Page 75 of Into Darkness (Night Prowler 6)
It?
?s time for me to go, little dragon.
All the tiny hairs on Lu’s body stood on end. She raised a shaking hand to her mouth, stepping back with a cry.
Nola lifted her head and looked right at Lu. Her face was streaked with tears. She said, “I had this awful dream where he came to tell me good-bye, and I woke up so scared I had to come check on him. And when I did, he . . . he just wouldn’t wake up. He was lying here, like he is now, his hands folded over his chest, holding this.”
She held up a trembling fistful of wheat. “Where would he have gotten this?”
Everyone looked at Lu, as if they knew she already knew the answer. Which she did.
Lu lowered her hand from her mouth, took a deep breath, and whispered, “In the field near where he grew up. I was there with him, last night.”
All the air went out of the room. No one moved. No one spoke. Only Grandfather looked peaceful, a small smile playing at the corners of his lips.
“He . . . he asked me to find him, to Dreamwalk with him, and I did. My sister and mother were there, and we talked, and then there was another woman . . . she was waiting for him . . . and he said he had to go . . .”
She stopped speaking because she realized she was babbling, and also because Nola’s face had bleached to the color of bone. She released Grandfather’s hand and slowly stood, her eyes as wide open as they would go.
“What woman?” she whispered.
“I-I don’t know. She had dark hair. She was young, pretty, wearing a long flowered dress and a lot of silver bangles on one wrist. And she had a child with her . . .”
From Nola’s throat came a strangled sound. Her expression was tortured. “A child?”
Lu whispered, “A boy. About seven, eight years old.”
Nola’s throat worked, but no sound came out, and Lu felt the compulsion to keep speaking, to try and explain the unexplainable. To do something to ease that terrible look on Nola’s face.
“They were waiting for him. They were happy, smiling. And he was happy to go . . . to go be with them . . . he’d only been waiting for me, and now that we’d met he could . . . he could . . .”
She couldn’t get it out. Her own throat was closing; tears began to slide down her cheeks. Then Nola broke down and sobbed into James’s chest. He held her, looking over her head at Lu with an expression she couldn’t decipher.
“Nola’s grandmother was killed in a car accident many years ago,” he said. “Her son James was in the car with her; he was eight at the time. I was named after him.”
There was a winch tightening in degrees around her chest. Her heart began to pound like it was trying to claw its way out of her chest. “I’m sorry,” Lu whispered, her voice cracking. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault. You’ve done nothing wrong.” Magnus stepped closer to her, gazing down at her with his own indecipherable expression. She looked up, pleading at him with her eyes. She needed his arms around her, needed the comfort she knew he could give, needed to hear him say it again, that it wasn’t her fault. She just needed . . . him.
So she closed the small distance between them, wrapped her arms around his broad shoulders, and buried her face in his neck.
He stiffened, but didn’t pull away. There was a breathless moment she was certain he would, but then—oh miracle—his arms came up hard to encircle her. He lowered his mouth to her ear. “It’s all right,” he whispered, his deep voice the softest, gentlest stroke of sound. “It’s all right: I’ve got you.”
I’ve got you. It broke the final shred of her restraint. She sobbed, her body wracked with a shudder. Both sobs and shudders kept coming, and soon Magnus was stroking her hair, murmuring comforting words she followed the shape but not the substance of, letting his voice wash over her, his heat warm her, his strength support her, until she was crying in earnest, letting everything out. He picked her up in his arms and carried her back to their bedroom. He closed the door behind them with his foot, and gently laid her on the bed.
He went to the bathroom and ran a washcloth under cold water, and brought it back to her with a box of tissues that he set on the little table beside the bed. Then he wiped her face with the cloth and dried it with the tissues, and made her blow her nose.
“Who knew you’d be such an ugly crier?” he whispered, brushing the hair from her forehead. He gazed down at her with such tenderness it almost made her break out in a fresh round of tears.
“I don’t ugly cry,” she sniffled, not believing it for a minute because she could feel the way her face had distorted, but not insulted because she knew he was teasing. Hoped he was teasing.
“You’re right. You don’t ugly anything. You couldn’t be ugly if you tried.”
The way he said it was so sweet, such softness from such a hard man, that Lu forgot for a moment all her hesitations and the walls he’d erected between them, and reached out to touch his face.
He snatched her hand with lightning speed, curling his fingers around her wrist. He held it suspended in the air between them, the look of softness in his eyes from seconds before replaced by an icy, furious look that might have made Honor proud.
“Don’t.”
