Born to Darkness (44 page)

“I don’t know what you’re doing,” Shane told her as he held her gaze, as he willed her to believe him, as he forced his arms not to shake. “But if there’s anything—at all—that you think I can do …”

She didn’t answer. She just looked at him.

So he pushed. “At least tell me what you’re trying—is it that emotional grid thing? Are you searching for that man, Caine?”

Mac closed her eyes as she nodded. “For a second I thought … I thought maybe I felt him …”

“But that’s
great
,” Shane enthused. “Mac, that’s amazing. Hey, come on, don’t look so disappointed. We got you up to sixty-three, right? I’m pretty confident we can do it again—hell, I’m certain. Just aim a little more of your voodoo at me, and I’m ready to go, right now. And if you can’t do that—for whatever reason—the room service guy can bring some Viagra with lunch. Wait—I keep forgetting—he’s the
prison-cell service guy
. Although right about now, with the prospect of an immediate replay in my exceedingly
bright future, I’m just not feeling all that terrible about being locked up.”

Mac opened her eyes to look at him, but the despair hadn’t left her face—if anything, it had gotten worse. Shane felt his heart lurch and he knew saying,
Please, please, please don’t shut me out
, would make her do just that. So instead he said, “Smiley face emoticon?” and he made a face that was half-anxious, half-smile, which did what he hoped it would.

It made her roll her eyes and exhale a laugh.

So he pushed even harder and, all kidding aside, he quietly told her, “I know you’re used to solving problems on your own, and sometimes the hardest thing in the world can be accepting help, but … Let me help.”

“Fifty-seven,” the computer announced. “Fifty-eight.”

“Whoa,” Shane said. Mac’s integration levels were … going back up?

But she didn’t look happy. In fact, she looked stunned and then horrified as the computer continued. “Sixty. Sixty-one. Sixty-two.”

“Oh,
shit
,” she whispered, as tears filled her eyes. And this time, Shane knew that he wasn’t imagining it, because this time two very fat tears escaped and rolled unchecked down her face, followed by more as—Jesus—Mac started to cry.

Anna wasn’t alone.

She’d been caught in this nightmare—and even though it seemed and felt more real than any dream she’d ever had, she knew it
had
to be a nightmare, because it was happening to her over and over and over again.

Plus, there was something even worse that was happening, something that had to do with Nika, but what exactly it was remained elusively out of her grasp as David slapped her and she fell, then tried to scramble away.

She failed, as she’d failed before and before that.

But this time, as David drove his fingers into the tangle of her hair and savagely pulled, as she cried out in pain and disbelief, as
she felt him slam himself into her with enough force to bruise and tear, she heard a voice in her head that wasn’t there before.

Low and calm, with the diction and elocution of a 1940s-era movie star:
We’re going to stop looping now, okay? Don’t move. He’s almost done and I know we’re going to want to move, to do what we did, to get away, to get out of here, but we can’t or the loop won’t break. Think of quicksand. I know you’ve never been trapped, but you’ve seen movies, read stories.… Struggling makes you sink. We have to float, spread out, stay still. It goes against every instinct, I know, but if we do this, now, David will vanish and we’ll be … Where do we want to be?

And just like that, the voice was right, and David was gone, only now Anna
was
trapped in a pit of quicksand, gluey and yellowish and stinking of rot. And in that first second as her weight took her down, as her feet scrambled for a toehold and found nothing to support her, the muddy slime went over her head and she felt a flare of panic.

I’ve got you. You’re safe
.

And she felt herself lifted up and pulled out as she coughed and spat and wiped the muck from her face and eyes.

And there was Joseph Bach, standing on solid ground, dressed like a Disney prince. And she realized that
his
had been the voice in her head, that he had been with her. He hadn’t left her there, alone. And she didn’t know whether to feel grateful or mortified as she moved through the air like some kind of nasty version of Tinker Bell. As her feet gently touched the ground, she realized—of course—that she was naked. But Joseph—also of course—was there with a blanket to cover her as she sank down to the ground, her legs pulled in tightly against her chest. She let him wrap that blanket around her, holding on to both it and herself to try to keep from shaking.

“What does it say about me,” she asked him, “that I actually prefer being trapped in quicksand than thinking about …?”

But God, the nothingness around them seemed almost to quiver and change back into the walls of David’s house.

Joseph grabbed her.
Don’t think about that!

To her complete surprise, he kissed her, but then she realized that he wasn’t kissing
her
, he’d just pulled her back with him, somewhere she didn’t recognize, somewhere she’d never been before. And she realized that she was now inside of his head, and that this was
his
memory.

And he wasn’t kissing
her
—well, he
was
kissing her, but she wasn’t Anna Taylor. She was someone else. Someone with much paler skin and reddish blond hair. Someone who was closer to Nika’s age than her own.

And then she was laughing softly as she joined him beneath the covers of what Anna somehow knew was Joseph’s bed, in Joseph’s room. But this was clearly a memory from years ago, when he was barely older than this girl himself.

“Annie, my God, what are you doing?” His voice cracked.

“What I want to do before you go,” the girl told him. “What you want, too.” She laughed. “Or you wouldn’t have left your window open so I could climb in.”

