“Daddy.” The small voice, and the hand tugging at his shirt, brought him out of his doze. He pushed himself up on one arm and blinked the sleep out of his eyes, squinting to try and see Emily in the dim light of the moon coming in through the window. She stood twisting the hem of her oversized T-shirt in her hands, her eyes big and dark in her pale face. “Daddy, I can’t sleep.”
“Why not?” He shifted over and held the blankets back so she could climb in, covering a yawn.
“It’s too weird. The bed’s too big and I keep seeing...” She shivered a little and snuggled in closer. “I want mommy.”
“I know.” He thought of offering to take her to the cemetery to see Allie’s grave but hesitated on bringing it up; she’d only just begun to show signs of recovery from her time spent at Edgemount.
For the first few weeks she hadn’t even allowed him to touch her, spending most of her time sitting in a corner of the apartment with her knees drawn up, watching him warily. She’d eaten, but only if he left the plate on a tray by her and went into another room, like an animal afraid of having its food stolen. As she slowly started to put on weight she had shown a little more life, and allowed him to sit and eat with her, then slowly started to find her voice again. Now she came to wake him up nearly every night, sometimes only crawling into bed and falling asleep, and sometimes—like now—she opened up a little. All he could do was be patient and wait for her to become more comfortable, though it hurt like a physical blow every time he saw her start at small noises, or heard her scream in her nightmares.
He realized she’d fallen asleep as he was caught up in his thoughts and after a moment he closed his own eyes to try and doze until she woke again. Instead he just hovered maddeningly on the edge of sleep, feeling vaguely anxious and uncertain. Something still felt wrong, even though he had Emily back, and they were safe in his apartment. Giving up on sleeping for the rest of the night, he tried to figure it out, turning it over and over in his mind.
He didn’t remember much about the actual rescue; his first clear memory was of standing in the front hallway of his apartment with Emily asleep in his arms. He vaguely thought he must have taken a taxi home—if he thought about it, he was sure he’d made some sort of excuse about a late party to the taxi driver—but he remembered little of the drive. All his memories of the years between Emily’s disappearance and her rescue were fuzzy, but he knew he could blame that on the drink.
No, something whispered in his head. You were sober for a time.
“When?” he muttered. “When I wasn’t drunk, I was hungover.”
How’d you find Emily? the voice said. You didn’t just wander in.
“Shut up. It was luck.”
Bullshit. He almost recognized the voice on that word, though he was sure he’d never met its owner. Except, of course, it was only his own mind voice playing tricks on him, telling him, Think, Jonesy.
“No,” he told it, louder than he’d intended. In his arms Emily stirred, whimpering a little in her sleep. He stroked her hair until she relaxed again, and the voice thankfully silenced. After a while he even managed to drift off, and didn’t wake again until the sun moved high enough in the sky to shine through his window and onto his face.
Emily was gone and he felt a moment of pure fear before he heard the toilet flush in the bathroom. He relaxed back, one hand absently pressed to his chest where his heart was still fluttering nervously, and listened to her light footsteps leave the bathroom and head down the hall to the spare room, which he’d been trying to turn into her bedroom. She was rarely as affectionate in the daylight hours as she was in the depths of the night, when time crawled to a stop and the shadows could have hidden anything.
After a few moments he got out of bed and went to use the bathroom himself, then headed into the kitchen to cook breakfast. He still felt restless and tense, though under the light of the strong late summer sun his thoughts of the night before seemed tattered and misty. He’d heard nothing but his own tired brain talking to him, probably using the voice of someone he’d heard on the TV or the radio. However he’d found Emily, it didn’t matter now; she was home and getting better.
She wandered into the kitchen as he was slapping fried eggs and bacon onto a pair of plates and climbed onto one of the chairs at the table. He set the plate down in front of her and added a glass of milk to it before sitting down to eat his own food with a mug of coffee. They ate in silence—Emily still gobbled her food without much sign of enjoyment but at least in the past few days she’d agreed to eat at the table—and Jones felt himself slowly starting to relax.
A loud knock on the door made him jump and startled Emily into knocking her half-full milk glass over. She gave him a wide-eyed look, her bottom lip trembling slightly. Whoever was at the door knocked again, a hard pounding that made him think of the cops, and he got up to answer it, stroking Emily’s hair on the way by and murmuring for her not to worry about the spilled milk. Without thinking he took one of the guns from the locked drawer he’d placed them in, loading it as he walked to the front door. He slid it into the waistband of his shorts and pulled the hem of his shirt over it before he opened the door.
