Dragon Fall Read online

  “Arvidsjaur Center for the Bewildered,” Rowan corrected.

  “Same difference. The doctor says it’s really nice, and very modern, and we’ll visit you just as soon as they say it’s okay.”

  “I am not crazy!” I wailed. “You can’t do this to me! All I did was see a man die and another man disappear in smoke—”

  “Aoife, love, this is for your own good,” Bee said in a calming tone of voice.

  Rowan, thank the gods, looked a little less sure. “I don’t know, Bee—putting her away like this does seem to be a little… harsh.”

  “Very harsh!” I said, panic filling me. I had to get out of here, get away from them so I could get my wits together and present my case calmly and intelligently.

  “Maybe if she stayed with you in Venice for a few weeks—” Rowan suggested.

  Bee sent him another unreadable look and gave a little shake of her head. “It’s for the best, it really is. She’ll be well cared for.”

  I lost it at that point. I didn’t know why my sister was so adamant to have me locked up or why she didn’t believe me when I told her what I’d experienced, but I wasn’t going to argue with her anymore. I made a dash for the door.

  It was, of course, the wrong thing to do, and by the time the nurse shot me full of more brain-molasses stuff, Rowan and Bee were gone. The next day I was driven down south to the booby hatch.

  I don’t care what anyone says happened. I know what I saw.

  Three

  “I don’t see how this can possibly be a good idea, Bee.”

  My sister looked up from where she was throwing some clothing into a suitcase. “Leaving you by yourself? Dr. Barlind says you’re perfectly fine to be on your own—”

  “Of course I’m fine to be on my own. Two years of intensive therapy have done wonders,” I said with a bright, “I’m not insane anymore” smile.

  “Me going to Africa, then?”

  “No, of course I think that’s a good idea. You’re going to be helping all those people get fresh water.”

  She dumped her drawer full of undies into the suitcase, glancing around the room. “I don’t know why you want to stay here by yourself, I really don’t. Rowan won’t be back for a couple of months, so you’ll be alone here in the house.” She shot a look out the window. Beyond a scraggy hedge, the dull gray and brown sand could be seen stretching out to pale bluish gray water. Overhead, a couple of gulls rode the currents, searching for signs of food, and even through the insulated glass I could hear their high, piercing cries. “I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.”

  “That’s because you’re a city girl now, Miss Lives in Venice.” I rubbed my arms and leaned against the wall, looking out at the endlessly moving water. “I like the isolation of the Swedish coast. Especially after spending two years in a house with forty other people. You can hear yourself think here.”

  “You’re lucky if you can hear anything over the constant sound of the gulls. Never mind, you don’t have to tell me that you love it here. I know that you do. You take after Dad that way.” She paused and glanced at the family picture that sat on her dresser before turning back to the suitcase. “You promise to call me if you have another… incident?”

  “I’m not going to have an incident,” I said, standing up straight and giving her another brilliant smile. I tried to remind myself to tone down that smile just a bit, since Bee was much more perceptive than Dr. Barlind had been. Bee always was able to tell when I was bluffing her, and the last thing I wanted right now was for her to cancel her trip in order to babysit me.

  “Of course you aren’t. Still, I don’t understand why Dr. Barlind insists that you confront your inner demons by returning to that weird fair that started everything. Oh.” She cast a perceptive glance at me, which made me swear under my breath. “That is what you were talking about not being a good idea, wasn’t it? Well, I agree. It’s just bound to lead to all sorts of grief for you.”

  I rubbed my arms again and turned my back to the beach. Unlike my metropolitan-loving brother and sister, I could happily spend hours wandering up and down our little stretch of the coast. “I don’t know about grief… It’s not like just seeing GothFaire again is going to make me snap, and I see Dr. Barlind’s point about confronting my personal bogeys. She’s very big on cathartic experiences and thinks that until you directly confront what is giving you issues, you can never really be cured. To be honest, though, I don’t have any desire to see GothFaire again. What if the people remember me as the woman who wigged out? I would die of embarrassment.”

