Shattered Dreams: A Midnight Dragonfly Novel (16 page)

My dead body.

“No…”
I managed, frozen at first, then fighting, twisting, clawing at the nothingness until finally I thrust my hands toward the mirror.

And saw the blood.

It dripped along the glistening silver blade and ran down my arms.

I screamed, and everything just stopped. The flashing. The spinning.

The lightning.

It was like being thrown from a speeding car, one second you’re racing along and then you slam into something hard, bouncing on impact, rolling …

I lay there in the stillness for a frozen eternity, until the breath hit my lungs. Then I was scrambling to my feet and running, across the room and to the door, yanking it open and staggering into the night.

“Oh, God!” I cried, going down on my knees. But I wouldn’t let myself stay there, couldn’t curl up like a baby no matter how incapable of thought I was.

My phone, I remembered. I’d dropped it by the fountain—

The gate crashed open, giving way to a man running through the darkness, his arms extended in front of him, a gun in his hands. On the ground, I stilled.

Until I saw the figure behind him.

“Chase!” I’m not sure who moved first, who moved faster. I only knew that before I could so much as breathe, I was by the fountain and in Chase’s arms, and he was holding me, holding me so tight, as if he would never let me go.

“I’ve got you, baby,” he murmured against my hair.
“I’ve got you.”

“Where were you?” I cried, pulling back to see his face. That’s when I saw the blood at his temple, and everything tilted all over again. “My God,” I whispered. “What happened to you?”

His eyes darkened, flashed, shifted to the other man, the one I’d completely forgotten in my rush to get to Chase.

Detective Aaron LaSalle stood between me and the old house, his gun drawn and ready. “Are you okay?” he asked.

Somehow I nodded.

“Trinity,” Chase said. “What the hell is going on?”

I swallowed hard, scrambled for words.

There were none.

“I d-don’t know,” I whispered. “I turned around and you were gone…”

He shook off my explanation, as if the words weren’t the ones he wanted. “You were screaming,” he said. “Just now when we were coming down the alley. Why were you screaming?”

Numbly I turned back toward the darkened house.

“Holy shit,” Chase muttered, and the alarm in his voice supercharged my heart all over again. I glanced up at him, saw him staring at my hands.

“W-what?” I started—then saw the blood seeping between my closed fingers.

“Trinity,”
Chase whispered, helping me uncurl my hands to reveal my palms.

Somewhere along the line night had fallen, leaving a thick web of darkness. It was enough, though, enough to see the deep cuts across the center of my palms and the ooze of blood.

“What the hell happened to you?” The words were from Chase. I knew that because I saw his mouth move. But the strangled voice was one I’d never heard before. Nor had I ever seen his eyes go wild like they did as he ripped his T-shirt from his body and used it to bandage my hands.

All this was happening, but like the image in the mirror, it was as if I watched, rather than lived. Saw, rather than felt.

“The knife…” I said, spinning around.

LaSalle’s cop-on-the-hunt gaze scanned the shadows of the courtyard. “What knife?”

It wasn’t there. “I-I…” Didn’t know. Didn’t understand. “There was an old woman … she gave it to me…”

“Baby, what are you talking about?” Chase asked, and I blinked again, turned back toward the door with the B.

“She was here.” My mind raced, struggled to put the pieces together. “I … I saw you. After you left, I—”

Against my arms, his fingers tightened. “I didn’t leave.”

I tried not to sway, wasn’t sure that I succeeded.
“W-what?”

“You stopped,” he said. “You stopped and started walking back to the steps.”

I shoved at the tangled hair falling against my face, but the T-shirt bandage made me clumsy. “The cat,” I said. “It was hurt. I was trying to—”

“Trinity.” It was Chase’s voice that made my heart slow to a horrible crawl, the gentleness. The concern. “There was no cat.”

And just like that the spinning accelerated, and I felt Chase move closer, his hands grip my biceps, holding me firmer. “Yes, there was. It was on the steps and it was bleeding and…”

Chase looked beyond me to where Detective LaSalle stood.

I hated the look that passed between them.

“Forget the cat,” LaSalle said. “I need to know what happened inside that house.”

I wanted to dive back into Chase’s arms and feel them close around me again, to hear his voice whisper to me, through me, to promise that this would all be okay.

