by Kate Aeon
Which was read cards.
She had half a hurricane pounding on her windows and whistling over her roof — and from what the agent said, it would be that way for at least the next three or four hours and maybe a lot longer, because the storm was large and moving slowly.
So she shuffled her Universal Waite deck and took a deep breath. Had to calm herself or she was going to give awful readings.
Took the Motherpeace deck next and shuffled. The cards were slippery. Lively. Some nights they just lay there, but right at that moment they seemed to be humming with energy.
She ran through four of the seven shuffles, and a card popped out of the deck and slid across the table, faceup.
The Three of Discs.
She frowned at it. The Three of Discs was usually a positive energy card — it meant “working together to accomplish something worthwhile.” And she could have read it that way easily enough. To see it as her and the FBI and no doubt Brig and the police, all working together to put Michael behind bars.
But that wasn’t the sort of energy she was getting from it. She wasn’t getting anything positive, anything good.
She looked at the image on the card carefully. Three women, two of them on a ladder and one on the ground, all of them lugging adobe bricks to build a wall. Above them, three discs. The background was bright yellow, the atmosphere was cheerful.
But something was wrong.
Phoebe kept staring at the card, while the hairs on the back of her neck stood up and the air around her got colder and colder.
The wall. That was clear enough. That was her protection. Locks. Bars. The FBI agents upstairs. The people in the other townhouses. Obvious.
Something about the picture was not right. Was bad. A warning. She’d looked at the damned card for years, and she knew it by heart. Yet now something about it was giving her the creeps. Icy air blew on the back of her neck, and she had a knot in her gut and the crawling suspicion that this was a warning. And she wasn’t getting it.
And then she saw it.
Well, she’d seen it ten thousand times before, but the usual meaning of the card was friendly and upbeat, and in that context what she’d seen had been only decorative.
Not in this context.
There was a hole in the wall. A big one. A you-could-sling-a-galloping-herd-of-moose-through-this-hole kind of hole — built right into the wall. Built right into the structure. No one was looking at it, but all three women could see it. It made the wall worthless for defense.
And the cold and the card and her fear told her that this was her confirmation. Her validation. That there was something she and everyone else had missed. A hole in their wall. A breach in their defenses that was so big and so obvious they were looking right past it. Thinking it was supposed to be there.
You have to get out of here.
Phoebe couldn’t be sure if that whisper was her thinking or if Chick was giving her a warning.
But either way, Phoebe believed it. She couldn’t stay in the townhouse. Something was wrong. Horribly wrong.
She decided not to do any readings. Money for the locks, money for the rent — it would just have to wait. Her averages would take a hit too, but this was big.
She couldn’t just walk next door, though. The FBI had told her to stay put. That they had everything covered.
She made her way up the stairs, building the lie in her head that she was going to have to present. She wasn’t a good liar, and she knew it, so she made the story she was going to tell as true as she could.
“I’m not feeling too well,” she said, poking her head in the door. “I’m going to go on to bed. If you need anything from the kitchen, or... anything...”
“We’ll be up here until nine in the morning,” one of the two agents told her. “We’ll be switching off then, and the day shift will keep you company.”
“Can I bring you anything to drink? Or eat?”
“No, ma’am. We have that covered.”
“Okay, then. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Sleep well,” he told her. “You’re in good hands.” He gave her a friendly smile. The other agent, listening on a headset, nodded acknowledgment in her direction but didn’t look up. Phoebe made her way down the stairs, grabbing her backpack from the top of the kitchen table, where she’d dropped it.
She went into her bedroom and locked the door the way she did every night, and wedged the bar under it. Then she went into the bathroom and barred the bathroom door shut. She turned on the shower, because the sound carried pretty well through the pipes even with the storm banging and roaring around, and she wanted the two men upstairs to think they knew where she was. She went back into her bedroom and undid the locks on the sliding glass door, and then she went back to the bathroom. Stood in the shower fully dressed, with the water as cold as she could get it, to lower her external body temperature. She didn’t know if anyone was using infrared goggles, and she didn’t know if what she was doing would help her hide if they were. But she was trying to cover all the bases, and that was the only plan she could come up with. When her nail beds were purple and her teeth were chattering, she turned off the shower. Then she slung her backpack over her shoulder, slipped outside through the sliding glass door onto her patio, and got slammed by Helene, knocked onto her ass before she could brace herself.
She fell hard, but the wind blew her against the building, so the agents upstairs shouldn’t have seen her. And she was below the privacy fence line, so she should still be out of sight to the ones across the green.
She closed the sliding glass door. Locked the little key lock, which was basically useless. But, she told herself, better than nothing.
She crawled the couple of feet from her bedroom sliding glass door to the part of the privacy fence she shared with Alan’s patio. She jammed her backpack under the fence. Then she flopped on her belly and scooted facedown through grass and leaves and water and sandy mud.
