Dark Child

by Jo Raven

  As if we weren’t trying to drown each other a minute ago.

  I’m back inside the dream, but this time, I control it. Nobody’s after me, no magical subconscious forces march me around like a puppet on strings, forcing me to stare at the dead, to run through the night, to drown in blood.

  So yeah, I’ll be damned if I walk away before I find a clue—and it seems Ross feels the same way, as he starts after me, leaving Jarett and Gigi behind.

  It’s fucking weird, the dream memories superimposing themselves on reality, ghostly golden trees over the blackened stumps and branches under which we walk. Morning mist winds around the trunks when in my dream darkness is starting to fall.

  In my dream I’m alone.

  In reality, I have Cos by my side and my family right behind me. No dead bodies. No blood. Ross is alive and well, if annoying as hell.

  No swans. No axes. No single unblinking eye gazing at me.

  Moving gets me warm enough for my teeth to stop knocking. “This way,” I say, almost seeing from the distance the man staggering behind the trunks, dragging the body behind him. “He came this way.”

  “It’s all in your mind,” Ross pants and huffs.

  “Here.” I stop, and Cos skids to a halt beside me, hanging onto my hand not to fall.

  “What’s here?” she whispers. She looks spooked and chilled, her lips purple. Her jeans are wet—she waded into the stream with the others when Ross jumped on me earlier.

  “There’s nothing here.” Ross stomps around like a drunken bull. “What the fuck are we doing here?”

  “He brought her here.”

  “And then?”

  “And then… I dunno. I left, I guess.”

  “You fucking left?”

  “I ran away, Ross,” I explain to him with more patience than I thought I had in me. “I was a little kid. He was the fucking bogeyman. I was terrified, so I ran.”

  “What’s going on?” Jarett and Gigi are arriving, pale shadows among the tree trunks. “What are you doing?”

  “Merc says this is where the bogeyman dragged the body,” Cos says.

  “No shit.” Jarett whistles. “You sure about this, man?”

  “As sure as I’ll ever be. I wouldn’t swear it on the Bible, all right?”

  They all look around, and see what I am seeing: trees, shrubs, muddy earth.

  “Maybe he buried her here,” I say, and I wince, my headache spiking. I see an ax rising and falling, sparkling.

  Fuck.

  Ross has a wild-eyed look, his back stiff, as if expecting a ghost to appear. It’s not a particularly ugly spot or anything, but I guess I set the mood, made everyone jumpy.

  A crash has us all whirling around, gasping, but the two figures approaching are none other than Matt and Octavia.

  “Jesus,” Gigi mutters, a hand pressed to her chest. “Are we done here? Can we go home?”

  “You wanted to talk.” My voice is hoarse.

  “Talk, not wander in creepy woods. I’m…” She takes a shaky breath. “I’m sorry. It’s all just reminding me of searching for you all those years ago, and how frightened I was.”

  I watch Matt and Octavia approach and say nothing.

  There’s nothing to say. I wanna go home, too, curl up with my girl and just forget. A pity the forgetting part was never a fucking option.

  Hey, at least I got the girl, the best girl, so despite everything, I’m a lucky motherfucker. Some people only get the bad dreams.

  “If you’re right,” Octavia says, turning in place in a circle, “then the body might still be here.”

  “There was no fucking body,” Ross mutters, “there was never a—”

  “I never thought this would turn into a murder investigation,” my sister goes on.

  “I dunno what you thought it would turn into. I thought we came here to find out if there was a body after all.”

  She shrugs. “It was all so abstract until now.”

  “It still is,” Jarett says. “What are we gonna do? We can’t start digging up the place.”

  “We put a marker here and tell the police.”

  “And they’ll believe us?” Ross glares at me. “Based on, what, a little kid’s memories, or a grown-up’s nightmares?”

  “I’ll talk to my friend the cop,” Matt says, “ask him to do this as a favor.”

  “You got a cop friend?” Jarett mutters.

