by Sarah Wynde
“The pain was back?” Nat asked.
He nodded. He turned again and looked at the child in the backseat. Her eyes were closed, her head tilted to the side. She’d dropped the cookie.
“And then what?”
“I stepped out.” His voice was quiet.
“Out of what? The car?”
“No. No, I was already out of the car.”
“Out of what then?”
He glanced at Nat. She was focused on the dark road, not looking at him. “Out of my body,” he answered.
“You—what?” She turned her eyes to him for a brief moment, before returning her gaze to the road.
“I know,” he said. It sounded ridiculous. But it was what had happened. He suspected he wasn’t going to be sharing this story with too many people.
There was a moment of silence before Nat said, “Okay. Keep going.”
He felt his lips curling up, amusement stirring. If Nat was having trouble with this first part, she was never going to believe what came next. “This is when it started to feel like a dream. There was a girl there.”
“Not her?” Nat tilted her head in the direction of the backseat.
Colin shook his head. “No, another one. Older. A teenager. Wearing a costume of some kind. And she was not real happy with me.”
“A costume?” Nat sounded disbelieving.
“Not like Halloween or MegaCon. She wasn’t a superhero. God, that would have been strange.”
Nat coughed slightly and he could see her trying to hide a smile.
“Well, yeah, it was strange anyway. Stranger, I guess,” he admitted. “No, she was dressed old-fashioned, that’s all.” He ran a hand through his hair, then over his face, trying to remember. “It gets blurry. I think I asked her if she was a shinigami.”
“A what?”
“You know, like in—never mind.” No way would Nat know. She’d never gotten into manga. “She didn’t know what a shinigami was either. Or a reaper.”
“A what?” Nat asked again.
He sounded crazy. He knew it. He’d warned her. “You know, like a spirit guide, someone to take me on to the next plane of existence, the afterworld. But she laughed and said if she was a spirit guide, she’d be the kind stopping and asking for directions every five minutes, because she was as lost as a goose in a snowstorm.”
“Okay, let me get this straight. You’ve left your body. You think you’re dead. And you’re talking to a girl in costume who’s making jokes about geese?”
Put like that, it didn’t sound crazy. It sounded ridiculous. “I told you, it was a dream.”
Nat shrugged. “Maybe. Then what?”
It was a dream that had felt very real, though, in its own way. He hadn’t been in a strange place or a surreal world. He’d been exactly where he was, standing above his body, talking to the teenager. The little girl had darted into the underbrush at the side of the road when he got out of the car, but she’d crept closer, wide-eyed and uncertain. She’d reached a tentative hand out to him and patted his back gently. His body hadn’t moved, but he had, crouching down next to her as he asked the teenager about her.
“The little girl moved me,” he said, remembering. She’d tugged at his body, pulling on his arm, working hard to turn him over. And the bigger girl, she’d said something. But it was gone, whatever it had been. The memories were slipping away, the rich, vivid images fading like a dream after being awake for too long.
“Rolled you over?” Nat asked sharply.
“Yeah, I think so.”
Nat looked over her own shoulder at the girl. “Not easy. She’s what, maybe fifty pounds? You would have been a dead weight. No pun intended.”
“No,” Colin agreed. “The other girl helped, I think.” Had she? She’d crouched down, too, almost on top of them both, her hands and arms passing straight through the smaller one. They’d touched his face, both of them, soft touches, but then the bigger girl shifted, directing the little girl down to his chest.
And then… he didn’t know what had happened then. There’d been light and heat and pain again, the burning in his chest back for a moment that lasted forever, and then Nat over him.
That had seemed as much a dream as anything. Ten years had passed since she’d touched him, a decade without her blue eyes the first sight he saw as he woke. Yet opening his own to meet hers had felt like falling back into the world as it should be, as it was meant to be.
“You know everything else,” he said. “I woke up. You were there.” The words sounded so simple. So easy.
Nat was silent.
“What do you think?” he asked her.
