Through the Veil (6 page)

Lee woke with tears drying on her face and an ache in her heart.

She stretched slowly, searching for any new aches and pains. Nothing felt outwardly painful, which was odd, because she felt like she had run the gauntlet. Usually when she woke feeling like this, she had myriad bruises all over her body.

From her feet up, she stretched, rolling her ankles, tensing then relaxing her calves, her thighs, her buttocks, arching her spine. As she started to stretch her arms over her head, she yelped. A fiery pain exploded in her left forearm.

Slowly, Lee sat up and cradled her arm close to her chest. She didn’t want to look at it. She didn’t want to see. This pain, whatever it was, felt different. Lee swallowed, the sound of it echoing in her ears. Foreboding filled her, hot and thick, as she slowly lowered her arm and stared at it. Watery sunlight filtered through the curtains, falling on the long, thin slash.

It was three inches long, the dried blood on it forming a scab. It was hair-thin. It would heal quickly and probably wouldn’t even leave a scar. He hadn’t wanted to scar her. Just scare her, just make some sort of point.

Terror bubbled inside her mind as she stared at the cut and wondered where that thought had come from.

Explain that.

An angry voice flooded her ears, and eyes loomed large in her vision, flooding out everything but their molten silver essence.

We’ll fight this war without you . . .

Swallowing, she rubbed her chest. The ache there expanded as his words echoed in her mind over and over.
Explain that.

Explain it—there was no earthly way to explain it. Well, there was one. She was going crazy. She was going crazy—having bizarre, insane dreams—and she had cut herself. But even as she thought that through, she knew it was wrong. This felt like no dream.

It felt like a memory.

A man’s face shimmered into her mind’s eye.

The man from that piece she had been working on the other day.

Kalen. His name was Kalen. His face had haunted her dreams for so long.

Kalen, standing over a bloody mess of chaos and destruction, turning to look at her with pain and disappointment in those amazing silver eyes. His hair was a silken black cloak that hung around his shoulders, halfway down his back . . . and he was angry, so angry the air around him all but vibrated with his rage.

You belong in our world . . .

She closed her eyes, pressing her hands to her face. Behind her eyelids, she saw a world that was overwhelmed by war, by chaos, pitted, blackened areas that had once been cities, forests stripped of everything green and pure, a world so ugly and torn. Smoke filled the air and fires always burned. It was a terrifying, ugly image, as close to hell on earth as she could imagine. But like an afterim-age . . . another world wavered, just beyond the reach of her sight, something green and lush and rich.

That was the world as it had once been. Before something, or someone, had torn open a hole that led straight to hell. Now it was a feeding and breeding ground for something evil, something vile.

Too real . . . too real . . .

Lee whimpered in her throat, wrapping her arms around her knees and resting her chin there.
You’re going out of your mind . . .

That low, raspy voice, with its odd accent. Like Ireland, but heavier. Almost more ancient sounding.
You belong in my world . . .
It sounded like music to her ears:
Y b’lon in me world. Ye know it . . . ye always have.

His eyes were pools of molten silver, and just as hot. Damn it, there was no way she could have imagined a creature as fantastical as he was. Or as angry. The rage she sensed inside him was practically tangible. He seemed so real . . . Whimpering, she curled on her side in the bed and whispered, “What’s going on with me?”

The entire dream, she remembered all of it. She had closed her eyes to go to sleep last night and had a brief moment of nothingness . . . then she had opened her eyes, seeing a murky display of greenish purple lights just beyond the thick cover of clouds. A strange sense of purpose had filled her, and she had moved through the bizarre landscape of empty rubble-strewn streets, shells of buildings, trees that were twisted and stunted. Walking those roads had felt familiar, and she had seen faces that she had known.

The more she thought about the dream, the more memories she seemed to find, like they had been buried just under the sand and a wind had come, blowing the sand away and exposing the memories. Curling her hands into fists, she clenched her teeth against another onslaught of them.
What is going on?

