Broken Illusions: A Midnight Dragonfly Novel (5 page)

I didn’t even notice the fleece blanket in Detective Aaron LaSalle’s hands until my aunt took it from him and wrapped it around me.

“You’re so cold,” she said, stroking the stringy tangles from my face. “You can’t stay in these clothes—”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Of course not. I can give Aaron the keys, let him run get you something to change into.”

Not caring whether I was wet or dry or cold or hot, I was about to shake off the offer, until I saw the way Detective LaSalle was studying me. And then everything just kind of flashed, and I knew that he knew. Somehow, someway, despite the fact I hadn’t said a word about it in my texts to my aunt, Detective LaSalle knew that I was the one who’d found Chase.

“That’d be great,” I said, but he was already stepping closer—and backing me straight toward the corner.

I knew exactly what was coming. If I had a bad dream, he wanted details. If I had a weird thought, he wanted to talk about it for hours. He was so set on staying one step ahead of any and everything bad, I could barely breathe without him playing twenty questions.

Despite the fact my aunt had invited him to go with her to a friend’s wedding in Mexico in a few days, I couldn’t forget who he was, or how he’d come into my life.

I was all about exploring my abilities, but I had no desire to be Detective LaSalle’s own personal oracle. Or guinea pig.

“
Trinity.
” His voice was concerned. “The accident report says you found him.”

“Aaron—” my aunt said as I glanced toward the door from the waiting room. “Do you have to do this now?”

“Only a few questions,” he murmured, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw him lift a hand to her arm. “While everything’s still fresh.”

Her unhappy sigh made me clench my jaw.

“Trinity,” he said, so, so gentle, but I knew—
I knew
inside he was stoked. “Can you tell me how that came to be? How did you know about the accident? Where to look—”

I twisted back toward him. “
We didn’t
. He was late, not answering my texts, so we just started driving—”

“The roads he would have taken?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure you didn’t …
see anything
?”

It was a point-blank question. I didn’t want to point-blank lie—but I didn’t want to tell the truth, either. That would lead to so many more questions, and really, in the end, what did it matter? We’d found Chase. The accident was over and done with.

“I was
worried,
” I said. “My imagination was going—”

That
gotcha
look flashed in his eyes. “Your
imagination
.”

I bit down on my lip, said nothing else.

But Aunt Sara did. “That’s enough,” she said, and even after all these months, I still didn’t understand how she could wrap steel in sugar. “The hows and whys aren’t important right now.”

Detective LaSalle’s eyes lingered on hers, but finally he relented, excusing himself to make a few calls.

“It’s taking too long,”
I said, after I was sure he was gone. “Chase’s dad should have been out by now—”

“Don’t go there,” Aunt Sara said, rubbing her hands up and down my arms. “Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

I looked toward the darkness beyond the windows, where Lucas and about ten other guys stood in small groups, most of them focused on their phones.

“Ah,
cher,
” my aunt murmured in that soft way of hers, the one that made me feel warm and connected. She worried about me. I knew that. She kept wanting me to see someone, and talk. “You remind me so much of your mom.”

Everything slowed. I felt myself turn toward her, felt the rhythm of my heart change—
deepen
. My parents had been gone a long time. I didn’t even remember them—but wanted so very, very much to know. To know …
everything
.

“How?” I asked.

My aunt’s eyes were brown, and when she got emotional, they swirled like melted chocolate. “She didn’t like to talk about what she saw, either.”

So not where I’d thought this was going. “But she read tarot cards in the Quarter,” I said, confused. “She worked with the cops. If she didn’t like to talk about what she saw—”

“Those were her outlets. They were safe—they weren’t personal. But with your dad…” She let out a slow breath. “She never talked to him about her dreams.”

I pulled the black-and-gold blanket tighter. “Why not?”

She reached for me, skimming her thumb beneath my right eye. “Protection, I think. She didn’t want him to live with what she saw.”

Protection. It sounded like such an awesome word. You protect people you love. You try to make sure something bad never happens. It’s why my grandmother had taken me from New Orleans when I was two years old.

