Greywalker - Kat Richardson [108]
I had to drive with care, in spite of an urge to speed. I couldn’t see well through my swollen eyes and the streets flickered Grey, overlaid in mist and silver, outlined in streaks of neon-bright light. I pulled over a couple of times and tried to breathe slowly and attentively until it stopped. It would not recede. The trip home was very long.
TWENTY-SIX
I jerked awake at a sound and cowered under the covers. The beeping continued and the bed shuddered as Will fumbled for his pager on the nightstand. I hid my face in my pillow and moaned, “Make it go away.”
He flopped backward with the pager on his chest. “It’s just Mikey, letting me know he’s at work.”
“He works on Sunday?”
“Usually it’s me. Mike volunteered to do the paperwork so I could sleep in.” He rolled over and grinned at me. “Wanna go back to sleep?”
I peeled the pillow aside. “No.”
His smile got wider as he felt my toes sliding up his leg. “Feeling better?”
“Much,” I replied. If I focused my attention on Will, I didn’t have to think about what had happened in the night, didn’t have to look at it, shimmering in the verges.
I had forgotten the note I’d left with Michael. The sight of the scarecrow figure in the darkened hall outside my home had made me recoil in fear. When Will stepped into the light, my relief flooded out as a puddle of idiotic tears and shaking. He was very sweet, even when he told me I stank and put me in the shower. I kept sliding down into the bottom of the tub and crying until Will gave up being a gentleman and got in with me. I clung to him and things improved from there, even though I refused to tell him what had happened.
Now I was disgusted with myself for having blubbered and oozed like a jellyfish.
He caught me frowning as he snatched away my pillow. “Hey. Want to take another shower?” he asked, laying on a wicked grin.
I was slow on the uptake. “Do I need one?”
“From a hygiene point of view, no. But interesting things seem to happen in your shower, so I thought it was a good place to start.”
I made a rude noise, grabbed back the pillow, and swatted him with it. He dove under the covers and tickled me.
Will let the horrors of Saturday night lie and kept me too distracted to think about them most of Sunday. After an afternoon of goofing off, he even agreed to come and look at the parlor organ with me on Monday and never speculated about whatever it was we were doing together.
After Will had gone, the misery and uncertainty began to close in again. Typing up my notes sent me into fits of shivering and crying. I thought of quitting. I could not face any more nights like Saturday, but I wasn’t sure I’d done enough to destabilize Edward. And if I could not move him in the direction I wanted, neither Cameron nor I stood a chance of seeing another spring. What did I have to offer Edward that was more attractive than the pleasure of taking my head off? I couldn’t trust vampires. I wasn’t even sure that I could look at Cameron without either screaming or putting a bullet in him—not that it would do any good.
I closed my eyes, trying to think, but only slipping around the edges. The Grey washed against me, chill and nauseating. I felt that I was standing on a dock—a world—afloat on the surface of another world, pitching with the motion of unknown tides. The disconcerting feel of electricity zipped along my nerves, but I kept my eyes closed against those twisting threads of fire. I didn’t want them, or anything to do with Wygan’s realm or vampires or ghosts or any of the rest of it. I felt the insubstantial ground shivering and thought of stepping off the dock. . . .
The sound of little claws on woodwork pulled me back from the bloody edge. I picked up the ferret and snuggled her to my face, smelling the warm, corn-chip odor of her fur. For