Shimmer: A Novel (28 page)

Unable to hide the disbelief in her voice, Fallon said, “
She’s
planning strategy.”

“She must have come down after I left the office,” Logan said. “C’mon!”

They hurried across the foyer to the hall and Ambrose’s office. The door was partly open, enough for Fallon to see Thalia in a paint-spattered smock and jeans, standing in the middle of the room with her palms cupped over her ears. “No—no—no! Stop it! I can’t! I can’t, I told you!”

“You created it with her, Thalia,” Gideon said forcefully, not backing down.

“Stop yelling at me!

“You can make it work.”

Thalia spun in a circle and stamped her feet, bumping into a wingchair in the process and almost falling. “No—no—not listening! Stop it—stop it now! I can’t—I won’t!”

Ambrose came around from behind his desk as Logan and Fallon entered the office. The white-haired old man placed his arms on Thalia’s shoulders to comfort her. “Let’s take this slow, Thalia. Please.”

“No, no, I don’t want to,” she said in a small, frightened voice. Her hair was a wild tangle gripped in her white-knuckled hands. To Fallon, Thalia seemed one more outburst away from ripping her hair out by the roots. “Ambrose, I can’t. It’s dark. It’s so dark in there and I’m scared. Please don’t make me. Don’t want to go there again…”

“Go where?” Fallon whispered to Logan.

Logan spared her a quick glance and tapped the side of his head.

She’s afraid of her own mind,
Fallon thought,
of using her paranormal abilities.

Thalia sagged in Ambrose’s grip, and, as if she’d lost strength in her limbs or merely the will to stand, she sank slowly to the floor, dropping her hands into her lap, her head drooping against her chest. “Go away,” she whispered. “Make it go away.”

Ambrose cast a meaningful look at Gideon. Although he was family, he was an outsider, unaccustomed to dealing with this volatile member of the Walker clan. Fallon could see that Ambrose was trying to urge Gideon to back off without creating further discord.

Gideon shook his head, ignoring the plea. “No, this is too important. I want to believe Liana and Barrett are coming back,” he said defensively. “But we have to plan for contingencies. And I’m—I’m no good to the family like this. I’m not asking her to fight, but she can do this. She has the ability to help me—to help us—win this battle.”

“Let’s talk about this later, Gideon,” Ambrose said evenly. “This may not be necessary. Let’s give them more time to—”

“We may not have time, Ambrose,” Gideon said. Though his tone was more reasonable, his fists were clenched at his side in frustration. The long scars in his face bracketing his black eye patch were deep, the skin unusually pale. “Yes, we can wait and hope, but we have to do more than that. We—the four of us—have to be prepared for what may happen next.”

“Five,” Fallon said.

“What?” Gideon asked, confusion replacing frustration.

“You forgot to include me,” Fallon said simply. “Four of you plus me equals five.”

“You’re not a Walker.”

“What’s in a name?” Fallon asked with calm assurance. All but Thalia were looking at her, even Logan, waiting. And now that she’d stepped forward, figuratively, she had to be careful not to insert her foot in her mouth.

Conscious of the clutter of boxes and paintings awaiting wall hooks, she decided against creating another tripping hazard and dropped her backpack beside the doorway. Then she stepped forward and kneeled beside Thalia. She took a deep breath to steady her hands, hoping nobody noticed her nervousness. She was determined to let supernatural intuition guide her, and that unknown instinct or inner voice or gut feeling or whatever-she-chose-to-call-it feeling was urging her to reach out again to the troubled woman. She placed her right hand over Thalia’s left, which hung limply in her lap. At that moment of contact, Fallon sensed her deeper, unspoken fear. “You can do this, Thalia,” Fallon said softly.

Thalia shook her head without looking at the younger woman.

“It’s what she would want.”

“Who?” Thalia asked innocently.

“Liana.”

Thalia turned her head slowly to her left until her hazel eyes focused on Fallon face. Thalia’s lip quivered, and before she looked away again, she said disconsolately, “I can’t feel her anymore.”

“That doesn’t mean she’s not out there,” Fallon said, “waiting for our help.”

“No, I can’t help,” Thalia said with another head shake. “Can’t go into the dark. Not again, never again, no.”

“Gideon needs your help to help Liana,” Fallon said.

“You don’t know what he wants,” Thalia said in anguish. “You can’t know.”

