Shattered Dreams: A Midnight Dragonfly Novel (17 page)

“Aaron,” my aunt said. “We’re talking about kids.”

Aaron?

He shot her a quick, apologetic look. “No,” he said. “We’re not.”

Her eyes narrowed, but he jumped in before she could say anything.

“I wish being sixteen meant nothing bad ever happened. I wish being sixteen meant you weren’t capable of anger or hate—or violence. But it doesn’t,” he said, and I couldn’t help but notice the change in him from the night he’d first come to take my statement. Then he’d been stony.

Tonight he seemed rattled. “My job is to think about everything. I can’t rule out someone because his mother might run for D.A. The bottom line is a girl is missing. Maybe she drove off on her own. Maybe she’s playing a game, trying to get attention or prove a point. Or maybe some sick bastard hurt her. Maybe someone she trusted—”

“Not Chase,” I whispered, but he kept right on going.

“Maybe she wasn’t the nicest person in the world. Maybe she pushed someone too hard. Maybe Chase got mad, or you wanted revenge. Amber was jealous, or Pitre wanted to teach her a lesson. Her sister had had enough, or the guy from LSU got jealous. Things went too far. Accidents happen. Someone got scared. Now it’s my job to bring her home, one way or another.”

It was “the other” that worried me.

His gaze locked on mine. “If you can help me do that, Trinity, great. But if you’re hiding something … I will find out.”

*   *   *

Long after Detective LaSalle left, the chill of his words lingered. After my shower I’d put on my favorite flannel pajamas (light blue with panda bears scattered all over), but I couldn’t have been colder if I’d been standing naked in a Colorado blizzard. My whole body shook from it.

I watched my aunt fill a glass measuring cup with water then slide it into the microwave, pull it out a few minutes later and pour it into two mugs. She’d been oddly quiet since LaSalle left, mechanical almost, as if she was running through some kind of mental checklist.

“Thank you,” I said.

Still in her yoga clothes, she looked up from the mugs where green tea steeped. “For what?”

I sucked in a sharp breath, then took a huge leap of faith. “Sticking up for me,” I whispered. “Believing me.”

Her face fell.

“It was real,” I said, needing for someone to believe me. For her to believe. “I saw her, I really did.”

“Oh,
cher,
” she whispered, not asking who, or when, or how. Not asking anything.

“I’m not crazy,” I said, shaking my head. Because I could see them still—LaSalle, Chase’s father—looking at me like I had a serious mental problem. And Chase … Omigod, the memory of the confusion in his eyes ripped me up. “I don’t care what anyone says,” I muttered. “I’m not crazy.”

“No,” she said quietly. “You’re not.”

I picked up one of the unlit votives and rolled it in my hands. “It was all there…” In the room—or some dark corner of my mind. I no longer knew which. The line between dream and reality—
vision and reality
—was increasingly obscured.

“The woman and the mirror—the knife…” Woodenly I replaced the candle and turned my hands palm up. I’d wrapped the gauze as tightly as possible, but blood still leaked through.

That
was real.

“I didn’t do this to myself,” I said, but that wasn’t true, was it? “At least, I didn’t do it on purpose.” But the knife
had
been in
my
hands. I had no memory of cutting myself, but obviously I had. “I-I don’t know how it happened.”

Aunt Sara’s eyes darkened. “Was the mirror black?”

It took a second for me to latch onto the fact I’d just mentioned a mirror. I nodded then, and she frowned.

“Your mother had one,” she whispered. “It was her mother’s, and her mother’s before her.”

The firstborn daughter of the firstborn daughter …
“But—”

“She saw things in it,” my aunt said. “She saw—”

By the way she broke off, I could tell she didn’t like what she’d remembered. “What?” I came around the counter, to where she stood near the island in the center of the kitchen. “What did she see?”

Aunt Sara looked down, into the greenish-brown tea in the two mugs.

“Things,” she said, looking up several seconds later. “Things she would never tell me about.”

I felt my eyes widen, but even open like that I could see the body again—pale, laid out like a sacrifice. I saw the woman, heard the shout of a guy, and once again felt myself start to float.

