Fade To Midnight (3 page)

Des undid his belt as he approached, jerked open his pants. Yanked out that horselike member of which he was so proud.

He shoved her skirt up over her ass, and parted her buttocks, fingering her pussy. She writhed and gasped with theatrical enthusiasm around his delving fingers. His ego was so big, he always bought her act, no matter how extravagantly she overplayed it. Men.

He thrust his hand deeper, growling. “You're sopping wet.”

Actually, it was hitting Mandy that had excited her, but Ava saw no reason to deny him the credit. Besides, she could lube on command. She knew what nasty things to think about to get that hot rush.

“It's you who does it to me.” She let her voice quaver, to hint at hidden vulnerability, calculated to puff him up, make him feel like the king of her world. Thinking he ruled her, with his throbbing scepter.

He grasped her ass cheeks, and drove inside. Ava whimpered as he started pumping. This was the tedious part. All that bucking and moaning. Des was relatively skilled, too, so the thrusting went on for a tiresomely long time before he allowed himself to squirt. Ironic, how personal politics dictated that she praise him for that quality when she would infinitely prefer it to be quick.

But she managed, defaulting to the familiar state of floating detachment where she always went to endure sex. Leaving just enough of herself there to keep the show convincing. The rest of her highly functioning mind was at work. Preparing the next X-Cog test.

Too bad the test subject couldn't be Edie Parrish herself.

The thought triggered a rush of genuine sexual heat that took her by surprise. Wow. She'd gotten Des on her side, using his weakest point, and it turned her on, too. Bonus points. “Is she cute?” she asked.

“Who?” Des grunted, his hips thudding against her backside. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Edie Parrish. I haven't seen her in years. Is she cute?”

His thrusting slowed. “I don't know. All right, I guess. Tall, long hair, bad glasses. She hides. Nice tits, though. Why do you care?”

Ava twisted, to fix him with a hot, wild stare. “When we take her, I want to crown her. And fuck you. Through her.”

He was so taken aback, he stopped moving. “Huh?”

“She'll be the best interface ever.” She rocked back, enveloping his cock once again. “Much better than all the others. I'll make her into a red-hot nymphet. I'll make her do things that you've never imagined.”

“I can imagine a whole hell of a lot,” he warned.

She turned her head, smiled. “Things I'd never do myself, with my own body,” she explained sweetly. “Wild, nasty, dirty things.”

Desmond rammed into her, so hard, she stifled a gasp of discomfort. “You are one depraved bitch,” he said, his voice admiring.

“Why, thank you.” She turned, bracing herself against each jolt, making keening, catlike wails. She'd gotten him. He'd do anything to make it happen now. But she realized, shocked, as the ride thundered to its roaring finish, that this fantasy of the X-Cog threesome compelling Edie Parrish was…oh, God…it was making her come.

Explosively.

 

He dripped blood as he ran. Shocked faces, their mouths horrified ‘O's, stumbling back. No one stopped him on his desperate race toward the guy's office. He had to tell them the truth. Make the killing stop.

But the man didn't listen. He was disgusted, terrified. Kev had thought that the blood, the burns, would be a proof too strong to dispute.

Wrong. He'd scared them to death. His gore had blinded them. He was living proof that hell on earth existed. Something to deny, forget.

He fought, but he was weak from drugs, torture. He threw one of the guys through the window, but there were too many of them. They brought him down. Dragged him out. Then he saw the little angel.

So strange, to see an angel in hell. Small, perfect, clad in blazing white like a sunlit cloud. A halo of white crowned her hair. She saw him with her fearless, fathomless eyes. Not a monster from collective human nightmares. Just him. She retreated into the distance as they dragged him away. Her compassionate eyes followed as he craned desperately to keep her in his field of vision. He cried out, but she was too far—

He gasped for air, felt the jolt, from dream to waking, but the images lingered on. His small angel. Her deep, soft eyes. The man he had begged for help, yelling at him to shut up, to go away, leave him alone. The security staff that had dragged him away. And a name. Someone was screaming a name. The monster that had to be stopped.

Osta…
Ostamen
…?

Gone.
Fuck.
It slid out of his mind, like sand through his fingers.

