Before I Wake (33 page)
Authors: Rachel Vincent
“What’s wrong?” Nash demanded, stepping closer to me now,
heedless of the glass and the wet floor. “Do you have seizures?” But I could
only shake my head at him, refusing passage to the wail trying to claw its way
out of me, denying the existence of a narrow bed in a sterile white room,
awaiting my return.
And suddenly Emma was there. Emma, with her perfect body,
beautiful face and heart the size of an elephant’s. “She’ll be fine.” Emma
pulled me away from the bar as the male bartender came forward with a mop and
bucket. “She just needs some air.” She waved off Traci’s worried look and
frantic hand gestures, then tugged me through the crowd by one arm.
I clamped my free palm over my mouth and shook my head
furiously when Nash tried to take that hand in his. I should have been worried
about what he would think. That he would want nothing else to do with me now
that I’d publicly embarrassed him. But I couldn’t concentrate long enough to
worry about anything but the redhead at the bar. The one who’d watched us leave
through a shadow-shroud only I could see.
Emma led me past the bathrooms and into the back hall, Nash
close on my heels. “What’s wrong with her?” he asked.
“Nothing.” Emma paused to turn and smile at us both, and
gratitude broke through my dark terror for just an instant. “It’s a panic
attack. She just needs some fresh air and time to calm down.”
But that’s where she was wrong. It wasn’t time I needed, so
much as space. Distance, between me and the source of the panic. Unfortunately,
there wasn’t enough room in the whole club to get me far enough away from the
girl at the bar. Even with me standing by the back door, the panic was as strong
as ever. The unspoken shriek burned my throat, and if I unclenched my jaws—if I
lost control—my scream would shatter eardrums all over Taboo. It would put the
thumping dance beat to shame, and possibly blow out the speakers—if not the
windows.
All because of some redhead I didn’t even know.
Just thinking about her sent a fresh wave of devastation
through me, and my knees collapsed. My fall caught Emma off guard, and I would
have pulled her down if Nash hadn’t caught me.
He lifted me completely off the ground, cradling me like a
child, and followed Emma out the back door with me secure in his arms. The club
had been dim, but the alley was
dark,
and it went
quiet once the door thumped shut behind us, Emma’s bank card keeping the latch
from sliding home. The frigid near-silence should have calmed me, but the racket
in my head had reached its zenith. The scream I refused to release slammed
around in my brain, reverberating, echoing, punctuating the grief still thick in
my heart.
Nash set me down in the alley, but by then my thoughts had lost
all semblance of logic or comprehension. I felt something smooth and dry beneath
me, and only later would I realize Emma had found a collapsed box for him to set
me on.
My jeans had ridden up on my legs when Nash carried me, and the
cardboard was cold and gritty with grime against my calves.
“Kaylee?” Emma knelt in front of me, her face inches from mine,
but I couldn’t make sense of a word she said after my name. I heard only my own
thoughts. Just
one
thought, actually. A paranoid
delusion, according to my former therapist, which presented itself with the
absolute authority of long-held fact.
Then Emma’s face disappeared and I was staring at her knees.
Nash said something I couldn’t make out. Something about a drink…
Music swelled back to life, then Emma was gone. She’d left me
alone with the hottest guy I’d ever danced with—the last person in the world I
wanted to witness my total break with reality.
Nash dropped onto his knees and looked into my eyes, the greens
and browns in his still churning frantically somehow, though there were no
lights overhead now.
I was imagining it. I had to be. I’d seen them dance with the
light earlier, and now my traumatized mind had seized upon Nash’s eyes as a
focal point of my delusion. Just like the strawberry blonde. Right?
But there was no time to think through my theory. I was losing
control. Successive waves of grief threatened to flatten me, crushing me into
the wall with an invisible pressure, as if Nash weren’t even there. I couldn’t
suck in a deep breath, yet a high-pitched keening leaked from my throat now,
even with my lips sealed shut. My vision began to go even darker than the
alley—though I wouldn’t have thought that possible—like the whole world had been
overlaid with an odd gray filter.
Nash frowned, still watching me, then twisted to sit beside me,
his back against the wall too. On the edges of my graying vision, something
scuttled past soundlessly. A rat, or some other scavenger attracted by the
club’s garbage bin?
No.
Whatever I’d glimpsed was
too big to be a rodent—unless we’d stepped into Buttercup’s fire swamp—and too
indistinct for my shattered focus to settle on.
Nash took my free hand in his, and I forgot whatever I’d seen.
He pushed my hair back from my right ear. I couldn’t understand most of what he
whispered to me, but I gradually came to realize that his actual words weren’t
important. What mattered was his proximity. His breath on my neck. His warmth
melting into mine. His scent surrounding me. His voice swirling in my head,
insulating me from the scream still ricocheting against my skull.
He was calming me with nothing more than his presence, his
patience and whispered words of what sounded like a child’s rhyme, based on what
little I caught.
And it was working. My anxiety gradually faded, and dim, gritty
color leaked back into the world. My fingers relaxed around his hand. My lungs
expanded fully, and I sucked in a sharp, frigid breath, suddenly freezing as
sweat from the club dried on my skin.
The panic was still there, in the shadowed corners of my mind,
in the dark spots on the edge of my vision. But I could handle it now. Thanks to
Nash.
“You okay?” he asked when I turned my head to face him, the
bricks cold and rough against my cheek.
I nodded. And that’s when a new horror descended: utter,
consuming, inescapable mortification, most awful in its longevity. The panic
attack was all but over, but humiliation would last a lifetime.
I’d completely lost it in front of Nash Hudson. My life was
over; even my friendship with Emma wouldn’t be enough to repair the damage from
such a nasty wound.
Nash stretched his legs out. “Wanna talk about it?”
No.
I wanted to go hide in a hole,
or stick my head in a bag, or change my name and move to Peru.
But then suddenly, I
did
want to
talk about it. With Nash’s voice still echoing softly in my head, his words
whispering faintly over my skin, I wanted to tell him what had happened. It made
no sense. After knowing me for eight years and helping me through at least half
a dozen previous panic attacks, Emma still had no idea what caused them. I
couldn’t tell her. It would scare her. Or worse, finally convince her I really
was crazy.
So why did I want to tell Nash? I had no answer for that, but
the urge was undeniable.
“…the strawberry blonde.” There, I’d said it out loud, and
committed myself to some sort of explanation.
Nash’s brow furrowed in confusion. “You know her?”
“No.” Fortunately. Merely sharing oxygen with her had nearly
driven me out of my mind. “But something’s wrong with her, Nash.
She’s…dark.”
Kaylee, shut up!
If he wasn’t
already convinced I was certifiable, he would be soon… .
“What?” His frown deepened, but rather than bewildered or
skeptical, he looked surprised. Then came vague comprehension. Comprehension,
and…dread. He might not know exactly what I meant, but he didn’t look completely
clueless either. “What do you mean, ‘dark’?”
I closed my eyes, hesitating at the last second. What if I’d
misread him? What if he did think I was crazy?
Worse yet, what if he was right?
But in the end, I opened my eyes and met his gaze frankly,
because I had to tell him something, and surely I couldn’t damage his opinion of
me much more than I already had. Right?
“Okay, this is going to sound weird,” I began, “but something’s
wrong with that girl at the bar. When I looked at her, she was…shadowed.” I
hesitated, scrounging up the courage to finish what I’d started. “She’s going to
die, Nash. That girl is going to die very, very soon.”
ISBN: 9781459233256
Copyright © 2012 by Rachel Vincent
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