“Amy, if we can eat in here I’ll give you a Christmas bonus.”
She grinned, dark red lipstick making her teeth look whiter, thick black eyeliner making her skin look paler. She dressed like an aspiring Addams Family member. “You always give me a Christmas bonus.”
“Then I’ll give you a bigger one. Please?”
She shrugged. “It’s your house.”
“It is, isn’t it? Then I decree we eat in front of the TV like a bunch of real rednecks.”
“I’m gonna bring everything in, then,” Amy said. “You clear off the coffee table.”
I saluted her and cleared off the magazines, books and catalogs with a sweep of my arm. “Done.”
“God help us all,” Amy muttered.
“Give me your keys, Aunt Rache. I’ll go get your luggage for you.”
“You are definitely the good twin. I don’t care what your mother says.” I nodded at my coat, lying like a red puddle by the front door. “They’re in the pocket.”
A few minutes later we ate. My luggage was in my room, my coat and boots magically in the closet, and the gifts from the Big Apple had been delivered. I’d managed to get two signed photos from Rusted Rail, a band they both adored, who’d also been guests on one of the talk shows I’d done. I was no longer sure which one. It was a blur at this point. The girls were thrilled. We talked into the night, and then Amy went home for the first time in several days, and Misty headed up to the guest room.
I walked around the house after it was quiet again. There was no cleanup to do; Amy and Misty had done it for me, knowing I always came back from these trips exhausted. And I was.
But there was more on my mind than being wiped out. I was thinking about Mason Brown’s visit and what he had said, and yes, I was feeling guilty for not telling him everything. The thing was, this phenomenon where I would start to dream, then be immediately startled wide awake, hadn’t been happening all that long. I mean, I’d sort of implied to him that it had been happening ever since we nailed the Wraith and went our separate ways. But it hadn’t. I hadn’t had another one of those terrifying vision-dreams since, so I guess my brain had seen no point in waking me up. Until about two weeks ago, give or take. But it had happened five times since then. I would start to dream, and bam! I’d be sitting straight up in bed with my eyes wide open, that startle reflex waking me right up. And every one of those times I’d been sure the dream I was about to enter wasn’t an ordinary one. It had felt like the other ones. Those terrible, horrible visions when I’d been seeing through the eyes of the serial killer whose heart beat in another man. And whose corneas had restored my eyesight.
Two weeks. That was how long he said the transplant recipient had been missing. A person who had received organs from the same donor. Mason’s brother, Eric, the original Wraith. What if my dreams had been telling me where she was, what had happened to her? What if I could have helped her?
It’s not my job. I’m not a caped crusader, I’m a self-help author.
But what if I could help? I mean, really, was it asking too much to just have a damned dream? Even a nightmare. It couldn’t hurt me, after all. It wasn’t real. It was a dream.
I suppose I could try to let one play out. What harm is there in that?
Images from the earlier visions started to creep in like black ink spilling over my brain, but I shoved them away. “It’s just a missing person,” I told Myrt. “She might be in trouble. I need to let the dream play out, because that’s what any decent human being would do.”
Nodding, my decision firmly made, I headed for the stairs. “Come on, Myrt. Bedtime.”
She was right beside me, hadn’t left my side since I’d gotten home, and she trotted up the stairs, happy as hell. She’d lost a few pounds since I’d adopted her. Our long walks were doing her a world of good, despite the fact that she acted like they were sheer torture.
I took a long hot shower while Myrtle lay on the bathmat in front of the shower doors, snoring. Then I put on my jammies—a white ribbed tank and panties—brushed my teeth and opened my medicine cabinet. There was some PM-style pain reliever, the closest thing I had to a sleep aid. I popped two of them, and then Myrtle and I went to bed.
She walked up her little set of doggy steps, and I knew she’d missed sleeping with me. I wondered where she’d been spending her nights while I’d been gone. With Misty, or in here all alone? She stretched out on top of the covers, as close to me as she could manage. I rolled onto my side and put my arm around her, and she sighed as if all was right with her world again. She was snoring within ten seconds.
