“No-one’ll tell me what’s going on.”
It had taken a few minutes to get to the med centre with Lainy pedalling her bike like a woman possessed and Kaie riding piggy back. She made a mental note to try and stretch the budget to a bike of her own. The tiny car park had a couple of cars in it, an ambulance and a row of pushbikes chained to the railings. Wheeling the bike into a space and locking it up would have taken a bit of time - mostly because Lainy didn’t even own a bike lock – so she just jumped off and let it clatter into one of the bushes, rushing through the doors and not watching to see if Katie followed. She did. But only after a deep breath and a cautious glance at the building before her. Katie decided that she didn’t like hospitals one little bit.
The inside of the hospital was quite busy. Not as busy as the big one in the city had been but busier than she had so far seen it. All told, probably just under a dozen people filled the small reception area; some looking ill or injured and chatting to the people who must have come in with them. A man got up and walked over to the drinks machine and slotted coins in. They fell through the machines innards and the crash as they landed seemed to cut through the steady buzz of conversation. He pressed some buttons and hot water hissed out of a spout. Katie found herself watching this operation with great interest, vaguely puzzled as to why she could hear all these quiet noises when everything around was so noisy. You can’t. Not really. But it’s better to pretend to hear that than this. This being the unforgettable, unforgiveable sound of people in pain. A hand on her back propelled her over to a quieter corner. Arms wrapped themselves tight around her, a warm body pressed against her and the beads of a spirit bangle pressed into her neck. Jaye. Instinctively, Katie hugged her friend back and didn’t say a thing. Jack had done that the other night. Maybe not because he knew she needed to be held like this. It had worked regardless. She knew Jaye was craving the exact same thing – the tight upper body muscles, the spine curved into a rigid S – even if she couldn’t find the words.
“They won’t tell me anything,” Jaye sobbed as she stepped away at last. Her face was pulled tight and was whiter than it usually was. “Because I’m not family.”
“They’ll tell me.” Lainy was sure of that. Likely her former medical training meant she could pull a few strings. “I promise you that.” She marched through the swinging double doors, setting them swinging and shouting, “De Rossa!” like she was calling on an old friend. Maybe she was.
“Hey.” Katie found some empty seats and sat down beside her friend. It was incredibly hard to know what to say that didn’t sound like something she herself had been hearing all summer. Telling her everything would be fine sounded so fake and meaningless. The trouble her family must have had trying to find the right things to say suddenly hit home. Katie took the safe option and said nothing. She just let Jaye curl up and lay her head in her lap like a child with its’ mother. Only the steady trickle of people leaving the medical centre gave any clue as to how long they sat there, Katie stoking Jaye’s shoulders. The tension etched into her face faded into the shadow of worry and Jaye sat up, looked around. Still no sign of Lainy. Was that a good sign? Bad?
“I’m sorry. I’m such a wuss.” The comment was meant as a joke but the laugh Jaye tried turned into a choking sob. Dried tears and other gunk had crusted at the corners of her eyes. There was a damp patch on Katie’s tennis dress where Jaye had cried. “I should be looking after you, not the other way round.”
“You’ve done more than enough this week.” The couple on the seats behind them got called through the double doors. “I reckon I’d have cracked already if I hadn’t had a friend like you.”
“The first weeks are always hard.”
“You have no idea,” she said and stretched her own back out. Lainy had dragged her off in the middle of her workout and she should do a warm down. Well, as best as she could manage here. “I seem to just be rushing through the events of my student years in a fortnight. Think that means my actual education will be nice and boring?”
Jaye made a face.
“Where are the boys?” It felt wrong, disrespectful somehow, for one of the house to be in hospital and not have the whole gang together.
Jaye tried, and nearly succeeded at, a thin smile and counted her fingers off as she spoke. “Pub. Football. Strip club.”
“I pray for football.”
“Who do you pray to? I mean, there’s no-one out there so what’s the point? It’s not like it’ll make any difference.” Her voice was rising in both pitch and volume. “She was trying to kill herself you know. I knew she might try and I decided not to take her seriously.”
“What happened?” A pause. “I know you probably don’t want to talk about it but if I’m going to avoid putting my foot in it with Dina in the future, I have to know.” Talking gently was always a good idea with emotionally fragile people, so they said. But it was stupid to avoid the subject altogether.
