Dawn Marie was impossible to rouse when she was so drunk, therefore Tobias didn’t even try. When they arrived back home, he opened the door into the main house then went back to get her. He scooped her up, long hair trailing over his arm in a tickling curtain as he carried her inside. He hummed “Here Comes the Bride” to himself with a little smile as he kicked the door closed behind himself.
He put her to bed, took off her shoes then arranged her in the most comfortable position on her side that he could before covering her up. His last act of business was to get the wastebasket from her bathroom and leave it beside the bed so she could vomit later without it going on the floor. Dawn Marie did not even try to make it to the toilet to puke, she just hung over the side of the bed and bitched about the mess later.
It was near sunrise by the time he settled back into his own bed and for hours, he laid awake thinking about Jeremy Harris and wondering why he was thinking of him at all. He fell asleep in the brilliant white glow of morning sunshine and didn’t stir again until later that afternoon when Dawn Marie stumbled in to ask if he was dead.
“I feel like shit,” she said as she flopped down beside him. “Come keep me company since you’re still alive.”
“Why wouldn’t I be alive?” he asked.
“Because you never sleep this late,” she said.
“I had a late night.”
“Still. You never—”
“I got it.”
“I was worried.”
“You’re bored is what you are.”
“And worried, I swear.”
“Uh-huh.”
He closed his eyes and reached out blindly for his cigarettes. She took the pack from him, stuck one in his mouth and lit it.
“How great am I?”
“You are a veritable geisha.”
“High class hooker?”
“They weren’t hookers, technically speaking. They were… companions.”
“So I’m your hooker-but-not.”
“No.”
Dawn Marie laughed. “Okay, so I’m your hooker.”
“Yes, fine, you are my hooker.”
“No way.”
“Are you hungry?” Conversations with Dawn Marie did so tend to get off-topic and veer into very strange waters. “Then we should go fetch your car.”
“Yeah. I ate some cereal earlier, but I barfed it all up again. I haven’t been brave enough to try again since. At least it was Lucky Charms though, those aren’t bad to hurl,” she said. “But, hey, good news; we don’t have to worry about my car. Wes and Nick went and got it for me.”
“It amazes me that you know so much about what is and what isn’t good to throw up.” Tobias sat up at last and pushed his hair back so he didn’t burn it with his cigarette. “That was nice of them to do that.”
“I ain’t no amateur,” Dawn Marie said. She bumped her shoulder against his. “C’mon, let’s go eat and while we do that, you can tell me things.”
“Like what?”
“Where do babies come from?” she asked in a high, childish voice. Then she snorted. “Like what you found out about the freaky-deaky shit that’s been happening to you lately. You said you’d keep me clued in.”
“I recall saying no such thing,” he said as he got up and walked toward his door.
She followed along behind him. “You totally said it. In spirit.”
“Sure I did,” Tobias said. “But all right, I’ll tell you while I cook… hmm… How do bacon cheeseburgers sound?”
“Like a good idea,” Dawn Marie said. “Boom, goes the calorie bomb.”
Tobias made their bacon cheeseburgers and while he did, he told her about his conversation with Wes and the possibility that it might be magic of some sort.
Dawn Marie’s very succinct take on all of it was, “Bullshit.”
“My thoughts exactly, but there’s nothing else it could be either,” Tobias said.
“But magic, Toby? Really? That’s… I don’t even know what that is,” she said.
“Absurd is what I keep coming back to, but it’s also hard to deny that it isn’t—”
“Normal?” she interjected. “Well, yeah, of course it’s not normal. But still. I keep picturing some psycho trying to pull you out of a hat.”
“I don’t think that would work.”
“Maybe it’s a giant hat.”
“Perhaps,” he said with a soft laugh. Dawn Marie grinned at him as she took a bite of her burger.
“Okay, so who’s doing the magic crap? And why? That part is almost more important than who,” she said.
Tobias thought both things were of equal importance and the best answer he had was, “I haven’t the first clue.”
