Page 70 of Midnight Secrets

And while he had worked hard to put himself together, she’d just mourned and baked cookies.

“I want to be better,” she said to Lauren. “I want to get myself together physically and mentally. I don’t want Joe to consider me a basket case. I need to move on if we’re to have a hope of being a couple.”

Lauren straightened and held a draftsman’s pencil over the paper. “I think we can make a good start if we can nail this face you see in your nightmares. That would be a really good first step.”

It would.

Isabel struggled at first. She couldn’t pin down the features. And when she did, a wave of dread washed over her. He was a creature of her nightmares but the horror bled into the daytime. She had to fight not to wipe him out of her mind.

Lauren walked her through it. “Shape of face?”

Just thinking of that shadowy form with darkness for eyes made her shiver. “What?”

“What was the shape of his face?”

Lauren’s hand flew over the paper. Twelve face shapes appeared. “So, these are the basic shapes, barring major deformities. Which one?”

Without thinking, Isabel put a finger on one. “This shape.” Long, narrow at the chin, broad in the temples. But she couldn’t have described it. The face still danced just out of reach of her consciousness.

“Okay.” Lauren lifted the sheet away and drew on a new one. “These are some shapes of a mouth.” Full lips, thin lips, top lip fuller, bottom lip fuller, wide, narrow…

“Like that!” Isabel felt a pulse course through her system, because those thin, narrow lips were exactly like those of the man in her nightmares. Again, she couldn’t have verbalized it, but she recognized it.

On another sheet of paper, Lauren drew hair, once Isabel said that the man’s hair was cropped short in an expensive cut and was salt-and-pepper. More salt than pepper.

Lauren fit the hair over the shape of the face Isabel had chosen and added the mouth. A prickle ran up her spine. They were getting there. And the man looked…she cocked her head. He looked somehow familiar.

Up to now she just thought the monster in her nightmares was some kind of composite representing the evil that had carried out the Massacre. Was the monster real?

“Nose,” Lauren said, but before she could start drawing sample noses Isabel surprised herself.

“Long, narrow at the bridge, finely cut nostrils.” Lauren looked up at her then her hands added…exactly the right nose.

Isabel couldn’t breathe.

“Eyes?”

Isabel never saw the eyes in her nightmares but the answer came welling up from a dark place inside her.

“Deep-set, slightly uptilted.” Though Lauren was drawing in black-and-white, she added, “Chocolate brown.”

Because she knew who this was.

Something was cracking inside her, some carapace that had enveloped her since the Massacre. The cracking openhurt.Faster than she could follow, her brain was making connections, filling in the dots. Filling in the holes that had plagued her since that terrible day.

There was a connection between the monster in her nightmares and the monsters that had taken away her life. All these months, her nightmares had been trying to talk to her and she’d been too scared to listen. She’d tucked them away in the back of her mind until they broke out of the walls.

Lauren’s hand stopped moving and she turned her head this way and that, frowning at what her hand had created. “Doesn’t he look…” She glanced up at Isabel. “Doesn’t he look familiar?”

The walls had collapsed and the floods came. Isabel was frozen to the spot, head whirling. She felt dizzy and sick.

“Isabel?”

Lauren’s voice was sharp with worry. She reached out to Isabel but Isabel stood up, swaying. The band around her chest grew tighter.

“Isabel, what’s wrong?” Lauren put a hand on Isabel’s shoulder.

“Hector Blake.” Isabel’s voice was low and raw. The words hurt.

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