“We were going to the out-of-town centre. Shopping. I was waiting for her to finish in the bathroom before we went when there was this bit of a crash. She’s always dropping stuff so I thought nothing of it. But then I noticed everything’s gone quiet and I can’t even hear her moving about. I shouted and shouted and then I got the door open and she was just lying there with blood everywhere. The mirror was all bust into shards and there was water in the sink, like she had cut her wrists underwater. It’s meant to take the edge of the pain.”
“God.” It was not impossible to imagine someone being driven so far into despair that suicide seemed like a viable option. What was impossible to conceive of was having the courage to do it. Knowing you might never come back…
“I should have kept a closer eye on her. Dina wanted to leave; she told me she wanted to go. I thought she wanted to move out. But she slashed her wrists instead.”
“I won’t tell you it’s not your fault because I know you won’t believe me.” There was nothing to be said that didn’t sound like a sound bite from one of Adams medical dramas. Besides, how could Katie promise that everything would be fine when hospitals, at least for her, echoed with lies and stories? “The worst bit’s over.”
Lainy stood at the double doors, peeling off a pair of latex gloves before coming over to them. “Well,” she began. “She was in surgery a while. We found a load of painkillers in her pockets too. Seems like she had a back-up plan if the bleeding hadn’t worked.”
“Elaine,” Jaye whined.
“Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. Dina’s okay. Unconscious. Lost a lot more blood than we could get back in to her. You can go sit with her though.”
Lainy retreated back into the recesses of the building. After a few minutes of stunned silence Jaye stood up and started towards the double doors, holding Katie’s hand. “You carry on. I need a minute on my own.”
To be honest, Katie thought she needed the rest of the week to herself. and even that might not be enough. Then she got up and followed her friend through the swinging doors. Being alone meant there was nothing to do but think, and she really didn’t want to think about anything right now. But just as she pushed through the doors, she was struck my an image – memory? – so strong that her breath was whipped away. There is nothing to see. All there is is a thick blackness and this sense of moving through the air, of being carried. Doors crash open and she feels air rush against her bare legs. Some-one shouts for help. Wheels squeal on a tiled floor and she feels herself being laid out on a hard board. A tremor rocks through her and pulls her muscles tight and long, feeling as though invisible ropes and chains are pulling them, holding them down. The voices calls for help again and she tries to shout along with it. But even the muscles in her throat are rebelling. Katie drags her eyes open just a crack and for just a moment and, she does not know why she expects this, expects to see green eyes staring back down at her. Everything will be okay if her green-eyed cowboy is
here. But he is not. Blue eyes, dark with emotion, hang over her. Then her eyes flutter closed once more and a new voice comes to take her away.
“Katie?” The voice was Lainy’s.
“What?” she asked, not wanting to wake up fully. Sleep was good, sleep was the only safe place. But her mouth was drier than the Sahara. She had to wake up to get the cup of water Lainy was holding in front of her.
“You fainted. Again. Can you please stop doing that?”
“I’ll try.” Katie struggled up from the tiny ball she had managed to curl herself into on one of the cushioned seats. They were in the waiting room deep in the centre reserved for families and friends of patients. “This is my least favourite place in town already. Did you know, I’ve spent more time in hospitals since I’ve been here than I have in my entire life?”
“We’re number one for life-changing experiences.”
“You can say that again.”
“We’re number one for –“ Lainy started laughing at her own joke and Katie couldn’t help but join in. She remembered the first night in Northwood and how Adam and Lainy had made her feel so welcome. She’d fainted then too.
“This degree of knackeredness should be illegal. I don’t know how you guys keep up with us all.”
“Years of practice,” Lainy grinned. She looked to be n her mid to late twenties, not that much older than most students, so the years of practice could not be too numerous. It was quite young, Katie thought, to be left in charge of a group of hormonal teens. It wasn’t Katie’s job to question though. “How’s everything going with… everything?”
The question was too vague. She could have been asking about anything – probably was – was likely leaving Katie to interpret the query however she wanted. Answering it in any meaningful way would have involved thinking and her thoughts on that today contained many variations on NO. So she did the only thing she could. She laughed. Laughing, however forced it was, made things seem better for a few minutes. “I wish I could tell you Lainy, I really do. So much has gone on though, and it’s all been so fast, that I haven’t had time to decide how I feel about any of it.” That made her laugh again, but it was only a few seconds of giggles this time.