She pursed her lips and tapped her fingers on the table. “All right. Then we’ll just have to figure it out.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“It’s not easy, but it doesn’t have to be hopeless either,” Dawn Marie said. “And look, you don’t have to do this alone. You do everything alone and I get why, but there are people who will help you, Toby. I will help you, okay?”
“Okay,” Tobias said after spending a minute under her dark, worried gaze.
“Good,” she said. “I knew you’d see it my way.”
“I am but your slave,” Tobias said. He picked up his iced tea and sipped it.
Dawn Marie gave him a long, searching look; head tipped to the side and a little frown on her face. Tobias pretended to be unaware of it and went about eating his food like he hadn’t just said something completely foolish.
After eating, they retired to Tobias’s office to comb the internet and pore over the pages he had printed out. He thumbed through a book he’d marked a few hopeful looking passages in while Dawn Marie clicked around a website she found that focused on the history of witches, witchcraft and spell-work.
“This thing is thorough.” She stopped to blow her hair out of her face. “It doesn’t really tell me anything though. Except in the biography section about famous witches. The sections about spell-work and all are detailed, but in such a way that it’s a bunch of words that say nothing. So… it’s actually not detailed at all.”
“I’ve found that to be the case with most of those sites,” Tobias said. “Either that or they want to sell you something.”
“Yeah,” Dawn Marie said. “I’m going to look somewhere else.”
Tobias raked his fingers through his hair then rested his hands on his knees as he stared at the opposite wall. The sound of birds singing outside filtered in to him through the thick panes of glass in the old windows. There was the soft moan of rising wind twining around the eaves of the house like a greedy cat searching for a meal. The sound of Lenore preening herself on the bookshelf behind him was even louder. The racket of Dawn Marie’s fingernails clicking against the keyboard just before the soft thump of the keys being depressed—click-tap-click-tap—was louder still.
He swore he could hear the condensation sliding down the sides of the glass of ice water that sat on the end table right beside him.
Tobias took a deep, careful breath and on the exhale he snatched up his water glass and in one smooth motion flung it at the wall across from him. It hit the heavy wood paneling and exploded with the discordant music of shattering glass. Water splattered the wall and dripped down to meet the splinters of broken crystal as they fell. Dawn Marie loosed a short, startled shriek and Lenore flapped her wings, flying away to the opposite side of the room with a frightened squawk.
Tobias stood, wiped his damp hand off on the thigh of his trousers and walked out of the room. He was calm about it, no bustling and slamming of doors, no angry stomping of his feet as he went, but inside he was furious. He was wasting his time and he knew it. The kind of magic being used or even if it was magic was not the issue or even really the point after a while. The truth of the matter was he had nowhere to look and no one to ask because he had no idea. He could not find a thing when he had no idea what was happening.
&nbs
p; He balled his hands into fists and stuffed them in his pockets. Dawn Marie called his name and he heard the thump of her tennis shoes as she followed him down the hall, but he didn’t turn around. He needed to get away, get out of the house and just go somewhere that was not there. He couldn’t think, he couldn’t even find words to tell Dawn Marie to leave it alone, that it was useless.
Tobias’s eyes ached with a low, burning throb that had been getting steadily worse for the last hour. His back was starting to chime in with minute twinges and flutters that did not bode well. Usually the spasms had no warning, but not always and he could feel one coming on. He was as helpless to stop those as he was everything else and that only made him angrier. Tobias desperately wanted to lay waste to something, anything; just pour his anger and frustration and sadness out on the world until he was scoured clean of it.
He walked through the front door and into the overcast light of late afternoon. Thunder rumbled in the distance and he felt it in his bones like an echoing call as he went down the doorsteps.
“Toby! Wait a damn minute!” Dawn Marie snapped from behind him.
