Still shivering, she swung her legs over the side of her mattress. In the gloom, something slithered or scuttled across the wall to her left. She jerked her head in that direction, but saw only a solid mass of shadows.
What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she see into the blackness? She concentrated, made a psychic adjustment, and instantly the darkness was hers again—a protective cloak, a womb that enfolded and cradled her.
Still, the uneasiness remained … the recent and increasingly familiar sense that, for a moment, the darkness had not been her friend. Instead it had seemed like … what? Her enemy? No, but a cold and watchful presence perhaps. Sly. A keeper of secrets.
She shook her head. These were dark thoughts. Stupid thoughts. Clearly she was still rattled by what had happened earlier. The massacre. The cult priestess’s words. Her loss of control with Sam. The memory, vision, whatever, at the high school …
She needed to orient herself. Figure out what time it was.
She switched on the little floor lamp beside her mattress, ignoring the shadows that slunk away into the cracks and crevices like snakes or rats.
Her old-fashioned alarm clock, the one with the Mickey Mouse hands, read 6:45. Was that a.m. or p.m.?
She groped for her jeans, which lay in a rumpled heap on the floor of the loft with the rest of her clothes, and fished her cell out of the pocket. She blinked at the display: p.m.! She’d been asleep all day. Several noncommittal texts from Sam asked her what the hell was going on, but the ones that worried her were from her boss. Yesterday had been Sunday, so wandering in a daze all day hadn’t been an issue. But this was Monday, and Raj was not at all happy that Nora had been AWOL.
She didn’t remember arriving home, getting undressed, crawling into bed. She had no recollection of anything after the barrage of memories—not mine, those were not my memories—that had assailed her at the school.
There were a few voice mails as well, from Sam and Raj and from Casey Santiago, the fashion editor at NYChronicle, who’d become Nora’s closest work friend. She couldn’t face listening to any of them right now.
Crawling to the ladder in her underwear, she descended to the living room and looked around for the Assholes. The cats were nowhere to be seen. She couldn’t decide if that was a good sign or a bad one.
She padded to the picture window, clicking on lights as she went. If there’d been anyone out there, they’d have been treated to a view of her in her undies and tank top, a tantalizing glimpse through the mostly bare branches of the tall trees that stood sentinel along the street.
Nora started. Something was squatting on one of those branches, peering inside at her. It was a dark, hunched shape. Her heart quickened as she looked again, staring into the night-black tangle of branches. No, she had been mistaken. There was nothing.
She exhaled. Her own reflection was wan and sickly in the glass. Her hair was lank, her eyes dark hollows in her thin face. That thing in the tree—that thing she’d thought was there—had reminded her of something. In light of recent events she grasped at it almost gratefully, though the recollection was far from pleasant.
It was the night her parents had died.
She’d been nineteen. She and her parents had been celebrating something—a promotion for her father? Her memories of the night were somehow both vivid and hazy, certain details standing out with stark and unflinching clarity, others shrouded in a fog of forgetfulness.
Selective amnesia they’d called it. The therapists, the experts, her parents’ friends and colleagues. She couldn’t remember any of them now. Once it was all over—the initial trauma, the funeral, the aftermath—those people had melted away, though she suspected it was partly her doing. She’d wanted to be alone, to escape her grief and seek out some sort of … meaning, or solace. And so she’d …
But no. She was getting ahead of herself.
That night. Focus on that night. If only to prove the lie in the priestess’s words.
The celebration is at a restaurant. An Italian place. Family-run affair, small but classy, in the theater district. Maybe West Forty-Fourth Street. Somewhere around there.
They’re happy. Drinking champagne. Laughing a lot. Her dad is square-jawed, handsome in his double-breasted suit, his dark hair slick and neat. Her mom is wide-mouthed as she laughs, bright red lipstick framing gleaming white teeth. She’s elegant in an off-the-shoulder number, which shimmers like gold.
Checked tablecloths. Candles. Music. It’s all as hazy as a dream. But Nora carries the images within her, enclosed in a fragile bubble of happiness.
Then … the dark night. It’s drizzling. The streets gleam like black metal. Light reflects off passing cars like white shards of endlessly shattering glass. Everyone is bundled up in coats and scarves. Her father opens an umbrella, holds it over the heads of his wife and daughter.
“Got to keep my girls dry,” he says. It isn’t particularly funny, but they all laugh.
Stepping from the warm restaurant into the cold air, Nora shivers. The soles of her shoes crackle on the gritty pavement. But the car isn’t far away. Her dad has parked it in an almost-empty lot owned by a company he does business with.
“Special privileges,” he’d told them earlier that evening as he cut the lights and he engine. And Nora thought how important, how respected, he must be among his colleagues, and how proud that made her feel.
The quickest route between the restaurant and the parking lot is an alleyway, little more than a cut-through. Too narrow for even a single vehicle to negotiate and made narrower still by the Dumpsters lining its walls on both sides.
Alone, she might be scared, but flanked by her parents, she feels safe, impregnable. Even when a black, hunched shape detaches itself from the dark block of a Dumpster ahead and glides along the alleyway toward them, she feels not a flutter of unease. Only when the figure raises its arm and she sees light slither along the barrel of the gun in its hand does she realize with a jolt what terrible danger they are in. Even now, though, her overriding emotion is not terror but indignation.
You can’t do this! she thinks. Not to us! How dare you!
She looks at the man’s face but she can’t see it. He is nothing but a void in her mind. Later she will be no use when the police question her about the incident … or at least …
She blinked, coming back to herself for a moment. A faceless man? Of course not. He was only faceless either because he kept to the shadows or because she’s blocked his features from her mind. As for the police, the truth is, she remembered nothing of the evening’s immediate aftermath simply because she was—quite understandably—deep in shock.
The gunman’s voice is a generic bad-guy growl. He demands her father’s wallet, her mother’s jewelry. How the mugger knows her mother is wearing a diamond necklace beneath her thick scarf Nora has no idea. Perhaps he’s been watching them through the window of the restaurant.
What happens next happens so quickly that to Nora it’s like a series of flash images, like movie stills: