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She nodded nearly imperceptibly before with the flick of a switch the façade had reappeared and she smiled warmly. “I guess I’m in.”
Frost grinned broadly for the first time in several days. “Excellent.” I gritted my teeth anxiously, still entirely unconvinced. They believed us and they stood by us. Fine. But what good would it do besides add to the death toll?
Liz’s onion rings arrived in a large, steaming basket that reeked of grease and she slid them in front of me. “Eat that,” she commanded before turning to Frost. “Now how can Justin and I be of any help?”
“Poe’s father lasted for around a decade before this curse killed him,” Frost answered. “From what we can tell, if we prevent the nightmares by recognizing them ahead of time, we can keep Poe from getting killed. We don’t know if there’s a…” he paused and I felt his eyes heavy upon me once more. “We don’t know if there’s a cure. Poe believes that someone should’ve found it by now. I disagree. I think the problem with the curse is that it’s inevitably people that think the same way who are affected by it.”
I narrowed my eyes and picked at the onion rings as Justin asked for me, “What does that mean?”
“It means that we need people we can trust who will look at the problem in a different light. Poe and I both know the Edgar Allan Poe nightmares well, but she looks at it as a terminal illness. I look at it as someone trying to hurt her. Every nightmare will come in a different way, disguised as something tragic. We need people with different backgrounds who can offer different input. What do you see?”
Justin and Liz both thought about the theory for a minute before Justin answered, “I see conspiracy.” Liz followed up with, “I see emotional abuse.” Frost nodded and I finally felt his icy gaze lift from me as he took a swig of his beer. “That’s why you’re helpful. Poe and I would not have seen either possibility.”
In my peripheral vision, I noticed Justin begin to shift uncomfortably and looked over to him. “What is it, Justin?”
His jaw tightened and his brow drew down in anxiety. “What exactly is the scope of this thing? What are we looking at here?”
I shrugged. “We don’t know. From what little we know the curse seems restricted to me and people close to me. Frost is a target. So is my foster-mother. Maybe Liz. I don’t know.”
Justin looked up at me briefly before taking a drink, his eyes hard as granite, but haunted. “I just don’t want to see a ‘Masque of the Red Death.’”
I saw my mother coughing up blood, turning white as a ghost, bleeding from her eyes, ears and nose, and even the pores of her skin. I saw my sister Emma’s first cough, the blood spattering across the digital face of a hospital clock, the neon red numbers leaping at me, 12:06, and then the eardrum-slashing, mind-splitting shriek of her flat-lining at 3:19. I saw the whirling colors of green, violet, blue and gold, the ebony clock, and the horrible red I always imagined in Death’s eyes as he mingled with the party. “I don’t want to see that either.”
----
Frost was right; telling Justin and Liz had been a good idea. For the rest of the evening, the four of us theorized and bounced ideas back and forth amidst normal conversation. We talked about work and our terrible parents and Liz’s cat, periodically interrupted by ‘What if’ interjections. There was little progress because there was so little to go on, but I could see how having them on our side would become vital in the all too near future. Besides, having friends to hang out with was…enjoyable. I wasn’t used to having friends and I wondered grimly how long it would take to adjust to the new concept.
At around ten, we agreed to meet a week from then, the next Monday, unless there were any developments. In a dark recess of my mind, I wondered if it would be too late by then.
----
At the door they said goodbye, Liz heading for a black Volkswagen sedan half a block down the street and Poe turning the other way down the sidewalk, arms clasped tightly around her narrow midsection in a fruitless attempt to keep warm in her layers of sweaters. As she turned away into the darkness, Frost watched something in her eyes, something in her expression dim, as though something wicked had broken into her mind again.
“Frost, what are you doing?” Justin asked quietly, also watching Poe vanish into the dark of the Baltimore street.
“What do you mean?” He could feel Justin’s gaze falling heavily upon him.
After a moment of study, Justin answered, “You can’t fix everything. Not everyone can be saved. Don’t go down this road.”
Frost met his eyes hesitantly, gritting his teeth. “Do you remember what I looked like?”
Justin folded his arms and shook his head. “It’s not the same and you know it.”
“Why not?”
“Because you had something worth living for, Frost. You had your parents, Maddi, Ryan, Trina…you had me. That girl has nothing to come back to. I’m surprised she’s lived this long.”
Frost looked away and, even though he already knew the answer, asked, “What do you mean by that?”
Justin sighed sadly. “I mean that she’ll only hurt you, Frost. You’ll try and maybe you’ll get close, but eventually either this curse or her messed up head is going to take her away from you. I don’t want to watch that. I don’t want you to be the one to find her with a gun in her mouth someday.”
Frost met Justin’s gaze once more and his partner took a step back in shock at the depth of pain in his countenance, in his eyes. “I know that,” Frost said quietly, his voice like splintering ice. “But it’s too late now. I can’t let her go.” He shook his head miserably and stared off down the dark, vacant sidewalk, a lone streetlight in the distance burning in his icy eyes. “Tell me what to do.”
“Let her go or fix her fast,” Justin said tersely. “The way I see it, you don’t have a hell of a lot of time. Her number’s up.” He began wandering away towards his car, pausing to look back at Frost, who was still staring into the dark as if memorizing every step she’d taken as she walked away. “Frost?” he called back anxiously. When his friend glanced briefly over his shoulder, Justin frowned deeply.
“Be careful, Frost.”
----
