Dreamer (The Seeker Series Book 2) (8 page)

“I suspected. Shit,” he sighed.

“I can leave,” I offered. “So you can…”

He clenched my hand tightly. “Please stay.” I nodded and we walked together toward his father.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“…
it
was as though two different worlds had

bumped into each other, and I was

shaking from the collision.”

–Madeleine L’Engle

Jack and his father stared at each other, neither saying anything. I don’t think Jack realized how hard he was squeezing my hand, but I wasn’t about to bring it to his attention. You’ve heard the expression about tension so thick you could cut it with a knife? Well, I never gave it any credence before, but this was a great example of it. As I looked between the two men, I was amazed at their resemblance. Jack’s father had a slightly darker complexion and his hair had silver threads running throughout, but they had the same eyes, the same nose, and the same strong jawline. No wonder I thought the vision I had was of Jack in the future; I felt like I was getting a glimpse of what he would look like in twenty or so years. His father was almost as good-looking as Jack, but I hoped Jack wouldn’t have the haunted, broken look in his eyes I saw in the older man.

“Jackson.” His father finally broke the silence.

“Dad,” Jack choked out. “What are you doing here?”

“I need to talk to you, son.”

“Fine. So talk,” Jack ground the words out.

“Could we go somewhere for a few minutes? Alone?” I noticed his father had a thicker accent than Jack and remembered he was raised in Mexico.

Jack shook his head. “No. Here is fine. And she stays.” He stared hard at his father for a moment, then finally relented slightly, saying, “This is my girlfriend, Ally Moran. Ally, this is my father, Marcos Ruiz.” We shook hands briefly.

His father nodded slightly, looking sadder and more defeated. “I wanted to let you know I’ve moved to Albuquerque. I’ve been hired as an adjunct professor at the university.”

“That’s great, Dad,” Jack said in a completely flat voice. “Congratulations. I hope you’ll be really happy. I didn’t know they hired drunks to be professors.”

I looked up at him sharply, shocked at his cruelty. His skin was drawn tightly across his cheekbones, his eyes hooded.

Marcos shut his eyes against Jack’s verbal arrow. He opened them and looked his son in the face. “I deserved that. I spent eight months in rehab and have been sober for a year. I know I can’t ever make it up to you, but I want to try. And I need to be a part of Megan’s life. I’m so sorry, Jack. I can’t begin to tell you how much I regret the past few years.”

Jack looked away and I could detect the shine of tears in his eyes. “Yeah, well…you’ll understand if I don’t really give a shit.”

His dad nodded again and looked away as well. “I do understand, Jackson. I needed you to know. Trina has invited me to dinner tonight so I can see Megan. I know you don’t want to see me, but I hope you’ll be there for her. This will most likely be very upsetting to her. She’ll need you.”

I hated Marcos in that moment; hated him for what he had done to Jack, and what he was doing to him now. I knew Jack would do anything for Megan, no matter how painful it would be for himself.

Jack, of course, nodded. “I’ll be there.”

“Good. Thank you, son,” Marcos said.

“Are we done?” Jack asked. “I really need to get to work.”

Marcos nodded. “Yes. I’ll see you this evening. It was nice to meet you, Ally.”

I watched him walk away, get in his car, and leave before I turned back to Jack. He had his hands in his pockets and was staring down at the pavement, the muscles in his jaw flexing. I didn’t know what to say, so I silently wrapped my arms around his waist and held him tightly. After a full minute, he finally took his hands out of his pockets and hugged me close.

“Thanks for staying,” he whispered.

“Always,” I whispered back. “Will you come over after dinner?”

He nodded and pulled away. “I gotta go.”

***

I worked on homework for my regular classes later in the evening while waiting for Jack to show up. We were reading
King Lear
for my CNM English class and I was supposed to be working on a character analysis for Edmund. The only thing I could come up with was he was a sadistic bastard and
King Lear
was probably the most depressing play ever written. I’m really more of a happily-ever-after fan.

I finished all my regular homework and glanced at the clock. I had begun to think Jack wasn’t coming and I was worried maybe things hadn’t gone well at dinner. When he finally arrived, he came in and flopped down on the couch, leaning his head back, eyes closed, and groaned. I curled up next to him, crawling under his arm and laying my head against his chest. He pulled me close and kissed the top of my head.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Yeah, I guess,” he breathed. “This is not going to go down as one of my favorite days, however. It may even make my top ten list of days that completely suck.”

“How did Megan do?”

“Better than expected. Better than I did, actually. She got real quiet and watched our dad throughout dinner. She sure didn’t eat much.”

“What did you do?” I was almost afraid to ask because he had been so angry this afternoon.

“Well, I didn’t punch him in the face, which is what I wanted to do. I guess I kept quiet too. Any question I wanted to ask was something I didn’t want Megan to hear.”

“You probably didn’t eat much, either. Wait here and get signed on the eCademy site.” I kissed him quickly and headed to the kitchen. By the time I got back with a sandwich for him, he had both our laptops ready to go for our economics class. I grimaced; I had very quickly realized economics was not my cup of tea. If supply decreases and demand increases, what happens to prices? Who the hell cares? Certainly not me.

Jack took the plate with his sandwich from me, set it on the coffee table, and pulled me down on his lap for a kiss. “Thanks for taking care of me, querida. I love you.” He kissed me again. “And I can tell you love me too.”

“Oh, yeah? How so?”

“You actually touched meat for me.” He gestured to the ham sandwich and then kissed me for a few moments. “All right. Stop trying to seduce me and let’s get back to economics. I know how much you love those demand curves,” he said as he set me down on the couch beside him.

“Seduce you? Hey, I’m not the one who started it this time.” I said. “And I freaking hate economics. If it was up to me, we’d go back to the barter system.”