  “I have all sorts of friends,” he says mysteriously. He turns to me. “I’ll talk to John Elba. Johnny.”

  “He helped when the kids were kidnapped,” Octavia says, taking his hand. “When I was kidnapped.”

  “Okay, so I think we’re done here.” I’m bone weary and so fucking cold. “Let’s go.”

  They all follow suit, and I bet they’re glad to leave this haunted place behind. I sure am. Fact is, I doubt I’ll be sleeping any better tonight. Seeing this place, remembering more stuff, won’t undo my nightmares. That’d be fucking wishful thinking.

  We haven’t solved anything. Sure, now I’m starting to believe what Gigi said all along—that my dreams are replaying something that really happened that night—but if they find the body of Ross’s mother buried in the mud… I can’t see how that will put me at ease.

  Because if she was killed, then who’s the killer? How will they catch him fifteen years later? Is he still walking around free?

  And that is if they do find a body. If not…

  Yeah, if not, then… Then what? What if these memories aren’t real? What if I’m remembering dream memories, things I dreamed about, my mind telling me they’re real?

  “Hey, there’s something here,” Gigi says stepping away from Jarett’s shadow. She nudges something with the toe of her shoe, something half-sticking out of the mud at the water’s edge. “It’s like… a handle. A wooden handle.”

  Jarett bends down and pulls, then curses and kneels in the cold mud to dig it out.

  It’s the remains of a shovel.

  “Do you remember this?” she asks.

  “I’m not sure. I…no.”

  “What if this is what you saw from the distance, and not an ax?” Jarett wipes his muddy hands on his pants. “You said it yourself, the light was fading.”

  Oh fuck. I dunno. I try to focus on the image of the ax in my dreams and pain rips through my skull, and the ground seems to slip from under me. Damn, I feel as if my head is splitting in two.

  Distantly, I hear Cos saying something about the cold and going home.

  Home sounds damn good.

  Then a voice says very close to my ear, “Merc, you all right?”

  Not really, I want to say, but my face is numb, and my knees are folding, and that ax keeps flashing in my memory like a warning sign. This isn’t good.

  Images keep tumbling in front of my eyes, from the dreams, from my life. Destiny, St. Louis, my family, Ross sneering from the street side, blood and the stream flowing, its choppy surface shining like golden shards as I fall.

  Fall where?

  Bile rises in my throat.

  “Goddammit, boy, come on.” Given how much I hate letting Matt see any sign of weakness in me, I shouldn’t feel so grateful when he puts an arm around my shoulders, all but holding me up, and hauling me toward his pickup. “Never seen you like this before. Is he sick?”

  “Could be the aftereffects of the pills,” I hear Octavia’s voice from behind.

  Worried. She sounds worried.

  “He’s had times like this,” Gigi is saying from somewhere to my left. “Since he was a kid. I think it happens when his memories come back.”

  Why are they talking as if I’m not there? I feel insubstantial, weightless like a ghost, and yet too heavy to move.

  “Cos,” I breathe. Where is she? “Cos?”

  “Right here.” She wraps herself on my other side, grounding me. She makes me feel real. “How do you feel? You went all white there for a moment. Was it something you remembered?”

  I clutch her closer, feeling ch
illed to the bone. “Not sure.”

  The water splashing around me.

  The bogeyman chasing me.

  The ax.

  I let Matt haul me along to his pickup, then shove me inside the back seat, shivering so hard I can hardly talk. Thank fuck for that, as I dunno what to say.

  Everyone piles up inside and Matt turns on the heater.

  “Where’s Ross?”

  “He was here two minutes ago.”

  Fuck. I look out the window. Why would he leave?

  And why would he stay, huh? We just went at each other in the river, and then all but told him someone killed his mom and buried her in the woods, then walked away and let him deal with it.

  Why this wave of apprehension, as if he’s in danger?

  “Merc.” Cos is snuggled against my side, under my arm, dark eyes turned up to meet mine. “Do you remember what happened after?”