“She saw herself die, didn’t she?” I whispered. And again, without waiting for an answer, I knew. “My mother saw herself die.”

My aunt’s eyes clouded over. “I have something for you,” she said, lifting a thin bronze chain from the counter next to her mug. I’d barely noticed it sitting there—Aunt Sara always had some kind of charm, pendant, or beads lying around.

Curious, I lifted my hand as she reached toward me, watching as what looked like a medallion settled against the bloodstained gauze.

“It’s from your mother,” she said, as the most phenomenal warmth moved through me. “She treasured it.”

The edges of my vision blurred, but not enough to distort the ornate curve of a tarnished dragonfly, or the warm glow of the orangish-gold crystal in the center.

“I should have given it to you when you first got here … but I was hoping you wouldn’t need it.”

I looked up. “Wouldn’t need it?”

It was crazy how pale her face was. “Her grandmother gave it to her—for protection.”

“A lot of good that did her,” I murmured, but even as the cynicism moved through me, I unfastened the clasp and drew the chain around my neck.

“Not her,” my aunt whispered, and my fingers froze.
“You.”

“Me?”

Her eyes went as dark as her skin was pale. “Mama Collette promised it would protect
you
—and it did.”

*   *   *

I didn’t sleep. Everything kept playing in my mind like a movie on repeat: Emma Watson and the bizarre courtyard, the mirror and the glowing dragonfly that had been in my mother’s family for generations—and Chase.

I hated how badly I needed him to call.

He didn’t. I told myself he was still at the hospital, but that only made me worry more. What if the gash on his head was more serious than we’d realized?

Victoria put that fear to rest. She’d talked to Lucas, who’d talked to Pitre, who’d talked to Chase. Chase who was home and completely fine.

I don’t know why I kept checking my BlackBerry. It beeped when a new message arrived, and there was no beeping. But every few minutes I grabbed it and fumbled with my laptop, dreaming up excuses. He was busy with his parents—or he’d fallen asleep. Pain pills could do that. But as the hours stacked up, another possibility needled deeper.

Chase had not called or texted, because he’d seen the blood on my hands. He’d heard me babbling about nonexistent old ladies and clocks and meticulously preserved rooms.

A story that had absolutely no substantiation.

After being lied to by virtually everyone he’d ever trusted, Chase Bonaventure needed substantiation.

God. I should never have told him anything, not about my parents, or my dreams.

Especially my dreams.

It hit without warning, sometime during the darkest depths of the night. I had no awareness of closing my eyes. I had no awareness of falling off. But then I was there …

Trees rose up around me. They were tall and old and frail, little more than skeletons against the sun-bleached sky. Some had green to them—most did not.

Squinting against the glare, I turned around, and saw the field.

Memory trickled through me. I’d been here before …

“Where am I?” I called.

But only the cry of a lone bird answered. I looked for him, that lone bird perched somewhere high out of sight, but the edges of the branches blurred, and I could make out nothing.

“Trinity…”

The sound of my name sliced through the silence with deafening softness. I spun again as the low roar started, soft, like purring on the horizon.

“Help me,” she whispered, and even as I started to run, I knew.

“Jessica!” I called, but the roaring grew louder, no longer a puff but an assault. The overgrown weeds slapped my legs—the mud tried to hold me in place. “Where are you?”

“Hurry…”

I twisted, using my hand to shield my eyes from the unnatural brightness. Against the absence of color, silver streaked high into the sky, until finally the roar of jet engines fell into silence.

Then I saw the truck.

“Wait!” I shouted, running again, harder. “Wait! Come back!”

But the old white pickup never even slowed. It came straight for me—

“Trinity!”

I felt my whole body jerk, recoil—

“Wake up,
cher
—please!”

A soft glow replaced the terrible blinding white, and I sat there, frozen, trying to breathe.

Aunt Sara had her hands on my upper arms, her mascara-smeared eyes steady on mine. “You’re okay,” she promised. But her voice gave away the lie. “Just give yourself a minute.”

My throat burned. My body trembled. I’d been there … been somewhere. Just like the night before, I’d seen the field and heard her. But tonight there’d been more.

