Breaking Normal (Dream Weaver #3) (19 page)

             
“After we were discharged from service, after the war, we came home. Sabre was furious that I’d spilled to Zeke about what we are, but after talking to your dad, he got the same impressions that I did—that your dad might be Caphar. So Sabre did some blood test. Nothing fancy. DNA coding wasn’t nearly as advanced in the 1970’s as it is today. But he was able to get equipment and knowledge that wasn’t available to the general public, or even most doctors. Anyway, he isolated the genetic abnormality in your dad’s blood, but couldn’t explain why Zeke didn’t show full Caphar abilities. He snuck us a sample of Jane’s blood as well. She did not carry the abnormality in her genes. Eventually, as we continued our relationship with Zeke, we grew closer with your Uncle Adrian.” I sneered at the mention of Adrian’s name. Something was amiss with the good doctor, lately. “Sabre picked up some—vibes—from him and asked to test his blood. He didn’t actually find out about us until you were about thirteen.”

             
“So just a couple of years before Emma’s accident at the cabin?”

             
“Yes.” He was quiet so long I went back to studying the brick and mortar backdrop around us. His voice was velvety soft when he continued. “Thomas has a tendency to drop out of the picture for long stretches of time. Guess you can only take so much of the same two guys kicking your ass over and over again.” He gave a morose chuckle. “We hadn’t seen him in over fifteen years when he returned to wreak havoc again. When he did, he discovered your dad…and you. And he found no greater joy than tormenting your father’s mind. Sabre and I did all we could think of to protect your father’s family, but Thomas would lash out and then run away, and we wouldn’t see him for months at a time. He’d sneak in after a long absence and bombard your dad with night terrors, and then just disappear again. We still don’t really know why he focused on Zeke. Probably just because he was close to us and showed pre-Caphar abilities. But your dad was over thirty by then, and all Caphar manifest fully by age twenty-five. Of course, at the time, we had no idea that the death of the mortal body was the catalyst to immortality.” He gave another melancholy laugh. “Thomas terrorized your dad the night before he and Jane left for Winterhaven. Zeke called us before he left and told us. It was the first time I ever really heard your dad really frightened, except for that day in Nam.”

             
“My mom once told me ‘I’ve been many different people in my life’ but I don’t understand now what that means. I thought she was saying she was Caphar, and she’d lived a lot of different lives under a lot of different names. But, if she’s…if she wasn’t Caphar, it doesn’t make sense now.”

             
“I think what she meant is that, as people, we change according to the people in our lives, the situations we face, the challenges we overcome. Even you aren’t the same girl you were a year ago.” He smirked at my unspoken retaliation of ‘duh, I’m an immortal now.’ “It’s not just that, honey. You’ve grown by leaps and bounds as a person. You’re wiser, stronger, tougher.”

             
“Aren’t those the same thing? Stronger and tougher?”

             
“I don’t believe so. You’re physically stronger and emotionally tougher.”

             
I scowled, “Yeah, maybe not so much ‘mature’ though. Nick, I’m…”

             
But he held up his hand to stay my apology. “It’s done,” he said with finality.

             
My eyebrows pinched together in thought and I mulled over the memory of the attack on Dad’s barracks, when Nick revealed his immortality and Dad discovered what Nick was. We strolled past the red brick tower of the local newspaper building. I hadn’t realized we’d been walking that long. Nick was quiet again as we strolled another two city blocks.

             
“We had no reason to believe that Thomas would attack your parents that way,” he said quietly, as though his heartache compressed his lungs. He stopped and stepped in front of me. “Emi, we didn’t know.” The plea for forgiveness wrung out his voice. “I’d do anything to change that day for you.”

             
I couldn’t stand the ache in his chest and the agony on his face. My arms wrapped around him in hopes of alleviating both our pain—just a little. “I wish you could,” I said into his chest. “I wish I really did wake up in the hospital and find them still alive, and all of this was just a dream.”

             
His voice darkened. “Even me?” he murmured into my hair.

             
“Of course not. Can’t a girl have the best of both worlds?” I teased.

