Fragile Darkness (30 page)

The sirens screamed closer, and Dylan stepped from the shadows.

Relief blasted through me. I ran to him, my heart pounding so hard I could barely breathe. “Dylan!”

He jumped down and reached for me, crushing me in his arms a long second before pulling back.

The second I saw his face, I knew something worse than desecrated toys waited inside.

“Oh, my God,” I whispered. “Will?”

Dylan shook his head, turning to lead me to a series of steps leading inside what looked like a warehouse. Grace followed.

The body lay amid a spill of concrete boxes, with a dark stain spreading from beneath. Jackson and Kiki stood nearby. Cowboy hat gone, dreads hanging against his face, Jackson had a hand to his partner's shoulder. Her eyes were dark, trained straight ahead of her.

I stepped closer, and everything wobbled.

Dylan slipped an arm around me.

The guy lay at an angle, his body twisted one direction, his head the other, revealing the inked “A” at the bottom of his neck. His hair was dark, chin-length, and slightly greasy. His eyes were closed, but if they'd been open, they would have been narrow and intense.

“He was at the parties,” I whispered, seeing it all over again, Friday night when he'd come up to me and offered me a drink, Sunday night when he'd crowded me against his body and asked me to dance, then stood watching while my world fractured and I ran out the glowing door. “He's the one who followed me into the woods.”

“License gives a name of Shane Mitchum,” Jackson said, crossing to us. He pushed out a rough breath, his eyes finding mine. “The name on your friend's wall was Sean Mitchell.”

Will. “He knew,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself.

Jackson held up a bag with a little device in it. “My guess is this is what he used yesterday.”

“A Taser,” Dylan said.

Jackson nodded. “Kieks and I saw him slipping in from the back and followed. He was watching you—”

I stiffened as a few more cops ran in, followed by the paramedics, who weren't really needed.

“—when you were over by the swings. We called for him to stop, but he took off running.”

So many questions hit me at once. “You think he's behind all this?” I asked. “You think he's the bliss guy?”

Jackson shook his head. “I've got a unit en route to his apartment. We'll know more…” His words trailed off, his gaze locking beyond my shoulder, where the sunlight spilled in from the open doors of the dock, and Aunt Sara stood with Julian.

 

THIRTY

“Trinity, oh, my God, Trinity!”

She was there before I could move, running through the maze of spilled boxes and pulling me into her arms, holding me like she couldn't get me close enough. And my heart jumped into my throat, because I couldn't remember, I had no idea of the last time she'd hugged me like that, with warmth and emotion, so real and raw and
unprogrammed.

“It's okay,” I said, hugging her back. Her whole body shook, her very
thin
whole body. “I'm—”

Okay.

But the second she pulled back, the word died in my throat. Her eyes. For the first time in weeks the façade slipped, the suit of everything's-okay-armor she'd been wrapped in, and the pain bled through.

Julian slipped in from the other side, casting me a quick look as he slid a hand against my aunt's lower back. Slowly she turned from the body on the ground, staring off behind us, toward the gravel drive leading into the park.

“Aunt Sara,” I said, reaching for her without thinking. “I know this is hard.”

She pulled back so fast I froze. “Hard?” she repeated, her voice matching the word. “Is that what you think this is? You think it's
hard
for me to get a phone call from DeMarcus telling me you're here,
here
of all places, and that you got Tased yesterday, and now someone's dead?”

I winced.

“You think it was hard to look up and see Julian, because DeMarcus called
him, too,
and for Julian to tell me you're having visions again, but they're not real visions, because you're too emotionally devastated for your psyche to allow real visions to come through?” She pulled even farther back, wrapping her arms around herself and pulling her lavender dress—the one she'd worn that morning for church—so tight you could see the outline of her ribs. “But you never thought to tell me anything, not a word? You think that's
hard
?”

I looked at her standing there, with the long, side-swept bangs blowing around her face and the glassy sheen in her eyes, and something inside of me slipped. Because I could see
her
in there, through all the devastation and shadows, the aunt who'd welcomed me into her home and given me not only the pieces of my past, but unconditional love.

