Broken Illusions: A Midnight Dragonfly Novel (4 page)

“Are you crazy?” Victoria breathed, disentangling herself. “You scared us half to death—”

“Scared
you
?” Amber widened her eyes. “We’re the ones who came in and found the place trashed, heard you scream…”

Victoria stepped back. Her mouth dropped open. “If it wasn’t you—”

“Of course it was them,” I said, not wanting her to finish. “Just like the truth-or-dare game last fall.”

She spun toward me. Stringy hair slapped her face. “
Omigod,
it was the board! What if there was an evil spirit—”

I silenced her with my eyes, silenced her emphatically, but it was too late. Amber, grinning like she’d just been chosen as the next reality star, had heard all she needed to.

“Holy crap,” she muttered. “You were having a séance.”

“Don’t be ridiculous—” But already she was racing for the back room.

I took off after her, cursing silently the second I found her squatting beside the worktable with the Ouija board in one hand, the triangular pointer in the other. “Now who’s being ridiculous?”

I flipped on the light, and all the shadows fell away. “It’s just a game,” I said. “No big deal.”

Victoria pushed up beside me, taking me by the arm. “How can you say that?” she whisper-talked. “You were there. It was crazy. You saw—”

I said it because I had to. I said it because I understood, even as I didn’t.

Something
had
happened. But I had no idea what. And I wasn’t about to start dissecting that fact in front of Amber.

“You said it yourself,” I reminded her. “It’s just a subconscious thing—”

Everything flashed. The image formed without warning, spearing in from nowhere and stabbing straight through me. I staggered, fell back—

Drew caught me. “Trin?”

Light cut in, like headlights through the darkness—and I saw him, saw him lying so horribly still. Blood covered his face. His hair was matted. His eyes were … closed.

“Chase.”
Somewhere deep inside started to shake. “Chase!”

Through the haze I could feel hands against my arms, fingers pressing against my hoodie. “Trinity.”

Drew, I realized. I could hear him, knew that he was there, but through the rain-shrouded theater of my mind, I saw only Chase’s unmoving body.

“Trinity!” It was Victoria now, the twist of her panic penetrating the haze. “Here, let me,” she said, and then Drew’s hands were gone and Victoria’s were there, holding mine. They were warm, like sunshine.

“Come back,” she whispered. “I don’t know where you are, but you need to come back here, to Fleurish!”

Chase wasn’t moving. He was wearing jeans. His T-shirt was the one I’d given him for Christmas, the gray Affliction with the tilted cross. It was plastered to his body.

“Tell me. Tell me where you are.”

“Chase is hurt.”

DIE

I couldn’t breathe. “He … needs me.”

The flood of light stole him, a bright, blinding flash, and he was gone.

I lunged forward, but arms held me back.

“Then why isn’t he here?” Amber smirked.

“He’s … in trouble.”

The girl who’d framed me for vicious Internet posts gave me a
you are so pathetic
look. “Maybe in
your
dreams,” she said. “But I can assure you Chase is safe and sound with Jessica—where he belongs.” Her smile was unbelievably hateful. “Now, it’s true they could be getting into trouble—”

“Omigod,” Victoria cut in. “We didn’t say good-bye.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “We didn’t close the portal! We let the spirits out—”

“No.” I cut her off as fast as I could, but Drew backed away from me anyway, much like Chase once had when confronted with the choice to believe—or doubt.

Trying to stay calm, I grabbed my phone and stabbed out a text.

R U OK?

Victoria hovered. “Trinnie—what’s going on?”

I stared at the blank screen, willing a response to appear. Just a word, that’s all I needed. YES. Just one word.

Please …

“I saw him.” Just like in the dream I’d had off and on the past few weeks. After nothing had happened, we’d written it off as harmless.

I had that kind, too.

“He was hurt,” I said, “lying in the mud.”

“Oh, God!” Victoria whisper-screamed. “The board. It said…”

DIE

Our eyes met. The unspoken word hovered between us. “No.” But I could see it all over again, the pointer sliding at will, answering a question that had not been asked.

“We have to find him.” I spun toward Drew, but he was already reaching for my hand.