  “After what?” I ask to buy time, though I know what she’s gonna say. She’s pieced it together, with the scraps me and my sisters have told her. Cos is smart, as well as sexy.

  “After you saw the man drag the body into the trees.”

  Yeah, that’s the question of the day. I told Ross I ran away, but where? Gigi didn’t find me until almost dawn. Where did I go that night, and what happened?

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Cosima

  The trip was like a day spent in the outskirts of hell. Nothing bad happened, nothing dangerous. Merc seemed to remember things—which was good? Or bad? Debatable—and I met the infamous Ross, black sheep of the family and bully extraordinaire.

  Who looks like Merc’s twin brother.

  And who pushed him into the stream and went on to wrestle with him until the guys had to intervene and pull him off Merc before he could drown him.

  Seeing Merc fight with the monsters in his mind was so hard. I don’t like seeing him struggling, in pain, mental more than physical, but still.

  I hate it. I want to fix this for him.

  I wonder if that’s how my sister feels when Griffin is hurting.

  It blows, I think, standing at Merc’s bedroom door, that a childhood memory should affect someone so hard. Of course, as memories go, this takes the cake of horrific events.

  A murder. That’s bad enough.

  Unless of course there’s more.

  And for some reason, it feels like there’s more.

  I walk into the room and sit on the bed, stroke sweaty hair off his forehead. He’s running a fever. It started as we drove back this morning, and now he’s tossing and turning, mumbling in his sleep.

  It makes my chest ache.

  Why did I think that by visiting the place of his memories this would be over? It seems we all thought that.

  Gigi takes my place at the door. “It has happened before. It will pass. He was never a sick kid, but from time to time he’d get a weird fever out of nowhere and toss and turn like that. That’s when I realized something had happened to him.”

  “He says he doesn’t remember anything after the man left with the body,” I mutter.

  She shakes her head. “I have a bad feeling about this,” she whispers, then laughs and claps a hand over her mouth to muffle the sound. “Oh God. As if all this isn’t bad enough. But at least he’s talking about it, at long last. It will get better after this. It has to. It’s like lancing an infected wound. That’s why shrinks make you talk and talk, right? Get it all out?”

  God, I hope she’s right.

  “Did Matt manage to contact his cop friend?”

  “Yeah. John Elba. He promised to look into it. I don’t have to tell you what a shock that was for the police. Destiny is such a quiet place. Our family keeps stirring up trouble.”

  “It doesn’t sound like you were the troublemakers. More like you were caught up in it.”

  “True.” She smiles at me. “Thanks for coming along today.”

  “You kidding me? He needed me there. Of course I was coming with.”

  Her smile widens. “He really likes you, you know. Never seen him like this before.”

  “How was he as a kid?”

  “Super cute. Girls kept falling in love with him from kindergarten to college.”

  “I believe it.”

  “They all wanted to marry him.” She giggles. “And he teased them. Teased all of us so much. Though he had his quiet and serious moments. He studied hard. Spent endless hours in his room listening to music.”

  “A heartbreaker,” I whisper.

  “Yeah.”

  “I love him.” I look up to find the sheen of tears in her eyes. “And I don’t care how long it takes for him to remember and to get better, I’ll be here. For as long as he wants me to.”

  “I’ve always worried,” she says. About him. “Not that he’d have trouble finding a girl. God, no. he’s always been surrounded by girls, practically throwing themselves at him. But a girl who’ll give him what he needs, who’ll love him as honestly and openly as he loves. He’s an open book, easy to take advantage of. He gives his heart without reservations. It’s so easy to break him. I don’t think anyone realizes, seeing him. He’s confident, and strong, and a handsome devil, but he’s set his heart on you, and if you didn’t feel the same way…”

  “I do.” I get up and go hug her. “And he’ll be fine. We’ll make sure of it.”

  She nods, sniffles, gives me a quick smile and goes out, wiping at her cheeks.

  I sit back down, place my hand on Merc’s chest, over the covers.

