Fade To Midnight. Shannon McKenna

      “It’ll be a girl,” Edie blurted, looking into the girl’s wide, wet eyes. “A beautiful little blond girl. And that selfish bastard is useless to you. He’s done his job. It’s all he’s good for. Unload him, and move on.”

      The girl’s mouth sagged. Wonder, fear, shock, chills. The usual.

      Edie let go of her hand. The pregnant girl stumbled backward, and took off, in a wobbly, stumbling run.

      Well. That had been stupid, with her father watching. It would have been stupid even if he hadn’t been. But she never had a choice. It had just…popped out of her. Totally involuntary. Like always.

      Edie stared at the drizzle of balsamic vinegar on her plate, her eyes fixed on the frilly shreds of romaine and arugula that clung to it. Avoiding the look in her father’s eyes. She didn’t need to see the anger, the disgust. She’d memorized them years ago. They never changed.

      “So. You’re still suffering from your delusions.” Dad’s voice was cool, expressionless. “I’ll make an emergency appointment for you with Dr. Katz, first thing tomorrow morning. If you do not go, there will be consequences. This is what happens when you don’t take your meds.”

      Experience had proven time without number that her perceptions were not delusions. They had never shown themselves to be false or misleading. Not even once. But that argument was lost before it began.

      “I don’t need meds,” Edie repeated, wearily.

      The truth was, the meds did work—in a certain sense. They zoned her out into emotional flatness, and clogged the airwaves so that she didn’t get private newscasts from people’s heads anymore. They also, surprise surprise, killed her desire to draw. She hated the meds.

      “Promise me that there will be no scenes like this at the reception,” her father said.

      “I won’t embarrass you at the reception, Dad,” she said dully.

      Who knew if that was true, though. She never had a choice. God knows, she would never have voluntarily chosen this hell. Being constantly judged, isolated. Punished. Never seeing Ronnie.

      Her father’s eyes flicked to the table. He jerked as if he’d been poked with a pin. “For the love of God, Edith! Stop that, right now!”

      She flinched. Her hand was holding a pen, which she hadn’t been conscious of picking up. It hit the bulb of her wineglass, knocking it over. She’d been doodling on the open sketchpad without realizing it.

      A sketch of her father’s face and torso covered the page. Wine spread across it, over the sketchbook, the table, dripping onto her lap.

      Edie grabbed a napkin, dabbed her skirt, murmuring a garbled apology. She’d been a compulsive doodler ever since she learned how to hold a pen, but her parents had gotten twitchy about it after the Haven. When the incidents began.

      “I’ll make a strategic retreat now,” Charles Parrish said, rising to his feet. “Before I get my fortune told. Please, Edith. Don’t do this to people! No one wants to hear it! And take your meds, goddamnit!”

      “I’ll try,” she said. Referring to the first request, if not the last. “Can I…would you at least tell Ronnie that I—”

      “No!” He spat out the word with vicious force. “I’ll contact Evelyn and Tanya for you. Clear your schedule for them, please, and arrange to go to their stylist and makeup artist before the banquet as well, understand?”

      She nodded mutely. He strode away. At least like this, they didn’t have to do the stiff, awkward, eyeglass bumping hug, she thought, bleakly. He shrank from any physical contact with her.

      Do. Not. Cry. Not in public. Don’t even think about it. She sniffed back the tears, swallowed, blinked. Grateful for the glasses, the shield of hair, for privacy. Dad was paying, at the door. He left. No glance. No wave. Their meetings always ended this way. No matter how she tried.

      The guy with the comb-over, the drug addicted daughter and the ADS grandson was chowing down on chocolate mousse cake, with the same grim sense of purpose with which he’d consumed the prime rib. Whoo hoo, she thought, staring at him. There was still more damage she could do, if she wanted to. Anything that she said to that poor guy would provoke a massive heart attack, clogged as his arteries must be.

      Hah. What a fit ending that would be for an evening like this. Something else to pile up onto her overloaded conscience. As if Mom’s death wasn’t enough for her to bear. And Ronnie. Feeling abandoned.

      She should just stop drawing altogether. Turn away from that part of her brain. Pretend it didn’t exist. But she couldn’t. Like a drug addiction. She couldn’t resist that free, whole, connected feeling.

      It was just the consequences that she couldn’t bear to face.

      She sighed and started gathering up her pens and charcoal, her sketchbooks, and shoved them into her big shoulder bag. She’d go straight home, not looking to the right or left. She’d lock the door. And if she ended up crying there in the dark, who would ever know?

      She picked up the napkin, thinking to sponge at the sketchbook once more, hoping to salvage at least a few sheets of the—

      She froze, staring down at the sketch she’d doodled of her father, still and cold as a block of stone. The wine had run over it in such a way that it seemed as if the stiffly upright figure with the disapproving mouth and the long, narrow nose was submerged in a pool of blood.

      Chills shook her. That familiar far away drumbeat of doom.

      I’ll just make a strategic retreat now. Before I get my fortune told. Her father’s words echoed in her head. He would never listen if she warned him. She could not help him. No more than she’d been able to help her mother. She was helpless. Hands tied.

      And her father was in deadly danger.

      The little girl floated over the tumbled boulders of dream landscape like a butterfly, darting out of sight, flitting back into it. Barefoot, thin, long dark hair. She wore a white tunic. When she looked back, her huge eyes looked scared, sad. She stopped beside a crack in the cliff wall. She bent. In a flash of thin legs, of dirty little feet, she was gone.

      Sean followed her in, bound by the heavy inevitability that came from having dreamed it before. This feeling of being locked in breathless ignorance was horribly familiar. Like a rock sitting on his brain, blacking out the center of his being. Obscuring his sense of place in space and time. Leaving him blundering and helpless in the darkness.

      The tunnel wound down, then the cavern opened out. Vastness around him. Cathedral ceilings, buttressed with gnarled stalactites and stalagmites. A forest of pallid, misshapen trees, glowing like radioactive tumors in the dark. Water, slowly dripping. The stink of batshit.

      Dread grew inside him, but he had to go on, to do the hard thing. The path curved, through a choked grove of dead, white calcite columns.

      A clearing was before him, a slab of stone in the center. Torches flickered in a circle around it, and the reddish light of dancing flames wavered evilly upon the man who lay on it like a pagan sacrifice.

      Rocks were piled on his torso. Only his sprawled legs, arms, and head emerged. He had to be dead under that weight, lungs flattened, organs crushed. His head was turned away. He wore a blindfold. All Sean saw was the jut of a cheekbone, lank strands of ash colored hair.

      A hole yawned in the rocks before the altar. Something stirred inside. Rustling, a chittering rasp. The flash of some nonhuman eyes in the hole, moving before he could make sense of the gleaming shapes.

      Something monstrous, something hideous. Something…hungry.

      Then a hairy, jointed leg extended delicately, prodding with its hooked claw. The chittering rasp grew louder.

      Sean’s heart thudded, but he couldn’t run. He leaned down to grab the first boulder heaped on his brother, and the thing burst from its hole, eyes glittering, barbed