“Look…I’m sorry, okay? Whatever you’re pissed about, I’m sorry. But I can’t do this right now, Dad. Can you just yell at me tomorrow?” I pinched the bridge of my nose to fend off the throbbing inside my skull, dipped the clean brush into a dark, unforgiving black, and swiped it down the canvas, blotting two thick smudges for eyes. It still wasn’t dark enough.
Dad leaned around the canvas to see what I was working on. “What’s this one supposed to be?”
I narrowed my gaze on the canvas, at the shadow eating up the fiery sunset behind it. Its hungry, hollow eyes watched me. Its gaping mouth, a cavern of bloody darkness, drooled. A chill ran down my spine.
“I haven’t figured that part out yet,” I said. God, I wish I knew. If I knew, maybe I could find a way to make them stop.
“Have you eaten dinner yet?”
I shook my head.
“How long have you been out here?”
I dropped my brush into a bucket and stared at the ceiling. “Do you need something?”
He took a step back and frowned. “Your principal called.”
I slid my gaze his way, careful not to make eye contact.
“He said you’ve been skipping school again.”
“I told you, I haven’t been feeling good.”
He crossed his arms over his burly chest. “You never feel good anymore. Haven’t you been using the inhaler they gave you? Taking the breathing treatments?”
I’d been cramming my body full of meds for a little more than a week since the fire. None of it worked. Whatever was wrong with me, whatever it was that was stripping my insides away a little each day, wasn’t anything modern medicine could cure. I needed a freaking witch doctor. A priest. Or better yet, a miracle.
I picked up a clean brush and started again. The eyes still weren’t right. Could you even call them eyes? They looked more like black holes when they watched me at night from the corners of my room.
The edge of my bed. I squeezed my eyes shut and shuddered.
“Cash?”
“Hmm?” I opened my eyes and flicked my wrist. Another violent stroke of black. Another shadow driving ice through my veins.
“Are you doing drugs?”
I laughed. “Not lately.”
Dad made a sound in the back of his throat like he did when a case didn’t go his way. “It’s not funny. I’m being serious.”
“So am I.” I spun around on my stool to face him. His blue button-down had a coffee stain under the breast pocket. His salt-and-pepper hair wasn’t quite as neat as usual, and the lines bracketing the corners of his mouth were a little deeper than they’d been this morning. He’d had a bad day and I wasn’t in the mood for one of his stress-induced lectures. If only he’d get laid. Maybe then I’d get some peace.
“I think you should talk to someone about what’s going on with you,” he said. “If you don’t want to talk to me, then there are people we could pay—”
“You think I need a shrink?” I laughed.
Dad pulled a business card from his front pocket and chose to look at the fancy font on the front instead of me. “Dan’s nephew saw this therapist. He’s supposed to be good.”
“You talked to your snob coworkers about me?” I was about to explode. I could feel the anger boiling under my skin. If anybody in this house needed a shrink, it was him. The guy was married to his work and hadn’t been on a date in like eight years.
He threw his hands up. “What do you expect me to do, Cash? Pretend this isn’t happening? Pretend everything is fine?”
“Look, I don’t need a father-son talk right now,” I said. “And I sure as hell don’t need your shrink.”
“Then what do you need?”
I tensed as a dark-as-death shadow slithered across the ceiling .
Not now. Not now. Not now.
Tearing my eyes away from the shadow, I took a deep breath. The smell of death and decay tainted the air. It felt like a cold rattle in my lungs. I coughed into my fist, trying to get the cold out, and something electric buzzed under my skin. I flexed my fingers as the tingling sensation raced throughout my hand until it felt like it might explode out of my fingertips. What the hell? I shook my hand until the feeling dulled.
“I need to finish this.” I nodded toward the half-painted canvas, still flexing my hand. “That’s what
I need.”
Dad’s gray eyes watched me. Waiting. For what, I didn’t know. Just like those damned shadows. He finally nodded and turned on his heel to leave, but stopped in the open doorway.
“You left your phone inside,” he said. “Emma called. Five times. And she left that for you on the front porch.”
He nodded to the container he’d tossed on the table when he’d walked in. A bright-pink label with
“zucchini bread” scribbled in familiar bubbly writing was stuck to the lid. Emma. My best friend. At least the girl I thought was my best friend. The fact that she thought she could buy me off with food just twisted the knife in my gut even further.
“You two have a fight?”
Fight? As in she’d been living a double life, blowing me off so she could date some dead guy, and then letting said shiny new boyfriend be the one to tell me about it? Not to mention somehow getting me caught in the middle. Why else would these…these…whatever the hell they were, be following me around, looking at me like I was lunch? It was the only explanation. Her dead boyfriend gets a brand-new life and mine goes to shit.
I wouldn’t call it a fight.
More like a total betrayal.
“Her mom told me she had a new boyfriend,” he said, almost hesitantly. “Got anything to do with that?”
“No.” Yes. “We’re fine, Dad. Leave it alone.”
“All right…” He rapped his fingers on the doorframe. “You better be in school tomorrow. Got it?”
I nodded.
“I mean it, Cash,” he said. “This crap you’re pulling reflects badly on both of us. It’s your ass if I get a call like that again.”
“I said I’d be there, didn’t I?”
“No. You nodded.”
I shrugged. “Same thing.”
Dad muttered something under his breath and pushed through the door. Cool air rushed into the room as it slammed shut and I flinched. I never knew what kind of cold was creeping over my skin. A breeze? A shadow? A hiss sounded from the other side of the studio and I spun around on my stool, holding my paintbrush like it was a machete. A shadow curled into the corner, opened its wide, dripping mouth, then seeped through a crack in the windowsill, where it dissolved into the night. What did I think I was going to do with it, paint them to death? I knew it was ridiculous, but I couldn’t seem to make myself let go. And, hey. It disappeared, didn’t it?
A breath of warmth swept over me. It started at the base of my neck and rolled over my shoulders, down to my fingertips, like raindrops, warming my skin as it went. The brush fell from my limp fingers and clattered to the ground. Black paint spattered across the concrete like a web of darkness.
This wasn’t the shadows. Whatever she was always chased them away. Maybe it was her warmth.
The way she smelled like thunderstorms and dreams instead of nightmares and decay. Maybe I didn’t know what the hell she was, but I knew she was female. I’d been on the merry-go-round of chicks and one-night stands enough times to know that soft, lingering presence wasn’t a dude.
I snatched my brush up off the floor and threw it into the bucket.
“I know you’re here,” I said, wiping my hands on a rag. It looked like it needed to be in an evidence bag by the time I was done with it. “And I know you’re not like them. They wouldn’t scatter like rats every time you showed up if you were.”
She didn’t answer but I could still feel her warmth. Smell the scent of rain all over me.