Fade To Midnight (5 page)

“Promise me that there will be no scenes like this at the reception,” her father said.

“I won't embarrass you at the reception, Dad,” she said dully.

Who knew if that was true, though. She never had a choice. God knows, she would never have voluntarily chosen this hell. Being constantly judged, isolated. Punished. Never seeing Ronnie.

Her father's eyes flicked to the table. He jerked as if he'd been poked with a pin. “For the love of God, Edith! Stop that, right now!”

She flinched. Her hand was holding a pen, which she hadn't been conscious of picking up. It hit the bulb of her wineglass, knocking it over. She'd been doodling on the open sketchpad without realizing it.

A sketch of her father's face and torso covered the page. Wine spread across it, over the sketchbook, the table, dripping onto her lap.

Edie grabbed a napkin, dabbed her skirt, murmuring a garbled apology. She'd been a compulsive doodler ever since she learned how to hold a pen, but her parents had gotten twitchy about it after the Haven. When the incidents began.

“I'll make a strategic retreat now,” Charles Parrish said, rising to his feet. “Before I get my fortune told. Please, Edith. Don't do this to people! No one wants to hear it! And take your meds, goddamnit!”

“I'll try,” she said. Referring to the first request, if not the last. “Can I…would you at least tell Ronnie that I—”

“No!” He spat out the word with vicious force. “I'll contact Evelyn and Tanya for you. Clear your schedule for them, please, and arrange to go to their stylist and makeup artist before the banquet as well, understand?”

She nodded mutely. He strode away. At least like this, they didn't have to do the stiff, awkward, eyeglass bumping hug, she thought, bleakly. He shrank from any physical contact with her.

Do. Not. Cry. Not in public. Don't even think about it.
She sniffed back the tears, swallowed, blinked. Grateful for the glasses, the shield of hair, for privacy. Dad was paying, at the door. He left. No glance. No wave. Their meetings always ended this way. No matter how she tried.

The guy with the comb-over, the drug addicted daughter and the ADS grandson was chowing down on chocolate mousse cake, with the same grim sense of purpose with which he'd consumed the prime rib. Whoo hoo, she thought, staring at him. There was still more damage she could do, if she wanted to. Anything that she said to that poor guy would provoke a massive heart attack, clogged as his arteries must be.

Hah. What a fit ending that would be for an evening like this. Something else to pile up onto her overloaded conscience. As if Mom's death wasn't enough for her to bear. And Ronnie. Feeling abandoned.

She should just stop drawing altogether. Turn away from that part of her brain. Pretend it didn't exist. But she couldn't. Like a drug addiction. She couldn't resist that free, whole, connected feeling.

It was just the consequences that she couldn't bear to face.

She sighed and started gathering up her pens and charcoal, her sketchbooks, and shoved them into her big shoulder bag. She'd go straight home, not looking to the right or left. She'd lock the door. And if she ended up crying there in the dark, who would ever know?

She picked up the napkin, thinking to sponge at the sketchbook once more, hoping to salvage at least a few sheets of the—

She froze, staring down at the sketch she'd doodled of her father, still and cold as a block of stone. The wine had run over it in such a way that it seemed as if the stiffly upright figure with the disapproving mouth and the long, narrow nose was submerged in a pool of blood.

Chills shook her. That familiar far away drumbeat of doom.

I'll just make a strategic retreat now. Before I get my fortune told.
Her father's words echoed in her head. He would never listen if she warned him. She could not help him. No more than she'd been able to help her mother. She was helpless. Hands tied.

And her father was in deadly danger.

 

The little girl floated over the tumbled boulders of dream landscape like a butterfly, darting out of sight, flitting back into it. Barefoot, thin, long dark hair. She wore a white tunic. When she looked back, her huge eyes looked scared, sad. She stopped beside a crack in the cliff wall. She bent. In a flash of thin legs, of dirty little feet, she was gone.

Sean followed her in, bound by the heavy inevitability that came from having dreamed it before. This feeling of being locked in breathless ignorance was horribly familiar. Like a rock sitting on his brain, blacking out the center of his being. Obscuring his sense of place in space and time. Leaving him blundering and helpless in the darkness.

