Nightfall (13 page)

“Too bad you're a grown-up.”

Jenna lifted her glass, her lips twisting. “To being a grown-up.”

Half an hour later, everything looked rosier. She and Ange had downed the cognac much faster than it was meant to be drunk. Jenna had a serious buzz to prove it. Everyone else she'd ever known might be dead, but that thought didn't depress her as it would have at the start of the day. Ange was her new best friend.

She proved it by listening to the woman talk about Pygmy elephants.

“I mean, there were less than a thousand of them left. You know, before.” Ange shook her head. “What's going to happen to them?”

“I have no idea.” Jenna's brow wrinkled. “Where the hell is Borneo anyway?”

“How much of this did we have?” Ange asked, her words slurred.

“Um.” Jenna peered at the bottle. “Half.”

“Crap. We should stop.” But she took another sip, still wrinkling her nose as if it was the first. “I wanted to study them, did ya know that? I was going to be Dian Fossey of the elephants. Never got there. Life stinks.”

Jenna's laugh felt like a bubble in her throat. “You wanted to be the Elephant Woman?”

Ange shook her head. “I'd imagined myself in the woods, all natural and organic. You know, I'd befriend native tribes and crouch in bushes to watch animals in their natural habitat. Keep a journal. Document everything. Maybe I'd write an article for
National Geographic
to show off my scholastic prowess.”

The soft light in their shared quarters tempted Jenna to close her eyes. Everything softened in a peaceful haze. “Can women have prowess?”

“I think so,” Ange said with a giggle. “Why let the guys have it all?”

“So why didn't you?”

“I did a few semesters at University of Oregon, but my folks made too much for financial aid. Loans only did so much, so I kept having to take years off to work. Every time I quit, it got harder to go back. The kids in my classes seemed to get younger every year, but it was just me getting older. I got to feeling like there was no point, that I'd be forty before I ever graduated.”

“The booze is making you maudlin,” Jenna said, although she felt it too.

“I'm due a bit of maudlin.”

“And somewhere along the way you got knocked up?”

Ange sighed. She rubbed the back of her head where red hair was knotted in a sloppy ponytail. “Yeah. My ex was a real piece of work.”

“You married him?”

“Nah, ex-boyfriend. I'm grateful he doesn't—didn't—know about Penny. He'd have found some way to hurt her, even if it just meant taking her from me.” She pushed out a heavy exhale. “What a great life, right?”

“Better than some,” Jenna said. “I had a friend who got a great job out of college. Melissa was gorgeous. After a whirlwind courtship and a fairy-tale wedding, she had her dream man. They bought a little storybook cottage and took long vacations in the Bahamas. Then she died of pancreatic cancer.”

“No shit.” Ange shook her head. “Was there a moral to this story?”

“Even if life
doesn't
suck, you still die?”

“Damn.” Ange laughed so hard she snorted. “Is it wrong that I'm having fun with you? I feel like I should be all guilt stricken because I'm not dour enough.”

“Mason would probably say so,” Jenna muttered. “But his rules shouldn't apply to normal people.”

“What's your deal with him anyway? You treat him like a hated ex-husband.”

“It's not like that,” she said. “Or maybe it is, except without the good times and sex before it all went bad.”

“Harsh,” Ange said.

Jenna sat up too quickly, as if she could escape from how uncomfortable she became when talking about Mason. “I know it's not fair, but I can't help blaming him that I'm in this situation. I'd be dead by now—I know that—if he hadn't come for me. But sometimes I wonder if that would've been better.”

The other woman's eyes were weary beyond bearing. “Would've been easier anyway. I'd never say so in front of Penny, but ... I'm glad my parents are gone. I can't imagine my mother living through this.”

Jenna remembered her fragile mother and shook her head. “Mine either.”

“What was she like?”

It had to be the booze. Ordinarily, she wouldn't waste time talking about the past, but Jenna's eyes filled with tears. “Small. Delicate. People said I have her eyes. I always thought she looked breakable, and it was worse after my dad left.”

“They didn't get along?”

