Читать книгу Fade To Midnight - Shannon McKenna - Страница 12

Edie rubbed her eyes, looked again. Still there. Still him. He was extravagantly tall, broad, built. His face was thin, his cheeks carved deep under jutting cheekbones. The spiky hair, the flat, grim mouth. The scars. The invisible mantle of controlled power humming around him, brushing against her body like a million tiny tickling fingers, though he was a yard away, across the table.

His eyes wiped her mind blank. That piercing green that laid bare everything it looked upon. She knew that face, though she’d only seen it once. She couldn’t mistake those eyes. Those scars. She’d seen the wounds that caused them. She wished that she had not.

She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t blink. Their eyes were locked. His eyes glowed with some intense emotion. There was an angry crimson spot in one of them. It made the green seem even more intense.

The person behind him in line began to clear her throat. Fade stepped forward and laid down his books. He held out his hand.

She took it, and dragged in a breath at the shivery feeling. It flashed across her skin, like wind rippling grass, rustling leaves. The ringing and dinging of a hundred tiny bells and chimes inside her.

She stared at her hand, swallowed up inside of his. Her publicist approached, coughing discreetly. “Edie? They need to wrap this up.”

Edit tried to reply, but a dry squeak came out of her throat. The guy gazed down, unmoving. A monument, a mountain. So silent, and intense. So beautiful. Like glacial lakes, like thundering waves, piled up banks of clouds. Wild animals. The uncontrollable power of nature.

She cleared her throat. “I sign with my right,” she told him, her voice thin. “You have to let go, if you want me to, um, sign your books.”

He let go. She took her hand back, peeking at it as if expecting it to be somehow changed by that momentous contact, but it was just her usual thin, inkstained paw. She opened his first book, struggling to remember what she was supposed to do. Um. Yes. Signing books. She paused, pen poised over the paper. “Your name?”

Something flashed in his eyes. “You don’t know it?”

She stared up at him. How could she? Was she supposed to know it? She shook her head, mutely.

“My name is Kev,” he said quietly. “Kev Larsen.”

She scrawled something unintelligible to Kev on all four books, and pushed them back. He took them, moved aside politely for the next person, but didn’t go away. Oh, God. He was waiting for her. Oh, God.

Excitement bubbled inside her. She was so aware of his presence, looming by the table while she chatted with the last few die-hard fans.

Julie, her publicist, came marching over, and gave the guy a cold look. “Can I help you with anything?” she asked him.

The man ignored Julie. “I was wondering if you would have a cup of coffee with me,” he asked Edie. His low, quiet voice was wonderfully resonant. Full of sparkling harmonics that made her body tingle.

Edie hesitated, and Julie chimed in. “Have you two met?”

“Yes,” he said. The certainty in his voice brooked no argument.

Julie gave her a sharp look. “Is this true? Do you know this guy?”

Know him? As if she could be said to know him. But she couldn’t explain anything so improbable to the practical, nuts-and-bolts Julie. She hadn’t even grasped it herself, yet.

She nodded, jerkily. Yeah. She, uh, knew him. Close enough.

“Well, then. I gotta run. Tell me what’s going on later, OK?” She shot the man a suspicious look. “You sure you’ll be OK?”

OK? Such a bland state of existence, to describe standing five feet from her ultimate fantasy, Fade Shadowseeker, inexplicably made flesh and inviting her out to coffee. She managed to nod.

After Julie’s heels clicked purposefully into the distance, Edie shrugged on her coat, grabbed her art bag, and risked another peek.

Sure enough, he got her again. She went blank, wordless, staring stupidly up into those eyes. Frozen by his outsized charisma.

He offered her his arm. The little smile and the courtly gesture broke the spell, thank God. She took it, and they were walking together.

He pulled sunglasses out and put them on. They passed the bookstore coffee shop, but people whose books she’d just signed were there. She shook her head at his questioning glance. “Somewhere else.”

They walked out and strolled silently down the block together until they found another coffee shop, this one almost deserted. He held open the door for her, bought them both a cup of coffee at the counter, waited while she doctored hers with various sugary and creamy contaminants, and followed her to a table in the far corner.

He took off his sunglasses, rubbing his eyes. “Sorry about wearing these indoors,” he said. “I know it looks affected, but I had a head injury recently, and the daylight’s too bright for my eyes.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. Please, put them on if you need them,” she urged.

“No, it’s OK in here. Not too bright. I’ve been waiting a long time. I want to see your real colors,” was his cryptic reply. She gave him a puzzled look, and he clarified. “I don’t want to look at you tinted green.”

