Blood Echo (Burning Girl #2)(20)

These thoughts, this recognition that the long dead and the brand new are colliding in her mind, are bringing her dangerously close to waking, and she doesn’t want to yet.

Because Luanne is here.

“I wouldn’t try getting inside their heads, sweet pea,” her grandmother says.

Charlotte thinks she’s talking about the resort. About Cole. His massive company. But her grandmother’s not finished. She keeps talking as she sinks her hands into the tide pool between them. “Sure, they’ll have a story, but that’s all it is. A story. A story they made up. If you really want to know evil, it’s not enough to just look evil in the eye. You’ve got to bash its head up against the wall and see what comes spilling out. That’s messy, girl. Real messy. You sure you have what it takes for that, Trina?”

Luanne gives her an inquisitive look, even as she keeps digging into the tide pool.

“I’m sorry,” she hears herself say, but what she really wants to say is, My name’s Charlotte now, Grandma. Will you call me Charlotte, please? It will make me feel like you’re alive again.

“What are you sorry for, honey?”

“I let him trick me. There wasn’t anyone there.”

“I know, honey. You wanted to set her free, but she wasn’t there, and she’ll never be there. Because she’s here.”

The skull Luanne pulls from the tide pool is clean and perfectly preserved. Salt water pours from its empty eye sockets. With the certainty Charlotte only possesses in dreams, she knows it’s her mother’s, and for some reason, it makes perfect sense that Luanne’s been keeping it here all this time, waiting for the right moment to present it to Charlotte like a gift.

She takes it in her hands and studies it and waits for the bone to transmute memories of her mother—memories she was never granted—into the flesh of her bare, dripping hands. The part of her that’s close to wakefulness feels she should be horrified, but inside the logic of this dream, there’s no greater gift her grandmother could have given her in this moment, and it fills Charlotte with something like warmth.

“But that’s not the only reason you ran, sweet pea,” Luanne says with a gentle smile.

Charlotte just stares into her eyes.

“You let him trick you. You let him give you something to run to. Because if you hadn’t turned your back on him, you were going to break his neck.”





18

Charlotte wakes with the sense that her mother’s skull is resting somewhere in bed with her. She reaches for where she thinks it might be and ends up grabbing a handful of bedsheets. Not quite as thin and scratchy as hospital issue, but close.

The bed’s edges are surrounded by some kind of zipper, the lower part of a plastic biohazard tent. The rest of the tent’s nowhere in sight.

A shadow steps forward.

Several bars of soft light—one at floor level, the other about waist-high, and the third close to the ceiling—start to fill the room, transforming it from a cube of darkness into something closer to a private room in a nightclub, then something a little brighter but still classy looking, like a waiting room in a high-end spa. The institutional blandness all around her is revealed to be a design scheme of the kind you find inside those celebrity-built mansions featured in magazines. Everything is clean and white, the stainless steel fixtures gleaming and polished. The walls, she sees, are upholstered.

It’s a padded cell, she corrects herself. The padding’s just really pricey.

Cole steps through the door between a viewing area and the rest of the room, dressed in one of his typical long-sleeved collared shirts and black slacks. As usual, the shirt’s blue. The shirt’s always some shade of blue. The one time he wore green, she commented on it and he actually cracked what seemed like a genuine smile.

He’s not smiling now. In the tense silence, she notices the window across the room is actually an LCD screen, its view of snowy mountains computer generated.

“How long since . . .”

“Eight hours,” he says quietly.

She wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d told her it had been a week, but maybe that’s due to whatever drugs they’re pumping into her. She’s got two IV ports feeding into her right arm.

“What are you giving me?”

“Antibiotics mostly.”

“For what?”

“You had wounds when the medics got to you, and they were bad. You just didn’t have them for very long. So our primary concern was infection. As for pain, we didn’t know if we should be treating any. You weren’t responsive, but we didn’t know how you’d wake up so we socked you full of the good stuff. How are you feeling?”

“Weird dreams.”

“Pain?”

She shakes her head.

“I’ll start pulling you off.” He turns in the direction of what must be a hidden camera and makes a slicing motion across his throat. Since he doesn’t explain himself any further to whoever might be watching, she assumes the person’s listening in as well.

There’s something she’s never seen before in his expression. Maybe it’s just concern, or maybe it’s fear. But the past eight hours have rattled the typically unflappable Cole Graydon down to his bones. Parental concern. That’s what’s suggested by his furrowed brow and the way he occasionally chews his lower lip. The way he’s studying her with uncharacteristically wide eyes.