Fragile Darkness (5 page)

I missed the talks we used to have, the way she used to smile and hug me, give me advice and words of wisdom, make me believe everything was going to be okay.

I missed her.

She insisted she was fine. Physically she was. But emotionally a robot had taken her place. She wouldn't talk about what happened when she was missing, but I know she'd thought she was going to die. That the man we'd all trusted was going to kill her … and me.

That was a lot to cover up with white paint.

“You're doing this because of him, aren't you?” I'm not sure why I asked. I knew what she was going to say.

She painted faster. “You know what, maybe I am thirsty. Can you see if we have any merlot?”

We didn't. Julian had cleared out the wine one day while Aunt Sara was at the shop.

Turning, I filled a glass measuring cup with water, slid it into the nuker, then retrieved one of the herbal tea bags he'd given me. Three minutes later I carried the steaming mug across the plastic.

At the ladder, I lifted my arm. “Here.”

She turned and glanced down, her shoulders rising and falling in slow rhythmic breaths. Then she went back to painting. “Just put it on the bar.”

I sighed, not the happy contented kind, but like a quiet scream. “Why won't you ever talk about it?” The dull residue of devastation hollowed out her eyes, no matter how much makeup she artfully applied. “The therapist says it helps.”

She dipped the roller in the thick, glommy white, then returned it to the wall, sloshing primer everywhere.

“We've already discussed this, Trinity.”

It was like we were strangers, or worse, formal acquaintances.

“The past is the past,” she la-la'd. “It doesn't belong in the now.”

I wanted to scream, a real one with all the sound and emotion tearing around inside me. Whenever I wanted to talk, she wanted to pretend. Of course she didn't call it that. She prettied it up by referring to it as moving forward.

By smearing paint on the wall.

I watched her, watched her roll white as if her life depended on it, and realized how feverishly we worked to keep reality far away. Because when the clouds of illusion fell away, sometimes we didn't know how to live with what remained.

Setting the mug on the table, I glanced at my jeans and hoodie, then stepped toward the ladder.

“Here,” I said, reaching for the roller. “Let me help.”

*   *   *

It was well after two before I crawled into bed.

Delphi jumped up with me, nudging against my arm as I reached for my journal and stared at the blank page. Since I wasn't saying much in session, my therapist suggested I write stuff down instead. She said I didn't have to show anyone, I just had to let it out. She wanted me to write a letter. To Chase.

I picked up the pen and dragged the notebook into my lap, exactly as I'd done every night for the past week.

Dear Chase,

My eyes stung. I stared at the words until they blurred, then ripped out the page, wadded it up, and threw it across the room.

It barely missed my glass dragonfly. The antique nun doll wasn't as fortunate.

Dear
was proper and impersonal, like my aunt. It was what you'd write in a thank-you note to an elderly relative you hardly knew.

I tried again.

Chase,

The hot, salty blur spilled over, rolling down my face to drip onto the page.

I'm so sorry.

My throat tightened, convulsed. Swallowing hard, I sank down in bed, bringing the journal with me. Delphi rubbed her pointy little face against my cheek.

I had no real awareness of drifting off, no awareness of anything.

Until the shadows swallowed me.

Darkness. It surrounds me, pressing from all directions, thick and penetrating, like a blanket thrown over the world.

Or maybe just me.

Separating me.

Holding me.

Smothering.

I shove at it, know that I have to shove at it, tear it away so I can breathe again, and see what's on the other side.

But the void swirls closer, cold and bottomless, endless, like an avalanche of nothingness.

I try to run from it, know I need to run from it.

But my body doesn't move. Nothing does. Nothing moves.

“No!” I scream. But there's no voice, either, no breath, only the cold seep of darkness. I try to spin, but the web surrounds me, slipping through my skin. Into my body. Oozing like cold, dark oil through every pore of my body.

I spin around, finally freeing myself.

A violent wash of white blinds, the quick, X-ray flash of the roller coaster sending me to my knees.

I came awake hard and fast, jerking up in bed and swallowing the hot spasm of a scream. Everything inside me raced, as if I'd been running, sprinting. As if I had to get away from someone, or
to
someone. I didn't know which, only that time was draining away, running out.

But there was nothing concrete, only the breath of cold from the party, the same icy awareness that had whispered through me the night I'd put my fingers to the Ouija board and the pointer slid from the
D
to the
I
to the
E
.
DIE.

I started to shake.

The clock read 5:21, exactly like it did every time I'd awoken from a dream about Grace.

Flicking on the lamp, I squinted against the bright intrusion and fumbled for my phone, like I'd done so many other mornings before school. Sometimes Chase would text …

I froze, my throat going stupid tight.

Then I looked down, and saw the dark blur of letters against the soft white glow.

 

FOUR

I heard you've been looking for me.

I'll be in the Square tonight.

Everything inside me started to race.

Grace.

She was back.

And she was going to be in the Quarter, tonight.

Finally.

*   *   *

Minute dragged into minute. At work, hours stacked up, one on top of the other. I tried to concentrate on the flow of customers in and out of the shop, but my mind kept wandering to the series of unexpected little bombs that had gone off since slipping out the door for the Greenwood party: the flash of white, the dream of darkness, Grace's sudden return and—

Dylan.

I could see him still, see him standing in the shadow of the heavy, velvet curtains, watching me. Watching me the same night a vision tried to form. Coincidence, I wanted to believe, especially since he'd been AWOL at the end of the party, when all the chaos happened.

And yet there was no denying Dylan's freaky sense of timing. Just because I didn't see him didn't mean he wasn't there.

Doesn't mean anything,
I told myself.
Doesn't mean
anything.
Couldn't.