But sometimes protection backfired. Sometimes it left you without defenses of your own.

“She knew, didn’t she?” I whispered. “She knew he was going to die with her, but didn’t want to freak him out.”

Against my face, Aunt Sara’s hand stilled. “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “Your mom couldn’t always tell what she was seeing. She said a lot of times they were just random little snapshots, out of time or place, context.”

I looked away, back toward the window—and saw Chase all over again, lying without moving.

Just like I had in the dream.

Through the reflection, the door leading from the waiting room swung open, and his father appeared.

FIVE

The noise, the babies crying and the loud sitcom, all the people on their phones, the man who’d been moaning for over an hour, blurred into a low drone. The room lengthened. And the blinding white of the fluorescent lights showed every line carved into Richard Bonaventure’s face.

He was a handsome man. A surgeon, he was also a serious man. But I’d gotten to know him over the past few months—it was pretty hard to play Just Dance and
not
get to know someone better. I knew how easily he smiled and laughed. I knew his dry sense of humor.

But in that moment it was the doctor I ran toward, the one who’d gotten a call from his freaked-out nephew on a rainy cold night. I’d heard Drew. I’d heard the way his voice shook …

And now I saw the echo of that reflected in Richard Bonaventure’s tired eyes.

“Ricky—” Drew’s father said as we all reached him at the same time. “How is he?”

My heart slammed so hard I could barely hear. “Dr. Bonaventure—”

He looked from his brother to me. “It’s good news,” he said, smiling, and my eyes filled. “A few scrapes and contusions, a pretty wicked headache—but the CT scan is clean. He said his ankle hurt so we took an X-ray, but that was clean, too. Just a minor sprain.”

Drew and his dad hugged. Victoria reached for her phone. Aunt Sara came up behind me and put her hands to my shoulders. But I didn’t move, couldn’t move, just stood there with silent tears running from my eyes.

“Can I see him?” I asked.

Dr. Bonaventure’s eyes crinkled. “I have strict instructions not to show my face again without you.”

The smile started deep, spread fast.

“Come on.” Putting a hand to my back, he steered me through the doors, past the nurses’ station, down a hall lined with patient bays—to one halfway down on the right. He reached for the curtain and pulled, and it was all I could do not to launch myself into the cubicle.

Chase sat on the edge of the narrow bed, with wires running to his chest and oxygen at his nose, the flimsy white-and-blue hospital gown no match for the width of his shoulders. His hair hung into his eyes, cuts crisscrossed his cheekbone, and the corner of his mouth was swollen, but he was there and he was okay—more than okay, perfect.

Everything else slipped away, slipped totally away, leaving only the overwhelming need to dive into his arms.

“Chase—”

He started toward me, but his mother held him back. “Not yet,” she said with a hand on his arm.

Susan Bonaventure was a lot harder to read than her husband.

“You’re okay,”
I said, and then I was stepping into him and closing my arms around him, burying my face against his neck.

I so did not care about the antiseptic smell.

“You’re okay,” I whispered. “You’re really okay.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, wishing I could drown in that moment, in the absolute perfection of feeling him hold me.

“Of course I am.” He eased back, lifting a hand to my face. “Hey,” he said, swiping at the tears that had once again started to fall. “Don’t cry.”

Everything was watery, glistening. “I was so scared,” I whispered. “When I saw you lying there—”

“Sh-h-h. Over and done with.”

I closed my eyes. Maybe it was minutes before Dr. Bonaventure told me Chase was being discharged. Maybe it was longer. I really didn’t know, couldn’t stop thinking about how close I’d come to losing him.

If Drew and I hadn’t found him …

If we hadn’t gone looking …

If I’d ignored the vision, misinterpreted it, written it off as a remnant from the strange dream I’d been having …

A premonition, I realized. A warning. I knew that now. And hours later, long after kissing Chase good-bye and returning to the condo, I slipped between my sheets and reached for the dragonfly dangling against my chest, and whispered into the darkness.
“Thank you.”