“I need to talk to Detective LaSalle,” I whispered, closing my bandaged hand around the warm glow of my mother’s amulet.
“Please,”
I said.

Even if he thought I was crazy.

*   *   *

“This isn’t much to go on,” he said shortly before six, standing with a cup of coffee near the breakfast bar. Clearly we’d pulled him from sleep. He hadn’t taken time to shave or formally dress, had just come over in jeans and a white T-shirt.

Under almost any other circumstances, the ratty flip-flops would have made me smile.

Aunt Sara nursed her own cup of coffee. She’d pulled her hair off her face and scrubbed away the mascara, pulled on her own pair of jeans and a T-shirt promoting the wetlands.

“She was white as a ghost,” she whispered. “Whatever she saw—”

“I got it,” he said quietly, cutting her off. “A field, an airplane, and a white truck.”

Even I had to admit it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

“Maybe by the airport,” Aunt Sara suggested.

He put down the mug and flipped his small notebook shut. “I’ll let you know,” he said, turning toward me. “I’d like you to keep quiet about this,” he said. “The fewer people who know, the fewer we have to worry about.”

I stilled. So did my aunt. “You don’t really think,” she started, but the regret in his eyes silenced her question. He did think. He’d made that clear the night before. He thought about everything.

“Just get some rest,” he said, a few minutes later, before he left. “Keep a low profile today—”

My mind raced through everything I’d had planned. No tests or anything … “But the vigil—”

“I’ll go with you,” Aunt Sara promised, and that seemed to satisfy him. Shortly after he left, she insisted I go back to bed. “I have a few appointments I can’t reschedule,” she said, standing outside the door to her room. She’d had a lot of those this week. “I’ll feel better knowing you’re resting.”

With a tight smile I slipped back into my room and tried to go to sleep. But like that was even possible. For a while I lay watching the ceiling fan, then I crossed to the trunk and once again sorted through all the little vials and boxes.

It was after I got dressed that I fired up my laptop and reached for my phone, and felt my heart stop.

Seven messages. All from Chase.

U OK?

That first message was from 1:07. I must have been asleep by then. The next text came two minutes later.

U there?

I swallowed, my throat so tight it hurt. Chase
had
texted me.

The third came ten minutes after the first.

Need 2 talk 2 u.

Now my palms started to throb.

WANT 2 talk 2 u.

They were just cold words on my phone, but I would have sworn he’d reached out and touched me.

COME ON, BABY. T2M

Baby. He’d called me that the evening before, in the courtyard when he’d held me and promised me everything would be okay. Just the memory brought a rush of warmth.

T2M. Talk to me.

If only I knew what to say, how to explain everything he’d seen go down.

WHAT’S GOIN ON?

My hands shook. It took three times to pull up the last message, sent at 4:42.

I WAS THERE. I KNOW WHAT HAPPENED. U DON’T HAVE TO HIDE.

That one I stared at a long time. Maybe the words were supposed to be reassuring, but the quick stab of cold made them feel ominous.

I dropped the BlackBerry, shoved it to the edge of my bed. Then I opened the browser and did a quick search on amulets.

What I read both fascinated and chilled me. The pictures were beautiful, the explanations intricate. I’d heard about rabbits’ feet, but I’d thought that was a bunch of superstitious baloney. But according to the author, amulets dated back to the beginning of time and crossed all religious and ethnic lines. Some called them magic. Others called them divine.

The result was the same, a connection with a higher being, manifested through a stone or crystal or metal.

I didn’t realize how tightly I was clenching the medallion until my palm started bleeding again.

Some kind of protection, I thought, hurrying to the bathroom. With a fresh wad of gauze, I was almost back to my bed when I heard the beep of an incoming message.

I didn’t want to look. For a long time, I didn’t. At least four minutes
seemed
like a long time. I told myself it was probably Aunt Sara checking on me.

But I knew that wasn’t true.

On a deep breath, I reached for the phone—and saw four messages had arrived while I was cleaning up my palm.

One from Victoria … three from Chase.

SIXTEEN

I told myself to read Victoria’s first. But of course, I didn’t.