Prowlers: Wild Things (10 page)

That yearning frightened her. Molly's heart began to race. She pressed her eyes closed and savored the security and harmony she felt in that moment. Then reluctantly she slipped out from beneath Jack's arm and sat up on the edge of the bed. Disturbed by her movement he stretched in his sleep and raised his arms over his head, splayed out on the wide bed with the abandon of a child. His mouth was open ever so slightly and he sighed lightly, still asleep, before curling up again as though she were still there for him to cozy up to.

Molly giggled softly as she watched him. After a minute she rose and went to the window and stared down at the dark ribbon of river that was only just now becoming visible with the lightening sky. The urge to wake Jack up was strong but that would not be fair. Just because she could not sleep, that did not mean she should deprive him, but she would be bored out of her mind after ten or fifteen minutes of sitting in the semi-dark staring out the window.

The television was a bad idea. Even with the volume on low, it was possible that it would wake Jack. But its dark face called to her and if she did not find some way to distract herself she was going to just wake him up anyway, so it was not long before she surrendered. Molly picked up the remote control and perched on the end of the bed. She clicked the set on and turned the volume down instantly, so low she thought it would be barely audible to dogs. The image brought another smile to her face.

The click as she changed channels was louder than the volume, but that could not be helped. Click, VH-1. Click, PBS. Click, Home Shopping Network. Click, CNN. Click, scrambled pornography. Click, Home and Garden. Click, the Food Network. Click, A&E. Click, click, click, network affiliates too early for network programming. Local news.

A familiar face.

Molly frowned, staring at the nearly mute television set. In that gray morning light, still edging toward dawn, with the feel of Jack's body against her and the warmth of his breath on her neck still fresh in her memory, the room seemed to quiver with a kind of surreal quality, the world in soft focus. Not quite a dream but not quite life yet either.

A familiar face. What was her name again? Stephanie? No, Suzanne. That was it. Suzanne.

With a frown, she turned the volume up just enough to hear clearly.

" . . . no evidence that the driver of the truck, Marie Suzanne Robinson, was under the influence of alcohol or drugs at the time of the crash. While police have offered the theory that the veteran trucker fell asleep at the wheel, other causes have not yet been ruled out. For more on the story, we take you live to Hollingsworth, where . . ."

The image on the screen switched to a live feed that showed a tractor trailer truck on its side in a tree-lined gulley, jack-knifed so that the cab and trailer jutted up at opposite angles. Police and rescue vehicles were parked haphazardly on the soft shoulder and a group of uniformed men and women stood around together staring down into the gulley with hands on hips and scratching their heads. Molly sympathized, because she knew they had to be thinking exactly what she was thinking.
How the hell are we supposed to get this stupid thing out of that ditch?

That was a problem, however, because that was not what they should have been thinking at all. What they really ought to have been thinking was,
how many more of these freak accidents have to happen before someone around here's bright enough to start thinking maybe it's not a coincidence? Aren't two in a week enough to give even the rustiest minds a little intuitive oil?

Molly gazed at the screen, almost numb as the reporter at the scene detailed how fortunate it was that the accident had happened in the wee hours of the morning when there were so few motorists on the road. That another trucker had radioed in the crash but wished to remain anonymous.
I'll bet
, Molly thought. That Marie Suzanne Robinson came from Wheeling, West Virginia, and was a divorced mother of two.

That snapped Molly out of the daze she had been in. Suzanne had been a mother. Two children, both high school age, according to the news. And hadn't they worked fast to dig up this information on a woman who had been dead only hours?

"Damn it," Molly whispered.

She set the remote control down and moved over to sit just beside Jack. For a few seconds she stared at him, the innocence of his sleeping face in spite of the dark stubble on his chin. She ran her fingers across that rough growth and then her eyes flicked back to the television. The picture of Suzanne was back, and then it was gone, and a story about pumpkin carving contests had taken its place.