“He thought he could save the world,” she said quietly. “Somehow he saw all this coming, wanted to convert everyone before it was too late. In some ways, I wish he'd devoted himself wholly to doomsday and not bothered with us at all. Then I wouldn't have needed to pick up the pieces after he walked away.”

And Christ, that had been hard. Her mother had never been a strong, independent person. When Mitch had stuck around, she looked to him for support. Once he'd left for good, nine-year-old Jenna stepped up. She recalled her mother crying in the night because she was so lonely, longing for the man who preferred living in the woods to spending his life with the woman who loved him.

His death had actually seemed a kindness. He wasn't ever coming back. That had firmed her mother's resolve. She'd stopped moping and had given Jenna a few good years. But cancer had worn away that happiness. Her spirit consumed, Clea Barclay had wasted away until she was little more than skin and bones and melancholy eyes. At age seventeen, Jenna had sat beside her mom's hospital bed. No dances or dates. Instead she had watched her mother—out of her head on pain meds and crying for Mitch—as she died.

Jenna hadn't been enough for either of them.

She would
never
wind up like her mother. Not ever. A man like Mason wouldn't be satisfied until he'd suborned her will. Mitch had been much the same when he was home. Too used to being in charge—the head prophet and font of all wisdom for the other crazy people—he failed to see when anyone else had thoughts or feelings or dreams.

Once she'd graduated from high school, Jenna hadn't wanted to think about college. So much of her energies had been depleted with her mother's illness that she needed time to recover. Like with Ange, the years had passed and she had grown accustomed to her routine: a five-day workweek and weekends with her friends. But she'd always held back, fearing what would happen if she ever let herself get too close—let alone fall in love.

Deep down lurked that old refrain.
You don't want to end up like Mom.

“So both your parents are gone too?”

“Yep,” Jenna said. “We're both orphans.”

They shared a smile over the absurdity of that statement. Then Ange stretched and sighed. “Are you tired? Maybe I'm just old.”

“You're not.”

“Forty-four feels it.”

“Quit with the pity party. I was gonna fix something to eat,” Jenna mumbled. “But maybe ... just breakfast instead. Tomorrow.”

Ange toppled sideways and curled on her bunk. They shared nonsense talk that got them giggling like kids at a slumber party. The half-emptied bottle of cognac sat on the floor between them. Slowly, Jenna's eyes drifted shut and she let the velvet dark blanket everything.

For a brief, blissful time, she knew nothing. Not even dreams.

A scream split the tranquility. Pure terror, accompanied by a crash and a thud. Voices blended into panic soup. Jenna couldn't make out individual words. She sat up too quickly and whacked her elbow on the wall.

“Shit! What now?”

Mason stood with his nine-millimeter cocked and aimed. That scream still bounced like a pinball around his sleep-fogged head. “Damn it, what the hell is going on?”

“You tell me,” Tru said, sprawled on the floor next to his bunk. He swiveled his eyes between the gun Mason held and where it was pointed—at Penny's eggshell white face. “But might I suggest that you stay away from children?”

“Save it.”

Mason yanked Penny away from the door and checked the hallway. All clear. He punched a button on the intercom just inside the dorm entryway and buzzed the lab.

“Yeah, what's up?” Welsh sounded wired. Didn't he ever sleep?

“Any break in the perimeter?”

“Um, what?”

“Any monsters get in here?”

The doc laughed, sort of scattered and disbelieving. “You think I'd be answering you with words if they had? More like gurgles or screams or—”

“Straight answers, Harvard,” Tru called.

“No, nothing. It's been quiet. What's going on?”

Rather than reply, Mason slid the nine-millimeter onto a high shelf. His head feeling like a nest of hornets, he scrubbed his face with shaky hands, as unpredictable and edgy as he'd ever been.

“What is she doing in our room?”

Tru laughed, his ragged black hair sticking up in odd places. “Just take your head meds and talk to her. Like you did at the cabin, remember ?”