He felt her hand on his elbow as he stepped off the last of the bluestone doorsteps. He thought to turn to her and tell her to leave him be for a while until he calmed down. He thought he would go sit with Hylas for a little while, that might do the trick. Then the spasm hit him so hard and with such a vicious grip it felt like squeezing, pinching hands grabbing the muscles on either side of his spine and bunching them in their fingers. His legs went out from under him with no warning and he hit the ground. He stretched out his hands and caught himself, reflex the only thing that kept him from sprawling face first in the gravel.
With a gasp at the ache, Tobias stared straight ahead and told himself not to scream though he felt one clawing its way up from deep in his lungs. He stared at nothing, stared at his yard, at the flowers swaying in the wind of the rising storm. He stared at Dawn Marie as she crouched in front of him, shouting. He could see her mouth move, but couldn’t hear what she said.
Everything wavered, rippling like heat mirages rising from sunbaked blacktop and then he was looking through them at something else. The world had become a projector reel, skipping and stuttering along. He was looking down into the cadet blue eyes of a young man whose face was smeared with ash and grime, tears or sweat cutting tracks like tributary veins through it, baring his fair cheeks. It was night and they were swirling—no, they were dancing, Tobias realized. He was dancing over uneven ground with a stranger who looked at him as though he knew him.
In the distance was a loud whistle and over it all, the wail of alarms blared through the night. Fire bloomed like a wicked blossom, a billowing cloud of flames and smoke rising into the sky. The flash illuminated the crumbled ruins of a city, their dance floor the rubble of previous bombings. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw much destruction, saw a pale hand and the sleeve of a blue coat poking from beneath some of the wreckage.
The young man smiled up at him and there was trust in his eyes. There was love, endless, hopeless, timeless love; a kind of love that hurt to look at it was so fierce. So devoted. But there was fear in the young man’s eyes as well and Tobias pulled him closer, held him tighter. In a voice that was and was not his own, he said, “Nothing can harm you here.”
“Don’t let go,” the young man whispered as he pressed his face to Tobias’s bare chest.
“I will never let you go.”
And so they waltzed in elegant circles, dancing in the rubble of a bombed-out city. Explosions rocked them, but did not knock them off balance. They moved between the world where everything fell apart, safe behind a curtain where nothing could reach them. They swayed and dipped and twirled through the avalanches of crumbling stone walls and finally, the young man lifted his head and smiled. He laughed. He leaned up and kissed Tobias and he loved that young man with everything that he was and would ever be.
“Nick, help me! He’s having a fucking seizure or something!” Dawn Marie’s screams cut through the bomb-blasted night and the young man faded away again. In his place, there she was and she was shaking him, looking down into his face. Behind her, Tobias could see the sky and how the clouds lit up with lightning (bombs, it’s bombs because this is The Blitz). There was the sound of running feet crunching in the gravel and Dawn Marie’s panting, panicked breath on his face as she leaned closer.
“Please!” she cried as she shook him harder. A crow was cawing, the shadow cutting circles through the sulfur-colored light.
“I’m okay,” he said. Then he screamed through his gritted teeth as another spasm worse than the first seized him again.
His back bowed upward so sharply he felt his vertebrae creak in protest. Tobias squeezed his eyes closed against the onslaught as he felt a tug, ropes tied to his innards, pulling him, drawing him. The world beneath his closed eyelids spun and rage so icy cold it burned rose up in him. He was in agony, but he fought the chains wrapping tight around him, trying to drag him away.
“No,” he puffed out between his gritted teeth. The bands clamped around tighter, hooks dug in alongside them and he saw that smiling, laughing boy again. He saw the dark, fearful, luminous eyes of a regal woman with blood glistening like oil on her face in the moonlight. He heard the rumbling purr of a cat, the shrill death whistle of a wounded stag, felt the heaving of its sides as it died. Saw the arrow jutting from between its ribs.
“No,” Tobias said as his grip began to loosen again. He was shaking, he could hear Dawn Marie screaming. He felt her hands on him, holding him. Rain fell on his face cool and wet. It tasted like salt and he knew it was tears.
