Dark Angel (13 page)

‘You think getting on to the course will be a breeze for me? It won’t.’ He thought for a while, and when he spoke again his voice was soft, almost pleading. ‘This is a competitive field, Tania. Kids from all over the country have applied. I have to focus on getting together my portfolio, not fight with you over our future together.’

I shook my head. ‘How did you suddenly turn that around and make it my fault? Who brought up this topic in the first place?’

I was surprised when Orlando lost the will to argue, dropped his head and covered his face with his hand. ‘Forget it.’

‘No. This is serious. I want to understand. I want us to agree.’

‘Forget it,’ he sighed, standing up and grabbing his jacket from the back of the couch. ‘We just hit a wall every time we talk.’

He looked so beaten by it, so sad that I had to put my arms around him and hold him tight. The only sound that broke the silence was the theme tune on TV as the credits rolled.

I woke early next morning to an unread message from Grace. It had been sent at midnight and said
Did u ever dare 2 believe?

Where r u?
I texted back but didn’t get a reply. What did she mean, did I ever dare to believe? I thought she must be somewhere on planet Ezra and I was immediately scared for her so I called her house.

‘Grace isn’t here,’ Mike Montrose confirmed. ‘She slept over at Tarsha’s house.’

I told him thanks and simultaneously thought this was odd. Since when had Tarsha and Grace been close buddies? Also, the last I heard from Jude was that Grace hadn’t left her house for days. I got this indirectly through Jude’s sister, Mia, who also told me that Jude’s asthma was bad again and that their parents blamed Grace.

‘Grace finally ditched my brother by text message,’ Mia had said when I ran into her on the Thursday. ‘Can you believe that?’

‘He took it badly?’ Of course he had – stupid question.

Mia was thirteen, sometimes wore her hair in corn rows and hero-worshipped her big brother. ‘We never thought Grace was the right girl for him,’ she’d said, aping her parents’ opinion. ‘We tried to tell him she was a total egotist but he wouldn’t listen.’

‘No way,’ I’d protested then stopped. Right now that was exactly how Grace came across, I realized.

So all week Jude had been on his high-dosage inhaler and Grace had been pleading sickness to stay off school.

‘It’s because she can’t face Jude after the way she treated him,’ Mia had declared.

I’d nodded but I knew it was way more than that. Now I went next door to Holly and showed her the dare-to-believe text.

‘Oh my God!’ Holly groaned. ‘When did she send this? What planet was she on?’

‘Exactly.’ And I told her about the so-called sleepover at Tarsha’s.

‘No way. Call her right now. Do it.’

‘I texted. Grace didn’t reply.’

‘Don’t text – call! And if her phone is switched off, call Tarsha.’

‘Wait.’ I sighed and sat down at Holly’s kitchen table. ‘I want to try and figure this out. Grace doesn’t come to school and she officially breaks off with Jude. She’s fixated on this guy Ezra.’

‘So far, so normal.’ Holly sat down opposite me. ‘It happens all the time. Let’s keep this in proportion.’

‘Except that it’s Grace we’re talking about, and Grace is the sweetest, kindest girl we know, right?’

‘Occasionally wacky,’ Holly pointed out. ‘Her head can be a little vague sometimes.’

‘But still sweet and kind,’ I insisted. ‘So where did this monster version of Grace suddenly come from? Why the lies, the delusions about flying and daring to believe?’

‘And ditching Jude by text message.’ Holly tapped the table, got up, walked away and came back again. ‘Even I don’t treat Aaron that bad.’

‘Ezra!’ we both agreed.

I waited a while before I shared the theory that had been lurking in my head ever since the party. ‘It’s like they set a trap for her.’

‘They?’ Holly narrowed her eyes and got ready to argue against one of my overimaginative interpretations.

‘Ezra and Zoran – everybody out there at the lodge. The whole thing – the heavenly bodies theme, the invite to the special gathering inside the house, the way we later forgot everything that happened; it was a trap.’

‘A conspiracy.’ Irony is what Holly turns to when she disagrees. She used it now.

‘Yes. Somehow they’re drawing Grace into their world. You know they have a commune up there – did Grace tell you?’

‘Wait. Rock legend builds house on Black Rock, sets up happy hippy commune, invites people from neighbourhood to join them. Am I getting this right?’

‘The way you say it you make it sound less sinister. But it’s bad, I’m telling you.’

‘Because it’s a cult and they laid some kind of trap?’ Holly considered the last word forensically.

