Winter's Shadow (14 page)

Lucy was waiting for her in the kitchen, chopping onions. She glanced over at Winter’s approach, one eyebrow arching questioningly at the cat in her arms.

‘What’s with the cat?’

Winter shook her head. ‘I found him on the balcony. He looks thirsty.’

Lucy tutted disapprovingly. ‘You shouldn’t feed strays, Win. It’ll keep coming back and before you know it you’ll have got yourself a pet you don’t want.’

Winter put the cat down and looked for a bowl. ‘I don’t mind if he comes back.’

Finding one, she filled it with water and placed it before the cat’s inquisitive nose. He immediately started lapping.

‘So, was that phone call about the guy who dropped you off? The same one from yesterday?’

‘Yep.’

‘What’s his name?’

Winter sighed softly and turned to face her sister. Why couldn’t Lucy just have a conversation with her without it turning into an interrogation?

‘Blake.’

‘What does he do?’

‘Deals drugs,’ Winter answered without blinking. ‘I’m thinking about working as a mule for him. You know – sneaking drugs over the border, stuff like that . . .’

‘Winter —’ Lucy always called her ‘Winter’ instead of ‘Win’ when she wanted to discipline her.

‘What do you want me to tell you, Lucy? I hardly know the guy.’

‘But you like him?’

Winter rolled her eyes dramatically, hoping to conceal her true reaction. The awful scene this afternoon hadn’t muddied her feelings for Blake; instead it had clarified them. Yes, Winter liked Blake – in fact
like
seemed too mild a word for whatever she was feeling.

‘So . . . are you going to tell me what you guys had to talk about? You seemed pretty upset before.’

Winter simply smiled and shook her head. ‘No. No, I’m not.’

Lucy pursed her lips in frustration and turned back to the onions. ‘Dinner will be ready in twenty minutes.’

Winter nodded and picked up the cat. She knew she should probably put it back outside, but she felt like some company. Company that didn’t ask a million questions, anyway. Leaving Lucy to seethe in the kitchen, Winter carried the cat into her bedroom and shut the door.

Almost immediately the cat wriggled from her arms, dropping to the floor. He padded over to sniff her runners, which lay discarded at the foot of her bed. Winter felt a wave of exhaustion wash over her. All she wanted to do now was go to sleep and forget everything that had happened ever since she left Fletch’s this afternoon. Unfortunately, if past experience was any indication, once she turned out the lights and closed her eyes, sleep would be impossible.

Whenever something upsetting happened, her mind, in an act of cruel insubordination, recorded it in detail – only to play the painful event over and over again as soon as Winter let her mental guard down. These mini mind movies were never straightforward accounts of what she’d experienced. Instead, they seemed to be edited for maximum emotional pain, lingering on scornful looks or hurtful lines of dialogue.

After her parents died Winter had lost what felt like weeks of sleep, tormented by one such mind movie she’d dubbed ‘The Police Scene’. This particular recording began with Winter arriving home from school to find a police officer sitting in the kitchen with Lucy:

The officer looks up as Winter enters the room, his young face (he couldn’t be more than twenty-two) heavy. He introduces himself – Wilson Oaks – to Winter and then offers her a seat. Officer Oaks tells Winter that she should brace herself. He pauses a moment, as though for dramatic effect, and then recounts her parents’ accident in slow, methodical terms as though he were describing to a blind person something he’d seen on television.
Officer Oaks asks Winter if she understands and Winter looks to Lucy to see if this is some kind of cruel prank. There is something about her sister’s vacant stare that convinces Winter that this is in fact happening.

Her parents are dead.

Winter excuses herself to kind Officer Oaks, because she’s about to throw up. She just manages to get to the bathroom and afterwards remains kneeling on the blue and white tiles in a kind of stupor.

This was the point where the movie would stop and rewind before playing again.

And now Winter had a fresh addition to join her collection of painful mind movies. She already had a title for it – ‘Winter the Psycho Stalker’ – and suspected it would be getting some serious play over the next week or so.

She stepped over the layer of dirty clothes covering her floor to reach her desk. There were three shelves screwed over it, the top two crammed tightly with music albums and the bottom one reserved for her treasures. This treasure shelf was something Winter had created five or six years ago after discovering a particularly beautiful seashell on Lighthouse Beach. The shell had been the first addition to the shelf and was followed a year later with a book of poems by Rimbaud, sent to Winter by Grandmother Sal six months before she died.

Sal had been a voracious reader, and was particularly passionate about poetry, which she occasionally read aloud to Winter after drinking too much eggnog during the family’s annual Christmas visit. Shortly after
Sal was diagnosed with cancer, she sent Winter the Rimbaud volume. Winter had been reluctant to accept the gift because of what it signified – her grandmother’s approaching death – but her mother had made her keep it. Even still, Winter hadn’t been able to open the book since the funeral because of the raw emotion she associated with it.

