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“Thanks, though.”
After a moment, Lydia nodded, got to her feet, and turned away. At the door, she hesitated again and wasn’t sure why. Then again, she could really smell the cancer inside the woman now, and she felt like she should acknowledge that in some way. As with the pregnancy, she had been too distracted at first by what was going on in her own life to notice the subtle changes in scent. But the disease was becoming more and more obvious, almost by the hour.
“The answer is, I don’t know.”
Lydia jumped and looked back around. “I’m sorry?”
C.P. stared down her fragile body and across the grand bedroom. “I don’t know whether I’ll try Vita-12b. Funny, it felt safer if Gus was the one giving it to me, which is illogical. The drug doesn’t care who is doing its administration. Then again, he would take care of me… if something went wrong. Would have, I mean.”
During their marathon of silence, Lydia had wondered about that, but how could she ask? Talk about insensitive:Hey, so you’ve lost your baby, how ’bout you try that novel agent you cooked up in your lab—if only because maybe it’ll help Daniel to take the drug, too. And then my life won’t be ruined if it works.
“That’s a decision only you can make,” Lydia said. “Get some rest. I’ll check in on you later.”
What a generic goodbye, she thought as she slipped out.
The kind of thing that took for granted you’d see the person again.
The stairs down to the foyer seemed as long as a trail descending a mountain, and when she got to the bottom, she went over to the guard standing sentry in his alcove.
“I’m just going to get something from the car,” she said.
He nodded curtly, and triggered his shoulder-mounted communicator. By the time she reached the heavy door, the lock was sliding free, and as she gripped the wrought iron handle, she sank down into her thighs and put her back into it—except there was no need for the muscle show. The bank-vault-like panel, which was easily as thick as her leg, opened as if it was nothing more than the lid to a bread box.
Outside, she took a deep breath, descended the shallow steps, and proceeded down the passenger side of the Suburban. As she came to the rear hatch, she stopped and stared at the glowing Chevy symbol on the asphalt, a false moon.
Shoving her hand in the pocket of her pants, she took out the key. She’d forgotten she’d had the fob with her.
She’d lied to the guard. There wasn’t anything she needed inside the SUV.
Wandering out from under the porte cochere, she looked over the front acreage that skirted the allée of trees guarding the driveway. In the nicer months, the lawn was mowed to golf course precision, the smooth, green nature-made carpet undulating out to the stone wall that ran along the roadside edge of the property. Currently, the landscape was draped in moonlight, everything in shades of blue, from the dull French gray of the ground cover, now dead, to the icy bright, skeletal branches, and the sapphire shadows thrown by the big trunked maples down by the road. This nocturnal palette wasn’t going to last long. Over to the east, along the horizon, a glow was just beginning to appear—
The flare of light came with such intensity that she was not just blinded, but assaulted by the burst of illumination.
Throwing both arms up to cover her eyes, she got nowhere with the blocking, her retinas continuing to burn in spite of the barriers.
Then again, what she was seeing had nothing to do with the coming sun, or anything that was part of the real world.
“No…” she moaned. “Oh, God… no—”
Stumbling back, she squeezed her lids shut behind the double bars of her forearms—and though she knew there was no fighting against what hadcome and found her, she turned away from what she was being forced to see.
For the second time.
“It’s not Blade. It’s not him. It’s not…”
As she repeated the denial over and over again, there was no forgetting what her superstitious Finnish grandfather had always told her, no denying the truth that had already come to her once: According to the ancient traditions, if you wanted to see your past, you went out into the gloaming, that sacred time between sunset and true darkness, and waited for the light to find you.
And if it was your future that you were seeking, the moment right before the dawn was the time—
“I am not seeking anything!” she called out. “I don’t care about the future—I don’t want the future!”
She had already seen Blade surrounded by the illumination.
He… was her future. And unless the universe had changed its mind, thesymphathtormenter was somehow on the property again—
Lydia started back for the house’s entry in a blind sprint.
She did not get far.
