The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [90]
And yet as she lay on the ground, her attacker disappearing into the night because he presumed she was as dead as her sister, almost right away she had the feeling that she wasn’t alone. The sensation was so pronounced that even when she was being loaded onto the backboard, her neck in a cervical collar, she thought Lucinda was being carried into the ambulance beside her. She wasn’t. At one point Reseda glanced at the trauma dressings and wraparound gauze that made her arms look like a mummy’s, and she could have sworn that she saw her sister’s slim wrist and the Georg Jensen bracelet with the moonstones she always wore.
Two days later she would be identifying Lucinda’s killer from a series of snapshots. He was a deeply disturbed custodian at the university lab where Lucinda worked and had had a crush on her that had gone horribly wrong. Somehow Reseda knew details of the relationship—and the strange ways the young man had stalked her sister—that Lucinda had never shared.
The incursion into her aura would prove, in some ways, to be a penetrating injury. And though her sister had meant her no harm (which Reseda knew now was usually, but not always, the case with the undead), Lucinda’s presence was at once debilitating and disorienting. Everyone in her family and at school noticed the changes in Reseda, and even when her internal and external wounds had healed, it would be a long, long time until she was fully recovered—until she was, quite literally, herself again. Everyone attributed this to the trauma, and they were right—though not in the way they meant. Had Reseda not been so traumatized by the attack, she might have resisted her sister’s invasion of her aura.
Which brought her back to Sawyer Dunmore and his crypt here in the basement. It felt empty, save for whatever bones were somewhere in the dirt beneath her feet. Either he had made it to another plane or he had found another host on this earth. She presumed it was the former, since whatever was tormenting the pilot did not seem to reflect the little she knew about Sawyer. She wondered: Had Chip Linton found the bones? If so, he hadn’t been thinking about them when he had been at her house for dinner. She hadn’t sensed either Sawyer or a skeleton.
She circled back in her mind to the women. She thought of Anise. Of Clary. Of Ginger. Then she thought of John Hardin and Alexander Jackson. The original tincture was long gone, but now they had a fresh pair of twins at their disposal. The odds were good they would try again.
When she went upstairs, Holly and the girls were all sound asleep in the living room. She kissed each on the cheek and then perched herself on the deacon’s bench in the kitchen, prepared to keep vigil until either Emily returned or the sun rose, whichever came first.
You know you are in a hospital bed. There are the metal rungs along the sides, there is a galaxy of small dots of light: distant stars, but not really distant at all. You listen to the sounds of the nurses, including the slim fellow with the immaculate, graying goatee, as they tend to you and whoever else is on this floor, passing by your half-open door. How long ago was it that Michael Richmond was here? An hour? Two? Three? You believe you are alone, but you are not completely sure. You hear no one breathing in that second bed, and there had been nobody there when you were first brought here from the ER. You recall that earlier your stomach hurt, but no more. They have given you something, and this is your principal source of frustration at the moment. You should be in pain. You deserve to be in pain. When you recall what you were contemplating, you grow a little nauseous. Would you actually have turned the knife on a child? Your own child? Apparently. It was close.
You fear that you will never be able to look your children in the eyes again. You