Dark Rain: 15 Short Tales Read Free

another time.
    For now, I wanted to fly, as high as I possibly could.
    I wanted to test my abilities, test my limitations. Explore myself fully.
    It was crazy.
    I should be home, doing laundry, or working a case. Not flying high above the treetops. Hell, at the very least, I should be powering through my DVR recordings. I had a whole month of
Nashville
episodes waiting for me. No, I didn’t watch any of the vampire shows. They often got it wrong, or focused on issues that were foreign to me. I didn’t sparkle or keep a diary. And I wasn’t like those other vampires played by beautiful, young actors. My God, I had kids. A dead husband. A sister who was still traumatized by the events of last month. She was getting better, yes, slowly but surely. But for a few weeks there, she’d wanted nothing to do with me. She only wanted to be around her family: her kids and her husband.
    She didn’t blame me for her kidnapping. She blamed the situation that I had found myself in, the situation she had been drawn into.
    Mostly, she was in shock. Her world had been irrevocably rocked, shaken. The poor thing had thought she would die. Or, at the very least, turned into a creature like me. Then, of course, she had been there when my ex-husband got killed.
    Yeah, that had not been a good night for Mary Lou.
    I’d told her that I was there for her if she needed me. She didn’t, not now. She needed her family—mumps and all—and I understood that.
    I kept soaring, gaining altitude. It was colder up here. I didn’t mind the cold. Hell, I enjoyed it. My God, I live in perpetual cold!
    Anyway, the temperature was dropping to near freezing. Near freezing didn’t bother me either. So, I continued up, higher than I ever had before. Higher and higher. My breath didn’t form vapor puffs before me, as the creature I became didn’t need to breathe much. I
did
need to reflect on my life—and flying gave me that chance.
    At which point, I’d finally realized something:
I had accepted Danny’s death.
    My kids were another story. They wept at night. I had often caught Anthony crying alone in the bathroom. With the door locked, he let it all out. Tammy was inconsolable in that dramatic way adolescent girls have. She didn’t hide what she felt like Anthony tried to. He was trying to be such a little man. And he had been. But they needed to mourn their father. And I let them. It had been a while since Danny’s death, and now I hoped their trip would distract them. They had been excited to go.
    When alone, I cried, too. Once, and then let it go. Danny was a bastard in the end, and a lot of my love and compassion were long gone. But I wept for the young Danny I had fallen in love with, the young Danny I had married and started a family with… and then, that was all the tears I had shed. No, he didn’t deserve what had happened to him; the poor sap hadn’t realized he was being used as a pawn. That he had aligned with Hanner to take me down should have been reason enough to not cry at all. But Danny was an idiot, and he had been scared.
Of me.
He based many of his decisions on fear, which is never a good idea.
    No, I chose to remember the Danny who proposed to me with a mood ring as a stand-in because he was too poor to afford a real engagement piece. I still had that mood ring in my jewelry box. I’d often considered ditching it; now I wouldn’t. I hadn’t kept much of our sentimental stuff, but I would keep that.
    Mostly, my heart broke for my kids. I couldn’t imagine what they were going through. And adding insult to injury, was the secrecy of it all. Yes, not only had their father been murdered—but they were being asked to cover up his death.
    To pretend nothing happened.
    To pretend that their father had simply
disappeared
.
    He hadn’t. He was entombed in a cavern, along with two vampires, both dead.
    I flew faster now. Faster and higher.
    They hadn’t asked for any of this. Neither had I, for that matter. Still,
they
were kids.