‘Listen.’ I persisted like a little terrier gnawing at Holly’s ankle. ‘One day Grace is normal. She’s happy, she’s looking out for other people, noticing that I’m down and persuading me to go to Zoran’s party without Orlando, the whole deal. Then she meets Ezra and is sucked into something she can’t control. Next day, her whole life starts to fall apart.’

‘And you’re saying Ezra deliberately did something to her. We don’t know what, but it wasn’t legal and it triggered off this weird behaviour?’

I nodded and murmured a line that came whizzing into my head. ‘“So quick bright things come to confusion.”’

Holly recognized the quote. ‘Whoa! Now Ezra is some kind of woodland spirit dropping poison on Grace’s eyelids and Zoran is the Oberon figure orchestrating it all?’

‘Kind of. Only there are no laughs in this. I think it’s more serious.’

Holly had heard enough. She got up from the table with an ‘Oh jeez!’ groan.

‘I do!’ I insisted. ‘And I think they targeted Grace
because
of her and Jude. They chose her because the two of them were crazy for each other.’

It turned out that Grace didn’t sleep over at Tarsha’s house, had never planned to, had never even been in touch.

‘She can’t just vanish,’ Orlando said over the phone when I told him the latest.

‘I spoke with Tarsha. Grace lied to her parents,’ I pointed out.

‘Yeah, we all do that.’

True – the useful little white lie to stop them stressing. But it wasn’t just this. ‘She missed a week of school,’ I reminded him.

‘Still not a major crime.’

‘I know. Holly already told me I was overreacting. I just came away from her place.’

‘She’s right. Where are you now?’

‘I’m in the car park at the mall. Where are you?’

‘At my computer. I got an email from Mimi Rossi at the college. She invited me to make a full application.’

‘Cool.’ I absorbed the fact and its implications, hoped my voice sounded sincere when I said, ‘Excellent! You need to work on that.’

‘You’re sure you don’t want me to come to town?’

‘No, I’m fine. Write your application. That’s such great news, Orlando. I’m so happy for you.’

‘I love you,’ he told me.

Oh, my heart sang out! Tell me again, say it louder. But I didn’t have chance to reply. Either he clicked off his phone or the signal cut out, I don’t know which.

I got out of my car and walked between the rows of parked vehicles, stepped over a big black oil stain in the shape of a giant moth.

I see the stain ignite, flare up orange out of the shadows. The curious flames lick at me then a wind fans them and makes a fireball that blasts all the way to the far end of car park level B
.

‘Aimee!’ a woman’s voice whispers, as if she’s sighing over the cradle of an adored child
.

There’s a western equipment store in Bitterroot, the Black Horse Country Store, geared mainly toward tourists and visitors. You can see it as you exit the mall and make a left turn on to Main Street, which I did because, after the illusory fireball experience in the multi-storey, I needed to walk and clear my head.

There was no fire, I told myself. There was no voice, no Aimee. But what happens inside my head often feels more real than what I can actually see, touch and smell all around. It always has and most likely always will.

‘That’s the way creative people experience life. It’s why you paint,’ Mom tells me whenever I try to explain.

Anyhow, I’ve never in my life walked through the door of the Black Horse store, but today for some reason I did. I walked slowly down the rows of pointy-toed, Cuban-heeled, tooled leather boots towards the Stetsons.

‘I’m looking for silver spurs,’ a familiar voice told a sales person and when I rounded the corner I came face to face with Daniel.

‘How much do you want to spend?’ the sales guy asked him, reaching for the fanciest pair.

‘Later,’ Daniel told him. He smiled at me without surprise, took my arm and walked me back down the boots aisle. ‘Hey, Tania, you look like someone who needs a coffee.’

‘I’m good,’ I protested feebly. Daniel’s hold on my arm was firm but not too forceful. I let him steer me out of the store on to the sidewalk.

‘Zoran wants me to buy all the equipment we need to train and ride the mustangs,’ he explained. ‘Everything has to be high quality, as usual; to hell with the cost.’

‘Lucky Zoran,’ I murmured. I’d felt my day slip further out of control the second I set eyes on Daniel and now my mouth disconnected itself from my brain to run in random directions. ‘You looked like you’d always worked with horses when I saw you in the arena.’

‘My uncle runs a spread in Montana. We vacationed there when I was a kid.’

‘Lucky
you
.’