He gasped for air, groped for the name. This felt like…fuck, it felt like a memory. Not a dream. A
memory.

Excitement pumped through him. He tried to open his eyes. Light stabbed. The stench of disinfectant assaulted his nose. His head throbbed, his insides churned. Unintelligible sounds battered his skull.

He tried to open his eyes, turn his head. Nothing moved. His eyelids were weighted down. His body was lead. The effort to move unleashed…
pain.
Raw, burning pain that he hadn't known since—

His mind flinched away, like he'd brushed up against a lethal live wire. A memory. He'd brushed up against a fucking
memory.
Oh, God. And it hurt. The memory hurt. He tried to calm himself.
Breathe.

What the fuck? What was going on? He was shit scared. So intense, the sounds, the smells. He wanted to scream, writhe, cry. Hide.

He grasped, instinctively, for the image of his little angel. His magical talisman. Her gentle gray eyes regarded him calmly. Wise and kind. He clung to her, until the panic calmed. The little angel never let him down. She had led him through his confusion, through the speechless darkness all those years ago. Back to relative normality and function. He was starting to hear now. He could breathe again.
Ah.

Voices. Audio cut in and out. He struggled to make it out.

“…no signs of previous physical trauma in his brain that would account for the amnesia,” said a male voice. “What was his diagnosis at the time? Where was he treated? I'd like to talk to his physician.”

There was a long pause. “He wasn't,” said a low voice.

A voice he knew. He tried to open his eyes. No luck. Paralyzed.

Bruno
. That was the guy's name. Bruno. Bruno's face, Bruno's history, slid into place in his mind. It was an exquisite relief. Bruno Ranieri. His adopted brother. Tony's great-nephew. Tony Ranieri. The diner. Rosa. OK. He had it. He knew who he was now. More or less.

Kev. Kev Larsen, that was what he was called, when someone cared to call him. He clung to his name, such as it was, like a lifeline.

“He…but he was obviously in some terrible…” The man's voice trailed off, almost frightened. “What in God's name happened to him?”

Another reluctant pause. “We don't know.”

“Excuse me?” The man's voice was incredulous.

“We don't know.” Bruno's voice was defensive. “My uncle found him that way. He'd been tortured, we don't know by who, or why. He doesn't either. Like I said. He couldn't talk. For years afterwards.”

“And he doesn't even know what—”

“No.” The guy cut him off, curtly. “He does not know diddly shit.”

“So his name…his identity, it's only…?”

“Yeah. Made up. It's only eighteen years old,” Bruno finished crisply. “His previous identity is unknown.”

There was a pause. “Ah…that's incredible. Were inquiries made? I mean, to the police, private investigators?”

“At the time, my uncle didn't want to go looking for the guys that fucked him up,” Bruno retorted. “I mean, look at him.”

“Well, yes, of course,” the other man muttered. “Terrible.”

Kev opened his eyes. Light sliced in, an agonizing red-hot blade straight into his brain. Pain, white. Bright lights, beeping machines.

Immobilized. In a rigor of burning agony. Fear built, as he hydroplaned through inner space, toward a memory that held a lethal charge. People touching him, making him flinch. Patting his cheek.

“…hear me? Kev? Can you hear us?”

“Hey, Kev!” Bruno, again. “Wake up, man, it's me! You awake?”

Kev squinted up into the light. The babble of excited voices was hellishly loud, battering his head. The light hurt, it
hurt
…

Pat, pat, pat
, on his cheek. The gentle, persistent slap made his head reverberate with sickening pain. He opened his eyes.

Young, good looking. Dark curly hair, close-set eyes, peering down at him. White lab coat. Smiling, pleased with himself.
Pat, pat, pat.

Mad eyes, lit with hellfire. Wet red mouth, crazy smile, muscling inside his brain. Shoving, wrenching him. He cowered away from that shit-eating troll. Better to hide in a hole, to wither and die there, than to crawl out and be mind-raped again—by…by—

“Ost…er…man.” He forced the syllables out.
Osterman.

Yes. Osterman would never hurt him again.
Never.

“What's that?”
Osterman's fanged mouth dripped blood, his hot breath sulphurous.
“Did you say something? Try again! We're listening.”

Kev exploded out of the bed with a scream of rage, ripping out tubes, IVs, leaping at the guy. He bore Osterman to the floor.