“Why didn't you say anything?” Her voice thinned on the question. “Why didn't you tell me?”

My eyes filled. “I couldn't.”

“Why not?”

Tears spilled over. “Because I didn't know how!” I said, and then it was my voice that was thinning, cracking. “I didn't want you to worry. I wanted you to move forward, and I thought if I told you about the vision trying to form or the guy I was trying to help, the roller coasters I was seeing in my sleep, it would drag you back, and you'd see him again. And I couldn't do that to you. I couldn't bring him back into your life.”

She froze. “What are you talking about?”

“LaSalle.” Saying his name made me sick. “I brought that monster into your life. I didn't know! He creeped me out, but I didn't see the truth until it was too late—”

Her eyes closed.

“And he hurt you,” I said. “He hurt you bad.”

“Trinity, no.”

“Yes,” I said, feeling it, the fast, violent swelling deep inside, all the emotion I'd tried to chain away, rising up and slicing to the surface. “He did,” I said. “He hurt you.”

I'd tried. I'd tried to do this her way, living in that pretend world where everything was okay. But it wasn't okay. She wasn't okay.

Neither was I.

“And I just want you to be happy again,” I said, and now the tears were coming, hard, fast, streaming in a free-for-all down my cheeks. “I want you to smile and dance around the condo, to sit on the kitchen floor with me and splurge on pralines, to hum while you work and laugh when Delphi jumps on the table and scatters your beads. I want you to let Julian in and I want—”

I broke off, swallowing a quick breath.

“You,” I said, quieter now, softer, because she was crying, too, looking at me like she had no idea what I was talking about. “I want you to be you again,” I managed. “The you who took me in last summer.” Hesitating, I searched her eyes. The words were there, right there, burning against my throat. Once they'd been so hard to say.

“The you I love,” I whispered. “The mother I never had.”

The wind kept blowing. I could feel it rushing in through the open dock doors and swirling around us. And everybody else was still there, Julian beside her while Dylan and Grace stood off to the side. Jackson and Kiki were talking to two men in suits. But none of that mattered, only my aunt, and the amazing transformation of her face, like the sun rising up after a bitterly cold night and shimmering against frozen tundra.

“I don't like the paint,” I said quietly.

Her shoulders rose and fell on one of those breaths she called deep and cleansing, the kind she used when meditating, back when she'd done that.

“Neither do I,” she said, watching me, watching me so very closely, as if studying or trying to figure something out. “But I thought if I changed things up,” she said, more quietly now, “if I made everything new again, you wouldn't be reminded of him, that you wouldn't see him every time you walked inside.”

“Me?”
The word shot out of me.

She smiled. It was crazy and insane and amazing, but even through her tears and still-perfect makeup, I saw her, more than just a glimpse. I saw my aunt.

My aunt from before.

“You,” she said, and then she was moving toward me again, moving as she had so many other times, stepping into me and lifting her hands, sliding them along my cheeks to smooth the hair from my face.

“Because I wanted
you
back,” she said quietly. “The
you
from before, who darted in from school and threw your stuff everywhere, who sprawled out on the sofa and started texting, who laughed when Delphi jumped on your chest and spent an hour fooling with you hair before Chase would come over…”

Her eyes met mine. “The you I should have trusted.” Her words were quiet now, fragile but strong. “The you who told me over and over that Aaron LaSalle creeped you out.”

My throat tightened.

“The you who knew,” she added. “The you
I
took away.”

The devastation in her voice, her eyes, rocked me.

“Because I'm the one who trusted that man, not you. I'm the one who threw myself into a relationship with him just to prove Julian didn't know…” She broke off, closing her eyes.

Julian stepped closer, sliding an arm around her waist.

She twisted toward him, looking at him a long moment before turning back to me.