“Are you
kidding
me?” Amber screeched. “She’s a freak—”

But Drew and I were already running out the door. Julian was there. I had no idea why. But he was there on the sidewalk in the rain, and when I saw him, when my eyes met his, I knew that he understood.

I never thought to ask why.

*   *   *

“I need more, Trinity. Something specific.”

Behind the wheel of his father’s TrailBlazer, Drew swerved onto another narrow, rain-slicked road. The headlights cut in front of us. The windshield wipers slapped pointlessly. “You know how many roads like this there are out here?”

I did. A lot. We’d been at it for almost an hour, starting at Jessica’s house. Her father said Chase had left around ten—but no one had heard from him since. He wasn’t answering his phone, wasn’t returning texts.

For the fifteenth time, I hit send.
“Answer me
.
”

The screen remained blank.

“Omigod, where are you?”

Sheets of rain destroyed visibility. Trees crowded in from both sides, partially concealing the swelling canal to the right.

“Trinity, maybe you should call your aunt,” Drew said. “Maybe her boyfriend can—”

“Not yet.” That would take too long. “A little farther, okay?”

“Look, try my uncle then and make sure Chase isn’t home asleep or—”

We saw the fuzz of lights at the same time, a dim beam slanting toward a canal. Then the restored Camaro.

Wrapped around a tree.

“Shit.”
Drew slammed on the brakes, sending the big SUV into a slide. We fishtailed left, right—

Somehow Drew regained control.

I had the door open before we even stopped, and started to run.

Rain pelted me. “Chase!”

Drew sprinted past me, reaching the mangled car first and yanking at the driver’s side door.

“Is he—” The cracked, blood-smeared windshield stopped me. “Oh, my God.” Grabbing Drew’s arm, I squeezed between him and the car and saw the collapsed airbag—and the empty front seat. “Where is he … I don’t…”

We both twisted around. “Chase!”

I ran, staggering through the garish beam of the headlights. Drew took off in the opposite direction.

“We’re here!” My feet slipped against the muddy incline. “Where are you?”

“Cuz!” Drew yelled behind me.

Nearly blinded by the rain, I shoved the hair from my face and pushed forward, never saw the fallen tree. I went down hard, landing on my hands and knees. The impact sang through me, but I quickly scrambled to my feet. Then lightning glittered, and everything else stopped.

FOUR

He lay by the edge of the canal, one leg in the water, the other twisted at an unnatural angle. He was on his back, his head turned to the side—just like I’d seen in my mind.

I lunged, but my foot slid away from me, and I went down again. “Chase!” I didn’t try to get up. I crawled. He was right there. Right … there!

And then I was pulling myself through the mud, reaching for him, sliding my hands from his chest to his neck.

“Oh, God,”
I whispered into the laughter of the rain. “Come on, come on, come on!”

His flesh was wet, cold, but beneath my fingertips came the most amazing flutter.

“Fuck!” Drew shot beside me and dropped to his knees. “Is he—”

“Call nine-one-one!” I shouted, and started to cry. My hands found Chase’s face, his jaw, his cheekbones, finally easing back matted bangs to reveal the source of the blood.

He must have been conscious after the crash. He’d gotten out of the car, was trying to go for help.

“We’re here,” I whispered, and through my tears, my mouth found his.

“Trin.”
His voice was low, strained, but strong and beautiful and the most phenomenal gift ever.

“Sh-h-h.” Against the side of his face, my hand shook. “Don’t talk.”

“I’m … sorry…”

The rain still fell. The wind still blew. But I felt none of that, felt nothing but the band squeezing my heart. Easing back, I found his eyes open and filled with something I didn’t come close to understanding.

“No reason to be,” I murmured in between soft, gentle kisses.

The coppery tinge drove home how close I’d come to losing him.

“Paramedics are on their way,” Drew said, easing Chase away from the canal. “Your mom and dad, too.”

“Thank you, God.” I shot Chase’s cousin a quick smile of gratitude. “And you, too.”

Soaked, covered in mud, Drew looked from his cousin to me, the oddest glow in his green eyes.

Closing mine, I dropped my head to Chase’s chest and tried not to drown in the steady thrum of his heart. Vaguely I was aware of his arm closing around me, his hand tangling in my hair.

