Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(32)

And then he did explode.

But not there.

Somewhere else.

Everywhere at once.

He thought he heard Ela gasping, screaming, glimpsed grayish shapes like the Dementors from the Harry Potter movies, slithering through the air, enveloping both of them in their dark shroud.

“Ela!” he cried out.

Or thought he did.

“Ela!”

Didn’t she see them closing in? Didn’t she know?

Gotta stop, gotta stop, gotta stop …

Words spoken or merely formed, it didn’t matter anymore, the difference reduced to nothing. Action and thought became indistinguishable from each other, to the point where Dylan could no longer tell which was which. Or what was really happening from what his mind conjured.

The Dementors …

Everywhere. And nowhere.

Just like him, just like them—him and Ela.

Together. Separate. Here. Gone.

And then it was happening again, inside him, only different this time. Because the Dementors were gone, replaced by ghostly specters watching him from afar and from up close at the same time. Dylan saw his mother smiling down at him, and he hugged Ela even closer, for reasons he didn’t understand.

But then his mother was gone, replaced by a series of spectral images drawn from among the monsters who had visited him in the past. Dylan had learned much too young that there were things that really did go bump in the night, that monsters were real. But they didn’t seem real now, making him question the integrity of his own memory and whether these beings were the products of comparable delusions, which attacked him only in his mind.

The faceless thugs who’d nearly beaten him to death just outside the Brown University campus, still faceless now.

The white slavers who’d kidnapped him in Mexico.

The serial killer with hundreds of victims to his credit.

Girls had been part of his crossing paths with all of them. And now they were watching him with Ela, as if to decide which would get another go at him.

You can’t. You’re dead.

“Don’t speak,” he thought he heard Ela say, atop him now.

Maybe it didn’t matter whether they were dead or not. His father thought he saw ghosts, at least one, so why not Dylan, too? Maybe the lines between the two worlds weren’t as well constructed as everyone thought. The right person, at the right time and place, might be capable of bulldozing right through them.

Leave me alone.

“Quiet,” Ela was saying, pressing a hand against his mouth.

Dylan realized he couldn’t breathe, that she was smothering him with a palm that tasted like the peyote tea, which was driving bile up his throat. He still couldn’t breathe, but her hand was gone, and then the spectral images were dissolving around him and the lantern light was fading to a soft blur. Then he saw only darkness, even though his eyes were open.

*

Dylan awoke in the root cellar, Ela pressed against him, their clothes shed in unkempt piles about the mossy earth. The blanket had bunched up, conforming to their dual shapes and no longer spreading any farther.

He had no idea where his phone was, to check the time, and the next time he opened his eyes Ela was gone, and he was terrified, until he slipped off again. But, the next time, her naked form was still there and his wasn’t, making him wonder whether he’d ever been there at all. If what had happened was real, if anything was real …

His head pounded like a jackhammer was working between his ears; his mouth and throat were so dry that he couldn’t swallow. He tried to open his eyes again, only to realize that they already were open but that there was nothing to see except the empty darkness, broken only by a sliver of light still shed by the fading lantern. The dark scared him, the night scared him, left visions of scurrying through the woods and brush on four legs instead of two, his nails turned to talon-like claws raking at the ground and air. Empty of thought, with the world his to embrace. Grasping at the air and seeking Ela amid the mist-shrouded night alive with the sounds of crickets and night birds. Calling out for Ela, except he had no voice. Hypersensitive to the world around him, every smell, sound, and sight.

Everything magnified until it all washed away in a splash of water that turned to blood, the light appearing from slivers cut out of the world above, just in time to remind him to breathe.





26

BOERNE, TEXAS

Guillermo Paz sat at his priest’s bedside, the side rail lowered so he could feed the man his dinner, which was watered-down oatmeal with the texture of drilling mud, to make it easier for him to swallow. Paz was the only one who could get him to eat anything at all, which convinced the colonel that his priest could grasp the meaning of his words, even if he could no longer respond to them.

“I’ll tell you, Padre,” Paz said, as the old man worked his mouth feebly and then managed a swallow, “I really miss our talks. Remember the first time you heard my confession? I know I threw you for a loop with that one, but you never shied away from telling me the God’s honest truth, if you’ll pardon my choice of words.”

Paz dabbed the spoon into the bowl of soupy oatmeal and eased it forward. His priest opened his mouth a crack and sucked up the meager contents with a slurping sound.

“I know you can’t talk to me anymore, Padre, but you can still listen, and that’s almost as important. I got back too late to call tonight’s bingo game. I know somebody from the home was there to fill in, but I still feel I let people down. I don’t like letting people down.”