I could feel myself trying to move, could hear the roar inside me, but it was like it was happening to someone else, that I watched from afar.

“Someone call an ambulance!” Mrs. Greenwood screamed.

“What's going on?” someone else shouted.

“Crap, is that the LaSalle girl?”

“Mile High, come on, baby sis. Don't do this.”

The fear in Deuce's voice registered. Dizzily I pulled myself back from that odd, detached place and grabbed onto him, looking around, but it was like I turned one way, and the world spun the other. Almost everyone was gone now, everyone but Deuce and Victoria and Lucas and Amber, the adults and several uniformed cops.

Mrs. Greenwood kneeled beside us. “Is she okay?”

“Maybe we should call DeMarcus,” one of the cops said.

I blinked him into focus. “No.” There was no reason to call Detective Jackson. Standing, I fumbled for the porch railing, searching for—

I didn't know. I didn't know what I was searching for, only that something horrible and cold had brushed against me.

“Trinity?” Victoria asked, stepping into me. “Omigod, you're like ice.” Her eyes, the green so dark it looked black, met mine. “Like when we did the Ouija board,” she whispered. “Maybe that really
is
why he was here. Did you see something?”

“No.” To both questions. “Nothing,” I said.

“Here, sweetie,” Mrs. Greenwood said, draping a blanket around me.

“I don't understand,” Victoria stammered. “If you didn't see anything, what happened? It's like you weren't even there.”

I didn't understand, either. It was like sitting down for a movie to start, but the screen going white before anything happened.