“That’s some seriously cool shit,” I heard Drew mutter as sirens carried on the wind. “You knew,” he said. “You eff’in—”

The sky flashed again, and the puddle beyond Chase glowed. I hung there, sprawled against him, as everything inside me tightened.

“… like totally awesome,” I heard Drew saying, but then he stopped. “Trinity? What the shit?”

Chase’s hands found my arms and squeezed, but I couldn’t feel it—couldn’t feel anything. “What’s wrong?”

I blinked against the rain, but the Mardi Gras mask remained partially submerged in the puddle.

“No, no, no, no…”
Then I was crawling, blindly pulling away from Chase and dragging myself through the mud toward the puddle, reaching out and stabbing my hand—

“Trinity!” Drew caught my arm. “What—”

“The mask! Oh, God—the mask.” It was only a few feet away—exactly like all those months before. “He was here!”

Arms closed around me. Chase. Strong. Pulling me against his body. “Baby—”

Sirens screamed from all around us. Headlights cut in.

“No!” I squirmed against Chase, had to touch. To feel. To find the mask before—

Drew plunged his hands into the slop—

And the glow went dark.

“Leaves,” he said, rocking back and opening his palms so that I could see. “Just leaves.”

I sagged against Chase, staring at the evidence in his cousin’s hands. I could tell him to try again, keep looking. I could beg him.

But I knew what he would find, what they always found when the unseen masqueraded as the seen.

Absolutely nothing.

*   *   *

He was okay.

That’s what I kept telling myself. Chase was okay. Paramedics brought all car-accident victims who’d lost consciousness to the ER. He’d been awake, talking. The CAT scan was precautionary.

But as seconds dragged into minutes, minutes into over an hour since Drew and I had rushed into the chaos of the emergency room, rational thought faded, and like a freshly kicked anthill, my imagination took over.
Something was wrong. They’d found a brain bleed. He’d lapsed into a coma, was being raced to surgery. The Ouija board.

Hugging myself, I started to rock.

“His dad said half an hour,” I reminded Victoria, who’d arrived with Lucas and Amber right after we did. Chase’s parents had gotten there a few minutes before.

Almost the entire football team had gathered, some inside, some hanging outside.

Word spread
really
fast.

“But it’s been twice that.” I kept staring at the door on the other side of the registration desk. His dad had come out once, all grim-faced and stony-eyed, telling us Chase was being taken for a scan and would receive immediate treatment, and promising to let us know as soon as he knew anything.

People had come and gone since then. A lot of them. Patients had been called back. Family members had followed.

But for every
one
called back, Saturday night craziness brought three more to the waiting room.

Victoria glanced at her iPhone, then at me. “An hour fifteen. I’m sure he’ll be out soon.”

I hugged myself tighter, didn’t understand why they kept the place so cold. It was the middle of winter and half the people around me were coughing or sneezing.

“Maybe you should ask them for a blanket,” Victoria suggested.

I stared at the TV mounted across the room, at an episode of
Friends
I’d seen at least twenty times, but heard only babies crying. I’d counted three.

“Should I add anything else?”

Robotically, I turned to see Victoria holding her phone out to me. “What?”

“A prayer request,” she said. “I put that Chase was in an accident and is in the ER, and that everyone should pray.”

From the small screen, the words blurred. I blinked, tried to bring them into focus. “No … no, that’s good.”

Immediately she thumbed the blue share button.

I stood. I had to move. Across the room Drew stood with his parents, his father a slightly younger replica of Chase’s father. Amber, completely dry with her wavy hair perfect, sat in a chair next to him, glued to her phone. I could see her fingers flying. Lucas, thank God, had gone outside—

“Trinity!”

I’d been trying not to panic. I’d been trying to be calm, rational. But the second I heard my aunt’s voice, I turned and launched myself into her arms.

“Ah,
cher,
” she murmured, hugging me against her, hugging me so, so tight. “We were at a movie, I had my phone on mute—I just saw your message.” She pulled back, her worried eyes finding mine. “How’s Chase?”

“IDK,” I said on a rush, blinking back the sudden flood of tears. “They took him back forever ago and we haven’t heard anything—”

My words stopped the second I saw the man striding in from the parking lot, all casually dressed in faded jeans and some kind of fitted button-down. But the look on his face, the sharp lines and assessing eyes, was all cop.