“I will gladly be your date,” he said, stepping away from the door to open it again. “And designated driver.”
“Shit,” Dawn Marie said. “I think I can live with that though.”
“Yes, yes you can,” Tobias said as she walked past him to wait while he set the alarm on the back door.
Old Home Week was a yearly summer festival held on the fairgrounds, the same place where the Christmas Carnival happened in winter, the Free Fair in fall and the Blooms and Beauty town-wide garden party in the spring. Of all the various activities that took place there, Old Home Week was probably even more popular than the Christmas Carnival was, though it was a close call. During Old Home Week the Midway was louder, the rides were bigger, the drinking more vigorous. There were arts and crafts booths, food stalls; the usual fare of any kind of public social event. The bonus draw of Old Home Week versus the Christmas Carnival was that there were also beer stalls open and a beer pong tournament on the last day of the event.
Instead of fighting traffic and paying for parking Dawn Marie and Tobias walked to the fairgrounds, which were no more than half a mile from the funeral home. It was a pleasant enough walk for a summer night; there was a gentle breeze blowing and the temperatures hovered in the low eighties; mild for that time of year. The air smelled of magnolias and fresh-cut grass, lemon blossoms and sweet olive. Tobias tipped his head back and breathed it all in, caught the faintest whiff of Dawn Marie’s perfume that smelled like weak black tea with a splash of cream and black pepper.
When she took his arm, he smiled and they walked on.
The fairgrounds were noisy, even that late at night; Old Home Week didn’t shut down until 2:00 a.m., another big draw for the crowds that gathered there. The lights were bright and there was laughter everywhere. People walked along, carrying exhausted children toward their cars, past young couples only arriving. The early shift was leaving and the new crew was coming in. There would be a rock band playing soon, if Tobias remembered the flier he’d seen correctly; some local group called Little Boy’s Ghost. He had heard them before and they weren’t half bad, actually.
They walked past Aaron Talley and Jason, each of them with one of Aaron’s big, mean dogs on a leash. Outside of their property, the dogs were well-behaved and didn’t even flinch when a little girl with some pep left walked by and patted the Rottweiler on the head while shrieking, “DOGGY!” at the top of her lungs. The dog had barely begun to wag his nub of a tail when her mother yanked her away and Aaron scowled at her, mouthed bitch and carried on, chased by cries of, “But I wan-oo pet the doooogyyyy!”
“Sheesh,” Dawn Marie said, wiggling her finger in her ear as the distraught child was hauled past them. “If I ever have a mental lapse and decide I want one of those, please kick me in the stomach.”
“Christ,” Tobias muttered.
“Okay, well, at least give me a ride to the abortion clinic,” she said.
“Then what?”
“Convince me that child-bearing is not in my best interests,” she said. “Because it isn’t.”
“Okay,” he said because there wasn’t much else he could say. He’d found that to be the trend for the day.
“It’s a plan,” she said. “Now, I am going to fetch us two monstrous beers and you will drink yours.”
“Of course,” he said.
“Because you still owe me a ‘get drunk with Dawn’ party,” she said.
“Not tonight though,” he said. He jingled his car keys at her. “I have to drive.”
“We can finish getting loaded at home.” She poked him in the ribs. “Eat shitty food, watch some bad TV and get lit.”
“Maybe,” he allowed.
“Ugh,” Dawn Marie said, but she was smiling as she walked away.
Tobias bit his lip against calling out for her to be careful. Just because he had seen her death did not necessarily mean he had averted it. What if Keith swooped in and took her while Tobias wasn’t looking? He doubted Dawn Marie would go quietly, but the crowd was so large and loud that another added ruckus would mean very little. With that in mind, Tobias went after her and he didn’t care about how other people felt for a change.
He avoided most of the people with clever footwork and the almost uncanny ability people had when it came to avoiding him, but as he neared the beer stall and caught sight of Dawn Marie’s unruly cloud of hair, a young man bumped into him.
So much, I just wanted to love her so much.
The click-clack of the hammer on a revolver being drawn back.
