The Gathering Dark (19 page)

I’ll lie here until they go to bed. And then I’ll find a way to talk to Walker.

Her brain ached from trying to wrap itself around what had happened tonight. The headache pounded relentlessly against her temples, a steady bass beat of pain. She felt herself shutting
down as the terror and postvomiting weakness tugged at her. She slid into a sleep that was more protective than restful, her body pausing reality in the hope of letting her mind catch up.

When she woke, it was instantaneous—a sudden leap into consciousness. Keira sat bolt upright in the dark bedroom. There was a glass of ginger ale on the table next to her bed. It looked flat, like it had been sitting there for hours. The clock beside it said 3:22 a.m. Keira swung her feet over the edge of the bed, thinking only of getting a phone—any phone.

It wasn’t until she had a hand on her doorknob that she heard the television murmuring in the living room. The sound of her mother, coughing quietly, rattled down the hall.

She was still up?

Dammit. God DAMN it!

Raking her hands through her hair, Keira threw herself into bed, flopping back against the pillows. She wondered briefly if Walker was lying awake, as confused and scared as she was. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he actually knew what was going on.

Keira lay in the dark with her hands tucked behind her head, listening to her mother wandering around in the night. She waited. She drank the mostly flat ginger ale. Her mom couldn’t stay up forever.

But she might as well have—Keira slipped back into sleep before her mother went to bed, if she ever did.

Then next thing she knew, there was light filtering through
her closed eyelids, and a hand on her shoulder, shaking her awake.

“Honey?” Her mother’s voice was catastrophically quiet.

Keira opened her eyes. Her mother looked haggard.

“Unnh . . . yeah?” Keira managed, struggling to sit up.

“I’m sorry to wake you. I have to run out for a minute, and I wanted to make sure you were okay before I left.” Her mother studied Keira. “How are you feeling? I didn’t hear any more vomiting last night.”

“I feel fine,” Keira said as convincingly as possible. It was hard to focus with the voice at the back of her mind yelling,
GET THE PHONE. CALL WALKER. CALL WALKER. PHONEPHONEPHONE
.

“That’s good. I’m glad.” Her mother looked exactly no happier than she had when she woke Keira.

“Mom, what’s going on? You look like someone died or something.”

For one instant, her mother’s face looked as raw as a scraped knee. “I wasn’t going to tell you about this until later—until you’d had a chance to wake up.”

The back-of-her-mind voice shut up about Walker for a minute. “Tell me about what?” Keira asked carefully.

“Keira, you know things have been difficult between your father and I for some time now. Yesterday, after I left to get your ginger ale, he made . . . I came home and he was on the phone. . . . ” Her mother cleared her throat. “Well. I’ll spare you the details. Everything sort of came to a head. We’re going to
spend some time apart and see if having a cooling-off period will help us straighten things out.”

Keira’s vision swam. She recalled the strange woman she’d heard when she’d picked up the phone last night. Her parents had always had an up-and-down relationship. It was like hurricane season—periods of stormy ugliness followed by stretches of relative calm. She’d known that they weren’t exactly in one of their blue-sky times, but she hadn’t suspected that her dad was seeing someone else.

“Are you getting divorced?” The question came out as a squeak.

Her mother swallowed twice and began to blink hard. “I don’t honestly know. We haven’t made any decisions yet.” Her voice strengthened. “We’re having a trial separation. We’ll just have to wait and see how things go.” She looked at Keira, sorrowful and sincere. “This isn’t your fault in any way, and I’m sorry, because I know that you’re the one who ends up suffering the most from all of this.”

Keira nodded. She hadn’t felt like she was responsible for her parents’ bickering, but she loved her dad, too, and she didn’t want to be stuck shuffling between her house and some crappy bachelor apartment. A lump swelled in her throat. “It’s . . . I mean, it’s not okay, but if you have to—”

“We have to,” her mother said firmly. “One way or another, things are going to get better around here. If you’re sure you’re okay, I’m going to get cleaned up and head out. Your dad’s going
to come over and get some of his things. If you want to come with me, you can, but you don’t have to. It’s your choice, and I don’t mind either way, but I’d rather not see him right now.”