Lee spent the day wandering the house, thinking she had lost her mind, her hold on reality. If she didn’t settle down and focus, she might just lose her job. She had four pieces due by the end of the week, but damned if she could focus on anything.

After dropping the drawing board and the stylus for the third time, she gave up on trying to work. Her equipment was too expensive to keep getting abused like that, and it wasn’t like she had accomplished anything today anyway. Not even crap. If she had finished a crappy piece, at least it would have been something she could try to rework tomorrow.

She felt disconnected from everything around her. Even sitting down and trying to watch reruns of
Law & Order
was a waste of time. She couldn’t follow the plot to save her life, not today.

His words kept echoing in her ears—
Open your eyes . . .

Damn it, what in the hell did those dreams mean?

Why didn’t they feel like dreams? Dreams felt vague, blurry—or more often than not, she didn’t remember them at all. So often she woke up and felt like she had walked through an entire other world, but recalling those dreams was nearly impossible. But this dream? It all felt too real for words.

She could remember the feel of his hands on her arms, the agony and the self-directed fury she saw in his eyes as he sliced that blade down her arm. Lee remembered the quick flash of pain—it hadn’t hurt, not at first. The pain came a few seconds later, but the pain wasn’t what had her so shaken.

He’d cut her. He’d deliberately hurt her. For some odd reason, she felt betrayed by that.

The cut . . . She lifted her forearm, staring at the cut with wide, troubled eyes. Anytime she had ever gotten hurt in life, it had healed with amazing speed. She hadn’t ever taken much notice of it, until another kid from the foster home she’d been living in when she was twelve came home with stitches in her leg from a laceration she’d gotten when she’d been hurt in a bike accident. Lee hadn’t seen stitches before.

Technically, she’d heard of them. But weren’t they for more serious things? Little cuts like that healed in a couple of days. Well, they always did for her. But Toni had kept those stitches in for more than a week, and the nasty gash on her leg took weeks to heal.

The cut on Lee’s arm was still raw. Still open. Like it wasn’t healing at all. Lee blew her bangs out of her eyes and dropped her arm, spinning away. “You weren’t in some magickal world last night. Some magicked blade didn’t cut your arm. You are you, nobody else.”

A mantra, she repeated it to herself over and over. But there was another voice,
his
voice, and it was louder, drowning out everything else.
You’re nothing but a shadow of yourself . . . a wraith.

“He talks about me like I’m not real. Like I’m not here,” Lee muttered. She hardly realized she was talking to herself. “I am here. I am real.” The sound of her raised voice startled her and Lee clapped a hand over her mouth, locking the argument inside.

“Stop it,” she mumbled against her hand. “This is just nuts.” Crazy. That’s what it was. She needed real, professional help. Her hand shook as it fell away from her lips, and she clenched it into a tight fist. A dream had done this to her. Had her shivering and scared, like a child afraid of the dark.

“That’s it. This has got to stop.” She took a deep breath and left the living room. There was a phone book in her office. The yellow pages had all sorts of professional help. She’d find herself a shrink, get an appointment— today if at all possible. If it took a bunch of pills and hours on a therapy couch, she was going to stop these damn dreams.

You’re nothing but a shadow . . .
Just outside the door to her office, his voice whispered through her mind again. She froze in her tracks. Then she started to run. Lee ran down the hall, tripping over the runner on the wood floor, skidding on her knees to a stop in front of the bookcase where she kept her photo albums.

“I’m not a fucking shadow. I’m not a wraith. What in the hell is a wraith anyway? I am real. I’m real,” she said, her voice harsh, her breathing erratic. Her hand shook as she opened the heavy cloth-covered board that made up the front of the album. The pictures had been taken last summer, at a barbecue when a friend sold a book to a publisher in New York. Lee preferred to be behind the camera, but this time, she had consented. A few pictures . . .

Her eyes lingered on the very first one. One of her with her arm linked around Moira’s neck. Moira’s face was clear, her eyes sparkling and bright, all the excitement and joy about her book deal showing in her eyes. But Lee’s face . . . it was like the lens had been wet. Foggy, or out of focus. Jason had been taking the pictures that day. Moira’s husband was a professional portrait photographer. He didn’t know how to take bad pictures.

