Authors: Ingrid Weaver

Tags: #mobi, #Romantic Suspense, #Paranormal Romance, #Fiction, #Shadow, #epub

Delaney's Shadow (7 page)

And proving to herself that she was indeed just like her father.

FOUR

EVEN BEFORE SHE UNDRESSED THAT NIGHT, BEFORE SHE dutifully rubbed the cream the doctor had prescribed into each line of the healing sutures, before she slid between the sheets and reached out to turn off the lamp on the beside table, Delaney knew the nightmare would find her.

The reprieve she’d had when she’d first come home was over. It wasn’t only the added stress of Elizabeth’s lawsuit. Deep down Delaney had known there was no escaping what haunted her, no matter how far she went. She couldn’t get away from it because she’d brought it with her.

The dream started as it always did. She saw a road through a tunnel of headlights. Or it seemed like a road, winding ahead of her in a shiny ribbon of bluish gray, but it was narrow like a path. She shouldn’t be going this fast. The branches and leaves were slapping her face and shins. She shifted her legs, pressing back into the seat, into the mattress, trying to stop her forward momentum. She didn’t want to see what was around the next bend. She didn’t want to reach the end. This was the wrong way. She had to turn back.

But she only went faster. Her hair was blowing across her eyes, and she lifted her hand to push it away, but now it felt as though she were moving through water. She couldn’t breathe. She fought to turn her head, to ask Stanford to help because it was dark and she was cold and why couldn’t she slow down? This wasn’t the way home and oh God what was that sound?

Delaney curled into a ball in the center of the bed. The top sheet was wrapped around her calves but the rest of the covers had slid to the floor. No breeze came through the window, no noise, no light. The moon had not yet risen, and the maples beside the house hid the stars. There was nothing to wake her up or to guide her back.

So she hurtled forward, through the cold and liquid scene, until the pale gray path turned shiny, then white, then fireball red, and suddenly she wasn’t moving anymore because she was outside, freezing and burning and helpless to block out those sounds.

Metal screeched as it buckled. It moaned and cried like a living thing. Glass sang when it burst, a high-pitched pulse that stung the scalp behind her ears. Fire laughed and cackled as it ate flesh. Bones crunched like stalks of fresh celery.

Delaney pressed her face to her knees. The sheet beneath her was damp from sweat. So was her skin. Slick and hot like the blood that ran from her hands.

No. Please, no. Not again. No more.

The worst noise was yet to come, the heart-rending sound of a man screaming.

Stanford.

He was dying.

Again.

She tried to move, but her legs wouldn’t work. Something held them down. Strands of seaweed curled around her ankles like slimy fingers. She tried to free herself but she couldn’t get any air even though she could feel the bubbles brushing past her lips as they rose through the water.

Delaney was dying, too. Through the hell of her nightmare, that certainty reached her consciousness. Her mind cried out in desperation.

No! Not again
.
Please!

Someone settled on the bed beside her. She could feel the mattress dip with his weight and sensed that she was no longer alone.

Yes, oh
yes
! He’d come back. He couldn’t be dead if he was here with her. Delaney moved toward the presence that she felt and spread her fingers to capture the warmth that flowed from his body.

Odd, though, that the place where Stanford was lying didn’t smell of lime aftershave. It smelled of sunshine and fresh air and . . . turpentine.

MAX SURFACED SLOWLY. HIS MIND WAS AS LAX AS HIS BODY, and both were urging him to sink back into sleep. His dreams, on the rare occasions when he did dream, were merely random firings of his synapses, kaleidoscope patterns behind his closed eyelids with no purpose and little form. His subconscious got sufficient exercise while he was awake and painting, so he usually slept like the dead.

But this dream was prodding him forward, refusing to let him rest. It encompassed his senses as well as his mind. He was positive he was no longer alone. He was just as sure there was no one else in his bedroom, because he’d never yet allowed a woman to spend the night. But there was a presence in his bed, an unmistakably female one.

Max felt no alarm at first. Having the woman here seemed right somehow. He could sense her weight on the mattress beside him and felt the warmth of her breath on his neck. He turned his head, and her hair tickled his chin. She smelled sweet, like roses.

Like Deedee.

Max’s eyes drifted open.

The dream didn’t fade. Neither did the sensation of the woman’s presence. He swept his arm across the bed beside him. There was nothing in the space, and yet he could feel a resistance, as if the air was thickening . . .

His pulse picked up. He looked around. The bed was cloaked in shadows. So was the entire room. The only illumination came from an orange glow that seemed to float in the corner. It was centered between a bookshelf and a potted plant.

He had no bookshelf in his bedroom. He kept no houseplants. His bed didn’t have wooden bedposts, either. What the hell . . .