*   *   *

I run. Around me, yellow bleeds into peach, then orange, purple. Light fades, and the sky glows.

“Where are you?” I scream.

The wind laughs, and the skeletal trees slip closer.

I spin around. Or maybe that’s the ground. I don’t know. I just know everything is turning, tilting.

“Please! Answer me!” But night falls quickly, and shadows steal light. Still I run, while around me, the whole world twists like an out-of-control carnival ride. “I’m here!”

The sky cracks, and the concrete buckles. And then I see him, see him lying so horribly still …

“No!” But already I’m falling.

Already I’m drowning.

“Trinity!”

Blindly, I reach toward the different voice, grab for the forgotten safety of his hand, but find tall grass instead. I pull, try to hang on.

“Trinity!”

But the water rises, and my body slips.

“No—no!”

Alone in the darkness, I still, listen.

“Omigod, you’re crazy!”

The voice … I know that voice, have heard it before. But I can’t place it.

“No—stay away—you’ll never get—!”

Silver flashes, sharp, glistening, and her frantic pleas dissolve into screams.

*   *   *

I came awake on a violent slam of my heart, jerking as my eyes flew open, my throat burned, and Delphi watched me through wide, worried eyes. Robotically I lifted a hand to her pointy face and rubbed between her ears, feeling more than hearing her purr.

As always, simply touching her made the band around my chest loosen.

It was still so hard to reconcile her with the terrified and emaciated cat that appeared on my doorstep the week after we found Jessica. I’d brought her upstairs and fed her, but it had taken weeks for her to venture from beneath my bed. Even then there’d been something about the unblinking look in the green of her eyes, something wise and … knowing.

Her name came to me in a dream.

Now she watched me, just as she did every time I pulled myself from a dream. The first time I’d seen Chase in the grass, she’d sat crouched beside me as I’d lain in the predawn darkness, squeezing the phone and listening to his sleep-roughened voice promise me he was fine. I’d begged him to be careful—but just as my mother had been unable to stop the fire, how did you protect against something as random as lying in the grass? Chase walked his black Labs every morning. He ran track. He was outside all the time.

The dreams, the premonitions, didn’t come with dates and times and places. Maybe that’s why I’d finally agreed to play with the Ouija board last night, some psychic nudge that it was time. It made sense. I couldn’t help but think the board was another channel, another way for my subconscious to communicate—
or warn
.

More than a little awed, I slipped from bed—and headed for the kitchen.

*   *   *

“You gonna eat that, T, or stare at it all afternoon?”

I looked up from the brownie I’d reached for when Chase had first dragged the game board from the box and placed it between us. Now everything was set—the pieces in their starting positions, the cards stacked facedown in three piles, the murder weapons carefully arranged.

Half the brownies I’d brought over were gone.

The second I’d finished baking them, I’d gotten dressed and headed over, arriving late morning. With the sweep of bangs falling against his forehead and his dark Saints T-shirt stretched tight enough to reveal how much time he spent in the weight room, Chase now sat sprawled on the sofa where we’d shared our first kiss—and so many others since then—as if this was any other Sunday, and last night had been any other night.

But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop staring at the bluish-black swelling around his eyes—and his totally busted lip.

“You saw me, didn’t you?” he guessed. “That’s how you found me by the canal.” Something in his eyes changed, the blue going darker. “You’re seeing it now.”

My heart just kinda stopped. His parents had hovered for over an hour, until announcing a few minutes ago they were going to the store. We were finally alone, with the exception of his younger brother Austin upstairs, playing Street Fighter with some friends.

This was the first time Chase had looked at me—really, really looked at me. And I didn’t understand. He was the one who’d been in the accident. He was the one who’d spent hours in the ER, whose father wouldn’t let him leave the house for twenty-four hours.

But he looked at me like I was the one hurting, and he didn’t know how to make it stop.

“It was like a flash,” I told him. “You were lying in the grass, just like in the dream.” And finally it broke, that cheerful, everything’s-fine wall I’d slapped around all I didn’t want to feel, the fear and the shock, the horror, the possibility that I was too late. That I’d lost him.