Something curdled in her stomach.

Molly reached out and shook Jack, whispering his name.

"Hey, Jack, come on. Wake up."

In her dreams, Eden Hirsch had hundreds of names, one for each of the lives she had lived over the course of forgotten millennia. Lorenza, Gwendolyn, Astrid, Johannes, Viktor, Collette . . . so many that she could never remember them all. In the landscape of her own sleeping mind, her steps took her through time, across the icy fields of thousand year old Russian winters and the sparkling spring nights of nineteenth century Paris, hot summers on the streets of ancient Rome and gentle autumn breezes across the Chesapeake Bay in the Roaring Twenties.

Hundreds of names.

Yet only one face. With each of her lives, the face that looked back at her from the mirror had changed, but in the dream world, that face was always the same. No matter the name, or the memories that spun and traced and molded her dreams like clay on a potter's wheel, she was Eden Hirsch now in body and soul, and that was the form she wore in her subconscious journeys.

This dream took her to an island in Polynesia long centuries past. Her name was Muani and each day when her chores were done and the men of the village were fishing she would take long walks around the island to find a shaded, silent spot where she could sit and listen to the wind and the waves, enjoying the peace of this life and remembering the many others that had come before it.

Muani sat now in her dream — in Eden's dream — beneath the trees atop a small hill that overlooked the cove where the villagers did most of their fishing. She could feel the breeze rustling through her long, dark hair and she closed her eyes for just a moment, tasting the heat and the salt on the air.

"Beautiful."

Her eyes opened and she glanced beside her. Artie Carroll sat with his back against a tree and his knees drawn up in front of him. He wore blue jeans and a hooded sweatshirt torn at the neck, and his sneakers were untied. The way his unruly blond hair fell nearly to his shoulders reminded her of another time, a Viking warrior she had known in another life, when she had worn another face and name. The warrior was called Ottar, and Artie had the same smile, the same glint of mischief in his eyes. It had occurred to Eden that the two might indeed be one and the same and Artie never know. Not all souls returned, and of those that did, few remembered.

When her name had been Roskva, she had loved Ottar.

"It
is
beautiful, isn't it? I never know where my dreams will take me, and yet somehow I often find myself drifting back here."

Artie grinned. "I'm not surprised. Even when we can't consciously control it, I think our minds are always dragging us back to the things we long for." An expression of surprise appeared upon his face and then he shrugged. "Not that I want to get all philosophical."

"There's nothing wrong with philosophy, Artie. Each of us spends our lives developing our own. It's how we learn to understand things."

He reached out to her and her dream shifted just enough so that they might be close enough to touch. Hands brushed close by and there seemed a moment when she grabbed at nothing. Then their fingers intertwined and Eden uttered a tiny gasp. She could feel his skin upon hers. It was only illusion, she knew. In her mind — perhaps in both of their minds — but it felt real.

Artie felt it too, for his eyes widened and then he laughed. "That's new."

"Yes," she agreed, gazing at him. "It must be you. Your focus."

"I'm not doing anything."

"No, but Seth was never able to touch me."

They fell silent then, there on her dream island. Seth had been her spirit guide over the course of many of her lives, a friend from the distant past with whom she had lingered in the Ghostlands, the afterlife, before she had been reborn. Seth had not come back, but he had stayed with her as a spirit, visiting her in her dreams until she had died again. And again. And again.

Seth was gone now, but almost as though fate had played a role in it, the very night she had lost her old friend, she had met Artie. Somehow her frequent reincarnation had blurred the border between her dreams and the Ghostlands, and spirits could pass back and forth. Artie had begun to visit her in her dreams and Eden welcomed him. He was sweet and funny and lonely, and he was dead. Without a spirit guide to connect her to the Ghostlands, Eden would have felt lost in the flesh world. Artie kept an eye out on those he had loved when he was alive, but now Eden provided him with a vital tether.

The hot breeze blew and they smiled at one another.