“Adam’s on his way. He can take you home if you want.”
“No, there are a few things I need to talk to Dina about. I’ll stay.”
Lainy backed out of the waiting room and Katie stretched out, not really caring about the others in the room were watching.
The complete black has taken her under and after the first few moments of swimmy half-consciousness, there is nothing. Not even the sensation of her sluggish, heavy muscles being pressed down or the feeling of moving on some invisible magic carpet. No, instead, there are footsteps. At first, Katie thinks it is her green-eyed cowboy come to rescue her. But it was not him, was it? She had seen blue eyes, had felt them in her brain somehow, had surrendered to that safe but straining grip. And the footsteps are running. They get quieter and maybe the blue eyes are running away; maybe they have given up. But they have not faded into nothing. The footsteps are still tip-tapping away on the floor and then they get closer. Katie tries to will her floating body to move faster, move at all, but brain and body are not communicating. And then the footsteps are coming up to her body and before she can shriek or cringe, a voice starts whispering nonsense words, and a red streak slices across her blank eyes. She knows what is coming before she can stop it and prays she will wake before the pain.
Katie woke with a scream and a start to feel someone peeling back the bandage on her arm. She looked down to see Dr de Rossa working on the cut, trying to clean it with a little antiseptic. It seemed quite clean to Katie and, although it would no doubt lave a life-long scar, it seemed to have started forming a scab already. “Tell me straight, doc, am I gonna lose it?” she joked, her brain evidently not as groggy as the rest of her.
“I must say, Miss Cartwright, you seem to excel in needing medical treatment. Maybe you should get a lucky horseshoe.”
“Nah, I’d probably hit myself in the head with it.”
To that the doctor said nothing. “Any other injuries or… nuisances?”
“Just a permanent headache. He’s called Leo. Lives in the next room,” she quickly added, seeing his panicked expression. Actually, her head was hurting more than a little now. She reached up and finger-combed a section of her sleep mussed hair over her eyes, glad it had mostly fallen out of the scrunchie in her sleep. She could feel a tiny slice in the skin above her left eye. It was too well hidden for anyone to notice if they were not looking for it. “How’s Dina?”
“Could use as many of her friends as possible.”
“I’m not really sure that includes me right now.”
“Are you sure you haven’t had any side effects from the Rohypnol? Anything at all?”
“That’s why. She didn’t know what was in it. Could have been anything, could have been nothing.”
“Excuse me, I think I might need the beginning of this story.”
“Dina. Spiked. Me. I heard her talking yesterday and she told Jaye she’d drugged me. It’s done now and all the sorries in the world can’t change it,” she said, knowing those words were about to trip off his tongue. “If you want some good reading, have my medical records brought up. And police records. It’s all good stuff.”
“Dr de Rossa.” The PA system crackled as it had when she had rushed in with her uncle, just as the conversation was becoming uncomfortable. “You’re needed in reception please.”
“Why would she do such a thing?”
“Wish I knew.”
“Are you sure she admitted it and wasn’t just discussing it?”
“I’m sure. But I don’t think it was just Dina being mean or anything. She doesn’t seem like a hateful girl.”
“Dr de Rossa to reception. Please.” The stocky little man glared up at the speaker as if it personally was the nuisance, hurriedly stuck the bandage back in place and scurried off. Katie went around the corner and stood in the door to Room 4. Lainy had told her to go to Room 4 when she was ready. She hadn’t warned her that this room was set up like the ones in the hospital dramas. It was the room she had feared seeing Uncle Billy in. Dina was lying in her bed, looking fragile under the white sheet, hooked up to beeping monitors and drips, tubes running into her bandaged arms. She was, however, looking mostly awake if pale and sickly. She noticed Katie at the door and beckoned her in, motioning vaguely to an empty seat. The others had left to get coffee and a change of clothes for Dina and that meant the two of them would have a few minutes alone.
“How’re you feeling?”
Dina looked at the beeping monitor for a long moment. “Like I’m still alive.” The comment was so flat that it could have been good, bad or just a statement of fact.
“Why did you do it, Dina?” Katie decided to take a tip from Lainy and let her decide what the question was asking.