Fallon looked up at Gideon, whose jaw was set as he stared down at Thalia. He remained silent, waiting. This was something she had to figure out on her own. Somehow this was a test. And she had to pass the test to win over Thalia. Fallon searched the harsh lines of Gideon’s face, trying to find the answer, but he refused to make eye contact.
His eye,
she thought suddenly.
That’s it! I don’t understand what it means, but that’s the issue here.
“He needs you to help him see again.”

Gideon shot Fallon a surprised one-eyed glance, swallowed nervously—
almost embarrassed,
she thought—before returning his attention to Thalia.

Thalia let out a tiny sob and sniffled. “He—he can see.”

Fallon examined Gideon’s stern face and harsh features and spoke, “Not as well as he could if you helped.”

Thalia had begun to wring her hands together; desperation seemed to ooze from her pores. She fidgeted in her awkward sitting position and sighed. “Don’t know how.”

“You need my blood to finish it,” Gideon said. “That’s all. She said as much before we left. Before the bus—”

Thalia closed her eyes and rocked back and forth. “No blood, please. No blood. I don’t remember how.”

Fallon maintained contact with Thalia’s flesh, but her hand had slid upward, holding the woman’s forearm in a gentle grip. It felt as if she was tapping into the ebb and flow of Thalia’s emotions, fears and resistance, sort of a psychic thermometer. While she held onto Thalia’s arm, she looked at Gideon again. This time he met her gaze, almost defiantly. “Liana told you she could restore sight to your damaged eye,” Fallon said. It was not a question; he nodded, but offered no further information.
Another test,
she thought.
I’m getting an impromptu Walker initiation.
“With a replacement eye.”

“I have an artificial eye,” Gideon said. “It’s cosmetic only.”

Fallon nodded. Then it hit her. A lightning bolt of intuition if ever there was one. “Not like that. She made you a beauty.”

“What is she talking about?” Ambrose asked Gideon, expressing more curiosity than impatience. His bushy white eyebrows drew together as he tried to assemble the pieces. “Liana never mentioned this to me.”

Gideon grunted and bobbed his head at Fallon. “Ask her.”

“An enchanted eye,” Fallon said, unable to control her smile. The sensation was such a rush, suddenly discerning something she couldn’t possibly know, at least not rationally. “But it needs your blood to… to what? Activate it?”

Gideon cleared his throat, noncommittally, but she could tell he was impressed. “Something like that.” He wagged a finger at Thalia. “She knows. They made it together. But it’s not finished. Right now it’s no better than the hunk of plastic I have under this patch.”

Fallon turned her attention back to Thalia and raised one of the woman’s nervously twisting hands, squeezing it between both of hers. “You can do this, Thalia.”

“No.”

“Yes, I can sense it.”

Continual headshaking accompanied a singsong response: “Wrong, wrong, wrong.”

“I’ll help you,” Fallon said. “If you’ll let me.”

Thalia seemed lost as she whispered, “Nobody can help me.”

Without releasing Thalia’s hand, Fallon rose into a crouch and repositioned herself in front of the older woman, who watched her with a measure of curiosity rising beneath her omnipresent fear.

“Ms. Maguire,” Ambrose began, then modified his tone. “Fallon. We appreciate your concern in this matter, but what is it, precisely, you plan to do here.”

“Trust me,” Fallon said, smiling as much for Thalia’s benefit as theirs.
When you climb on the intuition roller coaster,
she thought a little giddily,
you don’t examine the blueprints; you simply grab the safety bar and enjoy the ride.

She took both of Thalia’s hands and stared into the frightened woman’s wild hazel eyes. Some other sense was guiding Fallon, and she had surrendered herself to it. While she took several deep calming breaths, she recalled what Ambrose had predicted about her.
“I believe you have the potential… to interact with our kind, to… shift our boundaries.”
That’s what Fallon was dealing with at this moment: Thalia’s boundaries. After she’d been traumatized, she’d walled off a part of her psyche, hobbled herself and her abilities. Fallon needed to expand Thalia’s comfort zone without further traumatizing her. That’s what made her task so difficult. If Fallon messed up, she could drive Thalia irrevocably deeper into her defensive shell. Finally, Fallon asked her the most important question. “Do you trust me?”

Thalia almost snapped out a reflexive response, then pressed her quivering lips together. She closed her eyes and released a tremulous sigh. “I… I… yes, I trust you.”