The board privacy fence swayed in the wind, and she thought for a moment that if she got stuck and the rain kept coming down the way it was, she could easily drown in a couple of inches of water. Trapped.
Phoebe usually loved storms. Their energy and power felt magical to her, and in a way she had never been able to explain to anyone else, or even to herself, they comforted her. This storm was different. This storm felt like poison, and she wanted out of it as fast as she could get there. She broke free of the privacy fence and kept low and slow all the way to Alan’s patio doors, the ones that went into his main room.
She pounded on the glass. Hard. And waited.
Nothing.
Pounded again.
Nothing.
Oh, come on, she thought. It’s me. Answer your damned door. Let me in.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Sounded like something on the patio had blown loose and was slamming into the sliding glass doors in the living room.
Alan frowned, turned the tape recorder off, and muttered, “The hell with this.” He’d been an idiot to think he was going to get anything done anyway.
He hurried down the stairs, listening to the screaming storm outside and to that unending pounding. What was it? The gate? A tree limb blown down? Patio furniture?
He pulled back the verticals and tried to look outside, but the heavy tinting on the windows and all the rain made it impossible to see. So he turned off the inside light and turned on the porch light.
Phoebe was looking in at him for one instant, banging on the patio door with both fists. But when the light came on, she went belly down onto the patio and rolled right up against the house.
He turned off the light as fast as he could, opened the patio door. Instantly, horizontal rain soaked him and blew into the house.
He half dragged, half carried her inside. She felt like ice, even though the rain was blood-warm.
His phone started ringing almost immediately. Dripping wet, staring at the bedraggled Phoebe, he answered it.
“Agent Toeller her
e. You got a problem there?”
“No. Patio furniture hit the sliding glass door. I had to drag it inside before it broke the glass.”
“All right. Saw you come out on the porch and look around. I was just checking.”
“Thanks,” Alan said, and hung up the phone, and turned to Phoebe.
“What the hell are you doing? Why are you out in this? Are you crazy? Do you have any idea how dangerous this is? What if Michael had been waiting on your patio to grab you? What if one of the agents saw you sneaking around and shot you or something? For that matter, what if the wind just blew you away?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Now. But something was wrong over there. I— ” She stopped and looked down at herself, then said, “Oh, I’m sorry. Look at the mess I’m making on your carpet.”
“The hell with the carpet. I hate beige anyway. What’s wrong?”
“I just got this... warning. That I had to get out of there right then. That we had all missed something big. You and me and the police and the FBI. Like a hole in our defenses that was so obvious we didn’t see it; we were all looking right past it,” she said. “I think I heard Chick telling me to get out.”
“You think?”
“It got cold in there. In my head, I heard this warning. ‘You have to get out of here.’ But I don’t know if it was Chick or if it was just me. Me being panicked.”
“Maybe the panic is because of the storm.”
“Maybe. I thought I loved storms, but there’s something vile about this one.”
He looked at her and sighed. “And now the truth comes out. My beautiful Phoebe is a freak after all.”
“You don’t like storms?”
“They scare the piss out of me. Especially around here. I don’t like water. I don’t like high winds. I don’t like thunder or lightning.”
“I’m sorry. I just love the wildness of it all.”
He hugged her close. “You’re insane. But I think I like that about you. And I’m glad you’re here. I was going crazy trying to keep my mind occupied, telling myself you were going to be fine, and worrying about you anyway.”
She kissed him once, a gentle kiss on the cheek that wasn’t sexual. And she said, “Thank you for worrying about me” in his ear just as something huge crashed outside, and he about jumped out of his skin.
“Tree down,” he said. “Close.” But it hadn’t hit the house; he could tell. And the lights were still on.
Alan held Phoebe tighter, because he was glad not to be alone in the midst of this storm that was a hell of a lot worse than what he’d expected. He kissed her, because she was both strong and soft and he loved her, but he didn’t dare tell her that yet — it was too soon, and now with the mess in her life almost over, they were going to have time. He could tell her when the time was right.
He kissed her again, and her hands slid under his shirt, and he started to peel her out of her soaked clothes.
She laughed and said, “Cut them off if you have to. I don’t know if there’s any other way I’m ever getting out of these jeans.”
And, deftly, he showed her another way.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
They came together like the storm. All frantic groping and rain-slicked skin and bodies that pounded and surged and thrust and collided. Phoebe buried him in her and drew from his warmth and his strength a still place inside of her that she filled with him. With images of him. With memories of this moment.
The cold that she’d felt in her townhouse — the cold that was both a warning and a promise of darkness yet to come — would not leave her, but she didn’t tell Alan that. She had come to Alan thinking that as soon as she was out of her house, away from that massive breach that they had missed, she would feel better.
But when she touched Alan, the cold only got deeper, and she trembled not just with his touch but with a wordless, chilling premonition that this was their last time. That the breach remained, that they were going to fall, that they were still falling, that before the storm passed, death would touch them.