‘I guess.’ He was still smiling, still steering me back towards the mall. Before I knew it, we were sitting in Starbucks. ‘Training these mustangs is a big ask. They’ve been out on the Californian desert all their lives. This is the first time they ever saw the inside of an arena.’

‘That makes me feel sad for them,’ I admitted. ‘Won’t they miss their freedom?’

Daniel shrugged. ‘It’s government policy to take a percentage of wild mustangs off the open range each summer to stop overbreeding. The Bureau of Land Management offers them up for adoption at a hundred and fifty dollars a head.’

‘That’s nothing.’

‘Right. The government sells them cheap because they want to avoid culling. You know, where they send surplus animals for slaughter.’

‘Yeah, I understand culling,’ I said quickly. ‘It makes living in captivity on Black Rock seem like a good deal.’

‘Exactly.’ There was a pause before Daniel switched topics. ‘I hope it doesn’t feel like I’m stalking you,’ he said with an embarrassed grin.

‘No. You haven’t called me since I saw you at the lodge,’ I reminded him. ‘And it was me who ran into you back there in the store.’

‘Yeah, I lucked out.’ Daniel’s hands around his coffee cup were tanned, his fingers were long, with broad, well-trimmed nails. ‘The same way Ezra lucked out with Grace.’

‘She really likes him,’ I sighed. ‘Which is tough on Jude, I guess.’

‘These things happen,’ Daniel shrugged. Those sinewy hands were connected to muscular arms and broad shoulders that he didn’t parade in a macho posture like bodybuilders do. Instead he seemed to accept and underplay his physicality – something which I generally like in a guy. ‘If you want my opinion, Grace and Ezra are made for each other.’

‘In what way?’

‘They share interests for a start. Ezra knows the names of the planets and the star systems. It turns out Grace is a stargazer too.’

‘I never knew that.’ My short replies were a result of Daniel’s clear blue eyes staring deep into mine. It had the effect of further scrambling my brain.

‘And Ezra studied psychology. It was his college major.’

‘Hey – coincidence! That’s going to be Grace’s major too.’

‘That’s what I’m saying. I look at them and think those two are a natural fit. She seems so happy to be with him.’

His use of the present tense unexpectedly got through to me and I frowned. ‘Actually, I’ve been trying to contact Grace. I need to speak with her. You don’t happen to know where she is?’

Daniel nodded. ‘Sure. She’s with Ezra at Black Eagle Lodge. Why don’t I drive you up there now?’

A
t the time I convinced myself that I accepted the invitation because it was important for me to see Grace, but looking back I can see how much my rabbit-in-the-headlights attraction to Daniel had to do with it.

I said yes and we didn’t hurry. We finished our coffees and ran back to the Black Horse store for Daniel to choose Zoran’s spurs. We bought a pair and stored them in the trunk of his SUV. By the time we were driving the dirt track up to the lodge it was past midday.

‘Are you hungry?’ Daniel asked.

‘No, really.’ I was paying attention to the landscape, trying to concentrate on picking out angles for my next trip up here with my camera to replace the shots I’d accidentally deleted – especially where a creek snaked through a valley between rocks and aspens, and again when I spotted an area of burnout on a distant slope; an empty grey patch the shape of a tear drop.

‘There’ll be food later,’ Daniel assured me. ‘Zoran is planning a pool party with barbecued ribs. Does that sound good?’

I bit my lip and gave a shrug. No commitment.

‘Grace will be there,’ he promised.

‘I didn’t bring a swimsuit,’ I told him and subsided into awkward silence for most of the journey.

When we arrived at the lodge, Zoran’s grey dogs heard our car and loped out of the barn to meet us. They wove between Daniel’s legs then stayed to heel as we lifted boxes from the trunk and carried them across the empty arena.

‘What breed of dog are they?’ I wanted to know.

‘Lurchers – a type of hunting dog they use in Eastern Europe. You can put the stuff on the table through here.’

‘What are their names?’

Daniel shrugged. ‘They’re not pets. They don’t come with names.’ Then he led the way into a neat new tack room complete with saddles and bridles. My arm brushed his as we deposited the boxes. My skin tingled. Before I knew it he’d leaned forward and landed the lightest kiss on my lips, smiling slightly as if he’d scored a victory, then walked back through the barn.

My face burning with embarrassment, I followed him and saw that a boy around my age was standing in the cool shadow by the wide doorway. It took me a while to place him – he was the golden-haired guy who had been laughing too loud at Cristal’s joke outside the clubhouse.