Behind her, she heard Sam say, “Hold on!” His feet pounded as he came after her, but she was already flying out the door, and when he called, “Nora! You shouldn’t be—” she dove into the welcoming darkness before he could finish.
She imagined him darting into the hallway, mouth agape as he looked both ways, wondering how the hell she’d got down the stairs so fast.
Stupid, she thought. So stupid.
*
The shadows deposited Nora in her apartment. She sat on the cold linoleum, her back against the fridge, knees drawn up. The cats slunk in and circled, not so much concerned as curious. When Hyde nudged her hand, the shadows swirled and all three raced off, hissing.
It’s for the best.
Sam knew too much. He was—like the cats—too curious. She was vulnerable right now, and when you put those together, she risked spilling everything to him, and that would endanger not only Nora but Sam himself.
It was better this way. For him. She could protect him by scaring him off. By pushing him firmly out of her life.
Except that wasn’t what she wanted. Not at all.
Did it matter what she wanted?
No. It couldn’t matter. She had to put others above herself. That was her mission, and it extended to Sam.
Yet all that self-talk didn’t help. She was embarrassed and shamed by what she’d done, how she’d treated him. He might deserve her consideration and protection, but he hadn’t deserved that.
This was the only way.
Wasn’t it?
The problem was that now, having fled Sam, she couldn’t stop her thoughts from returning to the priestess’s words.
Then maybe she should let herself think about that. Focus on that, rather than push it aside and tell herself it was bullshit. Instead, she should prove that it was.
But you know it is.
Not good enough. She was a reporter, and she needed more. This was how she’d banish those words from her mind: not by seeking solace with Sam or by chasing him away. No, she would be logical and prove that her memories of her mother—of her life with her family—were exactly as she remembered.
She took her laptop to the kitchen table, opened it, and sat there, staring at the screen.
Start at the easiest point: her parents’ murders. Look them up. If only she could remember her mother’s name. What the hell was wrong with her?
Matt, she thought. Matthew Hesper. Matt and …
Stella!
Relief washed over her. She’d been afraid that using her powers had begun to erode her memory. Her mother’s name … that was a huge thing to have forgotten. It wasn’t a birthday or an ex-boyfriend’s address. But there were so many other fragments of memory now. When she tried to focus on them, they slipped away from her, blurred out of focus. She needed to rebuild them, to confirm them, or risk letting them deteriorate further.
And there was what the priestess had said about her mother. She couldn’t let that go unchallenged. The idea that Stella Hesper had anything to do with the Children of Phonos …
She poised her fingers over the keys, but hesitated. What exactly would this prove? They’d been murdered. There’d been hundreds of mourners. It obviously happened, so what was she going to do when she found the proof? Tell herself it was good enough, her questions were answered?
That was a cheat. Reading those old articles would only falsely reassure her or, even worse, bring those memories tumbling back at a moment when she was already reeling.
If she was going to do this, she’d do it right. Find some less “public” memory of her family life. A private one that only she’d know, and research that.
No, find several memories and prove they were true. Eliminate all doubt. Treat this like a proper investigation—you don’t contact a single source for verification and say, “That settles it.” Not for something of this magnitude. She’d need multiple proofs.
First, pick a memory …
Easier said than done. How exactly would one research personal memories? She flipped through her mental filing cabinet and dredged up images of sleepover parties … for girls whose first names she could barely recall. She remembered family vacations … to places such as beaches or campgrounds or Disneyland, locales so generic or well-known that kids could probably picture themselves there even if they’d never visited.
Wait! Her parents had taken her to see The Nutcracker when she was eight. She distinctly remembered that.
Nora confirmed the year with a calendar check and then typed in the search terms and, sure enough, the show had played that holiday season in New York … as it did every holiday season. She squinted at a blurry photo of the theater fa?ade, but it didn’t ring a bell. All she remembered was holding her mother’s hand and being led through a forest of people, the crush overwhelming. Oh, and it had been snowing, which a fact check told her it had done most of December that year.
Think, think …
She switched to her e-mail. Checked her contact list for someone she could ask …
Like who? Everyone in that list had come into her life after her return from Nepal. No one knew her before her parents had died.
As she was about to close the e-mail program, she saw that she’d gotten an autoreply from a colleague she’d cc’d on an e-mail, who was apparently out of town attending his high school reunion.
High school …
That would work. She could pull up high school memories and then check the school Web site. She hadn’t thought of her school in years. While she remembered a generally uneventful time spent there, she had no desire to revisit that time in her life. Too connected to her happy family life, she supposed. But she’d been on the school paper and she’d won an athletic award—volleyball, wasn’t it? She could probably verify that on the school Web site.
She found the site, clicked the link, and the screen filled with a notice that the site would be down for the next forty-eight hours for maintenance. Well, there went that idea. Time to find another.
Nora sifted through files on her laptop, hoping to spark some memory she could track down, but she kept thinking of high school. Such a simple check, one that would have taken just a few minutes, and then she’d have been able to relax, maybe even get some sleep on this endless day. But she’d been thwarted and that frustration pecked at the back of her mind.
She wasn’t going to be able to rest, much less sleep, until she had answers. If the Internet couldn’t provide them, she had another route.
Time to go into the shadows again.
*
Nora stood in a darkened corner, just inside the doors of her old school, and it took everything she had not to double over and puke out whatever remained from dinner. She could blame too many shadow rides in one day, upsetting her stomach. She could blame it on not having slept. She could add on the hell of everything that had happened in the last few hours. But all that felt like an excuse. The truth …