Then his voice, his image, and his scent all swam away on a final wave of incoherence and mercifully dulling pain.
10
The dreams a person has while unconscious are not the same as when they’re asleep. They’re more like something from a Bradbury novel, a carnival ride with ominous portents and sinister beings waiting to take siege of your soul. My dreams were like that now, shadowy, one slithering into another, carrying snatches of oblique conversations I’d never had and images of faces I’d never seen.
“More to the left,” I heard someone say urgently. “That’s not how it is in the picture, see? It has to be perfect.”
A masked face loomed over me, eyes concerned and considering, before it drew back and fluorescent lights blinded me again. “She will be perfect.”
No less unnerving were the tattered flashes of things I had seen, but combined in new scenes and settings, like a horror film saddled with an alternate ending.
There was Olivia, eyes shooting open to pierce me from her deathbed on the ground nine stories below me. Her skin was bleached white, and all of her blood had pooled in a heart-shaped lake around her broken body. Her gaze wide and imploring, she posed the one question I couldn’t answer.
“Why am I dead?” I struggled to reach out to her, but was whisked away, her parting words ringing in my ears. “Why me and not you?”
Xavier caught me from above. His grip was steel around my biceps, and as much as I thrashed I couldn’t escape him. He dragged me to him, opening his mouth wide to swallow me whole. “Zoe left you too.”
Then I was running, fighting for air as I fled through a dark desert night. I felt the sharp sting of tumbleweeds against my shins, my ankles turning over on themselves as I ran blindly into boulders and stones, barely keeping out of reach of an unseen fleet-footed pursuer. He—and it was a he—didn’t speak at all. Instead his voice invaded my brain by other means, slithering inside, not so much a snake’s hiss as the rattle of its tail. “I should have killed you the first time…”
I woke with a start, breathing hard. The room was dim, though not completely dark, and daylight peered at me through long slats in the window shades. I spied a lumpy outline in the corner of the room, and felt my mouth twitch. Warren, I thought woodenly. I was going to kick his ass.
“You know, you’re not funny,” I said, causing him to jump. He straightened in his chair, rubbing a long hand over his eyes, and stretched loudly. “You think you’re funny, but you’re not.”
He held up a hand as he rose. “Don’t hate.”
“Too late.” Yawning widely, I lifted a hand to rub over my eyes, but discovered it was too heavy, too far from my face, and too much trouble to complete the movement. Which was odd. Yet having had the distinct displeasure of a lengthy hospital visit once before, I recognized the lethargy as being chemically induced, some sort of painkiller probably. The question was, why had they drugged me? “What am I doing here?”
“Recovering,” Warren answered, standing at my side. “And hiding.”
“Are they after me?” My heart fluttered beneath my breastbone. “Can you smell me again?”
“Shh, don’t worry. You’re in isolation. Nobody outside this room can sense your pheromones. It’s like…you don’t even exist.”
I took a tentative whiff. All I smelled was hospital; drugs, antiseptic, and the type of cleanliness that erases not only bad odors, but good alike. It was a clean I’d hoped to never experience again. I looked at Warren. “There’s nothing. I can’t smell me at all.”
“I can.” He smiled, perching himself bedside. He’d taken off the long duster that made him look like some demented cowboy, wore a simple khaki T-shirt and fatigues, and his hair was pulled back, the matting tightly bound to his head. Each time I saw him, he looked a bit more reputable. Scary.
Closing his eyes, he inhaled deeply, like he was bending over a rose instead of a body. “You, but more so. The unscented thread now blends in with the rest of your genetic makeup. It’s beautiful, really. Lit up like some life-saving beacon…if you’ll excuse the visual analogy.”
I closed my eyes and breathed, casting my thoughts downward, inward. Nothing. After several seconds I looked at him again. “So it’s like an identifying trait? Like, I don’t know, permanent perfume?”
“More like the vein that runs through a particularly strong wedge of blue cheese.”
“Thanks a lot.” Just when I started liking the guy. “So, when do I get to go home?”
He rose from the bed. I narrowed my eyes. It looked like he was putting distance between himself and me. “There’s no easy way to tell you this, Joanna, so I’m just going to say it.” My heart did that little flutter again as he took a deep breath. “You’re dead. You’ve been dead for just over a week.”
“Dead-dead?” I asked hollowly. “Really dead?”
“Well, obviously you’re here, but as far as the mortal world is concerned, yes,” Warren said. “Your funeral is tomorrow. I’ve saved you the newspaper clippings from the last week.”
He motioned to the papers stacked on the bedside tray, and I glanced over to see my face staring up from the top copy, with the headline heiress joanna archer plummets to death. The byline, dated four days ago, posed the question of whether it’d been foul play or if I’d leapt from the midtown apartment. I dropped my head back, unwilling to read any more.
I was dead, I thought numbly. I no longer existed. And I felt strangely well for the experience.
“If I’m dead,” I finally said, “then who am I?”
I motioned down the length of my body, wincing when my hand brushed against my chest. Gasping with as much surprise as pain, I looked down, gasped again, and clutched both breasts in my hands—what I could fit into them, anyway. They were extraordinarily sore, with a tenderness that had less to do with the natural flux of the moon than a surgeon’s steel and, apparently, some huge creative license. The drugs had kept me from feeling the ache before, but I sure felt it now.
“What have you done?” I cried, holding them tenderly. I don’t think I’d ever heard my own voice so breathy and panicked. Then, brain cells and synapses firing rapidly, another thought occurred. I hadn’t actually ever heard my voice this high-pitched before either. I tried it again. “La, la, la, la…mother fucker!”
Horrified, I glared at Warren. “You’ve changed my voice!”
“And your breasts,” he said, pointing out the obvious with what I considered a great deal of misplaced pride. I glared, and he took another step backward. Just then Micah entered the room, halting inside the doorway. I lowered my chin and narrowed my eyes.
“You knocked me out,” I said accusingly, before turning on Warren again. “And you let him!”
“Well, we couldn’t have a dead woman walking about town, could we?” Warren said, like that was a reasonable argument.
“You told me you would take care of it! You said you’d clean up and make sure I wasn’t in trouble.”
“And we did,” Warren argued, crossing his arms. “You can’t be charged with a crime, because the only one dead is you.”
“But I don’t want to be dead!” I screeched in some other person’s voice. What was I supposed to do now? Only come out at night? Suck blood or haunt the living?
Warren looked insulted. “Sorry, but it was the only thing I could come up with on the spur of the moment. We had to do something to keep you out of jail, not to mention alive, so we brought you here.”
I looked around. Where was here? It looked like a normal hospital room; uncomfortable bed, machines that made beeping noises. Really bad wallpaper.