A Deep and Dark December (22 page)

“He’s targeting our specific abilities,” she said, her voice hollow. She startled a glance out of him and he found her watching him, as though judging how much more he could take. “Turning up the volume,” she continued. “So Aunt Cerie hears every thought of every person around her as though they were screaming. A constant, never ending barrage of noise. I don’t know how much more she can take.

“And my dad… he’s losing the ability to communicate. Not just putting thoughts into people’s heads, but verbalizing. He’s slipping away. From life, from reality...”

“From you?”

“Yes.”

“How many people know about your power? I mean really know.”

“We call them abilities,” she corrected. “They’re a skill, not a tool.”

“Ability, then. Who knows about them?”

“My dad, my aunt, you…my mom.”

He remembered the gossip around town about Colleen December. And when she’d walked out on her husband and child. Her name, whispered like a curse, had been on everyone’s lips. Even now, years later, her name sparked hushed conversations and shaking heads. Instead of putting the blame where it laid—on Erin’s mother—the talk turned toward Erin and speculation that there must be something wrong with her or else her mother never would’ve left and not looked back.

“When was the last time you spoke to your mother?”

“Doesn’t matter. She wouldn’t be involved.”

Graham pondered her strange choice of words—wouldn’t be involved. “Maybe she told someone.”

“She doesn’t tell people about me.”

That surprised him. He wanted to know more but she was already changing the subject.

“I’ve worked really hard my whole life to keep my ability a secret.”

“Even from friends and boyfriends?”

“Until recently it’s been an easy secret to keep. I had control over the visions or at least control over when and what I saw. Now they come at me out of nowhere and it’s getting harder for me to climb out of them.”

“So you can call up a vision about a particular person or event. Specifically?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“How?”

“All I have to do is concentrate on a person, decide if I want to see the past or the future, and then bam, I see it.”

Did she have visions about him? Did she know about what had happened in L.A.?
He wanted to ask, but didn’t really want to know the answer. Something else nagged at him. “Do the people you have visions about know? I mean, can they feel it?”

“Not as far as I know.” But he could hear the uncertainty in her voice.

The obvious question lay between them so he asked it, “Can you call up Deidre’s murderer again, maybe see his face this time so we know who we’re dealing with?”

“No.”

“No, as in you tried and couldn’t or no, you won’t?”

“I tried, but there’s a…block. I don’t know how to describe it. I don’t know who he is so I can’t access the vision that way. When I tried going back to the day of Deidre’s murder there’s nothing to grab onto. It’s blacked out.”

“You said you can feel your dad and aunt in your head and purposefully block them. Is it possible for someone with another kind of ability to know when you’re using your ability on them?”

“If they can, they’ve never told me.”

“
Would
they tell you though? I would think that would give them an advantage they’d want to keep to themselves.”

“How very cynical,” she accused. “Is that what you would do with your own family?”

“Probably not, but with anyone else—”

“
Anyone
else?”

“Most anyone else. Look, I’m just trying to work through how whoever’s manipulating your family’s abilities is able to target each of your specific talents. And how they seem to know about your secret ability.”

He exited the freeway and turned onto the two-lane highway that led to the center of San Rey. Lightning flashed, illuminating Erin’s face for the briefest moment. Even with the frown creasing her brow, she was so lovely, his next breath stalled in his chest and he had to force his focus back to the road ahead.

“I don’t know,” she finally answered. “I just don’t know.”

He reached for her hand and found it clenched in her lap. She resisted at first, then relaxed, slipping her fingers into his.

“I’m sorry,” he said, offering useless words instead of pulling the car over and clutching her against him, as he really wanted to do. “I know none of this is easy.”

“That’s my life…not easy.”

Her laugh, full of worry and fear, fisted his gut. He held onto her tighter and pressed a little harder on the accelerator. They came over a rise and the lights of San Rey sparkled in the distance as the first raindrops hit the windshield.

“How long have Mabel and your father been seeing each other?” he asked to shake loose the mood that had settled over them like the storm clouds outside.

Her laugh was real this time. “Close to ten years. They think no one suspects.”

“Seemed obvious to me.”

“My aunt and I have known for years, but pretend we don’t. I think they like the illicitness of their off and on affair.”

“Wasn’t she still married to Calvin Hobbs up until a couple of years ago?”

“She married Calvin when she and my dad were in an off phase,” Erin said. “She does that when she gets mad and frustrated because my dad won’t marry her. Breaks up with him, marries someone else, gets a divorce and then takes up with my dad again.”

“Why won’t your dad marry her?”

“He’s still waiting for my mom to come back,” she answered quietly.

“Do you think she’ll come back?” he asked, just as quietly.

“No. Never.”

“You’ve seen it.” He didn’t have to ask, he just knew. “But you haven’t told your dad.”

“No. We don’t talk about her.”

“I’m surprised he’s never asked.”

“He had his chance to make her stay and he didn’t.”

“By using his power, you mean? How would that work? He puts the thought in her head that she should stay with him and then what?”

“Why not? What good are our abilities if we don’t use them?”

“What kind of victory would that have been?”