After gaining this particularly poignant treasure, the shelf hadn’t had another item placed on it until Jasmine had presented her with a small stuffed frog she won in a ring game at the Easter Carnival last year. Even though the frog was pretty tacky, Winter had been quietly touched by Jasmine’s gift and so onto the shelf it had gone.

Now Winter reached into her bag and took out the crushed Nikon, placing it between the book of poems and the frog. She stared at the camera for a moment, feeling a sadness more resonant than anything she’d suffered today, before shaking herself. She’d rather brood over the experience at the Velasco place than think about her dad. Music. That’s what she needed.

Winter began rifling through her albums. She’d inherited most of them from her mother, and usually was able to find something amid the eclectic range to accompany whatever mood she was feeling. Her mother had never thrown away a single album she owned, so all her musical whims were represented, everything from yodelling cowboys from the fifties to Swedish death metal.

Seeing how clueless her friends were about music, how readily they lapped up whatever was popular on
the music charts without knowing how derivative most of it was, made Winter appreciate the gift of taste her mother had bestowed upon her. It gave her a small sense of superiority to cling to, when most of the time she felt behind everyone else with regards to fashion, television, boys . . . At least she could tell good music from bad.

Sometimes when she played her old albums Winter liked to imagine her mother as a teenager lying on her bed or doing her homework, bopping her head to the tunes the way Winter did. It made her feel happy and sad all at the same time.

After some deliberation, Winter picked a CD, Nirvana’s
In Utero
, and inserted it into her player. Although nearly twenty years old, it was one of the more recent albums in the collection, and perfectly suited for exorcising some pent-up emotions.

The jangling chords of the first track reverberated through her room as Winter flopped listlessly onto her bed. The tabby jumped up on the mattress and began pawing at the closed window.

‘Had enough of me, huh?’ Winter said with bemusement, and opened the window so the cat could escape. He crawled onto the ledge outside and then leapt onto the nearby branch of the cypress growing outside her bedroom. Winter watched the cat nimbly run down the trunk onto the ground below, where she was surprised to see two other cats join him. The three cats slunk off into the deeper shadows of the backyard.

Winter shut the window, feeling vaguely uneasy. Watching the cat crawl out of her window had given her a powerful sense of déjà vu. An image appeared in her mind – a memory of a dream, perhaps? Three dark figures hovering in the air over her backyard. Watching her.

Blake walked around the Velasco place checking that the wards he’d stationed were still working. Everything looked fine, but he did another circuit anyway, double- and triple-checking. The house was safe. Nothing supernatural could get in or out without his express permission. He had good reason to be cautious.

The Skivers had been here.

When he’d touched Winter in the car, Blake had used the Sight to peek into her mind. In that second he’d witnessed a memory – Winter’s experience outside his house, the shadows, the noises – and understood what had driven her inside. He should never have yelled at her. She’d had every reason to act the way she had. Unfortunately, catching her on the staircase had shocked him so badly that Blake hadn’t been able to stop himself
from yelling. His outrage had been motivated by fear. If he’d arrived home five minutes later then she might have been lost to him forever.

It was getting harder to think of her as a responsibility, as a problem he must solve. The concert ticket had been a disarmingly sweet gesture. It had been a long time since anyone had given him a gift. Thinking about this a slightly confused smile crept across Blake’s face. Why was he feeling this way? On an intellectual level he knew that immediate connection between them, the way his body reacted to her light, desiring it, wanting to possess it, was an instinctual one. It had nothing to do with emotions.

Winter’s evident infatuation with him could also be boiled down to body chemistry. He was aware of the effect he had on girls, how his eyes bewitched them, his allure. This was a mere superficial response. Beyond his appearance, Winter didn’t know Blake – she couldn’t possibly given the short time they’d spent together, but when Blake looked at her he felt the strangest sense that she did know him. Or could. It had been a long time since a girl had made him feel this way. A very long time.

With some effort Blake forced himself to stop this train of thought. These emotions weren’t practical and certainly weren’t going to help him keep Winter safe. If anything they would make it harder for him to concentrate. He needed to remain distant, cold, focused. The Skivers were growing bolder.

Earlier in the afternoon, while Blake had been following Winter in his truck, he’d watched them cause
the accident in the road. At the last moment, he’d driven them off, narrowly escaping drawing attention to himself. He didn’t want to scare Winter but it was going to be difficult to continue protecting her from the shadows. He needed more help. Luckily he knew where to find it.

Blake walked through the house and out into the front yard. Standing beneath the swaying boughs of the magnolia tree, Blake closed his eyes, sending a message into the night. Within minutes the cats answered his call, dozens of them, strays and beloved pets alike, creeping out of the woods and assembling on the grass before him. A faithful congregation waiting to hear Blake’s sermon. Before he could deliver it, there was a banging sound from the house behind him, like a hand slapping against a window. Blake turned around and looked up at the Velasco place. The windows were dark save for the last one on the second floor, which glowed malevolent amber. It was watching. Always watching.