“OK.” Her gaze flicked away. It had been more manageable when he wore the glasses. It was like looking at the sun. His gorgeousness was burning a hole in her retinas. Those eyes. So shockingly bright.

“So,” she began, trying to sound brisk. “What’s this all about?”

“I was hoping you could tell me,” he said.

That left her feeling uncomfortably on the spot. “Tell you what?”

He pulled the Fade Shadowseeker books she had signed for him out of the bookstore shopping bag, and spread them out on the table so all four covers showed. “You seem to know all about me.”

Unease deepened. She stared at him. “Those books are fiction,” she said. “Completely and absolutely creations of my imagination.”

“Yeah?” He opened the third book, Midnight’s Oracle, and flipped partway through. “See this? Where Fade goes over the waterfall?”

She leaned, looked. “Sure. I drew it. What of it?”

“That happened to me, four months ago,” he said.

She blinked helplessly, starting and abandoning a dozen different responses to that preposterous statement. Finally, she flipped the book open to the copyright page, and pointed. “Repeat after me,” she said. “All resemblance to real persons or events is purely coincidental.”

“It’s true,” he said quietly. “A matter of public record. It happened on June 24th. Read about it in the online archives of the Oregonian.”

She wonderered where this game was leading. Maybe into a trap she should be smarter in avoiding. “I wrote that book before that date,” she informed him. “A year before. You could have read my book first.”

His lip twitched. “You think I staged it? You ever look out over the top of Twin Tails Falls? I broke my arm, my thigh. I wouldn’t have done that voluntarily. For any sum of money.”

“Oh, and I imagine you saved a teenage girl from drowning right before you fell, right?” she challenged.

He shrugged. “Actually, it was a teenage boy, in my case. I jumped in to help him out. Ask the kid if he pulled that stunt to live out the story in your graphic novel. Might be good for a laugh.”

She shook her head. “Coincidence,” she repeated.

“I would buy one coincidence, or two, or eight, or fifteen,” he said. “But not hundreds of them.”

Suspicion grew inside her, and with it, disappointment so intense, it made her throat burn. “I see where this is going,” she said. “For the record, I’ll tell you right now that I know absolutely nothing about your stupid little life, nor do I want to. Everything I have written or drawn is my own pure, spontaneous invention. So if you plan on suing me—”

“Edie, no.”

“That’s Ms. Parrish to you, mister, and if you want to sue for plagiarism, or whatever it is you’re contemplating, go ahead and try. It happens a lot. It’s one of the shittier things about being the daughter of an extremely wealthy man, and you’d be surprised how many shitty things there are about that. After the third time, my dad bought me insurance. I’ll give you the numbers of our team of lawyers, if you’d like to save yourself some time.” She got to her feet. “As for me, I don’t have time for this insulting bullshit. I don’t appreciate being accused of—”

“Stop!” He grabbed her wrist, and tugged. “I’m not suing you! I would never attack you! That’s the last thing in the world I would ever do. Please. Sit. Please, Edie.”

His voice had a subtle commanding quality that unknit her tension. Her knees gave way, dumping her onto the chair. She yanked her hand away and put both hands in her lap, twisting her fingers til they were bloodless. “So, if that’s not it, what do you want from me?”

“I want to tell you a story,” he said quietly.

She waited for more, baffled. “A story that you want me to tell in one of my novels? I don’t use other people’s ideas. I don’t need to, because I’ve got plenty of ideas of my own, and besides—”

“No. I’m talking about my own personal story. Because I think, in some way or another, you already know it.”

“You don’t get it,” she said, helplessly. “I know nothing about you! I didn’t even know your name until you told me! Why are you being so cryptic? Tell me what you want! Stop hinting! Stop playing mind games!”

“I would if I could. But I’m at a disadvantage, because I don’t know exactly what I’m asking you for.”

She wondered uneasily if the guy had mental problems. Gorgeous and charismatic though he might be, he was making no flipping sense at all. “Excuse me?”

He let out a controlled breath, eyes fixed on his untouched coffee.

“I was found, eighteen years ago,” he said quietly. “I’d been beaten, tortured. I had some inexplicable brain injury. I wasn’t capable of speaking, or even writing, for years. I pushed a broom in a diner, mopped floors, washed dishes. I have no memory of who I was before.”

She stared at him, speechless and openmouthed. It was her backstory setup for Book One of the Fade Shadowseeker series.

Not possible, that this man’s life had followed the same…oh, please. No way. He had to be lying. Had to. Her mind reeled, fought it.

“But I do have dreams,” he went on. “Vivid dreams. I’ve always thought that maybe these dreams were of the life I had before. And one of those dreams is of you, Edie.” He reached out, and gently touched the back of her hand. The glancing contact made her shiver.

