The memory took him back further, to Bethany’s funeral, three years ago. He’d slipped out for some air, to find Violet in the parking lot, smoking. Not offering well-intentioned but meaningless platitudes like everyone inside, her lips closed around the cigarette, then released a puff of smoke while she listened to him vent about how everyone wanted him to let them know if they could “do anything” for him and Dora. “Nothing anyone can do,” Violet had said, then she’d let him bum a cigarette off her, even though he hadn’t smoked in years. A small act of kindness, like reading to him.
He squinted at Dora, who sat in the chair beside his bed reading a newspaper on her lap as she twisted her wedding ring around her finger. It never would have occurred to her to read to him.
“Hey.” Tony pushed aside the image of his brother-in-law being a little too friendly with her. Must’ve been conjured up by his painkiller-fogged mind.
Dora looked up with a start. “You’re awake.”
“How long was I out?” Tony clutched the sheet beneath his hand—less tired now, but still weak.
“You’ve been mostly unconscious for nearly a week,” she said. “The doctors are baffled—it’s almost like you’ve been in and out of a coma, but they say the brain waves are more like you were in a really deep sleep. Like an animal in hibernation. Your temperature was low, and your pulse got so slow... nothing they did helped. They were afraid you wouldn’t wake up. But then everything returned to normal this morning.” She turned up her hands.
Tony’s gaze traveled down the bed. What did all the weird stats mean? He definitely wasn’t dead. But almost a week? “Then everyone else—”
“Left two days ago.” Her fingers stilled, then she rose and walked around the other, empty bed. “Next year will be better.”
He heard her unspoken words. Another vacation ruined. Last year, he’d had food poisoning. “Sorry,” he grumbled. “It’s not like I planned it.”
Dora stopped her pacing, and drew a perfectly manicured nail around the Gucci watch he’d given her for Christmas a few years before. “I didn’t mean...” Her expression was sympathetic, but he caught the hesitation in her reply.
She walked toward him. He focused on the ceiling. With his glasses on, he could see a chipped spot in the light fixture’s frosted coating.
Dora walked back around the other bed. “They want to keep you another day for observation, then—if there’s no change—they said you might as well go home.”
“You mean transfer to a hospital in Dayton?”
“No.” She stopped at his side. “We might have them re-run the tests, just to make sure. But they won’t check you in when no one can find anything wrong with you, other than how tired you are.”
She kept pacing back and forth along the empty bed. “You look a hundred times better than yesterday.” She finally stopped and took the chair, staring down at her hands. The newspaper on her lap crackled as she twisted her wedding ring. “I don’t know if I could stand it... losing you, after Bethany...”
Tony’s throat swelled. He tipped his chin up. Bethany. Their only daughter. The day after his fall was the first time he’d gone a whole day without thinking of her, since the night nearly three years before, when she’d left a party with a couple of guys no one knew. Ironic—ever since she’d been diagnosed with diabetes at age five, he’d feared that would be what killed her. Not being murdered—
Bethany. He’d seen her. Heard her calling for him. In his dreams, before he woke up and crawled to the temple. Before the ancient natives killed him.
He remembered it with a clarity unlike anything he’d ever recalled in a dream. The silhouette of a young woman in the middle of that light. He’d barely been able to see her face in the incredible brightness, but it was her. Just as he remembered, forever frozen at age fourteen. Except she was even more beautiful. He’d wanted so badly to go to her...
A shout in the hallway yanked him out of his reverie. A woman yelled something in Spanish from the hallway.
“What the hell?” Tony muttered.
People in the corridor argued. An authoritative voice spoke a few sharp words, then the door opened.
A man wearing a beige, police-style hat marked Seguiridad approached Dora. “This person say he is family—”
A Mexican man burst in past the guard, gesturing wildly as he rapidly spoke in Spanish. As his eyes registered Tony’s slack-jawed confusion, he switched to English. “My name is Luis Ramon DeSantiago. I am your brother.” He approached the bed and reached for Tony.