Turning the page, she looked from one picture to another, and in every one her face was distorted or blurred. The sob started as an ache in her chest, building as she threw down the album and grabbed another one, this one from when she and Moira had gone to Ireland, three years before her friend had met Jason.

All of them. Blurred. Distorted. Out of focus. They hadn’t looked like that when she’d put them in this album. She knew they hadn’t. “No,” she whispered. With her fisted hand pressed to her lips, Lee stared at the picture of her and Moira in front of Dromoland Castle. Moira’s face was clear, her smile wide and easy. Her arm was slung around Lee’s shoulders. The image was so clear that Lee could see the numbers on Moira’s oversized watch.

But Lee? Her image was totally out of focus. Even her clothes looked blurry.

“No,” she whispered again.

Her mind whirled, e-mails she remembered coming to mind. Professional portraits she’d had taken to be used with the bio on her website, only to have the photographer e-mail her and tell her they’d need to do the pictures again, the images were blurred. Lee hadn’t bothered with it at the time, hadn’t wanted to mess with it, and she probably wouldn’t have if Moira hadn’t kept nagging her about it.

With startling clarity, Lee recalled when she’d finally given in to Moira and agreed to let Jason take some new pictures for her to use on her site. Those pictures had been fine. Perfectly fine. She had loaded them onto her computer right after Jason had taken them. They had been fine. They would still be fine.

Gingerly, she placed the album on the ground and rose, wrapping her arms around her body. She was freezing. She felt so damn cold. Lee stood there in the middle of scattered pictures and albums and rubbed her hands up and down her arms. Chilled to the bone, she turned away from the albums and walked to the office, one slow step after another.

The photos were going to be fine.

They were great pictures and everything was fine, she told herself as she walked into her office and crossed to her workstation. She sat down at her desk and opened the drawer.

Rifling through the scattered notes and paper clips, she looked for the envelope where she had put the disk with the picture files. Her hand was shaking as she put it into the disk drive, watching as the computer screen came to life, the flickering lights of her screensaver disappearing as she touched the key.

The sight of those lights touched another memory in her head.

That clouded sky. The lights behind a shield of dust, fumes and smog . . . Closing her eyes, Lee whispered, “Sweet heaven. I’m going nuts.” She had designed the screensaver from those lights, like the northern lights she’d seen when she went to Alaska. They’d amazed her, enthralled her . . . but these lights were different. Muted, almost broken. The lights seemed sad.

“I really have lost my mind,” she murmured. Covering the mouse with her hand, she opened the folder where the pictures were stored. She didn’t have to click on it any more than once before the sob that had been building in her throat tore free.

“No!” she screamed, standing out of her chair so fast it toppled over. With one vicious sweep of her arm, she knocked the keyboard, the mouse pad and the mouse from the under-the-desk platform, jerking the cords out with vicious pulls of her wrist, screaming as she hurled the keyboard across the room.

It landed with a clatter on the floor as she turned to stare back at the computer. All the thumbnail images stared back at her. And every single one was blurred, distorted, out of focus. She couldn’t so much as make out the color of her eyes.
No
.

Open your eyes . . .

Like a wind in the desert, the echo of the voice seemed to scorch her flesh, echoing all around her, echoing inside her head. She pressed her hands against her eyes and demanded, “What in the hell am I supposed to see?”

The world shifted under her feet. Lee gasped for air, throwing out her arms for balance. Noise assaulted her ears, and when she spun around to stare out the window, colors were so vivid, she felt as though she was staring through a kaleidoscope.

Trees seemed to glow, a golden light emanating from within. She could see each individual blade of grass. Hear the sound of a bird call. The ground still seemed to be trembling, but the leaves outside weren’t even moving on the trees. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. They were trembling, ever so minutely. A fly buzzed by and she whimpered as she realized that the fly was a good forty feet away. She could see it, so incredibly clear, as it landed on one of those minutely trembling leaves on one of the trees that seemed all glowy.