“I just thought it’d make everything easier. If I killed myself then I wouldn’t have to come back and do this. I’m not Jaye. I don’t care what she says, I’m not like Jaye. Never will be.” Dina tried to push herself up to a sitting position but it was too much, and she flopped back down into the pillows. The softness had dulled the edges of sharp reality. The hospital grade morphine helped too. “She thinks I can wait for the day I die and then smile about it and be brave and help others.” She shook her head weakly.
“Should I get a nurse or something?” Katie wondered out loud. The drugs those tubes were carrying must have had some side effects because the girl was talking nonsense.
“I never want to come back.”
“Okay… But no-one’s making you.”
“You have no idea.” Dina closed her eyes and turned her face to the window where it was getting dark. It was too early for stars to shine but the sky was cloudless enough that a handful should be visible in the n
ight sky. Katie thought Dina had fallen back to sleep and was about to turn and leave when she spoke again. “They’re making me stay. I don’t know who they are or why they want me but they make the rules.”
Rules.
There were always rules.
“I know you were listening outside the door yesterday. Jaye saw you.”
Katie wanted to ask how Jaye had seen her outside their room but she had a funny feeling that would be part of the explanation.
“I didn’t do it to get you hurt or anything. You have to believe that! I was trying to find a way to tell you everything. So I put a roofy in your drink. You ran off and I was going to come after you but when I got to the track, you were gone. I just wanted to make things okay.” Tears streaked down her face and one hand itched at the needles in the back of the other and vice versa. Pain was still a few hours off but the broken skin felt too hot, too tight for her body. Sweat popped out on her marble-white, waxy brow. It made Dina look much more vulnerable than any of the medical equipment.
“So you just left me God-knows where to be attacked? What did you think was going to happen?” Getting angry wasn’t getting them anywhere. Katie knew that – her mother would be nagging her to calm down and be rationale. She was here now.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry Katie. I never wanted any of this to happen,” she cried. “I just thought I could tell you everything you need to know and then you wouldn’t remember any of it in the morning. It was going to be safer for everyone.”
A nurse came in and Dina went quiet – Katie thought she recognised the nurse from the night she had spent in here. The nurse pulled the curtains across the window, pressed a button on the machine that controlled pain relief, handed Dina the TV remote and bustled back out with a disapproving glare at Katie. You’d better not be tiring my patient out, missy.
“Safer? You drugged me, Dina, and left me out there – lying dead in a ditch for all you knew. How is that safe?”
“You weren’t dead though. We live, we suffer, we die, we come back, we watch the same things happen to everyone we know. And that’s forever.”
“And you want to speed that process up?”
“No. Stop it in it’s tracks is what I want. Stop it dead. Ha!” She wriggled under the sheet, trying to find a cool and dry spot. There was none. “They’re all dead. Ghosts, every last one of them.”
And then the blanket of warm, deep sleep crept over Dina and Katie sat in the chair watching the even rise and fall of her chest. There was a small toiletry bag in the locker which Jaye must have fetched earlier. She unzipped it and rooted around for a mirror. The light in the room wasn’t fabulous but she could see just well enough to push her hair back and see the tiny slice above her left eye. It was just a nick, right on the brow line, where no-one would notice. Worrying at it, a single drop of blood squeezed out of the wound and dropped onto the crisp white sheet below. There’s always blood. The thought popped into her mind uninvited. It was true though. There shouldn’t be blood. It shouldn’t always be about blood. It just is.
Death seemed to haunt her dreams as she fought to grab a few minutes rest before the others came to takeover and Katie could go home to shower and change. Her death, Jacks’, Dina’s - and there was red liquid in each of them. Blood, red wine, crimson ink. Always spilt and always staining something.
“It’s all okay, now, Lady Katie. I’m here.”
The green eyed cowboy stood before her with a hand on Dina’s shoulder. The dream from earlier, the dream that had been so real it might have been a memory, came back to her. Everything will be okay if her green eyed cowboy is here. Jack frowned at the tiny cut above her eye, still with a hand on Dina, still solidifying. Katie watched this without even questioning it. Caught between nightmares and reality, everything made perfect sense. Everything will be okay because my green-eyed cowboy is here.
And then it was far from okay.
Okay may as well have been on another planet.
Dina began to flatline.