Except I knew that was impossible.

“I-I thought I saw Chase come back here. So I followed. There was this woman, it was like she was waiting for me.” God, that sounded crazy, even to me. “Like she knew I was coming.”

But that was also impossible. How could she have known, unless Emma Watson had told her?

“She said if I wanted to know the truth about my mother, then I had to go inside.”

“Ah,
baby,
” Chase murmured, and I died a little all over again. “I should never have brought you here.”

But Detective LaSalle was already striding toward the door with the B. I hurried along behind him, Chase by my side.

The door stood closed. I was sure I’d left it open. None of that mattered, though, because LaSalle didn’t slow down, just lifted a leg at full speed and kicked the door down.

Not open.

Down.

Rotting wood disintegrated at the blow, revealing the gape of darkness beyond.

I practically slammed into his back, stood there staring, shaking. “No…” I whispered, and then I was moving again, stepping away from Chase and around the detective, into the big, empty, rancid-smelling room.

“No, no, no!” I cried, spinning. “There was a clock…”

But now the wall stood vacant, peeling.

“And a sofa,” I said, blinking hard, thinking that maybe—

I didn’t know what I was thinking, but realized that I’d better shut up fast.

It was all gone, everything: the sofa, the tables, the rug, the lamp. The French doors—the china cabinet.

The mirror.

All … gone.

“Trinity?” Chase said, again beside me. “What are you talking about? What’s going on?”

I twisted toward him. “W-what time is it?”

Frowning, he pulled out his iPhone and checked. “A little after seven thirty—why?”

An hour. In the blink of an eye, I’d lost a full hour. And a whole lot more of my sanity.

“You kids wait here,” LaSalle said, moving past me, deeper into the suffocating darkness. From his belt he withdrew a flashlight and clicked it on, bathing the room in a brilliant white light.

The walls were a faded, barf-looking green, not dusty rose. No artwork adorned them, at least not the framed kind you bought in galleries, only the spray-paint kind, weird tattoolike drawings similar to what I’d seen at the house on Prytania.

LaSalle crossed to the far side, where his feet crunched on what sounded like broken glass.

Chase kept me against his side, and I didn’t know whether to scream or cry. Or run. That’s what I wanted to do. Get out of there, away from that place. To breathe—and think.

“I want to go home,” I whispered as LaSalle squatted to run his fingers along the floorboard. I glanced up at Chase … saw the blood at his temple. “What happened?” I asked. “What happened to
you
?”

He’d always been bigger than life to me, the drop-dead gorgeous football player with the amazing body and killer smile, the dimples that could melt your heart, the unexpected kindness that made me dream. But in that moment, with his bangs falling against his face and unease drenching his eyes, he looked like he’d looked into the gates of hell.

“Chase, I’m sorry,” I whispered. And I was. So very, very sorry. “I should have listened to you. I should have let you take me home.”

He pulled me closer, tangling a hand in my hair as he pressed a kiss to my temple. The protective—
possessive
—way he held me was enough to make me cry. His chest was so warm.

“You were gone,” he muttered, and it was almost as if he blamed himself. “I turned around and you were just gone.”

“Chase—”

“And then…” He let out a rough breath. “I don’t know. Everything went black.”

Swallowing, I was torn between watching the detective and watching Chase. “Black?”

“I don’t know how long I was out. I woke up to a man and woman leaning over me, asking me if I was okay.”

“Chase,”
I murmured, lifting a hand to brush the bangs from his temple.

The sight of my blood staining the T-shirt wrapped around my palms stopped me.

That odd glitter still in his eyes, he looked beyond me, toward LaSalle. “My wallet was gone, my phone still in my pocket. That’s how they reached my dad.”

A few more pieces drifted into place. “And he called LaSalle,” I realized.

Chase nodded. “No one had seen you. You were just
gone
. He was calling for backup when we heard you scream.”

I looked down toward the dirty, dust-covered floor. A floor that had been clean a few moments before, gleaming hardwood covered by a gorgeous rug.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, this time as Detective LaSalle returned. His eyes were hard, guarded. His mouth was set and grim.

“This is the room you were in?” he asked.

I nodded.