“I don’t have any brothers.” Tony recoiled as Dora yelled for security.
“But you do. In Saturn Society—”
A guard appeared and grabbed him by the elbows. “¡Fuera de aquí!”
“Get him out of here!” Dora rose, clutching her newspaper. The intruder resisted, still facing Tony as a second guard arrived and the two dragged him to the door. “I must tell him what happened... beheaded...” DeSantiago’s words faded as the guards thrust him out the door, slamming it behind them.
Dora huffed as she returned to her chair. “Hopefully that’s the last of them.”
“Last of what?” Tony’s gaze darted to the door. “What’s going on?”
“Reporters. Most of them gave up yesterday or the day before, but there’s still a few persistent ones hanging around.”
“What are you talking about?” Holy shit, what happened?
She regarded Tony with a solemn expression. “Don’t you remember?”
“Remember what?”
“What happened at the ruins.”
“I fell down and busted my head.”
Dora made an exaggerated blink. “That’s more than the doctor thought you’d recall. What else do you remember?”
“I was knocked out for a minute, then... I was burning up.” Like his body had been made of paper, and the sun’s blazing rays were about to set him aflame. “I pulled myself up the side and went into that little building...”
“And then?”
Images of the brightly clad Mayans of his dream burst through his mind. A blood-encrusted, stone battle-axe. The priest and his knife. Tony’s stomach grew queasy. “Nothing,” He turned up his hands.
“Dr. Santos says that’s pretty common with head injury, not to remember what happened immediately before or after.”
Just a dream. “So why are reporters hounding us?” He swallowed, his throat dry. “What did happen?”
She twisted her ring, then dropped her hands to her lap. “That woman...”
“What woman?”
“The I.T. girl. The heavy one.”
“Violet,” Tony said.
Her nose wrinkled for a fraction of a second. “Yes. She said after you fell and she caught you, you...”
“I what?”
“You... died.”
Tony snorted. “Obviously she was mistaken.”
“She insisted she lost your pulse for a few seconds.”
“Then what?”
“Like you said, you came to, got up, and went inside the little building at the top. Like you were hardly hurt at all.”
“Right.” He remembered hearing Thelma from Finance asking the tour guide about the ancients who’d built the pyramid. “But then...?”
“She said she stepped out for a second, and when she turned around you were...” Dora held up her hands. “Gone.”
“Gone?” A feeling swept over him of standing on a precipice with nowhere to go but over the edge. People did not just disappear. “But that’s—”
“Crazy, I know. But they went over every inch of that pyramid. They even unlocked the gate into the chambers beneath it and searched in there. Then, a half hour later, there you were, inside the building at the top. Covered in blood, and not a stitch of clothing.”
Naked. Blood. He squeezed his eyes closed, trying to shut out the sounds of his own screams, the image of blood fountaining from his chest as the priest slammed the knife down, in the second before he’d passed out.
“Was it mine?” There had to be a logical explanation.
“Of course it was yours!” She slumped back in her chair and looked down, pressed her fingers to her forehead. “I’m sorry. It’s just that—”
“What about my clothes?” His skin tingled at the memory of the men cutting off his shirt, shorts and underwear.
Dora’s face hardened. “I imagine some little beggar brat picked them up. Made a nice haul on your gym shoes alone, I’m sure. Those things cost over a hundred—” She pressed her hand to her forehead. “I’m sorry, this is really stressful, that’s all.”
“Tell me about it.” Covered in blood? He lifted his hand to his forehead and his fingers met with a short, raised area. He patted around it. As hard as he’d hit his head, it had healed remarkably well.
Dora shook her head. “That was just a little cut. Didn’t even need stitches. Of course, any head injury can be serious—the doctor says even something small like that can kill a person, but...”