Shoving all that aside, I pasted on a smile and untangled necklaces, keeping my thoughts on the other three question marks.

Grace was right. I had been looking for her. One day she'd been in the hospital, the next she was gone. No one knew where she went, or if they did, they wouldn't tell me. I'd walked the Quarter and gone to her apartment, asked other spiritualists, merchants, anyone I could think of.

Now she was back at the exact same time I saw a flash of white. Given how tangled our lives were, I had a hard time accepting that as coincidence.

Actually, I no longer wrote anything off as coincidence.

The beads I'd been working on came free.

Around noon Deuce came in with shrimp po-boys and stayed for several hours, watching me. He knew better than to mention the night before in front of my aunt, but he wasn't above shooting me texts while only a display of T-shirts separated us.

You okay?

Yeah.

Did the vision finish in your dreams?

No.

Would you tell me if it did?

I looked up from folding T-shirts over that one, and flashed him a smile.

I could tell he knew the answer: not necessarily.

Sometimes it felt like living in a fishbowl, with everyone gathered around, watching to see what happened next. But sometimes I didn't want to be watched. Sometimes it hurt more to smile in front of everyone than to pull my knees against my chest and cry alone.

He didn't leave until Victoria slipped in, and she didn't leave until I convinced her I was going to work until closing and that she should go with her family to the Isis parade without me.

Throughout it all, I kept looking outside the window, toward Jackson Square. Kendall's text came around five.

The reading will have to wait. Will's parents want him to stay home tonight.

By the time we closed at ten, it felt like I'd worked three days in one.

“See you at home,” I told Aunt Sara, then slipped into the flood of insanity outside the door. Music blared from every shop and bar. Beads rained down from balcony parties. Singing and dancing spilled from the sidewalks into the streets.

Almost everyone wore a mask.

But none were Venetian, and none sent a dark, drugging awareness pulsing through my blood.

It took three times as long as usual, but finally the bottleneck spilled into Jackson Square, and halfway down against the iron fence, I saw the funeral-like canopy over the table draped in black, and the girl sitting in the folding chair
wearing a glittery blue butterfly mask.

Exactly like the one I'd seen the night before at the Greenwood party.

My this-is-all-connected radar screamed a little louder.

I approached her through a long, invisible tunnel, one echoing with questions and memories and inevitability, threads of connection I was only beginning to understand. From the moment I'd arrived in New Orleans, the book of my life had been ripped open in a way I'd never imagined. The pages flew backward and forward. Sometimes it all seemed random. And yet other times, every revelation, every subsequent secret, seemed carefully plotted.

By who, I wanted to know. And why? Why did everything have to be some big mystery?

Is someone following me?
I'd asked Grace the first time I saw her. Yes, or no. That's all I wanted. Was someone following me?

The answer, I knew now, was yes.

Instead, she'd looked at me through those dark, old-soul eyes of hers and given me a riddle.

Now … or all your life?

Four months later when she went missing and turned up in my dreams, I'd assumed it was because of the connection we made that fateful fall night.

Now I knew our lives, our destinies, had tangled long before that.

I also knew the second she saw me. I saw it in the sudden wash of stillness. She sat watching me approach with the same intensity I watched her, like the bright beam of a lighthouse guiding me in.

So many questions stood between us, not only about the picture and copy of my parents' obituary I'd found in her apartment, but the old mystic in Belle Terre and the connection that allowed us to communicate through a higher dimension in ways we'd never communicated in the flesh.

Reaching her table, I started with the obvious.

“That was you last night,” I said. Maybe I should have said hi or something, but we were so far beyond small talk. “You were at the party.”

Watching me through eyes the color of moss, she slid off the mask. She'd always been pretty in a haunting way, with skin like alabaster and straight white hair. Now the long, soft waves skewed more brownish amber, highlighting the color of her slightly fuller face.

“I wanted to see how you were doing,” was all she said.

“Then why didn't you ask me?”

“You were with your friends,” she said, as if it was obvious. “It wasn't the time.”

Still talking in riddles,
I almost said, but knew calling her out wouldn't get me the answers I wanted.

“No one would tell me where you were,” I said, blown away by how good she looked. The last time I saw her, she'd been lying mannequin-still among trash. Through fuzzy cracks of light, Dylan and I had—

Dylan.

My chest tightened.

“I wanted to make sure you were okay,” I whispered as her eyes watered. “To
apologize.
”

A single tear spilled over her lashes. “You have nothing to apologize for.”

“LaSalle used you as bait to lure me into his game.”

“Because of
me,
” she blew me away by saying. “Because he knew I was on to him.”

“What?”
My voice was little more than breath.

“I ran into him one night,” she said, wrapping her arms around her black tank top. “Here, while I was working. And the second our eyes met, the darkness hit me so hard I couldn't hide it. And he saw. He knew that I could see through his cop shield, to the monster inside.” She closed her eyes a long heartbeat before opening them. “
That's
why he took me.”

I felt my mouth open, but no words came out.

“I wanted to warn you,” she said. “I tried to—”

“I saw the paper,” I interjected. “Where you'd written my name.”

She shook her head, sending long, amberish strands flowing over her shoulders. “That was all staged by him, to draw you into the game.”

Game.

“Why didn't you tell me?” I asked, point-blank. That was the bottom line. Why did everyone think it best to keep me in the dark? “Last fall, or even later, why didn't you tell me our mothers were friends?”
Best
friends.

They'd worked together here in Jackson Square, my mother giving tarot and palm readings, while Grace's mother led Haunted New Orleans tours.

Jim Fourcade had told me that.