One tense and tearful phone call later, Jaye came blurring through the medical centre doors like hell hounds were at her feet. She looked angry rather than upset; ready for war. Immediately, she stood in the corridor outside the empty treatment room as if expecting to see some ghost of Dina still in there. Of course, there was none. Fearing her reaction, Katie gently turned to Jack and made him lead her outside. There was no more mileage in hugs or words. The normally happy and smiling Jaye had stress radiating off her body. Her best friend had tried to kill herself. that was bound to send even the most cheerful of people hurtling towards the edge. The fight with Leo had been out of character too – well, out of character as far as Katie had seen. She was pretty sure that it had something to do with what Dina had been speaking about. Not that Dina had probably been talking much sense just a few minutes ago, but trying to string together her dreams and what people had been saying, Katie decided that there was some deep religious thing at work here making people believe in fate and the afterlife. Maybe. The explanation was good enough for now.
“You’re hurt.”
Katie turned around, lost in her own thoughts, remembering that Jack had come outside with her. Before she could say anything to him, Jaye walked out of the doors and stood in the middle of the tiny car park, rubbing her arms against the chill. She looked a bit like a B movie zombie, pale and stiff and slack faced. Katie wondered if she should go over and talk to her. But Jaye was staring at the ambulance in the car park, her whole body shuddering with the effort of keeping it all together. It was better to leave her to herself for a while.
“What happened?”
Katie stepped out of his arms, suddenly angry. “What right do you have to ask that? What right do you have to even be here?”
“I… you needed me so I came.”
“Oh, hell no, Jack! I needed you when I got hurt. I needed you when I was in danger. And you weren’t there. You weren’t anywhere!” It clicked then. He’d been everywhere with her this week. He had been the invisible hand that slipped into hers when she was scared, he was that feeling of being watched when no-one was around. “You weren’t there when it mattered.”
“I’m here now. And I can fix this.”
He was here now? That wasn’t the comforting sentence it was meant to be. Jack could see that as soon as the words tripped off his tongue. “Great! Everywhere you go, trouble, pain, blood. It’s never far behind.”
“I was meant to keep you safe.”
“Good job.” She gestured to her entire body. If there was an inch of it that didn’t have scars, visible or not, then Katie would have loved to hear about it. Jack began his tale, once more, of how he couldn’t stay away from her and so on, but Katie just faked a yawn and rolled her hand in the air. She didn’t need to hear this all over again. “Why is it that whenever I dream about you – and don’t go getting excited, you’re just infectious. Like measles. I always end up getting hurt?”
“I let you see a little bit of my past. The only part I can’t seem to forget, matter of fact. By taking you back to my own violent death in a dream – when we kissed actually – you were taken there in reality too. It was just a moment but it was enough for him to see you.” He paused and tried to looked away but Katie’s deep brown eyes – so very, very sad – drew him back. “And now he knows you, he can find you every time you close your eyes.” There was so much more to be said on the subject, so much he needed to warn her about, but tonight was not the night for it. He was just smart enough to realise that she needed to rage and yell and scream her heart out tonight.
“But you were there and I thought you would save me. For some reason I always think my green eyed cowboy is going to save me from the monsters.”
“And he always will.”
“Don’t make promises you’ll only break, Jack.” He tried to reach for her again but Katie backed away once more, pushing h
is grasping arms away. Then she reconsidered and grabbed his left wrist. “You should have scabs, scars, something. I remember you punched the stadium seats.”
“I… heal fast.”
“Something else you can’t tell me,” she spat. Such anger was rare for Katie but a vicious temper always came to the fore when she was under a lot of pressure. Being pulled in a million different directions was only fuelling her fire. “Is that another one of these stupid damn rules everyone raves about?”
“Yes.”
“Oh for God’s sake. Break the rules. Just tell me what the hell is going on?”
“Guys!” Jaye was suddenly standing between them, looking from one to the other. “Lovers quarrel – not helpful.”
Katie was shocked into silence and Jack put his head in his hands. The girl lying in some hospital bed in that sterile, impersonal looking building had brought all this anger to the fore and had been soon forgotten. “I’m so sorry Jaye.”
“I don’t think I want you here tonight. Either of you.”
“I’m sorry. I mean it.”
“I know. I just can’t have this, this fighting around us.”
Jack fixed Jaye with his sea-green eyes and nodded off to the side. They stood over by the ambulance, Jack leaning against it, his hat pulled low over his face but not quite low enough to disguise the shine of guilt and tears. Jaye stood in front of him, arms folded and waiting for him to speak. The cold night air carried their voices jus enough that Katie could hear their words, though little of it made sense. Everything will be okay now my green eyed cowboy is here. Every breath she took seemed a little bit harder when he was around though. Every heartbeat seemed like a countdown to her last. She ached to believe he could make the world normal again.