“Have you seen me before?” he asked. “I think you have. I saw it in your eyes, the moment you saw me. I see it from your books.”

She nodded, like a puppet. She couldn’t lie to him, nor could she think of any coherent reason for doing so. “A long time ago.”

His fingers fastened around her hand. “Tell me.”

So she told him what she had to tell; the incident on her eleventh birthday. The bleeding burned man, pleading with Daddy in his Flaxon office eighteen years ago. The security guards that came running. The guard the burned man had thrown through the window. Watching him be dragged away, to an unknown fate.

That was all. It seemed so little, in the face of his hunger for knowledge, but he didn’t look disappointed. His eyes were alight with cautious excitement. “Flaxon,” he said. “Interesting.”

“I had no idea what you were talking about, but it sounded terrible,” she finished. “Murder, torture. I had nightmares for years.”

“Not my name?” he asked. “You never heard it?”

She shook her head. “I was eleven,” she said. “I never heard it said, if anyone knew it. My parents refused to talk about you. I got punished for mentioning you.” She paused. “My father might know more,” she said. “But I doubt he’d be willing to talk to you about it.”

Hah. That was a flipping understatement, if she’d ever made one.

“Christopher Osterman did this to me,” he said, touching the scars on his face. “There were others, but he was the driving force.”

That, at least, was no surprise. “Dr. O.” The name left a bitter taste in her mouth.

“You knew him?”

She nodded. “I did the Haven program, when I was fourteen.”

“You don’t look surprised to find out he was a psychopath.”

“I’m not,” she said. “I knew he was rotten. I told my father, but Dad didn’t believe me. He thought I was just trying to wiggle out of any efforts to improve myself. Being weak and whiny and defeatist.”

“So he made you do the Haven program? Why? What for?”

“I was depressed, doing badly in school,” she explained. “Dad wanted to fix me. Soup me up. Dr. O talked a good line, but I don’t think Daddy realized exactly what the brain potential workshop entailed. Dr. O stimulated our brains with electricity and drugs, to enhance our mental function. So he said. It was…well, it was weird.”

Kev’s mouth hardened. “Did it work?”

She shivered. “I guess that depends on what you mean by working,” she hedged. “You might get in touch with the liaison from Helix to Osterman’s research facility, see if they have documentation on the Flaxon era. They might be able to tell you something.”

“Hmmm.” He looked into his coffee cup.

“I don’t understand why you came to me,” she told him. “I know so little. I can’t help you. With anything.”

“On the contrary. You’re the only one who ever has helped me.”

She gazed at him, blank and bewildered. “How could I?” she demanded, almost angrily. “I did nothing. It was awful to watch that. I felt so helpless.”

“You did help,” he insisted. “In my dreams.”

“Ah! Your dreams!” She laughed, nervously. “It’s funny, to get credit for how I behaved in another person’s dreams. I don’t even know what I did in them, so how can I—”

“You were my angel. When I needed help, you helped me.”

She shut her mouth, swallowed. “Um. How?”

“By existing,” he said simply.

She grunted. “That’s enough? Just to exist? I didn’t do anything?”

“You didn’t have to do anything. You just were. A beacon in the dark. The only one I had. It saved my sanity, maybe my life. So, thank you.”

“Don’t thank me,” she said. “I can’t take credit for that. In my world, you don’t get points for what you are. Only what you do.”

He shook his head. “Your world is about to change.”

Wow. That was bold. The quiet conviction in his voice made her catch her breath. Her toes and fingers were tingling with it.

Toughen up, Edie. “All this woo woo stuff is really spooky and interesting, and great material for a graphic novel, but it’s the creation of your own overheated brain,” she said crisply. “Just like my own stories are the creation of my own overheated brain. I don’t want to be mean, but your dreams have nothing to do with me. So get real, and take credit for being your own damn beacon.”

He shook his head. “I might have agreed with you before I read the Shadowseeker books. But I think you’ve been close to me all along.”

She was shredding the edge of her paper coffee cup into a fringe. An unconscious thing she did whenever she didn’t have a pencil in her hand. Another of Edie’s little closet full of compulsions, as her mother had called them. She tried to stop, then gave into it, and started tearing again. Why not? What the hell? She had nothing to prove to him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, watching her precisely tearing uniform strips in the cup’s edge. “I didn’t mean to make you nervous.”

She kept her mouth shut and her eyes on her cup fringe. The silence grew impossibly long, but she resisted the impulse to pump chatty filler into it. After several quiet minutes, he spoke again.