             
Nick released me as he chuckled, and continued to walk. His hand trembled in mine. “Zecharias asked me, when you were fifteen, to watch out for you if anything ever happened to him. But he made me swear to never reveal the Caphar to you—unless you manifested.”

             
“So, you knew I could potentially be Caphar. And Thomas knew. Were my nightmares after the crash just part of grief or did Thomas manipulate those too?” I asked.

             
Nick scowled. “He was there.” Again, Nick was silent for a long while as we walked into Riverfront Park, passed the Looff Carousel and strolled over the river on the wide concrete bridge. I thought of his weave, after the first battle with Thomas in the cottage. To calm me, Nick wove a sun-soaked stroll through this park. “I stayed close, watching out for you from under the blue spruce. At first, Thomas wasn’t around. But once you started to heal a little, he came in and tore you apart again. I couldn’t stand by and watch him destroy you like he did your mom and dad. So that’s when I started visiting you.”

             
I realized then, through this entire conversation, Nick hadn’t ‘shown’ me anything. “Why didn’t you ‘show’ me any of that?” I asked.

             
“What?”

             
“Normally, you would’ve projected a weave of the memories. You didn’t do that at all this time.”

             
“I guess…” he began. “I just needed you to hear from my own mouth what happened.”

             
My mind returned to the image of Sabre hovering over Levi at the laser tag place. “What makes us different from Rephaim when we give people bad dreams? I mean, like when Sabre twisted the assault memories and tormented Rico with them.” I didn’t want to confess I’d given those warped memories a tweak when I went to the jail.

             
“It’s different because we don’t do it for the hyped up delta waves. We don’t consume them. We don’t use them for the high.” A shadow filled his dark eyes and I knew we were thinking the same thing. Caphar don’t, but Sabre did. Was he over the line with no redemption? Had he finally tipped so far to the dark side he was falling in?

Chapter 2
6  Thunderstruck

              A summer squall thundered outside as I sat in a hard metal chair in a windowless interrogation room waiting for Molly. She’d called me early that morning about some leads she got after my interview with Sunny Sykes on channel five. Dark, electrical images sparked and flared in my mind. Memories from every suspect they’d questioned in this room smudged together in a blur of impressions. My brain ached from shutting them out. After a few minutes, Molly swung the door open and stepped inside with a stack of files pressed to her chest.

             
“Hey. Sorry it took so long,” she apologized.

             
“No problem. But why are we in an interrogation room?”

             
“Oh. That.” She gave a nonchalant wave of her hand. “Well, Sheriff Willie’s holding a meeting with the Chief and some of the deputies and captains in the conference room. And I figured, well, I thought you might want some privacy as we talk.”

             
“Oh. Okay. So what’ve you got for me?”

             
Molly crossed to the grey metal desk and fanned the file folders across it. She sat in the chair opposite me and crunched her brows together like she wasn’t sure where to begin. I folded my hands in my lap and twiddled my thumbs to release some of the building tension.

             
She cleared her throat as though it would cement a decision she made. “I have to be totally honest with you, Em. I’m more than a little baffled by a few things.”

             
“Oh?” I struggled to keep my features in check while my insides were squirming.

             
“There’s just been a few—coincidences. So many, in fact, that I’m beginning to think they’re not coincidences at all.”

             
My internal squirm reached my outsides and I shifted in the chair. Was this really an inquisition?

             
Officer Molly continued. “First, it was your insight on the Expo ’74 murder.” She flipped a file open. “You were right. The lab guys from back then missed the smear of blood from the murderer. They got a hit on CODIS. Detective Bannister and his partner are on their way to Moses Lake to question a man about the girl’s murder.”

             
I pursed my lips and nodded. “Cool.”

             
Molly scowled at me. “Then, there’s this.” She flipped open the next file. “There is no way in hell you could have seen a smear of blood on that guys arm from where we were.”

             
I blinked wide, worried eyes at her.

             
“And finally,” she flipped open the last folder, “there’s this. A half dozen calls came in the week after your on-air plea to victims of Rico DeLaRosa. Two were crackpots looking for some kind of reward, so we discounted their reports. One we discovered was not a DeLaRosa victim, but were able to identify who the perp was. He is now in lock up. But,” she flipped a page, “out of the three remaining calls, can you guess what two of the names were?”