“Good,” Fallon said, maintaining a relaxed tone and hoping Thalia would mirror her calm. “Let’s begin.”

“But… but I don’t know how.”

“That’s okay,” Fallon assured her. “I do.”

Thalia nodded, waiting.

Fallon leaned forward, and without being instructed to do so, Thalia reflected that movement. Their foreheads were inches apart. Fallon could see flecks of gold in the green sea of Thalia’s irises. As she stared into the older woman’s eyes, the pupils expanded. Fallon’s reflection slipped away from the slick surface as the darkness spread like an ink stain. Fallon experienced the disorienting sensation of slipping forward, passing through the membrane of those eyes, and into Thalia’s mind, wrapped in an enfolding darkness that threatened to encompass everything. By the grace of an ever narrowing gap, the outside world remained visible, available to Thalia. Every day, each hour, was a struggle to keep the darkness at bay. It was an exhausting inner battle, a consuming struggle to remain in the light, and it left room for nothing else. Thalia was burning up from within, and, at times, envisioned herself as a hollow woman, a shell of who she had been, a negligible piece of flotsam clutched by the frozen fingers of a sailor after a nighttime shipwreck at sea. Drowning in darkness, she clung to her life and her identity with all her remaining effort, focusing on the smallest source of light—and hope—to keep herself alive, if adrift. Thalia had survived her ordeal in the rift. That’s all her family knew, and in their ignorance, that was sufficient for them. But Fallon now understood Thalia’s secret: her battle wasn’t over. She had survived until now, but she had not yet won. And deeper still, the truth that Thalia kept even from herself. She was losing that battle. It was only a matter of time before the darkness won. Like someone who initially survives exposure to high levels of radiation only to die later from the cumulative effects of radiation poisoning. Poisoned by darkness, leeched of life and sanity and identity until only a void remained, until the brittle shell crumbled into dust.

Fallon shuddered with this premonition and the motion was like an electric current snaking down her arms, through her hands, and into Thalia’s body. When Thalia whimpered in fear, Fallon cursed herself for letting the insight overwhelm her. Sometimes the roller coaster elicits an involuntary scream out of the rider.
Hang on,
she told herself.
This isn’t about me.

Without thinking about her actions, Fallon leaned closer and Thalia followed suit. Until their foreheads touched. The sudden warmth of contact revitalized Fallon and calmed Thalia.

Better,
Fallon told herself.
Now what?
For a moment, she had a vision of the Vulcan mind meld from the
Star Trek
television series. That was fingers to face, though, not forehead to forehead.
My mind to your mind, Thalia,
Fallon thought. She had to discover what Thalia needed, which was knowledge unknown to Thalia herself. Fallon had to infer that knowledge somehow. From what she saw in her eyes. In the darkness.

“Yes,” Fallon whispered so softly she was sure only Thalia had heard.

Fallon projected her own light, her own hope, into the other woman’s psyche, pushing with her mind, pushing against the weight of the darkness that cloaked Thalia’s thoughts in consuming and unforgiving shadows. Fallon imagined heavy draperies drawn across floor to ceiling windows, admitting no light into the grand room of Thalia’s mind. Then Fallon imagined herself grabbing the dusty cloth and ripping it aside, imagined the purifying rays of the noonday sun blasting through that room and banishing darkness.

Thalia gasped, and for a moment, her eyes rolled back in her head.

Fallon clutched her hands, maintaining physical contact at three points, both hands and forehead. The hazel eyes lowered and stared back into Fallon’s eyes. But they were different now. Brighter, livelier, almost challenging. And crinkling at the edges now—as Thalia smiled at her.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

Fallon felt a moment of exhilaration and a lump in her throat. She imagined she was now seeing Thalia as she had been before the rift crossing, when she had been whole and free of the inner darkness. But it was no more than a moment, because Fallon could still see deep into those vibrant eyes and what she saw worried her.

“Are you okay?” Thalia asked, completely alert now and a quick study. She’d noticed Fallon’s misgivings as echoed in her body language.

“Yes, I’m fine,” Fallon said hastily, looking away to conceal the truth. The connection, the openness between them, was a two-way street. Fallon had to raise her guard lest her concerns undo whatever good she had accomplished.

She doesn’t need to know what I know,
Fallon reasoned.
Not yet, anyway.