Screaming. Grabbing. Punching. Cold tile against his cheek. Hands held him, pulling him from his prey, and—oh,
shit.
The sting of a needle.

Back down into that hole, fast. Only place to hide, inside his own head, in the deepest, darkest place. Lights out. Shut down.

Shovelfuls of earth rained heavily down on top of his mental hiding place, until the blackness was absolute.

E
die Parrish scanned the entrance of the restaurant and the twilit street outside as she sipped her red wine. No sign of Dad's upright figure striding, coat flapping around his legs. She deliberately released the tension in her chest, her face, her hands. Squeeze, release. Breathe, slow. In, out. This dinner would be fine. Dad himself had asked for her to meet him. She would take that as a gesture of peace. She had to.

Because she wanted to see Ronnie, desperately. She ached for it. Dad held the keys to that tower. It was his most effective instrument for controlling his uncontrollable daughter, and he used it mercilessly, punishing her for all perceived misbehaviors by keeping her away from her little sister. The strategy was brilliant in its simplicity.

God knows, if not for Ronnie, she'd have run away years ago.

She swallowed down the bitter gall of old anger. Maybe tonight she'd have some stroke of brilliance to persuade him. Maybe Dad would have a change of heart. She had to hope.

She sank down into her chair, glanced around to make sure she was unobserved, and gave into the guilty impulse, flipping through the pages of her smallest sketchbook until she found one with some space to fill. She shook hair over her face, for discretion's sake, and resumed people watching. Her eyes softened, absorbing infinitesimal details that her conscious mind didn't perceive as important enough to notice. This would get her into trouble for sure, but she couldn't resist. When she watched people, her fingers itched for the pen, the pencil. She knew she'd pay for it, but there was a part of her that just didn't care. And that part always, always won.

An obsession, her parents had called it. And so? What if it was?

Her eyes seized on the death-of-a-salesman type across the room, the stringy comb-over, the reddened nose, the eye bags. He was consuming his prime rib and baked potato with glum ferocity. Edie rendered him with a few swift pen strokes, and then tried again, trying to capture the set of his shoulders, the defeated look.

The weirdness started to happen, like it always did. Her brain kicked into a new gear. It felt like an eye, opening up deep inside her, seeing everything more deeply, more brightly. The world outside the focus of her eyes blurred. Her perception widened, deepened, softened. Her pen went by itself. Time ceased to move. God, she freaking
loved
it.

The sounds of the restaurant disappeared as she caught the dull anger in the broken veins across his nose, the aggression in his down-turned mouth, the heavy sadness of his hanging jowls.

He was avoiding home. Using work as an excuse to stay as far away as he could from the grandson he and his wife were raising. The child was violent, hyperactive, with learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder. His wife was exhausted, desperate, at her wit's end. So angry at him for abandoning her to deal with it all alone. Again.

He fled that situation every day, just as he'd fled similar problems with the boy's mother, his promiscuous, drugaddled daughter. He felt like shit about it, but he could not change. He didn't have the strength.

Oh, God, how sad, how awful. Edie dragged her eyes away from the unlucky guy and stared out at the lights on the street, trying to get the taste of the man's guilt and sour self-loathing out of her mind.

When she went into that place in her mind, she started picking up stuff from the airwaves. Whatever people were projecting. And there was no shutting it out. Not if she tried.

She looked around, for someone else to tune in to. Someone more upbeat, more hopeful. Like that cute couple across the aisle from her.

Yes, they looked promising. He was handsome, in a stiff, prosperous looking way. She looked sweet. Edie sketched her, smearing ink with her finger, trying to catch that glow, the shadows and curves, that unfocused, blurred look of shifting possibilities…oh,
God.

Pregnant.
That girl was pregnant. Just a few weeks along. It was still secret. Her dinner partner didn't know. She was planning on telling him. Tonight. Nervous about it. Smiling until her mouth ached from it, but her guy was not responding to her smile. He looked preoccupied.

