Shattered Dreams: A Midnight Dragonfly Novel (35 page)

LaSalle tracked my every move. “Why not?”

“Aaron.”
Aunt Sara was at his side again, taking his arm as if to hold him back. Of course, that still left Detective Jackson—and the relentless parade of warped images:
Jessica rocking. Jessica bleeding.

Jessica … fading.

“Jessica—” I started, but Jackson finished for me.

“—doesn’t need you.”

My mind raced. My options were limited. “Let me go in—” The door was only a few feet away. “Let
me
look.”

“Why? Because you know right where to look—or so you can slip away again?”

The web of dampness pushed closer. Vaguely I was aware of Fourcade moving toward the detective. “Give her a chance—”

I didn’t wait for a verdict. I spun around—and ran for the door. Darkness swallowed me the second I crossed inside, thick and stale, penetrating. Maybe it would have been smart to pause and orient myself. Let my eyes adjust. But I heard the shouting behind me, and knew there was no time.

“Jessica!” I called as a glass bottle rolled from beneath my foot, and my ankle twisted. I staggered, flung out an arm to brace myself, trying not to think about the sticky substance beneath my fingers.

“Answer me!” I cried. “It’s okay! You’re safe!”

Too late it occurred to me that I may not be alone.

I went very still, frozen in the vat of darkness, praying that what I couldn’t see, couldn’t see me, either. I didn’t know what had possessed me to do something so reckless, but hoped that if anyone else had been inside the rotting building, the cops had scared them—

I felt it before I saw it, a low hum, like that of a generator.

I didn’t want to turn. I didn’t want to see. But I knew I couldn’t stand there like some terrified animal—

Slowly I lifted my hand to the bronze chain around my neck and turned … felt everything inside of me go into instant and total lockdown.

Fuzzy at the edges, sharper in the center, a glimmer of light broke the nothingness, as if someone had dropped a flashlight, leaving the beam to—

He stood beside a stack of old crates, tall, motionless, his eyes more chilling than the nothingness.
Pitre.

TWENTY-NINE

Everything drained. My breath, my blood, everything I’d been trying to believe about what was and was not possible.
“No.”

I tried to back away—knew I
had
to back away. Get away. Get out.
Run.
But shock gripped me, trapping me in that one horrible moment.
Pitre
.

My friend.

“No,” I murmured again. That was all. All I could think. All I could say. No. Not Pitre.

Even as the pieces slid together.

“Trinity.” And just like the weekend before, he lunged for me. Except this time he was not here to rescue.

This time he was in pursuit.

Shock splintered into adrenaline, and I twisted with a strength born of purpose, and ran. It was like sprinting through a nightmare, stumbling, clawing, trying to make sense as everything shifted, fractured, as foe became friend, and friend became foe. Knowing you had to get out …

“Trinity—shit!”

But slamming into one dead-end after another. Disoriented, I veered right. I’d been so wrong, blind. I’d refused to let myself see, even though I
had
seen. And heard. The ugly truth had been there in the darkness of my mind: the old house, Jessica and Pitre. Arguing.

“Wait! Come back! You can’t leave me here!”

“Watch me.”

“No—wait— Why are you doing this?”

“Doesn’t feel so good when the tables turn, does it, Jessie?”

The door had to be close. I hadn’t been inside that long. All I had to do was—

I never saw the crate. I slammed into it, staggered, made myself keep going, knew I couldn’t go down. The door. The cops—

He caught me from behind, tackling me at full speed. We flew forward and went down hard, my hands and knees no match for the weight of his body.

The sharp rush of pain stunned me. “No!” I panted, trying to crawl from beneath him—but he was bigger, stronger, dragging me back like I was no more than the emaciated cat I’d seen outside. “Don’t,” I cried. “Pitre … please …
don’t hurt me!
”

“Jesus,” he muttered, his hot, sweaty body smothering me against the sticky concrete. His voice was no more than a breath, but it was desperate. “Stop fighting me.”

I twisted, tried to push up on my elbows. Couldn’t. He was too big, too strong. “Oh, my God,” I whispered, tasting blood in my mouth. I swallowed, tried again. “Please don’t—”

He crammed a hand between my face and the ground, pressing his sweaty palm to my mouth. “Sh-h-h!”

