Page 66 of Edge of Darkness (Night Prowler 4)
“What?” he asked, tensing.
She sighed. “Are you always going to be able to read my mind like that? It’s really annoying.”
His body relaxed. “I wish I could read your mind,” he murmured thoughtfully. “It would solve an awful lot of problems.” He skimmed his fingers over her shoulder and down her arm to the crook of her elbow. “It’s not your mind, though. It’s your body. Your body is an open book for me.”
“Yes,” she said sourly. “Among other things.”
He chuckled, but the sound faded as he trailed his fingers past her elbow and hesitated over the vein on the inside of her arm. Slowly his fingers drifter farther and he began to trace the outline of her scars. One by one, silently and with an almost religious reverence, he learned the length and width of them, where they puckered and pulled, where they were smooth and nearly unnoticeable, all the way from elbow to wrist. She allowed it because she knew he wanted to do it.
And because she was certain he wouldn’t ask her about them again, she was suddenly gripped with the urge to tell him. She began, hesitantly, to speak.
“I was eighteen,” she whispered.
His fingers stilled on her arm. He glanced up at her face, but she dropped her gaze to his chest, hiding, and drew a ragged breath before she continued.
“It was the day I graduated high school. My dad bought me a new car for my graduation present, though it was really for my mom because I would be going away to school in New York in the fall. I’d won a scholarship to Juilliard that spring and I was going to spend the summer performing with the Taos School of Music.”
“The cello,” he whispered, his body utterly still.
Ember nodded. “I was good. I was really good. Better than that, actually, my teachers all thought I’d be the next Yo-Yo Ma. But…you know…” Her voice wavered. She took another breath and said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”
Christian waited, just holding her, watchful and silent. A chunk of wood fell through the grate in the fireplace and sent an orange feather of hot ash floating up into the chimney with a sigh.
“It was a little red Honda, nothing expensive, but I thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world.” She closed her eyes and remembered with vivid detail her excitement when her father had driven it into the driveway and honked the horn so they would all come outside to see it. The glossy paint, the new car smell, the black tassel from her graduation cap, with the little gold plastic numbers that commemorated the year, which she hung over the rearview mirror.
“I drove it around to all my friends to show off, then picked up my mom and my little brother Auggie. My parents had a special dinner planned for me at my favorite restaurant.”
The name of the restaurant was La Fiesta. Ember would remember that detail for the rest of her life.
“My dad was going to meet us there. He just wanted to finish a painting he’d been commissioned for; it was due the next day. So the three of us went ahead.” She paused, swallowing, feeling an old, familiar weight begin to press down on her chest. Quieter than before, she said, “There used to be these really nasty electrical storms on the mesa during the summer monsoons—they came on sometimes without much warning. So it was raining when it happened…just after sunset…like it is now.”
Christian whispered, “Baby.”
The pressure in her chest increased. She moistened her lips, ignoring the water gathering beneath her closed eyelids. “The car hydroplaned. There weren’t guardrails on the main highway then, between
the oncoming traffic or on the shoulder. So when I lost control of the car, we spun right into oncoming traffic, and then went over the edge into a ravine.”
Christian’s fingers were digging into her arm. He’d stopped breathing.
“They put in guardrails after,” she whispered. “So it could never happen again.”
It was the second worst car crash in New Mexico history. There were eleven vehicles involved by the time it was over, and thirteen fatalities.
Thirteen dead.
Ember was the only one who survived.
When she hit the first car, a Chevy truck that crushed the entire right side of her Honda, her sliding spin instantly and violently changed to a flying tumble that rolled them over and over, shattering every window as it went. She remembered nothing of that roll but the screaming, which seemed to go on and on and come from everywhere. There was the sensation of motion and gravity pulling in the wrong direction, then a horrible sound like a bomb detonation, then blackness.
When she blinked her eyes open, she was upside down, still strapped into the driver’s seat, and her mother was dead in the passenger seat beside her.
In the back seat, her little brother was screaming.
There was a lot of smoke and water, along with the acrid stench of burned electrical wire and scorched rubber. Ember’s left arm had been crushed between the seat and the driver’s door, which was now a crumpled hunk of metal. She couldn’t turn her head to look at Auggie because there was something wrong with her neck, but she could see his face in the cracked rearview mirror. She saw him lying there, his face contorted in pain, his legs mangled beneath him. He hadn’t been wearing his seat belt.
She found out later it was almost twenty minutes before the paramedics and police came; there was no one left alive but her. The closest cell tower had gone down in the storm, so the cars that arrived on the scene immediately after the accident had no mobile phone service. Someone had to drive all the way back into town to the police station to report it.
Ember hung upside down in the car in the smoke and the rain for twenty minutes, with her dead mother beside her, while her little brother slowly bled to death in the back seat.