“About fucking time.” The man shoved past him into the house. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you, Jonesy. It was like you disappeared—” He stopped dead at the distinct click of Jones flicking the safety of the gun, and glanced back over his shoulder with wide eyes. Mismatched eyes, Jones thought absently, and wondered why that should almost trigger a memory.
“Okay, whoa, I’ve already been shot once recently,” the man was saying, a little breathlessly. “I thought you were over your whole shooting Shasta thing.”
“Do I know you?” Jones asked, keeping the gun trained on the man’s—Shasta, apparently—face.
“Yes? I’m not your favourite person but you know me. Did you whack your head or something? Where’s Drae?”
“Who’s Drae?”
“You know, Drae. Tall, pretty, for some reason loves you even though you’re an idiot at best and a dick at worst?” Shasta tilted his head. “You really don’t remember?”
“No, I...” he started, but something had clicked in his head and he knew where he had heard the voice in his mind before; not on TV, or on the radio, but from this man who stood in his front hallway with both hands partially raised. For a moment something huge threatened to overwhelm Jones and he staggered under its onslaught, nearly dropping the gun.
“Daddy?” Emily peeked around the corner, then drew back as Shasta turned to look at her.
“I’m fine.” Jones straightened up and locked his knees, swinging the muzzle of the gun back to bear on Shasta. “Whoever you are, you’re mistaken. Get out.”
“Oh, Jonesy.” Shasta wasn’t even looking at him, his gaze fixed on Emily. “She’s not real. You know that, don’t you? Somewhere you know that.”
“Get. Out.” Jones found he was breathing hard, his chest tight with fear, though Shasta hadn’t made a threatening move towards either him or Emily. “I’ll shoot you.”
“Yeah, I know. If you do, at least make it a clean kill.” Almost too fast for Jones to follow the movement, Shasta lunged forward and pressed his hand to Emily’s forehead. The gun went off but the bullet whined harmlessly past Shasta’s back and buried itself in the wall beyond him. Jones saw his daughter look at him, her eyes—the same blue-grey as his own—wide with fear and anguish. Then a slim vertical crack appeared down the center of her face and in the time it took him to blink she shattered apart into ash.
“No!” He dropped the gun and shoved Shasta aside hard enough to send him into the wall; but he barely noticed, falling to his knees beside the pile of ash that had been his daughter seconds ago. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again, willing himself to wake up from what had to be a nightmare.
Memories came crashing down on him instead; of Elle and her deal, of Drae in the cage and on the run and in his bed, of Shasta and Shiki and the labs at Edgemount where he thought he’d found his daughter. He gripped his head in both hands, feeling like his skull would explode, and doubled over. The harsh, strangled noises of grief coming from his throat barely sounded human and tore at his throat until he thought something inside would tear and choke him in his own blood.
“Jones?” He felt Shasta gently touch his back, rubbing a hesitant circle there. “I’m sorry.”
He shook his head but didn’t pull away, struggling to regain control of himself. Shasta waited silently, his hand still moving in a steady circle on Jones’s back until Jones sat back on his heels and took a deep breath. He pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes until he saw bright flashes of light behind his eyelids but when he opened his eyes again he felt calmer.
“How?” he asked, clearing his throat when his voice cracked slightly even on that single syllable.
“It’s a dreamwalker trick. A specialty of someone in my family, my aunt. She came to see me in the hospital a few days ago, that’s how I know she’s around. And, I guess, working for Edgemount or running it or something.” Shasta’s hand stilled its circles but he still kept it resting lightly on Jones’s back, warm and comforting.
“There was a woman... When I was in the military and doing this special project, I saw her a few times. She seemed to be giving the order.” Jones tried to concentrate and remember; of all the things he didn’t really remember about his years in the army, this was one of the dimmest spots. “I don’t remember her name.”
“It’s Aloria. Aunt Lori is what I called her. She’s my father’s older sister.”
“Can you find her?” The grief was fading now, being replaced by a pure hot rage. Pushing himself to his feet, Jones picked the gun up from the floor and went into the kitchen to get its twin. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the plates still sitting on the table but the grief barely threatened to come back before it was drowned out again by white-hot anger. “You better be able to find her, Shasta.”
“All implied threats aside, yeah, I think we can find her. Or at least I know someone who can find her.” Shasta held out a hand and mustered up half a smile. “Time you met Shiki’s mother.”
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