  Bee lifted her shoulders in a half-shrug. “What if they do? They don’t mean anything to us.” She paused in the act of gathering up toiletries. “Would you like me to cancel my trip and stay here with you for the next month? Maybe it’s too much asking you to stay on your own right after your release—”

  “No,” I interrupted firmly. “I’m fine, I really am. Dr. Barlind wouldn’t have let me go unless I was, right?”

  “Mmm,” she said doubtfully. She placed the items in her bag and zipped it up, turning to face me. “Aoife, you’re a smart girl. If you don’t think you need to go to that fair, then don’t go. Why stir up all those unpleasant memories? With all due respect to your precious Dr. Barlind, you’re out of danger now, and that’s all that matters.”

  “I never was in danger,” I started to argue, then stopped myself. I took a deep breath, remembering Dr. Barlind’s favorite saying: think twice before you speak once. If I made too much of a fuss, Bee would cancel her trip, and I very much wanted time to myself where I could sort out the shattered remains of my life. I didn’t want to go back to the GothFaire, didn’t want to see the face of the blond man who had lied, and certainly didn’t want to see the same field where I’d seen… but, no, it was better not to think of that.

  “Aoife?” Bee prompted.

  “You’re right,” I said, deciding that it was worth a little white lie if I could get her off on her trip. The thought of two lovely months of solitude was damn near priceless in my eyes. “I’m sure it would be better for my mental peace to avoid GothFaire.”

  She smiled, clearly relieved, and patted my cheek in that annoying way older sisters have. “Good girl. Ack! Look at the time! I’ll be late for my flight if I don’t leave now.” She set down her luggage to give me a hug and a kiss on both cheeks. “Call me if you need me. Or Rowan. You know we both love you.”

  “Love you, too,” I said, walking with her to her car. “Take care of yourself. Don’t get yourself kidnapped, because you favor Mom’s side of the family more than Dad’s.”

  “Ha. As if. Smooches!”

  She drove off with a wave, and I reentered the house, leaning against the door and sighing at the blissful silence. Really, there wasn’t a more ideal place than the house that my father built when he moved us to Sweden.

  “I miss you,” I told the last family portrait we had taken, about seven years ago. My mother’s face beamed out of it, her red hair and freckles making her look like a stereotypical Irish girl, whereas my father’s gentle brown eyes and dark chocolate skin radiated quiet warmth and love. Tears pricked painfully behind my eyeballs, but I blinked them away. “Dr. Barlind says that while it’s fine to regret loss, there is no sense in holding on to grief and that one way to let go is to state your feelings. So that’s what I’m going to do. I feel sad. I miss you both. And I’m angry that you went to Senegal even though you knew it was risky. I’m furious at the men who killed you and even more furious at the politics that caused the situation. But most of all, I love you, and I wish you were here so I had someone to talk to.”

  The picture didn’t answer me—of course it didn’t! That would be crazy, and I was as sane as they came. I laughed out loud at that thought and pushed down the nagging little voice in my head that pointed out that no matter what I told Dr. Barlind, no matter how many times I repeated that I had been mistaken and confused and not quite with it mentally speaking two years ago, no matter how ofte
n I told everyone that I had learned much during my stay at the Arvidsjaur Center and had come out a better person for it, the truth remained buried deep in my psyche.

  “I’m not listening to you,” I told that voice. One of the side effects of the therapy was that I now spoke aloud to myself. Dr. Barlind said it was a perfectly normal habit and that to stifle it would be to cease communication with the emotional self, and that was the cause of half the world’s problems. “I’m quite normal and not at all weird, and I will not think about things that are impossible, so there’s no sense in trying to stir up trouble.”

  The voice didn’t like that, but if I had learned anything during the last two years, it was not to let the voice in my head push me around. Accordingly, I padded barefoot into my room and considered the small suitcase that sat on the chair. In it were the things that I’d brought with me from the Arvidsjaur Center but that I hadn’t yet unpacked. There the suitcase sat, almost taunting me, implying that although I could ignore the little voice in my head, I couldn’t pretend reality didn’t exist.