Phoebe could not tell Alan about her fear. She had no pictures for it except an image of a thrashing sea. And darkness. Endless, cold, lonely darkness, stretching into infinity.
So she clung to him. She would have had something that made sense if she’d been reading him, she thought. So she was, perhaps, getting pictures of her own future. Of her own end.
She could not find a path through her fear to anything good beyond. She was watching the end of a dream; she was moving in a moment of fantasy that would be shattered before her eyes — that would shatter her and shatter him — and all she could think of was that she was grateful, so grateful, for this moment, his touch, his passion. She knew how it felt to love someone worth loving. And if she did not know how it felt to be loved, she at least knew how it felt to be wanted and cared for. She knew what it was to be touched with hunger and yearning and desire, to be seen as someone worthwhile and good. She had been appreciated. She and Alan would not part as enemies, with him thinking that she had tried to trick him or use him. The last things they said to each other would be good, not bad.
She would be gone — someplace cold, someplace dark and horrible — but she would have this moment to light the darkness. No matter what came after this, she would have now to hang on to and to cherish.
She kissed him deeper, hungering for the salt and sweetness of his lips, the plunge of his tongue against hers. She arched against him as he took her standing, pressed against the back of the couch and then lifted up onto the couch with her legs wrapped around him.
Crashing thunder, and the stream of the wind, and her screams as he brought her over the edge.
And they were on the floor, and side by side, and he laid her on her back and draped both her legs over his left hip, and he moved into her again, and reached new places in her. She shuddered and bucked and clawed the carpet, lost in him, with the coldness inside her shoved into a corner and silenced by heat and hunger.
And they were up against the wall, and he was holding her tight, his uninjured hand stroking her breasts and her belly, and tangling in her wet hair.
And they were in the shower, with the hot water pounding on both of them, bringing the storm outside in with them, and she was crying because he was more than she could have hoped for and she loved him and this was all there was. The end. The end.
All her life she had been waiting for this man, for this moment, for this place and time, and this was all she got.
And as he came into her, as they sank into the huge garden tub while their indoor storm, like a warm rain, grew gradually cooler, she thought, Thank you. If this is all there is — if I die before the sun comes up — this will get me through the rest of forever.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Alan woke clean and dry, amazingly and magnificently sore, deliriously happy, to the sounds of the storm outside and his cell phone going off next to his right ear. He swore at anyone who would call him at this time of all times. And what time was it?
Five a.m.
They’d slept that long?
Well, they’d had a lot of exercise.
He fumbled the cell phone off the nightstand with his left hand and said, “Yeah,” and even though he was irritated with the caller, he still answered with half a stupid grin on his face because Phoebe was right there next to him and he felt like the luckiest man on the planet.
“Disaster plan activated,” Morrie said. Alan could hear Morrie’s voice shaking, something he’d never heard before. “Get in here now. Loaded charter bus hit a tractor trailer on I-95, and cars dominoed into the wreck. Every ER in the county is going to get buried in just a couple minutes.”
And Morrie hung up before Alan could even protest that he had a hand that was swollen to twice its normal size. Then Alan realized that a banged-up hand really didn’t matter under such circumstances. They were going to need him anyway.
The call left him as awake as any bucket of ice would have.
&nbs
p; “Phoebe,” he said, shaking her shoulder. “Sweetheart. I have to get into the ER now. You need to go back to your place. I don’t want you to stay here if the FBI thinks you’re over there. I don’t want anything bad to happen. Okay?”
She rolled over and looked up at him, and he hoped what he thought he saw in her eyes was real. Because it looked like the future to him.
And then her expression changed and she whispered, “Don’t go. Please. I’m... cold inside, Alan.”
He pulled her close, realizing that she was cold on the outside, too. “Phoebe, there was a bad wreck on 95; I’m going to be tied up there all day — it’s going to be hell. I can’t stay.”
She nodded, staring into his eyes, and he felt her fear, felt the cold. Icy, horrible cold that burrowed out from the center of him, slowed his blood, made his arms and legs heavy, made him weak. He shouldn’t go. Shouldn’t.
But the hospital was dealing with a disaster, and the storm would have the choppers grounded, which meant every hospital would be keeping the major trauma cases that landed on it. And this was his job. His duty. People would live or die today because of him — because he was there or because he wasn’t. He couldn’t not be there. He watched Phoebe while he pulled on a spare set of clean scrubs he kept for such situations and shrugged into his lab coat. Tried to flex the fingers of his right hand, and then knew that whatever else he would be doing, he wasn’t going to be sewing anyone up.
And he almost called in and tried to beg off, because he didn’t want to leave Phoebe. Because something was wrong.
But he had to.
Chilled and scared, frozen from the inside out, he said, “Get dressed. Hurry, sweetheart. I’ve got to walk you home, and then I have to go in to work.”
Phoebe just nodded.
While she pulled on clothes, Alan called the number Agent Toeller had given him. Toeller answered.