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The child was blurry, but Sadie had understood that it was the alcohol level in her blood, not the child, really.
She wanted to ask what was in the cup, but she couldn’t. Her tongue wouldn’t work. Instead, she accepted the cup and drank the contents.
The world spun, and then the blackness took her. Two words followed her into the darkness.Be gone.
Sadie jerked upright in her seat.
She blinked. Shook herself. She was in the car. The ugly yellow one. Parked outside the Cortez home.
She blew out a breath. Water. She needed water.
What time was it?
She checked her cell. Almost midnight. She’d dozed off and slept for more than an hour.
“Damn.” She tossed her cell back onto the passenger seat.
She licked her lips as she stared into the darkness around the house. All the windows were dark now.
In the corner of her eye she spotted movement. A wisp of white fluttered around the back corner on this end of the house. Sadie sat up straighter. Peered harder through the darkness.
“What the hell?” she murmured.
She waited and watched. Then she saw it again. Something small but ghostly white in the distance of the backyard.
Opening the car door, she eased out, then pressed it shut. Keeping her head low, she moved around the rear of the car and across the street.
She disappeared into the tree line between the two houses. Soundlessly she crept along the property line until she was in the backyard of the Cortez home.
Holding as still as stone, Sadie waited and watched.
Maybe a minute later the ghostly apparition swept from around the opposite corner of the house and twirled around the backyard. The dress or covering was dark, maybe black like the night. The slip of white was the mask.
A mask exactly like the one the little girl had worn that night all those years ago in Mexico at a cartel compound.
Maybe she was dreaming. Or hallucinating. She’d done it before.
Sadie squeezed her eyes shut and held them closed to the count of five. She told herself she was dreaming.
But when she opened her eyes, the white mask was still dancing around the yard. Its two dark holes where eyes would be seemingly empty. Two garish horns curled up, one on each side.
Sadie dared to take a step forward, toward the dancing apparition.
Something hard collided with the back of her head.
Pain shattered in her skull.
Her face was suddenly in the cool grass.
“You shouldn’t have come.”
Not the child’s voice.
36
Session Five
Three Years Ago