             
Shit!
I wasn’t quite sure how to get out of this one. Did I need to change her memories? Destroy the evidence? No. Surely there were copies of this information on somebody’s hard drive somewhere. Maybe Sabre was ballsy enough to take on the entire SPD and their computers, but that just wasn’t me. I gaped at her, unsure of what to say.

             
“The day you watched DeLaRosa’s interrogation, you said two names.” She pointed to the name on the first report. “Angela.” She flipped the page. “And Haley. So how is it that you knew the names of two of these girls? And were able point out a murderer from so far away? And found new DNA our guys have missed for over forty years?” She watched my face like a good detective for any sign of a tell. Someday, she’d make a great detective.

             
I grumbled, low and perturbed. “What’s your theory?”

             
Her regulation bun bobbled as she shook her head. “I’d rather hear from you than to speculate.”

             
I sucked in a breath and measured its release. “You probably wouldn’t believe me, even if I told you,” I hedged.

             
“Try me,” she challenged.

             
I scrubbed my face with my palms and scraped my nails through my disarray of copper spikes. “Do you believe in psychics?” I asked her.

             
“I don’t know. I haven’t ever met anyone with psychic abilities. Though that lady from Boston or wherever sure makes me wonder.”

             
“Can you explain why I know all of this any other way?” I asked.

             
She chuckled softly. “Sure. That you’re an accomplice of some kind. Or you keep really bad company.”

             
I scowled. “You’ve met the company I keep. You can’t possibly believe that.”

             
“I’m inclined to say no.” I mirrored her pursed lips and stern brow. “Emari. I need you to be straight with me. I’ve got superiors looking over my shoulder at you, wanting to know what’s going on.”

             
I locked onto her eyes with mine. “I’m going to count to three. Then, I want you to remember the first thing you think of, but don’t say it out loud. Okay?” She nodded. “Okay. One. Two. Three. Now, pick a color: Red, blue or green. What is your mother’s first name? What was your GPA when you graduated high school?” Her left brow arched. “In reverse order, the answers are: 3.5, Irene, blue and Ivy. Is that right?”

             
Her mouth dropped open and her eyes darted to the mirror that took up one wall of the small room. I followed the glance.

             
“Aw, so we haven’t been alone, have we?”

             
“Um…no. But, how did you do that?”

             
My mouth twisted with a mischievous grin. “It’s a gift.”

             
“I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. What else can you do?”

             
The grin dissolved from my face. I truly didn’t want to divulge all of my secrets. Especially with others looking on from the peanut gallery. But this is what I’d determined to tell her, or anyone else, if they asked about my abilities. “I can read what people think and—I can read thoughts left behind on an object.” She scowled at me again, disbelieving. I smirked at her skepticism. “The man who last sat in this chair, his name was Brian Wainright. He was being questioned about a break-in down in Peaceful Valley yesterday. He denied that he did it…but I can tell you, he did. He snuck in a ground floor bedroom window—the south one, I believe. His fingerprints should be on a bedpost in that room—on the foot board. He took all the money from a candy dish, a tri-colored gold men’s wedding band, a Rolex knock-off watch—and something the owner doesn’t realize is missing yet. A Doobie Brothers CD from their ‘best of’ album from 1976.”

             
“How do we know you weren’t just an accomplice?”

             
“I couldn’t have been around for the Expo murder, could I? But I gave you info on that. And I have witnesses and an alibi for all day yesterday.”

             
“Where did he stash the stolen property? We checked his truck and home.”

             
“You’d best check the home again. They’re in one of those fake wall outlets in his living room. On the—north wall.” I stood and scraped the metal chair across the floor. “Now. Can we go?” Molly nodded and I headed for the door. She caught up with me in the corridor.

             
“Emari?” I turned to her. “I—don’t really know what to say. I’m sorry. Really. The brass wanted answers and they knew we have a rapport.” She grasped my hand in hers. “I didn’t really have a choice. I have to follow orders.”