“I used Dina to bring me through. I used Katie before but I got a warnin’. So I used Dina so I could be near her and I took too much,” he said all in a rush. Not a single word came from Jaye’s mouth. The silence filled the night like a roar. “I hope she’s not on my side.”
Before the questions could even begin to form in Katie’s mind, something incredible happened. Jack began to disappear. Not the showy puff-of-smoke crap street magicians would have you believe or the holographic flickering of sci-fi shows – he was just there one minute and the next… slightly less there. Jaye stuck her hand straight out in front of her and a little bit up. She was trying to grab hold of him. Katie wanted to run forward and pull her away. Her feet were rooted to the spot. Jack had all but disappeared. Jaye jolted her body forward, as if she had just hit a brick wall. Her hand, where she had reached out, had vanished too. She forced something forward.
“Oh no you fucking don’t you dead piece of shit!” Her muscles were straining, had to be, but there was no sign of that happening.
Suddenly Jack coalesced at the end of her arm, pinned by the throat to the side of an ambulance. The grip looked tight enough to bruise.
“Are we doin’ this now? I grew up bare fist fightin’.”
“Not right now, babe. Got better things to do.” She did not let go, step away, even blink. Something passed between them. Katie felt it like some weak pulse in her stomach. It was something darker and more dangerous than she could ever imagine. It was trying to get inside her, begging, pleading to come in from the cold. Jaye kissed Jack on the forehead and backed off. “But it will happen.”
It felt more like a warning than a threat.
When Jaye had gone and that dark pulse had faded to nothing, Katie watched Jack fold himself to a crouch and coughed. And then he stood up as if nothing had happened. “Jack!” Katie ran to him, more out of concern for a person who might be hurt than out of affection. She crouched and turned his face this way and that, looking for bruising or red marks. Was it too soon for bruises to appear? But there was nothing – not even pinked up skin. It seemed a very long time ago when seeing something like that would have shocked her. “I’m going home.” And then she said what was possibly the dumbest thing in the world but the one thing she was sure would get the right reaction. More hurt than she wanted choked her voice when she ordered him, “don’t follow me.”
By the time Katie had walked a few blocks to cool off and had squeezed through the locked gates to the athletics ground, Jack was already waiting for her at the end of the long jump pit. She didn’t bother to ask how he had got in there. It was time for round 2,
Her phone vibrated midnight the way it always did if it was still registering movement. Which made her wonder just why she was still moving at this time of night. What Katie wouldn’t give to still have that bedtime Mom and Dad had always drilled into her. A lot of stills. Even Jack was still. He was looking at nothing in particular but he seemed to be concentrating hard on something. It wouldn’t be at all surprising if he had some way of communing with Jaye to keep updated on Dine. The girl he’d sent over the edge. Feeling terrible was high on the emotional list but feeling bad would not change anything. It wouldn’t bring Dina back. So, like Katie, he had to do something to cover that jagged hole inside.
“Do you feel it?”
“I feel a lot of things. Human trait,” Katie said, not wanting to get too close to him but unable to stop herself. That dark pull from the hospital was working, trying to force them closer. Katie dug her heels into the grass and resisted the pull. It faded when it realised she had no intention of letting it control her; not completely but enough to be only mildly annoying. “Do you even have feelings?”
“That power? Something dark and a little bit frightening.”
“What if I do? I might not though.”
“You do. I can see it in your eyes like you can see it in mine.” He frowned again at the tiny cut over her eye. It shouldn’t have happened. But he’d known. “There’s a lot of it in town.”
“My arm? My eye?” if Katie ever went back to visit her family with unexplainable scars, she could kiss goodbye to her sporting career. Bye bye independence. Nice to know you, academy education.
“There’s a man,” Jack began, taking a deep breath. “He saw you when I took you into my nightmares and now he knows you, he can get to you every time you fall asleep.”
So, if this man could get her wile she slept, the answer was just to never sleep again. Simple. As an athlete, her body needed sleep to repair itself after exertion, and she was positive it would start systematically shutting down if she denied herself for more than 24 hours. Some people survived on power naps and microsleeps – good for them. Katie wasn’t in that minority. “How long has he been after me?” It slipped out of her mouth before her brain had caught up. It sounded like a filling time question and, since Jack was taking his own sweet time in answering, she set her mind whirring to find a question that mattered.