“Then where—”
“That’s just it. No one knows. Other than that, you were just a little scratched and bruised up. Nothing major. Nothing that could account for so much blood.” She rose and stood next to his head, peering down him. She walked to the foot of the bed, then back. “Of course, at the time, they didn’t know that, so they brought you here on a body board.”
When the men had tied him down to the altar in his dream. “And then?”
“When they cleaned you up... nothing. No open wounds, nowhere all that blood could’ve come from. Except for this weird scar around your throat...” She reached down and brushed a finger across his Adam’s apple.
His hand flew up and clamped around her wrist (huge stone axe).
She snatched her hand away. “Does it hurt?”
“No. It just... what is it?”
He slowly lifted his fingers to his neck, but the instant he felt the thick, raised ridge, images of the axe, and blood, lots of it, burst through his mind again as a ripping, burning sensation built in his chest.
His hand dropped to the bed. “Is it... what does it look like?”
Dora’s lips tightened. “It goes about halfway around your neck. Thick, like it was made with a... I don’t know, a big blade of some sort. But the strangest thing is it looks... old. Like it happened years ago. Same with the one on your chest.”
One on his— holy shit. This was way too weird.
He sat up. Man, he was so tired. Finally, he swung his legs over the side of the bed. “Help me.” He reached for Dora.
“What do you need? I’ll call the nurse—”
“No, just help me to the john.” He had dim memories of being walked to the bathroom every now and then throughout the week. “The doctors said moving around will make me get better sooner.”
She took his hand and helped him up.
He let go, then kept still for a moment. When he was sure he could stand unassisted, he shuffled to the bathroom and shut the door.
His legs wobbled. He clutched the sink, but thankfully, his feet remained planted on the cool tile. Before, it had been all he could do to take care of his needs before he collapsed, but he was getting stronger. He loosened his grip on the sink and studied his reflection in the mirror.
No trace remained of the tan he’d begun to acquire before his fall. His eyes stood out stark and bright blue against his pale skin. Dark circles rimmed his eyes beneath of his glasses.
He touched the bump above his eye, then his gaze traveled down to his throat.
A thick, silvery line ringed his neck, just like Dora had described. He ran a finger along it, but snatched his hand away as the images from his dream assaulted him once more. He forced the memories away and concentrated on the mirror.
The feeling of standing on a cliff returned, but this time the dirt was crumbling beneath his toes and he was plunging toward the distant ground. The scar was as thick as a pencil. A cut that could have been made by a big, stone axe. His so-called brother’s words flashed through Tony’s mind. Beheaded... Did the guy know something he didn’t?
He fumbled at the ties of his hospital gown, until all but the top came undone, then pulled the fabric aside to expose his chest.
Dread filled him when the mirror confirmed his suspicion.
A jagged L-shaped scar marred his chest to the left of his sternum. Right where the priest in his dreams had driven the dagger into him. Like the line around his throat, it was lightened with age.
The Mayan priests... the axe and knife... the blood... what if it had all somehow been real?
Tony couldn’t breathe. The second he’d pulled the black turtleneck over his head, the suffocation, the images of the stone axe, the priest looming over him, knife in hand—
Tony scrambled to get the shirt off, clawed at the armholes, clutched at the neck, then finally grabbed the hem and yanked it back over his head. Relief sluiced over him as his living room came back into view.
He fought to catch his breath. “I can’t... wear this.”
Dora stared, her chin lowered, then snatched the shirt from his hands with a sigh.
She stepped back, her brows furrowed as she studied the scar. “I think Thelma knows a good plastic surgeon—”
“No.”
Tony couldn’t do it. The thought of someone taking a knife to his throat made him want to curl into a ball and hide. He didn’t care how highly skilled a surgeon they found, no one was cutting into him.
Whatever had happened to him, some part of it was real. To obliterate the evidence would be like covering up the discovery of a vital part of himself. Pretending nothing weird had happened at the ruins. Lying.
And the scar was his only proof he wasn’t one hundred percent insane. “People will get used to it.” Eventually. It had been a week since they’d gotten home, and his stomach still lurched every time he looked in the mirror.