“What happened, in the bookstore? The girl ahead of me in line?”

The awful memory made her gut clench. “Oh, that,” she mumbled. “Just my evil genie, poking out its head.”

He waited for more, but she no longer freely confessed what happened when she sketched people. It never went over well. Her parents had gone bananas. Her therapist tried to put her on antipsychotic meds. The one time she’d confessed it to a boyfriend, he’d dropped her flat and never called again. Other friends and lovers had found out, too, when one of her fits came over her. They always had the same reaction, in the end. So she didn’t go there, anymore. Not ever.

“Tell me,” he prompted, gently.

She opened her mouth, let it fall out. Secrecy seemed irrelevant with this guy. After all, he was already inside her head. He lived there.

“It happens when I sketch,” she said. “I sometimes, ah…I pick up things. From their heads. I, um, tune into their frequency, I guess.”

He didn’t look alarmed, or even surprised. “What did you see?”

“I saw her boyfriend strangling her to death,” Edie said.

His eyelids contracted, a quick flinch. “Ouch. Jesus,” he said. “How reliable are these perceptions?”

“I can’t verify all of them,” she said. “Of those I can verify, one hundred percent. I’ve had no luck in changing outcomes, but not for lack of trying. I saw my mother’s heart attack, but I couldn’t persuade her to go to the doctor. I sketched my father a few weeks ago in a restaurant, and I…ah, never mind. So what do you want? An introduction to my father? I’m not really the one to ask, with the low opinion he has of me.”

“No.” He patted her hand. “I don’t want to make difficulties for you. I can get in touch with your father and Helix with no introduction.”

“So what do you want, then?” She felt lost.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just keep existing.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Oh, come on. Give me a freaking break.”

A shadow of a smile flashed over his face. “I don’t know. You could walk with me.” His voice sounded almost shy. “Just keep me company. Talk to me for a while. I like the way it feels. To be with you.”

Did he? Wow. He knew all her deepest, darkest secrets, and he wasn’t afraid of broadcasting something compromising to her? Was his heart so pure? Was he so fearless, so free of shame? Maybe he just didn’t believe her. Maybe he thought she was nuts. That was a classic.

She was flushed, charmed. Was he coming on? She didn’t have a lot of experience with come-ons. She wouldn’t recognize one if it bit her in the butt. He fell into place beside her on the sidewalk, and they walked in silence. So much for keeping him company. She didn’t have a thing to say. She was flustered, bashful.

She reflected on what he’d told her. He was a man who had made his peace with silence and solitude, and it had changed him, made him different from other men. She felt it. With him, silence could be as eloquent as speech. Each silence had its own tone and flavor, its own subtle tints and nuances. Each silence said something specific. And she understood each one. Or thought she did. Maybe she was projecting, or deluded. But she couldn’t resist that leap of silent understanding. Raw emotion in the center of her chest. Emotion she could barely control.

Play it cool. This man is a stranger, babbled the shrill voice of reason. She knew nothing about him, except that he was more or less brain damaged, full of weird notions, and intensely interested in her.

She should not be having these trembly, hot, gooey, hopeful feelings. It was fatuous. Dangerous. Stupid, too. She was going to get taken for a ride, made to feel like an idiot at best, and worst, who knew?

So run, the voice of reason bleated. Say hey, it’s been real. Flag a cab. Sprint. Parrish bodyguards were hovering nearby. They would pick her up, give her a ride home. Lecture her, too. Tell her dad.

He took her hand.

She dragged in air, as energy flashed through her. Every cell in her body got a sharp, wonderful little jolt of it. She tried to breathe.

Her hand liked his hand. Oh, so much. It was big, smooth. Callused skin, like polished wood. Warm and strong. She was too shy to meet his eyes. Her thoughts scrambled helplessly, here and there.

She couldn’t bear to pull her hand away. Tingling rightness flowed from him, right up her arm. It uncoiled slowly through her, swirling, pooling in the classic places. Tightening her nipples. Making her thighs clench, her clit tingle and throb. Just from holding hands.

They walked, silently, hands linked, eyes down. Barely noticing where they went. Over the Steel Bridge, traffic roaring around them, but it didn’t matter. They were struck mute. Neither was willing to break the surface tension of that huge, gentle shyness. It was a rainbow-tinted bubble. Improbable and lovely. She would just let it float along, shining bright, and enjoy it while she could. It would meet its end soon enough.

Bubbles always did. It was a natural law.

She didn’t realize where she was walking until she was standing in front of her own more or less grotty building on NE Helmut Street.

She hadn’t meant to bring him home.

Oh, hell. Get real. Maybe she had.