Then a bang followed by a heavy, wet splat.
Darkness.
The young man looked at Tobias, wild-eyed and hunted as he jerked away from him. He placed his hands on his head, ducked and hunched his shoulders as he disappeared back into the swirling crowd.
Tobias watched him go and coughed as a tickle began in his throat. He swallowed against it and thought, Oh, no, no, no, as he rushed to Dawn Marie. A woman in mom jeans knocked into him next and he heard the screech of brakes and a piercing scream followed by the crunch and crumple of metal being forced in on itself.
“Watch it, buddy!” she snapped at him as she stumbled away, clutching her big blue purse against her chest. She had spit-up stains on her purple t-shirt, but there was no baby in sight.
Tobias stopped and shuddered all over and really looked at where he was standing: right in the middle of the broad main thoroughfare. A river of bodies flowed around him in all directions as he turned in a circle, stuck fast in the flow. When he faced back toward the beer stand, he barely had time to react as a young woman with pale grey eyes and dark brown hair stepped right up to him. She embraced him, holding him tightly, cheek pressed to his chest. As she smiled, Tobias felt her blood draining out of his own wrists.
“Hi,” she said, eyes alight with madness. “I knew it would be okay. Thank you!”
She didn’t even seem to really see him because a second later, she was gone, spun away on the current of people drifting past. She didn’t look back, didn’t look around; only threw her pretty head back and hooted up at the sky with joy that splintered on the edge of insanity.
Tobias opened his mouth to call out to her, took a step toward her, hand held out like he thought he could ever reach her when she was already so far away. An old man in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank strapped to the back of it grabbed his hand before he could lift it very high. He kissed Tobias’s knuckles and pressed his cheek to his palm. He felt the wetness of tears on his skin, warm and slick, before he pulled it away.
“I’m so, so tired,” the old man said. “Thank you, sonny, thank you.”
“Grandpa, there you are!” called a young man who trotted out of the crowd and took the handles of the wheelchair in his hands. He gave Tobias a deeply suspicious look as he turned the old man away.
Tobias coughed again, harder that time and lost his balance as someone knocked into his back. He felt the wobble of a ladder and then the world tipped over and over and over again so quickly there wasn’t even time to call out before the solid, meaty thud that came next.
Whirling, Tobias searched the crowd as the itch in his throat became worse, but he saw no one; they had already passed on by. He had to move, had to get out of the seething mass of people, but he couldn’t see how to do that without bumping into someone else. As his chest hitched, another cough trying to fight its way free, a handsome older man walked up and cupped Tobias’s cheeks in his hands as he leaned forward and kissed him hard on the mouth.
“It’s time to let go anyway,” the man said. He seemed at peace, relieved as he smiled at Tobias and he heard another gunshot bang inside his head. “Without Marcus, there’s no point.”
“What? No. Please, wait—” Tobias broke off in another coughing fit, sides heaving, chest burning. He was choking as he stumbled through the people, trying to keep his arms tight to his sides.
A woman brushed past him and he felt the sharp pain of a heart attack lance across his chest. She gawped at him a
nd then began to cry and Tobias wanted to say he was sorry, but his lips went numb when a man not much older than him, face florid and slick with sweat, hit his other side. Stroke. Thirty eight years old and a stroke because… because…
“He touched me,” Tobias said aloud and he didn’t know if that was true or not and it didn’t matter because the next thing he did was gag.
He found the gravel shoulder of the thoroughfare and stumbled as he stepped onto it, the slight drop in height nearly sending him sprawling. He kept his footing and rushed away into the darkness behind the beer stalls toward the arts and crafts building. It was hard to breathe, his throat felt stuffed, a wad of scrabbling, digging things moving up-up-up no matter how hard he tried to swallow them down.
Tobias wheezed and coughed, gagged again as he knelt in the grass behind the building. Insects chirred all around him and from the stage came the sounds of the band doing their equipment test. He gasped and retched again as the fluttering grew intense, the itch maddening. He forced himself to gag then, only wanting to be rid of the horror inside of him.
