Шарон Сала – Haunted: Penance / After the Lightning / Seeing Red (страница 4)

He must have assumed she meant she’d be okay by herself outside, for he withdrew his arm and started toward the gaping door. But before he could step inside, two men filed out wearing medical examiner’s jackets and carrying a small black body bag on a gurney between them.

Haylee’s body, battered and broken, lay inside that bag. But not her spirit. Her spirit hovered yet on the mist, which thickened even as the light brightened. Everything receded again, the shouts of the reporters, the flashes of their cameras. She saw nothing but Haylee again.

“Ariel.” David called her name as his arm came around her shoulders, lending his strength and support with his closeness.

“Where’s Ty?” she asked, but a glance up answered her question. The officer stood near David, his dark hair rumpled, his face swollen and blood seeping through his dark T-shirt.

“What the hell happened?” David asked his friend.

Ty blew out a ragged breath. “Son of a bitch killed his daughter, then resisted arrest.”

“Wh-where is he?” Ariel stammered.

He nodded toward the house. “Still inside.”

“He’s dead?” David asked.

Another nod.

Ariel hadn’t seen Haylee’s father. But then, since he’d abused his own child, he’d probably lost his soul long ago. She gestured toward Ty’s T-shirt, where the blood seeped. “You’re hurt. You need help.”

With just a look toward the curb, David summoned paramedics, who rushed up to help his friend. “Take him to Mercy,” he directed them. “Dr. Meadows will be waiting.” His cell phone was out, pressed to his ear, before Ty could be helped toward the ambulance.

He refused the gurney, walking by himself instead. As he moved forward, unbeknownst to him, he stepped into the mist and passed through the fading image of Haylee. Ariel gasped as he turned back, his blue gaze meeting hers for just a moment before he swayed on his feet.

“He’ll be all right,” David said, his voice even deeper with conviction. “He’s strong.”

Despite his claim, David led her back toward the ambulance into which Ty was being helped. All color had drained from the officer’s face, leaving it as stark and pale as Haylee’s. He whispered to Ariel, too, but his words she heard. “I’m sorry.”

She shook her head, the regret all hers. She hadn’t sent him here to help Haylee. She’d known it was already too late for that when the mist had swirled into the classroom where she taught second grade and the student she’d thought absent had appeared. Like so many others Ariel had seen over the years—as a ghost.

The woman reached trembling fingers toward the television, brushing them over the image on the screen. Although the glass was cold beneath her skin, warmth spread through her. “Ariel…”

Not much of the child she’d been was left in the beautiful woman Ariel had become. Her hair was long now and a richer, more vibrant red that stood out like blood against the dead lawn of the property surrounded by crime-scene tape. Her face had thinned, her eyes, large and haunted, overpowering the delicate features of her nose and mouth.

Haunted. That was what this child was. The camera caught her reaching out toward empty space, but Myra knew what her daughter saw. The spirits had always been drawn to Ariel, even when she’d been a child. Myra wasn’t sure if Ariel had seen them then, but she obviously saw them now.

Then Myra glimpsed the charm dangling from Ariel’s thin wrist. She slid her fingertips across its image on the screen. Even though she touched glass, not the charm, she felt the heat of the little pewter sun, power radiating from it. If Ariel only knew…

Myra should have told her children everything that night so long ago when they’d been taken from her. She should have prepared them better to deal with their gifts and the curse. But they’d been so young.

Tears burned her eyes, blinding her to Ariel’s face. Giving them up had been the hardest thing she’d ever done, but they’d deserved better than her. They had deserved to live as normal lives as they could with the gifts they’d inherited. They’d deserved to be safe.

Pain pounded at her temples as pictures rolled through Myra’s mind, visions of her children. They weren’t safe. Not anymore. Maybe she’d given them up for nothing. She hadn’t hidden them from danger; she’d made them more vulnerable to it.