“Ah, God,” he breathed as she pulled off the T-shirt and dungarees she’d put on to make the journey across the fields in the dark, as she pressed herself against his warmth.

“We should be married right now,” she whispered. “This should have been our wedding night—and I say we
are
married in the eyes of God. To hell with what my parents say.”

“They only want what’s best for you.”

“
You’re
what’s best for me,” she said and kissed him.

This is the place I always ran to, whenever I needed to run. To lose myself. To save myself. To punish myself. It’s an equal opportunity memory. Not as awful as yours—not for the same reasons, anyway
.

Anna turned, suddenly apart from and outside of the two young lovers, suddenly aware that she was watching them from the darkness in the corner of the room. Joseph was beside her, and she could feel his longing and sorrow, his regret and grief—and she knew that this girl, whoever she was, was no longer alive.

I’m sorry
, she told him.

I am, too
.

He opened the door for her, relentlessly polite, and she went through it and into a narrow, dark hallway, suspecting that they could have passed through the walls if they’d wanted to.

It was then that Anna realized they were dressed as they were before—he in his princely get-up, she with only that blanket wrapped tightly around her. She still had mud from the quicksand on her, caked in her hair and beneath her fingernails, and she knew that he’d saved her yet again, by pulling her into this memory that he’d just as soon not have to relive.

He looked back one last time at the golden-haired girl in the bed before following Anna out of the room. He closed the door gently behind him, then led the way along the dark, narrow hall to a flight of stairs that went downward.

“This is the house where I grew up,” he said, glancing back at her. “I haven’t been back here in a long time.”

“What happened to her?” Anna asked as she followed him into a quaint-looking living room, filled with antiques. It was dark in there, with no lights turned on, but somehow she could see.“Annie.”

“She took her own life,” Joseph told her.

She stopped short. “Oh, God. You shouldn’t have brought me here—”

“I didn’t have a lot of time to pick and choose our destination.” He sat down on a rather stiff-looking sofa that had a straight and barely padded back.

“And you couldn’t have picked, I don’t know, a frat party at your college or—”

“I didn’t go to parties at college,” he said. “Please sit. Or don’t sit. But listen, okay? We have just a minute—seconds now—before you’re going to wake up, and you need to know that you shouldn’t be afraid. I’m on the bed with you, I’m holding you, but there’s nothing …” He stopped himself, started again. “It’s not
meant
to be sexual. You were shaking and … Plus it helps for me to be as close as possible while I maintain telepathic contact. Bottom line,
I didn’t want you to be alone, especially when I realized what was happening.”

“The loop,” she said.

He nodded. But then sighed. “If you ever want to talk about it—”

“I don’t.” She shook her head. “This shouldn’t be about me. We were trying to reach Nika. Did you connect with her?”

He shook his head no. “You had a negative reaction to the sleep aid.”

“Shit.”

He smiled at that, but only briefly. “Look, if you change your mind about—”

“Thank you,” Anna said. “But no. I went to counseling. I’m over it.”

He didn’t call her on it, but she could tell that he didn’t believe her.

Instead, he said, “Time’s up. Your eyes are going to open now. And it’s not going to be awkward. For either of us. It’s just going to … be. On three … two …”

One
.

Anna opened her eyes to find herself nose to nose with Joseph Bach, his arms tightly around her as they lay together on top of that bed in lab seven. From this proximity, his eyes were very brown and his lashes ridiculously thick and long.

Her hair had come out of her ponytail, and some of it was in his face. She was glad to see that the quicksand had stayed safely back in the caverns of their minds.

And even though he had to spit some of her hair out of his mouth, his being there
wasn’t
awkward—despite everything they’d just shared. And Anna knew that he’d probably done some sort of hypnosis on her back in his childhood living room, similar to the way he’d gotten her into his car, out in front of her apartment.

But with Nika still missing, she didn’t want to waste time on the inconsequential, so she cut to the chase.

“Can we try this again,” she asked him, “
without
the drugs?”

It was only then, as Bach released her and sat up, pushing his own hair back out of his face, that she noticed his hands were shaking. Still, he didn’t hesitate to nod. “Absolutely,” he said. “Let’s just let Elliot check you out first.”

“Sixty,” the computer in Shane’s apartment reported. “Sixty-two. Fifty-seven. Sixty-one. Fifty-six. Sixty-two.”

Mac’s integration levels were erratic. She was flopping all over the place like a fish on a dock.

She was also royally screwed.

This was Tim, all over again. Except Shane was no mere Tim. He was Tim times a thousand. He was a
million
times the man Tim could only ever hope to be.

And Mac? She had no one to blame but herself. Fool that she was, she’d been playing with fire. And now that she’d gotten this far, she couldn’t turn back. Not while the very real possibility of finding Devon Caine hung out there, almost within grasp.

Worse thing yet, she couldn’t stop her tears—she was crying like a little girl who’d lost her puppy. And Shane didn’t fuck-up his current standing as the world’s nicest guy by saying something dickish, like,
Hey, it’ll be okay
, or
Don’t cry, baby, it’s not that bad
, or even,
I’m sorry
, when he had no real clue why she was crying.

Instead, he gallantly provided her with an acceptable excuse for her emotional outburst as he looked at her with those eyes and said, “I want to find Nika, too.”