  “Right. You can shut up, too,” I told it, and with my chin held high, I opened the case and took out the bag full of paperbacks that Bee had brought me over the duration of my stay. Clothing was the next to be removed in the form of the pajamas and utilitarian bathrobe that had been given to me, followed by the pants and shirt that I’d been wearing two years ago when I was carted off to the loony bin.

  A small vanilla envelope lay underneath the last items, my name and admission date neatly printed in block letters. Inside were the contents of my pockets when I’d been hauled to the hospital—driver’s license, a little money, keys, and the jewelry I’d been wearing. I tossed the necklace and earrings into my jewelry box but stood frowning down at the remaining object.

  It was a ring.

  “Terrin’s ring,” I said, prodding it with my finger. I’d forgotten all about it, but there it was, sitting there looking like a perfectly normal ring.

  It’s magic, he had said. I closed my eyes, for a moment swamped by the memories of that terrible night, but I hadn’t been ignoring the voice in my head for two years without learning some tricks.

  “Fine, you want to be magic?” I shoved the ring on the fourth finger of my right hand. “You just go ahead and try.”

  I held out my hand, but of course nothing happened.

  “You’re no more magic than I am,” I said with a snort of derision, and proceeded to put the rest of my things away in their proper place.

  Swayed by Bee’s comments, I almost didn’t go to the GothFaire, but the memory of Dr. Barlind lecturing me on the subject of confronting issues rather than avoiding them resulted in me driving to the next town where the Faire was being held. “Fine, I’ll do it, but I refuse to have a cathartic experience,” I grumbled to myself as I parked in a familiar field. The GothFaire had returned to the same spot it had been in two years before, and just as it had been on that fateful night, people were streaming into the big tent, no doubt waiting for the band to start that night’s concert.

  I sat in my car for a few minutes, my hands gripping the steering wheel in a way that had my knuckles turning white. My breath came in short little gasps.

  “I can do this,” I told the silence around me. “It’s just a traveling circus. It’s not like Terrin is even here.”

  Who’s to say he isn’t? the annoying voice in my head asked.

  I got out of the car slowly, trying hard to hang on to the sense of calm that Dr. Barlind said would get me through the worst experiences.

  Anxiety is your mind being a bully, she had said during a very bad week when she had ordered electroshock therapy. Don’t let it make you a victim. If you can master your fear, you can master anything.

  “Easier said than done,” I muttered, shoving away the memories of that horrible week and locking the car before I followed a group of three girls heading straight for the big tent.

  As I passed by the first row of cars, I couldn’t help glancing down the line, just in case a body was lying there. “Ha, smarty-pants brain. There’s nothing there, so you can just stop trying to freak me out and get on board with the ‘a whole mind is a healthy mind’ program that Dr. Barlind says is the key to happiness.”

  The Faire was much as I remembered it—weird booths, loud music, and people indulging in the sort of excited laughter and high-volume chatter that went along with a day’s adventures. I strolled up and down the center aisle, not entering any of the booths but watching people with an eye that was soon much less vigilant.

  “No Terrin,” I breathed with a sigh of relief. I hadn’t really expected him to show up, but as my brain had pointed out, who was to say he wouldn’t have? “See, inner self? Nothing here but a circus full of pierced people and demonologists.” I passed by a booth with a sign that read SPIRIT PET PSYCHIC. “And ghosts who talk to animals. Nothing at all out of the ordinary.”

  I swear I could feel my brain pursing its lips in disbelief.

  Ten minutes later I started up the car and bumped along the field toward the exit.

  “Leaving so soon?” asked the young man who collected the money for parking. He had been sitting on a folding chair, a camping lantern next to him and a book in his hand. “You didn’t stay long. Do you want your money refunded? I’m afraid we don’t normally do that, but since you weren’t here long enough to partake in any of the delights to be found at the GothFaire—”

  “That’s not necessary. I was just here… er… to check on something.”

