“Okay, in a nutshell, Felicity had two ethereal episodes tonight and…”
“Felicity?” she interrupted. “Felicity did the woo-woo stuff? Not you?”
“That’s the complicated part.”
“Okay, I’ll catch up on that later. Go on.”
“Well, she had the two episodes, and just before she came out of the second one, she started telling us that Brittany Larson is dead.”
“Us? You mean you and Storm?”
“No, me, Cally, and RJ.”
“So what about Storm? Was he there or not?”
“He was already passed out,” I replied. “That’s pretty much why I’m calling you.”
“Why is Ben passed out, Rowan?” Her words were more of a demand than a simple question.
It was obvious that him missing the briefing was a sore spot for her, and what she had said was dead on- Benjamin Storm didn’t shirk his responsibilities. Unfortunately, this new little tidbit of information just added another layer to my worry over his situation.
I wanted desperately to cover for my friend, and so I tried to think of a feasible way around answering her without telling an outright lie. Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of a single thing to say other than the cold truth, and before I knew it, that was exactly what came tumbling out of my mouth. “He’s drunk, Constance.”
There was a spate of silence on the line, and then her voice issued again, this time with a hard edge. “Wake him up and get some coffee into him, Rowan. I’ll be there in half an hour.”
Knowing the way she drove, I suspected it would be more like fifteen minutes.
“Okay, but listen, Constance,” I appealed. “Go easy on him. He’s got just about as good a reason for this as anyone can have.”
“Yeah, well he’d better, Rowan because I had to throw some Federal weight around to get him back on the MCS for this investigation.”
“Yeah, I think he knows that,” I replied. “Or he suspects it at least.”
“Well, if he makes me look like a fool then he’s going to have someone besides Lieutenant Albright after his ass,” she snarled. “And I can be a hell of a lot nastier bitch than she can.”
That was it. I’d had enough arguing. I already felt like I was perched atop an inordinately narrow balance beam eighteen hours out of every twenty-four. Between Felicity’s binding spell, Ben’s marital problems, and now Constance being on the warpath, I felt like what little normalcy I had left in the world was crumbling away beneath my feet, and I wasn’t ready to fall quite yet.
My own voice adopted an angry edge, and I replied candidly, “Listen, Constance, I understand where you’re coming from, but I seem to remember a certain city homicide detective going to the mat for you when you assaulted a suspect during an interrogation.”
There was no way for me to retract the statement, but I’m not sure that I would have wanted to if I could. I had been a witness to her loss of control as well as having been her confidant when she needed someone to talk to about it. I hated to slap her in the face with an incident from the past, but Ben had gone so far as to lie for her, and that was no small gesture from a man who valued honesty as much as him.
Sometimes, I suppose we all need to be reminded of the debts we owe and to whom we owed them.
I could hear her breathing at the other end, but not a single word was spoken for the span of a half- minute.
“Listen, Constance,” I finally said. “I’m sorry about that. I didn’t mean to…”
“No, Rowan, you’re right,” she replied, her voice a mix of emotions. “See if you can get him sobered up. I’ll get out of here in a few minutes and head over.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I replied. “Thanks, Constance.”
I hung up the phone as I stood and then started out the door on my way to the kitchen to enlist some aid in getting Ben up and about. Whatever curiosity I’d harbored regarding how the process of the un-binding was going was immediately eliminated the moment the rasping pain raked across the back of my neck.
The wall before me became a psychedelic whirlpool spinning at an ever-increasing velocity. My body tensed then jerked as my knees gave way. The burning agony drew itself across my neck once again, halting, then biting anew as it dug deeper into my upper spine.
I was trying to call out for help when the floor suddenly filled my field of vision, only to be replaced almost immediately by indigo darkness.
CHAPTER 14:
I was floating.
Or maybe I wasn’t really floating. I had no visible point of reference in the darkness, so I couldn’t really say for sure. All I knew for certain was that it felt like I was floating, and I was happily willing to accept that as fact.
I blinked for no other reason than to make sure my eyes were actually open. Again, it felt like they were open, so I took the sensation at face value.
There was little else I could do, and the truth was, I didn’t really care.
I was comfortable.
In fact, I don’t think I’d ever been this comfortable in all my life.
Since I couldn’t see anything, I decided I would just listen.
Actually I wasn’t any more interested in listening than I was in seeing, but I did it anyway. Why? I had no idea other than the fact that there was this little nag in the back of my head.
It told me it needed to know something. I don’t know what information the nag was after, but it wanted something, and it wanted it now. I tried to ignore it, because after all, I didn’t see any point. It wanted to know something, not me.
The nag was on a mission. It told me I needed the information too.
I tried to reason with it. Given that I couldn’t see, and for all intents and purposes, I couldn’t feel, I didn’t really know that I could hear either. So, why bother trying?
The nag wouldn’t listen. It wanted me to try hearing in the worst way, and it wasn’t going to give up until I did.
I told it no.
It nagged harder and became an annoyance.
I told it to go away.
It wouldn’t. Instead, it just kept growing beyond annoyance and became a pain.
A real pain.
Physical.
Tangible.
Now I was no longer comfortable.
I gave up and listened. I doubted that it would do any good, but I did it anyway. I was willing to do just about anything to make the nag go away.
Had I cared, I would have been chagrined when I started to pick up the faint sounds around me, fading slowly in from nowhere to eventually fill my ears with ambient noise. But, I didn’t care about such things. I just wanted the nag to go away, so I kept listening.
Cicadas warbled out their song, the buzz rising and falling, fading away, then starting anew.
Okay, I could live with that. Why the nag wanted me to listen to cicadas I couldn’t fathom, but if it made the nag leave me alone, I was happy.
But, the nag didn’t want to hear the insects. It wanted to hear something else, so I listened harder.
Metal scraping against earth sounded softly in the darkness. How I knew it was metal against earth I couldn’t begin to say. I just knew it as simply as I knew two plus two equaled four. It was a fact.
The ambience grew as I listened intently. The cicadas, the metal, the earth, the wind… The crunch of dry leaves began sneaking through, adding themselves to the mix and setting up a rhythm.