“To prove he didn't know what he was talking about,” she said, and I could tell the words hurt. “That I wasn't hiding from the past or myself. That I
could
have a relationship.”

I watched them, blown away by the obvious intimacy zipping between them, an intimacy I'd always suspected, but they'd both worked hard to deny.

“I should have listened to you,” she said, shaking her head. “
Trusted
you. If I had, none of this would have happened. You'd be okay and Chase would still be—”

Alive.

The word hung between us.

I wished it were that simple.

“No,” I said, catching a quick blur of movement out of the corner of my eye. “You don't know that. You
can't.
Do you really think if you'd pushed that psycho away, he would have said,
‘Oh, well,'
and forgotten all about his sick little game?”

Her mouth tumbled open. I could tell she'd never thought about it like that.

“I want the bricks back,” I whispered as Jackson and Kiki turned from the guys in suits. “I want
you
.”

The remains of robo-Sara crumbled. “Oh, sweet girl.” And then she was closing me into her arms like she used to, full and hard and tight. “That's what I want, too. That's
all
I want.”

I hugged her back, feeling so warm and wonderful and connected, and wishing it could last.

When we pulled apart, Jackson was stepping toward us. His face was tight, his gaze dead serious.

“Got a call from the unit at Mitchum's apartment,” he said as Dylan returned to my side. “The kid's definitely been dealing bliss, and it looks like he's cooking it, too, like a meth hybrid.” He hesitated, looking like he hated what he was about to say.

“We also have reason to believe he was keyed in on you,” he said, looking directly at me.

Dylan took my hand as Aunt Sara surged forward.

“There were pictures,” Jackson said, “of you at parties and in the shop. Internet searches about psychic abilities and how they work, how you busted LaSalle.”

Cold. It slammed into me like shards of ice. I felt myself sag, felt Dylan move from holding my hand to sliding an arm around my waist.

“And Will Ingram,” Jackson said. “Mitchum had pictures of him, too. The history file from his laptop shows he spent a couple hours Saturday researching the kid. There were pages about the four-wheeler accident and near-death experiences.”

“But why?” I said as Dylan took my hand. Me I understood. My precognitive abilities were no secret. “No one knew about Will. He was just a guy. Why would anyone key in on him?”

Kiki stepped in. “When you're breaking the law, it doesn't take much to make people suspicious. Maybe Ingram looked at Mitchum funny. Maybe he said the wrong thing. People with secrets go to great lengths to hide them.”

I let out a slow breath.

“There's more, isn't there?” Dylan asked.

Jackson frowned. “Phone records. He made a lot of calls to a prepaid cell. And there's no record of where or how he got the bliss. It's a high-powered drug found mostly in Europe. There's no way some random nineteen-year-old would have access to it, unless from someone else.”

“The person with the prepaid cell,” Dylan said.

Jackson nodded. “Until we know more, I don't want anyone going back to the condo, or being alone.”

*   *   *

The big Siamese cat watched me.

With the shadows of evening slipping in through the kitchen window, I sat on a bar stool, drumming my fingers against the TV tray, waiting. I stared at my phone, waiting to hear back from Will. I stared at my sandwich, waiting for the peanut butter to look appetizing. I stared at the insanely still animal perched on the fridge, waiting for Bakta to blink. I squeezed my eyes shut, waiting for the X-ray flash to form into a vision. I listened to the silence, waiting to hear noise from the front of the long, narrow apartment.

Waiting.

Aunt Sara went back to Horizons with Julian. Jackson had a unit at the condo, and Kiki was pretending to be an employee at Fleurish! Will, in his own hiding spot, was working on a list of every name and every place he could come up with. When last I'd talked to him, he was on his seventh page.

Waiting. Everybody was
waiting
to see what happened next.

Dylan wanted me to eat. He'd made me the sandwich and poured a glass of milk, then dragged the stool from the small window, the window with the shade pulled down and bars that had not been there last fall. Neither had the bars along the front window, or the twin, double-cylinder dead bolts on both doors. And the security system. That was all new.