“Victory?” She tried to tug her hand free, but he wouldn’t let her.

“You know what I mean. He would always know that she stayed because he forced her to, not because she wanted to be with him.”

“And what about me?”

Her question threw him. He suddenly had an image of Erin as a child, growing up with rumors and pitiful glances instead of her mother. Maybe. Maybe if he were in Donald’s place he’d have used his ability to spare his child. Everything in him immediately argued against that thought. He’d just as soon wait out the rest of his life, as Donald had, for a wife who was never coming back than live with the artificiality of a forced relationship. He’d always know, in every look, every show of affection that none of it was real. And it would shame him.

“Maybe if he’d made her stay she might’ve gotten past…things,” Erin said. “And I wouldn’t have had to grow up without her.”

“It’s no different than using your visions of the future to alter it. Just because you have an ability doesn’t mean you should use it every chance you get.”

“You sound like my aunt.”

“Cerie’s a very smart, very scary woman.”

“Are you saying that if you had an ability you’d never use it?”

He hitched a shoulder. “Depends on the ability.”

“What if you could move objects with your mind and you saw that a little girl was about to be hit by a car. Would you use your ability to save her? Or would you stand there and watch her die?”

“I…”

“It’s not so easy, is it?”

“Change one thing and you could change everything.”

“The Butterfly Effect. I know. I live with it. It’s like if I’d done something about seeing Greg dead. Stopped it somehow. I would have altered everything that came after. Like this moment, this conversation. None of it would have happened. To be honest, sometimes I don’t think changing things would be such a bad idea.”

“Have you ever?”

“Changed things? I tried once. With my mother. It obviously didn’t work out. Now the fear is too deeply ingrained. In that way, Aunt Cerie did a phenomenal job raising me.”

“I’d say she did a phenomenal job all the way around.”

He pulled up to the police station, cut the engine, and turned toward her. He could just make out her features in the dim streetlight. Lightning flared, illuminating them both for the barest of seconds. Thunder rumbled low as he reached for her. She met him halfway and he was finally, finally kissing her. Being with her, kissing her pushed everything else away. It was only them. Him and her and nothing else.

“I lied earlier,” he said, breaking the kiss to trail his lips along her jaw line.

“Hmm?”

“I lied. I would’ve saved that girl from the car. Or at least tried.”

“I know.”

It was such a relief to hear her say that, to know she believed in him. Maybe he wasn’t so lost after all if she could find him amongst all the horror of what they were up against. He recaptured her mouth, pouring every grateful thing he felt with her into one kiss, one long, slow caress. She clutched at him, matching his urgency with hers.

His thoughts scattered, spiraling into a single need, sharp enough to slice him in two. He struggled to remember where they were. Struggled to right his world and put her, this kiss, and everything else into some kind of perspective. But when they broke apart and he looked into her eyes, he saw everything he was reflected back at him. She’d scrubbed him clean of his past and presented him back shiny and new and worthwhile. He wanted to be all of that for her. All of that and more.

“Erin,” he begged.

“Ssh.”

“I don’t think I can do this.” He wasn’t the man she thought he was. She didn’t know the shit he carried around and how much of that would get piled onto her. He couldn’t do that to her.

She put a hand on his cheek and leaned in close. “I know.”

They left his car in front of the police station and walked up the hill in the rain to Erin’s house. Standing at her door, dripping, Erin struggled to fit the key in the lock. She shook, not from the chill, but with a craving that ran so deep, it scared her more than anything. If Graham were going to reject her, she’d just as soon he did it right here on the porch. Once they crossed the threshold she couldn’t be responsible for what she might do. Desperate as she was, she wasn’t above begging and that, well, that would be the end of whatever they had going here and the last of her self-respect.

He fit his hand over hers and guided the key into the lock for her. She turned it and hesitated, biting the inside of her cheek. He put a hand on her shoulder, twisting her around to face him. The last shreds of her control slipped away under the heaviness of his stare. She saw the same mixture of longing, nerves, need, and unworthiness she felt.

She fisted the front of his shirt and pulled him through the door with her. She didn’t stop pulling him until they were in her bedroom. There, they squared off. And then he slowly reached back and closed the door behind him. In the darkness she could feel him, burning in the space between them. She didn’t know who moved first, but suddenly they were on each other, kissing, touching, yanking at clothing, each other’s and their own.

His shirt hit the floor with a wet smack. He’d gotten soaked, having left his coat with her father. That thought did more to excite her than the magic he was doing with his fingers and mouth. And oh, what magic it was. Her blouse and bra vanished, replaced with his hands. He bit her earlobe and she let out a loud moan, her knees dipping. His chuckle was low and wicked as he bit her again.

“God, Graham.”

“Yes, Erin?”

“You’re wearing too many clothes,” she panted, reaching for the button of his pants.

“So are you,” he said, shoving her jeans down her hips.

He cupped her backside, bringing her up against him. She could feel the hardness of him and renewed her efforts to free him. The wet denim wouldn’t budge. She made a frustrated noise, which seemed to amuse him as he took over the job, slipping out of the rest of his clothes faster than she could have wished them away.