Fragile Darkness (6 page)

“Because that was the past,” Grace said with a sad, reflective smile. “And my grandmother warned me not to.”

I think my eyes flared first, but it was close. Mine widened in reaction to the word
grandmother.
Hers flashed in response to mine.

It was obvious she realized I'd been doing my homework.

“Madam Isobel,” I supplied.

Around us, music blasted and the wind swirled, but I didn't need to hear Grace's whispered yes to know her answer.

Their eyes. They were so much alike, ancient, timeless. I could still see the way the old woman had looked at me, warning of broken illusions and hidden enemies.

“Why?” I asked. “Why did she warn you not to?”

Soft and damp, the wind swirled in from the river.

“Because the past is dangerous,” Grace murmured, sounding a lot older than the nineteen I knew her to be. “If you spend too much time there, you'll always be in shadows. Your life lies ahead of you,
that's
what your mother wanted for you, to be free of the shadows.”

Automatically I lifted my hand to the warm, smooth edges of the dragonfly dangling against my chest.

“Do you remember her?” I asked.

A soft light played in Grace's eyes. “No.”

Not the answer I wanted, but I had so many other questions. “What did your grandmother mean by shadows? Did she say?”

I saw the change immediately, the quick flare of uncertainty as Grace looked beyond me, toward the wall of people jammed behind us. I turned, too.

Her grandmother stood with her hands folded together, her white hair long and flowing, her eyes looking at me as if through the lens of some long ago time. The same necklace hung around her neck, a collection of gemstones interspersed with old coins and a large crystal dangling in the center. But there were Mardi Gras beads, too, and instead of a lavender robe, she wore a long gold tunic over black pants—and looked pretty much like your ordinary, average grandma hanging out for Mardi Gras.

Except Grace's grandmother was neither ordinary nor average.

“Your mother was a powerful psychic,” she said, her voice as rich as I remembered. “And sometimes what she saw, what she lived because of that, was ugly. Dangerous. But she believed it was her duty to try to help people, to prevent, or prepare.” She hesitated, her eyes suddenly sad. “Until you were born.”

Thousands of people surrounded us, but in that moment, the insanity of Carnival fell away.

Answers.

“Everything changed then,” she said, stepping closer and lifting a ring-cluttered hand to slide the hair from my face. Her touch was soft, gentle,
maternal.
No one had touched me like that since …

An unexpected wave of emotion surged into my throat.

No one had touched me like that since the funeral. There'd been hugs, Victoria climbing into bed with me while I cried, Deuce holding me on the kitchen floor, Julian sliding his arm around me, Jim Fourcade folding me against the quiet, steady rhythm of his chest. But no one had looked into my eyes, and touched my face.

Aunt Sara didn't touch at all.

“For the first time the danger frightened her,” Madam Isobel said, and it was like she knew what her touch was doing to me, because she kept her eyes on mine, her fingertips drifting against my cheek.

“She pulled back from her work with the police,” she told me, her voice as hypnotic as her eyes. “To focus on being the best mother she could.”

Tears spilled over. I couldn't help it. I didn't remember my mother. I'd seen only a handful of pictures. But sometimes I
felt
her, felt her so strongly it was like she was only in the next room and all I had to do was walk a few feet and she'd be there. I could even see her sometimes, in my mind,
my dreams.
I could see her turn to me and smile, the way her face would fill with warmth and she'd open her arms, and I would walk into them and she would hold me in that way mothers hold their children, and I'd hold her back, hold on
forever,
as if every moment, every breath,
every wish,
was real.

I thought about my father, too, but it was never as vivid.

“Everything was good,” Madam Isobel went on, “until children started going missing.”

Jim had told me some about the case, but he'd hadn't gone into tons of detail.

“And she saw them, each one: before they vanished and as they would be found.”

I cringed. To see little kids frightened, murdered … I could only imagine what that had done to my mother.

“And she knew she couldn't pretend it wasn't happening, not when she might be able to help. So she went back.”

Maybe it was the way Madam Isobel's eyes darkened, or maybe the deep, memory-carved lines that suddenly made her look years older, but from one breath to the next, I knew.

I knew what happened when my mother became involved in the case, and why Grace's grandmother looked so haunted.

“She saw
me,
didn't she?”

 

FIVE

Thousands of people packed Jackson Square. Music blasted from every direction, jazz and blues and rock, all fusing into a frenetic soundtrack that drowned out everything else.

Everything except the ugly kaleidoscope of truth spinning around me.

My mother had seen a vision of me.
Murdered.

“She knew she had to send you away,” Madam Isobel said as Grace slipped from behind the table and laced her fingers with mine. “The thought broke her heart, but she'd stepped into darkness, and it was coming for you.”

The shadows, I realized. These were the shadows everyone had tried to keep from me.

“She made plans with your grandmother to take you from New Orleans.”

My heart kicked. Gran had been in on it? Gran had known? My mother and Gran, two women who'd never seen eye to eye, had conspired to send me into hiding?

“… and keep you away,
safe,
until the danger passed.”

Except she never brought me back.

“You were to leave early one morning, under the cover of darkness, but he got there first.”

My chest tightened, and for a split second I was there again, in the darkness, the smoke …

“If Jimmy hadn't been there,” Madam Isobel whispered.

I blinked, a new truth falling into place. “Jim Fourcade?”

“Your mother called him before she went to bed and told him she was cold, that she couldn't get warm, that she was afraid.”

Cold.
Like the icy breath from the night before.

“She knew,” I realized. That's the way it worked.
We knew.

“Jim arrived within minutes of the house going up in flames and made sure that monster didn't get his hands on you.”

“That's what no one wanted me to know,” I murmured. “That she died protecting me.”

