Can't blame David. Can't blame Jo, either. Four years older. Made her fourteen at the start of everything. During the two years when It was going on, that four years made a world of difference. Difference between shit-your-pants terror and a kid turned loose in the toy store.
Jo had been old enough for Buddy Johnson. She'd wanted sex with the single-minded passion she threw at any obsession. Mo hadn't. Simple as that.
Buddy was your fault, too. You knew what he was going to do, after the first time. You could have stayed away from him.
And if you had told anybody what was going on, Jo would have caught it worse than Buddy. Dad would have killed her with that black leather strap, the one that drew bloody lines across your back.
Can't tell anybody: Dad, Mom, Father Donovan, the doctor, teachers, nobody. Never. You promised. Keep Jo out of trouble. Little Mo worships her big sister.
Can't tell the shrinks. They'd tell Dad, Mom, the cops, everybody. They'd have to. Can't even tell yourself. It never happened.
Lie. Play up the voices and delusions, they'll believe them. Turn the fear of men, the fear of your father, into paranoia to hide the real cause. Leave the real cause buried under the biggest rock you can find.
Maureen stood up with the exaggerated care of a drunk who knows she's drunk. She put the bottle away, rinsed out her cup, and very deliberately finished up in the bathroom. She stared at the mirror and chuckled with an edge of hysteria. The mirror face grimaced back at her, bloodless and wide-eyed like a startled corpse.
Those thoughts of letting a man into your pants: some other woman did that. Not Maureen.
Back in her bedroom, she peeled off her damp sweater and jeans and underclothes and tossed them with drunken carelessness until she crawled into bed naked. To hell with the open door. Maybe David would get up to pee in the middle of the night and forget which door was which. If she woke up in bed with a man, maybe nature would take its course.
Or maybe she'd kill herself.
The blankets gave no heat, and the sheets felt like they were woven from soft ice. Her body ached for a warm body next to it, someone to gently knead the terror out of her shoulders.
Bed-squeaks whispered through the wall between her room and Jo's. She'd seen Jo in bed with a man before, seen her learning the tricks of her trade with Buddy back when the world was young and innocent. That woman'd do anything. No way Maureen would ever pry David away from her. And if Brian ever did call, Jo would take him away.
Patterns.
If he comes back. Slap a man hard enough, he doesn't come back.
She forced herself to relax, willing her eyelids to quit squeezing their way down through her cheekbones. Count breaths. Visualize the calming light of a candle flame, an altar candle flickering at the feet of the Virgin. Concentrate. Chant your mantra. Trigger the relaxation response the shrinks taught you, the only thing they ever really did for you in all the sessions through all the years because you swore you'd never tell. Relax.
The candle turned into flames gushing from the second-story windows over the strip club, then metamorphosed into blue ghost-lights licking a slush-filled alley clean. Her eyes snapped open and she clamped her jaws to stop her chattering teeth. She was just coherent enough to recognize the symptoms of shock, and just suicidal enough to not give a shit.
Jo's bed squeaked, again. Maureen grabbed a set of headphones from her bedside and blocked out the sounds. The caffeine still warred with the whiskey in her veins, and the whole shitty day left her twitching.
If sleep wouldn't come, she'd try music.
She punched the CD player and came up with Altan, a disk David had given her. They started in on "Pretty Peg," a Scottish reel she'd heard his group practicing once.
She ripped the headphones off and threw the portable player and phones and cables and all across the room. The whole load hit with a muffled thud, landing on something soft in the darkness. Angles and trajectories swirled through her head, and she came up with her bald-assed giant teddy bear, poor bedraggled refugee from her childhood. She couldn't have hit it on purpose if she'd tried.
Insane laughter bubbled up, and she locked her teeth against it. You fucking idiot, you can't even make a tantrum work! Not with a bang but a whimper. Ought to crawl out and get the .38 and put five slugs through that damned CD. Then sit quietly and wait for the men in white coats to haul you away to the funny farm.
Pills. Doc Frantz had given her some pills when she couldn't sort out her sleep patterns on the midnight shift. She'd gotten promoted to evenings before she'd used them up. Damned things would stun a horse. Double the dosage and they even killed the nightmares. They were still on the bedside table.
Her fingers traced the overlapping paper labels on the bottle. Four or five of them, she remembered. They spelled out dosages and warnings. One said something like "Avoid alcohol while taking this medication."
Screw that.
She swallowed two pills, dry. Then she thought about night noises and took two more. She didn't want to wake up before David left. Before Jo left. Maybe not before Mo left.
The pills nibbled at her, inch by inch, until she floated away into swirling darkness.
Chapter Four
Dougal MacKenzie forced himself to keep calm. He didn't jerk on the black leopard's collar. He didn't release it, either. Shadow was too valuable a beast to loose on a mage as wily as Sean. Fiona's pet brother wouldn't stroll into this forest without protection.
Instead,