Keira stared at the empty glass that sat on the night table. She wondered what would have happened if her mother hadn’t gone racing out to get the ginger ale last night. “You go ahead. I’ll stay here and . . . I kind of need to think for a little while.”

“I understand, sweetie.” Her mother stood up, smoothing the rumpled spot she’d made on the comforter.

“Where’s dad going to stay?” The question slid out before Keira could stop it.

Her mother’s expression turned flinty. “I don’t exactly know. I have my suspicions, but he hasn’t said where he’ll be. If you want to get ahold of him, he has his phone.”

The words slipped over Keira’s skin like an ice cube, leaving her goose-bumped and shivering. “Okay,” she said. “Thanks.” Her mother nodded without looking at her and headed toward the bathroom.

Mechanically, Keira got out of bed and headed to the kitchen. She filled her mug with water and put it in the microwave. She watched it rotate, echoing the spinning in her head. Her parents were separating.

It wasn’t like they were ever home together, anyway.

It wasn’t like they were ever
happy.

It wasn’t like it should have come as a surprise.

Still, she found herself standing in the rubble of her life and
hating every second of it. She could practically feel the sharp edges under her bare feet. She glanced down and froze. Running through the middle of the kitchen was a path of black, glittering stones. And she was standing smack in the center of it. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a shape—a person—dart into the kitchen and disappear through the refrigerator. Keira shrieked, whirling around and stumbling onto the familiar worn linoleum. As the floor reverberated with the impact, the path faded like a shadow in the sunlight. The refrigerator stood, white and impassive, humming contentedly. Keira’s heartbeat, staccato and erratic, rose into her throat, choking her. After last night, she knew that somewhere, somehow, everything she’d just seen was real.

And whatever world—whatever reality—she was seeing . . . it was inhabited.

“Keira?” her mother called. “Are you okay?” Her voice was thick. In a flash Keira knew that she was crying. That she was using the shower to hide her breakdown from Keira.

“Sorry. I burned myself on my tea,” Keira lied, hiding her own breakdown. She couldn’t say anything to her mother. Not right then. Not when her mom was already crumbling.

“Okay.” Her mother shut the bathroom door and Keira tried not to listen for the sound of her sobbing.

With a shaking hand, Keira dropped a tea bag into her mug and scurried into the hall to steal her phone back from her mother’s purse.

She’ll never notice, anyway. Not in the middle of this chaos.

Chapter Twenty-Five

S
HE PULLED THE FAMILIAR
phone out of the front pocket of the purse and growled in frustration. The battery was dead. Of course. She usually charged it overnight.

She half ran to her room and jammed the cord into the phone, watching as the screen began to glow in slow-motion. The voice mail icon appeared in the corner.

Two messages.

That’s it? Two messages and no texts?

Maybe he was trying not to be suspicious. Not to be creepy.

But the first message wasn’t even him. It was the insurance agent’s office—the call she’d ignored on the way to the
restaurant last night. The adjuster announced in a bored voice that the body shop had called with a damage estimate, and they’d had to total her car. She was supposed to call to discuss “next steps.”

Right then, she didn’t give a shit about the car. Right then, all she cared about was the next message.

Walker’s voice filled her ear. “Hey. Listen, I know things got kind of weird tonight. I don’t know exactly how to say this. I don’t want to hurt you, Keira.” There was a long pause, during which Keira’s heart did not beat. “I’d give anything to have things be different, but they just . . . I’m sorry. I hope, maybe someday, you can forgive me. Call me when you get this. We need to talk.”

There was a click. And a pause. And then a mechanical female voice asking her to press one to hear the message again, press two to save, or three to—

Keira snapped the phone shut.

What the
fuck
?

Anger swirled inside her. Was he breaking up with her? Was he really going to dump her in the middle of all this insanity?

Jackass.