“A few days.” He was hiding something.
“Fine. Who is he?”
“The man who killed me,” he whispered, so quietly that Katie was sure she had misheard. No. That wasn’t exactly right. She knew she had heard him correctly, she just wanted to hear it wrong. “He killed me and now he wants you too.”
“I already regret asking this but why?”
Jack shrugged. If he had known any of this might happen then he would not have dragged her into his world, even for a moment. So, why had he? Because he thought showing her the other side would be less dangerous than telling her. Less dangerous for him. He hadn’t wanted to think too much about the fact he was putting Katie in harms way.
When the silence between them had grown enough that Katie was positive he wasn’t going to answer, she thought back a few minutes and went through everything she had heard in the hospital car park, everything Dina had told her. The older girl had no reason to speak the truth but they hadn’t sounded like lies or doped out ramblings. Asking more questions wouldn’t change the answers, talking about things wouldn’t make them any less true. There were just the cold facts.
Jack was
dead.
People were ghosts.
There was a murderer trying to kill her in her dreams.
Dina was dying just a mile or so away.
Katie fell something break inside her – it was a physical sensation of snapping the ropes that tied her to reality. She felt oddly detached from everything. She fell forwards to her knees and vaguely felt Jack run over to her and drape his leather jacket over her shoulders and guide her over to the seating area. It was as though Katie could command her body to move but she couldn’t coax it into feeling anything. Shock had taken her over so completely and so quickly.
“Come on. You’re freezing, let’s go inside.” Jack helped her up the stairs and through the door at the top. It led to a pavilion-style building with changing rooms and function rooms. He sat her down in one of the cushioned chairs by the door and hip-bumped the door shut. “There.”
Katie pulled the jacket tighter around her and buried her face in it, smelling the comforting smells of old leather, years of wear, Jack. There was something else too. Something sharp and acidic. Something she refused to give a name. Then she looked at the green eyed boy crouched in front of her, barely recognising him. his face was familiar enough, his name rang in her head like a bell – she just wasn’t sure she knew him anymore. “You’re dead,” she managed through chattering teeth. “But you’re still here. You’re a ghost and you couldn’t tell me so you took me to your ghost world so I could see for myself and now you’ve condemned me too.”
“You were always going to die young. That’s why you’re here.”
“Oh.” Under other circumstances that would have brought more tears and wild accusations.
“It’s a long story, if you want to hear it.” There was nothing but time now anyway. Katie nodded. “Some people who die before their time, mostly the ones who are too precious to lose, are brought here – they move here, go to the academy – because they can die here and know that they’ll come back.”
“How -?”
Jack pressed a finger to her lips and continued with his speech. “As long as they don’t screw with the natural order of things then they can come back as ghosts. Some people adjust really well and decide to live in this dimension. Like Jaye does. Me – I live in the world meant just for ghosts and I can come into this world whenever I want but I have to find a living person to draw energy from to give me a body.”
Jaye was a ghost too?
Thunder was rumbling in the distance and rain started battering the windows hard enough to make them rattle in their frames. Katie looked up and flinched as the first flash of lightning turned the sky silver for a heartbeat. She grabbed Jack’s hand.
She wished he hadn’t told her any of it. The fact she was here mostly because her own death was hovering in her future somewhere alone was enough to terrify her. Jack also wished he hadn’t said anything; there would be such trouble. It was against the rules for anyone under eighteen to be told the secrets of Northwood.
“I saw you get killed, Jack, I watched as hat evil sadist virtually flayed you alive. I stood there, not even able to help, and watched you try to run away.”
“You can’t change the past Lady Katie. I knew you were there though.”
“I can’t affect the past right? But he can hurt me.”
Jack smoothed her hair back from her head and rubbed a thumb across the cut, feeling Katie jerk beneath him as he sent nerves jangling. It wasn’t something he could fully explain any more than he already had. One look at Katie told him that she wasn’t waiting for an explanation. She was reminding him. Warning him. Things that could get her when she slept, could leave scars when she was awake,, might mess with the natural order. It wasn’t as scary as it might be if she weren’t so damned detached. Even scary things were blunted at the edges, dulled in intensity
“I don’t want to know any of this!” she cried, slapping her hands over her ears, trying to ward off the echoes of their words. Reality had definitely picked its moment to come slamming back into her body. With it came the flares of pain from her cuts, the trembling from fear and cold.