  “Oh? Did you find it?”

  “No. As a matter of fact, it was anticlimactic in the extreme,” I answered with a friendly smile. “But no worries—now I can tell my therapist to relax. There’s no chance of me having another mental breakdown.”

  “Er…” The man backed away from my car. “That’s good.”

  “It is indeed!” I gave him a cheery wave, and the car lurched off the grass and onto the tarmac. I hummed to myself as I zipped along, enjoying the feeling of freedom after two years of incarceration.

  “I have a bright new life ahead of me,” I told no one in particular. “Dr. Barlind said she was certain I have great potential in something. I just have to figure out what. Maybe I should try painting again. Or writing. Oh, poetry! Poets are always tortured and angsty, and after what I went through, I bet the dark, tormented poems would just ooze out of—Son of a fruit bat!”

  The car fishtailed wildly when I slammed on the brakes, the horrible thumping sound of a large object being struck by the bumper echoing in my brain, but not even coming close to touching the sheer, utter horror I felt at the thought of hitting something. Ever since I had been a child and my father had hit a deer in a remote section in northern Sweden, I feared running down a living thing. And here I was, happily yacking away to myself and not paying attention to the road…

  With a sick heart and even sicker stomach, I got out of the car, peering through the darkness at the road behind me.

  “Please let it be something old and ready to die… please let it be something old and ready to die,” I repeated as I stumbled forward a few steps.

  Just a sliver of the moon was out, but we were far enough north that we got the midnight sun effect—since the sun didn’t fully set at night, the sky wasn’t as pitch-black as it was elsewhere. Instead, we suffered through what I thought of as deep twilight—too dark to read but with enough residual light to see the silhouettes of large objects.

  My heart sank at the sight of the big black mound in the middle of the road.

  “Please be an elderly deer that was ready to die, please oh please oh please.” My voice was thick with the tears that were splashing down my face. I felt perilously close to vomiting, but I could no more leave whatever it was I hit lying on the road than I could have sprouted a second head.

  The black mound resolved itself into the shape of a large black dog. “Oh my God,” I moaned, guilt stabbing at me with hot, sharp edges. “I’ve killed someone’s beloved pet!�
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  I knelt next to the dog, the tears now falling on my hands as I ran them over the animal, my heart aching with regret. If only I had been paying attention. If only I hadn’t been so caught up in myself. Right at that moment, I would have given anything to take back the last five minutes and live them over again.

  Heat blossomed under my hands where I touched the dog. There was no visible blood, no horribly mangled limbs, but the animal wasn’t moving. “Noo!” I wailed, wanting to hug the poor thing and make it all better. “No, this can’t—Sweet suffering succotash!”

  To my astonishment, the dog jerked beneath my fingers, then leaped to its feet and shook. We’re talking a full-body shake, the kind where not only the head and ears get into the action, but also the sides, tail, and evidently, copious amounts of slobber. He was big, with thick black fur and droopy lips from which stretched tendrils of slobber that lazily reached for the earth.

  “You’re not dead. You’re okay?” Hope rose inside of me at the sight of the dog. “Did I just stun you? Man, you’re big. You’re the size of a small pony, aren’t you? Let me just look you over and see if there are any serious injuries…” I patted him up and down his body, but he didn’t seem to react as if he was in pain. In truth, he looked more dazed than anything. He kept shaking his head, which sent long streamers of drool flying out in an arterial pattern. My left arm took the brunt of much of that slobber.

  “But I don’t mind,” I told the dog, getting to my feet. “So long as you’re all right.”

  He sat down and promptly howled, causing me to wince in sympathy.

  “All right, you’re not quite unharmed, but at least you’re not dead, and that’s the important thing. Here… um…” I looked around but didn’t see signs of any nearby houses. “Damn. Houses here can be a mile or more apart. Looks like you’re my responsibility now. Great. Ack, don’t howl again! I’ll take care of you, I promise. What we need is a vet. Can you walk? This way, boy. Or girl. Whatever you are, here, doggy. Car ride!”