The first butterfly was like pulling a plug, after it popped free all the rest came fluttering after. Tobias moaned with disgust as he heaved then tilted his head back to vomit a swarm of black butterflies toward the sky. They slipped over his lips, legs tickling, wings beating as they took off one after the other, twining together into a shadowy spiral before they flew away out of his sight.
Gasping, Tobias bowed his head and sobbed dryly. His throat ached, his mouth tasted like incense dust and rich soil.
“God, oh, God,” Tobias said as he shivered in the grass, the warm summer breeze flitting around him and tangling in his hair.
He remembered Dawn Marie after a moment and got shakily to his feet. There was noise all around him, but inside his mind it was eerily silent as he moved out of the shadows back toward the light. His throat was on fire and his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth, but he had to find Dawn Marie. The sight of all the people milling past drew him up short, but then he caught sight of her pale hair waving in the breeze. She was blessedly nearby, only a few feet away to his left, talking with Aaron and Jason as she turned her head from side to side, searching. Looking for Tobias.
Tobias stayed where he was and raised his hand in a wave when she turned her head toward him.
“There you are!” she called as she waved him over.
Tobias shook his head and stayed where he was.
She scowled at him at first, but then she frowned and squinted at him. Her eyebrows lifted in surprise and she turned to say something to Jason and Aaron before hurrying over to Tobias, two large beers held over her head to save them from the jostling crowd.
“Where did you go?” Dawn Marie asked when she reached him. She leaned close to him and squinted again. “Toby, you look—”
“Please don’t say ‘pale’,” he said as he rubbed his throat.
“I wasn’t going to,” she said. “I was going to say you look like shit.”
“I don’t feel well,” he said.
“You never get sick,” she said.
It was true, he and Hylas had never gotten sick as far as he could recall, discounting Hylas’s narcolepsy. Tobias had won awards every year he was in school for perfect attendance; an honor which had earned him no cred with his peers. Hylas would have had the same and had when they were younger, but by high school, Hylas had mastered the fine art of cutting class and skipping entire days. Once he thought about it, the fact they’d never once been ill went well beyond odd and right into the realm of near impossibility.
Tobias grimaced then said, “I am sick now. Very sick.”
“Damn,” Dawn Marie said. “You look like it, too.”
“I need to go home,” Tobias said. “Please. I know you wanted to stay and I am so sorry, but I can’t be here tonight.”
“No, hey, it’s okay,” she said. “There’s three more days of this shit, I think I’ll be okay. Maybe you’ll feel better by then and we can try again.”
She reached to take his elbow and Tobias jerked away from her. “Don’t touch me,” he said, appalled to think what might happen if she did. He had seen Dawn Marie’s death, but it had been avoidable. The deaths he had seen in the last few minutes were not. Instinctively, he knew the difference, knew that by those people touching him, their fates had been sealed. The thought sent his stomach to churning, leaping and cartwheeling so violently he retched again before he could help himself. There was a very fine, subtle difference between foreseeing a death and signing a death warrant. Tobias didn’t know how he had always been able to do the first; the second was new and alien to him, but he knew all the same. That he did know struck him as even more bizarre, an extra element of uncanniness that made his head spin.
“What? Why? I don’t think stomach flu or whatever is communicable by touch alone, Toby,” she said, reaching for him again.
“Do not,” Tobias snarled at her. “Just don’t, Dawn Marie. I can’t control what might happen if you do.”
“Um…” She beetled her brows together, but took her hand back, both hurt and confused by his behavior.
“It isn’t safe,” he said.
“You are talking crazy,” she said. She held out his beer to him, fingers well clear of the rim of the plastic cup. “Drink your beer, it’ll make you feel better.”
“I doubt it,” he said.
“Something cold on your throat might be nice though,” she said. “You sound like you swallowed razor blades.”
“Or threw them up,” Tobias said.
“Uh… Yeah. Or that.” Dawn Marie tipped her head back toward the thoroughfare. “Let’s go, you can walk and drink.”