And then I closed my eyes and hoped I was wrong. That there would be no vision. That there was no connection between me and the others who’d received organs from my donor. Mason’s brother. The dead serial killer. None at all.
* * *
I was dreaming. I knew I was dreaming because I wasn’t me, I was someone else. I was lying on my back on the ground. I could feel the icy cold earth underneath me and the snow around me. It was freezing. I couldn’t move. I was awake, I was breathing, but I couldn’t move, and I was terrified.
Someone was with me, crouching over me. I angled my eyes until they hurt, but I couldn’t see them, really, because I couldn’t move my head and I was lying flat and naked in the snow.
Naked? No, not quite. I was wearing a dress, but it lay open on either side of me, sliced up the front. I could just make it out in my peripheral vision. I could feel something tight around my waist, like panty hose. And there were shoes on my feet, a little too tight in the toes.
All I could see was the night sky, dotted with stars and—
Ohmygod, something’s cutting me!
An ice-cold blade flashed in my vision and drove into my abdomen, and the pain screamed through me. And I tried to scream, as well, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t scream. It was cutting me. Oh, God, it was cutting me. I felt the blood, warm and running over my naked skin. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe!
I was going to suffocate. Let it be fast! Faster than the cutting! Oh, God, no more.
But there was a tearing, ripping. My lungs seemed to spasm in my chest, hungry for air, but I could not take a breath. Black spots started popping in and out of my vision. My head was going to explode. My torso was on fire with pain, and my heart was pounding like a jackhammer in my chest, or trying to.
Something was torn from my abdomen, and it rose up, into that tiny area within range of my vision. It was pink and dripping, and clutched in a gloved hand. A piece of me!
And then blackness descended. Merciful death caught me in soft hands. The pain went away from me. Or rather, I went away from the pain.
* * *
I screamed until my bedroom door was flung open and Misty stood there with a baseball bat in her hands. She wore cute flannel PJs, and her perfectly straight, perfectly platinum hair was in her face as she shrieked, “What the fuck!”
Hearing that particular word from my seventeen-year-old niece seemed to do the trick. I clamped my jaw and blinked my vision clear, pushed my hair off my own face and turned on the bedside lamp. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Misty, I must have scared the hell out of you.”
“You okay?” She lowered the bat.
It made me proud to think she would come running to my defense if I really was being attacked in my sleep.
“What happened, Aunt Rache?”
Someone paralyzed me and cut out one of my organs while I lay there unable to move. Good God.
“Aunt Rachel?”
“Bad dream, kid. Just a bad dream.”
She heaved a big enough sigh that I knew she’d been truly scared. “Jeeze, I thought someone was murdering you.” She let the bat drag on the floor as she came farther into the room.
Someone was. Only not me. Another of Eric’s organ recipients. Dammit, Mason was right. It isn’t over.
“Aunt Rache? You sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah. Fine. Look, I’m sorry, kiddo. You want to curl
up here for the rest of the night?”
“Only if you promise not to wake up screaming again.”
I looked at the clock. 4:00 a.m. The pills would have worn off by now. “I’m pretty sure I won’t.”
“If you do, I swear, I’m gonna hit you with this bat.” She stood it up against the headboard and climbed under the covers.
Myrtle snuggled back down between us and started snoring like a chain saw.
“Hope you don’t mind sharing with a bulldog,” I said.
“She’s been in bed with me every night since you left. I kind of missed her, to be honest.”
“Yeah, she has a way of getting under your skin, doesn’t she? Good night, Misty.”
“Good night, Aunt Rache. Sweet dreams. And that’s an order.”
I turned off the bedside lamp. Of course the night-light was on. I always left the night-light on.
Saturday, December 16
Seeing Rachel again after almost a month had had an impact on Mason that he hadn’t expected. He’d thought their one-night stand had been based on the drama they were going through, and the sense of intimacy between them on the secret they shared. No one else in the world knew the truth about his brother. Or that he’d concealed evidence to protect his family—his mother, his pregnant sister-in-law, his nephews. He loved those boys like his own. No one knew what he’d done but Rachel.