Weak in the knees, Myra settled back onto the hard wooden chair next to the round table covered with a brightly patterned cloth like the ones covering the walls that transformed her little trailer from drab to exotic. In the middle of the table a crystal ball glittered, reflecting the images from the television.

Mostly she used the ball as a prop, something to open the wallets of superstitious souls looking for a brighter future. So she didn’t always tell them what she saw inside her head but what she knew they wanted to hear. For a little while, they’d be happy and she’d be richer. But just for a little while.

That was as long as her happiness had ever lasted, when she’d fallen for Elena’s dad, when she’d had her children. She’d never been able to keep anyone she’d loved. She’d like to blame the curse, but she suspected it was her own fault, her cowardice.

But could anyone be happy forever? She would never know.

She leaned over the table, peering into the crystal. Myra could see no future in that ball, not for her. Not for her children.

All that reflected in the crystal was the television screen, the flash of red of Ariel’s long hair, startling against the cream-colored sweater she wore. Myra lifted her gaze to the TV, to the face of her beautiful daughter. The camera zoomed in, catching the anguish brightening her turquoise eyes with unshed tears.

“Oh, baby, it might already be too late for you,” she said on a ragged sigh. “Like it’s too late for me.”

She didn’t have time to warn them; if she tried, she might lead the threat to their doors. She didn’t have time to run. She’d seen the danger and it was closing in on her. Fast. It might already be stalking her children.

“Keep your eyes open, baby,” she advised her daughter, wishing Ariel could hear her. But telepathy wasn’t this child’s gift.

“He might already be there, with you,” she warned as a man’s arms closed around the woman on television, pulling her close. To protect her? Or harm her?

Hopefully her daughter had better taste in men than she had. Myra had chosen the wrong man to love, one who would never be able to love her back. But then, no man had been able to do that…once they’d learned the truth about her. That was why she’d started using them: for money, for security. But even that hadn’t lasted. They’d paid her to go away, not wanting anything to do with her or the children they’d fathered. Their money hadn’t lasted, either; she’d used it to try to drown the visions and outrun the curse, both exercises in futility. She was ready to accept her fate.

But not her children’s.

Her heart pounded as she watched those leather-bound arms wrap tight around her daughter, holding her close. Because he loved her? A tear trickled down Myra’s cheek with her doubts. Ariel was beautiful. But she was cursed.

Giving them up hadn’t saved her children; it had only prolonged the inevitable. Myra swayed, nearly toppling the chair, as a vision crashed through her mind: Ariel lying on a dirty cement floor, her turquoise eyes wide open but blinded…by death.

With a crack of static, the television blackened to a spark in the middle of the screen, swallowing the image of Ariel in David’s arms. Ariel, curled in her favorite chair, lifted her head toward David, who held the remote in a tight fist. He’d just walked into her sunny yellow living room, dwarfing it with his size and presence. For better reception, he’d had to take his cell outside to phone the hospital. While he’d been gone, she’d received a call from the school board to suspend her.

“Is he all right?” she asked, her concern all for Ty. She’d deal with her pain later, by herself, as she always had.

He jerked his head in a short nod. “Yes. Twenty-two stitches later. But he lost a lot of blood. They’re keeping him overnight.”

“You should go. Be with him. I’m fine,” she assured him. It wasn’t the first time she’d lied to him. An old Gypsy proverb teased at her memory. There are such things as false truths and honest lies.

Her mother had used that proverb to justify how she’d made her living, traveling town to town conning people. Although only a child at the time she’d helped her mother, Ariel had known the staged séances and the phony crystal ball had been wrong. But her mother had insisted that sometimes it was better for people to hear lies than the truth; it hurt them less.

David tossed down the remote with such force that it bounced against the couch cushions, then he called her on the lie. “No, you’re not fine. What were you thinking?”

Thinking? It didn’t work that way. She didn’t think. She just saw. Then she had to find a way to deal with what she’d seen. Numbness worked, but it always wore off too soon.

David didn’t give her time to answer his question—even if she could—before he fired off another. “Do you know what could have happened to you?”