             
I squeezed her hand. “No sweat. It’s all good. I should’ve known I left behind too many clues. I gave myself away. Most people kinda think you’re insane if you claim to be psychic or anything. I can’t blame them. Until recently, I wouldn’t have believed it myself. I never really understood as a kid what I was seeing. I just thought it was my imagination.”

             
“Then, you’re not mad at me?” Officer Molly was fully out of cop mode. Our friendship still had value to her.

             
“Honestly?” She winced, but nodded. “I’m a little disappointed. But, I understand your position. Besides, my girl’s got the hots for you. How can I stay mad in that case?”

             
Molly’s face flushed. “Really?” I nodded. She giggled like a love-struck school girl.

             
“Officer Elliot?” boomed a voice down the corridor. Molly’s smile faded and she tensed. She dropped my hand and pivoted around.

             
“Yes sir?” she squeaked.

             
“May I speak with you a moment, please?”

             
“Yes sir.” She turned back to me. “Meet you out by the cruiser? We’re still doing another ride along, aren’t we?”

             
“You bet. I’ll be waiting.”

             
The sun drew moisture from the storm off the streets and sidewalks in a wispy fog. The air still smelled of rain and sunshine—warm, wet and clean. I smiled as the last of the thunderheads rolled to the south and east, and the birds abandoned their hide-aways and broke into song. The heat already burned away the raindrops from Molly’s cruiser, so I leaned against the front fender and waited.

             
Nick and Sabre would be pissed that I revealed so much about myself to the cop. But I’d made my own decision about how I wanted to handle things like this. I didn’t divulge any information about them, just myself. I didn’t care if they didn’t like it. It was my life. And I made my own choices—just like Nick always encouraged me. They were
my
decisions, good or bad. And I had to make them based on what I believed was right, not what
they
believed was right.

             
“Hey girl!” Molly called as she jogged toward the car. “Sorry it took so long. Captain wanted to debrief a bit.”

             
“No problem.” But I could feel the anxiety rolling off her like the thunderheads to the south. We slid into the cruiser that still held the heat from earlier in the day. As she backed out of her parking space and entered traffic, I asked, “So what’s up? You’re all tense and stuff again.”

             
“Am I?” Her smile fluttered like a nervous crow. I just stared at her.
Like, duh.
Her lips finally settled into something more genuine and bashful. “Um…Captain asked me to ask you a personal favor. It’s kind of dumb. I think he’s trying to test you some more. I don’t know.” She grimaced.

             
I chuckled. “Whatever. Just tell me.”

             
Her eyes darted sideways toward me and down to the bag she’d placed between us on the seat. “That. He wants you to…one of our retired shepherds was—dognapped. The trainer he lives with was injured in an accident during a pursuit. He depends on that dog. But...”

             
“If it was Eddyson missing, I hope anyone who could, would help me find him.” I reached into the sack and ran my fingertips over the coarse fabric, like burlap. Burlap always reminded me of Sabre, when William and Thomas hanged him—back in the day. My breath hiccupped in my chest.

             
“What?”

             
“Um, it’s nothing. But your Captain is full of—crap. This is just a scrap of material. The only one who’s touched it recently is the Captain himself.”

             
Molly’s face blanched. “Uh…he said there were two items in the bag.” I scrabbled through the bag to find a black leather dog’s collar studded with silver pyramids. A city license, rabies tag, and canine officer’s tag jangled from the metal loop. “The boss says they found it in the officer’s front yard.”

             
I ran the leather across my fingers. “What’s he want to know?”

             
“Anything. The officer, he’s in pretty bad shape. He really needs his dog back.”

             
I closed my eyes and opened my mind to memories embedded in the collar.

             
A warm, moonless Spring night unfolds before my eyes. The air smells of fresh-cut lawns and burned hot dogs on a barbeque. My nerves are ablaze with tension. I have to get the dog from that stupid cop who sent my brother to jail. Just for revenge, I’ll kill the stupid animal. My hands shudder with nerves but I deny it. I’m not scared. It’s just chilly. The metal beads on a leather bracelet on my right wrist tinkle together and I stuff them up my sleeve to quiet them. There’s a tattoo and a circular scar on my left hand. A faded, blown-out, jailhouse tribal tattoo, and a meth pipe scar.