  Aw shucks, this family. They care for each other so much. They stick together. Matt just left with Octavia to go back to their kids, Merc’s mom came by and sat with him for a while—I even think she sang him a lullaby—and then Gigi and Jarett stayed with him.

  Now it’s my turn, and I feel as if I earned my place by him, like I passed a test, because they wouldn’t let just anyone sit with him.

  It speaks to me, reminds me of my sister, and how much I want to see her, tell her about everything that happened.

  Merc’s hand moves, covers mine, startling me.

  “Hey.” Those long lashes lift, showing a glimmer of blue.

  “Hey. Want some water?”

  He licks his dry lips. “You told Gigi that you love me.”

  I snort. “Silly boy, I told you that before. Were you eavesdropping as I talked to your sister?”

  He grins. “I like hearing it. Say it again.”

  “What, that I talked to your sister?” I stick my tongue out at him.

  He tugs me down to kiss me. “No, the other part.”

  “Were you eavesdropping—?”

  “Cos.”

  “I love you.”

  His smile is huge and so is my heart. I don’t think he realizes just how in love with him I am. It’s scaring the crap out of me.

  He hauls me down, right on top of him, and holds me tight. The feverish heat of his skin seeps through my clothes. “Cosie,” he whispers in my ear, “I’m remembering more.”

  I try to pull up, see his face, but he holds on. “Merc?”

  “It’s like, my body’s fighting it, doesn’t want me to remember. But it’s coming back to me, in bits and pieces, and I think…”

  “Yeah?” This time his hold relaxes just enough that I can sit up, look at him. His face is flushed, hair stuck to his forehead and temples with sweat, his eyes are too bright with the fever, but there’s a new calm in his gaze.

  “I think I know where I saw the ax.”

  So we’re all sitting around Merc’s bed, this time—same gathering, different settings, waiting for Merc to tell us what he remembered. Although he’s still sick, he insisted he had to tell us.

  Matt is relaying the story, on the phone with his cop friend who apparently took the news of a possible skeleton in Destiny’s backyard very seriously and has assembled a small police force to go and dig around in the woods by the stream.

  This is all good, right? Things are moving forward, and if Merc’s memories ar
e real, the police may well find something.

  I’m just concerned that he’s still unwell and afraid to know what else he remembered.

  Looking at the faces of his family around me, I think I can safely report I’m not the only one feeling that way.

  “Cos, come here,” he rasps, even though he’s just drunk a glass of water, and lifts his arm for me to snuggle against him. He tucks me into his side so that my cheek is pressed to his chest.

  He seems to like having me close when he’s reliving those awful memories, and who am I to deny him? I crave his closeness, and am glad to help in this small way, even if it’s the only help I can give him.

  What I want is to wrap myself around his body, like a vine, protect him from any enemy. But how can I, when it seems the enemy is his own mind?

  His memories.

  Which he’s now laying bare, peeling off the layers of dreams and fear.

  “I’d fallen in the water in my rush to get away from the body,” he says, and I hear his voice roll through his chest like distant thunder. “I was fucking terrified. She was all wrong, so still, eyes wide open, mouth open, all that blood.” I hug him more tightly, and he pets my hair. His heart is thumping so fast under my ear. “When he came back for her, because that’s what I’d missed, of course. He’d dumped her there, for whatever reason, then came back for her, and I just tried to crawl into the reeds, to hide better.”

  “And you saw him drag the body away.”

  “I saw that, yeah. I remember staring, trying to understand what was going on. I’m actually not sure I saw a shovel, or anything else. Because…” He swallows hard, his pulse accelerating. He lifts his arm, stares at the old scar there. “I lost my footing and fell into the stream.”

  “Goddammit, Merc.” Matt drags his wife against him, puts his arm around her, and it’s only then I realize she’s gone pale. “This is like a horror film.”

  “What happened then?” Gigi is leaning forward in her seat, holding her mother’s hand.

  Oh God, I’m so sorry their mom has to hear this. She’s gripping her daughter’s hand like a lifeline. Her boyfriend isn’t here today, no idea why.