“There’s nothing here,” he said, and I could already tell what he was thinking: that I was either totally out of my mind or a bald-faced liar. “No knife,” he said. “No woman.”

Just like there’d been no trace of Jessica at the house on Prytania.

Chase still held me pressed against the warmth of his body, but I couldn’t stop shaking. She was here! I wanted to scream, but realized there was no point. The more I said, the crazier they’d all think I was.

“I want to go home,” I whispered.

Detective LaSalle kept eyeing me, as if through the sheer force of his will he could make me confess. “I’m sure you do.”

“Come on,” Chase said. “She’s been through enough.”

The detective’s eyebrows bunched together. “Has she?”

He didn’t believe us. That was so obvious. “I must have fallen,” I murmured. “Hit my head—”

“Ah,” LaSalle said. “Let me guess. Another dream?”

FIFTEEN

I wanted to scream. More, I wanted to grab a can of spray paint and erase everything. Not only this day, but the past few weeks and this entire city. To be back in Colorado in the mountains, with Gran …

“She didn’t dream her hands,” Chase pointed out.

“Obviously not.” Suspicion remained sharp in LaSalle’s eyes—he was so not buying our story about vanishing cats and women and rooms. “I’ll take you home,” he said, but the second the words left his mouth, Chase pulled me tighter.

“I can,” he started, but stopped when a different voice broke through the silence.

“Chase!”

“Dad,” he said as the detective swung his flashlight to reveal a tall man in scrubs running through the courtyard.

The very dark courtyard.

The man raced in and smothered Chase into his arms. “Ah, Christ, I’ve been worried sick,” he said as Chase hugged him back, assuring his father he was okay.

I didn’t hear what either of them said after that, because I couldn’t stop looking beyond the door, to the crumbling cobblestone and empty hanging baskets, the broken clay pots—and old dried-up fountain.

And the skinny cat with the glowing yellow eyes, slinking through the shadows and into the night beyond.

*   *   *

“Tell me what you know about Chase Bonaventure.”

Fresh out of the shower, I hovered in the hallway with my back to the wall, listening. Chase’s father had insisted on taking him to the hospital to have his temple looked at, leaving LaSalle to drive me to my aunt’s.

I’d really hoped he’d be gone by the time I came out. Instead, he was grilling my aunt.

“Chase?” she said, and though I couldn’t see her, I knew she was looking at the cop like he was crazy. “You can’t think—”

“Trust me, Sara, I can think just about anything. Because I’ve seen just about everything,” he said, and it was bizarre, because his voice was different than before. It was lower, gentler.

I slipped closer, saw them standing near the breakfast bar. Not much space separated them. Aunt Sara was tall, but Detective LaSalle dwarfed her. She’d been doing a yoga video when we arrived. Still in her tight workout clothes with her hair knotted up on her head, she stood in a fighter’s stance, glaring up at him.

“I don’t get paid to see the best in everyone,” he added in that oddly compassionate voice. “Even when I want to. My job is to see the worst. To consider it, explore it. And here’s what I’m seeing right now: a beautiful girl is missing. The day before she vanished, she and her ex-boyfriend were seen arguing. Maybe things got out of hand. Maybe—”

No way could I keep standing there, listening.

“No,” I said, crossing toward them. “Chase isn’t like that.”

They both swung to look at me. Detective LaSalle spoke first. “They never are, sweetheart.”

“He’s a good guy—”

“Who made threats.” LaSalle turned all cop again, his voice as point-blank as his eyes. “I’ve got witnesses saying that he warned Jessica Morgenthal she’d be sorry—”

He’d admitted the same to me. But not like
that
.

“You can’t believe what Amber Lane says,” I said, wincing when I forgot about my palms and clenched my hands into fists. Quickly I uncurled my fingers. “She’s a drama queen, and Jessica’s best friend. All she wants to do is make Chase look as bad as possible.”

LaSalle lifted a single brow.

I really hated that.

“From all accounts,” he said, “Chase Bonaventure has done that by himself.”

“That’s not fair!”

“No,” he said, “it’s not. But it’s not about fair, either. It’s about finding the truth, no matter how ugly or shocking it is. Violence is rarely random. A huge portion of the time, the victim knows the perp. Sometimes it’s anger or revenge, sometimes just passion—”