Edie drew the stern line of his Roman nose, his sealed, thin-lipped mouth. His eyes, deep-set, sharp, pinched looking. Energy was gathering inside him. A storm brewing. He intended to hold forth, say his piece, present some watertight argument. He would bolster himself with arrogance, condescension. He thought only of himself; his freedom, his future, his own best interests. They filled his mind so completely, he didn't even really see the girl. How beautiful she was. How hopeful. The cliff she was poised upon. He was bored by her puppyish clinging. He felt suffocated. He was wondering if he could do better. Snag someone sexier, more interesting, more educated. Smarter. Richer.

He was about to to tell his girlfriend that he thought they should be seeing other people.
Edie's pen faltered, digging a hole in the paper.

Maybe she was projecting. Casting this guy as another Eric. An ex who had worn a similar hateful look on his face when he'd dropped that same bombshell on her. But probably not. She was never wrong in these things. Not even when she desperately wished that she were.

Ouch.
She capped her pen, laid down the sketchbook. Threaded ink-stained fingers together. Studied her wineglass. She should stick to horse skulls, stuffed birds. Drawing real people was too dangerous.

So she defaulted to the next best thing. Fictional characters. She could draw them, have intense insights into their heads, and call it creativity, rather than delusional craziness. Or obscene invasion of personal privacy, depending on your mood.

She didn't mean to do this, to anyone. She didn't want to. It was just something that happened to her, since she was fourteen. Since the Haven, and Dr. Osterman's cognitive enhancement techniques.

She'd been enhanced, all right. Practically into the mental ward.

But dwelling on that was not useful. She did some quick sketches of Fade Shadowseeker, the main character of her graphic novel, trying to catch the right pose for the part where Fade was holding the knife to the throat of the sex-trafficker villain of the fifth Fade Shadowseeker book. Demanding to know where the girls were, because his lover Mahlia was being held among them. His face was a taut mask of fear.

Drawing Fade made her think of the argument she'd had with Jamal that afternoon, while the kid was systematically inhaling everything in her fridge. Jamal was her eight-year-old upstairs neighbor and her very good buddy. He came down and slept on Edie's couch when his mother was entertaining her clients in their two room-apartment, on the floor above Edie's. Which was quite often.

The argument had come about because Jamal had been having problems separating fantasy and reality. Jamal was insisting that Fade Shadowseeker was real, and walking the streets of their neighborhood. Jamal claimed to know people who had seen Fade with their own eyes, people who'd been saved by him. Jamal knew of places to which Fade had given big wads of money that he'd taken from bad guys, after beating the shit out of them, of course. He had shown his Fade books to people who had seen this guy. They said yeah, it was him. He totally existed.

Jesus, what had she done? It gave her a wobble in her stomach. She was the one who had created Fade and put him into Jamal's mind, so Jamal's problem was partly of her own making. And it made her heart hurt, how intense Jamal's need for escape must be. It wasn't right. Reality should not have to be so bleak that the kid had to escape from it at all costs. But it felt hypocritical to scold him about it. After all, escape into fiction was one of her coping mechanisms, too. And it was a better one than most. Better than drugs, for sure.

It scared her, though, when Jamal's fantasies strayed into the realm of actual delusion. Jamal's mom was too busy with her clients and her own drug addiction to be bothered with the problem, so Edie wondered uneasily if she herself should track down Jamal's social worker, or school psychologist. Someone ought to know. But who?

She spotted her father coming through the doors. The host pointed Charles Parrish her way. She popped up, waving. Smiling.

Her father jerked his chin, waving her down. His disapproving smile said,
sit, Edith. Try not to make a spectacle of yourself.

She sank back down, trying to be decorous. Ever since she learned to talk, she'd been trying. Though come to think of it, when she'd learned to talk was more or less when the trouble began.

She shook away that unworthy thought as he walked toward her. Her cheeks ached with tension. They were both making an effort, and that was positive, right? Being defeatist or sulky would not help her get to see Ronnie. She was going to keep it together. Oh, so good, oh, so mellow, oh, so very normal and natural. No need for meds.

She got up when he reached the table, and they did the stiff, awkward kiss and half-body embrace. Always timing it wrong, jostling the eyeglasses, bumping chins, going for the wrong cheek and hitting a jawbone, or kissing an ear. Nervous, muttered apologies.

Finally, they were safely seated on opposite sides of the table. Searching for an entry point in the seamless marble wall between them.