Tobias looked at all of the people and shook his head. “Let’s go around,” he said. He turned away, back toward the arts and crafts building and the unpopulated shadows there that would lead them back toward the road without the danger of bumping into people.
“What the hell?” Dawn Marie asked, but she followed along behind him anyway. “Did you have another of those back spasm seizure things?”
“No,” Tobias said. “I… I threw up.”
“I’ve thrown up a lot in my life and have never flipped out like you are flipping out.”
“I doubt you’ve ever thrown up like I have either,” he said.
“Yes, because your puke is so much more special than everyone else’s,” Dawn Marie said. She sighed. “You’re not telling me something. I know you’re not.”
“Dawn Marie, please,” Tobias said. He was bone-tired all of a sudden, everything in him seemed to just drain away. “I just want to go home.”
“Fine,” she said. She didn’t sound happy about it, but she was at least resigned for the moment. “You can watch me drink and if you feel up to it, maybe you can join me.”
“I think it’s better if I lie down and rest for a bit,” he said.
“You really are sick,” she said. “But it’s more than that. You’re sick and—”
“Tired,” he cut in. “I’m just tired.”
“Right,” she said, but after that she was silent.
They walked back to Greene’s and because Dawn Marie had only drunk one beer, she was fine to drive, so she went to her car instead. Lenore was waiting on the roof of Tobias’s car and made an inquisitive sound when he leaned against the door beside her. He stroked her back because he thought that was safe and thankfully, he was right. He saw no messy avian death when he touched the crow and could not help the small shiver of relief that rolled through him.
“Toby?” Dawn Marie called from her car.
“Hmm?” he said, opening his eyes to look at her.
She was pale in the sodium arc light, eyes dark holes in her face as she watched him.
“Please be okay,” she said.
“I will be,” Tobias assured her as he finally opened his door and climbed inside after Lenore flew in.
He watched Dawn Marie drive away, staring after the dwindling glow o
f her headlights and hoped he had not just lied to her.
26
After two days, Jeremy went back to the barn, to the wraiths and the healing soil. There he stayed, wrapped in a cocoon of grass for another two days and nights. On the morning of his third day, he awoke refreshed and feeling more alive since the day Thanatos bellowed his outrage inside Jeremy’s mind. His hearing, while not as good as it had been, was vastly improved and the low, constant ache was gone entirely. The trembling in his hands and the pins and needles sensation in his legs was also gone. He still felt weak, a little wobbly and unsteady, but overall it was a great recovery. If he gave it time and came back to the barn for more healing he would likely recover in full within a month, but he could not afford to wait that long.
His healing had come at a price though and the grass where he had lain was withered and dry; dead. The wraiths were listless, moaning softly as they curled around him and Jeremy spread himself for them. They had given to him and he could give back to them now, even as he took pleasure from their feeding. He arched his back and gasped as thunderbolts of pleasure beat him to shreds. When the wraiths were done, they were more lively and Jeremy’s mind was numb, empty but for the faint echoes of pleasure so great it threatened to overload all of his mental circuits.
He didn’t know what the wraiths took from him when they had their way with him; it wasn’t life or vitality because if it had been, Jeremy would have been dead from it years ago. Maybe they fed on his pleasure, though all he was sure about there was that it stood to reason that such was the case. They took him to such unreal heights of ecstasy with their ministrations in that regard that it seemed to be the right answer because they had nothing to really gain from it unless it did in some way benefit them as well.
With a last soft moan, his body still feeling tender and used and new, Jeremy rose from the dead grass. He had been gone much longer than he’d thought he would be and Mooncricket was most likely frantic if he was even conscious. Jeremy had left him with enough dope to send a bull elephant off on an epic nod, a whole carton of cigarettes, plenty of food that he would probably not eat and booze that he would definitely drink. He’d also left him with strict instructions not to bother him while he was in the barn or to call anyone no matter how long he was gone for.
Falls the Shadow (Sparrow Falls Book 2) Page 36
