Out of Mind

“Promise me.”

“I’ve got people here,” she said through her teeth and cut him off again. “Now, folks, give me some space, please.”

Dimly, she was aware of shapes moving away from her. Nothing was clear anymore. She propped her elbows, very carefully, on the desk and rested her chin on top.

A quiet click suggested the other three had absented themselves to the tattoo parlor.

The next ring of her phone almost made her cry out. The readout showed Brandt, and she answered, “Mean ’n Green.” This would probably be bad, but she could hope it wouldn’t be.

“This is Chloe Brandt,” a woman’s pleasant voice said. “Is this Willow?”

She said, “Yes,” with her hand over her eyes. Wait for it.

“I’m sure this isn’t a good day for you,” Chloe Brandt said. “So I won’t keep you long. Val told me what a great job you did last night. Thank you, Willow—you saved us.”

Slowly, Willow dropped her hand. Her head still felt weird. “I’m glad I could help.”

“We have no idea what caused all that bedlam in the garden,” Chloe said. “A freak thing is the only answer we can get. It frightened you a lot, didn’t it?”

This was Willow’s chance to explain her disappearance from the party—if she chose to take it. “I’m not great with storms.” It sounded pretty weak.

“Neither am I. Val and I hope you’ll give real consideration to working for us. You probably don’t have enough time to do all we’d like to have you do—at least at first—but we’ll take whatever you can give us.”

We’re getting more openings by the minute. “We’d better make sure you know what’s been happening,” she said. “About the two people who have died and the police thinking Mean ’n Green could be involved in some way.”

“Yes, but it’s ridiculous,” Chloe said. “Don’t worry about it. The police are desperate for suspects.”

Willow agreed to return to the Brandts’ home later in the day, but by the time she could sign off with Chloe and turn her phone off completely, she was afraid she might be sick.

She didn’t know where it came from, but she welcomed a sudden breeze.

Softly, the curls that always tipped over her brow blew away from her face.

How could she try to explain all of this to anyone? Ben had looked at her so strangely when she told him about part of it. About feeling things. She closed her eyes and recalled standing with him on the sidewalk. He had gone. Only for an instant, but she was convinced he had not been there all the time.

But where had he been, and why?

Or was she imagining everything, including what she thought was going on with Ben? Was that one more part of some delusion?

The buzzing in her brain gradually shifted, moved outside her head and grew louder. Around and around her it spun. She searched everywhere. There was nothing to see.

Mario came back across the surface of her desk and sat again, this time looking at her. His ears perked up straight.

He was guarding her or warning her.

Delusion.

Strip lighting made the little room bright white, but while Willow sat there, paralyzed by her own confusion, a vaporous puff pressed down on her and spread. Like a deep purple cloud, the thing swelled to fill all the space around her. She couldn’t see beyond the thick, bruised atmosphere.

Like clamps, fingers closed on her shoulders. She tried to brush at them, but felt nothing there.

The squeezing moved to her upper arms and started lifting her. She opened her mouth, but couldn’t scream. With both hands, she clutched the edge of her desk.

Through the haze she saw someone approaching, a man, a handsome man, tall, with long, dark hair streaked with white. His clothes were from another age, but his face seemed familiar. He didn’t look at her, only past her.

Unable to resist the pull, Willow began to rise from her chair. Her thighs banged on the underside of her desk.

“No,” she screamed. “Let me go!” Her hands started to slip and her chair rolled back.

The man who approached held a book. This he opened, facing Willow, and he pointed at a page. She read,

The Embran will pursue us until we destroy them all. If we fail, they will destroy us.

On the facing page was an illustration of a dragon, a distorted, incredibly horrifying dragon with rows of bared and pointed teeth, burning red eyes and vast claws jutting from what looked more like human hands covered with scales, than animal feet.

Willow couldn’t make a sound.

The man turned the page and pointed. “Listen to them,” the man said clearly. Pale and faintly glowing, a beautiful face looked back at Willow and the mouth curved slowly into a smile. With the smile came an overwhelming peace that soothed Willow. She became heavy as if falling asleep. Beneath the picture of the woman was the single word, Angelus.

This, Willow thought, was a perfect angel.

The eyes in the picture moved and, like the man’s, stared past Willow. Light left those eyes and they darkened with menace.

Willow’s body shook, but not because she was afraid. Whatever tried to drag her away trembled and gradually began to let go.

It raised her another inch, and another, while she grew warmer, heavier, and then she dropped, hard, back into her chair.

Mario leaped onto her lap, and she felt his muzzle pressed into her neck.

She looked back at the book, only it wasn’t there anymore.

The man in his old-fashioned clothes receded, and when he was gone, the white light from overhead shone brightly again.

Chapter 15

Ben had almost dragged Willow out of her office. She seemed zombielike at the time and didn’t say a word to the staring group they had passed in the tattoo parlor. He told the woman, whom he remembered as someone employed at Mean ’n Green, that he was taking Willow home. With a vacant smile on her face, the woman had only nodded.

They were in luck when the policeman outside seemed to pay no attention to them.

Bringing Willow to Fortunes had been Sykes’s idea. Neither of them wanted her back in Royal Street until she had settled down enough to deal with the anger she would face—and the demands Pascal would make. Ben had a feeling Willow could forget trying to hold on to any of her protests about being “normal.” They were outrageous anyway.

Also, by now Nat would have had a few not-so-kind words with the laid-back cop outside the tattoo parlor, and the first place he’d go looking for Willow was Millet’s.

Sykes hovered nearby. He had shifted irritably from the opposite end of the blue leather couch where Willow sat with Mario at her feet, to the raised bar and Poppy, who hung out there. Preoccupied, Poppy cast anxious glances in Ben’s direction.

“Chris has been gone almost twenty-four hours,” Willow said faintly.

Ben didn’t think it wise to tell her she’d said the same thing a few minutes earlier. “Are you sure he’s not the type to take off? Some people aren’t into anything heavy—that’s why they like to live light and alone.”

“He didn’t take off,” Willow said, and he watched, actually watched her fold inside her own mind. Automatically, he began to follow her, but stopped. He might be able to listen to her thoughts easily as long as she wasn’t consciously shutting him out, but when they had been dating, he had promised not to do that—even though she had never actually admitted it could happen.