Charles Parrish's eyes fell on the pile of sketchbooks on the table, the pens scattered on the smudged tablecloth. Her blackened fingertips. She suppressed an urge to gather them up, mumbling apologies. She stopped herself. She was twenty-nine, a woman, a successful, well-known professional artist. Not a naughty child caught misbehaving.

The waiter arriving to bring water and take their order was a welcome distraction for a couple of minutes, but soon they were left alone, staring at each other. At a loss.

Her father made an unfriendly gesture with his hand toward the sketchbooks. “Hard at work?”

“As always. It's going well.” She waited for him to ask for more details. In vain.

“Is it?” he murmured vaguely. “Is that so.”

The dismissal in his voice killed the urge to pull out the sheaf of reviews she'd printed up for him, for her latest graphic novel. They said things like “ground breaking,” “genre defining.” They referred to her, awkward, shy Edie Parrish, as “one of the freshest new voices of a disillusioned but stubbornly hopeful generation.” They used phrases like “immensely powerful,” and “full of pathos and palpable yearning.”

But Charles Parrish didn't want to hear about it. His oldest daughter's pathos and palpable yearning had been an embarrassment to him her entire life. Edie crumpled the printouts in the pocket of her long sweater, and scrambled for something else to say. “I, um, have a book signing this Saturday,” she offered. “At Powell's. At seven p.m.”

“Oh. That's nice,” he said, his voice distant.

“It's for the release of my new graphic novel,” she persisted. “The Fade Shadowseeker series. The fourth installment. It's doing well. It's a pretty big deal, this event. I was wondering if…” She clenched her hands around the paper. Let him turn her down flat, right to her face. “Wondering if you and Ronnie might come,” she finished breathlessly.

Her father's eyelids quivered. “Fade Shadowseeker?” he said. “That would be the character based upon that that horrible event that blighted your whole childhood?”

Edie cupped her hands around her wineglass and stared at the liquid trembling in the glass. “I wouldn't say it blighted my childhood,” she said quietly. “But yes, that's the one.”

“I'm sorry to hurt your feelings, but I disagree with you about that. And I find it ironic that you would actually suggest that I come and…
celebrate
this unhealthy obsession of yours. Or that you suggest I let your thirteen-year-old sister witness it! What are you thinking, Edith? To ask me that? It's an offense!”

Edie felt her cheeks start to burn. “No. It's not like that, Dad.”

“I understood working out your feelings about that experience through drawing, and I applaud the attempt, but this has gone so far beyond a therapeutic tool, it's…it's—”

“It's a fictional character, Dad,” she said, her voice gentle and flat.

There was a strained silence as they both groped for a way out of this danger zone. Dad was half right, as far as it went. The event that had inspired Fade Shadowseeker had indeed been traumatic.

She remembered every detail. It happened eighteen years ago, on her eleventh birthday. Her mother had arranged a big party at the country club. Edie had been dreading the party. Her hair had been curled into a million dumb ringlets. She'd been dressed in a ruffly white thing with a scratchy lace collar. A wreath of white roses, baby's breath and lacy fluff in her hair. They'd stopped at Daddy's Flaxon office, so that Daddy could kiss her and give her his present in person, because he couldn't make the party. He'd bought her a pink bicycle. Pink silk ribbon bows on it. Pink helium balloons tied to the handlebars.

A man had burst in, and run into Daddy's office before anyone could stop him. He'd been hideously injured. His face blistered with burns, his hair singed off. His hands were black and swollen, his body bloody, covered with oozing cuts. He'd been raving about torture. Mind-rape. Kids thrown in a hole. Begging for someone to make it stop.

Her mother screamed for security, yelling that the man was trying to kill Daddy. They had come running. The enormous, shattering crash as the wounded man threw one of the security guards through the plate glass window and out onto the grounds still echoed in her head.

More security came running. The fight went on for a long time. The man was incredibly strong. It was terrible to hear, though she couldn't see most of it. Mother screamed through the whole thing.

They'd finally subdued him. It took five of them to pull him out of Daddy's office. His eyes had fixed on her as they dragged him past, still twisting and struggling. His eyes were bright green. They shone with a brilliant, desperate light, as if lit from within. She saw it in her dreams.