He laughed and took a huge bite of his sandwich.

Two hours later, we had finished both our economics and government homework and were watching the news. One of the lead stories was the discovery of the identity of the remains of Ashley Hayes, missing since 1984. They flashed a picture of her. She was blonde, beautiful, and smiling. It was probably her senior picture and it made me sad to think of her never graduating, never going to college, or getting married.

“My mom’s new boyfriend is the lead detective on the case,” I told him.

“Really? Huh. That’s cool, I guess.”

“Yeah…” I said.

“What is it?” He turned to look at me.

“Well, I feel like I’ve heard her name before. I mean, before they found her body. It’s bugging me, that’s all. It’s stupid.”

He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. I loved when he did that. “Just a feeling you get? Right?” I nodded. “Sweetheart, I’ve learned to never ignore those feelings you get. You
are
psychic, babe. You should probably pay attention to this.”

I gave him a half smile and nodded. We went back to watching the news. During the sports report I decided to ask him more about his dad. “Jack, are you going to see him again? I mean, to really talk to him?”

He exhaled loudly. “I don’t know. I don’t want to. I don’t want anything to do with him, but he is Megan’s father. I need to figure out if he’s sincere about being a part of her life. I don’t want her to have to go through any more pain.”

“Like you did?”

He pulled me closer. “Yeah. God, Ally. I don’t know if I can forgive him. I’m so fucking mad at him.”

I sat up and kissed him. “I love you. And I’m here for you, okay?”

“I know.”

***

The car slowed and came to a halt on what sounded and felt like a dirt road. I had been bounced around in the back for at least fifteen minutes, but it was impossible to tell how long we had traveled before I woke up. I was more terrified than I had ever been in my entire life and my heart was pounding out of my chest. I heard the driver get out and then the back passenger door opened. I was grabbed by my hair and my neck and pulled violently out of the car. I tried to scream around the duct tape. “Shut up, bitch, or I will kill you.” The voice was gravelly and low. I was nearly certain he was going to kill me anyway, so I kept trying to scream. I collapsed onto the dirt, but he yanked me up painfully and turned me around to face him. I didn’t recognize his face, but I did recognize the face reflected back at me in his sunglasses. It wasn’t my face. The blonde girl in the reflection met my eyes. It was the girl from the news, Ashley Hayes. “Help me, Ally!” she screamed in my head.

I woke up with a gasp, sitting up in bed, my heart pounding. I reached to turn on my bedside lamp, fumbling in my haste and knocking over the stack of books on my nightstand. I managed to get the light on and sat there, breathing hard and trying to fully wake from the nightmare. It had never gone this far and the ending had really spooked me. What was that? Why would my imagination dredge up something so awful? I got up to get a drink from the bathroom and splash cold water on my face. As I got back in bed, I bent down to pick up the books I had knocked over. The one I was currently reading,
A Ring of Endless Light
, had fallen open to the inscription and book plate inside the front cover:

Merry Christmas, Ashley 1983 Love, Mom and Dad. This Book Belongs to Ashley Hayes.

Ashley Hayes. No wonder the name seemed familiar to me. I was reading her book.

***

Okay. So I had a book that used to belong to a dead girl. A dead girl whose remains had been recently discovered by a hiker and his dog. And I was having nightmares about this girl being kidnapped. The problem was I didn’t know if the nightmares really were about her or if they were simply a product of my overactive imagination. I mean, I didn’t see her face in the dream until I had seen it on television. So, these dreams might be psychic, but they also might be the product of my stress and anxiety. At least I knew why her name had seemed so familiar to me: I had seen it the first night I started reading the book in my hotel room in Galway, unable to go back to sleep after having a nightmare. Wait…that was the first night I had the nightmare. And it was the first night I started reading Ashley’s book. Well, crap. It looked like this might be psychic after all, and there was very likely a connection between the book and the nightmares. I really needed to talk to Tara. Jack was going through too much right now with his dad, so I didn’t want to burden him with this new development and Cassie was still out of town, so Tara would have to be my confidante. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to tell Cassie about my possibly psychic dreams anyway; it would certainly be added to the list of Why Ally is Probably the Next Oracle.

***

We were standing around in the quad at school the next morning, chatting before first period, and I was trying to pull Tara aside for a minute so I could arrange an after school get-together to tell her about my late-night revelations regarding my nightmares.

“Ah,
bonjour mes amis
,” Rémy approached our group and began kissing everyone on both cheeks, like I had seen in movies. The rest of my friends seemed to be eating it up, especially Dustin. I could definitely see him trying to bring it into fashion here. Was I the only one who saw how ridiculous and cheesy this guy was?

When he came to me, I raised my eyebrows and gave him a look which clearly said ‘hell, no.’ He flashed his damn smirk and winked at me.

Jack arrived and elbowed Rémy out of the way. “Dude, do not try to kiss my girlfriend. I will have to hurt you.” He pulled me to him for a rare public kiss.

Although I always enjoy his kisses, this one annoyed me slightly because I felt like he was marking his territory more than he wanted to kiss me. It annoyed me even more that Rémy seemed amused by it.

“Jack, do not be upset.” Rémy laughed. “I mean nothing by it. This is how we greet one another in France.”

“Yeah, well we’re not in France, Rémy,” he ground out through clenched teeth. “In America, we shake hands.”

“Ah, but the exquisite Ally does not seem to want me to touch her at all. I wonder why?” he mused. “You have nothing to fear from me, chérie.”

Yeah, right,
I thought. I rolled my eyes at both Jack and Rémy. I pulled Tara aside. “Hey, can you come over after school? I really need to talk to you about something,” I whispered.