I'm not sure what I expected, but it wasn't for Madam Isobel to smile.

“Trinity,”
she said quietly. “Don't look so sad. Your mother had a choice, and she made it. Death didn't scare her. She was far more afraid of …
you.
”

The wind kept whipping hair against my face, and I knew it was warm. But the cold swirled closer, faster.
“Me?”

“Of how much she loved you. That she wouldn't be able to protect you. Death is but a transition. Rachel knew that. Love is forever, but it also makes you vulnerable. When you love someone…” She glanced at Grace, her chest rising with a long, slow breath. “You would go to the ends of the universe to keep them safe. You would
give
anything.
Sacrifice
anything. That's what love is.”

My throat squeezed as I looked beyond the sway of the big palms, toward the glow of the old cathedral at the back of the square.

“Your mother was only three when her mother died. More than any vision, what terrified Rachel was the thought of not being here to protect you.”

With the wind swirling around me, more pieces slipped quietly into place.

“That's why I didn't say anything last month,” Madam Isobel said. “When you and Jimmy's boy came to my shop. At that moment, you were better off not knowing about the shadows.”

The memory played through me, of her eclectic shop and the deck of tarot cards, the way Dylan had watched me, stayed with me.

“You said we'd met before,” I remembered. “That I'd walked this path many times.”

She took my hand again, like she'd done that February afternoon. Grace handed her a small flashlight, the bright beam illuminating the lines running through my palm.

Her eyes narrowed as she skimmed her index finger along the fleshy part beside my thumb.

“You have come far to be right where you are,” she said, shifting her gaze to two horizontal lines on the side of my hand, beneath my pinkie. One was faint, the other long and deep. “You and others. Never doubt the larger tapestry being woven. You are exactly where you are supposed to be.”

This, I realized. This is what I'd wanted all along. Answers. For someone to talk to me about who I was.

“The things I see,” I said, thinking about the bleached-out flash from the night before. “Sometimes they
do
seem random. I dreamed about Chase lying in the grass, but not what was going to happen to my aunt. Why is that? Why do I see some things but not others?”

“Because you are not God,” Madam Isobel said simply. “You have a gift,” she said. “Everyone does. Some have voices like angels, or can make music that touches your soul. Others are athletically talented or good with numbers.

“You and Grace, your mother and myself,
we know things.
But not all things. Doors are open for us that are closed for most.” With one of those wisdom-of-the-ages smiles, she reached out to finger my mother's necklace. “Like the dragonfly, you are of two worlds, two realms, the here and the now, while still being connected to the mysteries of the universe. You are both light and the reflection of light. You see beyond what your eyes show you.”

She made it sound magical, beautiful even.

“Like the girl who painted those portraits,” I murmured.
Of me.
Five had hung in the chapel-turned-gallery in Belle Terre.

I'd been unable to learn anything else about them, not what they looked like, or if they'd been found.

“The one who drowned,” I said. “Faith.” She'd seen things out of time and place, too. “Did you know her?”

A quick shadow crossed Madam Isobel's face. “You would have liked her,” she said. “You two had much in common.”

“Do you remember much about the portraits?” I could still see the four empty spaces where they'd hung, the small bronze plates, each containing a title:
GLORY, ECSTASY, RAPTURE,
and
ETERNAL.

What had Faith seen? What had she known?

“I only saw one in the lobby,” I explained.

Madam Isobel smiled. “They were beautiful,” she said. “Full of love and life.”

I frowned. “I was dead in the one I saw, with watery glass separating me from the world.”

“That's not what I saw. I saw dreaming.”

“Were the others like that, too? Just me, or were they scenes from my future?”

“That is not for me to say. Faith painted in her sleep. Sometimes the things we see are symbolic rather than concrete. Life is full of illusion. You must not let yourself get too caught up in them. What happens here, now, is only a drop in our existence.”

My whole body vibrated, like a caffeine high.

“Why now?” I asked. “If you didn't want to tell me any of this before, why now?”

Grandmother and granddaughter exchanged a quick look before Grace's eyes met mine.

“Because I saw you,” she said. “The darkness.”

“Last night?” I asked. “At the party?”

“In a dream,” she said. “Thursday night.”

The night
before
the party.

“That's only happened once before,” she said, lifting a hand to slide the hair from her face. “Last fall, a few nights before you ran up to my table.”

For the first time I noticed a small, iridescent dragonfly tattooed against the pale flesh of her wrist.

“The things I know, they are not glimpses from the future, like you experience. They're feelings and thoughts, knowledge. But in the dream I saw you in a wooded area, and you were running and stumbling, like you couldn't see and didn't know where to go.”

A vague sense of familiarity tugged at me, like a fading echo.

“It was dark,” Grace said. “I could feel the evil, smell it, like a stain on the horizon, pushing closer.”

The quiet words crawled over me.

“It was like I was drowning when I woke up, like I couldn't breathe, and your name kept whispering through me.” Long streaks of reddish-brown hair blew into her face as she slid her grandmother a tentative, questioning look.

Madam Isobel nodded.

“Mammy felt it, too,” she said, sliding the hair away. “Like a distress call.”

Always before the images, the premonitions, were mine. Being on the other end felt
odd.

“What kind of distress call?” I asked.

“That's why I came back,” Grace said. “To see if I could figure out what the dream meant. That's why I went to the party.”

“But why didn't you want me to see you? If you were worried, why didn't you say anything to me last night?”

“Because I wanted to see what I felt, before my presence changed anything, like watching the flow of the water before wading in.”

My heart was beating faster by the second, beating in time with the loud crush of Carnival craziness around us.

Grace came back the exact night of my first glimmer of invisible lightning in weeks.

“And what did you feel?” I asked.