“If you let me take it away, I can,” Jack offered. Tears shone in his own eyes but he wouldn’t let them fall. His shame at seeing Katie so upset because of him had fuelled his guilt but cowboys did not cry. Hadn’t his uncle told him that when he had turned his back on his family 150 years ago.
“You’ve taken so many of my memories away.” She remembered that. Sort of. There were holes in her memory and, something made her believe Jack was responsible. Was it the dark crackle of energy creeping through the room? Jack’s silence was more convincing than any confession. What she had learned tonight… these were ones she had to keep. All the magic in the world wouldn’t have taken that knowledge away. “If I forget this then I only have to learn this crap all over again. It’s not gonna be any easier a second time.” She touched the hand still covering the cut on her forehead and then knocked his Stetson off to trace the perfect round of dark skin on his forehead. I wish I could have stopped it. Whose words they were was unknown and nor did it matter. The words hung between them like a blanket, glowing and warming the pavilion the way only wishful thinking could. Katie shrugged off Jack’s coat and dropped it on the floor as she got up to stretch her legs.
“Lady Katie,” Jack began. Then he fell into silence. He couldn’t say what he wanted to say without sounding fake or clichéd. It was always so hard to say the important stuff. He stepped up behind Katie and put a hand in the small of her back, allowed his hand to melt through her t-shirt, felt the tensing of her spine and then as it loosened fractionally as her flesh remembered his non-predatory touch. Her nerves had been so badly fried over the last few months that any skin to skin contact with a man set her on fire. Any move could be an attack. “Let me take this away. You can forget the last hour, you can forget me.” It was a tempting offer. To erase from her mind the boy who had brought so much pain over the last week. It’s been so much longer than that. Longer? Katie didn’t care. Part of her wanted to get rid of Jack and everything that came with him – the blood and death, the nightmares, the world-changing knowledge he’d just dumped on her – and go back to a normal life in her normal town with normal friends. It wasn’t normal any more, she knew that, but she would not know that. And everyone would be free to carry on pretending. Win-win. On the other hand, evil was stalking her now and she couldn’t fight it if she was alone.
“No.”
“Katie..?”
“No, Jack! I won’t let you do it.” The rain lashed down outside. They watched the storm clouds swirl, rumble, flash with silver, swirl and gather power once more. It was a beautiful thing to see. But it was a tiny bit frightening to think of all that thunder and lightning just trying to find a living person to finish the circuit and feed it all into the ground. It was a it like Jack, she thought. A ball of energy and light searching for a life to feed off so he could manifest. Dina had been the conductor, much to her cost. And, a few nights ago, Katie had been filling that role. Dear God, she had thought she was going to die then. What the hell had Dina felt?
She turned to Jack and looked at him carefully. Nothing in his perfect face held anything but worry. The sweetness of the moment might have made Katie forget why she was angry with him. A flash of lightning and a crack of thunder so loud it might have been overhead brought her back from that edge of forgive and forget. “Stop doing that!”
“What?”
“That. Trying to make me give in to you by looking pretty.”
“I’m pretty?”
“I know stuff now and… I need you to be honest with me now. If I le you take this knowledge away from me, would it change anything?” Whatever the answer was, it was drowned out by the storm whipping itself into a frenzy. Katie had the most absurd mental picture of a tornado spinning out of the storm, Wizard of Oz style, and sucking her and Jack and this whole town into
its spiral, finally dropping them into a bright fantasy world where the sun always shone. It made her smile. If only things were as simple as the movies. “I need to know why my friends are all dead or dying right now; I need to know why I hate you now; I need to know that my nightmares really are out to get me; I need to know –“ Katie ran out of breath and, as she drew in another lungful of sweet zingy oxygen, she realised she had run out of anger. All that was left was a huge emptiness in her stomach. “I need to know why you didn’t save me that night?”
That was one thing that had been bothering her since she had had that flashback in the hospital. There was no feeling, nothing at all, and then feeling came back and her muscles reacted to the foreign agent Dina had so thoughtfully provided. Blue eyes – not green – had held her down, held her until the tremors had passed.
“And why did you let it be Leo?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Running Shoes (The Shades of Northwood) Page 12