Dora stuffed the shirt back into the bag and snapped her briefcase shut as the doorbell rang. “You’re still too weak to return to work.” He wanted to argue with her but she was right. He’d gotten up only an hour ago and all he’d done was watch sports news. Same thing he did every weekend or day off, but already he felt like taking a nap. Dora bent over him to brush her lips across his in a cursory kiss, then hustled out the back door as his sister Lisa sailed in the front.
Tony frowned after his wife. Dora had enough sick leave to stay with him instead of calling his sister, but of course she wanted to get back to work. He could almost understand, might have been tempted to do the same had the situation been reversed. Work was what they both did best.
Lisa leaned on the back of the recliner opposite him. “How’d your latest tests come out?”
“Everything’s within normal range.”
“I think you should get a second opinion.”
“I’ve already gotten a second opinion. And a third, and a fourth.” He’d been to the hospital a dozen times since he’d come home. They’d poked him, prodded him, hooked him up to monitors and run him through machines, some more than once. They still didn’t have a clue what happened. Nothing to explain his extreme fatigue, or the temporary slowing of his metabolism, pulse and all.
“Maybe you should try the Cleveland Clinic.”
“No.” He’d been through enough. All he wanted was to go back to work and for things to get back to normal.
“But Tony—”
“I’m fine now, so what’s the point?”
His sister’s bespectacled blue gaze, so like his own, met his. “The point is that people don’t hibernate. Metabolisms don’t just drop for a week, then return to normal for no reason—”
“Look, if you just came over here to argue with me, then leave. I’m fine, okay?”
“Yeah, like you were fine after Bethany...” Lisa walked around Dora’s recliner and sat.
“My blood pressure’s fine.” After he’d complained of daily headaches at their weekly dinner at their parents’ a couple years ago, their mom had coerced Tony into seein
g a doctor, who’d discovered his high blood pressure. By paying a little more attention to what he ate and making use of the company’s exercise room, he’d quickly gotten it under control. “I haven’t even had any headaches.”
“Well, I guess that’s good.” Lisa grabbed the stack of newspapers from the coffee table and tidied them, putting the Dayton Daily News on the bottom, then the Wall Street Journal.
“I’m going back to work Monday,” Tony said.
She stopped shuffling papers and frowned. “I don’t think—”
“I’m fine,” he insisted. “I sit at a desk all day. If I get worn out, I’ll leave early. I’ll feel better once I get back to work.”
Lisa moved to Dora’s magazine rack next to the recliner and pulled the magazines out. “Tony, you’ll feel better when you get on with your life, not just get back to work. I mean, do your job, sure, but—”
“What do you mean, get on with my life?”
She tilted her head, leaned forward slightly. “You know, ever since Bethany.”
At least Lisa said her name. His mother never did, like it was a forbidden word. Like he couldn’t handle it. “I was getting on with my life just fine until this—”
“No you’re not.” Lisa’s face grew stern. “You’re going through the motions. Have been for three years, now.”
He dragged himself off the couch and walked to the window. Behind him, Lisa shuffled through the magazines. “Hey, it’s the dog lady,” Tony said.
“Huh?” Lisa had begun to sort the magazines into three piles: one for Redbook, one for Newsweek, one for Cosmopolitan. He used to do the same thing himself until Dora said it drove her nuts and made him stop.
“She used to walk her dog up our street every now and then. No one around here has any idea who she is, she never talks to anyone. Just smiles. Probably been a good couple years since I’ve seen her.” The tall, leggy blonde walked past the house, taking tiny steps as if to match those of the little white terrier at the end of a delicate-looking leash. “Last time, she had a dachshund.” Like they’d had when they were kids. “Remember Sammy?” He forced a laugh. “You always hated it when Mom called him a wiener dog.”
Time's Enemy: A Romantic Time Travel Adventure (Saturn Society Book 1) Page 3