“We don’t dream when we’re unconscious,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“No idea.”
They’d reached the gate barring the way into GD. The security booth was dark, no guard on duty, but Nat pulled to a stop and rolled down her window. She punched a code into the computer pad next to the gate.
“She’s asleep, right?” Nat asked without looking back.
“Yeah.”
“So we’ll run some tests on you first. See what we find. Did you call DCF?”
“Not yet. I’ve got dispatch checking missing persons and making some calls.”
She frowned at him. “Child Protective Services will need to send a caseworker. They’ll probably want a psychologist present when you interview her.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Colin agreed. “But it might not be that complicated. How does a kid wind up lost in the forest?”
Nat’s brows drew down as she pulled the car forward. “Camping?” she offered. “Hiking?”
“That’d be my guess. So maybe the rangers and some frantic parents are searching for her already.”
“You’re thinking she just wandered off?” Nat asked.
“Maybe, yeah.”
Nat looked skeptical. “On Christmas Day?”
Colin shrugged. “Big meal, maybe the parents took a nap afterwards. Kid gets bored, next thing you know…”
“It’s a long walk from the nearest campground. I don’t think a child could cover that much distance in an afternoon.” Nat pulled into the parking space closest to the cobblestoned walkway leading to the front door. A lamppost shed a warm glow of golden light, while the bushes and shrubs that lined the path and bordered the building were sprinkled with the delicate white glimmers of hundreds of tiny holiday lights.
“Next possibility then.” Colin glanced over his shoulder at the sleeping child, then gestured to indicate they should talk about it outside. Stepping out of the car, he turned, leaning on the roof. In a quiet voice, he suggested, “The parents could have been in a car accident on one of the back roads.”
Nat winced. “Okay, that sounds more plausible. But still, to get to where we found her? It’s more likely she was on a trail. Maybe an ATV accident?”
“Yeah.” Colin nodded in agreement, his face grim. “No helmet, though.”
“And wearing a dress and sandals.” Nat shook her head, but not as if she were ruling out the possibility, more as if she were regretting the chances parents were willing to take. “It makes sense.”
“With any luck a couple of phone calls will clear it up. We’ll get her home before morning.”
Nat didn’t say anything, but then she frowned, blinking a few times as if perplexed.
“What is it?” Colin asked immediately.
She licked her lips. He felt an immediate and unsurprising surge of lust. Haloed by the light from the lamppost, Nat’s dark hair glinted with color, while the shadows made her blue eyes mysterious and smoky. She was beautiful. And he was alive.
Alive.
The smile felt like it started in his chest and built its way up until it reached his face. He knew he was grinning at her like an idiot, but he couldn’t stop himself.
Alive.
And with Nat.
Sometimes it felt as if he’d loved Nat forever.
He hadn’t, though.
It had only been thi
rty years.
He’d been a stubborn five-year-old, desperately trying to convince his mother—who already had seven children—that he needed a baby sister, one who would be all his. He would get to boss her around like his older brothers and sisters bossed him around, but he would never, ever hit her and he would play with her whenever she wanted. She could be Princess Leia when they played Star Wars. He needed someone to be Princess Leia. Unfortunately, his mother had remained resolutely unconvinced of the importance of his need.
Then, on the first day of kindergarten, he’d met Lucas. Lucas didn’t just have a baby sister; he had a baby brother, too. He didn’t seem to be as convinced as Colin was of his incredible luck, though, and he’d generously offered to share. Colin distinctly remembered his first visit to the Latimer house. He hadn’t even seen baby Zane. One look at the wide blue eyes and round cheeks of Natalya’s three-year-old self and he’d decided. Mine.
The arrangement had worked well for a long time. Through high school, through college, past graduation, up until the moment he got his first job as deputy and she had her premonition of his death—and then they’d hit a dead end. He’d let her go. Made her go, really, and not without hurting her.