He knew she needed time to figure out who the newly sighted Rachel de Luca was. He’d been relieved by that when she’d said it, because he’d convinced himself that their roll between the sheets hadn’t meant anything special. And he wasn’t ready for anything more than that, anyway. He’d just lost his brother, betrayed his oath of service, become the only father figure in his nephews’ lives. There was no room for anything else.
Even the way he kept thinking about her at odd moments, and the idiotic way he’d set his damned DVR to record anything that had her name attached to it, had seemed like no big deal. But seeing her again...that had hit him like a mallet between the eyes.
And now he was starting to wonder if maybe what connected them was more than just the traumatic situation they’d gone through together, the secret that they shared. Hell, he’d seen through her masks so easily on that talk show yesterday that she’d seemed completely transparent. But she wasn’t, she couldn’t be, or the entire reading public would see through her, too, right?
No, it was only him. And he saw more than the mask she wore, the positive-thinking public persona. He saw through the cynic she thought she was to the real Rachel. And it made him want to see her even more.
A door slamming downstairs reminded him that he wasn’t alone. It was the weekend, and his nephews, who usually showed up on Friday nights, had been delayed an extra twelve hours due to his trip into the city to see Rachel. They would not be put off any longer.
“Uncle Mason!” Joshua yelled. “Aren’t you up yet?”
He rolled onto his side and blinked at the clock. 8:30 a.m. Kids had no respect for sleeping in. Flinging back the covers, he sat up, gave his head time to adjust to being vertical, then shouted back, “I’ll be right down.” He needed a shower, but in the meantime he pulled on pajama bottoms, a T-shirt and a pair of nice thick socks, because his old farmhouse had cold floors. Giving his hair a rudimentary flattening with his hands, he headed downstairs.
Jeremy was in the living room, on the sofa, already manning the Xbox controller. His expressionless eyes were glued to the TV screen, and his brown hair was even longer than it had been last weekend. He refused to get it cut.
“Hey, Jer,” Mason said.
“Hey.”
Nothing, not a flicker. It was par for the course with Jeremy lately. Only a little over four months since his father had shot himself in the head in Mason’s apartment. Two and a half months since the teen had busted into a remote cabin where a madman was about to kill both Mason and Rachel. Jeremy had picked Mason’s gun up off the floor and shot the bastard dead. Just like that. He hadn’t even hesitated. The kid was depressed over the loss of his father, traumatized over having killed a man.
Mason scuffed into the kitchen where Marie had a pot of coffee brewing, and was taking mugs from the cupboard. She looked his way as he entered and smiled, but her eyes were dead, too. Like Jeremy’s. Her smile was fake. Forced. Her baby girl had been stillborn a few weeks ago. Her husband had killed himself three months before that. The woman was so destroyed he thought a stiff wind would knock her over. But she was putting on a brave face for her boys’ sakes, doing the best she could. It validated for him yet again that he’d done the right thing by hiding Eric’s suicide note. The family was barely holding on as it was. Imagine how much worse it would be if they knew that their beloved husband and father was a serial killer.
“Sorry we got here so early,” Marie said. “Josh was in the car with his backpack an hour ago. I put him off as long as I could.”
“It’s fine. I should have been up by now.”
“It’s your downtime. You know you could skip a weekend if you wanted.”
“And do what, sleep till noon and stare at the walls all day? Nah. I need these guys around to keep me from going to pot.”
Once again she smiled because she was supposed to. Her eyes remained stark. Dark circles under them told him she wasn’t sleeping. Her pale skin and sunken cheeks told him she probably wasn’t eating right, either.
How did you know when a grieving wife or son moved from ordinary mourning into a dangerous depression? Where was the line? He was going to have to find out.
The coffee was done, so he took the mugs from her and filled them. “Sit down, Marie. I’m cooking you some breakfast.”
