Heat Stroke(70)

Creepy.

The one interesting thing about it was that she had a secret stock of mint chocolate chip ice cream stuffed in the back of the freezer. Premium stuff, not the skim low-fat artificial sweetener crap. I took the carton out and weighed it. Half-empty. It wasn’t Kevin’s. He wouldn’t have cared whether or not anybody saw it, and I suspected the kid had never left an ice cream carton half-empty in his life.

I put everything back and proceeded down the hallway. An extra bedroom turned out to be an office. Everything was in files and folders, neat as an office supply store. No photos. In fact, she had no photos anywhere in the house that I’d seen. The art was all generic, carefully chosen to make absolutely no impression on anybody. I left the office. Three doors left—one was a bathroom, and as much as I’d hated Patrick’s trashy Wal-Mart happy faces in his loo, this one was worse. Ducks. Why did it have to be ducks?

The room it opened into was the master bedroom. I admit it, I was scared to go, but I couldn’t mist;

Kevin had specifically forbidden me to do it. I eased the door open slowly, one inch at a time, alert for giveaway creaks.

I needn’t have bothered. She wasn’t in there. The bedroom was clean and soulless as a hotel room. Didn’t look like a place to let loose unrestrained passion, or any passion at all, come to think of it.

That left the last room. I took hold of the doorknob and felt something. A kind of vibration, a warning…

I eased open the door and stepped inside.

The room had started life as a converted garage, then been gentrified with faux wood paneling and plush carpeting. Nothing much in it, but there was an aura to this place like nothing I’d ever felt before. Inanimate objects soak up energy, and that energy becomes visible in Oversight. The place looked dead normal, down here in the real world, but when I blinked and shifted into Oversight the real story came out. Red, rancid glows from the walls. Rotting greens. Pus-dull yellows. This place had seen suffering, and horror. It reminded me of Luminol, the stuff the police use to bring out old bloodstains… the ghost of evil, shining out of the darkness. Pain never dies completely, and this room was suffering.

David stood in the center of it, motionless, blank as a snowfield. He still retained his dark-copper hair, but it was shorter now, revealing the hard lines of his cheekbones, the strength of his face. The round glasses were gone. His eyes had gone dark. Very, very dark.

He was wearing black leather—pants, jacket, all of it looking butter soft and more than a little sexy. More than a little dangerous, too. Frightening. I wondered if she hadn’t actually expressed something essentially true about him that I’d never really quite grasped before… because David now looked like a predator.

Yvette walked a slow circle around him. There was something feline about the way she moved, both in the graceful sway of it and the predatory fascination.

Over the pulsing, thread-thin silver cord, I whispered his name. The dark eyes shifted and focused on me. I’d moved out of the doorway into a corner, shutting the door behind me; Yvette glanced toward me but saw nothing. David continued to stare.

Get out, he whispered to me over the silvery thread connecting us. I felt the warmth wrapping around me like an embrace. Please. You can’t help me.

I’m not going anywhere. An echo of the pledge he’d made to me. I said it even though I was terrified to watch this, terrified that I couldn’t do anything to help.

Yvette was holding the bottle in one hand, swinging it carelessly. Taunting him. Even if she dropped it, the carpet would break the fall; she’d have to throw it hard at the wall to even crack it. Still. If I could catch it on the upswing, it was possible I could help that along…

She froze in midstep. Her head snapped around, searching corners. She’d sensed something. How? I was sure I’d done it right…

“David?” she asked in that sweet, purring voice. “Someone here?” No answer. She understood why, unlike Kevin, and kept going without a pause. “Someone here? Someone here?”

I felt the compulsion click in, even across the room. David said, “Yes.”

“Show me where.”

He pointed. Right back at her. Yvette smiled. “Clever boy. Are we going to play these same tired games again? I thought you knew by now that I don’t tolerate that kind of thing.”

He lowered his hand to his side. She leaned forward and kissed him. Long, hard, hot. The same sultry, meaningless dance she’d done at Patrick’s apartment, with Lewis. She was professional at it, I had to give her that much. “I still think there’s somebody here,” she said when she pulled back for air. David remained still, blank-faced, unresponsive as a store mannequin. “Maybe that little silver-eyed friend of yours? Well. I’ve never minded an audience, I have to say, and you always seemed to perform better in front of one.”