The glow shimmered in midair, appearing to come from a dimension that wasn’t bounded by distance. He began to hear noises now. Crunching metal. It sounded like something was crashing over and over inside that light.

The woman beside him pressed closer, as if he could protect her, just as Deedee used to . . .

Finally, the pattern of what was happening registered in his brain. The last traces of sleep fled.

Hell, this was no illusion. Deedee had returned, but instead of crashing his painting, she’d stolen into his sleep.

Max sat up fast, pulling away from the presence on the bed.

He didn’t move quickly enough. Something tingled across his back. Not a touch, yet deeper than a touch. It held him where he was as her voice slipped into his mind. “Don’t go. Please.”

He felt himself start to soften, to lean into her, the way he used to. It was a reflex response. He gritted his teeth and held himself rigid. “What the hell do you want this time?”

“Max?”

“Who else did you expect?”

“Max?”

She sounded surprised. He didn’t know why she would, because this sure hadn’t been his idea. She’d been the one to bring him here.

But where was
here
? She’d drawn him into her grandparents’ yard this morning. He’d recognized the scene as it had formed around him, because she’d often played with him there. He glanced at the corner again. The plant and bookshelf seemed real, but the rest had the wavering haze of an unfinished dream. He swung his legs over the side of the bed.

“Max, wait!”

“This has to stop, Deedee. Quit barging into my head.”

“Don’t leave me.”

“Hey, you were the one who left me.”

“What?”

“Forget it. Go back to wherever it is you’ve been all these years. We’re done.”

“Help me, Max. I . . . need you.”

“What? To remember? I told you—”

“No! I don’t want to remember this part.”

The sounds of crunching metal grew closer. The glow in the distance—in the corner—brightened until flames covered the plant and licked up the walls. At their core was a dark mass, part car wreckage, part seaweed, writhing in rhythm with the screeching metal. As he watched, it stretched tendrils across the floor toward his feet.

This wasn’t a dream; it was a nightmare.

Deedee’s nightmare.

Max twisted to look at the bed. In the flickering light of the flames she had created, he could see the outline of her shape beside him. She had curled into a ball, her face pressed to her knees as she shivered and gasped for air. Someone was screaming, but it wasn’t Deedee; it was a man.

The dark tendrils from the mass in the corner reached Max’s toes and flowed upward. Cold slime, like the muddy bottom of a pond, enveloped his ankles. He was being drawn toward the core of the nightmare.

“Make it stop, Max. Please!”

He could free himself with a snap of his thoughts. She was the one who was generating this image, not him. He could break the connection between them as he had before and be back in his own bed in the next second.

That was what he should do. She didn’t belong in his life. This was the second time she’d ambushed him when his mental defenses were down, and she had no right. The boy she was looking for didn’t exist any longer. He owed her nothing.

“I’m begging you, Max.” She was shaking so badly her teeth chattered. “I can’t do this alone. Help me. Keep me safe
.
”

For all its urgency, the plea was silent. It was here and yet not here, like all the other words she’d spoken and the bed he sat on and the room he was in.

Yet it held him in place as firmly as her touch that hadn’t been a touch . . .

Damn.
Damn!
Max kicked loose from the slime that gripped his feet and swung his legs back onto her bed. “You’re okay, Deedee. It’s only a dream.”

She moaned. “It’s real.”

“It’s a dream,” he repeated. “It won’t hurt you.”

“It will. It always does.”

Always? Had she experienced this horror before?

Light flared from the corner, sending the flames racing along the ceiling while the dark seaweed tendrils crept over the edges of the mattress and up the bedposts. Deedee wrapped her arms around her legs and curled more tightly into her ball.

Max inched closer and leaned over her until he sensed the curve of her ear beneath his lips. “Deedee, you have to stop this.”

“How?”

The slime touched his feet again. He braced his hands beside her and shifted to his knees. “You know how. Go somewhere else.”

“I can’t.”

“We’ll go together. Think of sunlight. Birds. You like birds, don’t you?”

Fire billowed through the air, curling above the bed like a living canopy. The man was still screaming, only the sound was turning guttural, liquid, melding with the whoosh of the flames.

“Think of roses, Deedee. I can smell them on your hair.” Max pulled out a memory to build the picture in his head. “Look, we’re in your grandma’s garden. Here’s a bud that’s almost open. Aren’t the petals soft?”

Cold was spreading across the sheet as the glistening, wet darkness advanced. Overhead, the flames screamed in harmony with the man.

Max lifted one hand to her shoulder, holding his fingers close enough for her to feel his warmth. “Deedee, you have to let go of this dream before it swallows you.”

“I can’t.”

“You can. What color is the rosebud?”

“I don’t know!”

“I think it’s yellow. Sure, it’s the color of soft butter.”

“I don’t see it.”

He concentrated harder. “There’s dew on the petals.”