She wasn’t going to let him off that easy—she deserved an explanation. She tried to call him, but got sent straight into voice mail. It was still early—maybe his phone was off.

Fine.

She texted him.

Got ur message. Call me back. NOW.

She hit send and paced the room. Normally, the first thing she’d do in a crisis would be to call Susan, but what was she going to say? “Hey, I know you’re busy with Smith, but my parents are getting divorced and I think there’s another world out there that no one can see but me and Walker?”

Susan would think she’d lost her mind.

There was no way she could say that—not even to her best friend.

But Keira had one other friend she could turn to. A friend who didn’t care how early or late it was, who didn’t mind her snarled hair or morning grogginess, and who never accused her of losing her mind.

She carried her tea into the living room, put it on the floor, and sat down at her piano. Keira stretched out her neck and shuffled through the basket of music, nodding absently as her mother peered around the doorway and announced that she was leaving.

In the silence that followed, Keira knew that she wouldn’t be able to play any of the pieces she held in her hand. She knew each note on every page, and not a single one fit her mood right then.

Tossing them aside, she put her fingers on the keyboard. With her back to the room, she could feel the visible-invisible tree, lurking there, like it was waiting for her to start playing. She shivered.

She let the fear slink through her, let it slide down her
arms and into her fingers, which twitched against the keys. The music that slithered out of the piano was terrifying. There was a simple melody woven through, but layered on top of it was something discordant and jarring.

Keira poured all of her unmanageable feelings into the music. Without the weight of so much emotion pressing down on her, she was finally able to breathe. When the notes dwindled, and she could hear the end of the song approaching, her eyes fell closed.

The last, quavering note still hung in the air as Keira slid off the bench and padded back to her room to check her phone. She felt braver after playing.

She dialed Walker again. She was going to
make
him talk to her. He
was
going to give her an explanation. If he wanted to up and walk away after that, then he was a bastard, but she’d let him go.

She wasn’t going to deal with a world that only the two of them could see all by herself. Not when he obviously knew more about it than she did.

His phone went straight to voice mail.

She dialed him again and again, not caring that in any other situation, she’d look desperate and obsessed.

The fourteenth time she called, he picked up.

“About time,” she greeted him.

“I’m sorry! I fell asleep!” He sounded exasperated. “How many times did you call, exactly?”

“How many times did it take you to answer?” Keira snapped. “You’re the one who disappeared after you left me that
message.
I don’t know what your plans are. Quite frankly, I don’t care. But before you tell me that we can’t see each other anymore, I need some answers from you.”

“What? Keira, I’m not telling you that we can’t see each other. Believe me, if I thought you’d be safer with me gone, I’d already be
gone
. But that wouldn’t keep them from coming for us. Both of us.”

A tendril of fear sprouted inside her, but she brushed it aside. “Jesus. Is the mafia after you, or what? This is Sherwin, Maine, Walker. Not Sicily.”

Walker’s laugh was rough. “They’re much worse than the mafia. Please, Keira . . . ”

Please, nothing.

He was not going to beg his way out of this. Her insides turned to flint. “I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, but I know that you saw what I saw last night. I
know
it. And it’s . . . Walker, that’s not the only time I’ve seen something like that.”

He groaned. “Shit. I was worried that was the case. When you said there was a shadow on my face at the theater . . . when you didn’t burn yourself on the tea that afternoon at the diner . . . ” He half growled. “I should have known then. I should have walked away and never looked back.”

She interrupted him, ignoring the grief that sliced through
her when he said
never looked back.
“I’m not exactly trying to hold you against your will,” she countered. “But you owe me an explanation. I want to know what I’m seeing. I want to know what it means and why it’s happening more often, and then I can
deal with it myself
.”

“It’s happening more frequently,” he echoed in a whisper. “Oh, no. No, no, no. This is all my fault.”

Keira exploded. “
What’s
all your fault? Enough with the cryptograms.
Explain it.
Now.”

“I’m going to have to. But not over the phone. I don’t know what will happen when I tell you. If they—you might need me.”