The tunnel wound down, then the cavern opened out. Vastness around him. Cathedral ceilings, buttressed with gnarled stalactites and stalagmites. A forest of pallid, misshapen trees, glowing like radioactive tumors in the dark. Water, slowly dripping. The stink of batshit.

Dread grew inside him, but he had to go on, to do the hard thing. The path curved, through a choked grove of dead, white calcite columns.

A clearing was before him, a slab of stone in the center. Torches flickered in a circle around it, and the reddish light of dancing flames wavered evilly upon the man who lay on it like a pagan sacrifice.

Rocks were piled on his torso. Only his sprawled legs, arms, and head emerged. He had to be dead under that weight, lungs flattened, organs crushed. His head was turned away. He wore a blindfold. All Sean saw was the jut of a cheekbone, lank strands of ash colored hair.

A hole yawned in the rocks before the altar. Something stirred inside. Rustling, a chittering rasp. The flash of some nonhuman eyes in the hole, moving before he could make sense of the gleaming shapes.

Something monstrous, something hideous. Something…hungry.

Then a hairy, jointed leg extended delicately, prodding with its hooked claw. The chittering rasp grew louder.

Sean's heart thudded, but he couldn't run. He leaned down to grab the first boulder heaped on his brother, and the thing burst from its hole, eyes glittering, barbed feet slashing at Sean's face like whiplashes—

Sean jolted bolt upright, gasping for air. Heart racing. Gasps racked his torso, as if he'd been sprinting. The dreams about his lost twin had been getting more frequent, more intense. He was zonked out from sleep deprivation. As if it wasn't enough for them to deal with, the fallout they'd worked through together from that horrific encounter with the mad psycho scientist Christopher Osterman. They'd been supremely lucky to get through that with their lives and their sanity intact. More or less.

They'd been doing better. Convinced they were through the worst of it. And now, here he was. Tormented by fucking nightmares again.

Liv stirred, lifted her head. She shoved fuzzy, sleep-snarled dark curls back from her face. She touched his shoulder, in silent question.

“Shit. Sorry I woke you.” He hardly got the words out, his chest jerked so hard.

Liv sat up, curling her legs up, and putting an unconscious hand over her pregnant belly. “Another dream? Same one, I take it?”

His shoulders jerked in assent, and he hunched. Trying to hide, like a turtle in his shell. “I got farther into the cave this time.”

“Ah. That's good.”

A harsh laugh jerked out of him. “Oh, yeah? Is it?”

She shrank from his ugly tone. “Sorry. Just said that, you know. To say something.”

He kicked himself. “I'm the one who should be sorry. I shouldn't snarl at you.” He forced himself to go on. “I saw him, this time.”

She didn't even have to ask who. “And? How was it?”

He let out an explosive sigh. “Bad. He was blindfolded. Laid out on a stone altar. Covered with a pile of boulders. Staked out in front of the lair of some gigantic insect. Could I dream up anything worse?”

“I see.” She had that careful voice his brothers used. Talking Sean down out of his freakout. Let's scrape Sean off the ceiling again.

He hated it from Con and Davy. He hated it from his wife, too.

“Sounds like a picture on a Tarot card,” she commented. “How did you know it was Kev, if he was covered with rocks and blindfolds?”

“I just knew. You know how it is in dreams.”

“Yeah.” Liv dropped a kiss onto his shoulder. “Hey. Sean? Have you considered that these dreams might not be about Kev at all?”

“What do you mean? Who else could they be about?”

He could feel her caution, how she chose her words carefully, so as not to set him off. It made his teeth grind. “It's been about four months since you started having these dreams,” she began.

“No,” Sean said. “I've had these dreams for eighteen years, Liv. Ever since Kev disappeared. And when we found out it wasn't him, in the grave…” He shrugged. “I know he's not dead.”

“I know. But nightmares where you wake up screaming? These are new.” She kissed his shoulder again. “I feel compelled to point out to you that they started right about when I found out that I was pregnant.”

He went rigid. “You think this is about that?” His voice was so tight, it felt like his throat would implode.