She’d gone to medical school and they didn’t speak for years. After the bitter words of their last fight, the first time he’d spoken to her had been at her mother’s funeral. He couldn’t remember what he’d said, but she’d said, “Thank you,” her voice calm, collected, but her eyes showing the depth of her pain. After completing her residency, she’d returned to Tassamara.
He’d managed to draw her into a precarious almost-friendship—he could say hello to her on the street without her glaring at him—but it survived through a careful dance of manners and caution and patience on his part. He knew—or suspected—that if she had her choice, she’d never speak to him again. But Tassamara was a small town. That hadn’t been an option.
And now—well, he was alive. Now everything changed.
“I can’t—nothing,” she said abruptly, ignoring his grin. “Let me get the security guard to carry her in.”
She turned away. Before she’d gone two steps, Colin called out. “I’ll get her.”
She turned back. “Unconscious, remember?”
“Not without warning.” He dismissed her concern as he reached for the car door. “If it happens again, I’ll have plenty of time to set her down.”
The girl had fallen asleep slumped against the door. Her hand had crept up to her mouth, the thumb not quite inside but tucked next to her lips as if she would have been sucking it if she’d been a little younger. Carefully, Colin opened the door, slipping one hand in to catch her before she started to slide out. She stirred but didn’t open her eyes.
As he unbuckled her seatbelt, he considered his approach before taking the most straightforward route. Sliding his hands under her arms, he tugged her out and up, lifting her high and drawing her close, before tucking one arm underneath her legs. She wasn’t light, but something about her weight balanced in a way that made carrying her totally unlike picking up a fifty-pound sack of mulch for the yard. As if automatically, she wrapped her legs and arms around him before dropping her head into the curve of his neck.
“Da,” she muttered.
Colin froze. The tiny voice, the weight of her head, the soft tickle of her hair against his skin, the smell of light soap and sandy dirt, no hint of the tang of sweat—it was a visceral punch to the gut. Somewhere out there, in the forest or not, a man, a father, had lost this child. He’d get her home to him, he swore silently. He’d find her da for her.
“Colin?”
He could hear the worry in Nat’s voice. He turned and started toward the door, before saying, his own voice hushed so as not to wake the girl, “She spoke.”
“Oh, good,” Nat answered, hurrying to catch up with him. “Selective mutism from trauma isn’t uncommon, but maybe when she wakes up she’ll be willing to tell us what happened.”
At the door, she pressed a keycard against an unobtrusive black pad, reaching for the handle at the sound of a loud click. As she opened the door, she looked back at Colin. “What did she say?”
Colin’s gaze met Nat’s. Her face was open, her eyes clear. He could feel the warmth of the girl’s arm against his neck, her heartbeat against his arm. He opened his mouth to answer and then stopped, staggered by the moment.
This.
This should have been his.
Theirs.
If their lives had been what he wanted, what they wanted, how many times would he have already carried a sleeping child from a car while Nat held the door for him? Dozens? Hundreds?
This should have been theirs.
“Da,” he answered, his tongue feeling thick in his mouth, not able to hide the sorrow he felt.
A flicker of a frown passed across Nat’s face as if she were confused by his reaction, but he could see the exact instant she recognized what he was thinking as her face stilled and her chin angled up. They stood there, motionless, staring at one another.
He wanted to say so much to her. He shifted the sleeping child, but before he could summon the words, a security guard was pushing open the door.
“Dr. Latimer. Everything okay?” The guard’s eyes were wary, his hand close to his weapon, but he nodded at Colin in acknowledgement of the uniform. Colin nodded back, not sure whether to be annoyed or grateful for the interruption.
“Everything’s fine,” Nat said smoothly. If her smile looked forced, Colin didn’t think the guard noticed. “We’re just here to run some tests.” She stepped inside the building, moving briskly.
Colin followed more slowly. Maybe it was a reaction to almost being dead, but he felt close to battered by the intensity of the emotions flowing through him. Joy, relief, grief, regret on high-speed cycle.