I stilled, all those awful, disparate pieces grinding together.
I’d trusted him.
Even when I’d see him in the shadows of my mind, I’d trusted him. Believed him. I’d allowed myself to see only the best.

Now the enormity of my mistake threatened everything. If he so much as suspected how much I knew …

“Fuck,” he muttered, more to himself than to me.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Wincing, I tried to breathe, shifted the weight from my stomach to my hip and lifted a hand to tug at his wrist.
“Please,”
I mouthed.

He closed in on me, scraping his face along mine. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he muttered, and it was all I could do not to gag on his hot, stale-beer breath. “Just be still and let me think.”

Swirls of blue slipped closer. I fought them, fought the press of his body crushing the breath from mine. “Can’t … breathe…”

I felt him stiffen, felt his heart slamming a frantic riff against my back. Then the heaviness of his body miraculously lessened, and his hand relaxed.

Sucking in all the oxygen I could, I dragged it deep and let it swirl around inside. All the while I strained against the darkness, listening. LaSalle, Jackson … Fourcade. Chase.

They should have been right behind me.

“I-I didn’t mean to hurt…” he said, the words oddly broken. “I swear to God I didn’t mean to hurt … her.”

Her. Not me.

I didn’t want a confession, was already a liability enough. “W-what are you doing here?” I asked instead, my eyes fixing on a flashlight on the ground a few feet away. It must have been his. “Did … Chase call you?”

“Jessica,”
he panted. “My brother … heard she might be here.”

His brother the cop. But I still didn’t understand why he was
here
. If he’d taken Jessica, wouldn’t he know where she was? And if he’d left her here, wouldn’t he want to be as far away as possible when she was found?

“But she’s not, is she?” I whispered, staring at the flashlight. If I could reach it …

“Fuck,”
he muttered. “Where the fuck is she?”

I swallowed, tried to scrape the fear from my voice. “Pitre …
what’s going on
?”

And why did he sound so terrified?

“Just a game,” he half-said, half-breathed, much as Jessica had the week before. From the way he straddled me, I could feel the jerky breaths saw in and out of his body. “An eff’in game.”

Stall, was all I could think. Drag the moment out as long as I could.

“
Ah, Jesus.
I never meant to hurt her. I just wanted … to show her what it felt like to be out of control, to be messed with—”

I moaned, shifting to curl into myself.

He stiffened, easing up so that I could roll into a fetal position. “She was supposed to be there!” he went on almost incoherently. “You believe me, don’t you? I was only gone an hour—she was supposed to be there when I got back…”

I rolled onto all fours and scrambled back.

Pitre made no move to come after me. I’m not even sure he remembered I was there. “But she was gone,” he mumbled, and I could tell that he, too, had gone somewhere else. “I-I thought she got out, that she was just laying low, to make me sweat—”

“Trinity!”

He froze. I froze.

“Trinity—
where are you
?”

Something soft and fragile swelled through me. I felt myself rise to it, felt the words rise
through
me. All I had to do was call out and—

I swung back toward Pitre, saw the vague stillness of his body crouched a few feet away. If I screamed—

“Tri—ni—ty!”

With a sharp twist of my ankle, I scrambled to my feet and staggered into the darkness. “Chase!” Before I could say anything else he was dragging me into his arms and holding on, tangling his hand in my hair.

“Chase.” I closed my eyes to the silence, listening for breath from somewhere beyond. All I had to do was tell him … “I was so scared.”

“I’ve got you,” he said, pulling back enough to smooth a damp strand of hair from my face. “Everything’s okay.”

“But…” I followed the faint beam of the abandoned flashlight to where Pitre no longer stood. “Jackson and LaSalle—”

“Waiting outside,” Chase said. “They gave me five minutes to bring you back…”

I struggled back enough to put my hands to his chest.
“No.”

“T, there’s nowhere else to go,” he said, his frown so sad and tender that something inside of me bled. “I’ll go with you,” he said. “I’ll call my mom. She’ll come. Everything will be okay.”