"Eden," he said.

"Muani," she corrected. "It's Muani here."

"Muani. This is pretty cool."

"Yes. It really is."

They found themselves then sitting side by side, backs to the same thick tree. Birdsong filled the air and the surf crashed on the shore below the hill. Eden felt the warm pressure of his hand in hers and she squeezed. Artie squeezed back.

The phone rang.

Eden woke with a frown knitting her brows. Dawn splashed across the foot of her bed. Outside the window was a golden morning, the sky brightening with each passing moment. The phone rang again and Eden sat up, the tangled mess of her dark curls falling down around her face, across her eyes. With the third ring, she stretched and yawned and blinked her eyes, coming fully awake at last. A sadness swept through her and she glanced around her elegant bedroom.

"Sorry," she whispered to the empty room.

Halfway into the fourth ring, she picked up the phone and lay back onto her pillow.

"It is awfully early," she said.

"I know, Eden, and I'm sorry if I woke you up."

She knew the voice right away. "Jack."

"Yeah. Listen, Molly and I are in New York in this little town called Fairbrook. It's off Route 87, a little north of —"

"I know where it is," she said, stifling another yawn. "I used to live not far from there."

There was a pause on the other end of the line before Jack went on. "You did? When was that?"

"Turn of the century. It was nice back then. I remember the Wild West Show came through in aught-one. That was something else. Truly a marvel, even by today's standards."

"Wow," Jack said, and she could tell by the tone of his voice that he meant it.

Eden smiled. Though she knew Jack's heart belonged to Molly, there were very few people in her life with whom she could speak so freely about her past. It was nice.

"Stories for another time, Jack. I suppose you're calling for Artie."

"Yes. If he's around. We're trying to track down a pack in this area and we could really use his help."

Eden flexed the fingers of her left hand. It still felt warm where Artie's ghost had touched her. The sensation was nice, but also bittersweet, for it was only in her dreams that she could see him, feel his touch, and she had a life to live. Her response to Jack then was tinged with sadness, for if Artie were to go she did not know how long he would be gone, how many dreams she would have without him. She would miss him. Still, in life, Jack and Molly had been the people Artie cared about more than anyone else in the world.

"I'll pass it on," she said. "Good luck."

Jack thanked her and they said their goodbyes. As Eden hung up the phone, she gazed again around the empty room, at the hand-painted Carnival masks and framed pages of hundred and fifty year old fashion magazines that hung on the walls. Antique perfume bottles lined her bureau, and a silk gown hung on the back of her door. Her things. Her place.

With a short, resigned sigh, she spoke to that room, to the ghost of a young man she had become quite fond of. His friends needed him, she said, and she explained where he could find them. For a moment, her hand tingled with warmth again and she felt a breeze caress her cheek though no window was open.

Then the room seemed even emptier than before.

The Blueberry Diner was a sight to behold. Though only the jutting flagpole of a sign was visible from the highway, the place was a stone's throw from the Hollingsworth exit ramp. With its vast, cracked parking lot lined with trucks and the row of windows along its face, the diner would have been interchangeable with hundreds of others if not for the paint job that gave the Blueberry its name. The entire building had been adorned with several coats of blueish-purple paint that gleamed wetly in the sun.

"Wow," Jack said in honest admiration as he pulled the Jeep into the lot. "That's
blue
all right."

"Oh, yes," Molly agreed. "Sort of purple too, but all in all, I'm not sure I've ever seen anything so blue."

They both stared at the place in amazement as Jack parked amongst the handful of cars in front of the Blueberry, a half dozen or so vehicles that were dwarfed by the tractor-trailers, and which Jack suspected were owned by the employees of the diner. Nobody hauled electronics components in Ford station wagons as far as he knew.

"What was it that guy said yesterday?" Molly asked him as she got out of the Jeep. "The guy with the crewcut?"

"That we should talk to Max, because he knows everyone."