Feeling so emotional was damn exhausting, he thought. He hoped he’d get over it soon.
Chapter Three
Natalya rubbed her forehead, then pinched the bridge of her nose. It was late, she was tired, could she be misreading? Could she have done something wrong?
“Aren’t you done yet?” Colin’s call from inside her scanner was louder than it needed to be. She’d told him she could hear him if he whispered. His volume probably indicated his mood: she’d had him in the machine for almost forty-five minutes, longer than any typical scan.
But then this wasn’t typical. She pressed her speaker button and said flatly, “No.”
She picked up the test stick again. It was idiot-proof. She couldn’t have done anything wrong there. Drip some blood on the piece of plastic, wait fifteen minutes, look for a line. The line said, clear as day, that Colin had suffered a heart attack.
She looked back at her screen and began rapid cycling through images. Doctors, typically, neither gave the blood tests nor ran the scanner. Technicians did both those jobs, leaving doctors more time to treat patients. But when Natalya had returned to Tassamara, she’d retreated to a lab and research with relief. It wasn’t that she didn’t like working with people. She did. But medicine and foresight made for an uneasy combination.
She closed her fingers around the test stick, closing her eyes for good measure. She didn’t often try to induce her foresight; it came on its own, unwanted, ill-timed. But now, when she did want to know what the future would bring, she saw exactly nothing.
Nothing.
She opened both fingers and eyes, letting the plastic stick drop to her desk with a slight clatter. Reflexively she glanced over her shoulder at the tiny figure curled up on a nest of cushions on the floor behind her, but the girl hadn’t stirred at the noise, any more than the sound of Natalya’s voice had moved her. She’d been out cold since she’d fallen asleep in the car, her exhaustion overruling her hunger. Natalya hadn’t wanted to leave her alone in a more comfortable room, so she’d grabbed some over-sized pillows from the couch in an upstairs reception room on their way down to the scanner.
Natalya turned her gaze back to her
computer screen. Colin’s heart was perfect. Her hands flew over her keyboard, increasing the magnification of the images by two hundred percent, then three, then four. She stared at the screen, searching for evidence of microinfarcts, subtle tissue damage, but there was none. His arteries were lovely. His entire cardiovascular system looked stellar. If she’d been reviewing these images for a physical, she would have happily signed off on any activity.
“Come on, Nat. You’ve gotta be done by now.” Colin’s tone this time was closer to a mumble, a protest he didn’t expect her to hear.
Natalya rested her forehead on her hand for a second or two, trying to think. With a long exhale, she stood. She’d run the troponin test again.
She pushed the button to slide the table out of the scanner. Standing, she crossed to the door between the two rooms, and as Colin sat up, told him, “I need to take more blood.”
His sigh of relief at being out of the machine turned into a sigh of exasperation. “Seriously?”
“If you were in Gainesville or any reputable hospital, they’d be checking the enzyme counts in your blood every hour. Don’t be giving me a hard time about this.” With one last glance at the sleeping child—still motionless—she gestured for Colin to follow her and headed to the small exam room down the hallway. GD was a research facility, not a clinic, but she routinely checked her subjects’ basic vital signs, including blood pressure, heart rate, and temperature, before proceeding with their imaging.
Colin didn’t complain, but as she slid the hypodermic needle under his skin, he grimaced. “I think you’re turning into a vampire.”
“Overgrown mosquitoes. Not a chance,” she responded automatically, as she watched the syringe fill with red. Pulling it out, she pressed the cotton ball she had ready onto his skin and slid her hand up his forearm, gently forcing him to close his arm around the insertion point. And then her eyes met his.
His were hot, almost smoky. She could see the thought, the memory, as clearly as if her gift were telepathy. His old apartment. The television on. Him trying to convince her to watch. Her huffing in disgust. Vampire shows. Pfft. And then… how many times had five minutes of television turned into heated kissing on the couch, his hand sliding up her shirt, her hand sliding down his?