There was a hurricane in the center of his mind, blinding him with pain and images of so many faces he did not know. He slid across the ground, rocks digging painfully into his back and he dug his fingers into the gravel to hold on tighter.
He managed to suck in a whistling, wheezing breath and when he let it out, he screamed, “NO!” up into the swirling darkness. The sound of his scream married with the thunder that boomed down a torrent of rain as Tobias tipped his head back and screamed it again. He shoved with all his might, with every shred of his will he tore himself away. And in the darkness, he heard someone scream out, a word that was lost in the rising roar of the wind.
Panting and shivering, every muscle trembling like he’d been twisted through a wringer washing machine, Tobias turned himself over again and braced his hands on the ground.
“Toby?” Dawn Marie’s voice was a rasping husk, her hand on the back of his neck was shaking.
“Holy shit, what just happened?” he heard Nick say.
“I don’t know,” Dawn Marie said. She cleared her throat, stroked her fingers through Tobias’s hair. “Toby?” she asked again.
“I need to get up,” Tobias said. His own voice was tattered, barely audible in the pouring rain that pelted the gravel driveway.
“Let me help you,” Nick said.
“No,” Tobias said as he gathered his strength and began to push himself to his feet. He had kept his dignity for thirty-five years and was not about to lose it now. “I can do it.”
With uncustomary clumsiness, Tobias got to his feet and stood there in the rain, swaying like a drunkard who’d gone a few rounds in the parking lot. He hurt all over, the pain a constant, dull throb. His eyes stung and burned, the ache in them pulsing in time to his heartbeat. It was difficult to draw breath, but he did it and then took another and another. It felt like something beneath the skin of his back was moving, twitching and pulling; straining against his flesh with ever-weakening struggles.
He felt Dawn Marie’s hands on his cheeks. “Toby, look at me, huh?” she said.
For her, he would not refuse. Tobias opened his eyes and when he did, she screamed and stumbled away from him.
“Oh my fucking God!” she cried from behind her hands clasped over her mouth.
Tobias jumped and blinked rapidly in shock at her reaction. “What?” he asked, touchin
g his face. “What is it?”
She came back toward him, head tipped back cautiously to peer into his face. She reached up and brushed his hair out of his eyes.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just a trick of the light.”
“What did you see?” he asked.
“For a second your eyes—” Dawn Marie shook her head.
“They looked black,” Nick said.
Tobias frowned; his eyes had always been black. “They’ve always been black. Why is that a problem now?”
“No, man,” Nick said. He pushed his soaked hair back out of his face and blinked against the streaming water as he gestured at his own sky blue eyes. “I mean they were all black.”
“The whites even looked gone,” Dawn Marie said. “It was just the shadows from your hair though.”
“Yeah,” Nick said, shuffling his weight from foot to foot. “Just shadows.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and rolled his shoulders. “I should get back to Wes. He’ll think a tornado carried me off.”
“Thank you for trying to help, Nicholas,” Tobias said absently as he rubbed his eyes, not really paying attention to anything.
“No problem,” Nick said. He paused and turned back to them. “You need to see a doctor, Tobias. That shit was just weird.”
“Weird is weird is weird,” Tobias said. “What would we do without it?”
“I’d still work the night shift,” Nick said with a soft laugh. “Y’all take care and if you need anything, call me or Wes.”
“We will,” Dawn Marie said. “Bye, Nick.”
Tobias swayed in place as he tipped his face back to the rain hoping it would wash away the sound of that last scream from his mind.
“Hey,” Dawn Marie said.
“Hello,” Tobias said.
“What the fuck happened?”
“I do not know,” he said.
“I’ve never seen you so goddamn mad, Toby,” she said. “Even laying there like you were, that was scary. You looked ready to kill somebody.”
“I am ready to kill somebody,” he said, anger creeping back into his voice. “I am tired of this. Very tired.”
Falls the Shadow (Sparrow Falls Book 2) Page 33