But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go back outside, to the station. “I have to help her,” I whispered. “I’m the only one.”

Through the glow of his flashlight, I saw his eyes darken. “T,” he said, and his voice wrapped around my heart, and squeezed. “She’s not here.”

“I know.” Had known since the fragile moments before LaSalle and Jackson had materialized from inside the wharf, when the realization had drifted through my mind.

She’s not here.

But Pitre was …

My body burned. I could feel the perspiration gathering, dampening the big T-shirt hanging from my shoulders. I closed my eyes against it all, wished I could have another cup of my mother’s tea.

And then I started to rock.

“She’s hurt,” I whispered, making myself go back to that sad old house, where she and Pitre had played along the edge of a blade.

Wanted … to show her what it felt like to be out of control …

“She’s…” I let my mind wander, could still see the room in which she sat. “Wearing a gown,” I whispered. “And there’s…” Blood? Smeared against her face.

“A horn,” I said as the images took over. “Maybe a siren. There’s a hall. It’s long and narrow.” I made myself stay there, in that dark, rancid corridor, turning, taking it all in. “Double doors at one end, some kind of big desk or station at the other.” Drawn, I looked up. “There’s light,” I said, much as I had to Fourcade a few hours before. But standing in the penetrating darkness of the wharf, I found detail I had not seen before—or maybe the tequila had finally worn off, allowing my thoughts to sharpen.

“Broken. Shining through and against some kind of…” I didn’t know. I’d never seen anything like it. It looked like art—or a window. “There’s a man in the center, like … a tree trunk.” He had his arms lifted. “There’s other men around him … like branches. I—”

“Holy shit.”

I opened my eyes, saw the bleed of shock in Chase’s eyes.

“We’re at the wrong place,” he muttered. “She’s at the eff’in hospital.”

I blinked, didn’t understand. “No,” I said, shaking my head. “She’s alone … by herself.”

“Big Charity,” he said, and now his eyes glittered. “It’s been closed since Katrina.”

I rocked back, felt the surge move through me. “Then we have to go!”

He reached for my hand and tugged me toward the door. “It’s not that far—”

“Not that way,” I said, pulling back.
“They’ll take me.”

The glow of his flashlight made the blue of his eyes look black. “It’s the only way.”

But I couldn’t do it, despite the gentleness in his voice. “They won’t listen to me—you heard them!
Please,
” I said. “We’ll find another way out of here.” There had to be one. The place was falling down around us.

Chase frowned, but he was no longer urging me toward the door. I could see his mind working. “I don’t have a car—”

With a set of keys dangling from his left hand, Dylan stepped from the shadows. “But I do.”

*   *   *

We ran. We had a head start, but knew it was only a matter of time before Jackson and LaSalle caught up with us. The second Chase’s five minutes expired, the cops had started shouting, running with their flashlights and their guns into the wharf. That’s when we darted from the other side to make our getaway in Jim Fourcade’s car.

I’m pretty sure he knew.

Just as I was pretty sure he had our backs.

It was okay. LaSalle and Jackson could follow. They could find us. It’s what I wanted, actually, to draw them to the abandoned hospital. Because once they were there, they’d have to go inside. And once they got inside, they would find her.

We left the car in plain sight beneath a streetlight across from the facility that once served the city’s underprivileged. The art deco building dominated an entire city block, big and dark and surrounded by a chain-link fence. It was hard to imagine a facility so massive could simply be abandoned.

But that was the way of it in New Orleans, where despite rebuilding, much of the city lay in ruins. Some structures had been torn down. Others simply sat and waited, frozen in a time-warp as if someday something magical would happen and the life from before would just … resume.

The decay told the truth. Life was not frozen. It had simply moved on.

“This way,” Dylan said, tromping through a puddle beside a sign that warned of K9 patrols inside the building. Beyond the fence, a crumbling walkway led to the main entrance.

Heart pounding, I hurried toward him.

“Omigod,” I whispered, staring at the display over the entrance. Below the words
CHARITY HOSPITAL
, the image of a man dominated the center of a large, decorative screen, much as I’d seen in the darkness of my mind.

“You sure about this?” Chase asked.