“Don't be mad. Please, consider it. I've read that images in dreams are self-referential. Whoever you dream about, and whatever they do, it's mostly about you. Your own feelings, your own issues.”

“Maybe for most people, but not these dreams,” he said.

“No? Why not?”

“For a lot of reasons!” He stopped, tried to modulate his voice. “Kev woke me up when Gordon kidnapped you. He stopped me from walking off a cliff. That's not fluff crap about my issues, Liv!”

“I never said it was fluff crap,” she said quietly. “But couldn't those incidents have been you all along? Your own awareness, your own intelligence? Just using Kev's image to get your attention?”

“No.” His rejection of the idea was violent and absolute. “It is not.”

“Sean, please. I just want you to—”

“You think I'm scared because we're having a kid?” His voice cracked. “You think I'm freaked out by fatherhood, Liv? That I consider myself buried under a ton of boulders? What does that make you in this dream? The monster? A giant bug who eats her mate? Jesus, Liv! What kind of coward wuss do you take me for?”

She pulled her hands away. “Well. I guess you're a whole lot braver than me, then.” Her voice was clipped. “I'm certainly afraid. I keep having dreams that I'll leave the baby at a public bathroom, or the seat of a city bus. But that just means I'm a cowardly wuss, hmm?” She swung her legs over the side of the bed. “Fine. Whatever.”

Sean lunged, grabbing her waist and wrapping his arms above her baby bulge before she could slide off the bed. “No. Stop.”

“
You
stop.” She batted at his arms, and he could feel the anger, but he just held her there, in a steely grip, taking care not to put any pressure on that precious bump.

She could pick and pry and pummel him to her heart's content, but he wasn't letting her go. No way. He knew what was good for him.

She finally gave up, with a sharp sigh of irritation. He took that as a cue to drag her back onto the bed, pulling her down, and rolling her over so her stiff, resistant body faced his.

He pressed his face against her throat, dragging in her sweet, hot scent of her skin, the silken tickle of her hair. “Please, don't be mad at me,” he said, his voice muffled against her. “I can't take that, too.”

He held onto her with all his strength. After a few minutes, she relaxed, with a shuddering sigh, giving in. She wound her fingers into his hair, which had grown into a shaggy mop almost to his shoulders.

“You piss me off,” she said, petting him. “You big, rude jerk.”

“I know. I'm sorry.” He lifted his head, fixing her with a pleading gaze. “But that guy in my dream? He's not me, babe. I swear.” She opened her mouth, but he cut her off. “And I'm not scared about the baby. Really. At least not any more than a normal guy would be.”

Her eyes narrowed. “And what would you know about normal?”

“You have a point,” he conceded, wiggling down the length of her body until he could press his face against her belly. It was something he loved to do. Just lie there, feeling the little flutters against his cheek. It gave him such a rush, imagining his kid in there. So small. Swimming, turning and spinning in the primordial soup. About the size of his fist, on their last ultrasound. A fucking miracle. An amazing little creature.

No way. It wasn't that sweet tiny thing he was afraid of. No monsters there. Just everything that was fine, good.

“I'm ecstatic about our kid,” he repeated. “Over the moon. And you don't have to be scared. You won't leave the kid on a bus. You'll be an incredible mother. A freaking Titan of a mother.”

She batted at his shoulders, vibrating with laughter. “Oh, shut up. It's not like I have the greatest model for motherhood.”

He winced, in the darkness. True enough. Liv's mother was one of his least favorite people on the planet. A total whack job, to put it politely. Unfortunately, Liv's impending motherhood had inspired the woman to try to make peace with her daughter. She wanted that grandchild. God help the poor, unsuspecting kid. God help them all.

“No, really,” he pleaded. He shoved the oversized T-shirt she slept in up, and found her naked beneath it. Thank God, she had finally realized wearing panties to bed was just a blatant challenge to him.

He nuzzled the velvet of her skin, working his way down into the warm bush of her pubic hair, exploring all the angles and curves of her, changed by her pregnancy, but that soft, electrifying fuzz, the slick silky ringlets that adorned her pink girl parts, were as perfect in every detail as ever. No, better. Tender flower petals. Meltingly juicy, pulling at him.