Although he didn't feel the least bit capable of comforting a little girl, Mason took a deep breath. At least she wasn't crying. Despite having a handgun leveled between her wide blue eyes, she didn't regard him with any more fear than she did the rest of the blood-crazy world.

He held out his hand.

Barefoot, her back against Mason's bunk, Penny never took her eyes off his. No blinking. No tears. Not even a quiver across her lower lip. His back burned and itched, a million fire ants crawling under his skin, and her otherworldly stare didn't ease his gnawing discomfort.

“Hey,” he said, ignoring the rip of pain along his thigh as he squatted to her level. “How'd you get in here, honey? You scared me.”

She nodded—more like a twitch, but Mason felt a glimmer of her meaning. He'd tried talking to her at the cabin, feeling a bizarre sort of affinity for how much she must have seen. And a regret that she'd needed to endure it at all. But she'd never once spoken in return.

Small and fragile as a porcelain doll, she touched his shoulder.

He frowned, fingers clumped into fists at his side. No amount of strength or shouting would pull words from her mouth, which made him useless. “Penny, what happened? Where's your mom?”

But that placid, nearly vacant expression never changed, not even at the mention of her mother. No glimmer of recognition or affection. Penny lifted her hand, let it hover a few inches above his shoulder, then lowered it again. Her touch was so delicate that he could hardly feel it, only a gentle press of warmth.

The corners of her pale lips turned down. She shook her head.

Tru snorted. “Man, she is seriously. Messed. Up. Should I go get Ange?”

Penny's blue eyes widened and trained on the kid. With sure steps, she skirted around Mason to stand before Tru. Her frustration, a silent tension that charged the air, ebbed as she touched his shoulder too. Tru's face twisted into a freaked-out grimace, almost comical. But he held still and kept quiet—a miracle by itself.

Penny smiled. Dimples appeared in her apple cheeks and her lips parted to reveal how her child's face didn't yet fit new grown-up teeth. She scrambled onto Tru's lap, curled into a ball, and stuck a pinkie finger in her mouth.

Mason felt sucker punched. Too much he couldn't possibly understand. But he wasn't half as perplexed as Tru looked. The kid didn't know where to put his hands.

“She suits you,” Mason said, hiding a smirk.

“C'mon, get her off me.”

Seconds later, Ange burst into the room. “Where's Penny?”

“Don't shout.” Jenna shaded her eyes as she stepped in. “We heard a scream.”

“If you hadn't opened that Hennessy, you wouldn't be hungover,” Ange snapped.

“Yeah,” Jenna muttered. “Because I forced you to drink and talk pygmies or elephants or whatever for half the night.”

“She's over here, lady.” Tru still sounded baffled.

Close enough to touch her sleep-warm skin, Mason inhaled the sweet tang of alcohol clinging to Jenna. “You've been drinking?”

“Not enough. Maybe if I'd finished the bottle, I'd still be asleep. What's going on?”

Angela crossed the room in three strides. “Let go of her!”

“I didn't do anything,” Tru said. “She came to me.”

“Enough!” Mason grabbed Angela around the waist before she could launch herself at Tru.“You, sit down,” he said, planting her hard on his bunk. He held on to his exasperation like a leashed pit bull. “And just—everybody shut up.” He pointed at Penny, who'd tucked harder against Tru's pencil-thin body. “She screamed. Who knows why, but she did it inside our room. The door must've been unlocked. But I don't remember hearing her enter, not before the scream.”

“Me neither,” Tru mumbled, dark circles under his eyes.

“Does she sleepwalk?” Mason asked.

“No. I mean, she didn't.” The fight drained out of Ange, leaving the skin around her mouth slack and sagging. She looked older, certainly exhausted. “But I don't know now. We haven't had much chance for sleep. Not since ... you know.”

Mason nodded. “Okay, so maybe she took a little walk? Had a nightmare? Is that possible?”

Jenna glanced toward the door. “No four-footed bogeymen?”

“No, I checked with the doc. Nothing.”

“But why'd she come in here?
I'm
her mother,” Ange said, crestfallen. “She won't talk to me, and now she won't even come to me when she has a bad dream?”