“We already ate.”
“They did. You didn’t. Bacon and eggs, whaddya say?”
She shook her head, but accepted the filled mug and sank into a kitchen chair, holding it between her hands as if she was cold. He spotted Joshua running past the window, red parka, knit hat with a fuzzy ball on top like a character from South Park. He’d taken one of the plastic toboggans from out in the barn. Mason had bought them right after the first snow. Josh was heading up the hill out back with it.
“He loves it here with you,” Marie said. She’d slugged back half the coffee, though it was piping hot.
“I love having him.” Her boots were still on, making puddles under her chair. He frowned. “Are you in a hurry, Marie?”
She followed his gaze and shook her head. “No, just absentminded. I’m sorry about the floor.”
“I’m not worried about the floor. I’m worried about you.”
She met his eyes, but quickly shifted hers away. “Some of my girlfriends are taking me out shopping today. They think it’s time I...got over it. I just don’t know how they think that’s possible.”
“It has to be possible,” he said. “Marie, we all miss Eric, and I know you’re devastated about the baby.”
“Lilly. Her name was Lilly.”
He knew that. It was engraved on the headstone with the little angel above the plot right next to her father’s.
A dozen platitudes came in and out of his mind, things he’d read in Rachel’s books. But he didn’t say any of them, because he thought Marie needed to hold on to her grief a little bit longer. And that was okay. “You have a right to your pain, Marie. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
“Thank you for that.”
“When you’re ready to start to heal, though, you put your focus on those boys. They’re just as precious as they were before all the losses you’ve suffered. They need you to come back to them.”
She thinned her lips and nodded as if she was hearing him, but he didn’t think she was. “I appreciate you picking up the slack in the meantime.” Then she pushed away from the table and stood up. “I’ve got to go.”
She headed out the door to her car and took off—a little too fast for the road conditions, in his opinion. He’d had a set of studded snow tires put on for her, though, so she should be all ri
ght on the road.
But she wasn’t all right emotionally. He knew that.
He carried his coffee mug through the house to the back, passing Jeremy again on the way. He was as morose as his mother. Poor kid. But Mason kept going into the back room, the coldest room in the little farmhouse, which had no real purpose and would, he thought, make a great woodworking shop if he ever followed his intention to learn how to do that sort of thing. Right now it was a catch-all area for anything he didn’t know what to do with. He passed the piles of junk, opened the back door and hollered out to Josh, “I’m making breakfast. You hungry?”
Joshua was at the bottom of the hill, picking himself up out of the snow and preparing to head up again for another ride. He hollered, “Come out and sled with me!”
“I need food and a shower, and then I’ll sled with you.”
“Awwwwl-riiiight.”
“So you gonna eat?”
“How long?”
“Half hour?”
“Okay.”
“That’s about six more trips down the hill, Josh. Count ’em off and come on in, okay?”
Josh nodded and started back up the hill at a pace that made Mason smile. No question. The kid was going to try to get in ten. At least. Mason headed back into the living room, stopped behind the sofa and put both hands on Jeremy’s shoulders to be sure he had his attention. “I need to take a shower. Ten minutes, tops. Keep an eye on your brother, okay?”
“Yeah.” He didn’t look away from the TV screen.
“Jeremy, that means put the controller down, get up, walk to the window and check on him at least three times while I’m gone.”
“He’s eleven.”
“That’s not an answer. Come on, Jer, help me out here.”
“All right, I’ll check on him. Jeeze.”
Mason closed his eyes and prayed for patience. The kid had lost his father, his baby sister and, for all intents and purposes, his mother, he reminded himself. Add to that the typical brooding of a seventeen-year-old male, and you had a recipe for frustration that couldn’t be beat.
Mason headed upstairs for a shower that would compete with his record for brevity. When he came back down, hair wet, pulling on a long-sleeved green thermal shirt with a big black bear on the front, he heard voices. Female voices. He popped his head through the collar and pulled the shirt down over his belly.
Wake to Darkness Page 3
